Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 45
‘The crusade fleets.’
‘The kaygryn purge the provar from Andromeda in retaliation. It’s straight up genocide. Both sides claim to be Ascendant. The provar declare jihad against the Kaygryn Empire. The Kaygryn Empire swears to reclaim the Milky Way. They fight their way to stalemate, and…’ Haig shrugged. ‘They’ve been at it ever since.’
David regarded him in silence long after he had finished, but Haig ignored him, his own attention on the roiling sea. He was unsure how he felt. Unburdened was too simplistic – as was guilty, though as his passion for the pure narrative died away, he certainly regretted telling it to a man who essentially represented his enemy. But who had he betrayed? The UN or the kaygryn? Was it possible to betray both? He was already responsible for the deaths of thousands of his own people, though even something as objectively amoral as that produced in him a dichotomy of elation and nausea. He also bore collective responsibility for Hadan’s Reach. Everyone in the UN who used an IHD or took an intersolar flight had the blood of the kaygryn on their hands.
‘Who knows this?’ David asked eventually. ‘If what you’re saying is true, why don’t the kaygryn in this galaxy know about this… vast empire in Andromeda?’
‘The provar captured and enslaved all the seeded kaygryn in the Milky Way. They’ve spent centuries breeding the intelligence out of them. Anything that remains, any lingering knowledge, is passed off as religion or myth. A lot can be forgotten, given enough time.’
‘What about the provar? There’s billions of them. This information must have leaked.’
‘Why? The UN has billions of citizens. Our society is as open with information as it is possible to be, and yet even now there are things the government knows that the population never will.’
‘What about returning crusade fleets?’
Haig scoffed at that. ‘The crusade fleets don’t return. Most ships are destroyed the second they exit the Barrier.’
David fixed him with a stare. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right. Say all of what you’ve just told me is true. Where does your UN–Ascendancy war fit in to all of this? You felt bad about Hadan’s Reach? Is that it?’
‘We’re all responsible for Hadan’s Reach.’ Haig picked up a pebble and flung it into the sea. The splash effect was remarkably good. ‘I hate the arrogance of Tier Three. I hate it. The provar and the UN. We use the kaygryn because it’s easy, because they can’t fight back. We let the provar kill them by the thousand because we need their rare elements. Would we have ever signed Hadan’s Reach if we’d known about the Kaygryn Empire?’
‘You’re insane,’ David said. ‘This… Hasani is a talented fake. He’s duped you.’
‘The Ascendancy cannot fight a war on two fronts. It will have to split the crusade lines to defeat the UN. It will buy the kaygryn enough time to gain the upper hand. They will retake the Barrier.’
‘You would sacrifice every human in this galaxy for the sake of some ridiculous alien myth?’
‘Do you know what the Kaygryn Empire calls their war?’
‘Stop it. Tell me the truth,’ David said. The calm façade was well and truly gone. Now he was just another angry EFFECT man shouting at him.
‘They call it the Reclamation. It is holier to them than you can imagine. And the answer is yes; I would sacrifice every human in this galaxy. But it won’t be the provar that kill them. It will be the kaygryn.’
‘Enough!’ David snapped.
Something happened. The environment switched off, and Haig was back on the steel table in the basement of Pinnacle. The black pyramid resumed its silent, formless overwatch.
He exhaled the breath he had taken the moment before his unconsciousness.
The room was silent.
He was paralysed and alone.
He began to laugh.
*
They were enveloped in fire. There were four provar in the tunnel entrance, each armed with mid-range plasma rifles. The bulky black weapons made horribly loud whining noises as they fired, each shot like a thunderclap followed by a metallic screeching sound that made Courte want to jam his hands over his ears.
He flicked his railgun to full auto and emptied the magazine in the direction of the provar, while Fitzroy grabbed Siun and dragged him away from the blistering haze of phosphorescent blue bolts and towards the far side of the chamber. They were utterly exposed, and without functioning exoskeletons, they were relying on old-fashioned muscle power alone.
‘Moving!’ Courte shouted, as Fitzroy turned and laid down the next bout of covering fire. All three of their railguns were only functioning on chemprop rounds now. They chattered away like ancient machine guns, laying down lightning-white bands of enfilading fire.
‘Ah – ah! Fuck! I’m hit! Fucking fuck!’ Fitzroy shouted. Courte turned just in time to see him topple over, his left leg below the knee sliced free by a scythe-like plasma round. The wound had partially cauterised, leaving little blood, but their Mantix and IHD trauma subroutines were not functioning. The man would soon lapse into shock without treatment.
‘Siun!’ Courte shouted, his railgun already soaring towards him. The Xhevegan snatched it deftly out of the air and, wielding them both, unleashed a twin stream of whickering fire while Courte dragged Fitzroy up and draped him over his shoulder.
‘Christ,’ he grunted as the surplus weight of the Captain’s muscle-stacked frame, Mantix and exoskeleton pressed on his shoulders. Siun had done a good job of making the provar duck for cover, but they still had a lot of open ground around them. It would not take the Folhourtians long to stop, take a breath and actually aim at them. At that point, whenever it came, they would all be killed.
Courte began to hiss rhythmically with each step, focussing his energy on his enhanced quadriceps, forcing himself onwards, thinking back to basic training and the many thousands of hours since then spent on PT. Fitzroy managed to squeeze off a few shots as Siun reloaded both his and Courte’s railguns, before the Xhevegan resumed his perishing salvo of covering fire. Siun wasn’t even running any more, just walking backwards like a Goliath with both vambrace-mount ordnance points on full auto.
‘Head for the FTL array!’ Courte shouted. The array was not far now, perhaps a hundred metres, and he could clearly make out the event horizon situated at the apex of the dome – an impossibly black circle three metres in diameter. Below it was a comms beacon receiving all the signals from the enslaved kaygryn around the hall. As they neared, the effects of the FTL array could be clearly felt; Courte’s hair was standing on end, his mouth tasted like copper and his chest felt weird, like his heart rate was being interfered with.
‘I’m going to die,’ Fitzroy announced as they neared the beacon. Courte grimaced. Despite the intense heat of the plasma shot, there were plenty of blood vessels in his leg which had not been cauterised, and a long trail of glossy crimson traced their journey from the man’s severed shin.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Courte lied. Traumatic amputation required much more sophisticated medical packages than those they carried on their Mantix. They had them, of course – several crates’ worth with the team by the temple entrance, but they might as well have been on Vargonroth.
They reached the FTL array. The incoming fire grew more sporadic the closer they got – something which Courte had banked on. The aliens would not risk shooting at them now.
‘Siun – tourniquet, now,’ he barked, laying Fitzroy down on the floor. Siun tossed him his rifle back, and he caught it, bringing the weapon up. The Folhourtians were not standing in cover any more; instead, they just stood at the far end of the hall, weapons half-stowed, evidently arguing among themselves if the rapidity and pitch of their voices was anything to go by.
Courte immediately set to work, bringing out all the explosives he was carrying in his webbing. He had a handful of microgrenades the size of breath mints, one micromortar shot, a block of high-yield plastic explosive and the remainder of his chemprop rounds which lay in neat coils in a box at the back of his waist. He set them down on the floor, and, using the plastic explosive as a binding agent, mashed all of the remaining ordnance into it until he had one large wedge that he could stick to the side of the array. From another pouch he produced a remote detonator, one that would function irrespective of his fragged IHD. He pressed the metal contacts into the ball of explosives and then pressed it firmly against the side of the array. Once he was sure it had adhered, he turned his attention back to Siun, who was performing perfunctory first aid on Fitzroy. The Xhevegan had peeled back the seared Mantix as best he could. The nanogel matrix which formed the Mantix base layer was oozing free like the armour itself was bleeding luminescent orange blood.
‘Tighter,’ Courte said, watching as Siun applied the tourniquet. The alien obliged him, pulling the cord so tight the muscles on his arm began to bulge. The constant, trickling blood flow from Fitzroy’s leg slowed to a drip and then stopped completely.
‘Stay with us, Fitz,’ Courte said, ignoring the sporadic fire hissing through the air around them. He crouched down next to his second-in-command and lifted a small flap on his Mantix breastplate. Underneath, a small, battery-powered heart rate monitor showed the man’s pulse to be both slow and weak.
‘Shit,’ he murmured, then flinched slightly as Siun unleashed a long burst of fire in the direction of their assailants. At the far end of the hall, he could hear the Folhourtians bellowing their anger.
‘Commander,’ Siun said, searching his Mantix for another magazine of ammunition. Frustrated, he dropped the rifle to the floor. ‘What do we do now?’
Courte looked about the hall. There was nowhere to go that he could see. They were boxed in, alone, with no comms or electronics or ammunition, facing a fanatical enemy on foreign and hostile territory.
They also had hostage the greatest and most valuable artefact in the history of the Ascendancy.
‘We need to negotiate,’ he said.
Siun looked at the Folhourtians, then back at Courte. He nodded slowly. ‘I will do what I can,’ he said.
Courte grimaced. ‘Here,’ he said, unstrapping his sidearm and handing it to Siun. The Xhevegan checked over the pistol and manually thumbed off the safety.
‘If they take me, destroy it,’ Siun said. ‘They will kill me either way. Do not try and bargain for my life.’
Courte nodded. ‘Good luck,’ he said.
‘Thank you. It has been an honour to serve with the UN.’
Siun turned away, bellowing something to the Folhourtians at the far end of the hall. There was a pause of a few seconds while the sporadic fire died down, followed by some distant, animated conversation. Siun roared a few more things in FP before advancing towards the Folhourtians with his arms raised.
Courte turned back to Fitzroy. ‘Don’t worry, Fitz. Siun is going to get us out of here.’
‘I… can’t see,’ Fitzroy murmured.
‘Just stay awake,’ Courte replied. He squinted into the distance as Siun reached the enemy line. Three more had come out from cover now so that all seven were lined up with their weapons aimed squarely at Siun like a firing squad. They were too far away to hear, though judging by their body language they were not happy. Siun still had the rail pistol in his hand. He wondered how many the Xhevegan could take out, if he was quick.
His optics were on full zoom but that didn’t mean much given all the interference. Siun was about ten metres in front of them now. He watched him gesticulating, pointing back at him and Fitzroy, making an explosion with his hands.
‘It’s going to be okay, Fitz,’ he murmured. ‘We’ll get you out of here.’ He looked over to see the man staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling, expired.
Siun was still talking to the Folhourtians, and for a moment, Courte entertained the notion that they might actually survive – until he spotted something a hundred metres to the left of the group of provar. It was the tiniest hint of movement, the smallest glint of light off a weapon, but he knew what it was, as clear as day.
‘Siun!’ he roared as loudly as he could. Seconds later, the Folhourtians shot him through the forehead, and Courte was punched backwards as a phase bolt blew his arm clean off at the shoulder.
Luckily, it wasn’t the arm carrying the detonator.
‘Fuck you!’ was the only epitaph he managed, before he destroyed the FTL array and himself with it.
EMPIRE OF THE FALLEN
‘One day war will become obsolete. All we need to do as a species is stop inventing new reasons to wage it.’
Xhevegan dissident Alourani Akeck
He woke up to the sound of screaming. Screaming people, screaming engines. His eyes were gummed shut, and his nose and mouth were plugged with tubes, leaving his aural sense horribly accentuated. The searing, soul-piercing shrieks dragged him from his brain-weary unconsciousness and back into the harsh light of the real world.
It was the worst possible awakening. Every muscle in his body seemed to have utterly atrophied, making even the slightest movements painful and exhausting. He could feel tubes running all the way down his oesophagus and trachea, a nauseating sensation that stimulated his gag reflex and caused his heart rate to spike. The source of the screaming must have noticed something at that point because he was suddenly aware of a presence next to him, a woman by the faint smell of her perfume.
If it was possible to reek of fear, she would have done. As he waited as patiently as he could for her to extricate the tubes from his mouth and nose, he could sense her jerky, flustered movements. Her hands, on the few occasions when they made contact with his bare skin, were clammy with sweat. The biggest tell, though, was her breath. Every exhalation was ragged, shaky and uncontrolled.
The tubes came out, along with a lot of accumulated fluid that his beleaguered body was all too eager to reject. He vomited it out weakly, feeling the hot ejecta cover his chin, throat and chest.
‘Oh God,’ the woman said in a panicked voice. He felt a cold, rough flannel being rubbed vigorously over the affected areas and desperately tried to open his eyes.
Another scream tore through what he presumed was a trauma unit, the unmistakeable shriek of hypersonic engines cutting through the atmosphere not a few hundred metres above them. This in turn elicited another scream from the woman fussing over him, which caused him to murmur pathetically.
‘Anna! Come on, we need to go!’ shouted another woman’s voice from the door.
‘He’s waking up!’ Anna replied from next to him. ‘I – can we… just leave him?’
He didn’t know what was going on, but one thing he certainly did know was that he didn’t want to be left.
‘Mmmmmaaaauuhhhhhhh,’ he mumbled through dry, cracked lips, trying to wave his arms. Something that sounded worryingly like an explosion boomed from far away.
‘President Constance said that Pavonis wouldn’t be hit,’ the woman next to him was babbling. ‘She said that we wouldn’t be hit but they’re here; how could they have been so wrong? They must have known!’
‘Anna,’ the slightly further away woman said levelly, ‘we need to go. We only put his heart and lungs back in yesterday afternoon. He won’t last ten minutes out there.’
More engines, more screams. He could hear rapid footsteps thumping through the corridor outside. People running scared. Another series of distant explosions.
‘Anna,’ the woman persisted. There was a trace note of panic in her voice now. ‘You saw what they did to Trinity. That was a month ago. Remember what Constance said then? She said they would respect the Tier-Three War Accords. And did they?’
The woman next to him was crying now. ‘No,’ she sniffed. She must have been young. His guess was that she was a TU-tech, while the woman at the door was probably a doctor.
‘So let’s go. You can’t help him.’
‘He tried to save us all! Don’t you even know who this is?’
The doctor sighed. Her desire to leave was palpable. ‘Of course I know who he is,’ she replied, exasperated. ‘Hell, most of them probably do. But we can’t help him. If you stay here you will die, or worse.’
‘Mmmmmmm,’ was all he managed from the mentally screamed ‘Don’t you fucking leave me.’
‘Doctor Lynn – shit, Anna,’ – a man’s voice now, breathless. ‘What are you both doing here?’
‘Special Envoy Yano has just come to,’ Lynn replied.
‘Shit,’ the new arrival said. ‘Shit.’
‘We can’t leave him,’ Anna said.
‘We have to. Pavonis Met Police just issued a planet-wide evacuation order. The provar are allowing CDCCs to leave for the next sixty minutes, and then they start shooting.’
‘They can’t kill civilians,’ Lynn protested. ‘Fuck, what is wrong with them?’
‘There’s no such thing as a civilian to the provar,’ the man replied. ‘I’m sorry, both, but I have to go. I can’t wait for you. Christ, I have a family to think of.’
‘I’m coming too,’ Lynn announced. ‘Anna, come on.’
‘No,’ Anna said, somewhere between petulant child and a noble TU-tech who took the Hippocratic Oath admirably seriously. ‘He nearly died trying to save us all. I won’t leave him now.’
There was a brief silence, punctuated by the sounds of distant – but closing – warfare.
‘Oh, God,’ he heard Lynn say, followed by what sounded like crying and embracing.
‘Doctor Lynn,’ the man urged from the door.
‘Please be careful,’ Lynn said. ‘Here, take this.’
‘Thanks,’ Anna replied in a shaky voice, as if she couldn’t quite believe they were letting her stay on her own. ‘I will try and make the evacuation, I promise.’
‘Okay,’ Lynn said. It was the guilt-relieving panacea she was clearly after. ‘I’ll see you soon.’
They embraced one last time, then Lynn and the man left.
