Empire of the Fallen, page 21
Constance’s mind ticked over. As generals, they were, of course, not entitled to speak at the Assembly or even appear without being summoned for questioning. They would instead have secured someone to put the motion for them—most likely Alexander White, the leader of the Human Democrats. Now it was her turn to sneer. ‘And just who is your errand boy?’
‘You can probably guess,’ Kessler said.
‘Alexander White will submit the motion when the Assembly next meets,’ Foster said. There was a savage glee in his voice. Firing him had probably played into his hands, since now he was a free agent at liberty to do all the backstabbing he wanted.
‘Well,’ she said, keeping her temper in check. She knew what she had to do. Already she was resolved. ‘I suppose you’d all better go as well.’
There was a moment of silence, before Tavistock cleared her throat. ‘Sorry, what do you mean?’
Constance rolled her eyes. ‘Well, I can’t very well have a circle of military and intelligence advisors in the highest level of government who don’t agree with my policies,’ she said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘So you’ll all have to be replaced. I mean, surely you saw this coming? You couldn’t have possibly all expected to keep your positions after telling me this?’
She looked around at them like a mother admonishing a group of naughty children. What fools, she thought, what blind fools. I should have purged them after the Ascendancy War. They’ve grown stale.
Slowly, unsurely, they all got to their feet. Once again, the image of John Garrick’s corpse flashed up in her mind.
‘Well, Ma’am, I wish you the very best—’
‘Oh, piss off,’ Constance snapped, interrupting Kessler and ignoring his proffered hand. In the space of ten seconds, the ex-Joint Chiefs had filed uncomfortably out the situation room, leaving her alone.
She exhaled loudly and moved towards the window Kessler had been staring out of. It looked out across the flag-lined boulevard that led from the landing pads at the south end of the island to the HQ building. Each flag, representing a UN territory, flapped and snapped in the strong winds. Above, frigid black snow clouds soared towards Arrengate, ready to cover the beleaguered city in another bout of acidic slush.
She ran a relaxant program from her IHD but didn’t take her eyes off the flags. It was strange what a rectangle of fabric could represent. Each one, the arrangement of colours and shapes, meant thousands, millions of lives. People, ordinary people, just getting up in the morning, facing the day ahead, meeting up with friends and family, going to work, going to war, going to sleep. Uncountable human experiences were about to be lost to the Kaygryn Empire. The thought filled her with melancholy—but it also filled her with resolve. Any lingering doubt about what she had just done to the Joint Chiefs was extinguished. For the sake of the ordinary UN citizen, for the ordinary human, she had to forge ahead. There was no-one else with her far-sightedness, or with the gall to do what had to be done. Humanity couldn’t afford to have a president like Lex White, even though it thought it needed it. She knew exactly what the Human Democrats would do—exactly what Foster, Kessler, Tavistock and Ellisburg wanted her to do. Cancel the draft. Pull out of the Ascendancy. Probably storm provari EXM refineries and co-opt them. The problem was, although all of those things would draw unprecedented popular support, they were the wrong things to do.
No: she couldn’t be removed. Yet she would be. All it would take was someone with balls to propose the vote of no confidence. In other circumstances, the Federal Socialists in the Assembly would carry her to victory with a three-line whip, but there was a coalition now. The aliens would kick her out. She knew it. They were tired of the Constance dictatorship. Kurt Rankin told her in the xeno news roundup every day.
Well, they haven’t seen a dictatorship yet.
She saluted the flags, something which seemed silly somewhere deep inside but which outwardly seemed appropriate all the same. Then she composed herself and left UNSOC.
Pitt was waiting for her in the Bluebird. He looked pensive.
‘Relax, Bill,’ she said, climbing up the steps leading to the cabin. ‘All I did was fire all of them.’
Pitt’s eyes widened. ‘Jesus Christ, Andrea, you said you were going to play it safe!’ he snapped.
Constance recoiled as if the man had just slapped her. ‘For God’s sake, I’m the President of the United Nations. They were political appointees, and I’d lost them. They’re putting a vote of no bloody confidence to the Assembly in a week’s time, courtesy of Lex-the-massive-prick-White. What did you expect me to do, just sit there and take it?’
Pitt’s anger melted away, to be replaced with trepidation. Constance looked at him, disgusted. Here was a man, half of whose file was redacted because the operations were blacker than black, getting worked up over some cut-throat politics. It was the same with every military man: fire them out of the bottom of a spaceship into the middle of enemy territory and they would prosecute the mission with rigour and discipline. Put them in a mildly political situation where feelings were going to get hurt and they turned into—
‘Fucking children!’ Constance finished out loud. ‘I’m surrounded by fucking children! What’s the matter, Bill? There are a thousand four-star generals out there itching to be promoted. Would you prefer the alternative? That I be removed and some populist’s wet dream take my place? A guy who fucks the provar over—and our EXM supplies with them—who cancels the draft, who abandons the Outer Ring and keeps the Fleet for Veigis, or worse, Vargonroth!’ She pointed at him. He didn’t flinch from her gaze. ‘You know what we are doing. You get it. The importance of it. The necessity. Or am I wrong?’
Pitt shook his head. ‘You’re not wrong, Andrea,’ he said, but Constance wasn’t buying it.
‘Get us out of here,’ she said to the ship, and the Bluebird duly took off. Within seconds, they were soaring over the East Sea, heading back to the mainland and Carrington, where she could finally get some rest.
‘I just want it all to be over,’ she said after a while, letting her head rest against the plush cream leather of the chair she was strapped in.
‘I know,’ Pitt replied tiredly. ‘Me too.’
The explosion felt more like a rough patch of turbulence than it did a violent blast, but it did the trick. Constance barely had time to grunt in surprise as the Bluebird pitched down towards the sea and the cabin filled with smoke and the wailing of alarms.
‘Oh fuck!’ she shouted, horrible adrenaline flooding her system as the tremendously crap feeling of falling out of the sky took hold. She clawed madly at the chair, gripping it with both hands. Her palms were clammy with sweat against the leather.
‘Hold on!’ Pitt shouted pointlessly. The Bluebird’s main engines protested. The backup engines failed. Nozzles popped free of their recessed hatches and began drenching the hold in impact foam.
‘Why are we still in this fucking tomb?’ she shouted nonsensically as the craft plunged towards the turbulent, freezing water. Her IHD flooded her system with a combat-grade stimulant that suddenly made her calm and rational. Terrified mammals tended to do stupid things when their lives were at stake.
She snatched the oxygen mask down with a resigned irritability and strapped it over her head before she drowned on the impact foam. It filled the hold in ten seconds and turned into a syrupy fluid much like nanogel. The alarms faded beneath the pink goo, as well as the screeching of the engines.
[TERRAIN: BRACE FOR IMPACT] her IHD blared. Constance’s hands moved through the treacle-like impact gel and gripped the seat again. Despite the stimulant in her system, the sight of the green-grey East Sea and its five-metre waves rushing up to meet them through the port hole filled her with dread.
[TERRAIN: BRACE FOR IMPACT] her IHD blared again, and she couldn’t stop herself from screaming into the oxygen mask as the Bluebird hit the crest of the first wave, somersaulted, hit a second, and then finally slammed to a halt in a third.
Without the impact gel, both she and Pitt would surely have been killed. The executive jet had not been flying fast, but fast enough that the wall of water may as well have been solid concrete. It flipped and dashed apart the craft like a child’s toy, sending pieces of fuselage spinning off in all directions. The impact gel spouted out of the holes like pink blood out of a bullet-ridden corpse, hastening its evaporation.
Pitt tore off his mask the moment his head was free of the gel. ‘We have to get out!’ he shouted above the screaming din of dying engines and the crash of waves around them. Constance thrashed through what remained of the gel to pull her own mask off and hit the harness quick release. The gel smelled acrid. It was ironic that the life-saving substance was also incredibly toxic. Exposure to it without properly fitted oxygen masks irritated and inflamed mucous membranes. A few deep breaths of the stuff would cause loss of consciousness. Ingestion of sufficient quantities was fatal. It was why it evaporated so quickly; once the impact was over, the gel was the next most dangerous thing.
Waves loomed all around them in the fading light, mountains of green water frothing and foaming and churning pink as the gel seeped into it. What remained of the Bluebird’s airframe was now half-full of water. As the last segments of engine bit into its brackish turmoil, they cut out entirely. One shuddered violently, threatening to explode, before plunging into the icy depths.
‘Christ,’ Constance muttered, artificially calm, as freezing, salty water hit her head over and over again. She kicked herself free of the chair and clawed her way out of the airframe. Pitt swam over to her and thrust a bright yellow buoyancy aid into her hands, before another, larger dingy auto-inflated. He hauled himself in and dragged her in afterwards, and then hugged her close to his body and rubbed her vigorously to try and encourage some semblance of warmth.
‘W-what a t-t-terrible b-b-breach of p-p-protocol,’ she shivered as the man’s muscled arms ensconced her. Pitt laughed, but despite the extenuating circumstances, there was still something uncomfortable about it.
They were waiting for all of two minutes before a swarm of bright orange incident drones were swarming overhead, bathing them in bright light and firing down emergency blankets and first aid kits. A minute after that, a Goliath on quick-reaction alert from UNAF Arrengate South screamed to a halt a hundred metres above them, its downjets whipping up salt spray about them.
‘Madam President, are you all right?’ came a voice over the mech’s speakers.
Constance nodded and gave a thumbs-up.
‘Medevac will be here in forty seconds,’ the Goliath pilot said again. More incident control drones were diving into the water like seabirds, recovering the wrecked Bluebird and mapping what they couldn’t carry. It was all important criminal evidence after all.
Someone had just tried to assassinate the President.
WELCOME TO HELL
‘Yeah, they can rebuild you from the brain down, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t like my own original body I was born with. I get people asking me all the time why I’m so fucked up in the head. “How can you be?” they ask me. “You’re in one piece, you look just like you used to, you spent all those months in VR psychiatric therapy.” They think because it’s the modern day, war can’t fuck you up any more. Well, it can, and it does.’
Corporal A. Dallas, 781st Hanovrin Dragoons (med. dis.)
There was no time for a passing out parade, no time for any pomp and ceremony. Ten hours after she had completed Purgatory, Gia’s IHD informed her that she’d been formally added to the UN Fleet Register of Arms and gave her her serial number. Five minutes after that, she was informed, again by IHD dispatch, that she’d been assigned to 2nd Company, 421 Commando Battalion, UN Marines. It was Aker’s company.
‘All right,’ she whispered to herself. She moved quickly through the marine barracks on Peresvet, following the turquoise chevrons lighting up on her HUD, until she reached the quartermaster’s store. A small queue of newly qualified marines had already formed, waiting in their plain recruits’ overalls for their equipment bundles. Given that it was wartime, they would only receive their operational gear; all their other orders of dress—formal, ceremonial, service—would be shipped to them later, if at all.
She joined the line, her burly, muscular frame easily a match for the rest of the marines. Most stood, silently contemplative, while a few talked about rumours they’d already managed to pick up in the short time they’d been back on comms since Purg.
‘Heard that the kags have already started coming through the Barrier—Imperial kags, equipping the goddamn kags in this galaxy. Heard they’re catchin’ hell in the Outer Ring,’ one said, a man a few places further ahead in the line, in a decidedly non-Veigis drawl.
‘Yeah—meanwhile we’ve tied up half the Fleet with the cobs,’ another growled in reply. That drew murmurs of agreement.
‘We’ve been out of Purg less than a day, so how can you possibly know this?’ a third asked.
‘It’s all over the news. Besides, I’m shipping out on a CRO. I’ll bet you all are too.’
Gia grimaced. A CRO: a Casualty Replacement Order. They were substitutes, stand-ins, being airdropped into existing combat units. Stepping into a deceased comrade’s shoes was probably the only way to make a new, green trooper even less popular.
Her IHD inbox winked with a priority dispatch. Since they’d upgraded the software to UN Marine settings, orders appeared in white text within a flashing orange banner at the top of her vision. It was irritating and intrusive, and unfortunately something she was going to have to get used to.
She opened the orders:
[785910857 RAMAN: CRO for 2 Company 421 Commando Battalion. Your CO is Lt. HACHIRO, ROLAN. Report to UNS Cyclone at 19:00 local for transfer to UNAF Hermit, CICERO]
‘Cicero,’ she said out loud. She looked ahead. She still had a few minutes in the queue. She looked up Cicero on her UN Library program, and pulled up the official UN factbook profile. It was a UN world in the Gull Crest, very close to the Ascendancy. There were five nation states based there, three UN and two kaygryn, as well as an old quorl nesting station that had been abandoned for thirty years. None of the UN and kaygryn countries bordered one another, though two came within a hundred kilometres of each other. There was no mention of UNAF Hermit, which was odd given how profligate the UN was with its information—even regarding military installations—so she cancelled the Library factbook and summoned the UNAF database instead. There, Hermit had a listing as a static military research facility, but there was nothing else about it.
‘Next! Come on, keep it moving!’ the quartermaster snapped. Gia cancelled the images and stepped up to the desk. Her IHD credentials were automatically beamed to the man.
‘Raman,’ he said, consulting a holo floating above the desk in front of him.
‘Sir,’ she said.
He smirked. ‘Hope you like the heat,’ he said, reading off the screen. Behind him sat a bank of large drawers like a wall in a morgue. One chimed with an emerald light, and he turned and yanked it open. Inside was a large plastic crate, which the quartermaster heaved free with a grunt and thrust at Gia. A month ago and she would probably have collapsed under its weight; now her new muscles took the strain easily.
‘Thanks,’ she said, and she followed the chevrons on her IHD to the changing room.
She popped open the crate. Inside, everything smelled brand new. She discarded the packaging and pulled out the skintight bodysuit and Mantix armour, currently a deactivated olive-green, and pulled it all on with a practised ease. It fit her enhanced frame like a glove, and she let out a contented sigh as it interfaced with her IHD and the exoskeleton whirred to life with an almost imperceptible hum. The rest of the standard-issue equipment—plus a self-contained package with 00053 JUNGLE printed on it—she stuffed into the duffel bag provided, slung it over her shoulder, and left to pick up her railgun from the armoury.
Once she was armed and armoured, she headed to the landing platforms where there was a Manticore waiting to take her and five other marines to the civilian spaceport in Gossamer City. She was the last into the hold, and the engines were igniting before she had even strapped in. None of the other marines spoke to her, nor she them. Their training had been intense, terrifying, psychologically damaging… that and a thousand other things. But at the end of the day, it was two things that their impending operations weren’t: training and over. For all it had done to her mentally, it still couldn’t erase the low pulse of adrenaline in her guts.
After ten minutes of flight and being battered by the frigid evening air of Peresvet, they touched down in the eastern terminal of the spaceport. Gia jumped out of the Manticore and headed for her designated platform: 13G. None of the other marines she had travelled with followed her, but instead made for the space elevators further north.
There was a squat black Manticore on the platform already waiting for her, cockpit glinting in the late evening sun. She checked the time on her IHD. It was 18:42.
‘Trooper Raman,’ she said, saluting the pilot leaning idly against the airframe. Though they were supposed to know all the ranks of all branches of UNAF by heart, her IHD still told her when to do it. They had two weeks’ grace, then the program would self-terminate.
‘For the Cyclone?’ the pilot asked, bored.
Gia nodded. ‘Yeah.’
The pilot nodded. ‘You’re the only one today. Get in.’
They reached Cicero in twenty-seven hours. She’d spent a few hours in the sync trying to discern more about Hermit, but there was nothing. Anticipating a briefing on arrival, and, like the rest of UNAF, openly loathing space flight, she’d spent the remainder of the journey out cold. It had been just as well; sector patrol had warned them in their brief jump stopover in the Vespasian Breach of roving bands of unpatterned ships taking out AHF and Fleet vessels with impunity. Whether it was true or not, she simply didn’t want to know.
