Empire of the Fallen, page 25
‘That’s right,’ he said, and then added lamely, ‘New to the area.’
‘Nice and vague,’ Smith whispered in his ear.
The priest studied him for a moment. ‘And what skarlpresidence do you hail from?’ he asked. ‘I see from your sarong that you come from one of the core worlds. A cosmopolitan male. Myaxomoniq’ash. Ven’Ya, perhaps? No… To be honest, I am having great difficulty in placing your accent. Does everybody speak in such an austere way from your presidence?’
Yano felt his throat constrict. He hadn’t a clue what the priest was babbling on about. It was like giving witness testimony. If his furry body beyond his palms and the soles of his feet could sweat, he would have been positively dripping by now.
‘I’m sorry, I really should be going,’ he managed.
‘No, please, I am sorry,’ the priest said, holding out his one free hand. ‘I do not mean to pry. It is so modern, isn’t it, not to share the details of one’s skarlpresidence. The youth are so cagey. What brings you here, Ascended One? Looking for a quiet moment to pray, or perhaps’—he chuckled—‘a moment out of the Kurwenic sun?’
Yano took a deep breath and steeled himself. ‘Actually, I was hoping to speak to someone. To discuss my… faith.’
The priest looked at him curiously. ‘A member of the gormana, taking an interest in religious matters? How delightful! It’s so rare to find one such as you. To see you, I would guess your caste as that of the Will; you are too sensitive to be a barbarian solider. Am I correct?’
Yano nodded. ‘You’ve got me,’ he said uncomfortably. He desperately hoped Rutai and Smith were keeping track of what he was agreeing to. He would need to learn this off-the-cuff background for the sake of consistency.
The priest looked pleased. ‘Well, I will do all I can in my vanash-shen’ah to assist. Tell me, off-worlder, what troubles you?’
Yano’s pulse was pounding so hard he was worried the priest would hear it. But then, what was the worst that could happen? If the priest attacked him or tried to restrain him for some reason, Smith could obliterate the kaygryn from orbit.
‘I am worried that the provar will regroup and come back to attack us,’ Yano said. ‘They claim to be vanash-shen. Will this setback truly stop them?’
The priest nodded knowingly. ‘Many, even within the Conclave, fear the return of provar,’ he said. ‘But you must know that the glorious Fleet of Reclamation musters even as we speak. It is our Imperial and spiritual destiny to reclaim the Home Galaxy for our people. None doubt its purpose and legitimacy. It will pass through the Anohat and crush those who have sought to crush us for centuries.’
Yano nodded as though he knew all of this. ‘Of course,’ he said, searching for the right words. ‘I just wonder… the other races of that galaxy. What will become of them?’
Now the priest gave him an odd look. ‘The humans? Those who sold our brother kaygryn to the provar? Who have allowed them to be murdered and enslaved for decades? They will be subsumed into the Empire and taught to accept the superiority of our Ascendancy. Tell me, Ascended One: this is all common knowledge. You must have come across this information before now?’
Yano’s mouth was drying up. ‘Of course,’ he said, stopping himself from stammering. The humans will be subsumed into the Empire. ‘It’s just… I fear that there are those who do not believe the Reclamation would be legitimate if it extended beyond punishing the provar. Those that believe the humans and other races of the Home Galaxy should not be targeted by the Imperial fleets.’
The priest squinted at him. ‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘I have never come across anyone of that opinion. Not with so many Ascended Ones killed waging war in the Anohat. It is a strange opinion to have.’
‘It is not an opinion I share,’ Yano said quickly. ‘I for one cannot wait for the Reclamation.’
‘Yes,’ the priest said simply.
Yano stood uncomfortably. ‘Well, thank you for allaying my concerns,’ he said.
The priest bowed, but the air of suspicion was palpable. ‘You seem very familiar to me,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Your appearance. I wonder whether we have crossed paths before—though I’m sure I would have remembered hearing such an unusual accent.’
‘My father spoke this way,’ Yano said nonchalantly. ‘I must have picked it up from him.’ He immediately regretted his words. It was another strand to an already tangled web of deceit. Time to go, he thought, panicking.
‘You knew your father?’ the priest asked, surprised. ‘How unusual. I would be intrigued to know what skarlpresidence you hail from. What was your father’s skarlicia?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Yano said, backing away towards the door, ‘I have an appointment I must attend to.’
‘At this hour?’ the priest inquired. ‘It is barely trothliga.’
‘Please excuse me,’ Yano offered, and, almost running, he exited the temple and kept going.
VALLERON
‘I think we got to a point centuries ago when machines could prosecute hostilities more effectively and ruthlessly than humans could. We just chose to use humans anyway. You’d better believe that a human life is worth considerably less than an orbital phase cannon.’
Antonin Ansigar, Federal Socialist Minister for Xeno Affairs
He collared a passing medic and had her apply her medical override to his IHD block. She only briefly frowned at the legal warning that appeared courtesy of the DMA: when the whole of UNAF Cobalta was under attack, the need for fingers on triggers far outweighed the need for Hegemony Code compliance.
Vondur sprinted back to the Goliath hangars, quickly sorting through the backlog of desperate, base-wide communiques filling his IHD inbox. Ahead, he could already see Layne marshalling a gaggle of willing pilots on to the apron. He saw Cox, Tuan and Lieutenant Mathis among them—the latter technically his CO, since he’d been breveted—and a woman called Aed.
‘All right,’ Vondur said, only slightly out of breath as he came within earshot. The base around them was oddly empty since the majority of its occupants had dashed for the perimeter wall, Manticore troop carriers or the orbital pylons, though not so empty of base staff that hitting it with a rail strike wouldn’t kill anyone. The alarms provided a constant, droning backdrop, and together with the percussion of rattling small arms fire and explosions, formed the familiar soundtrack of martial panic.
‘Orders from Colonel Soto are to stand down until the threat has been removed,’ Mathis said warily. All of them ducked as the kaygryn Goliath shrieked overhead and applied liberal amounts of phase fire to the ops block. Something exploded, scattering debris across the concrete.
‘I know what Soto’s orders are,’ Vondur said tersely, aware that a group of pilots would make a rich target, ‘and I plan on disobeying them. You all know what happened with me this morning. I know how quickly rumours travel on base. I will not have women and men die on account of my actions. Now, I’m already fucked, so it hardly matters if I disobey orders. And by all accounts, that thing up there is lethal—and we’re flying analogue. So I’m taking volunteers only. Anyone who doesn’t want to do this, step away now.’
Everyone remained—some more uneasily than others.
‘All right,’ Vondur said. He ran Fight and Flight before the display of solidarity could overwhelm him with emotion. ‘We’re going to split into three pairs. Flight codename is “Hitman”. Enemy mech is “Valleron”. Cox, you’re with me, Hitman Actual and One-One; Mathis and Aed, Two-Zero and Two-One; Tuan and Layne, Three-Zero and Three-One. We’re on analogue so use phase; it’s the easiest thing to hit with and it’s the quickest way to overwhelm force shields. The plan is to lure it away from the base so that the Fleet can take a shot at it. Failing that, we’ll have to bring it down ourselves. That means getting up close and personal. Everyone clear?’
‘Yes, Captain,’ came the curt, tense replies.
‘All right. Let’s suit up.’
Even as they dispersed to their Goliaths, Soto was on comms. ‘Ben, I hope you’re not doing what the fuck I think you’re doing,’ she growled on the link. The channel background was rife with shouted orders and the bleep of tac screens and proximity alarms.
‘I’m going to pull it away from the base and you are going to shoot it down,’ Vondur said. ‘Don’t squander it.’
He cancelled the feed before she could voice her furious reply, and jogged across the apron towards Captain Sornn’s Goliath. It was untended except by VI-controlled waldo arms, and he climbed into and sealed himself within the cockpit with a practised ease. He brought up the dismayingly rudimentary tac screen and ran a full systems diagnostic. As warned, the Goliath was running at forty per cent redundancy. An icon in the top right corner of his vision pulsed with EMP. His enhanced targeting sensor suite was almost completely fried, save for a basic crosshair and rangefinder, and his LRIS and electronic warfare pods were done for. Three out of his four CODORs were little more than deadweight, and he jettisoned them. They clanked unceremoniously against the hangar floor.
‘Everyone report in,’ he said, picking out the functioning Goliaths in the vicinity and narrowing the flight down by known IHD markers.
‘Hitman Two, standing by.’
‘Hitman Three, standing by.’
‘This is going to be fast and furious,’ Vondur said, cycling through his advanced tactical displays. Each one said the same thing: ERROR, EMP. There was no Hypervect either, no active defence grid through which the Goliaths could co-ordinate movements. They were on analogue formations, analogue gunsights, analogue vectors. ‘Stay on the redline and only fire when you have a clean shot. Focus on your vectors. If you slow down or straight-line it, I’ll shoot you down myself.’
Without VI navigational assistance, they would be controlling the Goliaths manually. That meant they had to focus on both movement and firing simultaneously. AMMRCV combat doctrine dictated that movement took precedence over weapons for a good reason; the ammunition would always be there, but the second they weren’t on semi-randomised vectors, the Valleron’s targeting suite would happily knock them out of the sky.
‘The second those plasmastats light up, I want you off the ground on combat trajectories. We’ll reheat to two klicks and engage. Understood?’
‘Yes, Captain,’ came the chorus of replies.
Vondur’s heart pounded in his chest. ‘This is a dynamic situation against a powerful and unknown enemy. We know it can take down Goliaths, so evasion is the name of the game. Understood?’
‘Yes, Captain,’ came the second chorus.
‘All right, Hitman. Burn it.’
The Goliath’s powerful Royce-Khan thrusters ignited in the white-hot, incandescent flame of reheat and propelled Vondur into the air at supersonic speeds. Using his inferior IHD sensors to complement the Goliath’s struggling IFF grid, he picked out both the Valleron and Hitman. He had a team of professionals; they were jinking well, maintaining tight, two-man formations but in flight paths that would keep the Valleron guessing.
Vondur powered up to two thousand metres. Already his cockpit sang with alarms. A battery of ordnance was curving towards them, shimmering in the evening sun.
‘Three klicks and closing on redline, One at altitude, Two east, Three west, break, break, break!’ he shouted.
The flight split into three different directions. Vondur pulled back, soaring up into the clouds, vapour trails streaming from his Goliath. ‘CODOR free,’ he said, and jettisoned his only CODOR. A turquoise marker flickered on to his HUD, and his tac screen improved markedly with the drone’s own functioning Hypervect. It burbled as it activated its electronic warfare countermeasures—at least, those that were still functioning.
‘Talk to me, Hitman,’ Vondur said over the wideband, scanning the VL feed for the Valleron.
‘I’ve got him,’ Aed said, her voice tight as she suffered through her Goliath’s high-G turns.
Vondur upended so that he was facing downwards. There, a few klicks away, two black specs scissored past one another over the light-grey backdrop of UNAF Cobalta. Hydra missiles detonated against sprays of tungsten chaff like flak. He marked the Valleron with an IHD ENEMY tag, and primed his phase cannon.
‘Cox, run interference. I’m breaking south.’
‘You got it,’ the staff sergeant replied, screaming away on reheat.
‘He’s got me pinned, taking fire!’ Aed shouted. Vondur backflipped and saw spears of phase fire scything through the air like wild lances of light, along with bright, liquid-orange bolts that looked like some form of RRG.
‘Hitman Three, draw him off!’ Vondur snapped.
‘Hydras away,’ Cox said, his Goliath discharging ten missiles. They corkscrewed away from his machine and exploded like fireworks against the Valleron’s shields three klicks away. ‘Eat that, motherfucker,’ Cox growled, spiralling past and discharging both phase and his RRG.
‘Cox, stay on the redline!’ Vondur snapped as Hitman Three powered in from the east as ordered. More ordnance rippled through the atmosphere, popping like a thousand dislocated shoulders. Hot white smoke billowed away where the Valleron’s shields dispatched the munitions.
‘Keep your distance,’ Vondur said, powering towards the Valleron as Hitman Three overshot to the west. EWP chatter from the fight’s only functioning pod on Mathis’s Goliath clogged up an already saturated bandwidth, scrambling the Valleron’s target processors.
‘He’s breaking south. I’m gonna lose him!’ Tuan shouted as Hitman Three were undercut by the Valleron and earned a stripe of phase across their backs. Force shields fizzed and cracked as they overloaded, and thick black smoke bled into the air.
‘Losing—I’ve lost power,’ Layne shouted, and Vondur watched as the man’s Goliath dropped out of the air like a stone.
‘Pull up your auxiliaries!’ Vondur shouted, banking left and describing a wide, almost lazy arc.
‘I’m punching it; it’s not happening,’ Layne said, calm. There was always something unsettling about how calm a pilot sounded as they crashed. ‘I—nope, I’m going down… going down. Bracing.’
Layne’s Goliath hit the concrete apron to the north of UNAF Cobalta and tore a three-hundred-metre trench into it. With the Goliath’s diamond-composite nanoform hull, the worst damage was to the landing strip.
‘Hitman Three-One is down,’ Tuan reported over the wideband.
‘I’m down. No injuries,’ Layne said a second later, and then, a frustrated: ‘Goddamn it! I’m sorry, Captain.’
‘Just glad you’re all right,’ Vondur said through gritted teeth, performing a looping, jinking barrel roll to avoid three—four—five—spears of phase coming from the Valleron. The kaygryn shot past him, raking his Goliath with that odd, pulse-like fire, and it took him a second to realise it was punching straight through his shields and cratering his armour. More alarms exploded into life, bathing what little of his HUD remained in crimson.
‘Valleron has shield-breaking munitions!’ he yelled, spinning wildly to avoid follow-up shots. They tore past him and streaked into the distance.
The wideband filled with expletives. Cox somersaulted so that he was five hundred metres to Vondur’s right and travelling in the same direction. Tuan was away to the north-east, at least three kilometres away, and Mathis and Aed were over Ok’Vura a thousand metres above Vondur.
‘When will the LOAS kick in?’ Mathis asked.
‘When we draw it away from Cobalta,’ Vondur said simply. The Valleron was coming back now, charging towards them like a bull at a matador, engines flaring. As yet, it had not strayed over Ok’Vura, though Vondur had an idea about how he might change that.
‘What are your orders, Chief?’ Cox asked.
‘I want you to draw him upwards to twenty klicks,’ Vondur said, hastily forming a plan in his mind based on the weaknesses in their own tactical doctrine. The Goliath’s sensor suite was impressive, but attacks from below were almost always the last to be detected. Nine times out of ten, they were still picked up from thousands of metres away and neutralised with minimal effort, but he could remember swapping horror stories with other pilots years before about unexpected ventral assaults. They called it ‘breaching’, so named for the chosen method of attack of Terran great white sharks.
‘Twenty klicks, you got it,’ Cox said, his Goliath blazing away vertically on thick columns of exhaust. Phase and RRG fire spat and whined from his vambrace-mount weapons as he did so in an effort to drag the Valleron away from Vondur, and Vondur’s pulse relaxed slightly as the Valleron abruptly changed course and diverted to follow the sergeant. LRIS alarms and ACTIVE TARGET WARNING icons briefly flashed into existence as the alien’s electronic warfare pods raked him, but the kaygryn had taken the bait.
‘Hitman, I want you to help Cox at altitude. Remember your vectors. Tie the Valleron up for thirty seconds.’
‘Yes, sir,’ came the replies.
His rudimentary tac screen showed the flight jinking upwards, burning on reheat to twenty klicks above the surface where the sky above was black and the curvature of Cobalta could be vertiginously appreciated. There, a kaleidoscopic array of munitions cracked and rippled through the thin air, bright crimson, white and yellow exploding and colliding like lethal fireworks.
He circled below at fifteen klicks while Hitman fought desperately against the Valleron. Even with four against one, the UN Goliaths were being made to work hard for their lives.
‘Taking fire!’ Aed shouted. Vondur resisted the impulse to interdict, instead trusting them to get the job done while he focussed on his own objective. Then there was a huge, blinding flash, a sphere of white as incandescent as a second sun, tearing through the atmosphere.
‘Shit!’ Vondur shouted as his HUD jammed up with EMP alarms and EXTERNAL CONDITIONS HOSTILE warnings.
‘LAO, LAO, break!’ Cox yelled over the wideband.
