Empire of the Fallen, page 6
‘If I have to lock every fucking idiot in this galaxy away to let me get on with my job, I will,’ she snapped as Pitt opened the door for her.
‘Andrea,’ he said, nodding. He was wearing temperate fatigues and large black boots. His beret was tucked in his back pocket. Behind him, the baroque façade of Carrington Manor, the official presidential residence, loomed in the failing light.
‘I mean it,’ she said, stepping out into the cold. Her breath streamed away from her mouth in a cloud of vapour. ‘I feel like I’m losing my mind, Bill.’
Her shoes crunched into the gravel as she strode towards the front door. A visitor arriving even a few months ago would have been shown to a small selection of rooms right at the back of the house, where Constance had taken up residence overlooking the East Sea, leaving the rest of the mansion packed away under dust covers and tended to by robots. Since then, she had expanded and taken over the rest of it. Many of the rooms on the ground floor had been given over to SPECWAR, and the entire west wing was now home to the permanent legation of provari lords representing the Ascendant Feudality. Dozens of heavily armed Mantix-clad men and women ambled around the well-lit grounds. The tinny barks of dogs wearing olfactory enhancers could be heard echoing from the extensive gardens around the back of the property.
‘I saw the address,’ Pitt said when they were nearly through the door.
‘I expect you think I went too far?’ Constance snapped. Pitt was Old Colonies like so much of Special Warfare Division, and along with his pale complexion and dark, thinning hair, he also suffered from a maddening gentlemanliness and an engrained sense of fair play. That he could undertake some of the greyest, most ruthless and morally repugnant operations the UN demanded of him was a dichotomy she could not fathom.
Pitt shrugged. ‘Honestly, I don’t know how you do it,’ he said, surprising her. ‘Suicidal missions I can deal with, but a theatre full of politicians, count me out. I’d have probably shot someone.’
Constance snorted. ‘Believe me, I’d have liked to.’
She entered the main hallway and moved purposefully through the luxuriant corridors. They must have passed twenty or thirty SPECWAR operatives and provar, earning as many nods and salutes. Constance made sure to reciprocate each acknowledgement. This was her ‘enclave of Special Warfare operatives and provari advisors’ as Foster had put it. If she couldn’t make them feel valued, she truly was finished.
Their destination—a well-appointed meeting chamber on the ground floor—was already full by the time she arrived. Provari conversation, loud, oddly harmonic, occasionally brash, spilled out into the hallway. A parallelogram of yellow light slanted away from the threshold, flickering with shadows.
‘My lords,’ she said on entry and recited the Standard Imperial Greeting. There were six provar sitting down, each dressed in the white, green and gold robes of the Ascendant Feudality. None stood, but they all acknowledged her with their silence. They were a considerable way from friendship, but what had been a fledgling mutual respect had grown into a sort of begrudging trust. She recognised an’Yuen, the lord with whom she’d originally struck a deal bringing the war to an end. Two other key players, the Fleet Executors Godra lon’Voss and Exia en’Jago, reposed near the far wall. The other three she did not recognise immediately, though that in itself did not mean they hadn’t met.
‘Me present Anathar gan’Seke,’ an’Yuen said without preamble, struggling to effectively enunciate the difficult alien language. He gestured at one of the provar Constance didn’t recognise.
‘Madam President,’ gan’Seke said, standing. So flawless was his diction that Constance was briefly stunned to silence.
‘Executor gan’Seke,’ she said, clasping his hand.
‘Not executor,’ gan’Seke said, nictitating membranes flickering rapidly. ‘I am a… what you would call a professor, I suppose.’
Constance studied the alien. His grasp of Terran was reminiscent of that of the Xhevegans, banished provari apostates who had by necessity made their alliance with the UN and who, concordantly, had attempted to learn Terran. gan’Seke was even rarer than that, since he was a Folhourtian.
‘A professor,’ Constance said, stalling. She had no idea what to say now. ‘A professor where?’
gan’Seke’s ears twitched. ‘I lectured at the College of the Theocrats on Folhourt. I studied the ancient religions of all Tier Three races. I am well versed in the myths and legends of Anmet vos’Shan, the kaygryn scientist who discovered the routes across the Great Barrier.’
Constance nodded. She turned to Pitt, who nodded back, his expression one of approval. This was what they had been looking for: an expert in the religious texts. The fact that he spoke perfect Terran was a propitious bonus.
‘You speak our language remarkably well,’ Constance said.
gan’Seke nodded, and indicated his throat with a gnarled hand. ‘I lost two of my resonating chambers and a good deal of my jaw in an accident. My larynx fused in such a way as to be ideal for the enunciation of Terran.’
Constance looked closely at the alien’s neck and jawline. Provari medical capabilities rivalled their own, but even so, she could see a faint network of pink, subdermal scar tissue, like a river delta.
‘Well, if I may say so, Professor… for our purposes, it is a most fortuitous accident.’
‘Yes,’ gan’Seke said, inclining his head. ‘It has made communicating with my own species somewhat difficult though, as you can appreciate. I am something of a recluse, even by the standards of the College.’
< I wouldn’t have put it past these lot to have forcefully operated on him > Pitt transmitted via IHD-only message.
Constance tried to ignore it, but she had been thinking the same thing. Her flesh crawled.
‘I understand that you are to join us for the briefing tomorrow, regarding the Kaygryn Empire?’ Constance asked diplomatically. Some of the assembled lords made disgusted noises and muttered Ashgurn.
gan’Seke inclined his head. ‘I also understand that. My lords thought that both my knowledge and language capabilities would come in useful.’
‘Well, they were certainly right about that,’ Constance said, gesturing for the provar to sit.
They spoke for hours, well into the night, but she couldn’t shake what Pitt had said from her mind, and the rest of the meeting was spent with a growing feeling of terror.
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
‘But can you even find it in your heart to blame these people? If you lived in a gov-hab skyrise in the Bospen Wash with nothing more than your entitlement deed, would you not avail yourself of the limitless entertainment fantasies of VR?’
Drax Doyle, Human Democrat Secretary of State
VR debt. Ten months. Nearly a year of dreamtime, three weeks of real, spent in the sync. It was plenty of time to fall apart.
Gia Raman. Executor of Executor Jusla yen’Ghadri, the UN’s most feared and hated enemy, commander of legions of provar and entire fleets of Ascendancy ships. She’d put a bullet through his head at point-blank range. Her. Ex-Tier Two, her homeworld burned and its inhabitants slain. No roots, no ties, with an absurd amount of money from a grateful public and a Heroine of the Terran Hegemony medal awarded by Chief of the General Staff Algernon Foster himself.
It had all taken its toll, as she and others had predicted. The moment she was on Vargonroth, safe, the Ascendancy War already a memory for most, the deaths of her friends and family had plagued her. When her entire focus was her own survival, it had been easy to ignore. Then the long, lonely nights had come, safely tucked away in her hab, alone with her thoughts.
She had tried to make friends, but the UN public were as alien to her as the zhahassi. Their entire frame of reference was different. Their Terran was thickly accented and they spoke it at double speed. They were constantly hooked up to technologies of every description. Information was everywhere. Walking down any given street would trigger a thousand different advertisements, each clamouring madly for her attention. Her IHD constantly updated with breaking news, the latest trends, the must-have consumer goods. Everyone saved time by using the VR sync. Business meeting? Sync. Coffee catch up? Sync. First date? Sync.
It was easy to understand why. The monolithic towers of Arrengate, the largest metropolis on Vargonroth and the capital of the United Nations, were overbearing. Stepping out the door was an ordeal in and of itself. The air was saturated with sound and light. Robotically controlled flying vehicles zipped through the sky at manic speed. Thousands of people crammed the streets. Despite the air scrubbers, the atmosphere was thick with pollution of every kind. And the weather—the weather was abysmal. She was used to the tropical climes of Reya Vasar, its wide open green plains, its intolerably hot summers, its warm, wet winters. Arrengate was perpetually cold and grey. Freezing rain regularly lashed it. The sky was a perennial thunderhead. Everything seemed closed in, like a vast, thick forest of industry, technology and habitation.
Hiding away from it all, in the beginning, had been impossible. She’d been forced on to various talk shows—almost all conducted via VR sync—to discuss her roots, her background, and of course, Vonvalt. The latter was being touted as a stunning victory, and she was astonished at how little the portrayal of it to the general public actually matched the events of the day. The parts of her interviews where she talked about what actually happened were invariably edited from the broadcast—even when the broadcast was live. The technology was, to her, sorcery.
Her personal life, too, seemed to be a constant source of interest. Nothing was sacred. When she blushed about being asked for her top ten sex tips on live television, or what menstruation was like for Tier Two humans, the audience roared with laughter at her quaintness. The social mores of the UN were astonishingly loose. She would probably have been considered a slattern on ultraconservative Reya Vasar, where she had worn tight-fitting clothes and low-cut tops at school to attract the attentions of the opposite sex. In the UN, it was perfectly normal to walk down the street in entirely transparent garb. She was practically saintly in her chasteness by their standards, and they to her were repugnant, a clamouring mob. Genitals, breasts—these meant nothing. There was no censorship. The holos broadcast extreme violence—much of it real—and what Gia would have considered astoundingly hardcore pornography round the clock. Those she would have considered young children were considered adults. School concluded at the age of twelve, when most people had reached full intellectual maturity.
When it had died down—which had taken little more than a week—she had hidden away. The UN public was fickle, vapid, their interest transient. Liz Aker, long returned to the marines, had been right. She had been nothing more than the flavour of the month. They soon found someone else to focus on.
Using a combination of post-war resettlement grants and the money that she had been gifted, the Vargonroth Metropolitan Police Department had eventually put her up in a hab in Vonchester Heights, one of the wealthiest and most exclusive suburbs of Arrengate. Carrington Manor was only a few kilometres east. Despite the fact that the hab was on one of the most desirable plots of land in the United Nations, it was still very small, a three-room apartment part of a glossy black high-rise that looked out both over Arrengate itself and the grey East Sea. It had a bedroom, reception room and a bathroom. The VR sync was in the bedroom, a pill-shaped capsule fission-bolted to the wall.
She had used a VR sync once before, on the UNS Ramesses, where she had conducted two weeks’ worth of UNAF basic training. The experience had been, initially, deeply unsettling. The programs were so immersive and well-realised that they were practically a second version of real life, and all five senses could be replicated near-perfectly. It was why, she supposed, the military conducted so much of its training in virtual reality; the fear of being shot at—and the pain of being hit—could be replicated in an utterly convincing manner without any real physical risk to the participant.
There was the time perception, too. Days in the sync were minutes in real life. Weeks could be reduced to hours. Months became days. There was nothing more disorientating than spending two weeks on a planet, surrounded by virtual reality comrades, learning the ways and means of warfare, and then waking up less than an hour later in the bowels of a starship.
At first, she used the sync innocently enough. Interactive war games, which could be played either alone with VIs or with other people, were the most popular form of entertainment, but there were thousands of options. She could visit alien worlds and take interactive tours of the Zhahassi Commonwealth or the huge aristocratic estates on Earth, or take learning courses in a vast range of subjects. There were thrill rides too: she could fly like she was in a dream or dive to the bottom of an ocean and everything in between, the exhilaration and rush completely authentic.
After a day or two of real time, weeks of adjusted, she tired of these. It was amazing how quickly an overload of adrenaline could become boring, even after eighteen years of experiencing nothing like as exciting, and she became hungrier and hungrier for new experiences.
Like so many before her, she began to accumulate months of VR debt. Warnings of sync overuse started to greet her every time she logged in. She exited only to eat—too little—and use the toilet. She moved to shared worlds, and inexorably to the sordid but incredibly popular Ultraporn net. In what should have been a low point, she lost her virginity to a VI in a sync-generated bedroom, but the programming was so algorithmically responsive to her needs that subsequent dalliances with human-controlled avatars were never as satisfying.
The days began to blur together like a carousel spinning too quickly. IHD programs that enhanced the sexual experience in intense, mind-bending ways became de rigueur. Buoyed by an artificially maintained libido, she participated in increasingly pornographic encounters. Orgies of hundreds—thousands—of UN citizens was normal. Acts which were unthinkable became routine. She did things which should have been egregiously taboo.
Her time outside the sync was so rare that she was actually pulled from it involuntarily to drink some water. Her IHD was blaring with physiological alarms. She hadn’t left the apartment for weeks. She was bordering on dehydration and malnutrition. She stank. And it was in this sorry state that Warrant Officer First Class Elizabeth Aker eventually found her.
The bar was a dive, but that was the whole point. The thrill came from the danger. VI drug dealers lurked in the street’s darkened alcoves. Flickering holo signs teased of sordid experiences. The sounds of civilisation—traffic, shouted street conversation, the demented arcade sound of constant, in-your-face advertising—were worryingly distant. Here, where the towering slate-grey habs loomed like monolithic temples in the night, it was dangerously secluded.
Gia felt her pulse rise gratifyingly as she approached the bar. Her palms were sweating. The sync had already programmed her to feel heightened and tense, but sexually aroused. Men and women who fitted her new ideal paradigm had been slightly altered. They retained their attractiveness, but now they looked dangerous, scrappy, and ready for a fight. They would rob her just as quickly as they would sleep with her. Perhaps they would do both.
The bar was exactly as she had expected. Millennia of human evolution hadn’t led to any significant alterations in the format. A long, polished bar of chrome ran down the back wall, attended by a robotic barman. Interactive machines filled the walls. There was even a public VR sync. The whole place was ill-lit and smelled strongly of stale alcohol.
‘Nice touch,’ Gia muttered.
Most people, especially in the Ultraporn scenarios, rarely bothered with clothes, but the bar patrons that night had all been dressed in what the UN general public would recognise as ‘dangerous’: dark colours, concealed faces, weapons harnesses. It was illegal to carry weapons on almost all UN worlds, especially in places like Arrengate, but people, particularly gang members, still wore the harnesses. There was nothing illegal in wearing a harness after all.
‘Beer,’ Gia grunted at the robotic barman. She had learned not to be polite to the robots in the UN; being so always seemed to be hilarious to anyone within earshot.
The robot duly poured her a beer, and she paid with her implant creditline and took a sip.
‘You’re that girl,’ someone said from behind her.
She turned around. A woman was standing there, wearing a navy blue bodysuit and weapons rig. She could trace the curves of the woman’s body easily enough, but for Ultraporn, it wasn’t particularly revealing.
‘I’m what girl?’ Gia asked coyly. The definition on the woman was incredible. Even in the really lifelike sync programs, there was often some give on the graphics. Here, though, she could make out everything, every crease, every hair, every pigment. ‘You’re so clear,’ she said, tracing an index finger down the woman’s shoulder. ‘The definition… wow.’
‘Cute,’ the woman said. She didn’t seem aroused. She didn’t even seem amused.
They were drawing attention. She wondered when the people would start undressing. There must have been about ten or fifteen people in the bar, mostly men. How would they do it?
‘You’re the one who lidded that cob cunt. On Vonvalt. I watched you on UI two weeks ago,’ the woman continued.
‘I did,’ Gia said eventually. People often approached her in this way. She was a celebrity after all, however transient that particular accolade might be. Perhaps she should initiate? Take her top off?
No. This program seemed subtler. Despite her sync-enhanced libido and the drugs flowing through her bloodstream, she sensed there was something different about this scenario. They were going to make her work for it.
A few others were starting to close in now.
‘Yeah, I shot him,’ Gia said, flashing her eyes at the two men behind. They weren’t as attractive as she would have liked, but they seemed rugged enough. ‘He killed everyone on my planet.’
