"It's been two weeks!" Reaver snarled, his voice boiling with frustration. "Two damned weeks and we haven't learned anything! All you've got is a picture of some bloody Scraegan jewellery and a captive who might as well not even know we're here for all the information you've gotten from it. Do you have any idea what's going on out there?!"
Colonel Hackley's face darkened as she narrowed her eyes at the Hunter-Killer office. "You are speaking to a superior officer, Major. I suggest you mind your tone. And yes, I'm well aware of what's happening."
"Are you sure?" Reaver's eyes blazed as he held Hackley's stare. "My people are buying you these days with their damned lives and all you can say is 'mind your tone'?"
Ryke watched the exchange, his eyes widening in horror, and he knew he wasn't the only one. The senior Hunter-Killer officers had been summoned to the command operations module deep beneath StammBasin by Major De Lunta, and it had quickly become apparent that HK-Warlock's newly promoted commander had a very large and angry bone to pick with the base's hierarchy.
While he might have been surprised by how Reaver spoke to a superior, Ryke knew the truth underpinning the man's anger. Bad enough that his old commanding officer had died to bring the Scraegan captive back to Brekka, but now all they seemed to have accomplished was to force the Hunter-Killer Corp into a perpetual, guerrilla conflict with swarming Scraegan packs. The numbers were unlike anything Ryke had ever seen. No information had been gleaned from the creature they'd captured; no smoking gun and no watershed moment of understanding.
The humans remained just as in the dark as ever.
While Ryke and his companions had beaten off the attack on Cresentscar, other settlements, and other units, had not been so lucky. Casualties were mounting exponentially on both sides, but the Commissariat of Brekka, ensconced in the fortifications of the Forge, seemed content to let the carnage unfold while they interrogated the monster in their vaults. He had no idea what methods the Commissariat thought would coerce the Scraegan into ... well anything, but whatever they were doing wasn't working. There hadn't been even a whisper of information to tell them that their raid on the Scraegan compound had accomplished anything at all.
"I understand your frustration," Hackley continued carefully, holding Reaver's furious stare. "I really do, but we are working with complete unknowns here. No-one has ever had a live Scraegan to interrogate, but we still can't effectively communicate with it. We're piecing together a language that bears no resemblance to human speech, and we're doing it from battlefield recordings from Hunter-Killer cams. It's going to take time."
"It's time we don't have, ma'am," Sergeant Parnell interjected, her tone orders of magnitude more respectful than Reaver's, but disagreeing nonetheless. It had been a while since Ryke had taken to the field with her, and the veteran commander certainly looked more haggard than he remembered. Parnell's HK-Bishop was a hardened unit – that meant they'd probably been involved in some of the fiercest fighting.
"We don't have the numbers to catch every incursion," she continued, shrugging helplessly. "My people have been out in the badlands non-stop for the past four days. They're burnt out. We can't keep fighting like this."
"She's right," Ryke agreed, reluctantly looking up to meet Hackley's eyes. "It's costing the Scraegans, but they don't seem to care. For all we know they could keep this up for months."
"Somehow I doubt that," Hackley replied smoothly. "If they could have sustained this level of intensity they'd have done it long before now. This is a direct response to the capture of their... priest – shaman – whatever you want to call it. The chamber it was found in was some kind of worship shrine, our people are sure of that."
"That doesn't help us."
"Doesn't it?" A knowing smile flickered briefly across her face. "It shows that they have a system of belief, and beliefs can be broken, Sergeant. If we can understand why they are waging this war, that is our first step on the road to ending it. But until we do that, we have to keep fighting."
Reaver bristled. "Then we need more support. The Commissariat need to petition all the northern cities – empty them out because we need those Hunter-Killers here, now."
"It's being done," Hackley assured him. "But again, mustering those reinforcements takes time."
"Then you need to speed things up," the sergeant of HK-Thresher grunted. He was a heavily built man with deep brown skin and a thick black beard, and his weathered brow was furrowed with displeasure.
"You've seen the size of that thing," Reaver replied. "Is there a quick route?"
Hackley shook her head grimly. "We've tried piping parts of the language we think we've identified through loudspeakers. We've tried showing the images from the raids, the Scraegan iconography to try and get it to react – to speak to us. It just sits there. We tried long distance shock rods from outside the containment barrel. Thing nearly tore the whole room to pieces."
"You can't torture it!" Ryke blurted, his surprise forcing the words out his mouth before he had a chance to think. "It's not an animal!"
Hackley looked at him strangely. "Maybe not, but it is an enemy. I'm within my rights to use any means necessary to get the information we need."
He couldn't believe his ears. Ryke was the last person on the planet who would offer his sympathies to a Scraegan, but he knew how he would react if someone tried to coerce him with pain. If they wanted to beat the Scraegans they needed information. They needed a deeper understanding of who they were fighting and why. Trying to torture one of the things into some kind of dialogue would never get that.
"If all you're going to do is inflict more pain on it, you'll never get anywhere," he persisted. "They obviously hate us – they've been trying to wipe us off this continent since I've been alive. You think torture is going to change that? Whatever it is they think about us, you're proving it!"
"You're out of line, sergeant."
"Respectfully, ma'am, I think he has a point," Parnell interjected, though the unease she felt at contradicting Colonel Hackley was clear in her voice. "The thing probably thinks it's already dead. There's nothing for it to gain from engaging with us. If there's one thing I do know about Scraegans it's that death doesn't mean much to them. We need to offer another option, somehow."
"I am open to suggestions." Hackley's tone took on a definite edge of frustration now as she glared at the assembled pilots. "It's all very well for you to sit here and demand alternatives, but they don't exist. This is not a human prisoner. We can't talk to it. Even if we could, what leverage do we have? We have nothing to offer it. It ignores all non-violent means of communication, and it clearly isn't afraid of dying. That leaves us in the uncomfortable middle-ground of inflicting non-lethal pain until it gives some kind of response."
A grim silence settled on the room, the echo of Hackley's words dying around them. Ryke's gaze burrowed into the tabletop as he tried to think. Really, this was diplomacy, a strange and unwieldy brand of it, but diplomacy nonetheless. This was the first chance the colonists of Rychter had ever had to try and get to grips with why they were at war.
He hated the Scraegans. They had blown a crater in his life. But despite the anger and vengeance that boiled in his veins, Ryke knew they were more than just brute savages. Something was driving them to fight and every bone in his body wanted to know what that was. Even if it made no difference to the war, even if the fighting continued for the rest of his life, he wanted to know why his parents had died all those years ago at Rukker's Quarry.
"There is a different approach," he said quietly, his eyes rising from the table to meet Hackley's.
"Sounds like the spooks at the Forge have tried everything," Reaver grunted. "What've you got in mind?"
"It's pretty simple," he continued, lounging back in his seat and spreading his hands nonchalantly. "It sounds to me like someone needs to get in that cage and actually talk to it."
A series of incredulous looks rattled around the room before all pairs of eyes fastened onto him. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, his heart juddering. He'd thrown the suggestion out like it was the simplest thing in the world, but he braced himself for a stinging rebuke from his senior officers.
It didn't come.
Reaver shifted awkwardly in his seat, fingers drumming against the table before he shrugged, glancing at Hackley. "You've tried everything else-,"
"That is not an alternative," she snapped, cutting him off. "It's too dangerous. We lose enough good people to the Scraegans every day without us serving them up on a platter."
"We have to do something." Ryke threw his hands up in despair. "Whatever you're doing now, it isn't working and people are still dying! It's worth the risk."
"You seriously expect us to put a human being in a room with that thing?!" Hackley exploded. "Vannigan, even if I agreed with you, I can't order anyone to do that. It's as good as a death sentence!"
"You don't need to order anyone to do anything," he replied, resolve swelling in his chest. "Because you've got a volunteer right here."
*
You're insane.
That thought would not leave Ryke's mind no matter how hard he tried to shake it. It might have been his idea, but now that he was about to see it through he suddenly cursed his own stupidity for opening his mouth in the meeting. Volunteering in the safety of a briefing room had been easy, but now that he was confronted with the reality of his actions he wished he could go back and punch his former self in the jaw before he could get the words out.
But Ryke was not the kind of person to renege on a pledge.
He'd waited a full day after first proposing the idea – a day which Hackley had spent wrangling with the Commissariat to get approval for the audacious scheme. Despite her obvious misgivings, on some level the Scout Cadre commander knew they had to take a risk if they hoped to make use of their captive before the Scraegans overwhelmed them, town by town.
Then the order had come through, summoning him, personally, to the Forge.
Now he stood in his casual Hunter-Killer fatigues, naked without the massive armour and weapons of the war machine wrapped around him, a hundred meters below Brekka's streets with the military leadership of the city watching from dozens of camera feeds as he attempted to make history.
Hackley stood next to him as he stared at the twelve-inch blast door that would soon open to send him into the containment barrel. The walls of the giant armoured cylinder rose up a dozen meters in front of him like some kind of gigantic silo, studded with observation slits and reinforced with thick ribs of solid titanium. It was impregnable – indestructible – a fitting cell for the most important prisoner on Rychter.
He took a deep breath, trying to ignore the chatter of the attending Scout Cadre analysts and technicians that manned a dizzying array of diagnostic stations and computers that surrounded the chamber. He couldn't hear anything from inside.
In most of the footage he'd been shown the Scraegan captive was content to sit and wait, showing no concern about its predicament. It looked almost... confident, as though assured that nothing could happen to it despite being trapped in the military heart of its foes. As unnerving as that was, it only reinforced his conviction that they had to try something new if they hoped to gain anything from this encounter.
"Alright, let's go over this one more time," Colonel Hackley said quietly.
He nodded, tearing his eyes from the containment room to look at her.
"Once you're inside, stay on this side of the room," she told him, pointing at a schematic of the room on her data slate. One half of the circle was bathed in blue. "We will have operators with shock rods in position. If it goes for you, just bolt for the door and we'll try to keep it away long enough for you to get out."
"Got it."
"Assuming it doesn't try to kill you straight away, go through the pre-planned communications package, step by step. Your pad will project the images – just work your way through them one by one and give it a chance to respond. If it speaks, we've programmed the handful of phrases we have translated into the pad itself. You can try and respond to it that way."
He nodded again. Exhaled a long breath.
"Nervous?"
"Well... yeah."
"Thought so." Hackley smirked, fishing a small flask from the pocket of her jacket and handing it over. "Drink this. It's better than the home-brew crap you're probably getting from the engineers."
Ryke smiled thinly, accepting the flask and unscrewing the cap. He didn't bother waiting, quickly raising it to his lips and taking a big gulp. The fiery liquid inside scorched through his mouth and throat, the sensation making his eyes water. He coughed once, blinking furiously before attempting to hand the flask back.
"Keep it," she said. "I think you need it more than me."
"Thanks," he wheezed, pocketing the flask and wiping his eyes with one hand.
"I don't know if you're brave or just crazy – hard to tell with Hunter-Killers," Hackley told him, placing a hand on his shoulder. "But either way, I appreciate what you're doing."
"Someone has to," he replied, trying to ignore the tension in his muscles. "And if this goes wrong, it's not like you'll be able to say 'I told you so'."
"You'll be alright." She gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze and handed over the data slate. Then she stepped away and saluted. "Good luck, Sergeant Vannigan."
"Thank you, ma'am." He returned the salute with a wry smile.
Then he was alone, facing down the cage. A countdown sounded dimly from speakers in the walls, but he barely noticed it, his eyes locked on the thick blast door. The countdown completed and with a hiss of hydraulics the massive plates of metal split apart, opening an aperture just wide enough for him to pass through.
Gulping down his fear, Ryke held his head high and stepped into the den of the beast.