Empire of the Fallen by Richard Swan

Author:Richard Swan [Swan, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: KBK
Published: 2016-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

They didn’t know the name of the world, so they named it Leith in honour of Seka’s stellar astrography. From the high-orbit band, it seemed like a hundred other terrestrial worlds: blue and green and tan, swirling with bands of white cloud. There was nothing peculiar to it by virtue of it being located in Andromeda. There was some orbital activity—the usual slew of satellites, FTL comms arrays and a rudimentary military surveillance installation—but nothing that could detect the Last Chance Saloon. It was exactly what they needed: a backwater.

‘Superb efforts, guys,’ Yano said, yawning after another fifteen hours spent comatose in the sync.

‘Thanks,’ Seka said as she and Smith made a painstaking note of the exact mathematical co-ordinates of the star. Her voice sounded tired and clipped, and made Yano itch to do something other than act as an oxygen sink. The sacrifice he had already made by allowing himself to be turned into a kaygryn had no mileage left in it. It was time for fresh work and fresh efforts to earn his place on the LCS.

‘What’s the plan now?’ Lyra asked.

‘We wait,’ Smith said tersely. He sounded as exhausted as Seka. ‘The ship is mapping the urban areas now and tallying warm bodies. I also want to scan for weapons and observe the locals for a bit. Once we know what’s what, we’ll pick out a landing zone. But we need to be careful. Rushing in is going to be nothing but a headache.’

And so the waiting recommenced, while Seka and Smith caught a few hours’ sleep and the VI ticked over, accreting the vast wealth of data being mined from the surface into useable intelligence. The process took another five hours, while the LCS completed multiple orbits to ensure there was no part of Leith that hadn’t been bombarded with LRIS. They reconvened in the cramped life support capsule once the VI’s data scrubbers had come up with a few decent dossiers of intelligence, crowding round a pull-out table with an inbuilt holo generator. Around them, the voidbreaker lapsed to low power, dimming the lights.

‘All right,’ Smith said, looking and sounding all the better for his brief sleep. ‘This place is bigger than we thought. Seven hundred and fifty million warm bodies spread out over three thousand statistically significant settlements across the globe. Of that population, only two million are kaygryn, so it’s a safe bet that we’re looking at the equivalent of a Tier Two homeworld that’s being administered by the Empire.’

‘So it’s an Imperial possession. A slave world?’ Lyra asked.

‘Seems that way,’ Smith replied. ‘Look at Vargonroth: most of the population is confined to Arrengate. That takes up, what, a thousandth of the surface area of the planet? Look at Earth, people everywhere. Earth is a homeworld; Vargonroth is a colony. The same model fits here.’

Yano ignored Smith’s engrained Old Earth superiority. ‘Whose homeworld is it then?’

Smith shrugged. ‘No idea. Bipedal, mammalian, sapient: conforms with PBT.’

Yano wrinkled his muzzle. PBT—Prevalent Bipedalism Theory—argued that the most common and energy-efficient state for intelligent beings was the bipedal mammal.

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