Empire of the Fallen, page 38
Pitt glowered. When he spoke, his tone was threatening. ‘Andrea, I have recorded everything we have just discussed. Either you come with me now, willingly, or I will have you arrested on the spot.’
Constance snorted. ‘Come on, Bill, you think I can’t have your comms contained here? In Carrington? Even your EFFECT magic can’t get around those executive overrides.’
Pitt took two steps forward, ignoring her. ‘I won’t ask you again. It’s over, Andrea.’
Constance frowned, slightly concerned that the maniac was actually going to try and arrest her. ‘Bill, I’m obviously not coming with you,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘If you carry on like this, the guards will shoot you.’
‘That’s enough,’ he said tiredly, and he closed the gap between them. She flinched as he grabbed her by the bicep in a hard, gauntlet grip. Her bodily integrity alarms blared. IHD warnings were immediately sent to a dozen heavily armed men outside the library.
‘Bill, get off me!’ she shouted as she struggled against the iron grip and the oil and metal smell of Mantix filled her nostrils. She wondered where the hell her close protection officers were. There were no shouts outside, no thumping of boots up the stairs. The one time she actually needed them and they were nowhere to be seen. Carrington continued on as if nothing was happening.
Oh God, she thought with a lump in her throat and a sour feeling in her stomach. They’re on his side. They’re waiting to take me away. He’s actually got men outside waiting to arrest me.
‘Bill, wait,’ she said as he began to frogmarch her towards the door. ‘There is still hope. We can still come out of this. Yano is on the other side of the Barrier right now.’
‘We don’t know that,’ Pitt said grimly.
‘What are you suggesting we do? Surrender?’
Pitt said nothing. They reached the door.
‘For God’s sake, Bill, let go of me at once!’
The door opened. The Vulture stood there grinning, a rail pistol in his hand, held at head height. A single blam snapped through the library, and everything above Pitt’s chin was torn off and rearranged as a large red puddle on the floor behind.
Constance froze. Pitt’s fingers were still wrapped around her arm. His body swayed for a few moments before the exoskeleton couldn’t counterbalance it any more, and it collapsed to the floor.
‘Hello, Andrea,’ the Vulture said, smiling.
Constance screamed.
*
Scarcroft’s attention was torn between the growing sphere of Folhourt and the holos showing the Imperial kaygryn killing off Roque, Wolff, and all of the marines under their command—men he knew personally. It was difficult to tell among the clouds of blood vapour, smoke and lumps of armour, but it seemed that none of the kaygryn had been killed. While they had their personal force shields, they would be next to invincible in a boarding action.
‘Damn,’ he said quietly. There were a hundred UNAF men and women on board the UNS Galahad, most in storage in the hangars, and therefore blissfully unplugged from the sync and unaware of the death and destruction happening mere metres from them. Scarcroft and the bridge officers were not afforded that luxury. ‘Stellan, give me some good news, that’s an order,’ he said. He was nervous now, more nervous than he ever had been. Even in a transparent sphere, with the endless black environs of space stretching in every direction, a UN warship could be the most claustrophobic place in existence. He would take the open spaces of the goscol arena on Vonvalt any day.
He idly wondered how Gia Raman was getting on and whether the zhahassi had found her.
‘I can’t,’ Stellan said in the deadpan, impassive voice that heavy stim overuse engendered. His face was pressed right up to the holo in front of him. The man was so wired he was going to cook his brain. ‘VI can’t overcome the device that’s neutralising the engines. Every time we fire them, they fail. It’s some kind of counter-inertial device… Actually, fuck it. I have no idea what the damn thing is.’
Scarcroft wrung the command pulpit railing. They had tens of seconds of real time now, a few minutes of adjusted. The boarders were moving in slow motion to the armoured core.
‘I don’t understand it!’ he snarled, thumping the railing. ‘They’re going to get themselves killed! They’ll never breach the core in time to take us wide of the planet.’
‘Perhaps they don’t know,’ Devaraja said.
Scarcroft gripped the railing. He was going to have to give the order to abandon ship very shortly—for all the good that it would do. Their capsules would simply take them to the surface of Folhourt. CAF would burn them to death mere hours after they landed.
But the alternative was to stay and get butchered.
‘Abandon ship, non-crew only,’ he said in a tired voice.
‘Yes, sir,’ Devaraja said. Graphics flooded the command sphere as a hundred capsules fired free of the hold, pinging friendly Red Cross codes. Scarcroft waited for the flash of flak, waited for the dozens of capsules to be smashed to pieces by missiles or drones; instead, they swam through the void, listless, unmolested by the Imperial fleet.
‘God help them,’ Scarcroft whispered. The act of ejection would have roused all of them from storage. It was a lousy way to wake up.
‘Sir, they’re at the primary blast door,’ Devaraja said. Scarcroft nodded. His eyes were fixed on Folhourt. In a few seconds, the Galahad would rip through the atmosphere and hit the surface of the planet with the force of a meteor strike.
A flash on his holo told him the kaygryn were phasing their way through the outer blast door.
‘Stellan?’
The damage control officer simply shook his head. They had run out of options—Scarcroft had already pushed his luck in hand-to-hand combat over the course of the last seven months. This time, he would have to take his chances in hard vacuum, his only weapon a Galactic Naval Protocol SOS wideband broadcast code.
The kaygryn made it through the outer blast door.
‘Goddamn it, abandon ship,’ he sighed, pulling the plug. He waited until the bridge officers disappeared from the sync before authorising the scuttle sequence and his own ejection. In less than a second, he was blinking with gummy eyes inside his VR capsule as he unplugged from the command sphere. A savage headache pounded his skull. He fancied he could hear the hissing whine of directed phase fire through the bulkhead as segments of the armoured core were irreversibly blasted away to allow the passage of his sync capsule through a thin torpedo tube and out the bottom of the ship. Ensconced within the thick, smart nanogel, he felt nothing of the acceleration as he was jettisoned free into the vacuum. His IHD synced with the external VL sensors of the capsule.
‘What?’ he said aloud, his voice muffled inside his helmet, his features creased in confusion. Instead of the clear, dark starfield of Folhourt’s low-orbit band, he saw white, as if he had ejected into a wash of static. It took him a few seconds to realise what had happened. He’d left it far too late. He was already in Folhourt’s atmosphere, tearing through banks of high-altitude cloud.
After a couple of seconds, the capsule punched through the bottom of an anvil of dark cumulonimbus, affording him a brief view of the Galahad’s core detonating in a nuclear fireball. It must have been hundreds of kilometres away.
‘Shit,’ he hissed, cycling through the comms channels. His SOS codes were pinging as they were designed to, but he was unable to hail anyone. ‘This is Fleet Marshal Varren Scarcroft, transmitting in the blind. If any UN Fleet or UNAF forces are picking up this transmission, I have ejected from the UNS Galahad and am currently on Folhourt awaiting recovery.’ He looped the transmission and broadcast it on all comms channels. When his precise landing co-ordinates became clear, he appended them to the transmission too.
His capsule came to a controlled stop on a huge rock plateau two thousand metres above sea level, and he punched the front section free with the manual quick release. The nanogel immediately drained away on to the rock about him, and evaporated into thick, slightly toxic clouds of orange gas. He pulled himself out of the capsule and on to the rock, and yanked the oxygen tube off the end of his helmet in a high-tech pastiche of birth. Then he twisted the helmet until it unlocked from the gorget seal and dropped it next to him, and he felt the biting, scouring winds of Folhourt whipping the perspiration from his face.
Around him, a dark-grey plain of volcanic rock stretched for tens of kilometres, terminating in a shallow horseshoe of low peaks. Ahead of him, a hundred kilometres distant, the horizon glowed orange where hurricanes of fire extinguished millions of tonnes of oxygen in Folhourt’s atmosphere. Above, the sky was a striking maelstrom of dark cloud and red/blue sky, darkening as the sun set on this isolated, abandoned part of the world.
Folhourt. Mausoleum.
Scarcroft balled his hands into fists and let a scream of frustration loose into the frigid air, a cloud of rage-filled vapour that was snatched away by the cutting wind. Then he screamed again, and again, and each time he did, the wind stole it away and rendered his anger inert.
Eventually he sank to the floor, setting his buttocks on the cold stone and wrapping his arms around his knees. All comms channels were still jammed up, but his broadcast looped irrespective. He hoped someone received it. He was old and worn out and sick to the back teeth of warfare, but he was as susceptible to the primal urges of self-preservation as much as the next man. Burning to death in a three-kilometre-high wall of fire, regardless of how vanishingly quick and painless he could make it, was not an appealing prospect.
He breathed in deeply. Folhourt. A year ago, it would have been unthinkable for all but the most respected Xeno Division diplomats to step foot on its holy surface. Now, here he was while the green and blue lights above went out and the world breathed its last. If they lost Folhourt, he knew that the whole house of cards would tumble down. Folhourt was the lynchpin. President Constance had committed a vast number of ships to Ascendancy space, more than many felt prudent, and they were still going to lose.
He blocked out any further thoughts on meta-strategy. It was over. He would not go quietly into the night thinking about Solar Operations Command, the Fleet, the Galahad, the men, women and marines that he’d worked with over the decades, the Aurelius administration, the Ascendancy War… No. He would not think about that. He was done thinking about all that.
He swallowed and calmed his breathing as the fire on the horizon advanced, glowing a little brighter each minute. He made his peace with his mistakes, his regrets, all the things he wished he’d said and done. There was nothing he could do now. His had been a life well lived. He’d committed himself to the Fleet Code, served the UN with honour, commanded with audacity and spent lives with prudence. It might not have been the most glamourous, the most glorious death he could have hoped for, but he’d cheated the Reaper once before. His hand idly rubbed the scar where the provar had stabbed him in the goscol arena.
He closed his eyes, fancying he could feel the heat from the fires even from here. A distant rumble sounded through the atmosphere, and for a brief moment, it sounded like the roar of engines, but he knew it was just thunder.
He took a deep breath.
Not long now.
KILL ORDER
‘Don’t stand there and tell me we don’t sanction extrajudicial killings. Special Warfare Division is a glorified hit squad.’
Alvar Menes, Federal Socialist Minister for Home Affairs, speaking at a Joint Intelligence Command select committee hearing
Vondur watched, wide-eyed, as the massive ships lowered themselves to the surface of Cobalta. Gigantic fusion engines cooked the earth below and anything that stood on it—buildings, kaygryn, humans—and vast, crab-like proboscises anchored them into the bedrock. A gale of debris stormed through the streets from the downwash before the ground below was liquidated to molten rock and the ships settled into the magma stew, sealing them in place like wax signets. Whatever they were, whatever their purpose, they were here to stay.
He pulled his Goliath all over the place, straining to avoid the intensifying rail fire. Surface-to-air missiles, too, exploded around him as the kaygryn below tried their hand with man-portable ordnance. Sandwiched between two layers of seething munitions, it wouldn’t be long before he ran out of either shields or luck.
‘Cox, get close to one of these bloody things!’ he shouted over the comlink, highlighting the arks with an IHD beacon. ‘It’s the only protection!’
‘Aye, sir,’ Cox replied, his voice clipped and strained by G.
Vondur pulled the Goliath around in a hard, tight turn and burned on full reheat for the nearest Imperial ark ship. Most of the massive vessels had landed on the outskirts of Cobalta, but a few had landed plum in the middle of the city. One was less than a kilometre away, the ground still glowing an incandescent yellow beneath it, and he latched on to it like a tick on a dog. Immediately, both the orbital and surface-based artillery died away.
He took stock for a few precious seconds. He was a few hundred metres off the ground, but the ship was much taller than that. It towered above and below him, tan-coloured, ribbed with pulsing turquoise lights. On the ground, thousands of kaygryn, no longer being massacred by his and Cox’s Goliaths, were free to resume their assault.
Vondur felt the Goliath’s gauntlets grip the composite hull of the lander in helpless frustration as hundreds of humans below were dragged from their homes and beaten to death. He would only make matters worse trying to interdict; if he flew down to help them in his giant bullet magnet, errant rail strikes would obliterate the UN citizens much more ruthlessly and efficiently than the kaygryn flooding in from Ok’Vura.
The channel to Colonel Drago from the 114th Cobalta Infantry Regiment was dead. He turned his enhanced optics—enhanced in name only—towards UNAF Cobalta, but the vast pillars of smoke emanating from within its scarred walls told only of bad news. The air, too, was conspicuously free of Manticores and other APCs and aircraft which lacked the speed and manoeuvrability of his own AMMRCV. A few palls of smoke like exploded flak hung in the warm evening air.
‘What do you think?’ he asked Cox. The comlink was straining against the electronic warfare saturation permeating the wideband.
‘I think we’re approaching a conclusion,’ Cox said wearily.
Vondur nodded absent-mindedly inside his pilot’s capsule. ‘Christ,’ he said eventually. More explosions and chaos ripped through Cobalta City. They would soon find themselves behind the kaygryn invasion, rather than at the vanguard.
A few desultory shots raked the ark lander around him from the ground. The kaygryn could see him, but there wasn’t a bloody thing anyone was willing to do about it.
‘Where did you end up?’ Vondur asked Cox.
‘One klick north of you,’ Cox replied. ‘I can see you.’
Vondur turned his optics north and searched for Cox among the clutter of electronic beacons lighting up his HUD. The sergeant was there, latched on to the side of another lander, higher up but plainly visible. He, like Vondur, was the only feature on the otherwise smooth hull of the ark. The distant Goliath raised an RRG’d gauntlet in salute.
Vondur licked his lips. His pulse rose a few BPMs. There was only one thing they could do, one course of action open to them. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I think we’re going to have to ditch the Goliaths and proceed on foot. The second we detach, we’re just game for orbit.’
‘Yeah,’ Cox grunted resignedly. ‘That’s the conclusion I reached too.’
‘I can’t raise ZEN at all. All comms to base seem to be down. Are you having any luck?’
‘No,’ Cox replied, ‘already tried. Bloody ZEN would be damn useful right about now.’
There was a pause. Vondur watched the chaos below, trying to work out a way he could exit the comfortable, force-shielded and diamond-armoured Goliath without being immediately killed. A few seconds later, he saw his opening: a group of UN men and women armed with pilfered railguns and a variety of melee weapons. Where they had taken the guns from, he didn’t know—but it didn’t matter. They were an armed mob, they were fighting back, and Vondur could make a material difference to their chances of success.
‘I’m bugging out,’ he said before he could talk himself out of it. ‘Head for my position and I’ll head for yours.’
‘Roger,’ Cox replied.
There was a second’s pause while a number of sentiments passed, unspoken, between them.
‘Good luck, Chester,’ Vondur said eventually.
‘Aye, and you, Ben,’ Cox replied.
Vondur forced back a crushing wave of desperation with a long stim release. Whatever it was that had taken root in his mind, whatever trauma lay inside, was slowly winning out. He felt as though his sanity was hanging by a few weak threads. He just had to keep it at bay a little longer. Cox was right; whatever was happening on Cobalta, in the Milky Way, it was rapidly reaching a head.
He released his grip on the side of the ark, leaving two ragged holes in its hull, and slid down the side of the ship. A quick burst of thrust from his plasmastats took the sting out of the landing, and before he could think about it too much, he punched the quick release. The Goliath’s chest thumped outwards, explosively decoupled, the capsule hissed open, and he snatched the emergency rail carbine from its slot.
Screaming chaos greeted him. The air above was thick with red-lit smoke, and the smell of ionised air, of ozone and chemical explosives—cordite, among others—filled his nose. The air was a chattering cacophony of gunfire and the buzz of phase. When there was a pause in the canvas of popping small arms, then human and alien screams and battle cries were quick to take up the slack.
The kaygryn had given his Goliath a wide berth, fearing it to be active, and that gave him a few precious, unthinking seconds to raise the carbine and put three of them down before he scurried for cover in a southbound alleyway, chased by gunfire that scoured the asphalt around his boots.
