HAVOC: Cold Cohort

# Chapter 0. Aurora Carolina

## 1. The Tactical Chair.

Fourteen years of service. Nine of them in the tactical chair of the Kaath-Riven corvette Vengeant Wire, and in nine years Tsorrin-Kel had never once run a firing solution off a handwritten sheet.

The sheet lay on the rail beside his left hand. Paper. He had read the word in service manuals and had not held the thing in four years, and under his fingertip it felt dry and faintly greasy, warm from the deck lamp. The alphabet crowding the top half was none of the three he could read. But below it, at the bottom of the page, a column of vectors and a cadence line in standard fleet notation told him exactly what to fire, when to fire it, and how many seconds to leave between shots.

Three shots. Nine seconds. Three shots in nine seconds.

He had never fired three shots in nine seconds at anything, because the Kaath-Riven fleet did not fire three shots in nine seconds at anything. The drill they taught at the War Academy ran fire one, confirm, fire two, confirm, fire three. It took fourteen seconds on a good crew and twenty-one on a bad one. The whole point of it was that a tactical officer never put two slugs into the wrong thing in a row.

Three shots in nine seconds was a cadence for a crew that already knew where the target would be before the target did.

## 2. Aurora Carolina.

The target was the civilian passenger liner Aurora Carolina, inbound to Colony Yeager on the approach vector Tsorrin-Kel was holding at forty thousand kilometres. Her transponder was loud, legal, and scheduled. Four hundred and thirteen souls on the roster. Somewhere aboard the Carolina a civilian chief steward was reading out the approach countdown over the public-address system while Tsorrin-Kel's finger settled onto the firing stud, cold and smooth under the pad.

The captain of the Vengeant Wire had not spoken in eleven minutes. Korreth-Arn sat the command chair one deck up from the tactical deck, and for six of those minutes he had bent over his copy of the order that reached the bridge seven hours ago in the hand of a courier whose uniform carried no patches, whose face Tsorrin-Kel had studied once and then made a point of never studying again.

On the tactical repeater beside the firing stud the Aurora Carolina's transponder pulsed green every half-second, the way a civilian transponder was supposed to pulse. The recycled air on the tactical deck tasted of burnt coolant and the ration paste from the mess two decks down. A specific paragraph in the tactical officer's manual said a Kaath-Riven weapons officer never fired on a pulsing civilian transponder at the approach vector of a colony world under any circumstances, and that if the officer ever received such an order, he was to confirm it with the captain in person on the bridge and refuse if the confirmation did not come in writing.

The confirmation had come in writing. It was the handwritten sheet on the rail beside his left hand, in an alphabet he could not read. But the vectors were his vectors and the cadence was his cadence, and the order had come down the chain from Korreth-Arn, and six years of service said Korreth-Arn did not fire on civilians.

Tsorrin-Kel set his hand on the firing stud and his eye on the pulsing green.

## 3. The Cadence.

At the mark the cadence line gave him, he ran the solution.

The first shot put a kinetic slug through the Aurora Carolina's forward crew compartment at an angle that never touched the passenger decks. The slug was three metres across and moving at the speed a Vengeant Wire slug moved at, which was the speed a civilian hull was not built to survive. The chair shivered under him as the round left the rail.

Three seconds later the second slug went through the Carolina amidships, between her number two and number three passenger decks, at an angle that did touch them. It went in on the port side and came out on the starboard side and left a hole the shape of a slug.

Six seconds after the first shot, three after the second, the third slug went into the reactor housing at an angle the War Academy manual did not carry in its kinetic-attack chapters, because the manual did not carry angles that assumed the attacking crew already knew where the reactor sat and how its shielding rated to a half-percent tolerance.

Three shots. Nine seconds.

The Aurora Carolina came apart amidships. Her forward section kept moving on her original vector at a quarter of her original speed. Her aft section tumbled end over end away from Colony Yeager, venting a bright plume that went dark as it froze. Between the two sections, across eleven hundred metres of open black, Tsorrin-Kel's repeater registered four hundred and thirteen warm signatures going cold at the rate at which civilian life support went dark.

## 4. The Log.

Korreth-Arn gave the stand-down. The klaxon cleared. Tsorrin-Kel logged the solution and the cadence in the Vengeant Wire operations record exactly as the sheet had told him to, and the record-keeping officer on the command deck locked the log to his own signature and pressed the seal home with his thumb.

In his bunk that night, on his own paper in his own alphabet in his own hand, Tsorrin-Kel wrote one sentence for himself. He folded it twice and pushed it into the pocket of his tunic, behind his service identity tag, where the metal held it flat against his chest. The sentence was: The cadence was not ours. I fired a cadence that was not ours.

He sat on the edge of the bunk with the folded edge of the paper riding against the back of his knuckle and the cold of the deck plate coming up through his bare feet. Then he killed the light. He did not sleep, and he knew he was not going to forget, and he knew that forgetting was the one part of the cadence the man who wrote the sheet had failed to account for.

Then, at an hour when no one keyed a sealed bunk, the hatch lock turned from the outside.

Tsorrin-Kel came off the mattress onto the cold deck and put his back to the bulkhead.