Empire of the Fallen, page 32
Shaddai was a distant, forlorn memory. They had answered the call like quick-reaction Goliath pilots sitting on their deck chairs on the concrete apron of a UNAF base, sprinting for their cockpits when the alarms yammered. Millions of provar had been abandoned. Goliaths, men, Manticores, Titans… those which had not been directly slaved to the CDCCs waiting in orbit had pulled out the marine and UNAF contingents from three continents, bundled them aboard the waiting ships of the 6th Fleet 15th Solar Operations Group, and hurled themselves at the astrographic beacons of Folhourt. It was thirty minutes of a solitary, tense jump to the capital world of the Ascendancy. There were no tight, complex formations now, no neat, serried ranks of ships arranged by class and firepower. Hardware had been abandoned to save inertia, marines had been crammed in anywhere there was acceleration gel for them, and ships had fired their way into wormholes the second they could break orbit. It was all hands to the pump.
Scarcroft summoned the fleet roster. By the information provided in the last bulletin, there were three UN Fleets within quick-reaction distances of Folhourt: the 19th, the 81st, and his own mother fleet, the 6th. Between them, they had one hundred and fifty ships of varying classes. OC QRA Folhourt was Francis Haps, a man who had distinguished himself in the Ascendancy War and who was as good a choice as any, in the circumstances.
On top of the UN Fleet presence was the largest single portion of Ascendancy Home Fleet in the galaxy which accounted for another two hundred ships. Both Exia en’Jago, the bloodthirsty war criminal who had been responsible for the appalling Jago 541b virus, and Godra lon’Voss, the so-called ‘Saviour of Vonvalt’, were the AHF fleet executors commanding. Folhourt was one of the few worlds in Tier Three which rivalled Earth in volumes of MDPs too; at last count, eleven hundred platforms sailed through the orbit bands, packing huge heavy counter-assault lasers and lethal magazines of anti-ship ordnance. Taken all together, it was the most formidable concentration of firepower in the history of the galaxy.
God help us. If that doesn’t do it, nothing will, Scarcroft thought grimly.
‘Twenty seconds RT.’
‘When we’re out of the hole, I want voidar to maximum resonance and as many decoy pods as you can spare. Jarle, power to all weapons batteries one second RT once we’re clear,’ Scarcroft said to his weapons officer. ‘This isn’t going to be a subtle affair, so save the refrac, Stellan, and power to all force shields. And Petko, get me a line to the nearest blues. I want a sitrep and I want it quickly. We’ll help if we can, but I want an exit strategy if this place is done for.’
A chorus of affirmatives answered him.
‘And good luck,’ he added quietly, grimly. His hands, damp with sweat, wrung the command pulpit.
‘Here we go,’ Devaraja said.
The Galahad exited hyperspace. Immediately, its non-FTL drives kicked in, accelerating the warship to a tenth of the speed of light. The onboard VI fed vectors to the engines via a randomised algorithm to throw off any straight-line predictive ordnance. In the armoured core of the ship, the limp, unconscious bodies of Scarcroft and his officers floated peacefully in tanks of thick acceleration nanogel, gently bumping against the sides of their VR sync pods with each breakneck shift in trajectory. In the virtual reality command sphere, graphics and data populated the tac screen. The occupants’ IHDs, acting in concert with the ship’s powerful VI core, revised their time perception down to enable them to participate meaningfully in what would otherwise be the realm of ultra-fast thinking machines.
In those opening seconds, when the fog of hyperspace cleared from the VL feeds, Scarcroft saw Folhourt.
‘My god,’ he whispered.
The planet was on fire. Hurricanes of flame raced through the leftmost hemisphere, chewing through cities of millions. The atmosphere had been transformed into a hall held aloft by pillars of radioactive nuclear clouds. In some places, glowing craters so deep they had excised kilometres of crust were visible, as if some unfathomable cosmic giant had simply grabbed handfuls of planetary matter and tossed them into orbit. Across the terminator, great meteor showers illuminated the night sky, the remnants of hundreds of low-orbit MDPs as they tumbled into the atmosphere and were shredded to cinders.
Ahead of them raged the largest naval battle Scarcroft had ever set eyes on.
‘Mother of Christ,’ someone said as the command sphere synced with the Hypervect defence grid and became so festooned with fleet markers that Scarcroft thought it had glitched.
‘I’ve got incoming!’ Devaraja shouted.
Scarcroft gripped the railing, digesting the information in front of him, looking at the clouds of ordnance, the formations of ships, where the hotspots were, where there was refraction in play, where the redline vectors and blueline vectors were, what voidar was returning, and who was pinging IFF. Even as the Galahad’s ordnance pylons extended from their recesses and the Star Witch silos opened, their shields were taking heavy rail flak from many hundreds of thousands of kilometres away.
‘I want to hear UN voices on comms in two seconds!’ he shouted, conjuring up and dismissing floods of information with his hands, eyes and thoughts. ‘Jarle, get me a target, there’s plenty to choose from.’
The Galahad corkscrewed violently through the high-orbit band, dodging or absorbing glittering waves of hypervelocity flak. All around them, the space was chock-full of ships and ordnance, many in bits, and engines and explosions lit up the black star field like an orgy of post-dinner fireworks.
‘Galahad, is the rest of the 6th with you?’ crackled a voice thick with distortion across the narrowband. The tag marked it as the UNS Caspian—Haps’ flagship.
‘They’re en route, we’re the first, 15th SOG,’ Scarcroft replied, not taking his eyes off the tac screen. The Galahad’s processor was having great difficulty in identifying the Imperial ships, and they had no information on either type or capability. It was with some trepidation, then, that he watched Devaraja pull the ship into a high-G redline pass of the nearest enemy vessel and initiate a flak run.
‘What’s going on, Francis?’ Scarcroft asked, his knuckles white as their guns thundered. Three hundred thousand kilometres to core, something flashed.
‘Indigos are here with a thousand-plus ships. It’s like a goddamn crusade fleet. We don’t know how many are combat-capable. It’s taken them thirty minutes to clear the MDPs but Jago and Voss are holding them with heavy casualties. The 81st are tied up over Roma Vega. As it stands, the 19th is down to sixty per cent and falling. God only knows how many indigos we’re taking out; we can’t draw a bead on type or cap. One thing’s for sure: Folhourt is done.’
Scarcroft tuned briefly back in to his bridge officers.
‘Watch it, watch it, watch it! There! Sixty degrees to spin—’
‘I see him, initiating HGV with a five-point spread—’
‘Good hit, is he—’
‘Star Witch, Star Witch—’
His heart surged with adrenaline, and he closed his eyes against the combat high, relishing in it. ‘Francis, what are your orders?’ he asked as proximity alarms yammered and flak flashed across the command sphere like laser beams.
‘Every ship we don’t kill here is another ship to invade the UN,’ Haps said simply.
A savage grin parted Scarcroft’s lips. ‘Understood,’ he said, and terminated the channel.
*
Constance rested her head against the small porthole in the Manticore’s fuselage, the rumbling of the engines vibrating her skull. Missives clamoured for her attention on her IHD, but she ignored them. Outside, the early morning air was dark and filled with a swirling maelstrom of snow.
Folhourt was under attack. Not just Folhourt: the home of the Ascendancy, to billions of provar, the lynchpin of the galactic economy and the largest fleet staging area in the galaxy. The Empire had not harried the spinward line, not played cat and mouse, not sought to divide and conquer. They had gone straight for the jugular.
The reports were infuriatingly sluggish and ill-informed. The Fleet Comms Array had lost signals from a dozen worlds in the Omadan Sprint, leaving UNIS and FID as little more than bystanders, but there was no doubting it now, no ignoring the problem and writing it off as myth.
The Kaygryn Empire had arrived.
She massaged her temples as a nauseating headache engulfed her skull which no amount of painkillers and stims seemed to be able to rid her of. The past few days had been calamitous as the formal investigation into the deaths of Alexander White and Algernon Foster had begun and the news cycles had picked up on the story. Her instructions had been explicit—that they were not to be killed, merely rendered—but she knew that the Vulture had had a hand in this.
The others—Kessler and Tavistock—had disappeared, though their fate was as uncertain as Foster’s and White’s was not. Ellisburg, whether through sloppiness, operational oversight, or simple good fortune, had been spared the long knives. He now reposed in Halo Arch, directing the Battle of Folhourt. As far as Constance was concerned, he was the only man qualified to do so. It was just a shame she loathed him too.
‘We’re approaching Halo Arch now, Ma’am,’ the pilot said over the narrowband.
Constance didn’t reply. She was suffering from a fit of melancholy, a sickening mixture of guilt, relief and trepidation. The Assembly was back on her side—rather than the planned vote of no confidence, they’d instead voted to give her new emergency powers—but even that validation couldn’t quite cure her of the gut-wrenching feeling of having directly ordered colleagues and friends to be kidnapped. Foster and White she may have profoundly loathed, but there was hatred and there was being responsible for their deaths. These people weren’t a faceless mass of kaygryn hundreds of lightyears distant; they were people she had worked with for months.
‘Christ, I had dinner with Bethan Foster last week,’ she said aloud, the images of the woman’s distorted head impaled on a shred of cruiser fuselage refusing to leave her mind’s eye.
She started as the hold door opened. They had arrived. Snow swirled into the hold, and Constance drew her coat around her. Ahead, the Fleet headquarters stretched up into the dark sky, a massive three-dimensional ‘T’ overlooking a field of massive grass quadrangles, landing platforms and hangars. Orbital pylons disappeared into the cloud layer like marionette strings, winking with hundreds of altitude lights.
She hurried inside, accompanied by Mantix-clad bodyguards, and took an elevator to the top floor Operations Room. Far below, locked in underground PRISM bunkers, the direct operational advisors worked, sending coded orders via the Fleet Comms Array to distant corners of the galaxy. In this case, the antennae were pointed squarely at the heart of the Ascendancy.
‘Keep your seats,’ she said tiredly as she walked into the Operations Room. Here was the usual slew of officers, aides and aides of aides, and a kaleidoscopic mass of holos depicting the space around Folhourt, the Ascendancy, the Gull Crest and the Omadan Sprint. There was a lot of red.
‘Grant,’ she said, summoning Ellisburg from a console near the back. He looked up at her, unshorn, sleeves rolled up, shirt open at the collar. His eyes were red-rimmed and his pupils dilated from stim overuse.
‘Ma’am,’ he said guardedly as he approached. His whole body smelled of coffee.
Constance stood there for a moment, taking in Ellisburg’s lanky, almost ungainly form, that same thin, diminutive quality that all Fleet officers shared from decades spent in zero-G. In that moment, an odd feeling of contempt overcame her. The man hardly seemed grateful to have been spared the purge. In fact, his cagey manner seemed positively insubordinate.
‘Apprise me, then?’ she said impatiently.
An incongruous look of anger and confusion passed briefly across the fleet marshal’s face. ‘Folhourt is under attack,’ he said, blinking rapidly as he often did under pressure. ‘UNIS and FIDs picked up fifteen hundred ships exiting the Khāli Barrier twenty hours ago. They made straight for Folhourt.’
Constance felt her flesh crawl. Fifteen hundred ships. It was more than they had dared to anticipate in their worst-case scenarios.
‘So many…’ she said, her eyes focussing on a point somewhere in the distance over Ellisburg’s left shoulder. ‘How?’ she demanded. ‘Where did they find the strength after the crusade fleets?’
Ellisburg cleared his throat uncomfortably. It had been his office, after all, that had put together the estimates. ‘The provar have said repeatedly that most crusade ships are destroyed within minutes of exiting the Barrier. We can only assume that in recent years, the kaygryn have been able to increase their capability and production while simultaneously holding the Ascendancy lines at bay.’
Constance’s hands balled into fists. I won’t lose this fucking war now; not after what I’ve done—had to do—to get here.
‘And what are we doing about it?’ she snapped. ‘We put hundreds of ships within ten lights of Folhourt. This is exactly what I have been fighting the Assembly about for weeks!’
Ellisburg sighed loudly, itching to get back to his station. ‘Data is patchy thanks to the problems we are having with comms in the Gull Crest. en’Jago and lon’Voss are holding along with the quick-reaction force under Francis Haps, as planned for, but they are being overwhelmed.’
‘Fleet Marshal?’ an officer called from the other side of the room.
‘One minute,’ Ellisburg replied. ‘The problem is the Omadan Sprint. We had over a hundred ships at the fleet muster at Cobalta, plus another fifty over Roma Vega under the 81st. They were hand-picked, battle-hardened fleets from the Ascendancy War, more than enough to take on Imperial invaders based on the intelligence we’ve received.’
‘What’s the problem, then?’
‘We can’t raise any of them.’
Constance had to stop herself from screaming. She visibly calmed herself with a long, slow exhalation. ‘Tell me—’
‘Fleet Marshal?’ that same voice called again.
‘He is talking to the president!’ Constance snapped. ‘Wait, damn you!’ she turned back to Ellisburg. ‘Tell me we are handling it. Tell me we have plans for this.’
Ellisburg’s look did not give her the dose of confidence she had hoped for. ‘Ma’am, Cobalta was a very important staging area. We do not have unlimited ships, and many of the ones we do have, thanks to your policies, are based deep inside Ascendancy sectors. If we lose the Omadan Sprint, we will lose the Crest. If we lose the Crest, we will lose the Outer Ring. And if we lose Folhourt, we will lose everything.
‘I am trying my very best, with the resources we have, to sort this out. But for some reason, key intelligence personnel whom I have been working with for years have gone missing. The best four-star I have ever worked with was tragically killed this week. In one fell swoop, the top military and intelligence talent in the UN has gone for reasons which are beyond suspicious, to be replaced with—in fact, I don’t know who the fuck they’ve been replaced with, and neither does anybody else in this room. Now if you’ll excuse me, Ma’am, I am going to return to my station and try and salvage what I can from this situation, because if Folhourt falls in the next hour, so do the rest of the dominos, and the whole of the United Nations with it!’
‘Fleet Marshal?’
‘What?!’ Ellisburg screamed in the silent Operations Room.
‘We’ve just lost contact with Voga City.’
*
The air was so full of dust, regolith and smoke that the surface temperature was dropping despite the firestorm on the horizon. Even through the massive feet of the Goliath, its legs with their cushioning hydraulic struts, and the nanogel-filled cockpit which could withstand massive, punishing spikes in G-force, Lance Kanova felt the crust busters as they detonated on the far side of the planet. They rumbled like earthquakes, shaking the world to its core and ejecting many millions of tonnes of matter into the atmosphere.
Comms were down. Any semblance of martial order had disintegrated. The sky was erupting in flashes of lightning as the low-orbit battle raged overhead and MDPs tumbled into the air to be shredded by the ionising air of high-altitude re-entry. The western sky turned incandescent orange as the flames advanced across the continent.
Absent any orders, Kanova had done all he could in the tens of minutes he had to prepare FOB Zecad for invasion, sweating inside the cockpit as a dozen orbital ACTIVE TARGET WARNINGs flashed across his failing tac screen. He had never seen so much crimson above; vast flocks of red markers cut back and forth across his enhanced optics, well in excess of a thousand. Blues and greens were becoming increasingly hard to spot. At one point, a squadron of provari Zealots tore across the eastern horizon, but purple beams lanced each one out of the sky. Kanova had watched grimly as they vaporised or tumbled to the surface, their plasmastats touching off in huge megatonne furnaces of blue fire.
The UN force manning FOB Zecad had been reduced to a skeleton crew after the Last Chance Saloon team had left. There were less than twenty men, three Goliaths—two of which were light interdictor variants, including his own—and a handful of provari advisors. Barely two dozen guns and some heavy machinery to hold off a thousand ships’ worth of force-shielded Imperial kaygryn.
They set up diamond hard points anyway around the entrance to the Zecad itself, underneath the protective awning of their only portable force shield. Kanova sent in two men with shaped nuclear charges to scuttle the stasis chamber when they inevitably lost their grip on the temple. He thought briefly of Yano and Lyra, who would be stuck inside their Imperial bodies forever—but then nobody really expected them to make it back alive.
They filled the rest of the Forbidden City with long-saturation radiation mines—for all the good that would do, given his Geiger counter was already off the scale—and booby-trapped everything else with all the explosives they could lay their hands on. All of it could be detected and neutralised from kilometres away, since none of it was refracted, but he was loath to leave any of their remaining ordnance unused. If one stupid kaygryn got its leg blown off and bled to death before the shaped nuclear charge blasted the whole complex to oblivion, he would consider his mission complete.
