Empire of the Fallen, page 29
By the time it was evening, they had managed to enter into two communal areas they deemed safe to do so, one a public, unisex bathing house where they had been forced to strip naked and step into a freezing pool of water lest their behaviour mark them out as outsiders, and the second a debating chamber, where two teams of toga’d kaygryn argued about matters too abstract for either Yano or Lyra to follow.
‘We’re heading back to Gremlin,’ Lyra sighed as they traipsed past the large, rectangular lake they had walked past that morning.
‘Roger,’ Seka said, bored. It was understandable. She had been sitting on a refraction-shielded space plane all day, unable to plug into the sync in case Lyra and Yano required rapid extraction. Lyra thought the woman jealous, too, of her and Yano, though the very idea of it was preposterous. She was amazed that their relationship, whatever that now entailed, had survived Yano being turned into a kaygryn. Perhaps they were all simply ignoring the obvious truth of the matter: that whatever happened, Yano was going to stay as he was for the rest of his life—however long or short that was going to be. Logically speaking, it made Lyra a much better prospect than Seka for a lover. She shook her head. Given the state of intergalactic affairs, she could do without the soap opera.
‘Wait,’ Smith said, breaking Lyra from her reverie.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Something’s happening, something back at the temple. There are troops leaving.’
Lyra felt adrenaline course through her body. ‘Shit,’ she muttered. They were not completely out of the city yet, and there were still kaygryn and slaves around them. A few hundred metres away, a pair of soldiers started looking around. One of them had a pair of fingers pressed to its ear.
‘They’ve been told something, to look out for someone,’ Lyra said. Her pulse was spiking. ‘Shit,’ she repeated.
‘Calm down,’ Smith said. ‘We’re not scrubbed yet. I’m sending you a new route. You’ll have to go back into the city for a while, but it’s clear of soldiers.’
‘Okay,’ Lyra said, forcing herself to feel calm, utilising her UNIS training. A set of turquoise chevrons appeared on hers and Yano’s IHDs a few moments later, taking them back into the settlement. ‘Come on,’ she said to Yano.
‘Right,’ he replied, apprehensive.
They turned back and walked as casually as they could—which was not very casually—back down the road they had just come from.
‘Wait,’ Smith said, his voice strained. ‘No, scratch that. The new route is no good.’
‘Get us out of here, Orbital,’ Lyra said in a sing-song voice. There were other soldiers moving in their direction now, the hafts of their laser halberds tapping against the flagstones of the wide, dusty boulevards.
‘Christ, this is my fault,’ Yano babbled. ‘What the fuck was I thinking?’
‘Can it,’ Lyra snapped, looking for a way out, but it seemed like every available exit—of which there were only three or four—took them past a pair of guards.
‘Seka? I mean Gremlin, or whatever your name is,’ Yano said.
‘Yes?’ Seka said.
‘No,’ Lyra and Smith said simultaneously.
‘Are you kidding me?’ Yano asked.
‘We’re clocked,’ Lyra said matter-of-factly, seeing one of the troops point them out to his companion. They always seemed to appear in pairs. It was a piece of information she made a note of.
‘Clubfoot?’ Yano practically shouted.
‘Smith?’ Seka asked.
‘Stand down!’ Smith shouted. ‘Just see what they want first, for God’s sake.’
‘Copy,’ Lyra said, and she turned to Yano. ‘Just relax,’ she said, putting a hand on him.
‘Fuck,’ Yano breathed. The soldiers were only twenty metres away now, their expressions neutral.
‘Excuse me,’ one of them said. It hadn’t really occurred to Lyra that they would be polite, but it made sense. All day the locals had ignored the soldier caste, treating them with indifference or disdain. It could well be that they didn’t actually have the power to arrest them.
‘Yes?’ Yano said.
‘Please accompany us to the presidence.’
So much for that, then, Lyra thought.
‘We keep hearing this word, “presidence”,’ Smith spoke quietly over the comlink. ‘Must be some kind of local government oversight.’
‘Have we done something wrong?’ Yano asked innocently.
‘Please accompany us to the presidence,’ the same guard said again. He did not sound intelligent. ‘The High Priest of Kurwen would like to speak with you.’
Lyra swallowed. Yano, you have truly fucked us. She gambled. ‘We do not answer to the likes of the soldier caste,’ she said haughtily. ‘You cannot ask us to do anything without a good reason.’
Yano turned to look at her, his mouth agape.
‘I speak with the High Priest’s authority,’ the guard said patiently, as if used to being spoken to rudely. ‘It is the High Priest who commands an audience, not me.’
‘Go with him,’ Smith whispered over the comlink. ‘We can pull you out at any time. Let’s follow the trail for now, see where it leads.’
Easy for you to say, Lyra thought. ‘All right,’ she said to the guard, her heart pounding. Her voice, however, was level enough.
The guard nodded. Something flashed visibly in its corneal implant. A few moments of uncomfortable silence passed while Lyra became suddenly, viscerally aware of how alone they truly were, before an open-topped cruiser appeared, a floating platform in the vague shape of an old sailing boat made from ultra-modern materials. The underside of it glowed and hummed with a smooth, liquid data sound, and two more kaygryn guards stood aboard, one sitting, one holding on to a railing that ran the circumference of the platform at waist height. They were drawing a significant amount of attention now, from both the kaygryn around them—who struck Lyra as that particular strata of society which thrived on gossip—and the slaves, who were themselves clearly frightened of the cruiser and its capabilities. Lyra guessed that the fear had been hard learned through experience.
‘Please,’ the guard gestured, and Lyra and Yano boarded what was to all intents and purposes a police cruiser. Within seconds, they were pulling away from the ground, the unpleasant sensations of G-forces tugging her head towards her belly and the hot afternoon air blowing through her fur.
The presidence turned out to be a large tower, tan-coloured, cylindrical, and pulsing with turquoise altitude lights. A band of windows encircled it near the top, easily five hundred metres from ground level, and Lyra could see kaygryn moving inside it even from a kilometre away. Large sky-blue and purple pennants hung from perpendicular flagpoles and ran for most of the length of the building.
Their flight had taken a little over ten minutes, and Lyra had tracked their progress from the settlement thanks to an orbital topographic overlay surreptitiously provided by Smith. The presidence lay at the heart of a large complex of structures, most of them large tents made out of a heavy brown fabric—the kind Lyra was used to seeing in kaygryn countries with UN borders—though there were a few solid buildings too, conical stacks of hewn sand-coloured stone that reminded her of termite mounds. Beyond the settlement and the complex, there was little except wide swathes of dry tropical forest, occasionally interspersed with those rectangular artificial lakes with no discernible purpose.
They spent the journey in silence while Smith quietly fed them pertinent information. One of the guards sat behind them in one of three rows of chairs, and the other stood at the front of the cruiser like a captain on the prow of an ancient sea ship.
They pulled on to a landing pad three-quarters of the way up the side of the presidence and debarked, and Lyra and Yano were led through a doorway and into the corridors beyond. The interior of the building was cool, and the corridors seemed to be made from a lightweight polymer, a blank tan colour unadorned with anything except signage. The corridor was curved both overhead and in a circle, and Lyra got the impression that every floor in the structure was the same torus shape, like a stack of hollow doughnuts encased in a tough composite shell.
The guard led them for five minutes. Lyra could see rooms branching off, many of them empty and dark, though occasionally the flash of a window would hint at a hollow core, an atrium flooded with natural light that spanned the full half-kilometre of tower. There were few other kaygryn here, only the familiar background hum of computers, and she wondered whether the rest of the tower was as empty—or whether they had been brought to some kind of interrogation suite.
‘We have drone cover. I’m seeing about a hundred floors,’ Smith whispered into her earpiece. ‘A thousand warm bodies, most of them below you… and engines. I think that this thing was once a ship. It explains the structure and materials. Lightweight carbon polymer… heat shields… blast struts… I mean, the force it would take to lift that thing off the ground… It’s like a flying office block.’
‘Please, in here,’ the guard said. A circular door irised open to their right, revealing a simple cube-shaped room with a low ceiling, its far wall clear and slightly polarised so as to afford them a view of the green countryside beyond without blinding them with sunlight. An ornate set of chairs and a table sat in the centre of the room, carved from a local hardwood, topped with plush cushions. The walls were decorated with old frescoes that reminded Lyra of the interiors of Christian cathedrals that still sprung up in the UN every now and then during another religious revival fad.
Lyra entered, but Yano was prevented from following. Before she could protest, the door shrank shut like a pupil exposed to bright sunlight. It wasn’t too much of a problem; Lyra could hear Yano and vice versa, and Smith and Rutai could hear both of them thanks to their micro-comlinks. It at least meant that they could get their story consistent. What was worse was the fact that they were obviously being held under suspicion of something. Why else separate them in this way?
Here for less than a day and we’ve already been arrested, she lamented.
‘They’re taking him to another room a few down from you, Kilo Two,’ Smith said, ‘sit tight.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ Lyra breathed. She walked up to the window—or rather the floor-to-ceiling retina-definition holo—and tried futilely to spot Smith’s high-altitude CODOR drone currently saturating the building with LRIS.
‘All right, someone’s coming,’ Smith said. ‘Looks important, like some kind of official—probably a priest like the guy in the temple, judging by his clothes. Both of you: better to say nothing than to make something up. The more you say that we can’t corroborate, the more likely they are to suss you out. Don’t worry about torture; Gremlin will extract you long before that happens.’
‘Damn right,’ Seka said, though her voice was, for the first time, laden with concern.
Lyra sucked in a few deep breaths before the door opened, and an impressive-looking kaygryn stepped in, all rich purple and sky-blue robes, golden hoops, rings and bangles. He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t read.
‘Sit,’ he said tersely, gesturing to the chair facing the window, and Lyra did as she was told. The kaygryn sat down opposite her with a sigh. There were two sets of arm rests on each chair, offset vertically, and the kaygryn rested its four arms on them accordingly. Lyra unconsciously mimicked him. Her whole body was trembling, and her buccal mucosa was hot and flaccid, a deeply uncomfortable feeling which was akin to having been confronted on a particularly obnoxious lie.
‘Calm down,’ Smith whispered, evidently monitoring her telemetry. The response she would have loved to voice went unspoken.
‘I am Anick sa’Vah, the High Priest of Kurwen, the voice of the shen’ah in this overpresidence. I understand that your companion spoke with one of my colleagues in the temple at Hayisa earlier today. Do you know what he said?’ The kaygryn’s tone was stern and uncompromising, but there was something else she was picking up, an undertow of emotion that was difficult to place. Excitement was the wrong word… perhaps intrigue?
Lyra shook her head. Judging by the silence on the comlink, Yano had not been joined by anyone yet. She hoped he was paying attention to her conversation.
sa’Vah took a moment to size her up. She had no idea how to act; was she being petulant? Obnoxious? Respectful? Obsequious? She and Yano could understand most Argish thanks to an odd conflagration of her human and kaygryn neural pathways, but beyond that, she didn’t know what to do. Things like folding her arms, or scratching her nose, might be unfathomably offensive. Suddenly her respect for Yano and the Xeno Division of the Exigency Corps increased tenfold.
‘How did you come to be on Kurwen?’ sa’Vah asked.
Lyra wracked her brain, using her UNIS training to recall Yano’s conversation with the priest earlier that day. The priest had asked him if he’d come to Kurwen as part of the ‘season’.
‘We’re here for the season,’ she said as offhandedly as she could. ‘Just passing through.’
‘You and the rest of the gormana,’ sa’Vah muttered irritably. ‘What is your skarlpresidence? You’re from the core worlds, I can see that.’
Lyra was sure that she would be dripping with perspiration now had she been back in her human body. Once again, she delved into her UNIS Mind Map and pulled out Ven’Ya as the world that the priest had guessed Yano was from.
‘Ven’Ya,’ she said simply. For all she knew, the planet could have been wiped off the face of the galaxy by a supernova.
The priest frowned. ‘But your accent tells a different story. I would have guessed the very upper circles of Myaxomon, but even the shen’ah do not speak as formally as you; not in this day and age. Where on Ven’Ya? I have visited. Perhaps I know it?’
Trust me, you don’t fucking know it, Lyra said inwardly. ‘I…’ she fumbled. What on Earth could she say? The priest didn’t look like he was wired up to any kind of net, but that meant nothing. What if he could fact check her with a thought? ‘I’m from… Ar…Wan.’
The priest looked baffled for a moment. ‘What an odd name,’ he said.
‘It is a very small place. Presidence. Only a few hundred people.’
‘Who is the skarl?’
‘I… don’t recall his name.’ She was falling off a cliff now, snatching at the last few blades of grass hanging over the edge of the precipice.
The priest drummed his fingers, all sixteen of them, against the arm rests of the chair. After a short and dismally uncomfortable silence, he said, ‘I don’t believe you.’
Lyra’s heart sank. She felt like crying. It would have been one thing to resist interrogation as a human, with all of her skills and training intact. But to do it here, in this alien place, while trying to mimic an alien… it was impossible. The stress was driving at her skull, pounding on it like an angry fist on a door.
‘Keep it together, Kilo Two,’ Smith whispered. ‘I can lid him from here if needs be. Don’t shit yourself. Use your training.’
‘I don’t know what I can tell you,’ Lyra said, trying to pull herself together. It was almost impossible to do given that her body language was probably completely betraying her.
The priest didn’t look angry. ‘I know why you seek to protect him,’ he said softly.
That threw her. ‘I’m sorry?’
A ghost of a smile played across the priest’s lips. ‘He is precious, no? Our most sacred saint. It is possible that perhaps even he does not know who he is.’
‘Is he talking about Kilo One?’ Smith asked, more to himself than anyone else.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Lyra said. It was the truest thing she’d said in a long time.
‘The priest at Hayisa had an inkling, of course, and I’d have never believed it, but…’ sa’Vah paused, composing himself. He had been working himself up. ‘Tell me where you are really from. It is all right; I think I know the answer already.’
Lyra’s heart pounded.
‘Obviously don’t tell him,’ Smith whispered in her ear.
Obviously! ‘I am from Myaxomon,’ she said.
The priest looked briefly disappointed. ‘Perhaps you do not recall,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you did not travel with him from the Zecadach.’
Lyra’s body exploded with adrenaline, and she stared at the priest, mouth agape.
‘Oh shit, did he just say the Zecad?’ Smith said.
‘You know?’ Lyra said, involuntarily. She immediately regretted it as sa’Vah’s eyes gleamed with pleasure and triumph.
‘Gremlin ready to make extraction,’ Seka said tensely.
‘Standby, Gremlin,’ Smith replied.
‘I know, child; it is all right. The College of Prognosticators foretold of this. They predicted the end of the crusade fleets and the return of our holiest prophet. He is here, now, returned to us at our time of triumph. We will reclaim his ancestral homeland across the Anohat with the great Fleets of Reclamation already pouring into the Home Galaxy.’
Realisation, like a cold, dawning sun, slowly seeped through Lyra’s brain. She delved back into her UNIS Mind Map, searching back through countless briefings, until she recalled gan’Seke’s retelling of the history of the provar and the kaygryn and the rise of the Ascendancy. The priest was talking about vos’Shan. The provar had imprisoned him in the Zecad.
‘Wait a second,’ said Smith, his voice full of doubt.
The provar had downloaded them into two Imperial Kaygryn bodies—bodies that had been kept in stasis for centuries, since the dawn of the Ascendancy.
