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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
Chapter 96: Panic In The Ranks
The first thing Sergeant Voss noticed was that his radio had stopped working. Then he noticed his truck had stopped working. Then he noticed the blue flash receding over the rooftops and understood that both of those things were the same thing."Kill the lights. Everybody kill the lights.""Sir, they're already out.""Then get the flashlights off the top of the cab and get them down here.""Sir, they're frozen to the mount."Voss climbed onto the hood of the truck and put his boot on the mount and broke the flashlight off with two kicks and dropped it in the snow. The other two trucks in his group had already lost their lights. The whole street was dark except for the snow and the red dots.There were three of them, moving across the drift in slow sweeping lines."Sir. Sir, there's a laser on my chest.""Stand still.""Sir, there's a laser on my chest.""I said stand still." Voss came off the hood and crouched behind the truck's wheel. "Where is it coming from?""Sir, it's coming from
Chapter 95: The Drone Swarm Protocol
"Felix. How many drones do I have that still work?"He pulled up the inventory. "Sir, I have got twenty two in the eastern caves and fourteen more in the northern alcove. That is thirty six.""And the ones in the vault?""Sir, the crates from the aerospace liquidation. Those are the short range reconnaissance models.""Those are the ones I want." I sat down. "Get them out."It took Vance's crew forty minutes to bring the crates up from the vault and another twenty to break them open. The drones inside were flat and black and no bigger than a dinner plate with four rotor arms folded against the hull.Vivienne came down to the vehicle bay with her tablet and stopped at the edge of the workbench."What are those?""Suppression drones. They were built for crowd control." I picked one up and turned it over. "Non lethal. They carry four EMP grenades and a targeting laser and nothing else.""Why did a defense contractor build a crowd control drone?""Because in the spring before the freeze t
