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Chapter 102: Interrogating The Major
The detention cell was four meters by three and it had a steel table bolted to the floor and two chairs. Kwan was in one of them with restraints on his wrists and his coat hanging off the back of the chair. The fluorescent light above the table buzzed at a frequency that got into your teeth after ten minutes.I sat down across from him and put a tablet on the table."Major Kwan. You have been in this cell for four days.""I have noticed.""You have not asked to leave.""There is nowhere to leave to." He shifted in the chair. "You have got my men in a work camp and my stadium under a drone and my deputy running sixty three civilians. If I walked out of here I would have nothing to do but shovel snow.""Would you like to shovel snow?""No."I pushed the tablet across the table. "Then tell me what this is."Kwan looked at the screen. It was a satellite image of the northern range, eleven kilometers past the reservoir, and there was a square structure in the middle of it."That is the nor
Chapter 101: Integrating The Labor Force
The work camp went up in eleven hours. Vance's crew laid the power cable and bolted the floodlight masts into the rock, and the masts threw a white glare across four hundred meters of cleared ground that had been a snowfield two days ago. There were three rows of prefabricated huts with heating elements in the walls, a latrine block, a water point with a heated tap, and a line of automated ration lockers against the eastern fence.The workers came out at 06:00 and stood in the glare with their shovels."Felix. Read me the roster.""Sir, camp one has got one hundred and eleven workers on three shifts. Two clearing crews on the reservoir road, one on the eastern drainage works, one on the geothermal access tunnel." He pulled up the quota board. "Each worker is on a two thousand calorie ration and a three liter water allowance. Quota is six cubic meters of packed snow per shift.""Is six cubic meters achievable?""Sir, a good man with a shovel can do eight. A tired man does five. I set i
Chapter 100: Sovereign Of The Valley
The northern depot came in at 21:40 with a white sheet on its antenna mast and six men standing in a line in front of the gate with their hands on their heads. Felix had a drone on them the whole way and there was no trick in it. Duval was a wide, tired man with grey stubble and he walked into the alcove and handed his pistol to Vance without being asked and said four words.“The general is dead.”“The general is dead,” Vance said.“Then I have got nothing to fight for.” Duval looked past him into the tunnel. “Do you have food?”That was the end of the Southern Military Syndicate.At 22:20 I walked the gallery rail and looked at the panorama.Felix had built the composite over the last three days and it covered the whole north wall from the rail to the ceiling. It showed the valley from the northern ridge to the southern limit of the reservoir, and it was rendered in a thermal composite with the terrain in grey and every heat signature in amber.“Read me the board.”He read it. “Sir,
Chapter 99: Submission Of The Syndicate
The column came down out of the stadium at 06:20 and it was smaller than the manifest said it would be. Kwan walked at the front with a clipboard in his hand and Marta Halvorsen walked beside him with the children behind her in twos and threes, and behind the children came the technical section with their toolboxes on their shoulders and behind them came the conscripts in a loose file that had clearly never marched anywhere in its life.Felix had the drone on them the whole way. "Sir, I count fifty one in the column. Nineteen of them are under four feet tall.""How are the children walking?""Sir, the smaller ones are holding hands. The smallest one is being carried by a man in a parka.""Which man?""Sir, I cannot tell. There is no insignia."I pulled up the exterior speaker and opened the channel."Major Kwan. Stop the column at the base of the logging track."Kwan stopped the column at the base of the logging track."Put the children at the front and the technical section behind th
Chapter 98: The Price Of Defiance
The pistol was still in the snow four paces from where Kwan had dropped it and Kwan was still sitting against the alcove wall with his head in his hands when the intercom clicked."Major Kwan. Thirty seconds is up."He did not move."Major.""I heard you.""Then get up."Kwan raised his head. His face was grey and his lips were cracked and there was frost in his eyebrows."I want to ask you something first.""Ask.""When you opened that box and looked at my personnel list, what did you see?""A hundred and eleven names and a hundred and eleven previous occupations.""And what did you think?""I thought that eleven of them were useful and a hundred of them were mouths."Kwan laughed. It was a dry, broken sound."That is exactly what I thought when I read it," he said. "Eleven useful men and a hundred mouths. And I fed the mouths for six weeks because the general said we were building something." He looked up at the drone. "We were not building anything. We were sitting in a stadium wai
Chapter 97: The Major's Last Gambit
The stadium channel opened and Kwan's voice came back immediately, which meant he had been holding the handset the whole time."Vance.""Major. You have been standing at that gate for an hour.""I have been waiting for you to say something.""Then we are both satisfied." I pulled up the drone feed. "You have got a hundred and eleven men inside those walls and about half of them are going to be frostbitten by morning and you have got no fuel for the generators and no vehicles and no radios.""That is accurate.""So what is your plan?"Kwan was quiet for a moment."I do not have one," he said. "I have got a rifle on my shoulder and a clipboard in my hand and a hundred and eleven men who are looking at me to tell them what happens next.""Then I will tell you what happens next." I set the mug down. "You come up the valley tomorrow morning. You bring the technical section's records and the depot manifests and the fuel inventory and you bring them to my boundary and you hand them over.""A
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