Empire of the Fallen, page 1
EMPIRE OF THE FALLEN
BOOK THREE OF THE ART OF WAR TRILOGY
RICHARD SWAN
Copyright © Richard Swan 2016
Cover illustration by John G. Reinhart
All characters in this publication are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
The Art of War Trilogy
Reclamation
The Ascendancy War
Empire of the Fallen
In the Same Universe
Hadan’s Reach
VIPER One
VIPER One: Countervalue
Other Works
Earth Remembers
Via Orbit Books
The Empire of the Wolf Trilogy (coming February 2022)
Contents
A Call to Arms
VII: Best Laid Plans
Time Sensitive, Mission Critical
The Conciliator
Stranger in a Strange Land
A Devil Unknown
Combat Reassessment
Scorched Earth
UN Marine
State of Mind
VIII: Rats’ Alley
Off Mission
Last Chance Saloon
Changing the Guard
Welcome to Hell
Beyond the Barrier
Valleron
Long Knives
A Second Coming
IX: Reclamation
The Forlorn Hope
The Battle of Folhourt
Myaxomon
Last Man Standing
Domino
Kill Order
Desperate Measures
The Jewel of the Kingdom
Epilogue: Pax Kaygra
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
Select glossary of acronyms
AHF: Ascendancy Home Fleet
AOW: Anti-Ordnance Weapon
CAF: Comprehensive Atmospheric Firestorm
CQC: Close-Quarters Combat
EFFECT: Exigency Force For Electronic warfare and Counter-Terrorism
FID: Fleet Intelligence Division
FOB: Forward Operating Base
JIC: Joint Intelligence Command
LOAS: Low-Orbit Artillery Support
LRIS: Long-Range Invasive Scanning
MDP: Mobile Defence Platform
MECHCOM: Mechanised Command
PFS: Personal Force Shielding
ROE: Rapid Orbital Extraction
ROI: Rapid Orbital Insertion
SIR: Standard-Issue Railgun
SPECTRECOM: Special Reconnaissance Command
SPECWAR: Special Warfare Division
TKIA: Technically Killed in Action
UN: United Nations
UNAF: United Nations Armed Forces
UNDM: United Nations Diplomatic Ministry
UNIS: United Nations Intelligence Service
UNSOC: United Nations Solar Operations Command
VI: Virtual Intelligence
ZEN: Zhahassi Electronic Nemesis
Hail, solider, hail!
Where do you go?
I see the clouds of war gather.
A CALL TO ARMS
‘To coax the old soldier out of retirement: is there any greater crime?’
Colonel William Oester, UNAF
The crisp Alpine air was like powdered ice in his lungs as Melbourne Smith crested the long, shallow slope that led to his family chateau. Beyond its gothic spires and soot-stained crenellations, a vast emerald prairie stretched for twenty kilometres, speckled with yellow daffodils and peach-fuzz dandelions. On the horizon, half-lost in a blue haze, the Alps soared into the sky, whipped-cream peaks brilliant white in the cold mountain sunlight.
The housekeeper, an old and perennially dour holographic matron programmed by his grandfather nearly a century before, accosted him on his entry through the heavy main gate. She flicked at his rear with an incorporeal towel, tutting both at his filthy clothes and lengthy absence. The latter he could appreciate: he’d been gone, unannounced, for nineteen days.
‘Mr Robert Cunningham is waiting for you in the drawing room,’ the housekeeper said, briefly flickering. ‘He’s been waiting for nearly two hours!’
‘Has he?’ Smith replied with a grin, though he knew it, of course. His IHD had told him as much two hours ago. In any event, the man’s space plane was sitting on the estate’s landing platforms, an expensive and tasteless collection of sleek crimson and white fins and engines that a Kansubashi mech-tech would have been proud of.
One of the estate’s human retainers, Alain Durand, was waiting for him in the yard. He relieved Smith of his father’s old-fashioned hunting rifle, and then, with considerable distaste, his modified Gorman-Valstar L72 assault-pattern plasma rifle.
‘Dinner is round the front,’ Smith said, slapping Durand on the shoulder. ‘Tell Martin, would you?’
‘Certainly, sir,’ Durand replied wearily, holding the APR like a soiled pair of underpants.
Smith pressed on into the house, inhaling deeply the familiar smell of ancient wood, leather and cold iron. He could hear a fire crackling in the drawing room to his right and the chink of a crystal sherry glass being repaired to its tray.
‘Smith?’ sounded a loud voice through the old, vaulted hallway.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ Smith replied, kicking off his boots for one of the estate’s robotic retainers to take away and clean. He shed his jacket, too, and slung it over a peg to his right.
Robert Cunningham appeared in the doorway, all breeches, boots and cavalry-cut jacket, his red hair foppishly long, his shirt open at the throat. He looked Smith up and down. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
Smith grinned and seized his old friend in a crushing embrace. ‘Getting dinner,’ he said, pounding Cunningham on the back a few times for good measure.
‘No, Smith, for the last six months,’ Cunningham said, stifling an alcoholic belch. ‘Tom Seymour said you’d gone over to the other side at last. Full UN. Citizenship. No more of this mercenary act, larking about with guns like bloody Albert Banscroft, action hero esquire.’
‘Thomas Seymour is an idiot,’ Smith said, steering Cunningham back into the drawing room. ‘But I have been in the UN.’
‘Go on.’
‘Christ, Rob, let me sit down,’ Smith said, feigning exasperation. ‘And pour me one of those, for heaven’s sake.’ He pointed at the collection of decanters on the small table opposite.
He collapsed into a long green couch, accepting a charged goblet. The drawing room was a large space, twenty metres to a wall, warmed by a large open fire and chock-full of bookshelves and ancient ornamentation. His father’s desk, unattended for some thirty years, sat at the far end, looking out across the estate and on to the mountains beyond. Already a thick front of cloud was coming in off the Alps, tarnishing the otherwise unbroken sapphire sky. Smith sighed. It was barely midday.
‘How was it?’ Cunningham asked, pretending to be only slightly interested.
‘Rake,’ Smith groaned. ‘You know I’m not supposed to talk about it.’
‘But you will,’ Cunningham predicted confidently—and accurately. ‘Besides, I’m your attorney. Lawyer–client privilege.’
Smith snorted. ‘You are not my attorney.’
‘But I’m an attorney,’ Cunningham pressed. ‘Don’t be a bore, Smith. If Constance is to be believed, we’re all going to be dead in the next few weeks anyway.’
Smith gave him a withering look. ‘It’s not funny,’ he said.
‘I’m not laughing,’ Cunningham replied mildly.
There was a silence, filled only with the crackling of the burning logs. Eventually, Smith exhaled. ‘You read about Vonvalt?’
Cunningham nodded, triumphant. ‘I did,’ he said carefully, affecting to inspect his fingernails. ‘Only what reached the Duchy by snail mail. I’ve not been on the net for a while.’
Snail mail. The Old Colonies’ version of the UN’s IHD network. Outdated, rudimentary, wilfully slow. Given that galaxy-wide news evolved by the microsecond, it was an appalling way to be informed. Of course, they all had IHDs and net access, but it was rare that a proud Duchy citizen stooped to use either. The information overload of the UN was the height of vulgarity. The Duchy did things the elegant, old-fashioned way.
‘Well, I was there,’ Smith said.
‘The invasion?’ Cunningham said, leaning forward excitedly. It was difficult to believe, but the man was actually extraordinarily discreet.
‘No,’ Smith said, waving him quiet. ‘Before then. Months before. I was planting weapons ahead of planetfall. AOWs, Anti-Ordnance Weapons, big lasers to knock out any outgoing surface-to-orbit fire. Near the equator.’ He shrugged. ‘Biggest desert you’ve ever seen. And hot. So hot, Christ that heat. It’s a miracle the provar could tolerate it.’
‘Fascinating,’ Cunningham said, his eyes closed to a squint to ward off imagined desert grit. He reclined again and took a slurp of sherry. ‘Did you see any action?’
Smith shook his head, his eyes searching the ceiling. ‘Well, a little. Not really. I embedded with a tribe of kaygryn nomads after planetfall. We disrupted a few outlying Ascendancy supply positions, but it was… I don’t know. A massacre. There was no sport in it. The UN mopped up very quickly anyway, once lon’Voss appeared.’
‘lon’Voss?’
‘The...’ Smith waved his hand, as if to conjure up an explanation from the rug next to him. ‘The provari executor commandin
‘Of course,’ Cunningham said. ‘Yes, I read. Turned up at the eleventh hour.’
Smith nodded. ‘After that, there was little to do. I was debriefed by SPECWAR and cut loose. Came home about three weeks ago and got cabin fever in two hours flat. Thought I’d go out shooting.’
‘For two-and-a-half weeks?’
‘For two-and-a-half weeks.’
Cunningham sat still, his eyes searching the prairie through the window beyond Smith. Eventually they settled on Durand and Martin as they wrestled Smith’s prize into the yard.
‘They’re getting bigger,’ he said, after a while.
‘What are?’
‘The rabbits. You ought to control them better.’
It was true; the estate had been lax in controlling them since his father’s death. The rabbits were over a metre long now and had ghastly eyestalks. They traced their genetic lineage back to a mutant survivor of Old Europe’s last nuclear war, centuries before the establishment of the Federated Duchies, and populated huge swathes of the continent’s temperate grasslands. Still, they were harmless and made excellent hunting targets. Size had not diminished their speed in any meaningful way.
Cunningham’s attention returned to the room. He drained his glass, and refilled it and Smith’s. ‘Will you go back?’ he asked, lips glistening with sherry.
Smith shrugged. ‘I should think so. There aren’t enough in UNAF willing to get their hands dirty. Half of SPECWAR is made up of Old Colonies. And Kansubashi—or what’s left of it. The UN bods who do make it are all psychopathic. I think they need us to balance them out. Get some levelheadedness in there.’
Cunningham chuckled. ‘A bit of Duchy grit.’
‘Precisely.’
Cunningham toyed with his glass. ‘What’s the legality of it all?’
Smith shrugged. ‘Any human is eligible for UNAF, as long as they’re Tier Three. I think they like OCs because we’re more deniable. And even if an operation was traced back to the Duchy, what’s anyone going to do about it? Earth has more MDPs than Vargonroth and Folhourt combined. The system is mined to kingdom come.’ He took a swig of sherry, and then put down the glass. ‘Why, are you thinking of joining?’
Cunningham shook his head. ‘No. I mean, the Duchy is so dull at the moment but… I’ve never considered joining the military. Too restrictive. Better to do a tour of the UN. Learn their Neanderthal ways. Bed their loose women with my roguish Duchy accent.’
Smith shook his head, smiling. ‘It would get you nowhere. The UN is a thousand human civilisations meshed together. You’d find as many accents in any given city.’
Cunningham chuckled, but he was clearly disappointed.
They lapsed into silence again, and it troubled Smith. He was tired, and hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about his adventures, but there was something else, something hanging in the air, like the approaching Alpine cloud. Cunningham was his oldest friend, and was garrulous to boot. Their reunions were alcoholic affairs filled with Smith’s tales of aliens and the UN’s secret—and illegal—Special Warfare missions. But the bonhomie was lacking. The unspoken threat was there.
‘The Kaygryn Empire,’ Smith said after a while, enunciating each syllable.
Cunningham made a distasteful sound. ‘Coming for us all. One war done, on to the next. Does it end?’
‘One would like to think, given that they never had Earth, that we would be… immune from invasion.’
‘Who knows?’ Cunningham said, staring into the fire across the room. ‘Who knows what they’re going to do?’
‘Well, Constance seems to think they’re going to wipe out most civilised life in the galaxy and forcefully—rapaciously—recolonise our worlds.’
‘Well, yes, that is the prevailing theory.’
Smith sipped his sherry. He looked pensive for a moment. ‘You know, I can’t see it happening.’
‘I’m filled with confidence,’ Cunningham said dourly.
‘No, I mean it. With the UN and the Ascendancy allied… it’s a serious force to contend with. Plus the rest of Tier Three. And the Kaygryn Empire can’t exactly be in great shape. They’ve only had seven months since the crusade fleets stopped pummelling them.’
‘Until the President of the United Nations, centre of the universe, gives the all-clear, I’ll reserve judgement.’
Smith snorted. ‘And if she doesn’t?’
Cunningham thought for a moment. ‘All hail our new Imperial overlords,’ he said loudly, raising his glass in a mock toast.
It was some time after midnight when Smith received the summons. Cunningham was asleep on the drawing room couch, snoring loudly. The fire had almost burned itself out, and outside, snowflakes pattered against the windows as the weather closed in for the night. A volume of Keats lay next to Smith, half-read, and beyond that, there was a large platter of rabbit steaks swimming in bloody gravy.
A combination of nanobots and IHD programs rid him quickly of his drunkenness. The message was from Bill Pitt, a well-known operational commander from the UN’s EFFECT counter-terrorism division. It read simply:
< Major Smith, report to PINNACLE, Fleet Command North Africa Terminal, tomorrow, 18:00 local. TSMC. Pitt. >
He cancelled the message and reclined, regretting the loss of his inebriety. With a sigh, he stood quietly, grabbed one of the decanters from the tray next to Cunningham’s prostrate form, and went for a walk around the estate.
VII
BEST LAID PLANS
‘Let your schemes be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.’
TIME SENSITIVE, MISSION CRITICAL
‘But how much of the consciousness is retained in these procedures? We’ve read the reports of data sponging, and we can leave that to one side for the moment—though it seems like a violent and inefficient way of preserving a mind. What I want to know is, if I am effectively killed in battle, and a medical technician salvages my brain and my consciousness, how much of that is really me? What have I left behind? Am I still the same person?’
Sarah Kelly, Federal Socialist Secretary of State, questioning Dr Lewis Bollincht at a UN Select Subcommittee meeting on The Recovery of Consciousness from Battlefield Casualties
For the second time in her life, Lyra Staerck was brought back from the dead.
Her memories were intact, but the medical techs in UNAF Arrengate North gave her a briefing anyway. She’d been found on Sophia, a UNIS blackworld, along with Captain Ben Vondur of 11 Squadron Goliaths and a zhahassi ZEN from Tranquillity. In order to ensure her survival, Vondur had put her in low power mode—a deep coma in all but name—and by using the plasmastats from Uvolon and the ZEN’s auxiliary power unit, they’d been able to eke out her survival by six months. In fact, she could have stayed in that state for another six, they reckoned, with minimal physiological impact. She had been lucky, they insisted, that Captain Vondur was such a resourceful man.
William Pitt, the EFFECT commander who had serendipitously found them, had brought them back to Vargonroth for a full psych evaluation. She asked them if they’d grown her a body, since she was still just a head hooked up to a VR sync. That was when the techs had become fuzzy. They told her to rest. They told her that someone would explain everything soon. She didn’t like it.
She didn’t like it after the explanation, either.
‘Welcome back, Lyra.’
She had materialised in a VR forest, an endless thicket of pink-blossomed, white-trunked trees stretching to a warm, orange horizon. Blooms fluttered in the breeze, and the grass beneath her feet was soft and springy like moss. The air smelled clean and fresh.
The whole simulation had EFFECT written all over it.
She instantly recognised the woman who had said her name. It was Andrea Constance, Federal Socialist Minister for Xeno Affairs. She stood ten metres away, in front of a large pond, wearing a smartly cut suit of black wool. Under the glassy green surface of the water, red fish scales caught the sun.
