Empire of the Fallen, page 8
Gia completed both signatures and handed back the clipboard. Zhang snatched it from her grip. ‘Go through that door, follow the yellow line.’ He waved the holo back on, and the hypersled broadcast resumed. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, nodding to Aker.
Aker turned to Gia. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, sternly. ‘He’s right. The ad is right. Remember you’re going to have to fight no matter what happens, so you may as well be fighting with the best. They’ll tell you you can leave whenever you want. That’s true, you can. But don’t. Do it for yourself. Do it for Reya Vasar. Do it for me. Complete the training.’
‘What’s Purg?’ Gia asked. Her palms were sweating.
‘Purgatory. Orbital training. It’s what being a marine is all about. You’ll spend nearly ten months’ VR-adjusted time in the sync, learning all the basics. Then they’ll ship you up to orbit to complete. Less than a month of real time, that’s all it takes. Then you’ll be a marine like me.’
Gia was still trying to decide whether that was a good or a bad thing when Aker straightened up, gripped her by the shoulder, and gave her one last grin.
‘See you in one month,’ she said, and left with what Gia would come to realise was deliberate speed.
Gia turned.
‘Through there,’ Zhang said again, not taking his eyes from the holo. He was pointing to the door next to the desk.
Gia took a deep breath and went through.
A DEVIL UNKNOWN
‘Yes, many civilians did die, and I warned the then deputy strike commander that exactly that would happen. But then learning a complex network of tribal, familial and religious loyalties takes time and effort and the DSC didn’t want to know. I told them that until someone from this office went and sat down with the UNIS attaché on sig’Nava and actually attempted to learn what we were dealing with, two things would happen: the kaygryn there would remain an unknown quantity, and we would all have blood on our hands.’
UN Marines Colonel Max Lynch, giving evidence on the sig’Nava Massacre
Smith had been waiting on the dusky Alpine slopes for thirty minutes when the V14 Manticore appeared above him. Any other craft would have tripped the estate’s perimeter alarm long before and provided him with a personal IHD notification, but this Manticore’s electronic warfare pods easily overcame the estate’s security systems and expunged itself from the registers. There would be no record of this flight on any logs, public or private.
The journey was brief, and Smith was stepping out on to one of the terminal platforms at Fleet Command North Africa less than twenty minutes later. It was darker in this part of the world, though the sun was still low in the sky, giving the air a dusty orange glow.
He shouldered his bag and APR and climbed into a driverless jeep that had a turquoise chevron and his name hovering over it. There was no-one around. The space elevators were in operation, and the hot evening air occasionally trembled with the distant rumble of a launch, but the whole complex had an eerie, abandoned feel to it.
In another five minutes, the jeep had deposited him in front of the unremarkable grey concrete building which sat on top of EFFECT’s subterranean Pinnacle facility. He walked through the main doors, his footsteps rapping hollowly against the concrete floor. Inside the huge open atrium, he was challenged by a bowel-loosening electronic foghorn and several SPHINX autosentries, but they all shut up quickly enough after a brief bout of LRIS sniffed out his credentials.
An elevator opened at the end of the hallway, empty and featureless. He walked inside, the doors closed, and he felt a gut-dropping swoop as it descended into the depths of the facility. When the doors opened again, they revealed a small, featureless room with a VR sync at one end. He slung the duffel and APR to the floor and entered the capsule.
After a brief babble of data chatter, he awoke to find himself standing on the top row of a Hellenistic amphitheatre on a pleasant summer’s evening. Blossom fluttered on a warm breeze, and green hills speckled with columned villas sloped away and ended in a wide, crescent-shaped bay of topaz water. The sky, marked only by a band of fluffy white cloud, was deep blue and drenched in sun.
‘Melbourne Smith, United Nations Special Warfare Division,’ an automated voice announced out of the ether. Several figures in the bottom of the theatre looked up. He recognised the President of the United Nations immediately, and Bill Pitt, the legendary EFFECT commander whom he’d met before. The rest seemed to be provari executors, wearing—fittingly, given their surroundings—togas of white, green and gold.
He sighed as he walked down the steps. Behind the cluster of figures below, a large rectangular holo ten metres across swam with graphics and text.
‘They love their outlandish meeting rooms, don’t they?’ Smith remarked to Pitt as he approached.
Pitt took his proffered hand and shook it. ‘It’s an interrogation suite,’ he said, making a show of taking in the view, ‘hosted on Pinnacle’s data core.’
Smith wrinkled his nose. ‘Not sure I’ll ever have the measure of these UN types,’ he concluded. He nodded subtly towards the President. ‘Constance?’
‘Yeah,’ Pitt said. ‘It’s her brainchild. She’ll lead some of the briefing.’
Smith opened his mouth to speak, but before he could voice his disquiet, Constance had broken away from the knot of aliens and was approaching him.
‘Mr Smith,’ she said, smiling warmly. He was less impressed than he felt he should have been. Although doubtless a handsome woman, and young for a president at seventy, she was disappointingly ordinary. But then, with the rich, tumultuous and above all lengthy history of the Old Colonies, it was hard to view anyone from the UN, even the President herself, as anything other than an upstart.
‘Ma’am,’ he said gruffly, shaking her hand.
‘I trust your journey was all right?’ she asked.
‘Mercifully brief,’ Smith said, ‘a few thousand klicks.’
‘And how is the Duchy these days?’
‘The same as it always has been: quiet, old-fashioned, ticking over.’
Constance nodded knowingly. ‘Well, thank you for being here. You come very highly recommended. Your exploits with the kaygryn on Vonvalt made for impressive reading. With your track record of successful operations and your fluency in Argish, there was no doubt in Commander Pitt’s mind as to who should run this operation.’
Smith was too intrigued to properly accept the compliment. ‘And just what is this operation?’ he asked instead. Pitt winced, but Constance, who had always preferred the company of straight-talking military personnel, didn’t seem to mind.
‘We’re just waiting on a few others, Mr Smith, and then we’ll get started.’
‘Who are we waiting for?’ Smith persisted.
‘Civilians,’ Pitt said. ‘They’ll be here shortly.’
Smith nodded, taking the hint. ‘I’ll wait over here, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Of course,’ Constance said with a smile, and Smith excused himself and ambled over to the edge of the amphitheatre to mull over what he’d just heard.
The rest of the mission team arrived within fifteen minutes: Zavian Yano, a diplomatic celebrity he recognised from the news; UNIS Special Agent Lyra Staerck; and a kaygryn called Rutai, who was apparently a blockade runner, mercenary and ex-Federal militiaman. When they were all assembled, Constance bade everyone sit along the bottom few rows of the amphitheatre.
‘Thank you all for coming at short notice,’ she said when everything was ready. ‘No doubt by now you will have all heard of the Kaygryn Empire and you will know something of the nature of the threat we face.’ Smith noticed that one of the provar was quietly talking to the other three, translating everything Constance was saying.
‘We are putting into place, with our provari friends’—Constance indicated the provar, one of whom nodded—‘a programme of measures to safeguard as many people as we can. Worlds near the old crusade lines will be evacuated, humans and provar shall be resettled, civilians will be pressed into service in vast numbers, and we will turn every industrial facility in the galaxy towards military production. We must bring ourselves up to an unprecedented total war footing. But we also need intelligence. We need contingencies.’ She shrugged. ‘In essence, we need a backup.
‘We currently have information available to us which we have never had before: that contained within the Zecad. Thanks again to our provari colleagues, we have access to the navigable corridors of space between the Milky Way and Andromeda. For the first time in the history of the human race, we have the means to leave the galaxy.’ She clenched her right hand into a fist. ‘This is where you all come in. We will send you across the Barrier and deep into the Kaygryn Empire. Using your mission expertise, your military acumen, and all of your resourcefulness, you will find out what they’re doing. I want to know what they plan to do, and most importantly of all, I want to know how we can stop them. They may be more numerous and more technologically advanced, but they’re not immortal. They’re flesh and blood like the rest of us.’
She paused, wringing her hands. Her eyes searched Smith’s, Lyra’s, and Yano’s faces.
‘I have picked each of you based on your abilities. I have asked you—I have commanded you—to undertake this mission. None of you have a choice. I have been open about this. Some of you, perhaps all of you, will resent me. But please, think of the UN. Think of the human race. Think of Tier Three, Tier Two, Tier One. Millions, hundreds of millions, billions will die in the coming weeks and months. There is reason to think that the Kaygryn War of Reclamation is a war of extermination as much as anything else. There will be nowhere to hide. If you were not doing this, you would be fighting out in the trenches of a hundred UN territories instead. So please, reflect on how important this is, think about the lives you will be saving, the civilisations you will be saving, and I hope that will go some way to securing your investment in what we’re trying to do here.’
There was a stunned silence. It was one of the most impressive, most impassioned speeches Smith had ever heard. His new colleagues seemed equally taken aback. He could feel his pulse rising. He was fired up. Suddenly, he couldn’t wait to get stuck in. This was a cause he could fight for, the very survival of their human galaxy. It was all he could do not to applaud such rousing oratory.
Constance cleared her throat. It seemed she herself was not immune to the power of her own words.
‘My colleagues within the Coalition, and the various alien legations and planetary governors which form the government of this galaxy, are too caught up playing with the politics of it all. They cannot see the nature of the threat we face. They cannot see that by abandoning the Ascendancy to this ominous, powerful force, we simply destroy any chance of victory we have. They will dismiss the Kaygryn Empire as fairy tale, even though we have people who have seen and even conversed with their agents right here in this very briefing.’
Smith looked to his right, to see that the UNIS agent, Staerck, was nodding.
‘They would deny their existence even as our worlds burned around us. I will not let that happen.’ Her voice had fallen in volume. To Smith, it sounded as though she might be about to cry. ‘I must not let it happen. So, what are we to do? First of all, I would like to invite Anathar gan’Seke of the Ascendant Feudality to speak to us on the history of the threat and the Empire as it now stands. Professor?’
Professor? Smith thought to himself. He watched as Constance gave the floor to one of the older-looking provar, who drew his robes up about him. In the amphitheatre, it was as if some alien parody of a Greek play was about to take place.
‘Thank you,’ the old provar rumbled, and Smith, Yano and Lyra all exchanged glances. The alien’s diction was flawless, a rarity that never failed to stun any native Terran-speakers. Only Rutai was unmoved; the kaygryn was too busy studying the Argish translation on the huge holo.
‘Thousands of years ago, the provar and the kaygryn reached a level of biological complexity and intelligence that led them to form an unlikely coalition. Our primitive hunter-gatherer societies quickly coalesced into a working, symbiotic civilisation. Over centuries, we co-operated in all manner of things and formed intricate civic bonds.
‘Exactly one thousand and eleven years ago, a kaygryn philosopher and eminent polymath called Anmet vos’Shan discovered that there were routes across what you would call the Khāli Barrier. Like the native species of this galaxy, we had long puzzled over this dark mass of intergalactic exotic energies that our jump drives could not penetrate. vos’Shan realised that, through the application of some very complex mathematics and his deep, genius understanding of astrography, one could predict where passable routes would appear, vast corridors of space that fluctuated and writhed like snakes. They would appear and disappear within hours or days.
‘With a delegation of kaygryn and provar, vos’Shan led an expedition to your galaxy. He discovered hundreds of worlds, untouched by civilisation, ripe for the taking. Over the course of decades, he dedicated his life to unlocking these worlds, seeding them with kaygryn and provar—the humble beginnings of the now impotent Kaygryn Federacy and the vast Provar Ascendancy. For years, the exploration of this galaxy, our galaxy, was conducted in peace and in the spirit of scientific discovery. But as with many civilisations, the corrupting influence of religion soon led to quarrels.
‘Our religion, the details of which I am not permitted to share with you, stems from the ancient belief in vanash-shen: Ascendancy. Where two races of equal strength, intelligence and technological competence evolve and expand within the same system—well, it is not a great leap of imagination to see that any religion that these races share will one day predict the ascendancy of one over the other. For a thousand years, as religion dwindled in importance, it was an inconvenient myth that was easily ignored for the greater good. But now that the kaygryn could claim such a great feat of astral engineering, there were mutterings that it was they who would achieve vanash-shen.
‘Over the course of vos’Shan’s career, the mutterings grew in volume. Those who had previously taken no interest in the state religion began to advocate the political application of its principles. Mutterings turned to arguments, arguments to open conflict. There was fighting in the streets. Once peaceful households turned on one another. The political rhetoric called for violence. It was we, the provar, who made the first move.
‘On Folhourt, our sacred homeland, a group of provar captured vos’Shan and his scientific team—male and female kaygryn with whom he had worked for decades. In a cold, isolated temple which would come to be known as the Zecadach, surrounded by plains of rock carved by the ice-cold Ecriotha Rac, the provar tortured vos’Shan for his information. Only he and his team knew the astrographics required to traverse the Barrier, and they had never made it public.
‘After days, it became clear that neither vos’Shan nor his loyal team would ever share the information. In a fit of fury, a provar called yen’Grissa jabbed a data syringe into vos’Shan’s head and hijacked his mindstate. The rudimentary technology was able to absorb much of the information from the kaygryn’s brain, but in order to fill in any gaps lost through the process, they imprisoned and data syringed his entire team, too.
‘When provari colonies across the galaxy learned of what had happened, they turned on their brothers and butchered and enslaved the kaygryn. In Andromeda, the kaygryn were whipped up into a fury and began a systematic programme of genocide against the provar. In the lull, both sides began to construct vast fleets, and drafted armies to accompany them. Both sides claimed to have achieved vanash-shen. The provar declared jihad against the kaygryn; the kaygryn swore a holy vow to recover vos’Shan’s body and reclaim this lost galaxy.
‘After nearly a year of building up sufficiently robust mathematics to navigate the Barrier, the first holy crusade fleet left Folhourt to strike the so-called Kaygryn Empire. Legends tell us that the attack was devastating. The kaygryn ships were obliterated in their docks. Entire kaygryn worlds were razed. By luck alone, the kaygryn were able to repulse the attack, but from then on, they never sufficiently recovered to come back across the Barrier themselves to attack the Ascendancy. They have been defending the Empire for a thousand years, trapped by the weight of our numbers.
‘Now, thanks to the capture of the Zecad by your people and the destruction of the broadcast array, the crusade fleets have been wiped out. vos’Shan certainly had followers in Andromeda who knew his work sufficiently well to reconstruct his genius. The kaygryn know the routes better than we do. All they have been waiting for is a respite, time to recover, convalesce, regroup. While we have been warring, they will have been preparing.’
Silence fell on the amphitheatre. The audience was mesmerised. To hear the legend told so fluently and comprehensively was enthralling in and of itself. No-one, even the most learned UN scholars, knew anything more than what amounted to an educated guess. They had just been made privy to some of the most sought-after information in the galaxy, second only to the contents of the Zecad.
Constance stepped forward after a few moments of quiet.
‘Thank you, Professor gan’Seke,’ she said, smiling warmly, and then, slightly louder and in a way that made Zavian Yano wince, ‘and thank you, my lords, for sharing this information with us. We know how special it is to you, how important. It demonstrates that we trust one another.’
One of the lords made a gesture which Smith could not decipher, and Constance turned to them.
‘Commander Pitt has been speaking with gan’Seke and Executors en’Jago and lon’Voss about the state of the Kaygryn Empire now, based on the last known crusade intelligence. Commander?’
Pitt stepped forward a few paces so that he was standing where Constance had been.
‘Right, listen in,’ he said in his pragmatic, military manner. With a few discreet gestures, the large holo display shifted to some diagrams that looked a little like a family tree. ‘The Kaygryn Empire is ruled by—you guessed it—an emperor. The current Emperor is called vun’Daal the eleventh. He is supported by three circles of advisors: the Conclave Militant, for military matters, the Conclave Ascendant, for religious matters, and the Conclave of Will, for political matters. Each advisor holds the rank and status of executor. They form the empire’s governing mind and will.
