Empire of the Fallen, page 26
Vondur’s blood ran cold. Limited Atomic Ordnance. The Valleron had hit them with a nuke. The Goliaths were scattering on redline vectors, saved by a combination of force shielding and diamond-composite armour plating, but two were tumbling away from the blast, falling end over end like ragdolls, trailing comet streamers of smoke and debris.
‘Goddamn it!’ Vondur roared as the blast wave slammed through his Goliath, throwing him four hundred metres closer to the ground before his attitudinal thrusters could auto-correct. He ignited his main thrusters and powered upwards. It was too soon, but the EMP wave might actually work as an electronic screen. He had about five seconds to close the gap.
‘Hitman report!’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘Aed is TKIA,’ Cox said, his voice strained. Flying next to a nuclear explosion would do that. ‘I can’t get a read on Mathis.’
They’d lost Hitman Two—and from twenty klicks above the deck, the impact from both crashing Goliaths would be bone-shattering.
Vondur found he could concentrate on nothing but the Valleron. It was like a splinter in his cornea, a black speck framed against the black sky. Everything else, the deep blue of the upper atmosphere, melted away. There was nothing but the Valleron and his analogue rangefinder. Suddenly his IHD and tac screen deprivation training from combat reassessment seemed more than coincidence; it seemed like fate.
‘Cox, do what you can for Hitman Two,’ he heard himself say. His Goliath was on such a violent attack trajectory the airframe was almost creaking. He could almost hear the turbocharged Royce-Khan thrusters even through the layers of composite armour and nanogel.
‘Good luck,’ Cox said on the narrowband as the EMP saturation began to drain away and the Valleron finally clocked Vondur’s Goliath tearing towards it. There was nothing now, no time for evasion vectors. Instead, a lethal spray of incandescent orange energy bolts slashed towards him, slipping through the futilely accreting exotic matter of his force shields and gouging out trenches and craters in his naval-grade armour plating.
It wasn’t enough. Unless one of the bolts hit the heavily armoured cockpit and sliced through Vondur’s head, it was never going to be enough.
‘UN!’ Vondur roared as his Goliath smashed into the Valleron at full speed, the force and angle of his attack crushing the kaygryn’s RRG equivalent to useless junk. The impact was not fast enough to trigger force shields for either of them, and debris exploded from the crunch like a detonating shrapnel grenade. Locked together, they screamed towards the ground, the Valleron’s thrusters firing bursts on full power to try and jettison the new and unwelcome cargo.
Cobalta span around him, the blackness of space above, the deep blue of the sky around him and the grey-and-tan expanse of the city below whirling in circles across his optic feed. Mechanical screams emanated from the Valleron’s external speakers. The kaygryn mech tried to shake itself free from the Goliath’s vice-grip like an animal caught in a trap.
‘Are you there, Soto?’ Vondur shouted into his orbital comlink.
‘I’m here, Ben,’ Soto said, her voice clipped and restrained. There was noticeably less atmospheric static at nineteen kilometres above the surface of Cobalta. ‘We’ve got a bead on you. Can you get it over Ok’Vura?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ he said, powering his thrusters to reheat. They were levelling out now, heading more or less in the direction Vondur wanted. The Valleron’s thrusters were, mercifully, no more powerful than his, but they were no weaker either. After a few seconds of violent, mech-smashing tussling, they were both heading back upwards on a spacebound trajectory that would quickly exceed the limits of Vondur’s Goliath.
‘I need a hand!’ Vondur shouted, his ventral VL feeds obscured by the squirming kaygryn mech.
‘Hitman Three-Zero inbound on a redline,’ Tuan said. Vondur searched his damaged, near-useless HUD to see Tuan’s Goliath steaming from a few klicks below them to interdict. With both of them, they would be about to overpower the Valleron’s thrusters and deliver it to the middle of a fat Fleet crosshair.
Except now Soto wasn’t responding.
‘Orbital, come in,’ Vondur said, trying to scrub the channel with his junked hardware. Below, Tuan approached on a rapid-insertion vector. The sky above was growing darker by the second, the air—what little of it there was—thinner.
‘Orbital, do you read me?’ he tried again. Suddenly, the Valleron ejected a cloud of Hydra missiles from its shoulder-mount pods, forcing Tuan to corkscrew violently away. The air filled with explosions and chaff, and for a horrible, heart-thumping moment, Vondur thought he was going to lose his grip on the Valleron altogether. Then Tuan was back, his force shielding wreathed in streamers of smoke, using his Goliath’s gauntlets to smash the Hydra batteries free from the Valleron.
‘Hi, Captain,’ Tuan said jauntily, adding his bulk to the grappling mechs. With the weight and power of two Goliaths, even the Valleron, with its surpassing shield-busting munitions, was incapable of maintaining anything but the most cursory of resistances.
‘Drop to ten thousand metres,’ Vondur said, running what little remaining diagnostics he had on his orbital comms uplink. His enhanced optics were far too fried to identify any Fleet vessels in low orbit.
‘I… Orbit’s gone dark,’ Tuan said doubtfully.
‘I’m having the same problem,’ Vondur said. ‘Cox, can you raise Orbit?’
‘Negative,’ the sergeant replied. ‘Hitman Two successfully grounded. Both TKIA. It’s a goddamn mess down here. Kags look set to overrun the whole base.’
‘Get them to the med bay,’ Vondur said absently. He cast his VL sensors upwards and redirected his neglected CODOR drone to low orbit. A sour feeling was gnawing at his innards, undercutting the ice-calm being imposed on him by military stims.
‘Sir, what shall we do with Valleron?’ Tuan asked him.
Vondur checked the altimeter. They were still fourteen klicks above UNAF Cobalta. A radiation alarm chimed idly in his cockpit as it detected trace amounts from the atomic blast gusting through the atmosphere.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. There had been something comforting about the idea of drawing it off, like a man being corralled to the gallows, and allowing it to be obliterated by UN low-orbit artillery support. With Fleet comms down, the decision rested solely in his hands. Did they destroy it there and then and let the Valleron tumble fourteen kilometres to the ground and impact Ok’Vura with the same force as a rail strike? Or did they force the thing to land, arrest the pilot, and keep the mech for research? When the heat of battle was over, decisions over killing another living thing became much more difficult.
‘Ah shit, Mathis is gone. Total death,’ Cox grumbled over the net.
And the decision was made.
‘Tuan, get rid of its engines,’ Vondur said, anger coursing through his body. This is not what I wanted, he thought, men and women dying because of me. This is not what I wanted!
Tuan moved round the back of the Valleron. Steadying himself with his gauntlets, he jammed the barrel of his phase cannon at the juncture between the mech’s scapulas and the thrusters, and fired. With a buzzing squeal, the Valleron’s port and starboard engines were scythed free and tumbled away. The kaygryn was helpless.
‘All right, motherfucker,’ Vondur snarled, his own Goliath protesting under the new deadweight. He had Tuan support the Valleron from behind while he started smashing his gauntlet into the pilot’s compartment in the mech’s midriff. With thirty savage pounds, the armour had warped enough for him to get a hold on it, and bracing himself against the Valleron’s chest, he heaved on the cockpit hatch until it spanged free with a metallic screech and the nanogel-filled capsule was revealed like a vulnerable beating heart.
Vondur yanked open the door to the pod and the nanogel bled away like a burst amniotic sac. The flight-suited kaygryn—the four-armed Imperial variety—thrashed about inside, futilely trying to avoid Vondur’s massive mech gauntlet. The same feelings of desperation and rage were welling up inside him as those he had experienced when in the brig, and deep down he knew what he was doing was both ethically repugnant and a war crime to boot, but he felt compelled to act, to avenge the pilots who had died for the sake of his insanity.
Conflicting emotions boiled within him as he yanked the kaygryn free of its multiple docking umbilici. At this altitude, the kaygryn would both freeze and asphyxiate very quickly, and its evolutionary, terrified thrashing were testament to both of those facts. But then Vondur simply squeezed his hand, and the Goliath gauntlet closed with unimaginable mechanical force, and the kaygryn’s legs and head exploded in a horror-holo parody of gore.
As sickness, both mental and physical, claimed him, Vondur let the corpse tumble to the ground, and wordlessly flew back to the base.
UNAF Cobalta was in a state of total panic as Vondur approached. He made several passes of the base at a thousand metres, absent-mindedly shrugging off surface-to-air ordnance. It seemed as though the whole of Ok’Vura was violently relocating to Cobalta City. The dusty streets were clogged with clamouring aliens, and the perimeter walls of the UNAF base were teeming with militias being scythed to ribbons by the massed guns of the wall turrets and the garrison. In places, the perimeter had been penetrated altogether, and aliens and humans met in those breaches in violent, all-or-nothing melees.
Vondur watched this play out through the flickering, useless rangefinder of his Goliath HUD like a child might inspect an insect through a magnifying glass. Without their Valleron cover, the kaygryn below were doomed to die—Vondur could comfortably raze the entirety of Ok’Vura by himself—and yet he simply flew above in a daze. Something had broken in him, some of the last few cords of mental connective tissue had snapped. His actions were both repugnant and gratifying. The dichotomy paralysed him. He’d massacred civilians and the UN didn’t care. He’d saved hundreds of lives by destroying the Valleron, but he’d done it in a brutal, criminal way. But just as he felt vindicated for ending the kaygryn’s life, so he felt terror. What if the Valleron had done the same to him? What if he’d been the one thrashing in the thin, frigid air, while the unstoppable mental gauntlet had squeezed him to a paste?
He knew then that he could not forgive himself, even if UNAF could. The only thing left for him was to discharge himself as best he could, and redeem some semblance of honour.
He took a deep breath, ignored the pounding stress headache enveloping his skull, and keyed in the wideband. ‘Can anyone raise Orbital?’ he asked in a shaky voice, coming in for a low pass and banking hard to avoid a Manticore buzzing at five hundred metres. He raked the forward kaygryn positions with his rotary railgun, and watched as two hundred of them were simply erased from the face of the planet, reduced to a mass of splintered bones and scraps of armour.
‘That’s a negative, Captain,’ Cox said.
‘I’ve got nothing,’ Tuan confirmed. He was in the process of dropping the Valleron off in the Goliath hangars. ZEN was already there, waiting with its superior diagnostic powers to try and discern what it could from the mech corpse.
Vondur absent-mindedly unleashed a stream of incendiary-load Hydra missiles. A three-hundred-metre line of kaygryn troops was sterilised of all life in a thousand-degree inferno.
‘Hold on,’ Vondur said, and scanned for the UNAF CO.
‘Finally!’ a man’s voice shouted in his ears. His IHD tag identified him as Colonel Drago of the 14th Cobalta Infantry Regiment. ‘We’ve been trying to reach you boys for goddamn ten minutes. Cap Sornn?’
‘Captain Vondur,’ he said as he came for another low pass and hammered three separate kaygryn positions with his RRG. The aliens were falling back now, completely at the mercy of his Goliath.
‘Captain, we’re getting our asses handed to us here, as you can see, so I appreciate the interdiction. I thought the squadron was grounded until further orders.’
‘It was,’ Vondur said. ‘I’m flying without permission.’
‘Well, son, I appreciate that all the same, and I’ll do what I can with your superiors when this is all over. Tell me, we’re having a hell of a time raising Orbital. EMP saturation has knocked out more of our systems than I’d care to tell of, but our comms array should be working just fine. Are you having any problems?’
‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ Vondur said, spinning his Goliath to avoid some hastily aimed surface fire. His CODOR drone dispatched the missiles with a few select bouts of X-rays, and Vondur liquidated the kaygryn position with his phase cannon. ‘Can’t pick anything up on optics either. This thing is running on a wing and a prayer.’
The colonel made a knowing grunt. ‘I tell you there’s something going on, some kind of static interference. Our LRIS isn’t functioning or any of our own enhanced optics. Hell, we’ll be using goddamn telescopes next. Doesn’t help that these kags have some kind of magic shields. I’ve never seen it before. Personal-level force shielding. Things that should be carving these kags thirty new assholes aren’t even making a dent. In all my years in UNAF, I’ve never seen CQC—’
Vondur stopped listening and stared as the vast, three-hundred-metre bulk of the UNS Alexandria tumbled through the air five klicks away, cartwheeling and trailing flaming debris, before impacting on the fringes of the city. A gigantic plume of smoke and debris launched into the air, carried on a bed of bright orange flame, and a ripple of secondary explosions sent spheres of tortured air crashing through the buildings on the edge of Cobalta, levelling entire city blocks.
‘Oh… shit,’ Vondur said. More ships were dropping out the sky, whole frigates and cruisers falling to the earth like a flock of birds suffering a collective cardiac arrest. They rained down in the distance trailing streamers of smoke, black specks against the red horizon that exploded in distant, eerily silent blasts of white light.
‘The Fleet’s been fucked!’ Tuan shouted over the wideband. It was a succinct summary of the situation. The reason why no-one had been able to raise Orbital was because there was no Orbital to raise. Vondur’s blood turned to ice. Not only was the Cobalta Fleet Muster one of the largest naval installations in the UN, but it was also their direct fire support. Goliaths, with their huge sensor and weapons suites and surface-to-orbit capability, tended to attract a lot of orbital attention. Right now, kaygryn ships would be lighting up with warnings. He could almost feel the bead of targeting guns.
‘Colonel, tell me where you need me,’ Vondur said, soaring over the wrecked hull of the Alexandria. It had stayed remarkably intact on impact, though the main structure had broken into three equal parts. Exposed corridors and decks glowed where they had been mauled by high-powered energy weapons. He couldn’t see any reason why the crew wouldn’t have survived, ensconced in a nanogel core in a double airlocked shell of nanoform and diamond filament—not that they were going to get any assistance any time soon.
‘Protect the city!’ Drago shouted, and the channel terminated.
Vondur banked and came back around. UNAF Cobalta was of course only one small part of Cobalta City, and he saw now that the kaygryn from Ok’Vura were not limiting themselves to the military installation. Rather, thousands upon thousands of the aliens were flooding into the civilian areas, rioting and—
‘Oh shit,’ he said, watching as his CODOR drone sent him a feed of a young couple being beaten to death by a mob of kaygryn. ‘Cox, Tuan, the kaygryn are massacring UN civilians! Get to the city and put a lid on it!’
‘Aye, Captain,’ they both replied.
Vondur carved a violent, rapid-insertion trajectory through the air and landed heavily in a civilian street, splitting the asphalt. On both sides, habs and tower blocks festooned with holos rose above him, criss-crossed with municipal transport links.
Immediately, improvised missiles began to clatter against the body of his Goliath. There were dozens of kaygryn in the street ahead, smashing vehicles and windows, chasing down exposed humans and beating them with improvised clubs or shooting them with railguns. Vondur began systematically killing them off, a whack-a-mole-esque exercise that involved short, well-aimed bursts of RRG fire and exploding alien bodies. Had his Goliath been running on full redundancy, he would have simply programmed his guns to automatically target and kill kaygryn, but the mech was in a sorry state, and the systematic slaughter of each kaygryn was done manually with ruthless efficiency.
‘Shouldn’t 1st Flight be getting back by now?’ Vondur growled over the wideband, landing in another street and raking a small park and playground with phase fire. A dozen kaygryn evaporated while a trio of Manticores thundered overhead in formation, their underslung railguns chattering ceaselessly in the warm evening air.
‘We’ve lost contact with them,’ Tuan said.
‘Of course we fucking have,’ Vondur snapped. He checked his ammunition counters. His RRG was down to fifty per cent.
‘We need troops in these streets,’ Cox said. ‘I’m doing more damage to the infrastructure than the kags.’
It was true; RRG rounds were too high calibre for antipersonnel work. They cut straight through the kaygryn and hit buildings beyond, perforating composite walls as though they were cardboard. Worse, the tungsten rounds were hard but brittle; they would fragment on impact and spray the habs with shrapnel, tearing any UN civilians sheltering inside to shreds.
‘Hit them from above,’ Vondur said, igniting his thrusters. ‘Tuan, there’s a northern accessway that separates Ok’Vura from Cobalta. Use HE to—’
Tuan’s comms went dead before the report of the rail strike reached Vondur. The Pilot Officer’s Goliath, two kilometres to the north, shattered.
‘Incoming!’ Cox roared. Vondur was already burning on an evasion vector as enemy rail strikes smashed into Cobalta all around them. He would have given his right hand for refraction shielding, but it, like so many other systems, was simply not functioning. He jinked with increasing desperation as the strikes chased him through the city, pulverising buildings, streets, and people with impunity. The Goliath, even in its ruined, barely functioning state, was simply a bullet magnet.
