Empire of the Fallen, page 33
When everything had been set up, and the UN and provari troops were standing behind their diamond barriers, fingers on triggers, sweating in their armour, Kanova walked his Goliath back over to the temple entrance.
And waited.
*
‘New target, ah frigate-patterned ship, forty degrees to spin and five over the plane—’
‘I see it, locking—’
‘He’s seen us, watch that incoming—’
‘I’ve got flak at point-oh-one and five, manually correcting—’
‘Watch, he’s going to hit—’
‘No he’s not, I’ve seen it—’
‘I’ve got firing solutions on indigo.’
‘There, five, five, six! Come on, bring it about!’
‘Guns, guns, guns!’
‘Firing.’
‘Star Witch free—’
‘You’ve got him!’
‘Watch core! Thirty degrees, I can’t see—’
*
It didn’t take long for Imperial troops to arrive. Kanova saw them approaching on redline vectors, in silver, teardrop-shaped troop carriers, burning through the atmosphere like marines on ROIs. He and the other interdictor did what they could with phase and Hydra missiles, but the Imperial countermeasures were too effective.
‘Back under the cover!’ he shouted as return rail started tracking their ordnance blooms. Despite their own refraction shielding, the incoming was dismayingly accurate.
He and the other interdictor ran back under the cover of the main force shield as heavy rail started slamming down from orbit amidst the incoming landers, cratering the Forbidden City and destroying a good portion of their traps. Kanova gritted his teeth.
‘Come on then,’ he said, his fists clenching.
*
‘Watch for boarders,’ the FLEETWIDE comms channel winked. Scarcroft checked it. It had come from Haps, a two-second blurt of information on an already crowded wideband.
‘I’ve had my fill of those already this year,’ Scarcroft muttered to himself.
He analysed the information in the command sphere, trying to pick out a meta-strategy among the glut of data. The provari ships, blue circles with small AHF markers next to them, were clustered on the spinward side of the planet, engaging with the largest mass of the Imperial fleet in classic Ascendancy attack formations. They were paying a heavy price for it. The fleet roster was counting down at a rate of two ships every thirty seconds of real time.
The UN’s own efforts were chaotic. New ships from the QRA fleets jumped in every few seconds. Most of the 6th fleet had now shown up. Already one cruiser, the Ozymandias, was in two glowing halves, surrounded by a cloud of lifeboats. Haps’ own fleet, the 19th, was down to thirty per cent.
‘What is that man doing?!’ Scarcroft said, his eyes narrowed to a squint, taking in the positions of all the UN ships still fighting in the orbit bands. In front of him, Devaraja conducted his officers in his stead. Their frenetic, pulse-thumping back-and-forth filtered into his ears every few seconds. He had a preternatural ability to dip in and out of their dealings and correct them as he saw fit.
‘Sentrax, no—fuck, that one was through!’
Large metallic clangs rang through the command sphere, part of the artificial force feedback the Galahad’s processors provided them with which they otherwise wouldn’t hear. Damage alarms shrieked into life.
‘Shit, we’re venting!’
‘They hit the marines!’
‘How many fatalities?’ Scarcroft asked grimly.
‘Three.’
Holos swirling with damage reports crowded the command sphere. The nanoform hull had been perforated by a liquid-core tungsten slug. The breach was a full centimetre wide.
‘Look, why are we trailing on point-oh-three this close to Imperial guns? Use the voidar, the resonance is far too low!’ Scarcroft shouted, absorbing the information in front of him. ‘Get that—look, there!’ he shouted, pointing to a red icon directly above them. In two seconds of real time, it was gone, hundreds of thousands of kilometres behind them. ‘Should have had guns on him two millilights ago! Focus! Leave the refrac and vent that hold; it’s throwing your vector!’
There were no apologies. There were none required. There was no time for them anyway. The officers followed his orders with a renewed vigour as the Galahad continued to make erratic, high-G elliptical passes of the burning sphere that was Folhourt.
Scarcroft’s features creased in frustration. More UN ships were jumping in, but their post-hyperspace evasion vectors were sloppy. Good enough for the Ascendancy, perhaps, but evidently not against Imperial guns. The bandwidth was jammed, too. Their comms discipline wasn’t good enough. Too many captains were shouting about the state of Folhourt and the size of the Imperial fleet.
‘Get me fleetwide,’ he said to Petko. One of the enduring benefits of being a fleet marshal was that he was one of the few people to send priority comms to every allied ship within hailing range. ‘Can we get a formation here, please!’ he snapped as the Galahad dived under the south pole of Folhourt, jinking wildly to avoid MDP debris.
As they moved coreward, more Imperial ships entered the fray from the enormous mass on their right, pressing their advantage. ‘Can the chatter! Maintain comms discipline! It’s a big enemy fleet but it isn’t unbeatable. Get into your Reapers, I don’t see any PDCs doing what they’re supposed to be doing! Keep the pressure on the guns and be smart with the Star Witch—and let’s get some aggression going! If you stay on the redline, they’re not going to hit you no matter how many there are. There is no point in being conservative—all that’s going to happen is the AHF will go and that’ll be the end of it. Now, come on! If Folhourt goes, the galaxy goes! Do it for your friends and families! Do it for the UN! Come on! UN! UN!’
*
The kaygryn advanced in ranks like 19th-century riflemen, their drop pods steaming in the air behind them. They took their time: there was no need to hurry. The defenders couldn’t fire because their own force shields would stop their rounds.
They wore large exo-powered suits of armour, white interlocking kinetic plates trimmed with Imperial colours. Their halberds glinted in what little sunlight there was; the forest of hafts pulsed threateningly with quad-powered lasers. Their faces were covered by ballistic masks, making each anonymous, like an army of clones.
The UN and provari defenders stood nervously. It was one thing to fight, cognisant of the risks of death; it was quite another to fight knowing that death was the only outcome. Kanova liked to think it made them dangerous, like rats trapped in an alley.
In reality, it only made him frightened.
‘This is it,’ he said over the wideband as the ranks of Imperial troops had marshalled sufficiently to begin their slow, lockstep advance. ‘Thank you for your courage and your professionalism. You have done the UN and the Ascendancy proud. Whatever happens, rest assured: we will be remembered. Good luck.’
It wasn’t the most rousing delivery. It certainly wasn’t the most inspirational military speech he’d heard. But the men cheered anyway, a last, defiant shout, as if they could roar their way into the history books.
Then the kaygryn were through.
*
The Fleet Comms Array was slowly falling silent. The UN was a monster that gorged itself on a glut of information every second. The data that was produced by thousands of deep space relays, by military and civilian vessels, by direct-observation drones both legal and illegal across hundreds of human and alien worlds, was its lifeblood. Information on every conceivable aspect of everything was assimilated and tracked. From a random creditline facility engaged in a bar to the largest of Solar Operations Command’s meta-strategies, information was king. Indeed, so interconnected were the citizens of the UN to one another and to everything around them, from toilets to restaurants to universities to planetary VIs, that losing access to that surfeit of data, even for a few minutes, could induce severely depressive states. They were connected, like bees to their queen.
And so as the Fleet Comms Array went dark, as their sources of information were closed off one by one, it wasn’t just a strategic nightmare: it was a very personal, animal fear too. They were heading deep into the isolated unknown.
‘We’re losing Veigis worlds too?’ Constance asked quietly. The Operations Room was subdued, the freneticism and energy lost. They were a hypersled team too many points behind in the Galactic Super League to take first place. Now, second was the best they could hope to achieve.
‘We don’t know,’ a nearby officer said when Ellisburg didn’t answer. The holos lining the walls were flashing with so much crimson it was like being in a disco. ‘We are still engaging at Folhourt. Depending on the outcome, we could—’
‘Are we winning?’ Constance asked. She could feel perspiration trickling down her back.
The officer cleared his throat. ‘It’s difficult to say given the sluggish data reception, but—’
‘Are we winning?’ Constance asked in the same, tired voice.
‘No, Ma’am. In twenty minutes, by the current rate of attrition, we will have lost every AHF and UN Fleet vessel over Folhourt.’
There was no clamour of contradiction or bravado. The officers in the room apparently all agreed with the conclusion.
Constance felt the room closing in on her. ‘What’s… how—how are we losing?’
‘We don’t have enough ships, Ma’am. It’s as simple as that. We’ve fielded the largest naval force in history, but the Empire has more. They utilise much the same tactics as we do. Ships depend on evasion to survive, rather than force shielding. More ships mean a greater chance of being hit.’
Constance balled her hands into fists. A sudden surge of anger wrote itself as a crimson flush across her face. ‘Thanks for that!’ she snapped, ‘You’re telling me that more ships equals more guns and more hits? Golly, well, what an education! You’ve really made your salary back there!’
Silence claimed the room. Processors hummed, holos blinked. Men and women in uniform stared at their laps, their hands, their consoles, their eyes unmoving.
‘Pull them out,’ she said. ‘Fuck Folhourt. Pull them out. Do whatever you have to do to protect our worlds.’
A slightly renewed sense of purpose claimed the Operations Room, but there was none of the piss and vinegar that she’d have expected from warring marshals in their element. They had all but given up.
It all depends on Yano and Lyra now, Constance thought as she left the room to be sick in the toilets.
*
As the first of the kaygryn stepped through the shimmering, interlocking hexagons that marked the edge of the force shield boundary, the exchange of fire was so intense that the air itself began to ionise. Phase, plasma and solid shot scythed between the two lines of combatants, tearing into stone, diamond and armour.
‘UN! UN!’ Kanova shouted, surging down the temple steps with the other two Goliaths into the melee. He could see the Imperial force shields absorbing the phase and plasma and simply rejecting the hard rounds like a baseball batter dispatching a pitched ball. The only impact the fire from the defenders seemed to be having was to the speed of the kaygryn advance; the shots were not penetrating, but their shields still had to dissipate the force. In some parts of the line, the volume of fire had practically forced them to a standstill, with the aliens leaning forward into it like it was a gale-force wind.
It was one of these clogged-up areas that Kanova ran to. His Goliath’s force shielding easily shrugged off the kaygryn small arms fire, and the movements of his gauntlets and feet, though devastatingly powerful, were not fast enough to trigger the accretion of the exotic matter of their force shields.
‘Crush them!’ he shouted over the Goliath narrowband with savage triumph. The Imperials were only just realising their predicament as Kanova’s massive feet began to stamp and kick, like a ten-tonne toddler destroying a makeshift wall of wooden bricks. The aliens struggled to move out of the way as he squashed them underfoot, their force shields and armour useless against the slow, relentless crushing. Soon, the stone floor was awash with blood, mashed organs and bone powder as bodies exploded underneath Goliath hands and feet.
‘Stay where you are!’ he roared to the other defenders as they sensed the advantage and began to abandon their cover. Immediately, a handful collapsed to the powerful halberd lasers the kaygryn wielded, and the rest dived back behind their diamond hard points. Overhead, their own force shield jarred two, three times as Imperial rail strikes uselessly tried to destroy the Goliaths massacring their troops. Kanova could just imagine the terrified babbling of the aliens in front of him as they desperately tried to call in orbital assets and watched their comrades, initially so sure of themselves, now shitting in their space suits.
He crushed one underfoot and punched another one so that it sailed thirty metres back across the stone floor of the Forbidden City. They were thinning out. It was bloody, medieval work. His shields were not even close to being overcooked by the aliens’ lasers; it would take naval-grade weaponry to penetrate his layers of shielding and armour.
‘Drive them back!’ he shouted. There must have been a hundred of them left, some still trading fire with the other defenders, but most focussed on trying to bring down the Goliaths like prehistoric hunters trying to bring down a mammoth.
Kanova was just about to crush another one when an alarm cut through his tac screen. The hydraulics in his left leg were losing pressure.
‘Ah, shit,’ he snapped. The Goliath’s self-repair nanobots were already swarming to the site, trying to plug the gap, but it was far too big. One of the alien’s charged blades had cut cleanly through the diamond filament and nanoform armour and sliced the mechanism so that hydraulic fluids were spilling free like blood. Within seconds, he had completely lost power to the limb.
‘Watch your back!’ another Goliath pilot shouted over the narrowband. Suddenly, his number three plasmastat was losing power. The aliens were jumping at him, trying to grab hold of any external feature on his Goliath and sever vital mechanical components.
He dropped to the floor and began rolling, crushing more of the aliens in the process, but now he was losing force shields as his plasmastats struggled to maintain the power to both the Goliath’s main systems and his shielding.
‘I’m losing power!’ he shouted. One of the Goliaths began lumbering towards him, but Kanova could only shout helplessly as one of the aliens slapped an adhesive phase mine to his leg. The blast killed the pilot immediately and sent the machine lurching over to one side, its hull glowing where the phase had eviscerated it.
The air crackled with fire once more as the Imperials rallied and began to smash the defenders at the top of the stairs. More kaygryn clambered over his prone form, stabbing with their wretched blades. CRITICAL SYSTEMS FAILURE and MASTER WARNING ALARM both flashed in tandem across Kanova’s tac screen.
‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ he shouted, writhing violently within the pilot’s capsule as his systems shut down one by one and the Goliath’s life fluids guttered out of it on to the stone floor of the Forbidden City. Above him, he watched on the fore VL feeds as charged blades slammed into the chassis.
He screamed over the wideband as the kaygryn began tossing aside cut-off pieces of armour. No-one came to his aid. The other Goliath was down too, succumbed to the same fate as Kanova’s. They had seemed so invincible to start with, but he had only taken into account their damned lasers and forgotten about the blades. It was the last mistake he would ever make.
‘Zecad team, prime the charges and scuttle the temple,’ he managed to say as calmly as he could, relying on his IHD transmitter now that his high-gain was down. There was a sizeable hole above him now, exposing the pilot’s capsule like open-heart surgery.
One of the kaygryn stood astride the hole and raised its halberd, blade-down. Kanova had his IHD knock him unconscious before the killing blow could be struck.
The last thing he heard was the deep, tectonic rumble of a subterranean nuclear explosion.
MYAXOMON
‘Commentators speculated for years on what happened inside quorl nesting stations, and the truth was revolting. People too, for centuries, wanted to know where the Ascendancy crusade fleets were going, and now we wish we didn’t know the answer to that, either. Stop asking questions, I say, and just enjoy your life.’
Human Democrat Secretary of State Sarah Connery
Vargonroth was to Myaxomon what a hamlet of wattle-and-daub huts was to Vargonroth. As the space plane soared over the sun-drenched city, accompanied on both sides by an ostentatious formation of fighter aircraft, Yano drank in its expansive architectural extravagance with deep trepidation.
The whole continent seemed to be one enormous city, a horizon-to-horizon metropolis of arches, pillars, temples, golden domes, and vast, hive-like arcologies. It could have been ancient Rome, if the Romans had had the technical ability to construct buildings in excess of a kilometre tall. The high-altitude docks, too, teeming with orbit-capable ships like fish at a reef, gave the lie to this being anything other than one of the largest and most advanced civilisations in the galaxy.
In two galaxies, Yano corrected himself.
Yano had dredged his mind during the journey for Pitt’s briefing. Thanks to VR time debt, it seemed like many weeks ago. He recalled though that the Empire was run by vun’Daal XI and had three circles of advisors. The High Priest of Kurwen had already alluded to one, the shen’ah, which Yano guessed was the Conclave Ascendant, the Emperor’s religious advisors. He wasn’t sure how the College of Prognosticators fit into that body—or indeed, whether such a College had existed when he was supposed to have last been alive a thousand years ago—but he could always feign amnesia as Smith had advised.
