Empire of the Fallen, page 9
‘The Imperial government is based on a planet called Myaxomon. According to our provari friends, the Imperial Palace is the largest structure in Andromeda, and from it, the empire controls over five hundred worlds and hundreds of sentient races along with them. There is no Tier Three, or Tier Two; there is only the Kaygryn Empire and the conquered.’
The holo focus shifted again, this time showing a star map of Andromeda. It was woefully incomplete.
‘Known or knowable exits to the Barrier are under constant guard by both kaygryn warships and star forts.’ Graphic representations of both appeared on the holo. ‘From what I understand, which is very little, the entrances and exits are relatively stable; it is the corridors of intergalactic space in between which can fluctuate by hundreds of lightyears over the course of a few hours. Getting in is not the problem, and neither is getting out. It’s the jumps in between that need to be carefully managed.’
Smith raised his hand.
‘Question,’ Pitt said, pointing to him. Everyone looked over.
‘If the exits are guarded, how will we get through undetected?’
Pitt nodded. ‘The voidbreaker you will be taking will be fitted with the very latest in refraction shielding. Given that the empire has been looking for entire crusade fleets in the past, we anticipate that getting one small refrac’d ’breaker through will be much less of a challenge.’
‘So we’re counting on them not noticing us?’
‘Correct.’
‘Right,’ Smith said, raising an eyebrow.
‘That’s about all we know on the Kaygryn Empire,’ Pitt said. There was no trace of apology in his voice. He’d undertaken so many suicidal, hopeless missions off the back of some very shaky intelligence that he no longer had any sympathy for those being under-informed. ‘Nothing, right? The fact of the matter is, team, we’re going in blind. The provar have spent years fighting these guys and even they can’t tell us much. What they do know has been pieced together from stray comms and broadcast programming from kaygryn star forts, which has allowed them to build up, anecdotally, a picture of the present state of the empire. Everything else is conjecture. The crusade fleets get pounded the second they exit the Barrier. It doesn’t give them long to learn about the enemy.’
There was an uncomfortable silence. Smith had hoped, listening to gan’Seke’s story, that a detailed breakdown of the empire was coming: their fleets, their armies, their culture, their worlds. Instead, a growing feeling of unease took root. He may have been a talented operative, but in many ways that made him more risk-averse than the common soldier. This so-called briefing was no more than vague context.
‘The fact of the matter is,’ Pitt continued, ‘this will be as much about gathering information about them as it will be finding a way to stop them. You’ll need to learn about them, their ways, their military systems, their politics, their religion, and when you’ve done that, you’ll know how they can be stopped.’ If they can be stopped, he didn’t say. ‘Question,’ he said, nodding to Staerck.
‘What, uh, equipment will we be taking with us? Assuming we find a way to stop them.’
‘Given that you will be travelling as Imperial kaygryn, with the attendant appearance and language abilities, we would hope to get some kind of negotiated peace. We can’t tell you how to do that, but if you can make contact with key people, or people of influence, more’s the better. Gauge the mood; how do the public view the war? Many have lived and died under the threat of the provari crusade fleets, so we can assume it will be a topic of constant, open debate. If it is, there will be a dissenting voice. Do they simply want it all to stop? If so, we can certainly guarantee that. Do they want revenge? Well, that’s highly likely, but there will still be kaygryn who are less certain. Ask around.’
‘So we’re to reveal who we are?’ Yano asked.
Pitt shrugged. ‘If you think it would help. If it will stop them coming, or attacking us, then you have authority to speak on behalf of the UN and the Ascendancy. What we are trying to do is stop them. If we can’t stop them, stall them. If you can’t stall them, start blowing them up.’
‘So you are going to give us weapons?’ Staerck asked.
‘Yes. You will be given a comprehensive suite of weaponry including world-ending weaponry—high-yield nuclear warheads, crust-busting munitions and viral loads.’
‘How do you know the viral loads will work?’
‘They work on the kaygryn in this galaxy. The genome is identical.’
There was a silence. Eventually, Smith, who had been turning something over in his mind for a few minutes and hadn’t been paying much attention to Pitt’s recent remarks, raised his hand.
‘Mr Smith.’
‘Sir… you said we’ll be travelling as Imperial kaygryn. What exactly does that mean?’
Pitt cleared his throat. ‘You heard Professor gan’Seke, about the Zecad?’
‘Yes.’
‘The provar have the technology to download Ms Staerck’s and Mr Yano’s mindstates into the kaygryn bodies inside.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Smith murmured. ‘Will that even work?’
‘If it doesn’t, Mr Smith, we’ll know soon enough.’
Smith looked over to the pair of them with a newfound respect. Both looked back with grim, resigned expressions on their faces.
‘So Yano, Staerck, and Rutai will be… mingling?’ Smith asked.
‘Yes to Yano and Staerck,’ Pitt said. ‘Rutai will be acting as a language consultant and will stay on the ’breaker with you.’
‘I would be careful,’ gan’Seke said from away to the right, drawing everyone’s attention. ‘The reason your troops in the Zecad could not understand anything they intercepted from the comms arrays on the top of each preservation tank was not because they were encrypted; it was because they were in Old Argish. Old Argish is in many ways reminiscent of Folhourtian Provari. In fact, it’s a mix of Argish and Folhourtian Provari. If the mindstate transplant of your operatives is successful, they will be speaking in Old Argish. Rutai will probably have as much difficulty in understanding it as he would Terran.’
Pitt massaged his chin. The President looked worried.
‘He goes anyway. At best he can translate; at worst he’s a second gun.’
Rutai made a growling noise.
‘He says he will go,’ Yano said. He sounded surprised. ‘I think he’s intrigued to see his ancestral homeland.’
‘Good,’ Pitt said, in a tone that suggested that Rutai’s consent was far from necessary at this point.
‘I’m running the ’breaker, I presume?’ Smith asked. ‘What about comms between me and these two?’ He indicated Yano and Staerck.
‘You’ll be running the ’breaker, yes,’ Pitt said. ‘You’ll be in charge of weaponry, orbital support, comms and navigation. If you can’t communicate verbally, then write down words. Even if everything Staerck and Yano say comes out as gibberish, they can still write in Terran, and odds on they’ll still be able to understand it, too. They just won’t be able to speak it.’
‘Do we know this?’ Smith asked.
Pitt shook his head. ‘This has never been done before. I don’t know if they’ll even survive the transplant.’
There was an uncomfortable silence. Smith ground his teeth. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said. ‘Assuming we even make it across the Barrier…’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t like it at all.’
Pitt all but shrugged. ‘There’s nothing to like, Mr Smith. When have you ever looked at a SPECWAR brief and thought, “yeah, that looks all right”?’
Smith conceded that infallible logic with a nod. There are degrees of suicidal, though, he thought.
Constance stepped forward again. ‘Mr Smith,’ she said, slightly tersely, ‘we are going to do everything in our power to fortify this galaxy from a large, unknown and powerful enemy. We are probably going to lose billions of lives. No, we do not know what you need to do, or even what you can do. But for heaven’s sake, man, you are a Special Warfare operative. You are supposed to be the best the UN has—even if you are not from the bloody UN—at fighting. At thinking. At doing. You have next to you the best alien negotiator in the galaxy, and a UNIS agent who has met a Kaygryn Empire Executor in the flesh and lived to tell the tale. Rutai here is…’ her words embarrassingly failed her at this point. It was getting increasingly difficult to justify the seemingly random addition. ‘… a very capable kaygryn operative. This is not ideal; we all understand that. But we don’t have a choice, either. You don’t have a choice. So, use your initiative, use your training, use your head, and find me a way to stop this war from happening. Is that clear?’
Smith couldn’t help a grin splitting his lips. She really was a first-rate orator. ‘That’s clear, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘That’s crystal clear.’
COMBAT REASSESSMENT
‘We stand ready.’
Motto of 225 Interdictor Squadron Goliaths
It took less than twenty hours of real time to assess Vondur fit for combat. After some insultingly rudimentary classroom sessions in the sync, he’d been stuffed back into the nanogel-filled cockpit of the Goliath simulation and put through his paces. Little had changed. Goliaths were all basically the same, no matter what any given pilot insisted. Each perhaps had its little quirks—what UNAF Mechanised Command would assert were malfunctions—but they all came from the same manufacturing template.
He was put in a variety of situations to test his readiness. It started with basic movement—running, jumping, rolling, sauntering—followed by advanced movement, signals and comms, and then flight. The latter started on take-off and cruise, but he quickly moved on to rapid-insertion vectors, redline vectors, munitions evasion and tactical landings, also known as crashing at high speed.
Once all the basics were covered, he moved on to weapons training. The Goliath had a highly advanced suite of offensive weaponry, including a limited atomic ordnance battery, the trusty rotary railgun, Hydra missile batteries, phase cannon, a suite of slaved Combined Offensive/Defensive/Orbital Reconnaissance drones and a number of electronic warfare pods. The Goliath’s advanced tactical display could track and destroy targets far more efficiently than he could, and so most of the training, as it had done when he had first joined UNAF, focussed on IHD and tac screen deprivation firing. Then all he had was a tiny diamond window with some range markers etched on to it through which he had to gauge each discharge with needlepoint accuracy. Of course, he hadn’t reached the rank of captain without being one of the best shots in his squadron, and he found that the tasks posed nothing but a veneer of challenge.
Once the Goliath assessment was complete, he had a second psychological rundown which was more akin to what he had expected the first time around—Rorschach testing, a review of his childhood, a VI-issued questionnaire—and finally, a physical workout. The physical naturally couldn’t take place in the sync with any degree of efficacy, and so fifteen hours after they’d plugged him in to the regen suite, he was running laps through Arrengate North’s obstacle course in the crisp winter air, performing push-ups and sit-ups, and swimming lengths, all while his vitals were monitored by a ZEN-like VI who kept pace.
‘Congratulations, Captain,’ the VI said at the end of his final lap of the obstacle course. A hard copy slid free from the aperture in its chest: his combat fitness certificate. Already, his details had been uploaded to the UNAF Register of Arms and his captaincy reinstated.
Panting heavily, his light-grey t-shirt dripping with sweat, he snatched up the certificate. The VI was already trundling away. He looked at the hard copy, irritation written across his face. Below all of the florid language and holographic images, it read, ‘report to UNS Winchester 17:00 local’ in faded black lettering.
He looked around. Not a soul stirred in the cold, afternoon air.
‘That’s it?’ he asked, but the VI was already inside. There was no-one around. ‘That’s it?’ he muttered to himself, and trudged back to the changing rooms.
No-one met him to see him out. He showered and changed into the clothes they had laid out for him: some olive-green fatigues, a pair of boots, and the brown leather bomber jacket Bill Pitt’s team had given him. He had no personal effects to speak of.
His parents, ensconced in their countryside house on Sophocles, had already been informed that he was no longer MIA. When he spoke to them via the VR sync, it was a tearful affair. He embraced his mother for a long time while his father, ex-UNAF himself, pounded him on the back, unable to hold back his own tears. The conversation was being monitored by UNIS, so he couldn’t tell them half of what he wanted to, except that he was already back on active duty and was being posted to Cobalta. After an hour of catching up and saying all the things he wanted to say to them, he bade them a tearful farewell, and crashed out of the sync in a foul mood.
He left UNAF Arrengate North by the front entrance. ZEN was waiting for him outside, its yellow-and-black livery a stark and welcome riot of colour against the bland slate landscape of Vargonroth. Seeing his old combat VI again was just about the only thing that could have put him in a better mood, and he embraced it with all the affection he would have afforded a living, breathing relative. ZEN, cognisant of human emotion, was still amusingly baffled by this display, and Vondur had to stop himself laughing as the robot’s open palms clattered clumsily against his back.
‘It’s good to see you again, ZEN,’ he said, his cheek pressed against the cold carbon of its armour.
‘It is good to see you too, Captain,’ ZEN replied. ‘Did Ms Staerck survive?’
Vondur smiled. ‘She did,’ he said, ‘thanks to you.’
‘I’m glad,’ ZEN replied.
They fell to silence. He and ZEN rarely conversed beyond what the exigencies of warfare demanded. When they were not on active duty, the VI was allowed to do whatever it wanted, and that usually involved either interfacing with the nearest UN Library terminal for hours on end or watching UN engineers working on their Goliaths like an entranced dog.
‘We’re going back to the front line,’ Vondur said after a while. ‘To Cobalta.’
ZEN nodded once with a smooth hum of servos. ‘I am ready to follow your orders, Captain.’
Vondur grinned as he checked the time. They only had half an hour before they were due on the Winchester.
‘Come on. We need to get to Whiteport in thirty minutes.’
He summoned a driverless cab, which arrived a few minutes later, and they climbed into the back. It pulled away from the front of the UNAF base with a smooth whine of its engines, and Vondur navigated through the UN net using his IHD until he found a contact number for the Fleet Office at Whiteport.
‘This is Captain Vondur of 11—sorry, 225 Squadron Goliaths,’ he said as his IHD automatically transmitted his verification code and UNAF serial number to the operator. ‘I’m expected on the UNS Winchester at 17:00 local. Can you give me platform number or a pylon?’
There was a pause, and then the VI operator said, ‘Captain, the Winchester is in dock. You’re on elevator 61.’
‘Thanks,’ Vondur replied, and the channel terminated. He updated the taxi’s destination co-ordinates and sat back against the couch.
He felt good. For the first time in a long time, he was relaxed. He was connected to civilisation again, connected to the net, connected to the endless streams of data that the UN regurgitated every second. It felt good to be doing something again, an activity, having a purpose beyond basic survival. With ZEN reactivated and Lyra safe, and having seen his parents again and achieved that important closure, he was in high spirits, eager to get back to UNAF and inside a Goliath where life was simple.
Or was he?
Underneath this veneer of elation was something else, some insidious feeling like an oil slick just beneath the surface of the sea. It was there like cosmic microwave background, a constant that was impossible to modulate, that couldn’t be overcome or tricked into non-existence; a feeling that, despite his rising serotonin levels, something just wasn’t quite right.
The murder of Iyadi.
He sighed angrily. He wanted to be normal again, to feel normal again, but the image of the kaygryn refused to leave his head. It was a splinter in his mind, a broken holo that kept playing the same scene over and over again. He could hear the alien’s screams, see the blood on Halder’s Mantix, smell the puke and shit and fear, all as if it had happened that morning.
He should have hated the kaygryn and rejoiced in its torture for all it had helped to engineer. It was one of the key architects of the Ascendancy War, a conflict which had claimed the lives of his old squadron and many billions of others besides. He had never particularly liked the kaygryn race anyway, in the same way that nearly all UN citizens privately felt, and although he was positively liberal by the jingoistic, xenophobic standards of UNAF, the Treaty of Hadan’s Reach evoked little within him except apathy.
It was something about being sucked into the murky world of UNIS, though, where the abduction and torture of foreign nationals was apparently de rigueur, which had changed him. He wouldn’t go so far as to say he’d idolised the UN, but in UNAF, it was easy to fetishise its liberal, socialist, open ways, particularly when one compared it to the brutal regime of the Ascendancy. Being a military man was simple, too. Orders were received in furtherance to the UN’s objectives, and executed. He had represented a fundamentally good government, in an honest, open way.
Then Lyra Staerck had seconded him to UNIS and he had seen how they and EFFECT had operated, and it was as though an illusion had been shattered. Yes, the UN wasn’t perfect, but he had never known just how egregiously hypocritical it could be either. He realised then that he had become a cynic, overcome by a new world-weariness that had been compounded by six months alone and helpless on Sophia as the autumn and winter months had closed in with nothing but a comatose robot for company. That same permeating helplessness was there now. It made him breathless just thinking about it. And then there was the Kaygryn Empire, too…
