Empire of the Fallen, page 17
Vondur nodded dumbly. ‘How did you get here so quickly?’ he asked. Cobalta was seventeen hours from Vargonroth.
‘I’ve been on Uvolon since yesterday afternoon, Arrengate time,’ Kowalski said. He sat on the foot of the cot and clasped his hands together. ‘You don’t know this, Captain, but Special Agent Scoville and I put a tag on your file. We were… less than impressed with Arrengate North’s diagnosis of you.’ He massaged his chin. ‘Fact of the matter is, Captain, you can’t go six months disconnected from the net and not have something wrong with you. Not in this day and age.’
It was true. UN children were fitted with IHDs from birth. Ninety-nine out of a hundred citizens went their entire lives, well over a century, without ever disconnecting from the UN net. In an age of unprecedented psychological knowledge, IHD deprivation still engendered a host of psychiatric problems, from clinical anxiety to suicidal depression.
Vondur nodded, silent.
‘I knew there was something not right about you,’ Kowalski continued. ‘Over the course of a lengthy intelligence career, I can’t tell you how much I’ve come to hate being correct.’
‘How many kaygryn did I kill?’ Vondur asked. He winced in anticipation of the number.
Kowalski looked at him. ‘With that high-explosive Hydra yield, fewer than you should have done,’ he said.
‘Please,’ Vondur said.
‘Orbital confirmed five hundred and six casualties about an hour ago. Double wounded.’
Five hundred and six.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ Vondur said. One of the downsides of a lifelong ability to evade nausea was that when you did experience it, it was a thousand times worse.
‘No you’re not,’ Kowalski said. His eyes went vacant for a second, his left index fingertip glowed briefly, and the nausea vanished. ‘I have access to your IHD block,’ he said by way of explanation. There was a pause. Kowalski cleared his throat. ‘What happened up there, Captain?’ he asked gently.
‘I was… dreaming,’ Vondur said with a helpless shrug. ‘The Kaygryn Empire had invaded. The whole place was CAF’d. I saw Hasani. I was chasing him. Then I was back on Sophia. There was a Goliath. He was escaping, and I wanted to stop him. To kill him. I saddled up and tried to shoot him down with phase, but… he was long gone. I was angry. I hit the triggers. Next thing I know I’m a thousand metres above Ok’Vura with a ten-second comms backlog and an interdiction order sitting on top of me. I just… it all seemed so real. Like real life. As real as me talking to you now. I don’t even remember getting out of bed.’
Kowalski nodded. ‘I’ve seen the security holos and the footage from Orbital. You just get up, suit up, and take off. Mute comms. Five seconds later, you’re lighting up the city. I can’t say you looked switched on for any of it, but that’s just my opinion.’
With a stab of adrenaline, Vondur asked, ‘Do they believe me?’
‘Nobody thinks you were in your right mind, Captain, rest assured of that,’ Kowalski said levelly.
They lapsed to silence. Vondur stared at his hands. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ he asked after working up the nerve. At best, he would be court-martialled, discharged, and stored in prison. At worst, they would deliver him to the kaygryn for political expediency, who would probably execute him. The UN wouldn’t kill him while his sanity was in question—although Arrengate North had signed him off.
Kowalski sighed. ‘In short, nothing,’ he said. His eyes were focussed on a cluster of military personnel outside.
Vondur’s features creased in incomprehension. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘I mean, nothing. Nothing really. I’ve already spoken to Colonel Soto. General Stewart has been briefed. He won’t get involved; he’s got bigger fish to fry.’ He shrugged. ‘No-one has time for a hearing. The DMA will bury it.’
Vondur shook his head. ‘I don’t… I don’t understand. You just told me I killed five hundred civilians.’
‘You did,’ Kowalski said, ‘and fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you want to look at it—no-one cares.’
‘But I’m fucking insane,’ Vondur said, nearly shouting. ‘I’m not fit to be a pilot!’
‘I don’t think anyone is going to let you near a Goliath, for the time being, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ Kowalski said, unfazed.
‘No, it’s not what I’m worried about,’ Vondur said through gritted teeth. ‘What I’m worried about is I just wasted half a thousand kaygryn civs and UNAF is going to sweep it under the rug!’
Kowalski sighed and stood. ‘Captain, you’re ill. You need counselling and psychiatric care. What you don’t need is to be thrown to the kaygryn so they can cut all your limbs off and set fire to you. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen to my colleagues, and I’ll not see it happen again.’
Vondur looked around helplessly, as if to conjure up support from a host of invisible people. ‘But I… killed them!’ he snapped. ‘I don’t… how can… I mean—’
‘Ben, calm down. You’re going to stay here for a little while. Then Colonel Soto is going to speak to you. Then a psych tech is going to come and run a few programs from your IHD and maybe give you something to take. That’s what they should have done in Arrengate. In a few days, everything is going to be back to normal, and you’ll get your captaincy back. All right?’
‘No, it’s not all right!’ Vondur roared. ‘How can you stand there and tell me this so calmly?!’
Kowalski sighed. He was done. ‘I’ve got to go. Goodbye, Captain, and good luck.’
‘Kowalski!’ Vondur shouted, his hands balled into fists, but the UNIS man had already gone.
Soto came and spoke to him a few hours later, as Kowalski had promised. She looked like someone who had received all their bad news in one go, and she had.
‘How are you doing, Ben?’ she asked tiredly as she entered. Her khaki shirt was open at the collar and her hair had been hastily tied back. Judging from her bloodshot eyes, she was running stims from her IHD.
‘I’ve been better,’ Vondur said. He wished someone would shout at him. Having everyone pussyfoot around him was maddening. The only thing worse than committing a murder, it seemed, was getting away with it.
Soto sat down in the same place Kowalski had. She rubbed her face with her hands.
‘You have some powerful friends, Captain,’ she remarked. ‘UNIS has told General Stewart to bury it. Not that he needed much convincing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Vondur said, unable to meet her eye. ‘I’m sorry to put you through this. I wasn’t… my head isn’t right. Guess I’m suffering more than I thought.’
Soto nodded. ‘Captain, believe me, you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. Getting shot at every day does things to a person. Living with all that tension, all the time. They can give you all the combat conditioning they like but at the end of the day, everyone’s just a pressure cooker.’ She took in a deep breath and exhaled. ‘I kind of like it in here. Quiet. No IHD—’ She didn’t catch herself in time. ‘Sorry,’ she said, a little sheepishly, as if he might go crazy again at even the mention of it.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, snorting and immediately feeling guilty for that brief levity.
Soto straightened her shirt out, running her hands over her iron-hard stomach. ‘Ben, UNIS has probably told you by now that no further action is being taken. Maybe you feel relieved, maybe you feel pretty lousy, I don’t know. The official line is that you took Captain Sornn’s Goliath out for an ad hoc early morning reconnaissance patrol, your AO came under fire, you returned fire, and the threat was neutralised. Of the five hundred kags you switched off this morning, about fifty of them were militiamen anyway, so we have enemy technicals and combatants we can use for the report. The DMA will take a statement from you, and you’ll repeat what I just said. He’ll file it with the Attorney General on Cobalta, there’ll be a hearing which you will not attend, and that will be the end of it. One of the psych techs is going to sort you out this evening, and you’ll be back on active duty in the morning.’
Vondur’s eyes widened. ‘Special Agent Kowalski told me I wasn’t going to go near a Goliath.’
‘Well, Special Agent Kowalski doesn’t have to deal with a country of a hundred million kags rioting, does he?’
Sour adrenaline stabbed through Vondur’s guts. ‘They’re rioting?’
‘You better fucking believe it,’ Soto said bitterly. ‘The whole base has been mobilised. They’ve been hitting us for hours.’
Vondur put his head in his hands. ‘Oh Christ,’ he groaned, ‘this is all my fault.’
‘Yes, it is, and I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if you’re not going out there and fixing it like everyone else,’ Soto replied.
Vondur fought back competing emotions. The last thing he wanted to do right now was get back in the saddle, but to have fellow humans, fellow soldiers, killed as a direct result of his actions, that he really couldn’t abide.
‘I want to fix it,’ he said, resolved. ‘I do. I want to make this right. I can’t have any more blood on my hands.’
‘Good. Once the psych tech has cleared you, and I mean really cleared you, rather than whatever those morons on Arrengate North did, then you can take Cap Sornn’s Goliath out again. You’ll keep your captaincy, but you’ll not lead 2nd Flight any more. We’ve breveted Lieutenant Mathis for the time being.’
‘Okay,’ Vondur said quietly. He should have counted himself lucky; they could have taken his wings altogether.
Soto stood up with a tired sigh and moved towards the door. ‘I need to get back out there and sort this mess out. The psychs will be here in a few hours or so. Try not to do anything stupid until then.’
He waited alone for another two hours while the brig gradually emptied of personnel and those that remained moved about with increasing urgency. It was obvious even through the clear plastic wall that entombed him that something was very wrong. It was difficult to think of kaygryn, with their ragtag militias and their disparate military technologies, as being able to seriously challenge a UNAF base, especially at the Cobalta Fleet Muster, but then it seemed that Tier Three had made a habit of underestimating the galaxy’s weakest race.
He ordered the machine at the end of the cot to give him some water, using the physical interface since his IHD was still disabled, and drained it, absently looking out across the brig. He frowned. They had been running on a skeleton crew before, but now it was completely empty.
‘Huh,’ he grunted to himself.
The world exploded. Without warning, a blinding flash seared through the building so intense he could see the bones of his hands as they moved up to cover his eyes. He’d spent enough time in the military to know that flashes were never unaccompanied, and he dived under the cot just as the shockwave roared through the brig, slamming all of his organs to the back of his body and driving the wind from his lungs.
It could only have been a few seconds before he opened his eyes again, but it felt like hours. His ears were ringing, and his vision was filled with wild, kaleidoscopic shapes from the flash. Hot wind drove into him from a fracture in the wall, and the yammering of raid alarms hit him in a flood of disorientating sound.
He pressed himself up off the floor with trembling hands, trying to blink away the grit and colourful shapes in his eyes. There was a sudden level of clarity to the sounds he could hear that told him something was wrong with the integrity of the building, but it was only when he was able to clear his vision that he saw the clear plastic wall was just about the only thing that had survived the attack. From the cot upwards, the walls and ceiling had been blasted free by an enormous explosion, leaving nothing but exposed, glowing rebar and fluttering clouds of incandescent ash. Beyond, molten composite and rubble lay strewn out across the base. Perhaps a kilometre above, a shape moved against the afternoon sky, a black speck that looked like it could have been a Goliath, but wasn’t.
‘Shit,’ he breathed, and looked about, trying to get his bearings. The brig was at the northern end of the base, he knew that much, right by the perimeter. A flat concrete apron stretched ahead of him for five hundred metres, demarcating the base’s exclusion zone, and beyond was the city of Cobalta, all monolithic towers and screaming raid alarms. To his left was a series of huge olive-green hangars that blocked off the view, and to his right, perhaps a kilometre away, was the perimeter fortification that walled off Ok’Vura. The turrets there were chattering madly with constant glowing crimson streams of RRG fire.
He made several frustrated noises. Without a functioning IHD, all the little markers and labels that appeared over everything were absent.
He turned and ran back through the burning brig to check for casualties, but there was no-one in there. ‘Hello?’ he shouted, standing amidst the ruins of the building, straining to hear above the alarms. After thirty seconds, he gave up and ran through to the front of the building.
There were more personnel in the base proper. Troops and marines in Mantix were sprinting across the base’s copious concrete plains, jumping into jeeps and Manticore gunships and making their way to the perimeter wall. More still were making for the orbital pylons in the centre of the base and taking the express HGHNG—high-G-high-negative-G—elevators into low orbit. In the distance, Vondur could see LOAS in action, bright, lance-straight streaks of lightning pounding kaygryn positions.
‘Get down!’ someone screamed as the roar of engines filled the air. Vondur had a second to react before the banshee shriek of phase fire cut a glowing trench into the concrete three metres deep and blasted one of the jeeps to oblivion. Thankfully, the marines manning it had managed to ditch before the vehicle was liquidated.
‘What’s going on?!’ Vondur shouted, grabbing a passing UNAF trooper by the bicep.
‘Fucking kags have broken through P5,’ the man growled, yanking his arm free from Vondur’s grip. ‘Why don’t you make yourself fucking useful?’
Vondur stood and watched as the man ran another hundred metres and clambered aboard a waiting Manticore. Its engines roared to full power, and it fired into the air on a spear of incandescent exhaust.
‘Goddamn it,’ he said to himself, verging on frantic. Without his IHD functioning, he could hardly pilot a Goliath. ‘And what the fuck is that thing?’ he asked out loud, trying to make out the mech that was savaging the base.
‘Captain Vondur?’ someone shouted from away to his right. A man was running towards him in a Goliath flight suit.
‘Yes!’ Vondur shouted, whirling around. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Pilot Officer Layne, 225,’ the man said. ‘Thought we had them contained about an hour ago. Two columns of irregulars destroyed. Then this.’ He gestured around him with his hands. ‘Came out of nowhere. 1st Flight is two thousand klicks north. 3rd has taken fifty per cent casualties and the rest of the mechs are junk. 2nd is active but no-one’s going up.’
‘What? How?’ Vondur asked, aghast.
‘EMP saturation. All the redundant systems are working, but we lost three mechs flying analogue against that thing.’ Layne pointed to the black speck a few kilometres above. ‘We’ve been stood down until the Fleet can hit it, but as long as it’s over the base—or Cobalta—they won’t take a shot at it.’
‘What is it?’ Vondur asked, involuntarily ducking as something exploded in the distance.
‘Some kind of kag mech we’ve never seen before, and it’s tearing us a new one. Reports are coming in from all over the place about kags with all kinds of hardware they shouldn’t have.’
Vondur searched the sky as if for some divine inspiration. ‘Christ,’ he muttered. ‘What’s Soto saying?’
‘She’s the one who stood us down. No more sorties.’
Vondur chewed his lip. ‘Who’s running 2nd again?’
‘Mathis, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ Layne said in a moment of candour that in other circumstances would have seen him severely reprimanded.
Vondur looked up at the distant speck again. He made his decision.
‘I need to get my IHD reactivated, I need a flight suit, and I need a Goliath. Get me some pilots. We’re not giving this thing the run of the place.’
Layne grinned. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and turned and ran back the way he had come.
‘All right,’ Vondur said to himself, searching the chaos around him. ‘I need a doctor.’
LAST CHANCE SALOON
‘You can’t be mad at people when they don’t know things. There’s a lot of people who hate UNAF because they only see the bad—and there’s plenty of bad—but they don’t know what… I mean, my unit, for example, just lost eight guys holding the Giks Asteroid Base in Gamma—oh, that’s classified? Okay, well, my point is people don’t know what we do to keep them safe. If they did, they’d be a lot more grateful.’
Trooper Wilkinson Reyes on UN-A.M., two weeks after the massacre on Giks Asteroid Base
She awoke to the appalling, disorientating and downright distressing sensation of having all the fluid in her lungs sucked out by a hose.
‘Gnaargh,’ she managed, gagging on the proboscis, feeling fluid and air in equal measure being drawn from her chest cavity. Animal horror gnawed at her guts as the unbearable feeling of suffocation took hold. She knew, of course, that the chances of her actually perishing for want of oxygen in these controlled circumstances were so small as to be completely ignorable, but that did not make the experience any less nightmarish.
Her gummed-up eyes fluttered open and closed, and she caught glimpses of provar in surgical exoskeletons above her, their faces impassive as they reanimated this thousand-year-old kaygryn corpse.
For the first time in long, unbearable months, Lyra Staerck was back inside a body.
She coughed, spluttered, and vomited as the tube was removed from her trachea. Her breath rasped horribly in her throat as the remnants of the breathing fluid rattled through her lungs. Instinctively, she stretched out her body from her toes to her fingers, to find that she felt dreadfully lightheaded and nauseous.
