Empire of the Fallen, page 42
‘I don’t…’
‘You don’t remember?’ the Emperor said sharply. ‘You know the provar, the Provari Ascendancy, as they insist on calling themselves?’
Yano nodded dumbly. His heart felt as though it were about to explode.
‘You know the problem with them? They are stupid. Dumb. Their arrogance has blinded them. They throw thousands of soldiers at us from across the Anohat every year. They are all killed almost immediately. We barely garrison it any more. Our star forts monitor their crusade fleets and map every conceivable exit trajectory. We are waiting for them and every time they are obliterated. They have not learned from centuries of doing this, of throwing meat into the grinder.
‘We also know about the humans, however. The “United Nations”, as they like to be known. We have hundreds of agents on kaygryn worlds, listening, watching, reporting back to us. We know about their machinations, their guile and their cunning. We know how they have treated the kaygryn in that galaxy, how they have allowed them to be downtrodden and massacred. They meddle and legislate and pretend to help, and all the while the original claimants of that galaxy, of our birthright, have been reduced to husks, to wretched ghouls.
‘And, of course, we have always known about the kaygryn in the Zecadach. We have always known that the provar rely on them, on their minds, to navigate the barrier. They have tried for a thousand years to replicate the astrography, but they are simply not intelligent enough for it. How long, we asked ourselves, would it take for someone to use one of those kaygryn? How long before we saw a preserved corpse walking our streets, talking a dialect of Old Argish that no-one has spoken for five centuries?’
The Emperor looked Yano dead in the eye. ‘How long would it be before we saw an attempt at incursion, by an agent with the mind of a human but the body of a kaygryn? With blood that was little more than enhanced preservative fluid? How long, Anmet vos’Shan?’
*
Lyra was very much dead. Her head, down the base of her ribcage, was intact; the rest of her was gone. Excavated. Evaporated.
The smell of burning flesh and death filled the air. What looked like an IHD damper encircled Lyra’s kaygryn temples, preventing her from committing suicide. Her death would have been exquisitely painful. She’d had no way of communicating with them. A console holo, generating false telemetry, hummed quietly in the corner.
Smith felt the hard edge of Granite slip slightly as he drank in the horror of the scene, the ghastly medievality of it. His movements were fluid but disconnected and distant. His railgun was firing—when had he pulled the trigger?—and smoke filled the interrogation room. Lasers, emanating from the quad-powered prisms of the torturers’ halberds, sliced and buzzed through the air.
han’Kanar stood, ready for them, a grin of triumph on his face. He had known. They’d all known. It was a trap.
‘Seka, get Yano out and run!’ he roared on the comlink as laser beams carved into his Mantix exoskeleton. The refraction shielding failed. His visor exploded with crimson warning graphics. Rutai was screaming; his own telemetry was nosediving as blood was siphoned away from his vital organs by torn arteries.
The air was filled with the roar of close-range railguns, but the kaygryn had personal force shielding. The rounds bounced off them harmlessly like rain off an umbrella.
‘Yano, it’s a trap, get out!’ Smith shouted into the wideband, reinducting the Exigency Corps agent into the operational bandwidth. There was no response. No time.
Rutai was dead, killed by the lasers. It was a quick, clean and painless death, better than anything Lyra would have received. He hoped she’d killed herself before they strapped the IHD damper to her head. Perhaps she’d seen it coming. He prayed to whatever gods existed that she had. It was a brutal, ignominious end, an undeserving end to a highly deserving agent.
The world was slowing down. He knew what he had to do. The mission could still succeed. He just had to have the balls to go through with it.
han’Kanar was already moving towards him with the halberd. Smith threw his railgun to the ground and yanked his combat knife free again, but he was only partially focussed on combat. In front of his eyes, the activation sequence for the Feedback-Cascade Tectonic Destabiliser flashed.
‘If this is what we can expect in your galaxy, I feel sorry for your race,’ han’Kanar shouted with savage glee as he thrust the halberd deep into Smith’s guts. ‘The Fleet of Reclamation will make slaves of you all!’
Smith didn’t even flinch as tendrils of crackling fire raced through his intestines. He confirmed the activation and grabbed hold of the haft of the halberd, and began pulling it through his body with all the exo-powered might the Mantix suit had to offer. han’Kanar’s face went from triumph, to surprise, to panic, all in the space of three seconds. It was a transformation that Smith would relish for the rest of his life.
Which would also be about three seconds.
‘Slaves?’ Smith shouted, thrusting the combat knife into the kaygryn’s bull neck and taking great pleasure in the look of shock and anger as han’Kanar gurgled himself into the afterlife. ‘You don’t know humans very well.’
The guards’ lasers finished him off before the tectonic destabiliser could.
*
‘I’m coming, Yano!’ Seka screamed into the comlink. The Last Chance Saloon’s space plane was tearing through the sky over Myaxomon so fast that even with the refraction shielding, there was no escaping the multiple sonic booms which chased it through the city. Below her, hundreds of kaygryn looked up from their afternoon of lazy hedonism, briefly and bemusedly searching for thunderclouds, before returning to their feasting and games and extravagant orgies.
Seka watched as the Imperial Palace grew in the VR pilot’s sphere at dizzying speed. Streams of data filled the space around her as the plane tracked for enemy LRIS and ordnance. Her electronic warfare pods were picking up a host of signals from the sky ports and Conclave Militant orbital surveillance rigs, but probably due to the sheer outrageous implausibility of her presence, they hadn’t thought anything of it beyond some kind of glitch—yet.
Even so, she had less than a minute to rescue Yano and clear Myaxomon entirely. Fat red warning lights blaring on the command sphere indicated that Smith, in his final act, had decided to destroy the entire planet.
*
Get out and run!
Yano took a few steps back, as if the Emperor’s gaze were physically repelling him. Smith’s voice was still ringing in his ears when Seka’s scream penetrated the operational comlink. Lyra dead; Smith and Rutai killed; Myaxomon about to crumble to dust under catastrophic tectonic shift. Even as the Emperor spoke, he felt himself slipping into a stunned daze.
‘Yes, vos’Shan—or whoever the hell you are—we know about you,’ the Emperor was saying, his face a picture of disdain. ‘Did you not think it extraordinary that within two days of arriving here, you were standing in front of the Emperor himself? That we, even as a holy people, would lend such credence to the words of an unknown fanatic? You may have fooled the provinces, pretender, but you cannot fool the Imperial court.’
Yano swallowed. He was dead. There was no way Seka would reach him in time.
‘What makes you think we’ve been here for a few days?’ he asked, his voice steady. He played for time.
The Emperor snorted. ‘vos’Shan is our holiest prophet. His image appears in every vanash-shen’ah from Myaxomon to the farthest reaches of the Empire. You were recognised immediately by the priest on Kurwen, and we know the provar have your body. Really, of all the corpses you could have chosen, it was the most foolish of errors.’
Yano turned. Kolvaar was standing still, his expression unreadable. Beyond, the two guards in ceremonial armour stood, impassive. They knew Yano was not a threat. If he made for the Emperor, they would kill him in milliseconds.
The floor trembled beneath his feet. The feedback-cascade was initiating. The bomb was issuing deep, penetrating seismic waves into the bedrock of Myaxomon. Already it was too late; once the cascade had started, there was no way to stop it. SPECWAR had literally broken out the big guns for this mission.
The Emperor looked over to Kolvaar. ‘What is that shaking? What is Vagr doing?’
There was a pause. ‘I cannot raise him, Majesty,’ Kolvaar said eventually, his face falling to worry.
‘Well, what of the kaygryn with him?’ the Emperor pressed.
‘Some kind of interference…’ Kolvaar said, distracted. ‘I can’t—’
The Emperor rounded on Yano. ‘What have you done, human?’
Yano found himself smiling. He felt suddenly giddy. ‘What are your plans for the human race?’ he retorted.
The Emperor was briefly dumbfounded. ‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded.
‘What is your plan for the UN? For the rest of Tier Three? What will you do when you have conquered the provar?’
‘We will make slaves of you all!’ the Emperor thundered. ‘You will live under the boot heel of the Fleet of Reclamation for a thousand generations! We will colonise your worlds and rule over you with a brutality that will make the provar look like children! That is if we don’t exterminate you like the vermin you are first!’
Yano leaned forward, grinning like the Cheshire cat. ‘Well, Emperor vun’Daal the eleventh,’ he said with the careless relish of a man who knows his time is up and there is nothing he can do about it. ‘You will do so without a homeworld.’
*
Seka watched as the whole of Myaxomon seemed to ripple, as if the city were made of water. She knew from their training that the cascade worked quickly.
‘Christ, Smith,’ she hissed to herself, bringing in the space plane low across the surface of the city. The Imperial Palace was seconds away.
‘Yano, I’m coming in fast; you need to jump!’ she shouted.
*
Yano’s eyes widened. He looked over to his right. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen metres from the edge of the throne room.
The trembling was more violent now. Dust and masonry were tumbling free of the ceiling high above and shattering against the throne room floor. The Emperor rounded on Yano in wide-eyed fury.
‘What have you done?!’ he screamed. ‘What have you done?’
But Yano didn’t answer. The space plane was there, its attitudinal thrusters burning white hot, forcing hot, dry winds across the throne room. The guards started firing at it, but the force shield contained their lasers.
‘Yano, come the fuck on!’ Seka screamed.
Yano ran. The Emperor was yelling behind him, his apoplexy total. Lasers chased him. One scythed into his arm; another scored a glancing blow across his back. But they were too slow, too late. Yano reached the force shield and leapt through, thumping hard against the metal grilling of the space plane’s hold. The ramp was already closing behind him. He grabbed hold of a harness and wrapped it around his arms as the main thrusters ignited and powered the plane into the sky.
Beneath them, the cascade intensified. Myaxomon shook as the earthquakes spread across the metropolis.
In a few minutes, the city would be nothing but a hundred kilometres of rubble.
In a few hours, so would the planet.
THE JEWEL OF THE KINGDOM
‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely.’
Terran aphorism
Her throat and mouth were raw from the violent expulsion of the contents of her stomach. Between each horrible, hacking cough, and each spasm of pain emanating from her abdomen, she screamed.
‘Shut up!’ the Vulture snapped.
She did. She brought herself upright, her chin slicked with vomit, and looked the man in the eyes. Behind him, loitering on the staircase, two men in modified Mantix stood, railguns idly slung over their shoulders. Bloodstains marked the carpet in the hallway beyond. One hand, attached to a body obscured from view by the ceiling, twitched horribly.
‘What have you done?’ she moaned, strenuously avoiding the corpse of Pitt. So many lives simply snuffed out, like some God high above flicking off a row of switches. In one moment, a man, a brave man, a decorated officer with a glittering career behind him; in the next, a skin-sack of cooling innards, inert, charnel meat. In a day and age where almost everything could be fixed and cured by the wonder of medical science, death seemed all the more final and appalling; terrifying, even.
‘I’ve saved your life,’ the Vulture said irritably. The gun was back in its holster. In a moment of unthinking madness, Constance lunged for it. The Vulture issued a single, stunning blow to her head, an open-palmed slap that had the same force and effect as a flashbang, and righted her with exo-powered gauntlets before she could collapse to the floor and injure herself. The men beyond remained unmoving.
Constance let out a single wail. In that instant, she had been broken. A part of her wished that Pitt had succeeded, that the whole ordeal was finally over, that she could relax and let the course of events carry on without her. The war was lost; what more was there to do but accept it and die?
‘You planted the explosives on my Bluebird, didn’t you?’ she asked after the ringing in her right ear had subsided. ‘You knew what I would do, how I would react.’
The Vulture sneered. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a voice that suggested she should have pieced it together long before she had done. ‘You blamed your generals. Really, Andrea, that was moronic, even for you.’
She looked at him with a venomous expression. How she loathed him now! Only a few weeks ago, she would have been pleased with his pride, revelled in his approval. He was the real deal, the genuine SPECWAR article; if he agreed with her actions, then she was the hard-nosed, jaded, practical wartime president that she had inexplicably aspired to be. Now she wanted none of it. She wanted Pitt back, honourable Pitt. She wanted Foster and Lex White and all of them. She was crushed by a sudden burning wave of guilt, as if someone had upended a vat of molten steel over her.
‘What have I done?’ she whispered hoarsely.
‘What needed to be done,’ the Vulture said. There was anger in his voice. ‘You did what no-one else would. You saw the actions that no-one else could see. Now finish it. Finish what you started. Be the woman, the President, that I know you to be.’
Tears welled up in her eyes. She wanted to crawl into bed. No, she wanted to unplug from reality. Her IHD inbox was so full of missives and messages it would have taken two lifetimes to get through them all. Heads of state, generals, fleet marshals, governors, representatives, diplomats… They all wanted orders, wanted to know what was happening, wanted to tell her that, sorry, they had lost another UN world.
‘What’s happening out there?’ she asked quietly. The air in Carrington seemed very still. She wondered how many of her retainers the Vulture and his men had killed.
‘Folhourt has fallen,’ the Vulture said. ‘The Outer Ring has gone completely dark. There is a list of Veigis worlds which the Fleet Comms Array can no longer pick up. I can send it to you.’
‘What are you asking me to do?’ she asked. ‘It’s over. Folhourt was everything. If we’ve lost it, then we’ve lost our fleet. If we’ve lost the fleet, then we’ve lost the war.’
‘We have not lost the war!’ the Vulture thundered. She flinched. Her heart rate spiked—something which, but a few minutes ago, would have brought guards running. ‘Vargonroth lays claim to the largest minefield in the galaxy. There are thirty ships sitting above us right now. Hundreds of MDPs.’
Constance pushed past him, but he followed. She didn’t want to talk any more. She walked down the stairs in a daze. The early morning light gave Carrington a grey, purgatorial feel.
She should have been more shocked at the sight of dozens of corpses. Provar, men, women, soldiers, civilians. Their deaths had been violent and terrifying, killed by human operatives who should have been doing anything to protect them. Anything. That was the point of SPECWAR, after all: to do awful, illegal things to protect the UN—
Of course. The UN. Not humanity, the United Nations. Humans were not precluded from the insane machinations of the Vulture. He was the ultimate consequentialist. In the twisted, psychopathic recesses of his mind, the end always justified the means. These people had died for the greater good, and the greater good demanded the survival of the Terran Hegemony at any and all costs.
It was only then, in that moment, that she appreciated how much of a monster he was.
‘I will not have more lives lost on my account,’ she said, imagining the Assembly Building packed with alien legations and human politicians—those that had chosen to remain on Vargonroth, once news of the loss of Folhourt had leaked from Halo Arch—and how they would react to her plan.
‘What do you propose to do?’ the Vulture called after her. ‘Surrender?’ There was a trace element of panic creeping into his voice.
‘I’m going to speak to the people,’ she said calmly, walking through the corridors stacked with corpses. With every step, she expected a bullet to tear her head apart, but she passed unhindered through the ranks of the Vulture’s men lining the walls.
‘Andrea!’ the Vulture called after her. ‘Andrea! Get back here!’
But she kept walking.
Vargonroth was the quietest she’d ever seen it. The cold air stung her face. If the sound of gunfire had managed to escape the Vulture’s audio damper fields, then there was no evidence of it out here in the quiet, well-heeled Vonchester Heights. It was as calm and serene as it had ever been.
