The Vega Citadel training program for Vanguard Cadets ran sixteen weeks. Eight weeks of physical and tactical conditioning, four weeks of suit operation and weapons integration, two weeks of scenario simulation, and two weeks of supervised field deployment in low-density Revenant zones Stage 1 through 3 only, always with an active Vanguard unit in overwatch.
Ray was in week three when they told him about the intelligence briefing.
It was Kaspar who summoned him a brief message to his unit terminal that said only Report to Intel Suite 7. 14:00 hours. and was signed with Kaspar's Iron Wall designation code. Ray had spent enough time around the Captain since Harlan's Gate to understand that Kaspar's brevity in messages was in direct proportion to how much there was to say in person.
Intel Suite 7 had six people in it when Ray arrived: Kaspar, Lt. Kitagawa, a Forge Division engineer named Dr. Yun who had the look of someone who had been awake for an uncomfortable number of consecutive hours, and three people in Vanguard dress uniforms with stars on their collars that indicated they were not people Ray had clearance to know the names of.
On the wall screen was a photograph.
The photograph was taken from a surveillance drone, altitude unknown, at an angle that suggested the drone had approached the subject carefully and not gotten as close as the operator would have liked. The subject was standing on a mountain ridge above what the caption indicated was the former city of Kyoto.
She was tall. Silver-white hair that moved as if in a wind that wasn't touching the ridge. Eyes, even at drone altitude, visibly burning — a white so total it should have been painful to see photographed.
Ray looked at the photograph and felt the Genesis Suit pulse once, hard, against his chest.
"Stage 12. Designation Vael, alias 'The First Throne.' Confirmed visual from three separate intelligence assets in the last seventy-two hours. She has been stationary at this location for approximately four days."
"What does a Stage 12 do when it's stationary?"
Everyone in the room looked at him. He'd apparently said the out-loud part out loud.
"Good question."
Dr. Yun pulled up a secondary screen data feeds from the area around the Kyoto ridge.
"What it does, Mr. Lexmix, when it's stationary, is summon. We've been tracking the Revenant density increase in a 300-kilometer radius around that location. In four days, it's gone from an estimated twelve million to our current models suggest upward of forty billion individual Stage 1 through 6 Revenants, converging on the Kyoto basin."
Forty billion. Ray had time to think: that's close to the entire pre-Eclipse population of the world.
"We don't know what she's building. We don't know the target. What we know is that in the past forty-eight hours, she has looked up at our drone three times. Directly at it. From a distance at which a human eye cannot see an object that size."
The room was quiet.
"She knows we're watching. She's letting us."
Ray looked at the photograph again. At the quality of the stillness in the subject not the stillness of someone waiting or someone planning, but the stillness of someone who had already arrived at the end of a thought and was comfortable there.
"She wants us to see the numbers."
Another look from the room.
"Explain."
"She's not hiding the army she's building. She's aware of our surveillance and she's choosing not to obstruct it. Which means she wants us to know the scale. She's not preparing an attack she's delivering a message. The army is the message."
Dr. Yun was writing something on his tablet very fast.
"What does the message say?"
"I don't know yet."
But he felt the suit pulse against him again, steady as a second heartbeat, and thought: but she does.