Empire of the Fallen, page 40
Cox nodded despite not having the first clue who Kowalski was. His features wore the pained expression of someone watching their parent succumb to dementia. ‘You need the psych techs to give you a good working over. Nothing they can’t cure these days. Just hang in there, lad. You’ve been through so much. Time to give up the ghost. Rest.’
He whispered the last word. Vondur closed his eyes. When he opened them again, a minute or so must have passed, for the Imperials were there, their halberds humming softly with the charged blades. Neither made any kind of threatening move, though Cox still placed his and Vondur’s carbines on the deck and raised his hands.
The kaygryn seemed to ignore them for a moment. Then one activated a wrist-mounted holo and held his arm out. Cox watched the screen.
‘You are now prisoners. It is not our desire that every human is killed. Our quarrel is with the provar. You must not fight any more. Submit to the Reclamation and your lives will be spared. If you do not fight, you will be treated well. You are now prisoners. It is not our desire—’
The foremost kaygryn cancelled the holo.
‘It’s over, lad,’ Cox said, wrapping his arm around Vondur’s shoulders. ‘Come on. It’s over. Let’s go.’
But Vondur just looked at him blankly.
*
Five kilometres to the north, on the firing shelf of UNAF Cobalta’s southern perimeter wall, ZEN calmly loaded a magazine of long-range API-85 incendiary airburst rounds into its LR701 long-barrelled railgun. Either side of it, Mantix-clad corpses of UNAF soldiers lay three deep, twisted and mangled by all manner of ordnance and charged blades. Behind it, the base, little more than a series of craters and burning piles of rubble, smoked like factory towers in the warm evening breeze.
The fighting had largely died away. The Imperials and Ok’Vuran kaygryn had moved south and east into the city to round up all the remaining human civilians. Because ZEN did not emit a warm body signal, it had been overlooked. ZEN did not think that the Imperials used VIs, which accounted for the oversight, but ZEN also did not like conjecture and did not dwell on the thought.
ZEN brought the railgun up and rested it on the lip of the firing shelf. There was no sight; ZEN instead had synced with the railgun’s sensor suite. There was no drone or orbital cover to assist, but that did not matter. ZEN pilfered what data it needed from the remnants of the human net. Despite the electronic warfare saturation, there was enough information there to give it what it needed. As for data on the target, ZEN had acquired it first-hand on NV-[Tier-One/Non-Sentient]-1509a/UN010: ‘Sophia’. The data files appended to Colonel Soto’s final looped transmission ranked a poor second against its own primary source.
It took a few minutes to locate the target. It was three kilometres away, moving at speed to the south-west. It had been marked as a probable by twenty-three different UNAF personnel in the last few hours. The height, weight and appearance of the target tallied with everything ZEN had seen first-hand.
ZEN lined up the rifle to take into account the spin of Cobalta, the speed and trajectory of the vehicle, the temperature of the air, the air density, pressure, wind, and a hundred other things which only ZEN could do at this range and with this weapon. The long barrel of the 701, lined with more and more powerful electromagnets than the SIR, had an effective range of ten klicks in its hands—against perhaps six or seven in those of a human.
ZEN did not let out a breath because it did not breathe. Instead, it ordered the trigger unlocked and pulled it back. There was no pressure, no force to overcome in the pulling which might knock the barrel off target at the very last second. It was an anticlimactic connection of electrodes which sent the API-85 down range in a squeal-bang of the sound barrier being obliterated.
The bullet was in the air for four seconds, more than enough time for the troop transport to bank or climb. But it was on a straight-line vector, the most dangerous form of movement in modern warfare that every Tier Three combat doctrine warned against. Well, the target was not Tier Three, but the best lesson was the one hard learned. ZEN recalled Captain Vondur having said that after New Carthage, but hadn’t truly appreciated the Terran aphorism until that moment.
It watched as the round struck the cockpit window of the aircraft and fragmented. Almost all of the round shattered on impact, but it was the payload—a viscous pink gel that burned hotter than thermite plasma—that mattered. A few drops, travelling well under the velocity required to activate Hasani’s personal force shields, latched on to the kaygryn’s fur, and ignited.
ZEN had often mused on the death of organic beings. When a ZEN was terminated while online, its consciousness simply returned to the net to be reused, its death another lesson in the networked recursive self-improvement loop that made ZENs the hive-minded killing machines that they were. With organics, it was different. Mindstates could be preserved, but ZEN was given to understand that this was both rare of itself, and that the states were simply a copy, a template, rather than the original.
Nonetheless, ZEN was well-acquainted with the nuances of revenge, and took some satisfaction in watching Executor Ghesovius Hasani immolate in a three-thousand-degree furnace that, incidentally, brought down the craft he was on.
‘Rest easy, Captain,’ ZEN allowed itself to say aloud, an uncharacteristic piece of learned human nostalgia that seemed appropriate in the circumstances.
Then it left the rifle where it was, climbed down off the firing shelf, and started walking.
DESPERATE MEASURES
‘The life of one human is worth two zhahassi, five provar, and a thousand kaygryn.’
Special Envoy Suresha Edmao, formerly UN Commissioner for Refugees
Smith pounded the console in front of him. ‘Shit!’ he snapped, running two hands through his damp hair. His face, illuminated red by the light in the Last Chance Saloon’s operations centre, glistened with perspiration.
‘She has an IHD,’ Seka was saying from the pilot’s sync capsule. ‘Even if they torture her, she won’t feel anything. She can hold out indefinitely and not tell them anything.’
‘We are not sitting up here while they pull her apart,’ Smith snapped. ‘Even if it is painless, we need her.’ He turned to Rutai. He had some difficult decisions to make, and he had to make them quickly. ‘Get ready to move out,’ he said in Argish. He probably could be quieter and quicker alone, but in these situations it was always better to have a second gun.
‘Ash,’ the kaygryn responded.
‘And how exactly do you propose to do this?’ Seka asked, scornful. ‘It’s Yano you should be focussing on. They’re taking him to meet the Emperor for Christ’s sake. You need to be there for him, to back him up.’
Smith gritted his teeth. ‘Yano is not in immediate danger. Lyra is. Leith, for God’s sake, don’t fuck this up. We are here for humanity, not to save your relationship.’
‘It’s—that’s not even what I’m talking about,’ Seka snapped.
‘Get the plane ready for ROI,’ Smith retorted, ignoring her affront. ‘We’re bugging out in two minutes.’
He didn’t wait for a response, though he received a few. Instead, he moved through into the hold. He was already clad in his Mantix and required little surplus equipment beyond what he kept in clamps at arm’s length. The only locker he opened was at the back of the hold.
A suite of planet-ending weaponry greeted him, a rack of man-portable bombs which could be carried on an exoskeleton, planted on the surface of a world, and detonated remotely from orbit. When they had planned for the mission with VIs and SPECWAR strategists, over half of the scenarios run had ended with Smith deploying one of the weapons. Even then, he hadn’t been able to see himself actually using one, in spite of the existence of the human race hanging in the balance. Destroying a perfectly habitable world full of civilians was so utterly offensive to the laws of human nature that it simply seemed impossible.
He was surprised, then, when he found that he had no compunction whatsoever in lifting one of the cereal-box-sized bombs from the rack—a Feedback-Cascade Tectonic Destabiliser—and slotting it into one of the Mantix plugs on his exoskeleton. For many involved with the Last Chance Saloon mission, both provar and human, destroying Myaxomon had been the starting point of their calculations, rather than the end. Yano had seen it differently, the Xeno Division habits in him dying hard. Much better, he had insisted, to enact a sea-change in kaygryn thinking that will last rather than give them a reason to hate the human race even more. Langdon Keita had agreed. Smith had, too.
Now, he did not.
‘Leith, how are we looking?’ he asked.
‘Ready in thirty seconds,’ Seka replied, her voice tight with anger.
Smith cursed himself. He should have listened to Pitt’s last-minute misgivings and told her to fuck off. She was an unknown quantity right now. Her piloting skills were not enough to compensate for her dangerous love for Yano.
Too late. Far too late to be thinking about it. The mission is all that matters.
‘Rutai?’
‘Ready,’ the kaygryn replied, appearing in the hatchway. The kaygryn was wearing a full SPECWAR Mantix rig, tailored for his body. A Fleet-issue shotgun and an SIR were loaded into his back racks. A distasteful number of grenades were secreted about his rig.
‘All right,’ Smith said. He had been tracking Lyra’s whereabouts constantly in the minute it had taken them to prepare. She had been moved into an underground location, some kind of rudimentary, low-tech jail. Her resonance mapping was providing a three-dimensional picture of the area. He could hear her breathing over the comlink, and the guards’ and han’Kanar’s growled conversation in Old Argish. From her telemetry, she was frightened but keeping it in check. She was trusting them to rescue her.
And we won’t disappoint, Smith thought.
He and Rutai moved through the cramped accessway and into the space plane, and sealed themselves into two of the VR sync capsules inside.
‘Where do you want it?’ Seka asked over the comlink.
Smith studied a map of the Imperial complex below. Even with full refraction shielding, they were going to have great difficulty in reaching Lyra without being seen.
‘Here,’ he said, sending Seka a marker.
‘You’re the boss,’ she replied, and the space plane disengaged from the Last Chance Saloon and made full speed for the surface.
‘We’re coming for you, Lyra,’ Smith said over the comlink. ‘We’re coming.’
*
Yano was only vaguely following the conversation over the comlink as Kolvaar led him through the labyrinthine Imperial complex. Instead, he was far more focussed on his impending meeting with the Emperor of the Kaygryn.
How has it come to this? he thought desperately as Kolvaar took him through corridor after corridor of huge, vaulted stone, each more crammed than the last with Imperial paraphernalia seized from hundreds of planets across Andromeda. He was trying to replay the conversation that had just taken place, trying to understand the power politics at play, trying to utilise his Xeno Division training—the unique selling point which made him such a good fit for the mission in the first place—to decipher their mannerisms and how the complex alien relationships all slotted together. Instead, all he could do was swallow hard and try not to let his internal panic overwhelm him. He was a diplomat, not a spy or a bloody messiah.
‘What does the Emperor want with me?’ Yano asked eventually. It would have been foolish to trust Kolvaar, since the kaygryn was doubtless as self-serving as the other two, but he was in the market for a little reassurance nonetheless.
‘Do not delay, Highness,’ Kolvaar said, now slightly out of breath, ignoring the question. ‘The Emperor must not be kept waiting.’
‘I don’t know what I can say to him—’
‘Only what you have told us, Highness,’ Kolvaar said. ‘The Emperor has always been a religious man, and rightly so, but in recent years, his faith has waned. The return of our holiest prophet will convince him to return to the vanash-shen’ah. He has already received the augury from the Prognosticators. Once he has seen you and heard your holy words, he will recognise the importance of the Conclave Ascendant and the holy work we do. We will reclaim our place as the senior Conclave.’
So, he was a pawn after all. Yano followed, helpless and mute. Events had spiralled out of control much more quickly than any of them had dared to predict during the mission planning phase. How could they have not known that this was vos’Shan’s body?! Such a basic damned error!
Kolvaar took him into a huge white marble hallway that was filled with enormous, wide staircases. Here, armed kaygryn from the soldier caste waited in the wings, clad in elaborate ceremonial dress and armed with undoubtedly real laser halberds. Most wore ballistic masks, but those that didn’t watched him with a dull impassivity as Kolvaar led him up one of the staircases, his honorifics and badges of office tinkling with each step. Bright sunlight slanted through massive windows that gave breathtaking views of the Imperial city, and a breeze wove through the open space, tugging at the fabric of weighted pennants hanging from the walls.
‘This way, Highness,’ he said, and they turned right up another flight. There was no bannister, and by the time they had reached the top flight of stairs, they were easily a hundred metres from the marble floor below. Yano swallowed. Although he had no idea where they were, it was clear from the vertiginous views that they were nearing the throne room itself.
It didn’t take long for this assumption to be proved correct. At the top of the stairs was a short hallway, easily thirty metres from floor to ceiling, held aloft by pillars carved into Atlas-like kaygryn.
‘Do I need to speak or act in a particular way?’ Yano asked. His mouth was doing that peculiar imitation of human dread again.
Kolvaar turned only very briefly. Was it Yano’s imagination or did he wear a wry smile?
‘Of course. Court etiquette has changed over the course of the long centuries since you last met the Emperor.’
Yano felt his stomach drop as if he’d just walked off the side of one of those ludicrously unprotected staircases. Of course. vos’Shan was the brilliant scientist-philosopher who had discovered the routes across the Khāli Barrier—or rather, the Anohat. Of course he would have met the Emperor of the time.
Kolvaar didn’t twist the knife. ‘Simply bow when you enter. That will suffice. His Majesty will not expect you to recall the interminable nuances of court.’
Yano nodded, filled with a deep dread that even his most stressful days within Xeno Division could not live up to.
Kolvaar nodded once and rapped sharply on the massive doors in front of them.
*
The space plane steamed through the atmosphere of Myaxomon with reckless, skull-rattling speed. Even with their state-of-the-art refraction shielding on full power, the less time they could spend on-world, the better. In, extract, out, run.
‘One minute,’ Seka’s voice sounded over the comlink. Smith was watching the ground race up towards them, at first a hazy sprawl of grey and white, then a distant latticework of roads and tower blocks, and now a massive metropolis chock-full of what his schoolteachers in the Duchy would have called ‘classical architecture’. The place could have been some kind of Greek or Roman city, dialled up to eleven. It was the thousand-metre-tall skyscrapers and sky docks that gave the lie to it.
He was running some seriously powerful combat programs and stims now. The old SPECWAR favourite was Granite, for razor-edged operational acuity, but he always ran Fight and Flight to bottle up any emotional reflexes too. Lyra’s recovery was the mission, and that decision had been made. There was no need to get angry about it now.
‘Thirty seconds,’ Seka said.
Smith kept an eye on Yano. They had taken him to the highest point of the Imperial Palace, into the throne room itself. Not bad for three days’ work, he thought to himself.
‘Anything, Seka?’ Smith asked.
‘Nothing yet,’ she replied.
As a matter of good practice, he too had been scanning all the comms channels and tracking frequencies, looking to see if they had been spotted or traced. So far, their refraction shielding seemed to be holding true.
The space plane banked violently and levelled off, before they began to jink rapidly between the towers and airborne traffic ahead. Their destination was the bottom of the northern slope of the Imperial Palace, where a sewage outfall fed into a subterranean robotic treatment facility. It was a plan as old as siege warfare, heading up the drains and into the heart of the fortress—but as with all operations, the simpler it was, the better.
‘Prepare for debarkation,’ Seka said.
Smith punched his way free of the VR sync capsule and stepped into the hold, using the grab hoops and the power of his exoskeleton to move against the G-forces being exerted on the space plane’s airframe. Rutai joined him a short while later, nothing more than a blur against the hold and a green outline on Smith’s HUD thanks to his refraction shielding. Their debarkation window was vanishingly short; once the ramp opened, the fidelity of the ship’s structure was broken and the refraction shielding would fail for valuable seconds. Then they would be visible to all and sundry.
‘Greenlight,’ Seka said.
The ramp opened a crack and was already closing again as Smith and Rutai jumped free. The space plane winked in and out of existence. Seka pulled away.
‘Nothing on comms,’ she said, her voice tight with anticipation.
Smith and Rutai were travelling too fast for rapid deployment harnesses; now it was ‘GG’, green goo, a quick-dissipating cushion of nanogel that would stop them from splattering against the ground. Smith fired his GG shell and thumped into the gel in a textbook manoeuvre, but Rutai fired his too late and penetrated the gel all the way through to the ground below. He grunted in shock as his shoulder speared into the hard earth, but his Mantix took the impact where the gel couldn’t, saving him from a shattered clavicle.
