Empire of the Fallen, page 39
‘Hey! The… Over there!’ A woman’s voice, her mouth jammed up with words from the combat high. ‘That machine… the soldier!’
Vondur couldn’t see who it was, but it must have been the impromptu militia he’d resolved to help. There was a loud exchange of gunfire—Vondur had forgotten just how ear-splitting it could be without the benefit of a metre of nanogel surrounding him—and a brief, tense interlude, before the thumping of footsteps turned into a disorganised mass of civilians standing in front of him. There were ten of them, only half of whom were armed. Some were visibly wounded. All of their pupils were stretched wide open by stims.
‘I’m Captain Ben Vondur,’ he said, standing. His flight suit, while bearing the rudiments of Mantix, lacked even a helmet speaker, and he had to remove the thing to be heard over the backdrop of world-ending violence. ‘I’m Captain Ben Vondur, 225 Squadron Goliaths,’ he said, feeling the warm, fire-driven breeze lick the perspiration from his face.
‘I’m Grol,’ the leader-apparent said, a burly man in a disagreeable Cobaltan accent. ‘Ex-UNAF. Cobalta Rifles,’ he added proudly. ‘What’s going on? What the fuck is that thing?’
Vondur didn’t need to follow the man’s finger. The ark was barely thirty metres away, looming over them like an enormous corporate HQ.
‘Some kind of Imperial kaygryn lander,’ Vondur said. ‘I honestly have no idea what it does.’
‘Where is the Fleet?’ a woman asked from behind Grol’s shoulder.
‘Destroyed,’ Vondur replied simply.
Consternation rippled through the impromptu militia.
‘There’s nothing?’ Grol demanded.
‘There’s nothing,’ Vondur echoed tiredly.
‘What the fuck do we do, then?’ a third person asked.
Vondur stopped himself shrugging. Too cavalier. These people were having their lives, their homes, their friends, their neighbours and families literally torn apart. Heavy stim usage must have been the only thing keeping them from breaking down. Vondur knew that that was certainly the case with him.
‘We last as long as we can,’ he said, trying to force some fire through his veins. ‘Most of the kaygryn you see are just from Ok’Vura, civilians, irregulars. They’ll die just as easily as anyone else. The Imperials have four arms and force shields. If we come across one of them, game over.’ Evidently, no-one needed a briefing on what he meant by ‘Imperials’.
‘And then? They killed my girls! My two girls!’ one of the men snapped, though with the odd, clinical detachment that only Fight and Flight could produce.
‘I don’t know,’ Vondur said, guilt coursing through him. ‘I don’t—’
He stopped. His comlink crackled, then it squawked, then it whined and whistled. Then a message, clearly on loop, began playing—and judging from the fact that its author was dead, it had been playing for some time: ‘This is Colonel Soto broadcasting on all UNAF and civilian ECA channels. The Imperial kaygryn leading the attack on Cobalta is Executor Ghesovius Hasani. He is a priority target. There is a standing kill order on him. If you have any opportunity to terminate him, take it. This is Colonel Soto broadcasting on all UNAF and civilian ECA channels. The—’
‘What?’
Vondur looked up. The comlink fuzzed for a few seconds, then died. His IHD confirmed the authenticity of the broadcast.
‘What?’ The same voice again.
‘Hasani,’ he said. The word hurt like a slap across the face. The author of his greatest misery. The one alien in the galaxy he would gladly kill above all others. He was here. Here on Cobalta. Vondur’s vision swam in and out of focus for a few seconds as the news sank vertiginously into his already strained mind.
‘What’s a Hasani?’ the gruff leader asked. The militia was growing restless. They were only one street removed from the tail end of a massacre. Combat-grade stims were making their trigger fingers itchy.
‘Executor Hasani is the leader of the Imperials,’ Vondur said distantly. ‘There is a kill order on him.’
Something exploded in the street next to them, making them all flinch. Above, some sort of foghorn blared from the ark lander, triggering Vondur’s UNAF-implant audio dampers but incapacitating the militia for the duration of it.
‘What do we do?!’ the women behind Grol yelled when the infernal noise had stopped.
‘I’m going to find him and kill him,’ Vondur said through gritted teeth. ‘Join me or don’t.’
But Grol couldn’t pretend to assert himself, ex-Rifles or not, over the authority of a serving member of UNAF. ‘We’ll come with you,’ he said.
Vondur nodded once and hefted the butt of his carbine into his shoulder. ‘All right, come on.’
They moved back the way they had come, Vondur at the head, Grol behind him. The woman with Grol was evidently his partner, judging by the way they interacted, and was comfortable holding a railgun. Vondur put two more with railguns at the back. Those in the middle were armed with melee weapons and would only be useful in diverting bullets away from those with guns.
Vondur peered round the corner and took stock of the street. His HUD detected nothing, though with the current levels of electronic warfare saturation, that didn’t mean much. He snatched his head back. ‘All right, stay focussed,’ he said. ‘It looks like they’ve moved west, but I can’t be sure without enhanced optics.’
Grol nodded and signalled to the rest of them.
Vondur moved into the street. It was wide, as most were in UN purpose-built colonies, but walled in on both sides by huge grey buildings. Most of the public advertising holos had died, and municipal transports—those that remained intact—were stationary on their maglev rails. The street was a field of corpses, smashed cruisers, chunks of rubble and craters. Fires, unhindered by dousing systems thanks to the loss of power, raged out of control, eating through modern building materials and emitting clouds of toxic black smoke.
They moved westwards, following the fading sounds of violence, trying to ignore the hundreds of smashed and bloodied corpses of humans lining the streets. Many lay as ragdolls, their faces purple and swollen, their clothes ripped off; others lay in heart-breaking poses where they had tried to protect loved ones. For every twenty humans, one unlucky kaygryn lay in the mix. A few bore the hallmarks of having been hit by Vondur’s own RRG—which was to say, there wasn’t much left of them at all.
‘Goddamn kags,’ Grol was muttering angrily over and over. Vondur remained silent. Hasani was all that mattered.
If only I had any idea where to find him.
‘Captain?’ crackled the comlink. Vondur’s head instinctively turned. It seemed like a slow, weak movement without the Goliath interface.
‘Cox,’ Vondur said, searching his IHD for a marker. ‘I can’t see you.’
‘I have a reading on you. You’re still a klick south of me,’ the staff sergeant said, his voice barely above a whisper. He paused. ‘Sir, there’s something going on over here.’
‘What?’
‘The Imperial lander, sir. It’s… it made a bloody loud noise. Now it looks like it’s opening.’
Vondur spun around, giving Grol a start. Sure enough, the nearest ark lander to them was opening too. Around the giant crab claws of the landing proboscises, huge hangar doors were yawning free of the superstructure.
‘Oh shit,’ he breathed. Imperial soldiers appeared at the top of the newly extended debarkation ramps. There was a collective intake of breath from the militia as slowly, inexorably, ranks of kaygryn, halberds and armour gleaming, began marching down to the ruined earth of Cobalta.
Vondur keyed in the wideband. ‘This is Captain Ben Vondur in the blind, UNAF 225 Squadron Goliaths, I have eyes on Imperial, that’s indigo ground troops on Cobalta… Thousands of them,’ he added, briefly awed by the unfolding scene. ‘Damn it, they’re in the landers!’ His breath rasped excitedly in his throat. He could think of nothing else to add, and so looped the transmission and kept it broadcasting.
‘Captain!’ Grol’s partner shouted. He looked at her. ‘What do we do?’
Vondur scowled. ‘Find Hasani,’ he said, repeating his new mantra, but then the air was filled with the rattling of gunfire and the keening of assault lasers, and suddenly finding Hasani seemed like the last thing they were about to do.
‘Get to cover!’ Vondur yelled as hard rounds spanged off the wall above and around them. One of the mob’s gunners went down, a fist-sized exit wound through his abdomen. Ahead, a few hundred metres away, a group of kaygryn were moving back east. A few were clutching old rifles that UNIS agents would have laughed at from orbit a few months ago.
‘There, in there!’ Vondur shouted, gesturing for the group to move down a road that ran perpendicular to the one they were on. Grol lingered, took a knee, and calmly fired. One of the kaygryn’s shins exploded, and it went down hard. Vondur lay down a covering burst—accidentally braining the kaygryn Grol had just wounded—and then slapped the Cobaltan on the shoulder. ‘Come on!’ he shouted.
Under a hail of fire, they followed the group on to the next street. Vondur’s hands were slick with sweat inside his pressure suit. He gripped the carbine tightly and scanned the area for any sign of kaygryn, but they turned up nothing except corpses and shattered, crumbling, burning buildings.
‘We lost Goldwater,’ someone was crying, evidently for the man who’d just had his stomach filleted by hard tungsten rounds.
‘Cox, where are you?’ Vondur asked, motioning for Grol to watch their rear. The man nodded irritably.
‘—o minutes away,’ Cox replied over the failing comlink. ‘That’s zero-two minutes. I’ve got a clear run south. Might have eyes on Hasani.’
Vondur’s heart threatened to explode at the mention of his name. ‘Where? When?!’ he transmitted, but the line had failed again. ‘Fuck!’ he snapped, and he slapped the nearest fighter on the back. ‘Let’s push north!’ he shouted angrily. ‘Make for the gap between those two buildings, past the theatre. Move!’
The man nodded dumbly and led the group away at a clumsy sprint. Vondur turned and brought the carbine up. The kaygryn who had killed Goldwater would be following them, and sure enough, in a brief and fortuitous electronics reprieve, three aliens showed up on his warm body scanner, approaching the street lackadaisically from the south-west. They must have been what in UNAF parlance were known as HAGs, Have-A-Gos, civilians like the ones Vondur was leading.
‘Three coming, end of this alley,’ he said. Three and then tens of thousands more from the east, he thought. Every second they lingered for an easy win was a second’s march closer for the Imperials streaming out of the arks.
The kaygryn appeared in the middle of the alley at the end, confirming Vondur’s opinion of them by not even taking cover. Grol and Vondur killed two straight away; the third made it a few metres back down the alley before a second burst from Gol blasted the back of its furry head open and threw a fistful of brain into the hot Cobaltan air. Vondur was loath to admit it, but the man was a considerably better shot than he was.
The sky was darkening now, a combination of evening twilight and thick palls of smoke. In the distance, another Fleet ship, no more than a black speck, tumbled to the surface. Vondur watched it in a daze. Any last vestige of UN control over the situation was gone.
‘Sir!’
Vondur span around. Cox was at the northern end of the street, alone. His pressure suit was smoking in a few places, and phase burn marked his right boot.
‘Cox!’ Vondur shouted. ‘Grol, come on,’ he said, and ran to the northern end of the street. He grabbed Cox into a quick embrace.
‘The other pilot we saw,’ Grol remarked as he closed the distance. He held out his hand. ‘Grol Hogan, formerly of the Cobalta Rifles.’
‘Good man,’ Cox growled, taking the man’s hand. ‘Staff Sergeant Chester Cox.’
‘What did you see?’ Vondur asked, desperate. ‘Did you see Hasani on the way here?’
‘Can’t tell ’em apart, but it might have been,’ Cox said. ‘One chap was wearing a cloak. Looked important. Matched the description you gave me.’
Vondur’s mind swam. By anyone’s standards it was lousy intelligence, but they were living on borrowed time. If every ark was disgorging thousands of Imperial troops, then they had minutes before they were surrounded. Ever since Hasani had left Vondur to die alone on Sophia, that cold, alien superiority written across its well-groomed features, Vondur had dreamed about killing him, dreamed what it would feel like to have revenge, to wrap his fingers around its thick tree-trunk neck and strangle the life out of him. It was enough to go on—for him.
‘I have to kill Hasani,’ Vondur said, suddenly on the verge of tears. He dumped more stims into his system until he was close to overdosing, and bit back the emotion until the feeling subsided. ‘I have to. If it’s the last damn thing I do.’
Cox nodded. He too had foregone his helmet, and his old features, drawn from years of combat and high-G vectoring, creased in understanding. ‘I know you do, lad. I’ll help in any way I can.’
Vondur turned to Grol.
‘I’ll help too,’ Grol offered, but Vondur shook his head.
‘You need to help your friends. You’re the only one with experience and they’ll last longer with you leading them. Hell, you’re better than me with that thing.’ He nodded at the railgun.
Grol shrugged nonchalantly, but he had been stung by the refusal. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said and slapped Vondur on the shoulder. ‘Good luck. If you find the kag you’re looking for, give him one for me,’ he said. Then he turned and headed north-east.
‘Come on,’ Vondur said to Cox. ‘We don’t have much time.’
In fact, they didn’t have any time. Cox’s expression suddenly contorted in shock, and Vondur knew that, behind him, the Imperials had arrived.
‘Go!’ was all he managed to shout. He didn’t want to turn back, to look and see the four-armed kaygryn with quad-powered laser halberds and charged blades and personal force shields marching towards them, but he did, and there they were, moving with an odd nonchalance that was total anathema to UNAF combat doctrine. There must have been two dozen approaching from the south, their armour light grey and trimmed with sky-blue markings, their faces impassive behind ballistic masks. They each held their halberds in their two right hands. They made no attempt to fire.
‘Run!’ Cox shouted, and they did, heading north. A tower to their left collapsed in the firestorm, shattering to the floor with an enormous clatter like the blackened skeleton of a giant. Overhead, the first Imperial aircraft began to appear, chunky insectoid craft that looked no better or more sophisticated than Manticores, draped with electronic warfare pods and ordnance pylons. They burbled with data chatter like ZENs as they passed, and Vondur once again tried to hail his own ZEN. The comlink remained defiantly silent.
They pressed on through Cobalta as it died, curiously unmolested. Any remaining civilians had either fled or been killed. Ok’Vuran kaygryn had swept west into the city. UNAF forces had been neutralised. The Fleet was gone. For an eerie minute, it seemed to Vondur that he and Cox were the last humans left in the city, alone with the gigantic ark landers.
‘Where next?’ Vondur snapped at Cox. Whatever he had felt about killing the kaygryn this morning, whatever remorse he had, whatever the sadness, the anguish, the psychotic distress, that had been relegated to the back of his mind, there to burn like an underground fire. They had rampaged through Cobalta and deliberately, brutally killed every human they could lay their hands on. They did not deserve his remorse. Iyadi, murdered by EFFECT agents, no longer deserved his guilt. It was anger, now, rage, white hot, that burned his heart like phase had burned the city. His sanity had been ripped apart like wet tissue paper by Hasani. The feeling of betrayal when Hasani had abandoned him to die, the feeling of helplessness as he had wept alone on Sophia for six months, the feeling of isolation, of being cut off from the net—that ran soul-deep. He fixated on it. Hasani was the key to his salvation. Closure. The death of this one alien would absolve him of a lifetime of guilt—ten lifetimes. He was so tired, tired of everything. Just one more death and it could all be over. Just one more…
By the time they rounded the corner on to North 5 Traverse, Vondur was practically incoherent. Cox had to physically drag him into what had once been a café to stop the captain running at a mass of Imperials moving methodically down the road. They had been seen by at least thirty kaygryn. Not a single shot had been fired.
‘Captain!’ Cox yelled, and slapped him smartly across the face. Vondur stopped babbling. They had taken cover—insofar as anywhere was cover—on the first floor. Vondur could feel the heat of a nearby fire through the floor and walls. The air was saturated with it. Perspiration ran in rivulets down his face.
‘They saw us and they didn’t fire,’ Cox said.
Vondur stared at him. He tried with all his power to hold himself together, for the sake of his colleague and friend. Despite Herculean efforts, he could feel his mind unhinging.
Hasani.
‘Hasani,’ he said, licking his lips feverishly. ‘I have to—’
‘They’ve seen us, lad,’ Cox said with infinite patience. ‘They’ve seen us and they’re not firing. I don’t know what’s going on, but now seems like a good time to jack it in. Game over, as you would say.’
Vondur felt his grasp on the situation slipping.
‘They killed August,’ he said.
‘No, the provar killed August,’ Cox said soothingly. ‘And Jarvin.’
‘And Elyan, and Syoba. And Vandemarr.’
Cox nodded sadly. ‘Aye,’ he said.
Vondur could hear the Imperials downstairs now, hear their boots crunching the shattered window glass. They talked to one another casually in Argish.
‘I can’t, Chester,’ he said. He thought of Iyadi again, and then of the Valleron pilot he had killed with his Goliath gauntlet. ‘I can’t… I’m losing it. The med techs were right. Kowalski was right.’
