Empire of the Fallen, page 16
‘And you remember Rutai,’ Yano said, completing the introductions.
‘Of course. Hello,’ gan’Seke said, nodding to the kaygryn.
‘Ash,’ Rutai replied tersely.
‘Well,’ gan’Seke said, gesturing to the capsules and gurneys behind. ‘The team here is almost ready to extract the kaygryn from their stasis. They will have to partially wipe their mindstates first before implanting yours. They want to keep intrinsic behaviours as much as possible, but remove any personality and memories which might interfere with the transfer. I have attempted to glean as much as I can from the process to inform you, since I am the only one here who can speak fluent Terran, but I must admit, much of it is lost on me. The process seems more akin to sorcery than medical science!’
Yano forced himself to chuckle, but inside he was in turmoil. Lyra was presumably in a similar state of angst. She hadn’t said a word to him since they’d left Vargonroth.
< You hearing this? > he asked. It was embarrassingly easy to forget she was there, given that she was effectively luggage.
< I’m hearing it > she replied tersely.
‘You will be pleased to know that although the procedure will take some hours to complete while they map the relevant control centres of your brains to those of the kaygryn, the process is entirely reversible,’ gan’Seke went on. ‘The unfortunate aspect of the procedure seems to be that the Zecad is the only place in the galaxy where it can be carried out. Our distant ancestors clearly had much more knowledge about such mindstate transfers than we do now. We have reverse-engineered much of it, but it is still imperfect.’
Yano felt himself sweating despite the frigid atmosphere. It’s too late to back out, he thought. He told himself it a few times, and tried to think of Constance’s rousing words: if we pull this off, we’ll be heroes. If we pull it off.
The provar fussed around the consoles and holos for a few minutes. Then they exchanged a few words before one of them spoke to gan’Seke. The professor turned to them.
‘We are ready to begin,’ he said as both of the capsules hissed open. Inside was a human-shaped bed of green gel and an oxygen hose. More consoles and machinery piled up around the two stasis tanks seemed to come alive, winking with lights and flickering with holos.
‘Please remove your clothing, Mr Yano, and step into the capsule,’ gan’Seke said.
Yano exchanged a glance with Kanova, took a deep breath and did as he was bade, taking off all of his clothes and handing them to the Goliath pilot. His genitals withered in the cold atmosphere. None of the aliens seemed to care.
< See you on the other side > he sent to Lyra.
< Yeah > she replied.
‘Good luck,’ Kanova said, gripping his hand. ‘I’ll be here the whole time.’
‘Thanks,’ Yano said, then he had to repeat himself since the first time was barely more than a whisper.
The gel layer was freezing. He gasped as his naked buttocks and back sank into it. To his right, the provar were carefully opening the crate with Lyra’s head in it. The aliens in the medical exoskeletons were moving towards the stasis chambers, ready to recover the Imperial kaygryn and place them on the gurneys.
He lay back fully in the gel, his breathing shallow. Holos sprang into life around the capsule, displaying his vital signs. He stared at the chamber ceiling, trying to calm his thoughts. Nothing to do but wait and see, he thought. He laid his palms flat on the gel bed, only vaguely conscious of his nudity.
Provar in medical headgear loomed over him. Lights were shone in his eyes. One of them snapped their fingers a few times next to his ears.
‘Gorlan’a hai?’
‘Hai.’
‘They are going to put you under now, Mr Yano,’ gan’Seke said from out of his sight line. ‘We’ll see you in a few hours!’
Then the capsule lid closed, and Yano slipped, terrified, into unconsciousness.
VIII
RATS’ ALLEY
‘An army may march great distances without distress, if it marches through country where the enemy is not.’
OFF MISSION
‘Forget orbital drilling lasers and colony fleets and geosynchronous constructor rigs; the greatest settler’s tool in the history of the galaxy is the UN standard-issue railgun.’
Brigadier General Hans Templeton
The world was burning. Huge columns of fire rose into the air, weeping clouds of acrid black smoke into the atmosphere. Beneath it all was a perfect, classic vision of hell, an incandescent red landscape filled with human corpses and pulverised skyrises.
Huge buildings looked out over the inferno, massive phallic ships of tan-and-white composite twinkling with altitude lights and bristling with hundreds of antennae. From these otherworldly towers stabbed bright beams of green and purple light, brilliant lances of fire that keened like banshees and destroyed whatever they touched in billowing puffs of blue smoke. More of them were settling on the earth by the minute, rocket-propelled tower blocks that scoured deep craters into the bedrock with their nuclear engines and filled the air with world-ending noise. Vast mechanical proboscises anchored them into the ground while hangar doors lining their smooth hulls sprang open and disgorged streams of fighting vehicles like flocks of starlings.
Vondur watched these apocalyptic machines agape, his eyes wide with terror. Boiling air scoured his lungs as the firestorm raged around him, and thick, acrid smoke stung his eyes and blurred his vision. Around him, three corpses lay, split from crown to groin by laser beams like butchered pigs. He recognised each of them: Halder, Cole, Takach, the three EFFECT men who’d taken him to the blackworld, Sophia.
‘No,’ he said. Even if it hadn’t been a whisper, it would have been drowned out by the raging fires and shriek of tortured atmosphere.
He stepped forward, his foot crushing a human skull. With a horrible, gut-wrenching surge of nausea, he realised it was Lyra’s head. His foot had crunched through the Mantix helmet like it was eggshell, and her brains spilled free and enveloped it like a sucking bog.
He screamed. No sound came out. He was running now, running across the blasted landscape. He was wearing a Goliath flight suit, a rubbery set of overalls covered in interface patches. His heightened senses heightened further, so that the hellish vision became even more visceral, a mind-altering experience so intense it threatened to completely overwhelm him.
He pressed on madly, each laboured breath sucking down more of the foul air into the pits of his lungs. Pompeiian corpses, flash-dried casts of ash from the CAF seething across the world’s surface, broke under his relentless sprint. Ahead of him was a silver cone, a space plane he knew belonged to one alien and one alien alone.
Hasani.
‘You!’ he roared, while beyond another huge landing craft speared into the ground on a pillar of churning flame.
‘We have been existing under the boot heel of the provari crusade fleets for centuries.’ It was Hasani’s voice, smooth and condescending and with an undercurrent of venom. He recognised the words from before, like a half-remembered dream. ‘But all that is about to change.’
‘Come back!’ Vondur screamed. He could see the kaygryn now, standing on a mountain of corpses, his conical silver ship behind him.
‘Goodbye, Captain Ben Vondur. I doubt our paths shall cross again.’
Vondur could see his Goliath now, standing next to the shell of a building which had been gutted by orbital fire. It was being fussed over by loader mechs. They hadn’t even removed Captain Sornn’s name from the chassis.
Vondur let out a roar. Now the hellish landscape had gone. The Goliath was standing in a clearing, a glade in the middle of an endless forest under a pink sky. It was a calm, late summer’s evening, and the air was warm and pleasant. The corpses were there again. ZEN was lying in a pile on the floor like someone had reached down from the sky and turned him off.
He was back on Sophia.
He had to dodge violently to the right to avoid running directly into a tree. The change in scenery didn’t faze him as much as he felt it should have done, but the familiar sights and smells of that endless forest and the knowledge that summer would soon turn to the coldest and wettest of winters made him stop. He couldn’t take six months of isolation again, and the exquisite, agonising frustration that went with it. Horror claimed him, manifested itself as a crushing weight, compressing his chest, forcing him to take short, sharp gasps of that clear, virgin air while his vision closed in.
‘Goodbye, Captain Ben Vondur.’
Hasani’s voice cut through the air like a scalpel through flesh. Vondur was snapped out of whatever attack he seemed to be having and searched desperately for the kaygryn. He didn’t have to search for long; Hasani was a hundred metres away, just past the Goliath, standing at the top of his ship’s debarkation ramp.
‘Stop!’ Vondur roared, breaking into a sprint as Hasani turned and ducked into the doorway. He synced to Captain Sornn’s Goliath via his IHD and the cockpit hissed open. Hasani’s ship was already taking off by the time Vondur had harnessed himself in, closed the cockpit door and flooded the pilot’s capsule with nanogel.
UNAUTHORISED ACTIVATION flickered up on the HUD, and he cancelled it using his emergency command override. He would be damned if Hasani was going to slip through his fingers a second time.
He activated the Goliath’s tac screen and locked on to Hasani’s fleeing spacecraft. Already it was three kilometres away, cutting through the atmosphere on twin vortices of exhaust. He brought the mech’s phase cannon to bear, primed it, and screamed his rage as he opened fire.
MISS, the HUD flashed. Vondur snarled. The phase fire had scored a direct hit; he’d seen it. He fired again, but the HUD obstinately flashed with another MISS icon. He opened up with the Hydra battery, but each missile corkscrewed well wide of the target and smashed into the forest below, kicking up huge fountains of debris.
‘Goddamn it!’ he shouted, and fired the Goliath’s thrusters. The mech powered into the air on a redline intercept, but after a few seconds of reheat—more than enough to close a few kilometres of ground—Hasani’s ship vanished from the tac screen and the VL feed.
‘No! No!’ he screamed, clamping down on both phase and RRG triggers and sending spears of white and blue tracer arcing into the ground below. The cockpit whined with alarms.
After a few seconds, he stopped firing and pulled the Goliath out of its punishing vector. He floated through the air for a second, trying to work out what had happened, but already his surroundings were changing again. Now he was surrounded by cold dawn sky, a deep blue fading to yellow in the east. Below, a vast metropolis stretched for a hundred kilometres. It looked for all the world like vos’Shan, the long-obliterated kaygryn nation state on Uvolon, but he knew it wasn’t. For one thing, the towers and hydroponic domes of Anternis were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the much larger city of Cobalta stood in its place, a vast march of holo-flooded skyrises and orbital pylons.
‘What…’ he murmured to himself. He looked about the HUD and realised his comlink was off. He flicked it on and a dozen voices hit his ears all at once.
‘—Christ he’s lit up five square klicks. Kilo Six-Zero, this is Orbital, come in for God’s sake, I repeat, come in, that is a direct order—’
‘—unauthorised weapons discharge over a civilian area, repeat—’
‘—sir, it’s OK. Whatever is happening, just come in. If you don’t come in, they’re going to knock you out the sky. Just stand down and safe all your weapon systems—’
‘—head on a fucking stick! Goddamn it, Vondur, I do not have time for people going Section 8 right now, safe those weapons and RTB—’
‘—Six-Zero just lit up, like, a thousand civs—’
Vondur’s eyes widened as the cold realisation of what he’d done dawned on him like the early morning sun to the east.
‘Oh my God…’ he whispered, adrenaline gnawing at his guts. Below, fires were raging through Ok’Vura where habs had been obliterated by Hydra incendiaries and phase fire. Warm body scans were already tallying the dead in the hundreds.
His HUD chimed. A pair of Interdictor-variant Goliaths from 225 Squadron had intercepted him. His ACTIVE TARGET WARNING icon winked into life as both of the mechs and Orbital drew a bead on him.
‘Stand down, Captain,’ one of them said: Pilot Officer Tuan, from 3rd Flight, by the comm tag. ‘It’s okay, sir.’
He activated the comlink, cutting out all of the voices shouting in his ears. ‘This is Kilo Six-Zero…’ he said in a shaky voice. He could feel himself sweating inside the interface suit. Absent-mindedly, he locked all of his weapons on SAFE and initiated a slow, non-threatening vector back to UNAF Cobalta East. The two other Goliaths followed him at a cautious distance.
‘Ben, this is Colonel Soto,’ she said. Her voice had changed; now she spoke with a cautious condescension, the way a detective might question a child who’d witnessed a crime. ‘What’s going on up there, huh? We all green?’
Vondur cleared his throat. It had all seemed so staggeringly real at the time… Now he felt like a fool for ever believing in it.
‘I… I don’t think I’m okay,’ he said, fighting to keep the tears from his eyes. ‘I was having a dream, a n-nightmare. It all seemed so real… I didn’t even know I was in this thing until ten seconds ago.’
‘It’s all right, Ben,’ Soto said. She was much calmer now that he was talking. ‘It’s okay. Just RTB, nice and slow. This is not your fault.’
Oh fucking Christ it is my fault, Vondur thought, a fat lump in his throat. How many had he killed? The warm body counter was going up by the second. It had already hit three hundred. Three hundred civilians massacred in the blink of an eye, whole lives violently snuffed out because he’d lost his fucking mind.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘It was so real. I didn’t know I was doing it, I swear.’
‘It’s okay, Ben, it’s okay,’ Soto soothed, and then, to someone else in the background, ‘get me our DMA in here right fucking now. And call the CO!’
The DMA. The Designated Military Attorney. He was fucked. He’d just killed three hundred and fifty civilians. They would store him for this. And the CO. Soto’s CO would be another colonel at the very least, and more likely a brigadier general.
‘Oh God!’ he moaned. ‘What have I done?’
‘Keep it together, Ben,’ Soto said as he approached the UNAF exclusion zone. ‘It’s going to be fine. Staff Cox is going to be waiting for you on the pad, all right?’
‘Okay,’ he sobbed wretchedly, easing the thrusters down. His two tailing Goliaths maintained a vigilant overwatch. His HUD was blaring with five different alarms as the base turrets locked on to him too, big railgun emplacements designed to blast incoming munitions out the sky.
He saw Cox on the landing pad ahead, as well as another two men wearing the white berets of UNAF Police. Behind him he could hear air-raid sirens wailing into life over Ok’Vura.
He put the Goliath down, throttled back the thrusters, perfunctorily performed all the landing checks and then ordered the cockpit open. The nanogel was sucked free, and the early morning light speared into the hull. Cox stood in front of him, shadowed by the Goliath.
‘Out you come, lad,’ he said, his face a rictus of sympathy. Behind, the MPs looked on impassively.
Vondur trembled as he climbed out of the cockpit. His IHD told him he was experiencing nausea and shut it off before he could vomit. Cox moved forward and grabbed him before he could collapse.
‘Easy now,’ he said, taking the captain’s weight. ‘Come on, that’s it.’
Vondur fumbled madly at the helmet clasps and pulled it off, letting it drop to the floor. He sucked in a lungful of fresh air, and another, and another, until he was hyperventilating. Cox let him sink to the floor and squatted down next to him, rubbing his head with a calloused hand.
‘Easy, lad,’ Cox soothed, ‘easy.’
‘I killed them,’ Vondur whispered, clutching at his face with his gloved hands. ‘I killed hundreds of them! I’m fucking mad, Cox! I’ve lost my goddamn mind!’
Cox looked about him and leaned in close. ‘I know you’re upset, Captain, but just watch what you say, yeah? These are MPs. They’ll be recording it all.’
Vondur fell to sobbing. What did it matter either way? He was a murderer. UNAF might not have given a flying shit about the kaygryn, but that didn’t make what he’d done any less unbearable or appalling.
‘God help me,’ he whispered, pushing himself to his feet. The MPs stepped forward, but Cox waved them off.
‘I know where he’s going,’ the old sergeant growled in a threatening tone. ‘I’ll take him.’
Numbly, on mute, Vondur allowed himself to be led away. Behind him, ground crew, drones and more MPs moved in to recover the flight data from his Goliath.
They put him in the brig. Cox tried to fight them—good, honest, loyal Cox—but there was nothing he could do, and he knew it.
He lay alone for hours with nothing to occupy him but his thoughts. They’d frozen his IHD to prevent him from doing anything he shouldn’t. They were mostly concerned about him wiping his memories, or clearing the Goliath IHD interface data banks, but there was also the risk he might kill himself. There was food and water on demand, both prepared by a machine at the end of the cot, which he opted not to avail himself of.
He stared at the mint-green ceiling while men and women walked past the clear, soundproof wall to his left. I should have died on Sophia, he thought. I should have found a cliff and jumped off it. Or drowned myself. I should have tried to attack Hasani and let his guards split me in half for my complicity in Iyadi’s death. If I wasn’t alive, this couldn’t have happened.
After four hours of tortured introspection, the door to the cell opened and a man walked in. Vondur blinked and then rubbed his eyes.
‘Yes, it’s me again,’ Kowalski said tiredly. He was still wearing the same dark suit and tie. A pair of aviator sunglasses were hooked into his breast pocket. ‘Mind if I sit?’
