Empire of the Fallen, page 10
Suddenly he regretted his flippancy in Arrengate North. He opened the cab’s window. The bitingly cold air flooded the hold, but it was no use. Sour, adrenal nausea was churning his guts. It was as if the thought of it all was a physical weight, crushing him. His pulse became the pounding lockstep of thousands of Imperial kaygryn troops marching through conquered UN cities, the breeze through the window was the howling gale of wintry Sophia as it tried to kill him, the—
‘Captain? Is everything all right?’ ZEN intoned.
Vondur looked at the VI, his chest heaving, his forehead damp with perspiration.
‘Yes,’ he managed, nearly choking. Ahead, the vast orbital pylons of Whiteport loomed. ‘Yes, I’m… I’m fine.’
Sixteen-and-a-half hours later, he was floating blearily through the docking proboscis connecting the UNS Winchester to terminal five of the Cobalta Fleet Muster when he saw a familiar face. There, hovering on the other side of the airlock with a broad grin, was Staff Sergeant Chester Cox. Vondur couldn’t help but grin as he underwent decontamination and the airlocks hissed and repressurised.
‘Goddamn it, sir, is it good to see you!’ Cox shouted, and the two grabbed each other into an awkward, zero-gravity embrace. ‘When they told me you were alive, I couldn’t believe it. We all thought you’d been killed when that kag shot up Navem Sigma.’
Iyadi.
Vondur shook his head and shrugged. ‘I’m still here,’ he said lamely.
‘And ZEN! Christ on a bicycle, how are you, you old can-opener?’ Cox growled, thumping the VI so hard he sent himself cruising backwards.
‘Hello, Staff Sergeant,’ ZEN said. ‘I am well, thank you. How are you?’
‘I’m a hell of a lot better now that the boss is back,’ Cox said, winking at Vondur. ‘Lad, you’ve got some serious explaining to do.’
Vondur nodded, still feeling slightly disorientated in the freefall environment. ‘Are you my liaison?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know who I’m supposed to report to. Do we have a squadron leader?’
‘No, we’re operating by flights at the moment. Colonel Soto is OC 225,’ Cox said, jerking his head backwards. ‘She’ll give you a proper brief. They just thought it might be nice if I met you first.’
Vondur couldn’t help but smile again. Cox, his irreverent former sergeant, had always commanded his respect in the way only a gruff, affable NCO could. He was genuinely pleased that the old man had made it through the Ascendancy War.
‘How long have we got?’ Vondur asked.
Cox shrugged. ‘Soto’s on-world. She won’t be back until this afternoon. Gives us a few hours at any rate.’
‘All right,’ Vondur said. ‘Is there any gravity in this place?’
‘Aye, follow me.’
Cox led them through the warren of increasingly wider corridors until they reached one of the station’s rotating rings, and Vondur felt himself relax as the reassuring centrifugal force pressed him against the torus’s outer bulkhead. From there, it was a five-minute walk to the canteen through a wide passageway crowded with marines and Fleet personnel. It was still late morning, station time, and the lunch rush hadn’t started yet.
They took a table near the back where a wide bank of high-definition holos gave a convincing impression of a window, and Vondur drank in the view of a hundred Fleet ships floating thousands of kilometres above Cobalta while Cox went and got them a pair of coffees.
‘Black coffee, black coffee, can of oil,’ Cox said, setting three containers down. Vondur snorted.
‘Very amusing, Staff Sergeant,’ ZEN said.
‘You taught him sarcasm?’ Cox asked Vondur, his grin making it seem like he’d made a particularly uproarious joke.
‘I didn’t teach him anything,’ Vondur said, as ZEN inspected the can of carbonated soft drink. Quietly, it set it to one side.
‘So,’ Cox said, taking a sip of his coffee, ‘what happened?’
Vondur told him what happened, from the beginning, back when 11 Squadron had first been engaged by the provar on Uvolon. He told him about Staerck, Iyadi, Halder, the blackworld, Executor Hasani, surviving for six months on Sophia, and finally his debrief by Kowalski and Scoville. Cox listened with an unprecedented patience, and only stirred when Vondur had finished—a good half hour after he’d started talking.
Cox let out a whistle. ‘Jesus…’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t even know what to say to half of that.’
Vondur shook his head. ‘What is there to say?’ he said bitterly. ‘We were betrayed. By the UN. For sanctioning Halder in that way. We don’t torture people, even kaygryn like Iyadi.’ He paused for a moment, studying the spacecraft outside. ‘Do we?’
‘Never trust the spooks,’ Cox said. ‘They do what they want. The Code doesn’t apply to them. Give me a good, straight-up, clean brawl any day. Save your shadowy shit for someone else.’
‘I thought we fought for a principle. We’re no better than the bloody provar,’ Vondur said. He traced a large cruiser with his eyes as it soared across the docking area, its grey-and-blue livery stark against the blackness of space. He took a long gulp of coffee.
After a while, Cox shrugged. ‘What can you do? They do what they want and you can’t stop them. Besides, everyone else does it. Everyone in Tier Three does shit like this all the time. We’re probably just the biggest hypocrites in condemning it so vocally.’
Vondur sighed. Cox was right. What could he do? And yet it made him feel no better. ‘I feel so bloody naïve,’ he said after a while.
‘Ah,’ Cox said, waving him off. ‘You and ninety per cent of the UN. They keep it secret for a reason. Don’t let it bother you.’
There was a silence while Vondur let it bother him. It did bother him, for reasons which he couldn’t fathom. He’d never considered himself overly principled. Why was this information—something which should apparently have been obvious anyway—getting to him?
‘What happened to Jarvin and August?’ Vondur asked quietly, ‘on Irene’s World.’
Cox’s face immediately fell. He seemed to age ten years in a second. It was easy to forget that while Vondur had been scratching out his survival on Sophia, the rest of the galaxy had been locked in all-out war. Cox and every other Goliath in the UN would have been right there on the front lines. In other, more innocent circumstances, Vondur might even have envied them for seeing some actual combat; now, he was almost relieved to have missed it.
‘Aye,’ Cox muttered. ‘It was… well, there wasn’t much anyone could have done about it. Brass was as good as you could have hoped for. Ellisburg and Foster were doing well between the pair of them.’
‘Who was the CO?’
‘Ah, we had Ueda from MECHCOM. Kozlov was Fleet.’
Vondur nodded. He knew of them both.
‘en’Jago’s splinter hit the Fleet at dawn. Our dawn; I don’t know what the hell they call it in orbit. Ten ships wiped out. We were at the mercy of the provar for two hours. We hit them with all the STO stuff we had, and thank fuck we had shielded ground positions. We held them for a while, but they didn’t deploy to clear us out like we expected. Instead, they hit us with viral loads.’ Cox clasped his hands together to stop them from shaking. It was the first time Vondur had seen the old sergeant show any kind of real emotion. It was as troubling as the story he was telling.
‘Of course, shields do nothing against viral, so plenty were exposed. The med techs did all they could. Maybe saved about fifty per cent. August didn’t make it. He was…’ Cox’s voice faltered. ‘He was a mess by the end, Cap. Bleeding from everything. Puking his fucking guts up. I wanted to pull my gun on him and end it, but the techs insisted he be left.
‘Well, he died. Provar came again the following day. Fleet had left us with one frigate. It didn’t even try and fight, just bugged outsystem. This time they hit us with ground forces too; they overran the shields. Rail strikes did for Jarvin. They sent the 10th Fleet to save what was left of us. After six hours, it wasn’t a lot. Then we left and the provar set the world on fire. CAF. Killed everyone who was left. Every civ on the planet. I don’t even want to know how many souls.’
They sat in silence for a few minutes, two men broken in different ways.
I should have been there, Vondur thought, clenching his hands into fists. It should have been me.
Another few minutes of silence passed while both of them regained their composure. When they were sufficiently calm, Vondur asked with a forced nonchalance, ‘So what’s the deal here? What’s Soto going to tell me later?’
‘225’s good,’ Cox said brightly, happy to be talking about something else. ‘Twenty-one Goliaths in three flights. I think you’ll be replacing Captain Sornn. He was TKIA last week. It’ll be a month before they can regrow him a body.’
‘Jesus,’ Vondur said, ‘what’s going on here?’
‘Fucking kags,’ Cox growled. ‘Every kag in this damn galaxy is rioting, blowing themselves up, and generally causing a damn bloody nuisance. Your Hasani character—they worship him like a god. When you said you’d met him, I was already trying to think of where I’d heard the name. He’s like their damn messiah. The Kaygryn Federacy has fallen apart. Any kaygryn government that was ever sympathetic to the UN has completely lost its grip on power. Kag nations across the galaxy are just failed states. The militias run the show, and now with all this talk of the Kaygryn Empire, they’ve gone completely bananas.’
Vondur studied Cobalta below, the vast green and tan and blue orb silently turning in the void. From orbit, everything looked so peaceful.
‘It’s bad here?’
Cox nodded, finishing the dregs of his coffee. ‘You’d think with the Fleet presence the kags’d calm down a bit, but they’ve been attacking almost every day. 225 has taken two casualties already.’
‘The kaygryn are taking out Goliaths?’ Incredulity wrote itself across Vondur’s face.
‘You’d better believe it,’ Cox said, his eyebrows raised. ‘They’ve been whipped into a frenzy. They fight like men possessed. You’ll be walking down the street, minding your business, and one will slam an AP50 to your leg and take you and a square kilometre out with him. It’s mad.’
‘Jesus… what’s the situation on the ground?’
‘Kaygryn country is in lockdown. Ok’Vura, it’s called. It borders Cobalta for five hundred klicks. We’ve imposed martial law, curfew, arrested hundreds of the militia leaders, hit their bases with precision strikes but… Well, they’re inventive fuckers, that’s the truth. I don’t feel safe patrolling.’
‘Why are we patrolling? Sounds like we’re just losing men for no good reason.’
Cox shrugged. ‘Got to dominate the ground. Get eyes on, flush out the enemy. Can’t let them get organised, can we? Besides, we’ve closed the border. There are fifty million people in Cobalta City alone. That’s fifty million corpses if these kag fucks had their way.’
Vondur sighed. ‘What a fucking nightmare,’ he said after a while.
‘Aye,’ Cox said, ‘and these are just regular kags, not even the super-kags Constance keeps harping on about.’
The canteen was filling up. ZEN was drawing looks.
‘Where are we stationed?’
‘Half on the Crossland, for orbital insertion. The rest planetside, UNAF Cobalta.’
‘Never heard of the Crossland.’
‘You won’t have; it’s new. Lost half the Fleet in the last fucking war. She’s holding low orbit now. She’s our LOAS.’
‘We’re billeted there?’
Cox nodded. ‘Sornn was, so I guess you’ll be. I’m down on the base.’
‘I’d like you back as my sergeant, if I can swing it. Would you be interested?’ Vondur asked.
Cox grinned. ‘Of course. With ZEN, we’ll make our own miniature 11 Squadron.’
Vondur was halfway through smiling insincerely when a rumble shook the station. Immediately the hold filled with the yammering of alarms.
‘Shit,’ Cox snapped, looking around. Everyone in the canteen had stopped what they were doing. Some were standing up, searching for some kind of instruction. Palpable consternation filled the air.
Vondur felt his pulse spike. There was another rumble. A tremor ran through the station’s superstructure. He looked out across the ships in the marshalling yard to see docking clamps being explosively decoupled in great geysers of gas and engines flaring hard against the star field. It was strangely hypnotic, watching those huge instruments of death moving so silently, so ponderously.
Then their flak cannons and ordnance pylons began to extrude from their hulls.
‘Shit,’ he agreed. The canteen was a wall of sound. Men and women were streaming out through the doors like blood from a severed artery. ‘An attack?’
‘It’s the kags!’ someone shouted as the canteen was thrown into sharp relief. Vondur’s first instinct was to hit the deck, but he managed to shove ZEN off the bench next to him. In the marshalling yard, the UN railguns were firing at something he couldn’t see. It looked like it was above them. The station suddenly felt horribly vulnerable.
‘This way!’ Cox shouted, running for the door they had come in by. ‘Need to get to the armoury!’
They barged their way through the corridors and clambered up the ladders, up into the gravity-free section of the station. The rotating sections were shutting down anyway, as they did in all proximity alerts.
The corridors were flooded with Fleet personnel scrambling to get to their ships—those that were still docked—and marines yanking on helmets and priming shotguns. Every so often, they would pass a window-holo and Vondur would see pinpricks of light flickering in and out of existence in the distance. Though it hardly seemed like it, he knew enough about fleet engagements to know that those distant specks of light were terrifyingly proximate warships, well within range of the station.
‘They’re attacking a Fleet muster?’ Vondur shouted over the yammering of alarms as he and Cox pulled themselves through the corridors. ‘They must be suicidal!’
‘Welcome to Cobalta,’ Cox growled.
It took them a few minutes to reach the armoury. Dozens of marines were already clustered around it, shouting at the quartermaster to hurry up as the man handed out shotgun after shotgun as quickly as he dared. Cox eventually managed to grab two and thrust one into Vondur’s hands, then did a double take, took another and gave it to ZEN.
There didn’t seem to be any kind of protocol. Vondur followed Cox back the way they had come, bowing to the man’s superior knowledge of the station, but there was no discernible purpose to their movements. The kaygryn would never get close enough to board, given the sheer number of UN Fleet ships in and around the station. They were much better off firing at it from a distance, as they were doing.
The station rumbled again as its own batteries unleashed hundreds of flak salvos at the distant warships. Vondur, Cox and ZEN pulled their way into a marshalling hangar where the lifeboats were, and in the lull, they located armoured pressure suits and donned them. Every second, more personnel crowded into the hangar, loitering around the lifeboat airlocks. Whatever the drills were, they needed rehearsing—badly. A single successful canister shot would obliterate everyone inside.
They waited while the engagement was thrashed out. There was nothing else to do. Vondur gripped the shotgun nonetheless, syncing with the station’s VI, trying to discern what was happening via his IHD. Like all non-Fleet personnel, he loathed being in space. Even with force shielding and nanoform hulls and diamond armour, everything was so vulnerable. The five minutes he spent in that hold, squeezing the pistol grips of the shotgun, trying to cram himself into a smaller space between the lifeboat airlock and the bulkhead, was a fresh vision of hell.
Then, after one last concussive boom which rattled the station to its core, it was over. The alarms died away. A palpable wave of relief washed over the station’s inhabitants. In that moment, he had never felt more grateful to the Fleet in his life.
‘Jesus,’ he breathed, trading a look with Cox. The old staff sergeant looked equally rattled, a mirror image of everyone else there whose faces were not concealed by counterboarding armour.
‘Come on,’ he said, his breath ragged. ‘Let’s see if we can find Soto. Quicker we can get off this death trap, the better.’
Colonel Soto didn’t arrive at the Fleet muster for another forty minutes. When she did, she summoned Vondur to her quarters in another of the station’s rotating rings. Cox led him there in silence. Neither had spoken since the attack. Instead, they’d sat in tense silence, reliving those brief but unending minutes of terror over and over again.
‘Thank you, Staff Sergeant, that will be all,’ Soto said tersely when they arrived.
‘Yes, Ma’am,’ Cox grunted. ‘I’ll wait out here with ZEN,’ he muttered, and Vondur nodded.
‘Have a seat, Captain,’ she said. She gestured to the chair in front of her desk, and Vondur sat in it. The door irised closed behind him.
Soto looked at him. She had remarkably piercing eyes, and a severe face to go with them. Her hair, jet black, was so tight against her scalp it may as well have been painted on.
‘I have…’ she said, waving through various reports on the holo in front of her, ‘… reports from Emma Okerea—that’s your CR—and Special Agent Kowalski telling me not to ask you about the last six months. You’re an interesting man, Mr Vondur. Black ops, was it?’
Vondur cleared his throat. ‘You might say that,’ he said eventually.
‘Hm,’ Soto said with a raised eyebrow. ‘Well, you’re good to go, according to these people. I shan’t ask why you needed a CR in the first place. Cap’ Sornn is TKIA and I need a replacement. You’re a very qualified pilot and an experienced captain, and you have the added benefit of being alive. Not many of those left, since the war.’
