Empire of the Fallen, page 2
Nice effect.
‘Minister,’ Lyra replied, guardedly. Six months of coma had had much less of an impact on her and her mental wellbeing than the med techs had predicted. While Vondur had suffered the agonies of survival and isolation, she had been unconscious. Executor Hasani may as well have killed Commander Halder and his men on Sophia yesterday, as far as she was concerned. Shocking, yes, and an undoubtedly violent incident, but hardly life-changing.
Constance smiled. ‘It’s President now. They promoted me.’
Lyra contemplated this new development. Eventually she nodded. ‘Makes sense.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’
Lyra looked around, but there was no-one else there.
‘The medical technicians have told you where you are?’ Constance asked.
‘A substrate at UNAF Arrengate North.’ Lyra said. ‘They told me. Where’s Ben?’
‘He’s fine. He’s here too.’
‘He saved my life.’
‘We know. You were recovered from a—’
‘UNIS blackworld, Sophia, I remember,’ Lyra said impatiently. ‘Ma’am President, why won’t they grow me a new body?’
Constance studied the floor for a moment and the blossoms tumbling in the breeze there. ‘Will you allow me to explain the situation, first?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘Of course. But as with many things, context is important.’
There was a pause. ‘Fine,’ Lyra said.
‘Follow me. Let’s go for a walk.’
Constance turned, and Lyra fell into step beside her. Ahead, the trees seemed to have parted slightly, allowing for two people to walk comfortably abreast. The branches curved overhead to make a quite beautiful natural tunnel. At the end of it was clear sky, a breathtaking band of washed-out blue that faded to orange on the horizon.
‘We have been at war with the Ascendancy for six of the last seven months,’ Constance said. Her voice was older than her appearance would have suggested. To Lyra, she looked barely a decade older than her, with a full head of thick brown hair and barely a wrinkle in sight. But the voice was different, raspier than it should have been, strained from helming an unruly wartime empire for half a year.
‘Christ,’ Lyra decided after a moment’s contemplation. ‘Are we winning?’
‘The war is over, thank God,’ Constance said in one loud exhalation. ‘I would like to say we won, but really… I think both sides were burned out by the end. We signed an armistice four weeks ago.’
Lyra allowed the initial surge of adrenaline to pass. The ramifications were overwhelming. Immediately, she thought of Iyadi’s confession and the sinister machinations he had hinted at, but that could all have been nonsense, implanted memory designed to mislead his interrogators. Rather than attempt to fill in the blanks herself, she stuck to the basics. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Tensions were already high after the attack on Uvolon,’ Constance said distastefully. ‘Under President Aurelius’ orders, a team of EFFECT operatives, with a contingent of Xhevegan allies, landed in the Forbidden City on Folhourt and captured the Zecad. The plan, according to Karl Howarth, was to hold it to ransom while provari elements loyal to the UN engineered a coup. Needless to say, it failed spectacularly. The Ascendancy wiped out about two dozen Outer Ring colonies in the space of twenty-four hours.’
‘Jesus,’ Lyra breathed.
‘It gets worse,’ Constance said grimly. ‘Aurelius and his Joint Chiefs were manipulated into activating this suicidal contingency by Josette Chevalier. Josette was the Commissioner for Refugees before taking on a role within UNIS. In concert with a number of other well-placed intelligence agents and a ring of kaygryn sympathisers, she dialled up the pressure between the UN and the provar until Aurelius was goaded into attacking Folhourt. Then, once war was assured, she killed him.’
Lyra’s UNIS-conditioned mind worked this over, fleshing out the news with what she knew and generating a list of questions to fill in the parts she didn’t. The one that loomed the largest was where Executor Hasani came into the picture, but she held that one back for the moment.
‘What happened to her?’ she asked Constance.
‘She died in Halo Arch,’ Constance said dispassionately. ‘There was a firefight. A high-pressure pipe exploded and killed her. Most of the rest of the former Joint Chiefs are dead, too. Some died in Halo Arch. Howarth was assassinated by quorl mercenaries a few weeks later.’
Lyra digested this, too. It was like listening to someone summarise the plot of an action holo. There was one name, though, cutting through it all, rising to the forefront of her mind unbidden like a memory of a nightmare. ‘Karris Haig,’ she said with sudden venom.
‘Yes,’ Constance said, surprised. ‘Your former colleague was one of the sympathisers. He was picked up by EFFECT and interrogated at Pinnacle. It is from his account that we have pieced together much of our current understanding. Unfortunately, the best intelligence died with Josette. You knew about him?’
Lyra nodded. ‘I was present for the interrogation of Commander Iyadi,’ she said.
‘Ah, of course,’ Constance said in the resigned tone of one who has discovered the missing piece of an incomplete jigsaw years after it has been thrown away. ‘We knew that he had been picked up after the PR catastrophe on Navem Sigma, but we lost the trail when he was blackworlded. Josette co-opted the data from the EFFECT strategic commander and purged it. We knew he was taken somewhere, and that he had been questioned, but we just didn’t know where. Then the war started and suddenly… it became a low priority.’
They walked on. Lyra mulled further, filling in a few more of the gaps, getting a sense of her place in the scheme of recent galactic events. ‘How did the war end?’ she asked after a while.
‘A provar called Lucra hab’a an’Yuen, one of the lords representing the Ascendant Feudality, more or less pledged his support to us at a secret meeting on Volteroth. Together, we were able to destroy a large portion of the theocracy’s remaining fleet over Vonvalt and bring the war to an end.’ She snorted. ‘And now we’re all firm friends.’
A thought suddenly struck Lyra. ‘What happened to the Zecad? Did they see what was inside?’ she asked, unable to keep the anticipation from her voice. Like every other Special Agent in UNIS, she had long dreamed of being the one to uncover the greatest secret in the galaxy. Despite the circumstances, she was oddly disappointed to have missed its unveiling.
Constance nodded. ‘They did. And that leads us to the crux of the matter. It was a map, Lyra. A map of the navigable astrographic routes across the Khāli Barrier. The crusade fleets had been using these routes to travel to Andromeda and attack the—’
‘Kaygryn Empire,’ Lyra interjected without thinking. ‘Executor Hasani was… telling the truth.’ She sounded surprised. She was surprised. She had seen the kaygryn with four arms, seen their strange space shuttle and armour and technology. But still, the idea of an entire galaxy filled with them seemed far-fetched at best and otherwise downright mythical.
‘He was,’ Constance said. ‘We extracted the—wait, how on earth do you know about Executor Hasani?’ She stopped and looked Lyra in the eye so intensely that Lyra felt distinctly uncomfortable. There was power behind those eyes, and a shrewd wisdom that had seen much and could cut through more. Even with all her UNIS training, Lyra felt powerless, like a sparrow caught in the talons of a sparrow hawk.
‘On Sophia,’ Lyra said. ‘That’s how we were stranded there. There was a kaygryn ship, a pattern I’ve never seen before. It wiped out the Janitor and killed the EFFECT team in orbit. Then it landed and killed Halder and his men. There were kaygryn with four arms and technology I’ve never seen before. The leader called himself Executor Hasani. He told us that the Kaygryn Empire had been existing under the boot heel—or jackboot, or something—of the crusade fleets for years. Something about Iyadi, too, helping to engineer the war between the UN and the Ascendancy. Then he took off and left. I’d have thought it was all a nightmare, except you’ve just confirmed it all.’
Constance was silent for a long time. Occasionally, her eyes would lose focus for a few seconds and Lyra knew that, during those periods of vacancy, the President would be consulting with a team of watching UNIS personnel who were analysing Clairvoyant—the UN’s sophisticated polygraph software—and they would be telling her, yes, Ms Staerck is telling the truth, or at least what she believes to be the truth.
‘Forgive me,’ Constance said after a while, walking on. ‘I don’t mean to be rude. I was going to ask you what happened on Sophia, but as you can imagine, we didn’t expect that.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ Lyra said, stopping herself from waving off the President. ‘How do you know about Hasani? Has he returned?’
‘I certainly hope not,’ Constance said, and laughed despite herself. ‘Haig told us about Hasani. Seems the good executor has been loitering in Tier Three space for some time. Including on Uvolon.’
Lyra’s mouth creased in distaste. She had always considered Haig to be something of a lousy intelligence agent, but it took quite a leap to think of him as a seditious mastermind responsible for an entire interstellar war.
They were approaching the edge of the forest now, and Lyra could see a huge open vista ahead, a valley of green plains stretching for many kilometres. In the distance, the sunlight caught the open sea and it shimmered like a vast lake of fire. She had to hand it to the EFFECT VR techs: they loved a good landscape.
‘Lyra, I’m sorry to say that we are not out of the woods yet,’ Constance said. The irony of that statement was not lost on either of them as they exited the woods and came to a stop on the edge of a towering escarpment. Even Constance was not immune from the wonder of the view, and stood for a few moments in contemplative silence. ‘All we’ve really done is trade one enemy for another,’ she said after a while, her hair caught in a passable breeze effect. ‘Obviously you’ve heard of the Kaygryn Empire. We still don’t know much at this point except some myths and legends which we are cobbling together into workable intelligence, but rest assured, they are real, and they are coming. With the crusade fleets gone and the UN and the Ascendancy locked in a state of war, we’ve given them ample time to regroup. My fear—and that of the provar—is that the kaygryn will now look to retaliate. With their historic enmity with the provar, and our complicity in Hadan’s Reach, it’s not looking good for either of us.’
Lyra studied the horizon as she took all of this in. Could it all be some horrible nightmare? Had she actually perished on Sophia, and this was the afterlife—a ghastly existence in which there was nothing but unending warfare? Or was she still on that blackworld, dreaming in limbo, her comatose mind inventing extravagant fantasies for her to live out?
‘Can we not stop them? All of Tier Three combined?’ she asked.
‘We don’t know, Lyra. They are bigger and better than we feared. The provar tell me that the Ascendancy has long been dependent on overwhelming numbers to keep the Empire on the other side of the Barrier. That certainly makes sense, given the size of the crusade fleets. With seven months of respite and a unique singularity of purpose, I fear even with all of Tier Three arrayed against them, we will still be outmatched. And that is if all of Tier Three can be arrayed. The Coalition is tired of war, Lyra. Selling them another one is going to be tough.’
Lyra’s mind ticked over, her psychological conditioning compartmentalising all of this new information, working it over like a mouthful of fattier-than-anticipated steak. A lesser person might have broken down, might have begged to be unplugged, but she ploughed through it like a ship turning its bow into a tsunami. The players might have changed, but the game was still the same.
‘I’m guessing you’re going to ask me something and I’m not going to like it,’ Lyra said eventually. She didn’t take her eyes from the distant liquid-gold sea.
‘I am,’ Constance said, and she took a deep breath. ‘And I’m not sure I’m giving you a choice, either.’
Lyra did look at her then. The President’s expression was one of resolve, but there was a certain melancholy there, too. She didn’t flinch from Lyra’s gaze.
‘Well, that certainly makes things simpler,’ Lyra said stonily. Constance might have been the most powerful person in the galaxy, but she was not immune from Lyra’s ire.
Constance paused, choosing her words carefully. When she spoke, her voice was grim. ‘Lyra, the whole of human civilisation is in peril. We face a threat that is unprecedented in the long history of the United Nations. Many of us are going to have to do unpalatable things in the coming weeks and months, things which we’ve very vocally condemned. We’re going to have to break some of our own principles. Our own codes and laws. I have to drag a war-weary population back to its feet, dust it off, and throw it back into the grinder. We are talking greater good now. If we have to lose a few fingers to keep the body alive, I won’t hesitate. I hope I’m clear on that. This is not the time to be thinking about yourself.’
Lyra bit back her petulance. Constance reminded her of her own mother. God only knew what UNIS had been feeding her. They’d probably told her that Lyra was dead. ‘What do you want me to do? I’m guessing I’m not going to get my body back.’
‘No,’ Constance said, shaking her head. ‘Not your body.’
Lyra shrugged impertinently. ‘So?’
Constance cleared her throat again. ‘The map that we discovered in the Zecad, of the routes across the Khāli Barrier, that map is the product of a number of ancient Kaygryn Empire citizens, a group of scientists who first laid claim to the Milky Way. They were betrayed by the provar who accompanied them here and were data sponged. Their preserved mindstates are feeding the complex astrographic algorithms into an FTL beacon which guides—guided—the crusade fleets through the Barrier. Lyra, I want to download your consciousness into one of those kaygryn, and I want to send you into the Kaygryn Empire to find out just what the hell is going on over there.’
*
They took Vondur to UNAF Arrengate North too, a well-known and vaguely infamous military psych hospital in the chilly northern district of the UN capital, for a full psychological debrief.
In truth, he felt—mostly—fine. He was malnourished and undoubtedly suffering from the effects of six months of solitude. But once they’d brought him back to civilisation and his IHD had reconnected to the network, his mental health had appeared to improve quickly. There had been countless studies on the phenomenon of IHD deprivation, most within UNAF where the effects of EMP and other electronic warfare programs were more prevalent. To go cold turkey from one’s IHD for anything more than a few days was very ill-advised. To go without it for more than a few weeks, having had access to the network since birth, was enough to cause psychological damage in all but the most robust of citizens. But like all members of UNAF, he’d undergone the IHD-deprivation training. It had affected him, but less than the psych techs were apt to believe.
He watched as the complex of plain, blocky buildings that formed the hospital gradually grew in size through the breath-fogged port hole of the Manticore. After a few minutes, the APC touched down with a jolt on a landing platform to the north of the complex. They’d given him a jacket, a Fleet-issue non-vacuum-capable bomber with a thick sheepskin collar, and he tugged it up about his ears as the bulkhead door hissed open and the biting winter air of Arrengate cut into the hold.
‘You all right?’ his chaperone asked him, a gruff, bearded EFFECT man from Bill Pitt’s team. He was wearing Mantix to the gorget and a backwards baseball cap. His helmet was in a clamp next to him, alongside his railgun.
‘Tired,’ Vondur replied. On rescue, they’d shoved him into a VR capsule and knocked him out for four weeks, both for want of proper medical facilities on the cramped EFFECT voidbreaker, and because they still had a month left on their mission timer. He’d been awake for the last few days, devouring content on the ‘Ascendancy War’, as United Information was calling it. As far as shocks to the system went, it was severe, though a part of him had expected it. After seeing what the provar had done to Uvolon, war had seemed inevitable.
‘Well,’ the man said, yanking his helmet and railgun free and stepping out into the brisk air, ‘you’re home now.’
Vondur offered a weak smile as he followed him on to the landing platform. Above, Arrengate’s perennial cloud layer swirled like a maelstrom of slate; ahead, the landing apron stretched for a few hundred metres, and gave way to several large white buildings that looked like enormous cubes of sugar.
They were invasively scanned as they approached, and cleared for entry. His chaperone led him to the entrance where a pair of psych techs were waiting, their breath steaming in the frigid air. One was a man wearing a close beard and brown cardigan, the other a woman probably twice his age in a black turtleneck and sporting a pair of glasses. They both smiled as he approached.
‘Captain Vondur,’ the woman said, holding out her hand. ‘Emma Okerea.’
He took it. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Graham Hammond,’ the man said. Vondur shook his hand too.
‘We’ll take him from here,’ Okerea said to the EFFECT man behind him.
‘Yeah,’ he replied. He slapped Vondur on the shoulder and sauntered back to the Manticore.
‘Would you like to follow us?’ Okerea said, and Vondur followed them.
The interior of the building was well-lit, he discovered, from a glass atrium, and the walls were a deliberately soothing mint green. Subtle classical music played from concealed speakers. Despite his cynicism, he found it relaxing.
They took him to a large room with several leather couches in it. Bookshelves lined with hard copies on psychology lined the walls. The music persisted quietly.
‘Please, have a seat,’ Okerea said, gesturing to one of the couches. She and Hammond took up two of the wing-backed armchairs. Vondur sat. A moment later, the door bleeped, and two more people walked in. Both were shabby-looking men, probably mid-forties, dressed in plain black suits and ties. They nodded politely to Vondur. One offered a slightly uncomfortable smile.
