Empire of the Fallen, page 45
They collected her from her cell at dawn and transported her to the Assembly Building. Thin, sickly and suffering from severe IHD withdrawal, it wasn’t the well-formed, attractive and demure President who was dragged to the block, but a skeleton, abused and terrified, unable to stop retching in fear.
Even those humans who had been the most vociferous in calling for her death could barely watch as she was pulled, naked and shackled, into the Grand Chamber. Surrounded by a cloud of camera drones that broadcast her suffering to every corner of the Milky Way—and back to Andromeda—she fell to wretched sobbing as the list of indictments was read out by a kaygryn official only a small fraction of those watching could understand without assistance. Once it was over and the official had stepped back, Constance was forced to her knees by the headsman—a muscled kaygryn wielding a charged halberd—while a second gripped a fistful of her hair and pulled her neck taut over the block from the other side.
Silence descended over the chamber, broken only by the gurgling screams of the former President of the United Nations. The camera drones swarmed closer, ensuring that everything would be captured.
The headsman moved to the side and raised the halberd. He looked over his right shoulder. The kaygryn official who had read the indictments nodded once.
The halberd came down. Constance’s head was parted cleanly from her shoulders. The second executioner was sprayed with two jets of crimson blood.
The audience erupted in one huge groan.
*
‘What happens now?’ Vondur asked. Kowalski walked next to him across the beach, their footsteps tracing a long line in the sand.
To their left, the metalled, circular accessway of Anternis radiated the afternoon heat. Where large freight trains had once trundled round its trackway, and tankers and traffic had travelled at speed around the orbital, now there was nothing.
To their right, the seemingly limitless ocean stretched, choppy and grey, broken only by a lone, pearl-white orbital pylon a few kilometres offshore.
It was strange to be back on Uvolon, a year after the former Ascendancy had pulverised Anternis with rail strikes and nuked and irradiated Vos’Shan to the north. They’d both had to take high doses of anti-radiation sickness drugs before landing, and it was only thanks to the geographic obscurity of Uvolon and Kowalski’s very senior UNIS credentials that they were even able to land at all.
The place was completely deserted. The Vos’Shan’i kaygryn had long perished or fled, and the UN government of the day had mandated the complete evacuation of the planet. A radiation quarantine had then taken effect, and no-one had had any great desire to return there in the intervening year.
It was not difficult to see why. The once massive tower blocks of intragalactic trade that had dominated Anternis were shattered hulks, skeletal ruins that cut a dark, jagged and foreboding shape across the horizon. It was the mausoleum of hundreds of thousands of humans and aliens, a bleak monument to the folly of warfare. The pervasive silence and absence of all intelligent life put Vondur in mind of Sophia, and despite the warmth of the late afternoon sun, his skin broke out in gooseflesh.
After a while, Kowalski shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘We’re in unchartered territory. UNSOC and Halo Arch have been dismantled. The Fleet Comms Array has gone quiet. UNIS DSRs across the galaxy are dark. Worlds have been destroyed or colonised. The whole Kaygryn Federacy has risen up in concert with the Empire. There’s nothing we can do. Not right now. Just resist and plan.’
They walked on. Vondur looked out to the sea.
It had taken Sergeant Cox four months to get Vondur off Cobalta and back to UNAF Arrengate North. The first two months had been spent in an internment camp for surviving members of UNAF, before the Empire realised it was wasting good soldiers on guard duty to a few thousand shell-shocked automatons, and handed over the reins to the Ok’Vuran kaygryn. Following a further fortnight of appalling maladministration, the Empire had closed the camp completely and left the veterans to fend for themselves on the streets of occupied Cobalta City.
It had taken Cox another month to find a group of quorl pirates in the Argonian freeport two thousand klicks west from Cobalta City who were willing to take him and Vondur off-world. Piracy had thrived since the invasion of the Empire; the kaygryn were too busy consolidating their position on dozens of UN worlds across the Pillars of Cain to care about it. One night, with the payment made and the charter finalised, Cox had taken a battered old UNAF jeep scoured anonymous by the windborne sand, loaded the catatonic Vondur into the back, and driven for thirty hours across the continent. He’d reached Argonia after dark, ditched the jeep, found that the quorl had kept their word, and had been blinking in the cold light of Arrengate twenty hours later.
He’d had Vondur readmitted to the overflowing psych hospital on a mysterious priority order from UNIS, and personally threatened the doctors there with physical ruin if they didn’t do their jobs properly this time. The thought still made Vondur smile.
Another month of painstaking VR therapy and psychiatric treatment saw Vondur at about ninety per cent of his former sanity. The psych techs chose that moment to tell him that Cox had taken his old service rail pistol, drained a bottle of whisky, and blown his brains out. It was Kowalski who had pieced together the sergeant’s efforts, who had told Vondur a few days later, and who had, against the advice of the techs there, brought Vondur to Uvolon.
‘What will you do?’ he asked Kowalski. They had stopped and were looking out over the sea. A thick bank of grey cloud was soaring towards the shore, underlit gold by the evening sunlight.
‘Me? I’ll keep going. Keep needling away at the belly of the beast. We have fairly solid intel that the Imperial homeworld is gone. Destroyed.’
‘I heard that too,’ Vondur said.
Kowalski nodded. ‘A mission authorised at the highest levels of government. Constance’s last throw of the dice. It might destabilise the Empire’s position in Andromeda enough to warrant a recall of the Imperial Fleet.’ He shrugged. ‘It might not. We should keep an ear to the ground though, keep moving, resisting, attacking. Whatever happens, we’re stuck with them for the time being.’
Vondur smiled sadly. ‘Well, you are,’ he said.
Kowalski turned to him. ‘Yeah. I am.’
‘Is there hope?’
‘There’s always hope, Captain. Humans weren’t built to be slaves. It’s not in our programming.’
Vondur held out his hand and Kowalski took it, giving it a firm shake. ‘Thanks. For everything you’ve done for me,’ Vondur said.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ Kowalski said, waving him off. ‘We have to look out for each other now, us humans.’ He paused, briefly lost in his own thoughts. Then he snorted, and slapped Vondur on the shoulder. ‘See you around, Captain.’
‘See you around.’
Vondur watched as the UNIS agent walked back to the distant space plane, his suit trousers rolled up around his shins. An hour later, the plane was gone, the rumble of its engines lost to the rumble of thunder on the horizon.
Slowly, methodically, Vondur removed his clothes and walked out into the sea. The water was cold, bracing, but he barely felt it. His tears added to the brackish foam as he swam slowly towards the old orbital pylon, the last surviving member of 11 Squadron Goliaths.
Once he’d reached the pylon, he took the small bronze squadron brooch that he’d attached to his wrist via a small chain, and set it on a plinth of concrete there. He saluted once, stood in silent contemplation for a few minutes, then climbed back into the sea.
Instead of heading for the shore, he kept heading south into the open water.
Heading home.
*
Hundreds of lightyears away, the sun was also setting on the ancient chi-anian fortress city of Lo-Sai. The huge network of lakes and paddy fields that surrounded the city glistened in the sunlight like a vast swamp of liquid gold, and a warm summer breeze ruffled the wet fur of the hundreds of aliens working there, hauling nets and plucking fruits from the kilometres of semiaquatic plants and depositing them into large, shoulder-mounted baskets.
It was simple, repetitive, and often back-breaking work, but for Gia, it was exactly what she wanted. Mindless labour took the sting out of the countless hurts she had experienced, the raw sense of loss, the adrenal numbness, the things she had seen and done. Her restless nights were tied up in hot fever dreams on damp, sweat-soaked sheets, dreams which often descended into nightmares and which no amount of artificial relaxants could cure her of.
But during the day, she could work. She could build and be useful. She could distract herself, if only in the daylight hours.
The chi-an had been embarrassingly welcoming. They of course remembered her. Khasan Ghar, now a senior and highly respected officer in the chi-anian army, had been thrilled at her return and had insisted she lodge with him in his impressive quarters in Lo-Sai. They had spent a long time in those early weeks trading reminiscences. Khasan had tried to get her to enrol as a special advisor to the chi-anian army now that the UN’s funding and provisions had dried up at the conclusion of the Ascendancy War, but she politely declined. Her military career, short-lived and horrifying beyond measure, was over. She had done her part. Now she wanted nothing more than anonymity in a distant, unmolested part of the galaxy.
Well, Khasan had happily granted her that. He had also granted her the necessary martial labour to rebuild Reya Vasar, the Tier Two human colony murdered by Ascendancy gamma beams which she had, a lifetime ago, called home. The old site was no longer suitable, being under strict radiation quarantine, but she had used chi-anian military airships to scout a new location to the north, where the climate was a little cooler. Just a few buildings would be constructed at first, which she hoped to tempt a new human population to. Their links with their chi-anian neighbours would be intricate and friendly; their links to the Empire—including the former UN—would be non-existent.
After a few months, Khasan had successfully lobbied for a small crew of willing volunteers to take Gia inside the quarantine zone via military airship. On the morning of their departure, Gia received a welcome visitor.
‘Gia Raman,’ Zasha said as he disentangled himself from the hearty embrace of Khasan, who, forsaking all form demanded of his senior position, had grabbed the zhahassi commando into a bear hug.
Gia felt tears of joy trickle down her cheeks as the alien embraced her in turn. For the first time in a long time, he was not wearing his ZPK armour—rather, a light, breezy robe fastened by a belt about his waist—and his white skin looked badly scarred and marked from the previous twelve months of turmoil.
She told him about the planned trip to the quarantine zone, and he provided much-needed counter-radiation drugs from the space plane he’d landed in. The chi-an had their own supply, but it was a dwindling and dated UN stock, and they had planned to use hazmat suits for the lion’s share of the trip.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked him, as Khasan led them through the cool, early morning streets to the airship spire docks at the western end of the city.
Zasha shrugged. ‘I’ve left the Peacekeepers,’ he said after a short while. ‘My people are re-establishing the Demilitarised Zone and dismantling Zvell’s empire. Tassis is to be a Commonwealth again. The kaygryn are not interested in us, nor we them.’
‘What will happen to Tier Three?’ Gia asked.
‘I do not know. Tier Three was based on a trade pact, but it has become much more. Even under Imperial rule, it will be hard to disentangle all the players without the total collapse of interstellar trade.’ He paused for a moment. ‘All I know is that I do not fit any more.’
They walked on in silence for a short while, Gia and Zasha reflecting morosely on the state of affairs. They reached the docks and ascended to one of the military airships which had been set aside for their purpose. Khasan received salutes and growls of approval from every chi-an they passed.
The three of them made their way into an open hold on the underside of the dirigible. After a few minutes of adjustment, the propellers wound to full power, and the airship decoupled from the spire and was soon making decent speed over the steaming grass plains and jungles that months before they had desperately traversed on foot.
‘I know what you mean,’ Gia said after a while, not taking her eyes from the emerald countryside below.
‘About what?’ Zasha asked.
‘About not fitting. Belonging. I feel like whatever happens now, to the UN, to humanity, to Tier Two and Three, I can’t be a part of it. My time in that world is done.’
Zasha nodded but said nothing.
‘How long will you stay here?’ Gia asked him after another pause.
‘A while,’ Zasha replied, and Gia couldn’t help but smile. She had hoped the zhahassi would stay. ‘Months, years… Like you, I desire nothing but a simple life. Perhaps I will take you to Tassis one day.’
Gia nodded, emotion threatening to overwhelm her. ‘I would like that,’ she said.
They reached Reya Vasar after a few hours. Gia descended from the dirigible in a harness designed for the purpose, along with Khasan and Zasha. A pair of chi-anian soldiers dressed in jungle-pattern DPMs joined them too, both with crackling Geiger counters.
They followed Gia in sombre silence through the abandoned ruins. Little had changed; the buildings were the same shattered hulks that they had been six months ago, scored from laser beams and pocked and cratered from small arms fire. Only the corpses had changed, transmuted to sun-bleached skeletons, most hidden in unchecked floral growth.
The whole settlement baked in the midday sun. Here, even the birds had fallen silent, as if out of respect for this impromptu graveyard. With sweating, trembling hands, Gia led them to her old family home, a government-mandated apartment of cheap concrete near the centre of town.
They stopped outside the grey building.
‘I don’t know if I can,’ Gia said, shaking. Waves of nausea rolled over her.
‘You can,’ Zasha said softly. ‘Come.’
He gently took her by the arm and walked her into the building. Inside, it was a little cooler. Gia took them to the third floor via the concrete staircase and stopped outside the door.
‘You don’t want to leave them in there, do you?’ Zasha asked. ‘We will bury them outside and mark their graves. It is an important part of saying goodbye.’
Gia knew he was right. With a deep breath, she opened the door.
They buried the remains in the small communal parkland behind the block. The soldiers had brought entrenching tools in anticipation, and all five of them pitched in, taking it in turns to dig under the sweltering early afternoon sun. Once the holes were prepared, the soldiers unloaded small caskets and chi-anian hardwood grave markers in accordance with their religion. Their belief was that over time, the hardwood would slowly fade and decompose, giving the deceased’s spirit time to let go of the corporeal world and adjust to the spirit world. Gia had no religion to speak of, and so was grateful to the aliens for treating the occasion with the level of respect and solemnity that they would with their own.
In the afternoon heat, they gently placed the skeletal remains of Gia’s parents into the caskets and lowered them into the ground. One of the soldiers expertly carved their names, Avi and Rafi Raman, into the grave markers, and they were secured into the earth too.
Once it was done, and all the soil was replaced back into the graves, they stood in respectful silence while Khasan, as the ranking officer and a native, gave a short eulogy in Chi-Anian. Afterwards, Zasha intoned an old zhahassi war lament, and when he was done, he turned to Gia. ‘Would you like to say something, Gia Raman?’ he asked.
Gia shook her head, biting back tears. She was overwhelmed, by both sadness and by the generosity and reverence displayed by all those present. Then, in a trembling voice, she said, ‘I have lost my parents, but I have gained a family.’
Then she hung her head and sobbed.
Later, on the airship back to Lo-Sai, Gia asked Zasha what the Terran translation of his eulogy was.
‘It is a poem called Volscia’s Lament,’ he said. ‘Volscia was Kashgar’s wife. Kashgar left her to lead his armies against Tassis, and Volscia killed herself. She sings:
Hail, solider, hail!
Where do you go?
I see the clouds of war gather.
To the defeated: death!
To the victors: death!
To those left behind: O, wretched long life!
To have known a moment of valour is worth all the years of living shame.
Leave me not, my love, but reforge me on the hot anvil of war and take me with you unto glory.
Spare me not the violence of battle;
I call for it, welcome it, beg for it!
With no weapon in my hand and no song in my heart,
What purer and more glorious end can there be?
War take me, silence my life!
And with the cool embers of my heart,
Forge the new dawn for those damned to live it.’
***
Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to Tim Johnson for beta-reading The Ascendancy War and Empire of the Fallen and for providing his sage advice in relation to a number of plot holes and character flaws. Those that stubbornly remain, like fat Golgronic rats nesting in a torpedo tube, are my oversight.
I would also like to thank Sophie Swan, William Smith, Kate Haigh, George Lockett, Kelvin Liew and Maung Thuta, for reasons which will be apparent to each of them.
Author’s Note
Thank you all for taking the time to read the Art of War trilogy. It has taken some four years to complete, and stands at just shy of half a million words. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed the journey. Thanks also to those of you who have reached out via email and provided me with your own thoughts and theories on the books. That you have engaged with the narrative in such a way is really rewarding.
