Empire of the Fallen, page 19
Yano appeared a few moments later, winking into existence a few metres away. His fur was darker than hers, charcoal-coloured fading to grey in his extremities. She was chestnut-coloured like Rutai.
‘Still can’t really believe we’re doing this,’ Yano said, eyeing the course ahead of them.
‘No,’ Lyra replied. ‘How good did you say Seka was at piloting again?’
‘The best there is,’ Yano replied.
Lyra nodded. ‘Well, that’s good to know.’
A silence descended over them. Somewhere in the distance, an invisible bird cawed—part of the ‘outdoors’ sound program the sync was running.
‘All right,’ Yano said eventually, ‘let’s do it again,’ and he jogged to the first section of the course.
*
They were a quarter of the way through the evacuation. In front of him, the row of massive Titan landers ingested the provari population through their gaping metal maws, naval-grade halogens stabbing through the blizzard like heavenly beacons in the dying light. The noise of their vast engines was a constant, hypnotising drone, and Scarcroft was so caught up watching the milk-river flow of provari civilian traffic that he almost flinched when Captain Roque appeared at his side.
‘Bad news,’ he said. Without physical comlinks, it would have been impossible to hear the man over the howl of the freezing gale.
‘Is there any other kind?’ Scarcroft replied.
‘We’ve lost contact with Roma Vega. Last message through was two hours ago, and our FTL array is in perfect working order. We’ve checked.’
Scarcroft turned to face him, the white world stained a bright shade of orange by his goggle lenses. ‘If they transmitted a flash on dumb comms, when could we expect to receive it?’ he asked, already doing the maths in his head.
‘Forty, maybe fifty days?’
Scarcroft grimaced. That sounded right. If it took five hours of hyperspace jumps, it would be well over a month before any dumb comms reached their nearest FTL deep space relay.
‘Is there any inclination of what might have caused it? Cosmic interference?’ Scarcroft asked, but he knew the answer before it was given.
‘No, sir. Not from this far away.’
‘Shit,’ Scarcroft said. IHD messages informing him of the communications breakdown started trickling in to his inbox. Roma Vega, one of the largest industrialised worlds in the Omadan Sprint, was the destination for the millions of provari civilians currently being shuttled into orbit. Losing comms, at this advanced stage, was mission-ending.
‘We’ll have to send someone to investigate,’ he said, trying to think of alternatives. Other worlds in the Sprint had been prepared to receive large tranches of civilians, but the lion’s share of the provar were being moved further into UN space, well away from the kaygryn ‘front line’—insofar as that term meant anything in the unending three-dimensional vastness of space. Simply dropping them on a planet which hadn’t been geared up to the task would be no better than leaving them on Shaddai.
‘Do you want me to liaise with Commodore Minad, sir?’ Roque asked.
Scarcroft shook his head. ‘I’ll take care of it. Thank you for informing me.’
‘Of course, sir,’ Roque said, and he left to attend to his duties.
Scarcroft opened a channel to orbit via his IHD.
‘Orbital, go ahead.’
‘Put me through to the Sword of Gemini, would you?’ he said.
There was a fuzz of static and then Commodore Minad’s voice cut across the channel. ‘Minad.’
‘It’s Varren,’ Scarcroft said. ‘You’ve heard about Roma Vega?’
‘About thirty seconds ago,’ Minad replied. ‘Shall we reroute?’
‘I don’t know,’ Scarcroft admitted. ‘I’m unwilling to dump them all on an unprepared world. It would be no better than leaving them here.’
There was a pause. ‘We could leave them here,’ Minad said.
Scarcroft’s features creased in irritation. ‘We have orders, Commodore.’
‘Of course,’ Minad replied. He, along with the rest of the operational commanders, would have been thrilled to abort the entire mission—Halo Arch be damned.
‘Send a runner to Vega,’ Scarcroft said. ‘See if we can find out what’s going on. What’s our capacity at the moment?’
‘Uh, Protector and Nebula will be hot to trot in about four hours.’
Scarcroft grimaced. ‘They’ll just have to hold here while we fill up the other CDCCs. I’m not shipping them out yet. If Vega is gone, they’ll have to go to Geodyne or Laishan Sigma. But let’s not jump the gun.’
‘Roger,’ Minad said. There was another pause. ‘Have you had any word on what’s happened at Vega?’ he asked. He couldn’t keep the apprehension from his voice.
Scarcroft shook his head absent-mindedly. ‘No. But we’d better hope it’s a comms malfunction and not You-Know-Who,’ he said.
‘Roger that,’ Minad said, and Scarcroft terminated the channel. He spent a few minutes authoring dispatches to the CDCCs holding orbit, and then sent out an IHD wideband to the other operational commanders, both Fleet and Marine, to disseminate to their troops. Once he was done, he walked over to the metal barriers where Goyai and meng’Dama stood in awkward silence. Either side of them, two massive queues of provari civilians shuffled past into the row of Titans behind.
‘Did he do his blessing in the end?’ Scarcroft asked Goyai.
‘No, Fleet Marshal,’ the kaygryn replied. ‘He’s… He was not happy about it.’
‘I don’t care,’ Scarcroft replied.
‘Yes, Fleet Marshal. I believe you made your feelings on the matter very clear.’
‘Touched a nerve, did I?’ Scarcroft said. The scarf pulled up around his mouth concealed a thin smile.
‘Did what, Fleet Marshal?’ Goyai asked. ‘I am sorry, I don’t—’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Scarcroft muttered, irritated, and left.
He had been pacing through the snow for a few hours, attending to administrative matters and providing general oversight to the evacuation, when his comlink chimed and an IHD message appeared in his vision. It was Commodore Minad again.
‘Scarcroft,’ he said.
‘Fleet Marshal,’ Minad said. His voice was tinny and distant from the atmospheric disruption. Scarcroft absently cast his eyes upwards. His night vision offered nothing but thick banks of low-altitude snow cloud, though his IHD was still able to give him the Sword of Gemini’s low-orbit position via a small blue marker.
‘Give me some good news,’ Scarcroft said tiredly.
‘I’d love to, Fleet Marshal, but it’s the usual bad I’m afraid.’
Scarcroft sighed. Of course. ‘Go on then.’
‘Sector patrol has just sent us a flash. It’s a few hours old. Apparently ORSD was picked up in the high-orbit band of Vega before comms went down.’
A sour knot of adrenaline clenched Scarcroft’s guts. Orbital Residue Signal Decay, one of the most hated acronyms in the Fleet. Someone had detected residual chatter in the high-orbit band, trace signals that nine times out of ten indicated the recent presence of enemy. ORSD ahead of a comms knockout did indeed amount to very bad news. Scarcroft did not believe in coincidences.
‘Does the 6th know?’ he asked.
‘Not sure. The message from sector patrol was an APB. If the 6th has picked it up, we’ll know about it soon enough.’
Scarcroft clacked his tongue. ‘Get me some orders, would you?’ he said. ‘Vega is obviously a no-go, and I’m not about to lift all of these provar into orbit and then just leave them there indefinitely.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Minad replied.
‘The sooner we…’ Scarcroft trailed off. Something was happening a few hundred metres away, some commotion within the crowd. He could hear dogs in olfactory enhancers barking madly over the driving wind, and a few seconds later, one of the Manticores on duty overwatch slowed to a stop half a kilometre above the scene and flooded the queue with beams of light.
‘The sooner we what, sir?’ Minad asked.
‘Hold on,’ Scarcroft replied, peering through the gloom. ‘Something’s going on.’
He took a few steps forward, then stopped. He could hear shouting now. The aliens in front of him looked panicked, like a herd of prey that had just spotted a predator.
‘Bomb!’ someone managed to shout on the emergency wideband, before a white sphere of light appeared in the crowd like a second sun. Scarcroft had time to blink before the sphere turned into a fireball and the blast wave slammed into him like an invisible hypertrain, sending his IHD mad with External Conditions Hostile alarms.
‘Gah!’ he grunted, staggering backwards and collapsing on to his buttocks in the snow. His Mantix nanogel shock dissipater had neutralised the brunt of the force, but his unprotected head felt like it had been punched by a fist made of fire.
Total chaos ensued. The provar, seized by a mob mentality, crushed against the metal barriers until they gave way and spilled into the Titan landing area. Scarcroft’s eyes widened as a stampede of provar surged towards him, while above Manticores converged on the scene and around him men in Mantix charged at the wave of aliens with weapons up.
‘Get back!’ they were shouting, brandishing their weapons amidst the swirl of halogens from above. The net filled with a hailstorm of frantic chatter.
‘—somebody secure the Fleet Marshal—’
‘—watch the Fleet Marshal, they’re gonna crush—’
‘—goddamn it, secure the bomb site. There could be more—’
‘—Indigo One-Five, are we weapons hot—?’
‘—at’s a negative, stand down—’
‘—dogs are picking up another—!’
‘—motherfucker—’
‘—down!’
A second explosion ripped through the crowd, sending snow and bits and pieces of bodies flying. The panic intensified. Scarcroft was seconds from being crushed underfoot by the mass of terrified aliens ahead. Mantix loudhailers boomed in Terran and VHX to no avail.
‘Satcom, we are taking casualties, request immediate assistance from orbital assets, over.’
‘Belay that order!’ Scarcroft roared, pressing himself to his feet. Weapons twitched all around him. The provar didn’t stop. Alarms wailed into life as Titan embarkation ramps began to whine closed on massive servos.
‘LOAS prepped and standing by.’
‘Satcom, do not—’
‘Shit, there’s a third, there’s a third! Sierra Bravo out in the open!’
Sierra Bravo. Suicide Bomber. Of course. It had been too easy, too efficient. First the loss of contact with Roma Vega, and now this. The damned aliens couldn’t just accept the UN’s help, even in the face of total ruin. They had to prove something, their anger, their faith, their bloody-mindedness…
‘He’s gonna blow!’
‘Target acquired, neutralising.’ Scarcroft saw from the IHD tag that the last transmission had come from their LOAS.
‘I said stand dow—’
The rail strike punched through the bloated black mass of snow clouds above and slammed into the column of provari civilians with laserpoint accuracy, pre-emptively obliterating the third bomber and a good hundred of the surrounding aliens with him as collateral. Scarcroft’s IHD was once again alive with warnings as the shockwave tore through the UN lines.
‘Good hit, good hit.’
‘Scanning.’
‘There’s too many—’
‘They’re going to overrun the Titans!’
‘Light ’em up!’
Rail fire cut through the air from twenty guns, a prismatic hailstorm of tracer that scythed into the stampede of aliens. Immediately, the front rank collapsed into piles like they’d been switched off, their hot blood steaming in the frigid air. Caught between being shot and being crushed, the ensuing provar tried to turn to the side and suffered both fates. A moment later, a second rail strike pounded a fourth suspected bomber, this one nearly a kilometre away.
‘I said cease fire goddamn it!’ Scarcroft roared on all channels with his command override, shouldering the marine next to him out of the way and smacking the barrel of his railgun towards the floor. ‘Cease fire, right now!’
The LOAS and rail fire died away. Scarcroft clenched his teeth. Ahead of him, the provar, robbed of their momentum by the slaughter, milled about in a daze. The Titan alarms died away, to be replaced with the wailing of the aliens. The carving wind, carrying great swirls of snowflakes, monopolised the lull.
Scarcroft’s hands balled into fists. The wideband remained silent, waiting for his next words.
He got it. The tension and the rage. No-one wanted to be there. Everyone hated the provar. Everyone had been itching to shoot something. Perhaps it could even be justified under Galactic Naval Protocol: the rampaging aliens had been a threat to their AO and the landers. He could understand that these factors, coupled with a run of bad news and impending galactic war, had put everyone on hair triggers. But to him, there was no excuse. The provar could hardly have hurt them, clad in Mantix as they were. The suicide bombers could have been weeded out by the dogs and neutralised. He’d half a mind to have every perpetrator detained.
But even as these thoughts crossed his mind, he knew that there was nothing to be done. What was essentially a war crime would be swept under the rug because they didn’t have the time or the manpower to do anything about it. And besides—who would care? If he kicked it upstairs to Halo Arch, they would tell him to stop being a baby and get on with it. The UN had a thousand and one things to worry about over a few hundred dead provari civilians.
He sighed, his anger melting away like the snow beneath the Titan engine downwash. He was far more irritated at having been disobeyed than by the deaths of the provar.
‘The next man to disobey a direct order to cease fire will be executed by firing squad. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Sir,’ came the stiff and somewhat sheepish responses from the operational commanders on the wideband.
Scarcroft looked around him. Thousands of provar were milling about the half-cocked embarkation ramps, now too high to permit access. The anger and fear remained, but there was nowhere else for them to go. Beyond the UN AO was nothing but hundreds of kilometres of empty frozen wasteland. Even in their panicked state, they were aware enough of that fact not to do anything really stupid.
‘If there were four, there will be more,’ Scarcroft said on the comlink, looking grimly at the pillars of smoke being whipped into nothingness by the wind. ‘Get the dogs on it. That’s what they’re here for. Weed them out before one of these psychopaths takes down a Titan.’
‘Yes, sir,’ came the response, and Mantix-clad men with Alsatians pushed into the wailing, mourning crowd. Around Scarcroft, more marines and Fleet armsmen kept their weapons up and trained on the civilians, while a steady stream of Manticores buzzed overhead, their halogens searching the mass of aliens for further bombers—for all the good that would do.
‘Goddamn analogue bombs,’ Roque said, appearing next to Scarcroft. ‘Just can’t pick them up. Especially in this cold. The smell just doesn’t travel well enough.’
He was right. The bombs were organic liquid compounds, accreting in the lymph nodes of the provar and running on analogue, often biological timers. They were very hard to detect, and though their yields weren’t devastating, they could easily punch a hole in the pressurised hull of a Titan. Reports of such bombs going off during the evacuations of dozens of other Ascendancy worlds over the past few weeks had come in intermittently, though as yet the theocracy lunatics responsible had yet to bring down a lander. Due to the unpredictable nature of the explosives, most had gone off early, in the marshalling phase of the evacuations.
‘Do your best, Captain,’ Scarcroft replied curtly. ‘We’ve already squandered enough of our time here.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Roque replied, chastised, and moved forward into the crowds. ‘Get these civilians back behind the cordon!’ he shouted over the comlink, gesturing angrily at the few thousand provar still looking wistfully up into the inviting Titan holds.
‘Sir,’ cut another voice across the comlink. It was Minad again.
‘Go ahead,’ Scarcroft said. He only kept some of the anger from his voice. LOAS would never have fired without orbital authorisation, and that would have come from the commodore—in flagrant disregard of his orders.
‘New orders from the 6th. All SOGs to make all haste to Folhourt.’
‘Folhourt?’ Scarcroft asked. He inadvertently cast his eyes upwards, to the little cluster of icons above representing the 15th Solar Operations Group.
‘Aye, sir. I think we’re on.’
‘It’s too soon,’ Scarcroft muttered to himself. ‘We’re not ready.’ He looked out across the marshalling area, some semblance of order returning to the chaos. ‘What about the provar?’ he asked Minad.
‘Orders are to make all haste,’ the commodore replied. A small icon winked on Scarcroft’s IHD. It was the flash from the 6th. He read it quickly, and saw that Minad was right: there was no mention of continuing the evacuation.
‘All right,’ Scarcroft said tiredly. ‘Prepare to move out.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Scarcroft terminated the channel and dialled in Commander Wolff.
‘Wolff.’
‘Fleet Marshal.’
‘We’re leaving. Terminate the evacuation. All un-embarked civilians are to return to their homes. You’ve got one hour.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Wolff replied, unquestioning.
Scarcroft cancelled the channel. Somewhere in front of him, a mournful wail cut across the chilly air. He cast a weary eye across the scene, taking in the twisted metal barriers, the harsh cones of artificial light, the hundreds of corpses littering the snow-smothered ground.
‘What a mess,’ he muttered, and started walking back to the command module.
