Empire of the Fallen, page 23
‘Kilo assault at Dog Two, we’ve got fifteen kags in the open and assaulting Dog T—’
Something flashed, and the wall twenty metres from Gia detonated in a shower of rubble and smoke. Some marines hit the floor; others simply allowed their Mantix to weather the storm of shrapnel. The treeline had fully opened up with railguns now, easily twenty or thirty. A horizontal hailstorm of slugs zapped through the air above, hissing and whining and buzzing like some insectoid percussion.
‘Breach, they’ve breached—’
‘Perimeter breach at Dog Two!’
‘—pinned down and taking heavy fire—’
‘Raman, Fletcher, Waterman, at Dog Two now!’ Christen bellowed. ‘Nothing gets through!’
Gia ran down the firing shelf. There was no time to think. Her training, fresh and bright in her mind, kicked in.
She looked over the diamond hard point to her right. Fifteen kaygryn were dashing across the open ground between the treeline and the perimeter wall while a haze of ordnance covered their advance from refraction-shielded positions. Each was armoured in an exo-powered, Mantix-like suit, form-moulded to their alien bodies, and each carried a railgun.
‘Oh shit, we’ve got an indigo!’ someone shouted over the wideband.
‘What’s an indigo?’ Gia asked, pausing briefly to fire off a textbook blurt of railgun fire. She let out a grunt of satisfaction as every round hit home on the nearest target, but her features fell to confusion when the kaygryn barely paused for breath, shrugging off the hypervelocity slugs as if they were nothing.
‘What the—’
‘Heads down!’ someone roared. Gia was tackled to the floor as another banshee wail of magma pulse licked overhead, searing the rainy air like a pan-fried steak.
Marines converged on the breach at Dog Two. Someone was shouting, ‘CQC! CQC!’
‘What’s an indigo?!’ Gia yelled.
‘Imperial kag!’ Waterman yelled back, pressing himself to his feet and running to the breach.
‘Here? How?’ she asked, but no-one responded. Rather than waiting for an explanation, she snatched up her railgun and thumbed the button on the pistol grip which caused a twenty-centimetre bayonet of chromium to thunk free from its recess. A few metres away, a mob of kaygryn clamoured up the ramp of rubble at Dog Two, alarmingly impervious to the withering doses of plasma fire from 1st Platoon’s heavy weapons team, which should have been slicing the attackers to coils of raw meat.
There was nothing for it. Gia dived into the confused mass of combatants, marines on the wall, aliens assaulting from below. It could have been the classic playground game ‘soldiers versus aliens’, except for the screams and blood and death. The fire from the treeline still savaged the breach. Hard tungsten rounds cut through the kaygryn from behind and hit the defenders. The kaygryn pressed on, oblivious, invincible, grappling with the marines. They didn’t use railguns, but instead used charged blades like the provar did, hacking and slicing through Mantix nanofibre weave like katanas through bamboo.
One of the kaygryn screamed with rage as it surmounted the rubble and charged at Gia. It swung once with its charged blade, twice, a third time. Gia ducked left and right, trying to avoid both the weapon and her fellow marines. It was like being on the front line of a medieval brawl, crushed in by both sides, able to perform only the most perfunctory combat. She squeezed off a string of shots from her railgun, but although all of them hit the kaygryn, all of them crumpled like cans under a sledgehammer. ‘Shit!’ she shouted, fumbling with the weapon, waiting for the fatal blow to land. In her desperation, she thrust her bayonet forward, unsure what she was hoping to achieve with a knife over a hypervelocity slug—but to her surprise, the blade seemed to pass through where the rounds could not, and she nicked the kaygryn at the neck.
‘They’ve got force shields!’ she choked out over the wideband, using her forearm to block the kaygryn’s hands as it brought the claymore above its head for a two-handed swing. With her railgun gripped in her right hand, she jabbed the bayonet into the alien’s armour, futilely trying to find an entry point. Seconds later, unable to contain the exo-powered swing, she lurched awkwardly to the side as the claymore came crashing down to her left and bit into the concrete.
‘Motherfucker!’ Fletcher snarled, and stamped on the kaygryn’s arm with all his Mantix-powered might. The sword tumbled free as the alien screamed, and Gia dropped her railgun and snatched up the charged blade.
‘Fucking… fucker!’ she roared unintelligibly. The kaygryn raised its left arm, and the blade chopped clean through it and its head in one seamless movement. The freshly rendered corpse slumped backwards and tumbled down the breach.
It was only then that Gia saw Fletcher’s own right arm had been cut off above the elbow.
‘Asshole got me,’ he muttered, irritated, and pushed his way out the back of the brawl.
‘Raman! Watch!’ Caradoc roared, and she whirled around to see another kaygryn charging towards her. She held the blade inexpertly and moved forward to strike so that she was sliding down the rubble when a string of shots chewed up her abdomen and chest and sent her flailing backwards.
‘Give me the fucking blade!’ Christen snapped, and yanked it free of Gia’s hand just in time to take a claymore through the stomach. The blade crackled in the blood and rain, fizzing and spitting with static.
‘Goddamn it!’ he shouted, and turned round to face the alien so that the sword remained jammed in the nanofibre weave of his Mantix, and dispatched it with several hard, brutal chops.
‘Incoming!’ came the shout—too late—before explosions ripped through Dog Two. Marines cartwheeled through the air in hardened Mantix as shock-dissipaters worked to diffuse the force of the blasts. Gia gritted her teeth as the unfailingly unpleasant sensation washed through her organs before searching for a weapon—but the kaygryn were leaving, not advancing, melting back into the smoke.
‘They’re falling back!’ shouted Waterman over the wideband, seconds before the heavy chop of mounted RRGs and the shrieking whine of plasma fire filled the air, chasing the attackers back to the treeline. A Hydra battery added to the mix, lighting up three hundred metres of rainforest with incendiary missiles, though the damp, wet jungle didn’t take the flame.
Gia pressed herself to her feet. The last of the red ENEMY icons faded from her view. Marines lay all around her, wounded and dying. Acrid smoke filled the air, and spent casings carpeted the floor, tinkling with every step. Her pulse slowed, and her breathing with it.
‘How you doing, kiddo?’ came Aker’s voice over a private channel. She was standing just inside the perimeter and at the bottom of the steps leading up to Dog Two. She held up a hand, waved once.
‘I’m fine,’ Gia said, her heart thumping, her mind an inexpressible mixture of emotions that clamoured under a skin of numbness. All she wanted to do was take off her helmet and breathe some real, fresh air, but she knew the moment she did, a sniper would take her head off. Sometimes Mantix could feel like a tomb.
‘You see the indigo?’ Aker asked, as if the alien had been an interesting zoo attraction.
‘No, I didn’t,’ Gia replied. She didn’t want to talk to Aker right now. She wanted to ride out the combat high, to sit down and take stock of what had happened, what she’d just—quite unthinkingly—done. It was a testament to marine training that the first serious consideration she was giving to her own wellbeing was after the battle was over.
‘All right,’ Aker replied, picking up Gia’s tone. ‘I’m here if you need me.’
Gia grunted in response, already feeling lousy for being brusque. Before she could say anything, Waterman was sliding through the rubble to where she sat.
‘What the fuck was that,’ he gasped. ‘They had force shielding. Personal force shielding. They were shrugging off whole drums of ammo.’
‘I know,’ Gia said, recovering her railgun from ten metres away. It was miraculously in one piece, though the casing was scarred and burned. She would need to pay a visit to the installation’s armoury, and soon.
‘Must have got it from the indigos,’ Tan said, appearing on the firing shelf. His Mantix had a large gouge in the left shoulder pad, bleeding oily smoke. ‘This… kind of fucks us.’
Gia stared ahead, watching as the situation slowly returned to normal. ‘Welcome to hell,’ she said quietly, and the rain thickened once more to torrential.
BEYOND THE BARRIER
‘We don’t know what it is. It’s a curtain of intergalactic dark energy that, for whatever reason, our EXM heavy-element jump drives simply won’t work in. It doesn’t conform to any known model of physics and—frankly—up until a few weeks ago, no-one’s given a shit about finding out why.’
Author and physicist Jackie Mellor, discussing the Khāli Barrier on The UI Evening Bulletin
For the last few hours of the journey, when UN comms were well and truly dead and gone and the crushing feeling of total isolation was pervasive, Yano slipped tensely into unconsciousness. If they were to be detected by the Imperial star forts guarding the Barrier exits and shredded by naval canister shot, it was an experience he would undergo in blissful ignorance.
As it happened, he needn’t have worried. The threat, according to a jubilant Smith and Seka after the event, had been highly exaggerated—for that exit at least—and the Last Chance Saloon was officially the first UN vessel to traverse what had been for centuries impassable intergalactic space.
‘Glided right past it,’ Seka gabbled elatedly as they punched free of their capsules and crowded into the life support module. Her hands and arms did a rudimentary performance of the voidbreaker slipping into Imperial space. ‘Cut the power and went full refrac the second we were out the hole. They were hardly even looking for us. Got hit by LRIS but we were going too fast for it to do any damage. Took another random jump once we were clear to be safe, but no problems at all. I don’t know what kind of tech they packed into this ship, but it’s better than anything I’ve come across before. Would have joined the Fleet years ago if I’d known these were the toys I’d have to play with.’
Seka’s face was radiant, flushed with relief and dripping with perspiration. Even Smith, dour and practical, looked relieved. Yano grabbed her into a four-armed hug while everyone else slapped awkward high-fives or exchanged grins. The jump tension was melting away, but it was simply replaced with the next wave of anxiety. Now they’d cleared the Barrier, they were actually going to have to forge ahead with the mission—and quickly.
‘So where are we now?’ Yano asked. Rutai duly translated it for them into an odd hybrid of Terran and New Argish.
‘We don’t have a clue,’ Smith admitted. ‘Deep, deep space. Our passive AO scanners picked up a random sample of signals coming from the star fort. The onboard VI is analysing them now with data scrubbers, trying to build up a picture of workable intelligence. We’ll add that to the intel we’ve received from the provar, then we’ll feed it into the astrograph. Using some FTL probing and mapping of likely candidates, we’ll head to the nearest inhabited world and see where to take it from there.’
‘How long will that take?’ Lyra asked.
‘With the best possible luck, somewhere between twenty and forty hours.’
‘Jesus,’ Yano said. With VR fatigue and nowhere to go but a small, cramped life support module, the time was going to pass very slowly.
Smith shrugged. ‘It’s a big galaxy, and we don’t have a map. If the VI doesn’t come up with anything, we could be searching through empty star systems for weeks.’
It was something Yano hadn’t even contemplated, but it made horrible, brutal sense. Navigation between UN worlds was only possible thanks to a lengthy and detailed schedule of astrographic co-ordinates and well-known and well-used jump routes lined with deep space triangulation relays. In the grand scheme of things, after all, even the vast empires of Tier Three were nothing more than a handful of habitable worlds among millions of unaccounted-for stars and planets. Without a map, they were staring down the barrel of thousands of lightyears of uncharted space. They could rattle around Andromeda for months looking for somewhere to land.
Yano swallowed back his fear. It was something the mission planners in SPECTRECOM would have taken account of. There was no need to panic.
‘What do we do in the interim?’ he asked.
‘Come up with a plan,’ Smith said. ‘We have reams of data from the provar on the Empire. Lots of it is conjecture, but it could be useful. Remember, this isn’t Tier Three any more. We can assume comparable technology, if they and the provar have fought to stalemate, but the last thing we want to do is set foot on a planet and get blown to shit because we’ve not observed some basic ancient custom. What’s going to fuck us over is if you two don’t blend in.’ Smith looked at them both for a second. ‘All right, let’s get to work.’
They spent a dozen hours poring over the data that the provar had provided while Seka and Smith sat in the sync and tinkered with the astrograph. They read novels’ worth of text on AHF reports and watched the small stock of VL sensor feeds from provari ships in combat. So few crusade fleet ships made it back across the Barrier to Ascendancy space—partly because most of them were destroyed, and partly because those returning were working off hours-old navigational data which would have lost its reliability the second they lost contact with the Zecad—that the VL feeds, even after centuries of warfare, lasted only minutes.
Slowly, they added some detail to the vague picture they already had of the Empire. It seemed, civilisationally, to be a mishmash of Ascendancy and Tier Three kaygryn. The kaygryn themselves lived a life of post-scarcity hedonism, enjoying the arts, sports and lengthy bouts of eating, drinking and socialising, while slave races and machines undertook the menial work across hundreds of planets. As far as the provar had been able to discern, the soldier caste was the only one to actively augment its kaygryn with IHD equivalents; the vast majority of the citizenry found such things vulgar.
The dossiers and missives which provided this information were lengthy, poorly worded and often contradictory, and much of it was hundreds of years old, when the provari crusade fleets seemed to have had much more success in fighting the Empire—in some instances actually gaining a toehold on Imperial worlds, rather than being smashed apart the second they exited the Barrier. At the end of the research, Yano did not feel a great deal closer to understanding the aliens or their ways of life.
‘It’s all well and good reading this stuff, but until we’re actually on-world, witnessing it, there’s only so far it can take us,’ Lyra said, exasperatedly cancelling the holo in front of her.
Yano chewed on a stick of boursh. The kaygryn cadaver his mind was manning required an inordinate amount of sustenance to stop it from wilting, and he found himself constantly ravenous. An image of him landing, obese, on an Imperial world made him snort.
‘What’s funny?’ Lyra snapped.
‘Nothing,’ Yano muttered. ‘I think I have an idea. For a plan of action.’
Rutai and Lyra exchanged a glance. ‘Go on then,’ Lyra said.
‘So, think about it. The Empire is founded on religious principles, yes? In the briefing, they said that the whole state religion comes from the belief in vanash-shen.’
‘Yeah,’ Lyra said.
‘So, what we have is a society in which religion is pervasive, like the provar. Every cob in the galaxy believes that they are Ascendant, except the Xhevegans, right down to the grassroots level.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘So, how do you keep the religion alive? How do you ensure that children are brought up on a steady diet of vanash-shen?’
‘I’d think that the constant threat of the crusade fleets would be a good reminder. If the provar have been tossing meat into the grinder for centuries, you can bet the kaygryn will have been doing the same.’
Yano waved his hands irritably. ‘No, you’ve missed my point. Remember how humanity used to be religious? You learned about it in school, right? There was Christianity, there was Hinduism, there was Islam—almost everyone basically fell into one of five or six camps, right?’
‘Vaguely,’ Lyra said.
‘The point is, they had buildings, churches, temples that they all went to, and there were ceremonies that took place there. In the same way you see provari temples on the holos that all look like the Zecad and they’re all babbling away in some kind of religious ecstasy. The point I’m driving at is that if the kaygryn want to bring everyone up on this diet of vanash-shen, then they’re going to need some buildings in which to do it. And there is the Conclave Ascendant, right, the Emperor’s religious council. Well, if it’s an organisation, then it’ll need people at the bottom as well as at the top.’
‘I feel like we’re getting close…’
‘So, we land on the nearest planet. We find a town. Given that there is a state religion, there will be buildings dedicated to it, and priests who work there. All we have to do is find one of these temples and confess.’
Rutai made a surprised growling noise. Lyra looked at him like he was an idiot. ‘What the hell do you mean, “confess”? Tell them about the mission?’
Yano’s eyes widened. ‘What? No, don’t be ridiculous. We know—or we assume—the Empire is coming for the UN. They must be mobilising, gearing up on a massive scale. Mustering like that can hardly be a secret. So we pretend we’re concerned locals, we tell the priest or whoever that we’re having doubts about the purpose of the Imperial retaliation, and see what he says. He might be able to give us a clue about whether there is any other opposition to the invasion too. In a civilisation as advanced as the Kaygryn Empire, there is bound to be a dissenting body of opinion. There has to be. We need to hook up with those people, those naysayers.’
