Empire of the Fallen, page 44
But the Vulture didn’t respond. He sat, slowly beginning to tremble. Blood tricked from his nose, then poured. Constance watched in horror as the man convulsed. Something held her in place, though. Perhaps it was her hatred of the man, or perhaps it was the look he gave her that warned her to back off. Perhaps it was neither of those things, but it still took a lot to suppress the basic human instinct to help someone in their death throes.
The Vulture’s face had transformed into a mask of blood. His mouth was contorted into a rictus of agony. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head.
Then, with a great, spluttering heave, he expired.
Constance had no way to know that the man’s self-inflicted brain tumour had finally killed him. She simply stared at the corpse for a long time, mouth agape, while the kaygryn guard sauntered over and said something in Argish which she did not understand.
They came and took his body away a few hours later.
EPILOGUE: PAX KAYGRA
‘We humans do not make good slaves. We are too tenacious, too proud. Warfare has been in our blood since the first ape fight.’
Brigadier General Brennus Anastasio, UNAF (ret.)
It took six months for the Kaygryn Empire to consolidate its position in the Milky Way, but it would be years before a fully fledged Imperial bureaucracy could take effect. The Ascendancy had been crushed, its people dead or enslaved, its military annihilated and its organs of state completely dismantled; such efforts took time and resources, and the UN survived these months more or less in limbo.
Those kaygryn native to the Milky Way, newly enfranchised by their Andromedan brethren, picked up the slack with gusto.
Whether the Empire would ever have been able to dominate the Milky Way without the billions of kaygryn already there was a topic that was hotly debated among the conquered in the weeks following the invasion. Hundreds of UN colonies, mostly those that shared no borders with the kaygryn, remained completely untouched by the Empire, and even those that had been set upon by the Empire’s vast colony of ark ships still retained a large degree of self-governance. But the destruction of the UN Fleet, and the means of manufacturing new ships and training men and women to crew them, meant that the Empire didn’t have to do much but bide its time and rely on its superior shield technology and complete orbital dominance. Once the purge of the Ascendancy was complete, the Empire would turn its attentions to the UN.
In light of this, the UN initiated a serious charm offensive, bringing to bear its galaxy-renowned diplomatic division to court their new lords and masters in an attempt to thrash out terms of subservience. In fact, the Empire’s position was much weaker than the UN came even close to realising. Rumours of the destruction of the Imperial homeworld—and with it, the governing minds of the Empire—persisted, though their strenuous denial by the Fleetmaster of the Imperial Fleet of Reclamation, the de facto governor of the UN, was enough to dampen Xeno Division’s ardour. Over the course of the next six months, the UN’s politicians and diplomats petitioned their Imperial overlords to treat the Terran Hegemony with mercy. An independent body politic with a strong economy was the perfect Imperial subject. They pleaded with the kaygryn to allow the Terrans to remain a peaceful, prosperous people. UNAF was no more than a defence force curbing the worst excesses of the old kaygryn, and there was no fleet to speak of. Allow them to rebuild and they would not question the Empire’s right to rule over them.
The Empire agreed, though only to bide its time. Andromeda was in chaos. Myaxomon had been destroyed by some kind of doomsday device. The Emperor was dead. The Fleet of Reclamation as it was currently formed would have to hold the whole of the Milky Way for some years yet. The UN could never be allowed to know.
There were conditions to the peace. Those responsible for the Treaty of Hadan’s Reach were to be brought to account. Old politicians, long retired, were dragged from their comfortable homes and pensions and thrown in prison to await trial—of sorts. Those politicians responsible for attempting to resist the Imperial advance into Ascendancy space, too, were to be tried. Andrea Constance, the most hated woman in the galaxy, was offered up by an unresisting UN. There was little doubt that she would be publicly executed.
UN forces which had fled to UNIS blackworlds in the Trillian Veil renewed personal force shielding research efforts and initiated an organised insurgency against the Empire. Reprisals among the UN population were regular and brutal. Other Tier Three races neglected to involve themselves, declaring for the Empire. In return, they remained autonomous, unmolested. The zhahassi, the quorl, the golgron, sick of war, recalled their diplomatic legations and retreated into themselves.
They let the kaygryn get on with it.
*
They fled. For as long as they remained in Andromeda, they would be hunted. Before Myaxomon had shaken itself to oblivion like a man undergoing a fatal seizure, word had escaped of Anmet vos’Shan, traitor.
Assassin.
The Empire was reeling, trying to contain the news of the destruction of the Imperial throne as much as remedy the consequences, but as far as Yano and Seka could see, it made no difference to the aliens’ designs on the Milky Way. The Fleet of Reclamation had already left, and hundreds more ships had crossed the Barrier in its wake. There seemed to be no immediate prospect of their return. Their mission, that of the Last Chance Saloon, had failed before it had begun.
With hearts heavy with failure and the ingrained, primal fear of being hunted by all the resources of a massive interstellar empire, they made their way back to Kurwen. They found a spot, a small island in the southern tropics, thousands of kilometres from any of the indigenous aliens or Imperial citizens, and landed there. It put Yano in mind of the island he had lived on on Gonvarion. One day, he would go back there and seek out that squat hexagon of carbon he had once called home for six months. It was still full of priceless alien artworks, its only security its geographical isolation.
They used the voidbreaker as a home, and spent the long, hot days teaching Seka Old Argish working out a plan. They would need to get back to the Milky Way, that was certain, but for that they would need the complex astrographic capabilities of the Empire—and as far as they knew, Smith had destroyed that navigational beacon when he destroyed Myaxomon.
They attempted to make love once, but gave up. Interspecies sex was certainly not unheard of within Tier Three, but it was very much taboo. Seka could not bring herself to enjoy it, and with the language barrier between them, they began to drift apart. Yano, entombed in the kaygryn body, became surly and withdrawn. Seka’s resentment at his having accepted the mission in the first place returned. Cabin fever took hold. They began to fall out of love.
After several bitter months, they agreed to leave Kurwen and attempt to follow a kaygryn ship through the Barrier in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to get home. They packed up their provisions, activated the voidbreaker’s refraction shielding, and left. Seka retraced their route back to the Barrier using the ship’s VI logs, and they exited hyperspace two million kilometres from the last known exit. Using the ship’s VI scrubber and Yano’s knowledge of kaygryn, they were able, serendipitously, to piece together a tracking signal from a nearby Imperial star fort and acquire it under the pretence of being an exploratory vessel attached to the Fleet of Reclamation. With the chaos wrought by the destruction of Myaxomon, they weren’t challenged in any serious way, and Seka was able to plug in the jump co-ordinates and take them across the Barrier in a few tens of hours.
They arrived to find a new age had dawned in Tier Three: what would come to be known as the Pax Kaygra.
‘I’m sorry that things turned out this way,’ Yano said, standing on the debarkation ramp of the Last Chance Saloon. It was now approaching winter in the southern hemisphere of Gonvarion, and the brackish breeze had a hint of cool to it. Either side of them, waves lazily lapped the shore, and seabirds trilled overhead. The sun sank towards the horizon, staining the sky gold.
Seka nodded. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and she looked gaunt from months of stress. ‘You did what you had to,’ she said quietly. ‘For the President. For the UN. I wish I could change it all, I really do. But things are different now.’ She faltered, stopped.
Yano nodded. It turned out kaygryn could cry too. ‘I’ll always love you,’ he said softly. He wished he could say it in Terran, and not brash, guttural Old Argish. Just once, he wished he could speak the same language as her!
Seka nodded. The wind caught her hair, tousled it. Suddenly, anger passed across her face. She shook her head. ‘I’ll find a way to change you back,’ she said. ‘I will. If it takes me years, I’ll do it. Zhahassi ZENs have networked personalities. EFFECT data sponges people. The goddamn cobs managed it! There must be a way!’
Yano paused and eventually nodded sadly. The Zecad was gone, and the UN did not have the technology, as far as he was aware. But he nodded all the same. It was a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dark and uncertain galaxy. ‘I’ll be here,’ he said, gesturing to the untouched module behind them which was now thoroughly overgrown. ‘Come and visit whenever you like.’
She nodded again, and the tears flowed freely. ‘I’ll be back,’ she said. ‘I promise I’ll come back for you. You’ll be human again. I’ll tell everyone that Myaxomon is gone, what we did. It’s got to count for something. Perhaps there will be an uprising. Perhaps we’ll win, kick the kags out. And then we can go back to how things were.’
Yano pulled her into a hug, not trusting himself to speak. He knew he should tell her not to, to go and live her life and find someone else, but he was selfish. He wanted to be human again and he wanted to be with her.
They embraced for what seemed like an age. Then slowly, tearfully, Seka walked back up the debarkation ramp and closed it behind her.
Yano stood back as the engines cycled to full power and the voidbreaker rose steadily into the air. He watched it as it disappeared into the deep golden sky, and stood and continued to stare long after the rumble of its engines had faded and the tiny speck had disappeared.
He was alone again, an intergalactic hermit.
With a sigh and a heavy heart, he sat down on the sand and waited for nightfall.
*
His lungs still ached from the fire. There was a tightness in his chest now, too. There was nothing wrong with him, from a medical point of view. The wounds were psychosomatic.
CAF was a terrible thing to behold. The heat was overpowering, beyond any mammalian comprehension. A wall of flame kilometres high, devouring all of the oxygen from the atmosphere, sucking the air out of his lungs like his Fleet hull breach training in a giant vacuum pump from decades before. Boiling, hurricane-fast winds, and a roar like a million-tonne rock fall, like the furnace of hell.
Varren Scarcroft was a broken man.
It was Commodore Minad who had come to his aid, a last-minute, high-velocity, ROE snatch. The rest of his crew had been left, abandoned as low priority, suffocating long before they were immolated by the flames. Scarcroft himself had been minutes from death, the air searing his lungs, the air thick with steam ahead of the edifice of fire, when the grab had come. Minad had risked his life and the crew of his ship, not to mention the Sword of Gemini itself, to rescue him.
It made Scarcroft both tearfully grateful and apoplectically furious.
He had reached an age where his operational utility was well past its peak. He had survived on his reputation and the forbearance and admiration of his crew. He was a good commander and an excellent strategist, but he was also a member of the old guard, elderly and exhausted, worn out to the point of retirement. But for Chevalier and her cronies tipping the galaxy into chaos, he would have remained in his advisory post and retired on a generous pension.
The best thing he could have hoped for was a good combat death. There was no place for a man like him in post-UN society. He was not a man who took to servitude, who could abide anything other than total liberty of thought and deed. He could not survive as an Imperial subject, bound either to serve new, alien masters, or disavow his past and career, a lifetime of work and achievement.
He had been robbed of that death. Burning alive in the firestorm on Folhourt was hardly glorious, but that is not how he would have been remembered. His legacy would have lived on, an old warhorse fondly remembered in the officers’ mess at Halo Arch, doughty and tenacious to the end. Hell, they would have even commissioned a portrait, provided the place wasn’t sacked by the kaygryn and its staff disbanded or executed.
Minad had risked everything to save his life, and he could do nothing but respect the man for that. But the bitterness was there. UNIS agents had visited him on Roma Vega—now an Imperial possession in the painful process of reconstruction—during his convalescence. For his own safety, his past had been erased. Every operational file mentioning his name, even in passing and even in code, had been obliterated, purged from the servers buried under Halo Arch and the Fleet Comms Array. Varren Scarcroft no longer existed. He was now Alexander Munroe, former VR technician living out the rest of his life on his UN entitlement deed.
At first he had laughed, then raged, and finally cried. In the space of a year, the UN had gone from prosperous beacon of libertarian values to a bankrupt and war-torn shadow under occupation by a superior foreign power. There was no hope on the horizon. The Vargonroth fleet had absconded to begin a guerrilla campaign, but how long before a refraction-shielded Imperial voidbreaker followed them home, beamed the astrographic co-ordinates to the Fleet of Reclamation, and they too were wiped out?
Part of him wanted to join them—and he knew they would take him, too. But it would be out of respect, out of a sense of desperation and duty. He was done, finished, a thin old man taken through the wringer of zero-G combat, good for little but propaganda. They needed young men and women, full of piss and vinegar, ready to give everything to the cause.
Once the UNIS agents had left and he’d been discharged from hospital, he had travelled to his new home, a modest, government-mandated hab in a grey tower block on the outskirts of Garbatella, and sat in silence for a long time. The hab was on the fortieth floor, and the view it gave him over the city was unparalleled.
He studied the ark landers on the horizon. There must have been twenty or so, pulsing with turquoise lights, huge phallic ships mated to the earth by vast claw-like proboscises. Each one contained thousands of Imperial citizens, ready to occupy, enslave, rule. Without their personal force shielding and control of orbit, they’d be nothing. But they had both of those things, and that made them—for the time being, at least—untouchable.
The sun sank closer to the horizon. There was no traffic outside, no discernible movement. The whole planet seemed to be holding its breath, waiting to see what happened. Scarcroft could never have known the turmoil that had engulfed the Empire in Andromeda, could never have realised how precarious the Imperial position really was. All he could do was erode their grip here, one kaygryn at a time. They might not need him in the Trillian Veil, but he could still achieve a good death.
He stood up, drained the glass of whisky analogue his matter generator had compiled for him, snatched up a kitchen knife, and made for the door.
Perhaps this was the end of human civilisation; perhaps it was the end of the UN. Perhaps this would be the start of a new era of servitude, a thousand centuries of humanity as an underclass, each person eking out their lives in bondage. If that was to be their fate, then Scarcroft wanted no part in it. He was not going to rot in his hab, a forgotten nobody, while aliens plundered their wealth and destroyed their way of life.
He took the elevator to the ground floor. He saw what he was looking for almost immediately: a pair of Imperial soldiers ambling through a deserted street, the hafts of their halberds tapping against the asphalt.
His hand gripped the handle of the knife, held behind his back.
He started walking towards them.
*
Every avenue of appeal had been exhausted, every possible interdiction by every possible person depleted. Diplomats, Federal Socialists, those military staff who had not yet fled, who had seen their UNAF bases reduced to provincial police stations, all spoke out. Their entreaties fell on deaf ears. They had promised that Constance could deliver the UN, deliver its compliance in the face of a growing insurgency, deliver its subservience in the wake of rumours that the Andromedan Empire was facing collapse, but they succeeded only in postponing the inevitable. Constance had precipitated a costly war, she had authorised the genocide of those kaygryn in the former Federacy, and there was nothing left for her but to die. The people wanted it. The Empire wanted it.
Six months after the Fleet of Reclamation had burst into Tier Three space and laid waste to the Ascendancy and much of the United Nations, Andrea Constance stepped forward to meet her fate.
They had converted the Assembly Building Grand Chamber for the purpose. Where the mahogany lectern had once been, now there was nothing but the headsman’s block. Imperial kaygryn lined the walls behind. Half were clad in the robes and togas of the various new offices of state; the other half wore ceremonial armour.
The Chamber was packed, mostly with former Federacy kaygryn, though there was a sizeable contingent of humans there too. All told, there were ten thousand warm bodies present for the execution, most excitable and expectant, some anxious and withdrawn.
The Empire’s treatment of its new human subjects had been schizophrenic, sometimes brutal and wanton, sometimes conciliatory and pragmatic. But the rumours of the destruction of the aliens’ homeworld had not abated, and renewed attacks by the UN insurgency had led the aliens to adopt the former rather than the latter mindset. Andrea Constance’s execution would be an exercise in barbarity. A lesson.
The Vulture’s face had transformed into a mask of blood. His mouth was contorted into a rictus of agony. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head.
Then, with a great, spluttering heave, he expired.
Constance had no way to know that the man’s self-inflicted brain tumour had finally killed him. She simply stared at the corpse for a long time, mouth agape, while the kaygryn guard sauntered over and said something in Argish which she did not understand.
They came and took his body away a few hours later.
EPILOGUE: PAX KAYGRA
‘We humans do not make good slaves. We are too tenacious, too proud. Warfare has been in our blood since the first ape fight.’
Brigadier General Brennus Anastasio, UNAF (ret.)
It took six months for the Kaygryn Empire to consolidate its position in the Milky Way, but it would be years before a fully fledged Imperial bureaucracy could take effect. The Ascendancy had been crushed, its people dead or enslaved, its military annihilated and its organs of state completely dismantled; such efforts took time and resources, and the UN survived these months more or less in limbo.
Those kaygryn native to the Milky Way, newly enfranchised by their Andromedan brethren, picked up the slack with gusto.
Whether the Empire would ever have been able to dominate the Milky Way without the billions of kaygryn already there was a topic that was hotly debated among the conquered in the weeks following the invasion. Hundreds of UN colonies, mostly those that shared no borders with the kaygryn, remained completely untouched by the Empire, and even those that had been set upon by the Empire’s vast colony of ark ships still retained a large degree of self-governance. But the destruction of the UN Fleet, and the means of manufacturing new ships and training men and women to crew them, meant that the Empire didn’t have to do much but bide its time and rely on its superior shield technology and complete orbital dominance. Once the purge of the Ascendancy was complete, the Empire would turn its attentions to the UN.
In light of this, the UN initiated a serious charm offensive, bringing to bear its galaxy-renowned diplomatic division to court their new lords and masters in an attempt to thrash out terms of subservience. In fact, the Empire’s position was much weaker than the UN came even close to realising. Rumours of the destruction of the Imperial homeworld—and with it, the governing minds of the Empire—persisted, though their strenuous denial by the Fleetmaster of the Imperial Fleet of Reclamation, the de facto governor of the UN, was enough to dampen Xeno Division’s ardour. Over the course of the next six months, the UN’s politicians and diplomats petitioned their Imperial overlords to treat the Terran Hegemony with mercy. An independent body politic with a strong economy was the perfect Imperial subject. They pleaded with the kaygryn to allow the Terrans to remain a peaceful, prosperous people. UNAF was no more than a defence force curbing the worst excesses of the old kaygryn, and there was no fleet to speak of. Allow them to rebuild and they would not question the Empire’s right to rule over them.
The Empire agreed, though only to bide its time. Andromeda was in chaos. Myaxomon had been destroyed by some kind of doomsday device. The Emperor was dead. The Fleet of Reclamation as it was currently formed would have to hold the whole of the Milky Way for some years yet. The UN could never be allowed to know.
There were conditions to the peace. Those responsible for the Treaty of Hadan’s Reach were to be brought to account. Old politicians, long retired, were dragged from their comfortable homes and pensions and thrown in prison to await trial—of sorts. Those politicians responsible for attempting to resist the Imperial advance into Ascendancy space, too, were to be tried. Andrea Constance, the most hated woman in the galaxy, was offered up by an unresisting UN. There was little doubt that she would be publicly executed.
UN forces which had fled to UNIS blackworlds in the Trillian Veil renewed personal force shielding research efforts and initiated an organised insurgency against the Empire. Reprisals among the UN population were regular and brutal. Other Tier Three races neglected to involve themselves, declaring for the Empire. In return, they remained autonomous, unmolested. The zhahassi, the quorl, the golgron, sick of war, recalled their diplomatic legations and retreated into themselves.
They let the kaygryn get on with it.
*
They fled. For as long as they remained in Andromeda, they would be hunted. Before Myaxomon had shaken itself to oblivion like a man undergoing a fatal seizure, word had escaped of Anmet vos’Shan, traitor.
Assassin.
The Empire was reeling, trying to contain the news of the destruction of the Imperial throne as much as remedy the consequences, but as far as Yano and Seka could see, it made no difference to the aliens’ designs on the Milky Way. The Fleet of Reclamation had already left, and hundreds more ships had crossed the Barrier in its wake. There seemed to be no immediate prospect of their return. Their mission, that of the Last Chance Saloon, had failed before it had begun.
With hearts heavy with failure and the ingrained, primal fear of being hunted by all the resources of a massive interstellar empire, they made their way back to Kurwen. They found a spot, a small island in the southern tropics, thousands of kilometres from any of the indigenous aliens or Imperial citizens, and landed there. It put Yano in mind of the island he had lived on on Gonvarion. One day, he would go back there and seek out that squat hexagon of carbon he had once called home for six months. It was still full of priceless alien artworks, its only security its geographical isolation.
They used the voidbreaker as a home, and spent the long, hot days teaching Seka Old Argish working out a plan. They would need to get back to the Milky Way, that was certain, but for that they would need the complex astrographic capabilities of the Empire—and as far as they knew, Smith had destroyed that navigational beacon when he destroyed Myaxomon.
They attempted to make love once, but gave up. Interspecies sex was certainly not unheard of within Tier Three, but it was very much taboo. Seka could not bring herself to enjoy it, and with the language barrier between them, they began to drift apart. Yano, entombed in the kaygryn body, became surly and withdrawn. Seka’s resentment at his having accepted the mission in the first place returned. Cabin fever took hold. They began to fall out of love.
After several bitter months, they agreed to leave Kurwen and attempt to follow a kaygryn ship through the Barrier in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to get home. They packed up their provisions, activated the voidbreaker’s refraction shielding, and left. Seka retraced their route back to the Barrier using the ship’s VI logs, and they exited hyperspace two million kilometres from the last known exit. Using the ship’s VI scrubber and Yano’s knowledge of kaygryn, they were able, serendipitously, to piece together a tracking signal from a nearby Imperial star fort and acquire it under the pretence of being an exploratory vessel attached to the Fleet of Reclamation. With the chaos wrought by the destruction of Myaxomon, they weren’t challenged in any serious way, and Seka was able to plug in the jump co-ordinates and take them across the Barrier in a few tens of hours.
They arrived to find a new age had dawned in Tier Three: what would come to be known as the Pax Kaygra.
‘I’m sorry that things turned out this way,’ Yano said, standing on the debarkation ramp of the Last Chance Saloon. It was now approaching winter in the southern hemisphere of Gonvarion, and the brackish breeze had a hint of cool to it. Either side of them, waves lazily lapped the shore, and seabirds trilled overhead. The sun sank towards the horizon, staining the sky gold.
Seka nodded. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and she looked gaunt from months of stress. ‘You did what you had to,’ she said quietly. ‘For the President. For the UN. I wish I could change it all, I really do. But things are different now.’ She faltered, stopped.
Yano nodded. It turned out kaygryn could cry too. ‘I’ll always love you,’ he said softly. He wished he could say it in Terran, and not brash, guttural Old Argish. Just once, he wished he could speak the same language as her!
Seka nodded. The wind caught her hair, tousled it. Suddenly, anger passed across her face. She shook her head. ‘I’ll find a way to change you back,’ she said. ‘I will. If it takes me years, I’ll do it. Zhahassi ZENs have networked personalities. EFFECT data sponges people. The goddamn cobs managed it! There must be a way!’
Yano paused and eventually nodded sadly. The Zecad was gone, and the UN did not have the technology, as far as he was aware. But he nodded all the same. It was a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dark and uncertain galaxy. ‘I’ll be here,’ he said, gesturing to the untouched module behind them which was now thoroughly overgrown. ‘Come and visit whenever you like.’
She nodded again, and the tears flowed freely. ‘I’ll be back,’ she said. ‘I promise I’ll come back for you. You’ll be human again. I’ll tell everyone that Myaxomon is gone, what we did. It’s got to count for something. Perhaps there will be an uprising. Perhaps we’ll win, kick the kags out. And then we can go back to how things were.’
Yano pulled her into a hug, not trusting himself to speak. He knew he should tell her not to, to go and live her life and find someone else, but he was selfish. He wanted to be human again and he wanted to be with her.
They embraced for what seemed like an age. Then slowly, tearfully, Seka walked back up the debarkation ramp and closed it behind her.
Yano stood back as the engines cycled to full power and the voidbreaker rose steadily into the air. He watched it as it disappeared into the deep golden sky, and stood and continued to stare long after the rumble of its engines had faded and the tiny speck had disappeared.
He was alone again, an intergalactic hermit.
With a sigh and a heavy heart, he sat down on the sand and waited for nightfall.
*
His lungs still ached from the fire. There was a tightness in his chest now, too. There was nothing wrong with him, from a medical point of view. The wounds were psychosomatic.
CAF was a terrible thing to behold. The heat was overpowering, beyond any mammalian comprehension. A wall of flame kilometres high, devouring all of the oxygen from the atmosphere, sucking the air out of his lungs like his Fleet hull breach training in a giant vacuum pump from decades before. Boiling, hurricane-fast winds, and a roar like a million-tonne rock fall, like the furnace of hell.
Varren Scarcroft was a broken man.
It was Commodore Minad who had come to his aid, a last-minute, high-velocity, ROE snatch. The rest of his crew had been left, abandoned as low priority, suffocating long before they were immolated by the flames. Scarcroft himself had been minutes from death, the air searing his lungs, the air thick with steam ahead of the edifice of fire, when the grab had come. Minad had risked his life and the crew of his ship, not to mention the Sword of Gemini itself, to rescue him.
It made Scarcroft both tearfully grateful and apoplectically furious.
He had reached an age where his operational utility was well past its peak. He had survived on his reputation and the forbearance and admiration of his crew. He was a good commander and an excellent strategist, but he was also a member of the old guard, elderly and exhausted, worn out to the point of retirement. But for Chevalier and her cronies tipping the galaxy into chaos, he would have remained in his advisory post and retired on a generous pension.
The best thing he could have hoped for was a good combat death. There was no place for a man like him in post-UN society. He was not a man who took to servitude, who could abide anything other than total liberty of thought and deed. He could not survive as an Imperial subject, bound either to serve new, alien masters, or disavow his past and career, a lifetime of work and achievement.
He had been robbed of that death. Burning alive in the firestorm on Folhourt was hardly glorious, but that is not how he would have been remembered. His legacy would have lived on, an old warhorse fondly remembered in the officers’ mess at Halo Arch, doughty and tenacious to the end. Hell, they would have even commissioned a portrait, provided the place wasn’t sacked by the kaygryn and its staff disbanded or executed.
Minad had risked everything to save his life, and he could do nothing but respect the man for that. But the bitterness was there. UNIS agents had visited him on Roma Vega—now an Imperial possession in the painful process of reconstruction—during his convalescence. For his own safety, his past had been erased. Every operational file mentioning his name, even in passing and even in code, had been obliterated, purged from the servers buried under Halo Arch and the Fleet Comms Array. Varren Scarcroft no longer existed. He was now Alexander Munroe, former VR technician living out the rest of his life on his UN entitlement deed.
At first he had laughed, then raged, and finally cried. In the space of a year, the UN had gone from prosperous beacon of libertarian values to a bankrupt and war-torn shadow under occupation by a superior foreign power. There was no hope on the horizon. The Vargonroth fleet had absconded to begin a guerrilla campaign, but how long before a refraction-shielded Imperial voidbreaker followed them home, beamed the astrographic co-ordinates to the Fleet of Reclamation, and they too were wiped out?
Part of him wanted to join them—and he knew they would take him, too. But it would be out of respect, out of a sense of desperation and duty. He was done, finished, a thin old man taken through the wringer of zero-G combat, good for little but propaganda. They needed young men and women, full of piss and vinegar, ready to give everything to the cause.
Once the UNIS agents had left and he’d been discharged from hospital, he had travelled to his new home, a modest, government-mandated hab in a grey tower block on the outskirts of Garbatella, and sat in silence for a long time. The hab was on the fortieth floor, and the view it gave him over the city was unparalleled.
He studied the ark landers on the horizon. There must have been twenty or so, pulsing with turquoise lights, huge phallic ships mated to the earth by vast claw-like proboscises. Each one contained thousands of Imperial citizens, ready to occupy, enslave, rule. Without their personal force shielding and control of orbit, they’d be nothing. But they had both of those things, and that made them—for the time being, at least—untouchable.
The sun sank closer to the horizon. There was no traffic outside, no discernible movement. The whole planet seemed to be holding its breath, waiting to see what happened. Scarcroft could never have known the turmoil that had engulfed the Empire in Andromeda, could never have realised how precarious the Imperial position really was. All he could do was erode their grip here, one kaygryn at a time. They might not need him in the Trillian Veil, but he could still achieve a good death.
He stood up, drained the glass of whisky analogue his matter generator had compiled for him, snatched up a kitchen knife, and made for the door.
Perhaps this was the end of human civilisation; perhaps it was the end of the UN. Perhaps this would be the start of a new era of servitude, a thousand centuries of humanity as an underclass, each person eking out their lives in bondage. If that was to be their fate, then Scarcroft wanted no part in it. He was not going to rot in his hab, a forgotten nobody, while aliens plundered their wealth and destroyed their way of life.
He took the elevator to the ground floor. He saw what he was looking for almost immediately: a pair of Imperial soldiers ambling through a deserted street, the hafts of their halberds tapping against the asphalt.
His hand gripped the handle of the knife, held behind his back.
He started walking towards them.
*
Every avenue of appeal had been exhausted, every possible interdiction by every possible person depleted. Diplomats, Federal Socialists, those military staff who had not yet fled, who had seen their UNAF bases reduced to provincial police stations, all spoke out. Their entreaties fell on deaf ears. They had promised that Constance could deliver the UN, deliver its compliance in the face of a growing insurgency, deliver its subservience in the wake of rumours that the Andromedan Empire was facing collapse, but they succeeded only in postponing the inevitable. Constance had precipitated a costly war, she had authorised the genocide of those kaygryn in the former Federacy, and there was nothing left for her but to die. The people wanted it. The Empire wanted it.
Six months after the Fleet of Reclamation had burst into Tier Three space and laid waste to the Ascendancy and much of the United Nations, Andrea Constance stepped forward to meet her fate.
They had converted the Assembly Building Grand Chamber for the purpose. Where the mahogany lectern had once been, now there was nothing but the headsman’s block. Imperial kaygryn lined the walls behind. Half were clad in the robes and togas of the various new offices of state; the other half wore ceremonial armour.
The Chamber was packed, mostly with former Federacy kaygryn, though there was a sizeable contingent of humans there too. All told, there were ten thousand warm bodies present for the execution, most excitable and expectant, some anxious and withdrawn.
The Empire’s treatment of its new human subjects had been schizophrenic, sometimes brutal and wanton, sometimes conciliatory and pragmatic. But the rumours of the destruction of the aliens’ homeworld had not abated, and renewed attacks by the UN insurgency had led the aliens to adopt the former rather than the latter mindset. Andrea Constance’s execution would be an exercise in barbarity. A lesson.
