Empire of the Fallen, page 41
They both stood, gel evaporating around them to be snatched away by the wind. They had landed on a wide patch of disused scrubland between a large artificial lake, similar in design to the ones they had seen on Kurwen, and the north slope of the Imperial Palace—very much the ‘back’ of the structure. Landing in the middle of Myaxomon was the highest risk they could have taken, but as far as prying eyes went, this was both the closest to Lyra and the least overlooked part of the city.
Smith wasted no time. He snatched his APR out of its cradle and sprinted to the small outlet tastefully nestled within a five-metre wall of mossy boulders. Rutai was hot on his heels, moving with a slight limp thanks to the mangled landing, but without a word of complaint. A few combat-grade stims and some painkillers would put paid to it quickly enough.
They reached the hatch. Smith handed the APR to Rutai and yanked it off with nothing more than his exo-powered gauntlets. His Mantix scanners picked out nothing in the metalled accessway beyond: no warm bodies, no security systems, nothing but the clanking of distant machinery and the dripping of sewage sweat off the walls. Their path was already mapped out, but he plucked a small reconnaissance drone from his webbing and tossed it down the shaft anyway. A better, higher-definition map of the sewage works populated his vision.
‘They’ve started,’ Lyra said, her voice strained with fear. It was so out of the blue, so unexpected, that Smith actually stopped for a second. Rutai slapped him on the shoulder pad.
‘Quickly,’ he said in Argish.
Smith nodded and ran ahead, his footfalls clanking loudly against the metal grilling—though the noise was confined to the full audio-damper envelope being projected by his exoskeleton rig. They moved across the catwalks and suspended gantries at speed, Mantix rebreathers filtering out the smell of kaygryn sewage. Ahead was a pumping station, fully automated, and Smith was about to charge straight through it, but now their reconnaissance drone was picking up warm bodies and security systems, and he had to bring himself up short.
‘Shit, you see that?’ Smith asked Rutai, indicating the crimson warning markers appearing on both his and the kaygryn’s HUDs.
‘Ash,’ Rutai replied.
They were both refraction-shielded as well as audio damped, but neither systems were infallible—particularly to scrutinising electronic warfare pods with invasive scanning capability. Smith paused, studying the schematics. His Mantix wasn’t picking up any weapons signatures, just two warm bodies. He slotted his rifle into its exoskeleton mount and took out a large combat knife from its chest sheath. He motioned for Rutai to do the same.
They advanced, Smith first, knife outstretched. Ahead, two large white processing tanks loomed in the darkness, striped with lines of Argish. The gantry was vibrating now, to the tune of the clanking, thumping machinery below. The sound of water rushing through the network of surrounding pipes provided a convenient blanket of white noise.
Smith rounded the corner of the rightmost tank. Two kaygryn, no, two other aliens, slaves in workman’s overalls, were conversing over a holo console. Neither looked up or gave any indication that they had noticed the vaguely perceptible shimmer of refraction-shielded Mantix.
‘Stand down,’ Smith whispered in Argish, replacing the knife into its sheath. The security systems, too, turned out to be nothing more than a pair of blister-sized cameras mounted on the walls, nowhere near sophisticated enough to detect them. He silently cursed himself. They were wasting time.
‘Come on,’ he said into the secure comlink, and they moved towards the upper floor of the pumping station.
*
‘I present His Most Excellent and Divine Majesty, Emperor vun’Daal XI,’ Kolvaar said as the throne room doors had finished lumbering open, pulled by the armoured hands of two Imperial guards.
Yano stopped dead in his tracks. It was breathtaking. A gigantic, vaulted hall loomed over them, impossibly tall, more akin to a cathedral than anything else. More enormous white pillars, carved into sentinel-like kaygryn, held the ornate support pillars which in turn held the ceiling aloft. Brilliant sunlight slanted into the room, and a warm breeze wafted through the hall through the southern wall, which wasn’t a wall at all but rather a transparent force shield that allowed him an unparalleled view of the Imperial city of Myaxomon.
‘You must be our lord and saviour,’ said a gravelly voice from above. Yano looked to his left, to the ten-metre white pyramid that formed the base of the throne, draped in sky-blue flags and pennants. At the top was the source of the voice, the Emperor himself, bedecked in all the gaudy trappings of state. At the base of the pyramid stood a pair of Imperial guards clad in ceremonial armour, their laser halberds humming quietly with potential energy. The rest of the room was empty, but Yano suspected that on a given day, it would be crowded with courtiers.
Despite knowing what he knew, and the true purpose of his presence, Yano found it difficult not to prostrate himself in front of the head of the Empire. No matter what he thought of the kaygryn standing there, there was no denying that he exuded raw power, as if he was a god to be worshipped.
The Emperor walked down the steps slowly and carefully. Yano studied him like a warrior studying his opponent. His once lush, golden fur had gone to grey almost everywhere, and where bare skin showed, it was leathery and crinkled. The Emperor’s lower arms were supported by stiff cloth sleeves, and his bearing told of a regal but decaying alien. Yano was put instantly in mind of Richard Aurelius.
‘I am Anmet vos’Shan,’ Yano said for want of anything else to say, bowing low. There was nothing but silence in his ears now. Smith had blocked him from the operational circuit to stop him from being distracted. He really hoped they reached Lyra in time—though quite what would happen after they did, especially to him, he did not know.
‘I know,’ vun’Daal said tiredly. ‘I have heard it from many mouths now.’
Yano stood quietly, deciding it was best to let the Emperor ask the questions. vun’Daal studied him carefully. For a long time, there was silence between them. Eventually, the Emperor said, ‘What brings you to us?’
Yano almost shrugged. ‘It is difficult to put into words, Your Majesty,’ he said, a little uncomfortably. ‘I don’t recall the process of arriving. All I remember is a long period of blackness, of nothing, and then being in the forests on Kurwen. My memory has quite abandoned me. I’m not sure it will return,’ he added, covering his back against further attempts to divine the circumstances of his resurrection.
The Emperor said nothing. There was nothing to be discerned from his features, either. Instead, he clasped his top hands behind his back and walked deliberately to the massive force shield at the end of the throne room. He squinted slightly as he took in the huge metropolis and the massive sky ports. It was only here, at this exact location in the city, that Yano could see that the artificial lakes below formed a complex pattern of symbols. He hoped that they weren’t meant to mean something to him. Even the most prevalent and ancient of Imperial symbols would be meaningless. His position was utterly precarious, ready to dissolve at the mildest scrutiny. There was only so long he could go on trading on this resurrection nonsense.
‘Your arrival is somewhat providential, Anmet,’ the Emperor said, not taking his eyes from the city. ‘The Fleet of Reclamation has departed. The College predicted your return. If I didn’t know better, I would have said that Oniser Kolvaar had orchestrated the whole thing.’
From behind them, Kolvaar laughed. The Emperor did not. ‘My Conclaves are at each other’s throats,’ the Emperor rumbled on. ‘The Militant has set forth to reclaim our birth right. The Will tries to impose the resolve of the gormana on me, as if they know what is best for the Empire. And the Ascendant—they bring me you, a holy prophet, returned to us on the eve of the greatest moment in the history of the Empire.’
Yano felt distinctly uncomfortable. From the way Kolvaar had brought him here, he had expected a slightly mad, geriatric king, swayed by his warring chief advisors and running out the clock on the reins of power. Instead, he was faced with a savvy, bitter old alien who did not seem the least bit impressed with Yano’s story.
‘Your Majesty, I sense you are disappointed to—’
vun’Daal held up a hand, and Yano lapsed to silence. His heart was thumping so hard that someone with the inclination and patience would probably be able to hear the snapping, squelching valves.
‘Do you know how long the provar have been attacking us?’ the Emperor asked. He didn’t take his eyes from the horizon.
‘Centuries, Majesty,’ Yano said, judging by the gravity on Myaxomon that their years were at least vaguely close to the Old Earth Standard.
vun’Daal closed his eyes, as if remembering a painful personal memory. ‘Centuries,’ he agreed. ‘Centuries of warfare. The provar, the Cursed Ones, once our brothers and allies, have been trying and failing to wipe us out for centuries. Through sheer bloody-minded stubbornness, they send what they call crusade fleets—as if they were the righteous!—to our borders, to kill our people, to destroy our Empire. They are savages. Do you understand?’
Yano nodded, biting his tongue at the Kaygryn Empire’s evident catalogue of failures in the arenas of basic human rights—or kaygryn rights—intragalactic slavery, intergalactic state-sponsored terrorism, and running a theocratic police state. A larger part of him was worried why the Emperor was telling him this. Surely there was no need?
‘For centuries, the provar have claimed the ancient and holy right of vanash-shen. They proclaim themselves righteous and attack us without provocation. They have co-opted our texts and legends for their own ends. And now’—his eyes twinkled briefly with triumph—‘now they will see what true Ascendancy looks like.’
Yano cleared his throat. ‘What of the other races of that galaxy?’ he asked. Adrenaline coursed through his system. He was terrified of being found out, but really, who would make the leap? Who would think of him as anything other than kaygryn?
The Emperor smiled thinly. ‘The Terrans, you mean?’
Yano’s words caught in his throat. He simply nodded.
The smile turned into a leer. ‘We have plans for them.’
*
Smith’s Mantix boots pounded the floor. It took a great strength of will to trust in the audio damper fields and not tiptoe his way through the lower vaults and hallways of the Imperial Palace.
They were clear of the sewage works. It had taken only a few minutes to move through the otherwise abandoned robotic facility and circumvent its rudimentary security. Now they powered through the palace complex’s subterranean levels, railguns up, constantly honing in on Lyra’s tracker. The kaygryn who had taken her, han’Kanar, was holding her in what any Tier Three operative would recognise as a prison: thick stone walls, thick walls of polarisable glass, a closed-circuit security system. Drone recon scans were picking out a few warm bodies and some interesting security systems, but this was not a high-security storage facility—the UN equivalent of prison, where people served their time unconscious and woke up twenty years older; this was a basic gaol, and one where such systems could easily be overcome.
‘We’re coming, Lyra, just a few minutes more. Hold on,’ he said into the comlink, his guts grinding with adrenaline. There was no feeling quite like the aggressive helplessness of not being able to help a captive comrade.
There was no transmission in response, though Smith could see from her telemetry that she was alive, and relatively calm. That was good; she was using her IHD to hold back the pain. She would be using her UNIS training, too, to compartmentalise and rationalise, to take herself into a semi-trance-like state where she could meditate and block out her surroundings. She knew from ghastly experience that her body could be repaired. It was her consciousness that needed preserving.
Smith took them through a corridor that was far removed from the extravagant ornamentation of the upper levels, ducked right, passed a pair of slaves who saw nothing except a shimmer, heard nothing except the memory of distant footsteps, and felt nothing except a light breeze, and reached a secure door at the end of the hall guarded by a solitary grey-skinned slave, the same kind that they had seen on Kurwen.
It took Smith a moment to realise that it was a provar.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, drinking in the stunted, dishevelled alien. He’d never seen anything like it. It was a shadow of a provar, an evolutionary offshoot like—
Like the kaygryn in the Milky Way.
Without pause, he slipped his combat knife from its sheath and plugged it into the alien’s chest. A look of surprised terror briefly crossed its face, before Smith gave the knife a twist and withdrew it, satisfied that its special coagulatory properties had sealed the exterior wound but left the heart rigorously pumping the guard’s lifeblood into his thoracic cavity. He gently lowered the provar to the floor while Rutai opened a nearby side door. The space beyond contained nothing more than supplies, and Smith easily manhandled the corpse behind a stack of crates.
‘Quickly,’ Rutai said.
I know, goddamn it, Smith thought, turning to the gaol entrance door. His SPECWAR codebreakers tore through the kaygryn security system, ignoring the Argish characters and going for the source code. Numbers were still numbers, after all, whether you were a human or an Imperial kaygryn. In seconds, the software had neutralised the door’s alarms.
‘They have charged blades and personal force shields,’ Smith said as he chucked another small recon drone down the metalled staircase yawning away from them. Once again, a better schematic of the space ahead populated his HUD. He scanned it as he spoke. One of the benefits of Granite was it allowed for enhanced cerebral multitasking. ‘We’ll have to get close. Most I’ve seen don’t use CEA, so go for the neck or head. Understood?’
‘What is a CEA?’ Rutai asked.
‘Closed Environment Armo—they don’t wear helmets,’ Smith said, interrupting himself impatiently.
‘Understood,’ the kaygryn said.
‘Let’s go,’ Smith said once the warm body count was revealed. If he’d been scanning for Mantix-clad soldiers, he’d have picked up nothing, but the Imperial kaygryn armour seemed to bleed heat. Currently, he could distinguish five Imperial kaygryn, three of whom were in one room and two were standing outside it. The rest of the occupants of the gaol were neither kaygryn nor numerous.
They took the steps quickly and silently. At the bottom, the gaol opened up into a circular space, with each cell facing into the centre. Cameras studded the ceiling above. At the end was a single door with markings in Argish on it. Two kaygryn guards were standing outside, dressed in what looked to be largely ceremonial armour.
‘It says interrogation,’ Rutai said, translating the Argish on the door.
‘Not for much longer,’ Smith growled, moving at speed down the final flight of stairs and into the well-lit centre section.
The guards didn’t stand a chance. Smith knew he and Rutai had been detected: the way the guards traced their refraction shimmer, the way they moved uneasily in their final living moments, the way one brought his halberd across his body. But it was nowhere near enough. Perhaps if they’d had air-pressure sensors and better reactions they would have avoided being decapitated by large combat knives, but they hadn’t, and they didn’t.
Smith slammed the knife into its sheath once more as the corpses slid to the ground, guttering blood, and he yanked a small brick of breaching charge from one of his webbing pockets. The dough-like high explosive also doubled as an electronic warfare scrambler and a neural stunner, a one-stop shop for dynamic entry. A brief scan of the door told him the ideal placement, and he pressed the explosive on and primed it via his IHD.
‘Ready?’ Smith asked. The reconnaissance drone hovered just above them like a fly, unable to penetrate the security door.
‘Ash,’ Rutai replied, standing back, his railgun up.
Smith triggered the explosive. There was a huge bang muted by his audio dampers, a blinding flash filtered by his Mantix visor, an electronic warfare pulse neutralised by his integrated Mantix/IHD VI core, and a neural stun wave that didn’t penetrate his helmet.
He moved rapidly into the interrogation cell and saw immediately that Lyra’s telemetry had been all wrong.
‘Oh my God,’ he said.
*
Yano stood mute as Kolvaar walked up to the Emperor and whispered a few words into his ear. He was still trying to work out what the Emperor had meant by having ‘plans’ for the UN when the old kaygryn turned his attention back to him. Kolvaar retreated to a respectful distance.
‘The priest on Kurwen told us that you bled clear blood,’ the Emperor said. It was not a question. ‘Why do you think that is?’
Yano felt the familiar hands of panic closing around his throat. What had Kolvaar said to him? Had Lyra talked, broken under torture? Had she been killed? Had Smith rescued her, and was the whole palace about to go into lockdown?
‘I don’t know, Majesty,’ he said, screening his emotions behind a façade of serene calm. Thanks to his Xeno Division training, it was a relatively easy trick.
‘There is much you do not know,’ the Emperor snapped. Yano’s surprise must have been obvious, because the Emperor sneered again. ‘Tell me, vos’Shan, you do not remember the circumstances of your resurrection. Perhaps that is to be expected, and I do not know the processes well enough to comment. But you must remember your childhood? Your upbringing? The commune you lived in, the presidence you reported to, your skarls, your priests, your work on the astrography around the Anohat?’
It took all of Yano’s worldly effort not to run away at that point, to simply bolt for the force shield and hurl himself off the palace. They knew. Lyra had cracked and they knew everything. It had all been such a stupid idea, such a ridiculous plan.
