Empire of the Fallen, page 15
‘Out of the question,’ Pitt said. ‘If that was it, you can leave now. Peterson will show you out.’
Seka felt her cheeks flush a second time. Just like that, the anger was there again. ‘He’s my fucking boyfriend,’ she snapped, ‘I know what you’re planning to do with him.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Pitt cautioned.
She stopped. ‘I can fight,’ she said after a while. ‘I’ve been blockade running for years. I’m the best there is. I would get a reference, but my old boss is dead.’
The other man snorted.
‘I don’t need you. I don’t want you. You’re an oxygen sink,’ Pitt said. ‘Do you have any idea what you’re doing? You can’t just come in here bandying about classified information and threatening me with it. I could have you thrown in storage!’
Seka—wisely—bit her tongue. Pitt glared at her. The other man seemed to be rather enjoying himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. The words were like poison in her mouth. She couldn’t remember the last time she had apologised.
‘Good,’ Pitt said. ‘That will be all, Ms Leith.’
‘Wait a minute,’ the other man said. Her IHD, even with its various illegal programs and implants, couldn’t pull up any kind of ID on him. Pitt looked at him irritably but didn’t say anything. ‘What kind of blockade running are we talking?’
Seka shrugged. ‘Been doing it for years. Cargo smuggling for NSTA mostly. Ran the zhahassi MDPs around Gonvarion. That’s how I met Yano.’
‘Ever run anything through Ascendancy space?’
Seka nodded. She had to be careful. This was her way in, she could sense it. ‘Lots of times. Run Xhevega, Vespasian Breach, Keshourt, Perseus ore belt.’
‘Have you ever been picked out?’ the man leaned forward, steepling his fingers against his philtrum.
Seka shook her head. ‘Those that do get spaced.’
The man grunted. It sounded like a laugh. ‘What makes you so good at it?’
‘Knowing when and where to jump, and when to burn fuel. How to use the magnetosphere to hide. I know what races use what tech, how they use it, and how good they are with it. The UN is heavy on LRIS, so we jump insystem further out, burn the engines for a few seconds and coast. Can’t pick up our power blooms cos we’re running refrac, then just count the pings. We’re in atmosphere before the next burst. In a squeeze, we can make ourselves look like a meteorite.’ She shrugged. ‘That kind of thing.’
Pitt and the man exchanged a glance. Pitt looked at the table and sighed. ‘Ms Leith, will you wait outside a moment?’ he asked.
She had to stop herself from grinning. ‘Sure,’ she said and left. The room behind her was enveloped in an audio damper field.
*
‘Didn’t have you down as an actor, Bill,’ Smith said once Seka was out of earshot.
‘Trod the boards in my youth, didn’t I?’ Pitt replied absently. He still wore a frown.
They had known about Seka, of course, and guessed—correctly—that Yano would tell her about the mission. How to broach the subject with her had been the source of much debate within EFFECT. Simply asking or ordering her to fly the ’breaker, they had decided, was not the way to go. She had too much of a history of disobedience. Instead, they had opted for a more roundabout but more effective route: they had let her invest herself in the mission.
‘She’s got skills, sir. Skills I could use,’ Smith said, reading the commander’s expression and trying to head off his doubts. He picked up a holo stylus and absently rolled it across his knuckles. ‘I’m a jack of all trades. She’s a specialist. She’ll do a better job of piloting the ’breaker than I will.’
Pitt nodded, his brow creased in concentration. ‘I’m not denying that she’s skilled. If she’s been doing it for as long as she says she has, then she would have to be. Especially if she was running in the war.’
There was a pause. ‘She’s incentivised, too.’
‘I know,’ Pitt replied. ‘My worry is that she’s too incentivised. That she’s in fact distracted. She’ll blow the mission if Yano gets into trouble.’
‘She won’t. I’ll be there with a command override. I’ll shut her down if she tries anything stupid.’ He shrugged. ‘Worst comes to the worst, I can shoot her.’
Pitt clucked his tongue a few times. ‘I’m going off the idea,’ he said eventually, sending a jolt of adrenaline through Smith’s guts. ‘I can’t just induct random criminals into this mission, Melbourne. There are a thousand SPECWAR pilots out there.’
Smith stared at the table for a moment. ‘She knows the kaygryn, as well. Rutai. The one we’re bringing. They ran together. At the very least she can ease communication.’
‘You speak Argish,’ Pitt observed.
Smith wrinkled his nose. In truth, the one thing he was most concerned about was piloting. He was an operations man, more comfortable in riding in the back of a space plane than flying it. A pilot would take the pressure off and let him concentrate on running the op. This Seka Leith character was a piece of luck too good to give up.
‘She’s just going to sit on the ’breaker with me, Bill,’ he said. He could see already the man’s resolve weakening. Pitt was too good a commander to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Pitt made an exasperated noise. ‘All right, Smith. I’ll clear it with the President.’
Smith shrugged. ‘She’ll defer to your opinion on this. I’m telling you, this is pure serendipity. Besides, you don’t want someone from SPECWAR piloting. They’ve been taught to a syllabus.’ He nodded towards the door. ‘She’ll have a feel for it. It’ll be innate. And she probably has more actual balls-to-the-wire experience.’
‘I know,’ Pitt said testily. ‘I know all of this. I just don’t like it.’
‘I don’t like the whole mission,’ Smith said. ‘At least let me pick the team. Odds are we won’t even make it out the Barrier.’
Pitt nodded, accidentally agreeing with him.
*
The field disappeared and the door reopened. Seka walked in. Even before either of the men said anything, she knew they were going to take her. The giddiness she felt was almost immediately tempered by the crushing realisation of the mission she’d just asked to be a part of. Fortunately, Pitt didn’t give her long to let it sink in.
‘Listen to me,’ he snapped. The door slid closed behind her. ‘We’re not fucking around here. This information cannot leak. We are talking about the survival of the human race. The President is personally overseeing this mission. You may be a talented pilot, but you are a criminal and by rights you should be in storage.’ He worked at his bottom lip for a moment, considering his wording. ‘However. Your skill set is one we cannot ignore, and for that, I am willing to indulge Mr Smith here, who for whatever reason is keen to delegate his piloting responsibilities.’
Smith looked irritated at that.
‘You won’t regret it,’ Seka said calmly.
‘No, I won’t,’ Pitt said, ‘because you’re not going until one, you’ve been thoroughly vetted and briefed, and two, until Smith and I have seen you in action. If you don’t pass muster, you’re not going—and then I’ll put you in storage myself. I don’t like being barged in on, I don’t like being talked at the way you’ve talked at me, and I certainly don’t like adding further risk to what is already an insane gamble. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes,’ Seka said levelly. ‘I promise you won’t be disappointed.’
‘Good,’ Pitt said. The door slid open again and a different Mantix-clad guard stood there. ‘Chang. Take Ms Leith to Pinnacle. She has a lot of catching up to do.’
*
They travelled to Folhourt in the UNS Nakatomi III, a Fleet Auxiliary point defence frigate with overpowered heavy-element jump drives which got them there in nineteen hours. Neither Yano nor Lyra were allowed to sleep; rather, their bodies were artificially rested in regen pods while they trained in the VR sync on maximum time dilation. It gave them just over eleven days’ sync time to learn—or in Yano’s case, practise—as much Argish as they could, to learn as much about the kaygryn as they could, and to undertake an intensive course in unarmed combat, military signals protocol and survival skills. They also studied the Imperial kaygryn based on a reconstruction of Lyra’s and Ben Vondur’s recollection of their meeting with Hasani on Sophia, while SPECWAR personnel made detailed notes of their arms and armour.
By the time they arrived over Folhourt, Yano was beginning to feel prepared. Eleven days was not much time, given that operations like the one they were about to undertake usually engendered months of rigorous preparation, but it was enough to drill the basics into them. With Yano’s knowledge of Argish and the kaygryn from his time in the Xeno Division, Lyra’s knowledge of UNIS fieldcraft, and Rutai acting as an orbital advisor on the nuances of the aliens’ behaviour, he was feeling the most optimistic he had done since the first briefing.
The fact that Seka was going to be their pilot was a different matter. That he was really in several minds about. The protective part of him, the part that loved her, that part wanted her to stay in the UN to keep her out of harm’s way. The professional part of him was glad that they had such an excellent pilot flying the voidbreaker. The vain part of him was irritated that she’d stuck her nose in in the first place and insisted they take her along. This had been his chance to be the hero for once; now she was going to be there to keep an eye on him after all. At times, she felt more like a bodyguard than a girlfriend. God knew what she was going to be to him when he was a kaygryn. His handler, perhaps?
He put it from his mind. It was done now. They’d already taken her to Pinnacle for training. Getting worked up about it would achieve nothing except distract him from the issues at hand.
They were given their clearance vector after an unprecedented twenty minutes in high orbit. Folhourt was, astrographically speaking, dangerously close to the Khāli Barrier exits, and aside from the thousand or so heavily armed MDPs cluttering the orbit bands, there were three enormous minefields and hundreds of Ascendancy and UN ships to navigate through too, all with itchy trigger fingers. Yano watched them filter past on the frigate’s VL sensors, all naked to the human eye without tactical overlay except for the odd black speck against a bright bank of cloud.
Folhourt loomed above them as the Nakatomi III slowed to a stop and held in geosynchronous orbit. He and Rutai were then pulled out of their sync capsules by marines and taken to one of the frigate’s Manticore troop transports in the ventral hangar. Lyra, who was still a head in a crate, was loaded into the hold afterwards and strapped against the bulkhead.
They spent the journey to the surface in tense silence. The Ecriotha Rac, Folhourt’s perennial ice vortex that scoured thousands of kilometres of the planet’s surface with gale-force storms, battered the Manticore so intolerably that by the time they landed, Yano realised he’d had his eyes screwed closed for the final minutes of their descent.
‘Jesus,’ he breathed once the Manticore’s landing struts had found the hard ground of the Forbidden City. Even Rutai, who so often seemed imperturbable, was shaken.
‘I hate flying,’ the kaygryn said in Argish.
‘You and me both,’ Yano breathed.
The hold door hissed open. Immediately, freezing air cut into them, and Yano wrapped his thick Fleet-issue trench coat around himself. Ahead, perhaps five hundred metres away, the Zecad loomed in the dark-grey sky, an obsidian-black pyramid worn glass-smooth from nuclear fire.
He felt an odd sense of vertigo as he stepped out of the hold and on to the stone floor. The Forbidden City was exactly that—forbidden—or at least it had been for millennia. Had he not been focussed on what was about to take place, he might have been paralysed with awe. He, along with the rest of the UN, had spent his childhood fixating on the myths and legends surrounding the galaxy’s most secretive and infamous landmark. To see it now, in real life, was humbling—or rather, it would have been had there not been dozens of UN ships, personnel and Goliaths milling about.
‘Unbelievable,’ he muttered. He knew about the UN presence around the Zecad—it had kick-started the Ascendancy War, after all—but since the war’s conclusion, the Forbidden City’s unofficial moniker, ‘FOB Zecad’, had become… well, official. UN-livered prefab modules were stacked all over the place, and between them heavy canvas tents fluttered in the wind, housing banks of holos and consoles and hundreds of crates of military hardware. Mantix-clad personnel loitered everywhere. Huge Goliaths tramped across the ancient holy site like it was a spaceport landing platform. Behind him, the old temple apartments which used to house the Forbidden City’s resident warrior monks were nothing more than skeletal ruins and piles of rubble. One figure out of ten was provari. He could have been on a UNAF base on Vargonroth.
‘Deputy Yano?’ someone asked from his right. He turned. A good-looking man with tanned skin and a buzz cut was walking towards him, wearing what looked like an armoured pressure suit. A few globules of orange nanogel still clung to him, smoking in the cold air. Behind, an unmanned Goliath was being fussed over by a group of engineers.
‘Hi,’ Yano said, holding out his hand. The man took it.
‘Lance Kanova. I’m the ranking officer here. We weren’t expecting you for another five hours.’
Yano nodded. ‘This is Rutai. In the crate is Lyra Staerck,’ he added, indicating the crate the Manticore pilot had just carried out of the hold.
‘I spoke to your CO, Pitt. EFFECT man. He’s told me what I need to know, which apparently isn’t much. There are a group of cobs up there in the temple waiting for you. I understand Pitt and another of your group is arriving in a few hours?’
Yano nodded. Pitt and Smith had been held up in Carrington. Yano and Lyra were under instructions to liaise with Kanova and begin the process with the provari team being overseen by gan’Seke and an’Yuen. Yano was just glad there were some provar there that he’d met.
‘All right. You want anything before we go in? Food, drink?’
Yano shook his head. Adrenaline had killed his appetite.
‘All right then. Follow me.’
Kanova led them through the base and up the steps that led to the Zecad entrance. Yano paused at the top, his heart pounding, his stomach fluttering with adrenaline. He looked out over the rock plains that surrounded the Forbidden City, hundreds of kilometres of grey slate carved by the wind into a thicket of scythes, and took in the spectacular view through his human eyeballs. The next time he saw it, he would be a kaygryn. Or he wouldn’t see it at all, because he would be dead.
What am I doing? he thought, shivering in the wind, and ducked inside before he could talk himself out of it.
The interior of the temple was even colder and bore all the hallmarks of historic combat. The further they delved into it, the more pocks, craters and burns there were. When they reached the map room, there were stains to add to the mix, too, rust-coloured stains which had indelibly permeated the stone. Old ammunition casings littered the floor, and scars in the stone told of vicious caldar strikes. He eyed them uneasily, trying to picture the frantic, close-quarters combat that must have afflicted this place.
The stasis chamber was accessed by a single, corkscrew-shaped tunnel. ‘There used to be a holo-generated wall here,’ Kanova said as they passed through the entrance. His voice was distant, grim. ‘You wouldn’t know this doorway was here at all.’ It was the first time anyone had spoken since they had entered the temple. Halogen lamps had been fission-bolted to the wall, providing a welcome touch of familiar technology among the thousand-year-old stone. They disappeared from view as the tunnel curved away.
‘You fought here?’ Yano asked, peering ahead.
Kanova nodded. ‘Been here since the beginning,’ he said, affably enough, though it was clear that further questions on the subject were unwelcome.
It took them ten minutes to descend the tunnel. Yano’s pulse thumped loudly in his ears. His throat had gone dry, and his whole body trembled with adrenaline. He felt like a man walking to his execution.
They reached the bottom. Yano had been able to hear voices for the last few minutes of the descent; now he could see the source of them. There must have been ten provar in the stasis chamber, clustered around a pair of capsules, a pair of gurneys and a bank of consoles. Beyond, a wide, drum-shaped room stretched for hundreds of metres. Pillars carved out of the bedrock were evenly interspersed between the tanks of preserved Imperial kaygryn he’d heard so much about. One of the tanks had been shattered by an explosion, but the rest were intact. Each had an antenna array on the top which pointed to the centre of the chamber. On the floor was a pile of charred wreckage—presumably the old FTL comms array that Jean-Luc Courte had destroyed when the Zecad was first taken.
‘Ah, Mr Yano,’ gan’Seke said, breaking away from the group of provar and heading over to him. He was still clad in the white, green and gold robes of the Ascendant Feudality, whereas most of the provar beyond, save an’Yuen, were dressed in sterilised medical exoskeletons and wore surgical helmets with invasive scanning mounts.
‘Samman,’ Yano said, feeling some of his trepidation melt away thanks to the provar’s easy manner. ‘This is Lyra Staerck.’ He indicated the crate.
‘Of course,’ gan’Seke said, ‘after our briefings in the VR, it is easy to forget that only her head survives.’
‘This is Lance Kanova,’ Yano said, indicating the CO.
‘Hello,’ gan’Seke said.
‘Hi,’ Kanova said.
