Empire of the Fallen, page 18
‘Fucking Christ, kill me,’ she mumbled—except she didn’t mumble that at all. Instead, a string of harsh, guttural growls that made up Old Argish escaped from her throat. Her furry, kaygryn throat.
There were noises all around her, the sounds of people speaking in Terran and FP. Searing white light stabbed into her eyes. She tried to move her arms—her four, unwieldy arms—up to shield her vision, but strong provari hands gripped them and forced them back down. A few moments later, a familiar face appeared above her.
‘Irah, is that you?’ asked Rutai, the kaygryn mercenary SPECWAR had attached to the mission. He was speaking in Argish, but she could understand it as though it were Terran.
Well, that’s a good sign, she thought.
‘Lyra,’ she corrected with a foreign growl. ‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘It worked,’ Rutai said in Argish, and then someone else repeated it in Terran. Immediately a cheer echoed through the stasis chamber.
‘Be still,’ the provar said above, pressing a cold hand against her forehead. ‘Wait.’
She collapsed back against the gurney, constantly having to clear her throat of the residual mucus from her lungs. Everything seemed louder and clearer, like her new ears had a better range of hearing and her visual range was higher in definition, but then she’d been living in the VR sync for so long that even a brief taste of the real world was going to be better than the alternative.
They made her wait another hour while various things were done to her. They checked her vision and her hearing, her sense of smell, taste and touch. They vigorously rubbed and stretched all of her muscles. They got her to clench and unclench her hands—all four of them. They did other things which would have been unspeakably embarrassing in any circumstances, let alone with an audience of senior Special Warfare personnel and provar watching.
When it was all done, they got her to sit up slowly, their medical exoskeletons whirring in the chilly air. In fact, it didn’t feel so chilly now that she had a nice, glossy coat of fur covering her body.
To her right stood Commander Pitt, Smith, Rutai, the Goliath pilot Kanova, and another four-armed kaygryn still slick with stasis fluids which she guessed was Yano. Next to them stood a pair of toga’d provar, gan’Seke and an’Yuen. Behind them, perhaps ten metres away, stood a woman with short blonde hair and a hard face. Lyra didn’t recognise her.
‘Yano?’ she asked the other kaygryn. It came out, like everything, in Argish.
‘Hi, Lyra,’ Yano said, waving two of his hands. ‘How do you feel?’
The assembled people followed the conversation like a crowd following a tennis match, heads twitching back and forth between Yano and Lyra.
‘Lousy,’ Lyra replied, ‘but more… normal than I thought. I feel like this body is just my body.’ She lifted and dropped all her arms. ‘Can’t get the hang of these though.’
Rutai was providing a quiet, running commentary to the audience. Behind her, the provari med techs were celebrating what was, to them, a highly successful operation. The incidental advances in medical technology would be staggering.
Smith stepped forward after a few moments. ‘How are you?’ he asked in Terran.
Lyra nodded. ‘I’m OK. Hungry, and very weak and tired, but OK,’ she said. She could tell by the way Smith looked at her that he hadn’t understood half of what she’d said. He turned to Rutai, who said something in Argish which in turn sounded like half-gibberish to her. Smith then re-accosted her.
‘You’re speaking in Old Argish,’ he said in Terran. ‘It’s a very old dialect. Rutai can understand you but apparently you sound more like his great-grandfather than any modern kaygryn. But you can understand me speaking in Terran, yes?’
‘Yeah,’ Lyra replied. It came out as ‘Ash.’ At least affirmatives hadn’t changed over the centuries.
‘And I can understand Rutai, and he can understand you.’ Smith was talking intolerably loudly, like she was a deaf child. ‘Yano said he thinks in Terran but it comes out in Argish. Is that the same with you?’ Yano waved facetiously behind him.
‘Yes,’ Lyra said, and nodded for good measure. Everyone was nodding and taking notes. gan’Seke was translating for the provar.
Smith nodded and turned back to the assembled group. ‘All right. We have comms.’
Pitt nodded and gave her a thumbs-up. ‘Great work, Staerck,’ he said. No-one seemed to be as amazed or impressed as they should have been. Perhaps they had expended all of that on Yano: he seemed to have been up and running for longer than she had.
‘Right,’ Pitt said, turning to face both her and Yano. ‘Now we need to get some food in you and give those muscles a workout. The med techs say that regen pods should work just as well on kaygryn bodies as any other. They need to map your IHDs as well. We’ve got seven hours’ RT, then we’re a go. Understood?’
Lyra looked at Yano, then back to Pitt. ‘That’s it?’ she asked. ‘Seven hours? But we don’t know anything. I can barely even move properly.’
Pitt waited for the chain of translation to complete. He looked grim. ‘We’re out of time. Reports are coming in from half a dozen UN colonies. The kaygryn are wreaking havoc with all kinds of tech they shouldn’t have—advanced EWPs, high-beam energy weapons, deadzones and force shielding. SPECTRECOM reckons even now there are embedded Imperial kaygryn in this galaxy, stirring up the hornet’s nest. We’ve got seven hours to get you scrubbed up, then you’re out of here. Understood?’
Lyra nodded through searing blasts of adrenaline. ‘Ash,’ she said.
‘Outstanding.’ He turned to gan’Seke. ‘Get them in regen ASAP. They’ll not last five minutes in zero-G like this.’
They spent six of the seven hours in regen, having their muscles stimulated and their circulatory systems filled with artificial perfluorocarbon blood. With time to kill, they went straight back into VR sync and continued their training, most of which focussed on using their arms in a natural and independent way. Suddenly, the kaygryn laser halberds which she had seen on Sophia made sense. Long, pole-mounted weapons could be gripped and wielded to deadly effect with a combination of hands and arms. Railguns, in contradistinction, were clumsy and unwieldy. She wanted to use all of her arms to control it, with the result that her aim was either way off or she nearly shot her own hands.
‘So on a scale of one to ten, how fucked do you think we are?’ Yano asked her as they attempted to improve their dexterity by clambering through an assault course.
‘I’d say about ten,’ she said. ‘Who was that woman in the chamber? The blonde?’
Yano looked briefly uncomfortable—something which she was able to tell instinctively from his kaygryn body language ‘That’s my… partner,’ he said, and quickly added, ‘she’s a blockade runner. She insisted on coming after she found out what they were going to do to us.’ He sighed. ‘Luckily for us, she’s probably the best pilot in the galaxy.’
‘Jesus,’ Lyra said, focussing entirely on the first thing he’d said. ‘Is she going to be a distraction?’
Yano looked at her, his large kaygryn eyes boring into hers. ‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘you’ll be grateful we have her.’
They ploughed on, moving over and under and through the obstacles until they surmounted a large wooden block. Its summit lay a few metres above the rest of the course, and they took a moment to catch their breath and take in the view.
‘You could have illegal alien sex with her,’ Lyra said after a while, and then laughed. It was so good to be doing something other than sitting in limbo. This process should have been nerve-shredding, and certainly, if she really thought about it, it was, but at the same time she was anticipating it with gusto. Her spirits were the highest they’d been in recent memory. And then there was the novelty of being inside an alien body, too; the technological ramifications of that alone were beyond imagination, not to mention the brave new world of espionage they had just opened up.
‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ Yano replied, though he didn’t sound overly amused. ‘I don’t know how all this junk works though. I think the penis is recessed inside this weird sheath. Should I be embarrassed?’ He poked around a cylindrical pouch of flesh in his groin. Both of them were naked, and neither of them felt particularly self-conscious about it. Their Terran brains and thoughts were firmly ingrained within their kaygryn host bodies, but there was still a tangible level of dissociation. Lyra realised then that they would need to be careful. Such dissociation would make them reckless with their lives.
‘I think these nipples below my stomach are my boobs,’ Lyra said, investigating the six teats running the length of her abdomen. Touching them did not elicit any kind of sexual thrill, however, and she poked at them amusedly.
Yano straightened up, clenching and relaxing each of his four hands. The obstacle course was in a blank, endless field of luminescent blue mesh. To the west of them, the sun sank to the horizon, casting the sky in an orange glow. After a while, he said, ‘I’m nervous, Lyra.’
Lyra nodded, adrenaline coursing through her bloodstream. ‘Me too. Just got to remember what Constance said: we’re doing this for the whole human race.’
‘It’s that that makes me nervous,’ Yano replied. He turned to her. ‘We know so little. It’s like they’re throwing a paper aeroplane into a black hole and hoping it comes back with the secrets of the universe. Even Pitt said this whole thing is a punt.’
Lyra shrugged. ‘I’ve known UNIS operations launched off the back of less. Think about it: how much time have they actually had to put this mission together? Weeks? They didn’t even know if putting us in these bodies would work. I don’t blame them. We’ve just got to be resourceful. No-one is pretending that it’s anything other than a punt. At least they’ve been honest with us. It’s more than I’m used to.’
Yano was quiet for a moment, silently exercising his shoulder muscles. ‘Yeah,’ he said eventually. He studied his body. ‘I hope they give us some clothes before we go.’
Lyra laughed. To hear the kaygryn laugh coming from her own mouth was a disarming experience. ‘Come on,’ she said, moving to the edge of the wooden block. ‘Let’s finish this off.’
‘Wakey-wakey!’ Smith’s voice boomed in her sensitive ears as Lyra was roused from the regen pod. Already she could feel the strength in her muscles, the powerful beat of her heart, and energy coursing through her body.
‘Yeah, right,’ she said, clambering out the side while the VR fog cleared. She performed a few jumping jacks while they roused Yano. The module filled with steam as his pod hissed open, and after a few seconds, he was out too and jumping on the spot. Coming out of regen was like having a dozen shots of espresso.
‘We’ve got less than one hour,’ Smith said, conjuring some holos from thin air and closing down the pods. ‘Regen took longer than we anticipated. Mapping your IHDs was a bitch.’
Lyra hadn’t even noticed the reappearance of her IHD’s HUD, but it was there, running background programs and offering her bits and pieces of information on her surroundings as it always had done.
Rutai came through into the module a moment later. The module itself was in the Forbidden City, rather than in the Zecad temple, and cold air chased the kaygryn through the door. He was carrying a box of Fleet ration bars.
‘Eat,’ he said, placing the box on top of one of the pods. He recovered two bars wrapped in gold foil and tossed one to Yano and one to Lyra. Both dropped them.
‘I see you’ve got the hang of everything,’ Smith said sarcastically. He was moving round the module, fussing over different bits and pieces of machinery with an air of controlled freneticism. ‘We’ll have more sync time when we get on the ’breaker. Right now, you need to eat a lot, and eat it quickly. Commander Pitt will be here in five minutes for the final briefing. Leith and Rutai have loaded us up. We’re clearing Folhourt in thirty minutes. Another thirty minutes to the Barrier. Then we’ll wait for our window. Nod if you understand me.’
Both of them nodded as they shovelled the dense, high-energy food into their mouths. Kaygryn had bigger teeth than humans, and Lyra found that without concentration, she would smash them together with skull-rattling force.
Pitt appeared a few moments later, his face ruddy from the cold. Seka was behind him, dressed in a high-G, diamond filament and spider silk armoured pressure suit.
‘All right,’ he said in his usual business-like manner. ‘We’ve got less time than I’d like, so I’ll keep this brief. We’ve got a course mapped out for you. It’s going to take one jump to get to the nearest Barrier relay, less than thirty minutes. You’ll pass through the Khāli Barrier by the Second Crusade Fleet muster. From there, it’s ten jumps. Each time you come out of hyperspace, you realign and jump again as quickly as you can. We can only reach you with the Zecad FTL array for the first two jumps; from there, you’ll use historic data just like the provar have been doing for centuries. That’s why speed is of the essence, clear? Think of it like a tunnel collapsing behind you.’
They all nodded. Lyra’s heart was pounding. She’d forgotten how dangerous just getting across the Barrier was. They’d been so focussed on what they would do once they were in Andromeda that they’d neglected to worry about getting there in the first place.
‘You come out of the last jump fully refrac’d and at full speed, all right? You’ll need to preserve as much speed as possible because the second you burn those engines, you’re going to light up on the Imperial grid like Christmas. So you get well out of LRIS range before you burn. It’s going to be a tense few hours of cruising: don’t lose your nerve.’
‘It won’t be a problem,’ Seka said, calm and confident.
Pitt shot her a sideways glance before continuing. ‘Once you’re inside, as we’ve said before, it’s going to be up to you. You’ve got the full SPECWAR complement, including planet-ending ordnance. Do whatever it takes to stop them from coming here. Persuade them, kill them, blow up their homeworld, overthrow their whole social order—anything goes. Once you’re across the Barrier, comms will be completely dead. You’ll be on your own and you have full discretion to take any and all actions. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir,’ they all said in their various languages and dialects.
Pitt nodded once. ‘All right. Good luck.’
The voidbreaker they were taking was a model Lyra had never seen before, a sleek, flat arrowhead-shaped airframe with four heavy-element jump drives arranged in a single horizontal line. It was completely unliveried, but someone had called it the UNS Last Chance Saloon and christened it with a bottle of Ascendancy rum.
Inside was as cramped as any voidbreaker in the UN Fleet. Seka Leith was in the pilot’s armoured capsule, while the rest of them were in the VR pods in the main life support capsule. The only other section was a tiny manual cockpit with an equally tiny diamond porthole for astrographic triangulation if everything went wrong. There was no mess; the remaining space was taken up by the engines and a much larger and more complex refraction shield generator. A space plane hangar, barely bigger than the space plane itself, gave the voidbreaker’s ventral side an almost imperceptible bulge.
Lyra grunted and hissed as she manoeuvred herself into the tailor-made pressure suit in zero-G.
‘You smell like Rutai,’ Seka was saying to Yano. She was stroking the side of his face. Such was the cramped nature of the life support capsule that private conversation was impossible, but it didn’t seem to bother their pilot. How on earth their relationship could continue, Lyra didn’t know. She just hoped it wasn’t going to fuck with the mission.
‘Hear that Rutai? She says I smell like you,’ Yano said to the kaygryn, who, like the rest of them, was pulling a rubbery black pressure suit on.
‘You smell like a cadaver to me,’ Rutai retorted, and Lyra couldn’t help but laugh.
‘What did he say?’ Seka asked Rutai. Lyra realised that if one of them was killed, it was going to make comms a very complex affair.
‘He said he is lucky, then, as Rutai smells healthy.’
Seka cocked an eyebrow. ‘Okay, pal,’ she said with a grin, and turned back to Yano. ‘I love you,’ she said quietly, touching her forehead to his. ‘Even if you are a fucking kaygryn now.’
‘I love you,’ Yano replied, though this time Rutai didn’t translate, since it was obvious.
‘Be safe,’ Seka said, savouring what could be their last physical contact. ‘Don’t do anything stupid. And if you’re killed, I’ll go back to the UN, find your human body and keep it in my freezer.’
They all laughed, but the painful truth was there, an insidious undercurrent that cut the mirth short. The fact of the matter was, unless they were exceptionally resourceful or somehow made their way aboard an Imperial vessel bound for the Milky Way, theirs was a one-way trip. The navigational beacon in the Zecad could not penetrate the Khāli Barrier beyond a few thousand lightyears. Even if they succeeded in their mission, they would be stranded in Andromeda.
‘All right, everyone in the sync,’ Smith said, pulling his way through the iris hatch. ‘Leith, five minutes and we’re breaking orbit. The focus starts now, people. Most of you have done wetwork, legal or otherwise, so you know: fuckups get everyone killed. Fuckups in space get everyone killed even faster. From now until mission complete, abort, or fail, we have game faces on, understood?’
‘Yes, sir,’ everyone replied.
‘We concentrate, we use our heads, we use our skills, we get it done,’ Smith said, pointing at each of them. ‘The second we break orbit, we’re on our own, whatever happens. Green?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Outstanding,’ Smith said and thumped his VR sync capsule quick release. ‘Saddle up.’
Christ, I hope we make it, Lyra thought as she pulled her helmet on and climbed into her own sync. Once she had harnessed herself in, the pod filled with nanogel and her IHD interfaced with the capsule’s VR core. Then there was the familiar screech of data chatter in her ears, before she slipped into the VR space she’d last occupied—that of the obstacle course.
