HAVOC: Acceptable Losses

# Chapter 0. Veil-Three Courier

## 1. Two Hundred and Seventeen Souls.

Khar-Tasel stepped off the diplomatic transport onto the loading apron of the Veil-Three outpost and counted the souls behind him before he read the structural state of the deck under his boots. The cold came up through the soles first, a hard cold that had nothing to do with the air, the cold of alloy that had held vacuum on one side and thin atmosphere on the other for four decades. A plate seam ran under his left heel and gave a hair when his weight crossed it, the give of a fastener a shade past its rated cycles. Behind him the transport ramp ticked as it cooled, the alloy shedding the heat of descent in small irregular reports, and the smell of scorched grip-coating still hung around the wheels. His predecessor's predecessor at the Compact embassy on Calloway's World had taught him the order a new liaison kept. Souls before structure. He was the new liaison. He counted.

Two hundred and seventeen.

Forty-one were children. Eleven were elderly. Sixty-three were spouses and siblings and family who had no place on the diplomatic register but had been flown in for the reason every Veth Compact family was flown in to these moments, which was that the Compact wanted the cameras to find them. A peace overture witnessed by the families of the diplomats was an overture no one on either side could quietly dispose of when they decided later that peace had become inconvenient. That was the Compact thesis. Khar-Tasel had been raised on it. He believed in it the way his father believed in the orchard at Tau Ceti, which was to say in spite of the evidence.

He looked up. The outpost shell was older than he was. The dome plates were a colour the standard Compact catalogue did not list, a grey that said only derelict, do not file. Up close the plates showed the pitting of long storage, a fine speckle where micrometeor dust had frosted the surface and never been polished out, and along every joint a bead of grey sealant sat proud of the metal, reapplied in a hurry three months ago and still tacky at the edges. Above the dome, through the thin envelope of atmosphere, ran a stripe of stars he could not name. The air on the apron was cold and flat and left a faint tin taste at the back of his tongue, the taste of a scrubber cycling recycled gas one pass too many. The Veil system held three suns and a great deal of nothing. Engineers had put the outpost into mothball four decades back and pulled it out three months ago, and they had certified it fit for a hundred-day posting in eight pages he had read twice on the transit.

A man in a Compact uniform jacket crossed the apron toward him, his boots ringing flat on the plates, each step throwing a small metal note into the cold. Older. Veth Command College pin at the collar, the enamel worn to brass at one corner. He laid his hand flat over his heart and held it there in the formal Veth greeting.

"Liaison Khar-Tasel," the man said.

"Senior Attaché."

"Welcome to Veil-Three."

The senior attaché's name was Drevon-Karel, and Khar-Tasel had memorised his file on the transit, and the file rearranged itself now to fit the actual face. Drevon-Karel was tired. Three months on a derelict dome with a hundred-day clock running wore at the corners of a Veth's eyes the same way it wore at a UEF officer's, which was a thing Khar-Tasel had not known before this posting.

"The pouch," Drevon-Karel said.

Khar-Tasel touched the breast of his diplomatic jacket. The peace overture pouch lay sealed against his ribs in the old Compact pattern, unchanged since before his birth and in need of no improving. It had weight, more than paper wanted, the weight of the lead thread stitched through the lining to defeat a scanner. He could feel the seal through the fabric, a hard ridge of poured wax gone cold. He could feel the four signatories' marks pressed into the cover, four shallow depressions his thumb found in order without looking. Shen-Verath. Shen-Karan. Vor-Telles. Karis-Vael. Four names that had agreed, and the agreement had survived nine months of internal Compact argument, and the nine months had survived this morning.

"It is intact, Senior Attaché."

"Good."

A second figure came across the apron behind Drevon-Karel. Younger. Compact diplomatic courier, by the cut of the jacket. He carried a thin folder in his right hand and a plastic-skinned waybill in his left, and the waybill crackled once as his grip shifted on it. Something in the courier's face sat wrong, and Khar-Tasel could not name what. He noted it the way he noted the small unconscious sway in the man's walk, the sway of someone who lived a third of his life breathing thin outpost air.

The courier placed his hand over his heart.

"Liaison."

"Courier."

"The docking authorisation."

The folder transferred. It was cold from the man's hand, the cover a stiff plastic that flexed and did not fold. Khar-Tasel opened it. Inside lay a single sheet of plastic, slick under his thumb and colder than the folder, dense with a printed pattern he did not at first parse. Three rows of marks. Ten columns. A heavier black bar across the bottom margin, the ink laid thick enough that it caught the apron light and threw it back. A routing-code stamp in the upper right corner he did not recognise, its edges bled where the pad had been overinked. The routing code ran four characters. Three letters and a digit. The digit was a four.

"This is the docking authorisation," he said, because he was the new liaison and had been told to repeat what he received in the cadence in which he received it.

"Yes, Liaison."

"Routing code?"

The courier inclined his head. "Standard for Veil reactivations. Cleared by the joint registry six weeks ago. The Compact ambassadorial channel."

Khar-Tasel closed the folder.

He did not know what a Fleet Air gun-ranging cadence looked like set down on a sheet of paper. The Compact academy had not trained him for the look of one, because no one there had reason to think he would ever hold one in his hand. The cadence carried three pulses in five seconds, and the pattern in the folder was three marks, then two clear columns, then a heavier bar, and had Khar-Tasel known what lay under his thumb he would have refused to dock the transport. He did not know.

He nodded to Drevon-Karel.

"The peace overture is intact, Senior Attaché. Every soul is accounted for. Veil-Three docking is authorised."

"Welcome, Liaison."

## 2. The Heavier Bar.

Inside the dome the air ran thin and cold and carried, very faintly, an ozone he had been told was normal for an outpost three months out of mothball and would clear by week six. The inner hatch had sealed behind the party with a suck of pressure that popped in his ears, and beyond it the corridor breathed colder still, the walls sweating a thin condensation that beaded on the conduit runs and left the handrail damp under his palm. He had read that in the certification. He believed it. He walked behind Drevon-Karel toward the residential quadrant where the families would be billeted, his own footfalls and the attaché's falling out of step and back into it on the ribbed decking, the pressure of the sealed dome settling into his ears and easing as he went, the folder in his right hand and the diplomatic pouch against his left, and the children of the delegation came off the transport behind him in a small ragged line he counted again, because souls before structure was the order.

Forty-one children.

He filed the docking authorisation at the residential quadrant administrative desk, a scarred composite counter with a strip of worn tape along its edge where a screen had once been mounted. The clerk worked by the light of a single overhead panel that buzzed at a pitch just inside hearing and threw a hard white circle on the counter. The Compact clerk took the folder, worked a thumb under the flap to check the tab was seated, brought a stamp down on the cover with a flat wet click, left a green chit on it, and slid the folder into a hardcopy archive that ran home on its rails with a long metal rasp and a final knock. He would not open it again. Khar-Tasel watched him do it.

The heavier black bar along the bottom of the sheet was a target window. He did not know that either.

He did not know, and the authorisation was filed, and the souls he had counted on the apron walked into the dome behind him for the hundred-day posting, and Drevon-Karel laid his hand over his heart a second time and said, in the flat voice of a senior attaché three months tired, "We have you, Liaison."

Khar-Tasel placed his hand over his heart.

"You have me, Senior Attaché."

The dome sealed behind them with a soft pneumatic thud, and the atmosphere envelope caught and held. Four star systems away, in a Fleet Air operations theatre, a clock had already run ninety-six hours toward zero, and the three-mark cadence now buried in a Veil-Three archive was the last confirmation it had waited for. No one inside the dome knew the clock existed. On a gunnery plot no soul here would ever see, the target window went live.