Empire of the Fallen, page 24
Lyra’s muzzle twitched as she ruminated on the proposal.
‘I think it’s a good idea,’ Rutai said after twenty seconds of silence.
Yano inclined his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Lyra?’
She shrugged. ‘I think it’s as good an idea as any. My worry is if there isn’t any public opposition to the invasion, and he has you arrested—or worse, tries to kill you there and then.’
‘Then we’ll kill him first,’ Yano said casually.
‘Right. Very subtle. Two random people no-one has ever seen before turning up and murdering the local holy man. I’m sure that’ll go down a storm.’
Before Yano could retort, Smith’s voice crackled over the wideband.
‘We’ve found something. Everyone in the sync now.’
They didn’t know the name of the world, so they named it Leith in honour of Seka’s stellar astrography. From the high-orbit band, it seemed like a hundred other terrestrial worlds: blue and green and tan, swirling with bands of white cloud. There was nothing peculiar to it by virtue of it being located in Andromeda. There was some orbital activity—the usual slew of satellites, FTL comms arrays and a rudimentary military surveillance installation—but nothing that could detect the Last Chance Saloon. It was exactly what they needed: a backwater.
‘Superb efforts, guys,’ Yano said, yawning after another fifteen hours spent comatose in the sync.
‘Thanks,’ Seka said as she and Smith made a painstaking note of the exact mathematical co-ordinates of the star. Her voice sounded tired and clipped, and made Yano itch to do something other than act as an oxygen sink. The sacrifice he had already made by allowing himself to be turned into a kaygryn had no mileage left in it. It was time for fresh work and fresh efforts to earn his place on the LCS.
‘What’s the plan now?’ Lyra asked.
‘We wait,’ Smith said tersely. He sounded as exhausted as Seka. ‘The ship is mapping the urban areas now and tallying warm bodies. I also want to scan for weapons and observe the locals for a bit. Once we know what’s what, we’ll pick out a landing zone. But we need to be careful. Rushing in is going to be nothing but a headache.’
And so the waiting recommenced, while Seka and Smith caught a few hours’ sleep and the VI ticked over, accreting the vast wealth of data being mined from the surface into useable intelligence. The process took another five hours, while the LCS completed multiple orbits to ensure there was no part of Leith that hadn’t been bombarded with LRIS. They reconvened in the cramped life support capsule once the VI’s data scrubbers had come up with a few decent dossiers of intelligence, crowding round a pull-out table with an inbuilt holo generator. Around them, the voidbreaker lapsed to low power, dimming the lights.
‘All right,’ Smith said, looking and sounding all the better for his brief sleep. ‘This place is bigger than we thought. Seven hundred and fifty million warm bodies spread out over three thousand statistically significant settlements across the globe. Of that population, only two million are kaygryn, so it’s a safe bet that we’re looking at the equivalent of a Tier Two homeworld that’s being administered by the Empire.’
‘So it’s an Imperial possession. A slave world?’ Lyra asked.
‘Seems that way,’ Smith replied. ‘Look at Vargonroth: most of the population is confined to Arrengate. That takes up, what, a thousandth of the surface area of the planet? Look at Earth, people everywhere. Earth is a homeworld; Vargonroth is a colony. The same model fits here.’
Yano ignored Smith’s engrained Old Earth superiority. ‘Whose homeworld is it then?’
Smith shrugged. ‘No idea. Bipedal, mammalian, sapient: conforms with PBT.’
Yano wrinkled his muzzle. PBT—Prevalent Bipedalism Theory—argued that the most common and energy-efficient state for intelligent beings was the bipedal mammal. As a piece of scientific trivia, it was as well known as the Technological Plateau Principle.
‘Okay,’ he said after a moment’s consideration. ‘That makes our lives easier, presumably? If there are only two million kaygryn, they must be concentrated somewhere.’
‘Precisely,’ Smith said. ‘In three places, actually. I propose we land near the smallest colony, here.’ He manipulated the holo map so that it showed an area in the middle of a large, subtropical dry forest. Optical enhancement showed a series of lakes cut into rectangular shapes, partitioned by wide boulevards and urban structures. It took Yano a moment to realise the image was live. Tiny, ant-sized beings crawled across the screen. It was late evening.
‘Here, there are only a few hundred thousand kaygryn, propped up by an almost equal number of slaves. I honestly can’t tell what the industrial significance of the place is, if any,’ Smith said.
‘Might be a holiday retreat,’ Lyra suggested.
Smith nodded. ‘Could well be.’
‘Any buildings that look like temples?’ Yano asked. He explained to Smith his mission plan.
‘Sounds like a big risk,’ Smith said, but added quickly, ‘but we’ve not come up with anything better so far, so let’s roll with it for now. The answer is yes, we have. The VI has been looking out for any architectural uniformity. Things like government, judicial and religious buildings might conform to a single design.’ A few buildings on the map highlighted in red. ‘We think these are temples. Each one has four spires, see?’
The view on the holo shifted to the advanced topographical mapping view and extracted the temple to a separate pane. Everyone in the voidbreaker leaned forward slightly.
‘Looks like someone stuck four Zecads to the top of a dome,’ Yano said.
‘Exactly. Given the common lineage, it makes sense that kaygryn religious buildings look like those of the provar,’ Smith said.
They all studied the image for a bit longer, then Smith cancelled it.
‘Okay. Here’s the bad news. You remember I told you we were scanning for weapons? Well, there are plenty. Even in this colonial backwater, there are soldiers everywhere. I guess it’s to keep the slaves in line: in which case, that won’t be a problem as our kaygryn friends down there are packing quad-powered laser prisms on top of null-charge halberds—and, I shit you not, personal-level force shields.’
Yano blinked a few times. ‘What?’
‘The military hardware they’re packing is beyond anything we have in the UN. We’ve seen null- charge blades before—the provar occasionally use them for CQC—but never personal-level force shielding.’
‘We have force shielding,’ Lyra said.
‘Yes, but not at this level. The stuff you’re talking about is for warships and Goliaths, or at best platoon-level portable generators. The generators are massive, heavy, and expensive, and as far as I know, we’ve never been able to get them any smaller. These guys are wearing them like t-shirts—and I’ll bet those halberds are better and more effective than anything the Ascendancy has.’
‘So basically, don’t fuck with the police,’ Seka said.
‘That would be the takeaway, yes,’ Smith concluded. ‘If every Imperial soldier has PFS like this, then stopping them in our galaxy is going to be really, really difficult. Force shielding works by accreting mass in response to a stimulus, anything that goes over a certain velocity. I don’t know the maths but I would guess anything from small arms upwards. That means that unless their shields overload under sustained attack, like naval shielding, CQC is going to be the only way of bringing them down.’
‘We get it,’ Yano said testily. ‘Avoidance is the best policy.’
His irritation must have been lost in Rutai’s translation, because Smith simply nodded. ‘Exactly.’
There was a brief pause. ‘So,’ Lyra asked eventually, unable to keep the trepidation from her voice, ‘when do we start?’
‘I propose we land two hours after dark. I’ve picked an LZ nine klicks out of town. There should be nothing nearby. Seka will stay with the space plane; Rutai and I will advise from orbit. We have corneal and audio feeds from both of you, so we can see and hear exactly what you do. Stay on comms. If everything goes to shit, the panic word is “Clubfoot”. If you can’t speak, blink quickly ten times. We’ll pick you up.’
Yano felt his heart ratchet up a few beats per minute. ‘Okay,’ he said.
‘Codenames: me and Rutai will be “Orbital”. Seka will be “Gremlin”. Yano, you’ll be Kilo One, and Lyra, you’ll be Kilo Two.’
Yano was too nervous to make fun of Seka being called Gremlin. ‘How long until we land?’ he asked.
Smith checked the time. ‘By my count, just over four hours. Take this time to make any last preparations—and for God’s sake, put the right clothes on. We have a bunch of sarongs from the provar of all lengths and colours. All the kaygryn here seem to be wearing sky blue.’ He stopped and looked both Yano and Lyra in the eye. ‘Any questions?’
There was nothing.
‘Good. Let’s get ready to move out.’
They landed, as promised, just shy of nine kilometres out from the settlement, in the dead of night. Above, the sky curved above them, an upturned bowl of deep violet hazy with the unknown constellations of Andromeda. Despite the hour, the atmosphere clung to the warmth of the day, and neither Yano nor Lyra suffered any discomfort in going bare-chested.
It felt good to breathe in natural air, and Yano sucked in deep lungfuls while the space plane ticked and cooled behind them. Then the debarkation ramp closed with a hiss and it vanished from view entirely, its power fully channelled to the refraction shields.
‘Good luck, Yano,’ Seka’s voice whispered in his ear. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘We’ve already done all the stupid things there are to do,’ Yano murmured. Ahead of them was nothing but dry forest. He understood that Smith had had to pick a place that was both suitable for landing and far enough away from the locals to remain hidden, but he still did not relish the prospect of picking through nine klicks of untamed hinterland.
‘Comms check, come in Kilo One,’ Smith’s voice crackled in Yano’s ear.
‘Yeah, I can hear you,’ he said.
‘Take this seriously or we all fucking die,’ Smith snapped.
‘Jesus,’ Yano breathed. It was the first time they’d heard the SPECWAR operative raise his voice. It was genuinely frightening. ‘Copy Orbital,’ he murmured.
‘Come in Kilo Two.’
‘Five by five, Orbital,’ Lyra replied.
Show off, Yano thought, and with their sarongs tight about their waists, their feet sandalled and with a canteen of water each, they set off into the woods.
They were only in the forest for an hour before Smith directed them to a path via an orbital map downloaded to their IHDs. Yano was glad not to be picking his way through the ancient, creaking boughs, where nocturnal creatures chittered and growled to each other in the night, though to call the compacted dirt track a path was bordering charitable. It sped the going, however, and after a few hours, they had reached the edge of the forest and the first of the artificially rectangular and embanked lakes.
Yano looked across the alien settlement through alien eyes, and felt a profound sense of distance and isolation so intense that for a few moments, a wave of vertigo seethed through his mind. It was as if the lake itself, easily two kilometres by one and as still and smooth as polished obsidian, represented the Khāli Barrier, and the town beyond Andromeda and the Kaygryn Empire. Yano had never felt such an unpleasant and mind-bending sense of… remoteness.
‘I don’t feel well,’ he mumbled.
‘Not the time,’ Lyra said brusquely. ‘Come on, it’s coming up to dawn.’
They followed the edge of the lake round to a wide boulevard. Yano’s palms were greased with sweat. Here, armed Imperial guards walked idly up and down, the hafts of their laser halberds tapping against the paving stones of the accessway. They didn’t spare either of them so much as a second glance, though there were no other kaygryn about in any direction.
‘Should we speak to one of them?’ Yano asked, nodding to a guard with his back turned.
‘I’m going to say no,’ Lyra replied. ‘We don’t even know if we’re not supposed to speak to them. It might be some kind of breach in protocol.’
‘They’re not even bothered by us. They’re not even watching us. To them, we’re just a pair of kaygryn. Why don’t we just ask them how they are? Be polite?’
‘Of course we’re just a pair of kaygryn to them,’ Lyra hissed. ‘Why would they think anything different? Let’s just walk around until we see what the other kaygryn do.’
They walked through the quiet, dark streets for another hour, trying to discern public and private buildings and signage. The written Argish didn’t entirely conform either to Old or New Argish, and it took Yano, Lyra and Rutai working together to decipher street names. During the course of their explorations, members of the slave race began to emerge from decidedly slummier, hive-like buildings to prepare the town for another day of activity. As dawn broke on the horizon, washing the violet sky a shade of orange, the sound of generators and the smell of breakfast foods filled the municipal areas.
‘Looks like they have cafés, same as us,’ Yano said, watching as the slaves—sexless, grey-skinned, hairless humanoid creatures a metre and a half tall—busied themselves. Judging by the architecture and general structure of the place, it seemed as though the Empire had more in common with the provar and the UN than it did with the quorl and the golgron, despite being a galaxy apart. Then he had to remind himself that the provar were from Andromeda. It made him wonder where humans could have come from, but he quickly cut off the train of thought like a gangrenous limb before he could be infected with more existentialism.
‘Look,’ Lyra said as they reached the end of another street and stopped short at the foot of a third, large lake. Yano followed her two left index fingers to a building in the distance. The telltale black towers loomed against the morning sky. It was the temple.
‘I’m sending you a route,’ Smith said, and their IHDs populated with chevron waypoints. ‘We’re detecting a lot of activity now from up here, so prepare for some bustle.’
He was right. Over the course of the next few hours, as the sun climbed in the sky and they picked their way through the streets with exaggerated casualness, the Imperial kaygryn started to appear. They were dressed in light togas or sarongs and they sauntered through the streets tiredly, like they were all exhausted and hungover. Few walked; most were being transported on either rickshaws or carried on litters by the locals, wafting breezily at the local insects with fans. They ate and drank at the cafés and eateries like ancient Romans, lying on their sides and picking at plates piled with meat and fruit. Their conversation was loud and exuberant, and their habits—spitting, public grooming, and even public urination—were vulgar and commonplace.
‘I’m not seeing any kind of IHD usage,’ Yano murmured. None of the kaygryn wore anything beyond a sarong or toga, and none bore any kind of visible electronic ornament or implant. If there was a converse of UN society, with its obsession with integrated nanocomponents suffusing them with a drip of information, it appeared to be the Empire. But then, Yano corrected himself: they’d seen one small settlement on a backwater world of a civilisation known to contain over five hundred worlds.
They reached the temple at mid-morning, considerably more relaxed given that no-one had spared them a second glance. The slaves treated them with embarrassing deference, and both Yano and Lyra had to force themselves to be haughty and disdainful. Nonetheless, they walked the whole way, despite many offers of a lift.
The temple was accessed by a long sweep of steps, and its dark-grey stone seemed to sweat in the heat of the sun. Like the Zecad had been, before nuclear fire had purged its exterior of ornament, the temple walls were festooned with murals and gargoyles.
‘Do we just go up into it?’ Yano asked.
‘I can’t see anyone else going in,’ Smith said warily. ‘Perhaps they only go in at certain times. Or worse, perhaps they are forbidden from entry. Might be worth waiting it out and seeing what happens.’
‘Or we could just be dealing with a lazy, agnostic portion of the population,’ Yano retorted, eager to push his mission credentials. ‘Come on, every hour we spend waiting and observing is an hour closer to the UN’s destruction. I’m going in. Lyra, wait out here and watch my back,’ he said, turning to her.
‘Copy that, Kilo One,’ she said stonily.
Inside the temple it was mercifully cool. The kaygryn body, with its coating of short fur, was akin to wearing a jacket all the time, and he relished in the cold darkness of the church.
The temple was dome-shaped, and he saw now that the Zecad-like extrusions were in fact hollow. Strings of pennants and bells hung from the ceiling like washing lines, and the air was redolent with the smoky, earthy smell of incense. The floor was bare stone, and there was no seating. Statues competed for space around the edges, and religious murals plastered the walls. At the very far end, doused in multicoloured light from kaleidoscopic windows, was a solitary stone table, and behind it, a massive white statue of a kaygryn, its four arms stretched up to the sky, doused in light from a hole in the ceiling above.
‘Vanash-shen,’ he muttered.
‘Vanash-shen indeed,’ sounded a gravelly voice from over to his right. A robed kaygryn stepped out from behind a pillar and bowed. Its bottom arms were clasped in front of it, and its top left carried a staff. It was liveried in sky blue and purple.
Yano’s heart thumped. Suddenly the whole plan seemed like a terrible idea. What had he been thinking? He wouldn’t be able to answer even the simplest of questions.
Clubfoot. Even now it seemed so tempting just to say it.
‘I should leave,’ he said lamely, turning to go.
‘Nonsense,’ the priest said. ‘I never turn down an opportunity to meet someone new. I do not recognise you. Are you passing through on the season?’
Yano felt his blood turn to ice. Focus, Yano, for fuck’s sake, he snapped inwardly, you’re a member of the Exigency Corps. These kinds of situations are your bread and butter.
