Empire

by John Connolly

  “That wasn’t my first plan.”

  “I didn’t think so. Again, what is it you want?”

  “To tell you what I know, and what I suspect. And you, in turn, can confirm for me the location of various Illyri within the castle.”

  Meia had not expected Syrene to be leaving Earth so soon. Her plan had called for more time, but now she would have only one night.

  “You came to me about this, and not Lord Andrus? He loved you, you know. You were like a child to him.”

  “Lord Andrus is not . . . himself, as you are no doubt aware.”

  “That red bitch has drugged him, that’s what I think.”

  “No,” said Meia. “She has done something far worse.”

  And she told Danis of all that she had learned.

  • • •

  Far beyond the castle walls, Trask began gathering his people. He had fewer of them to call on than before because the Securitats were doing their work well: three Resistance members dead in the last week alone, and twice as many again imprisoned. For each operative that the Illyri captured, more were often betrayed, their identities obtained through torture or, when that failed, threats to wives, husbands, children. These were not idle threats either: Trask had seen the bodies, dumped at the outskirts of the city with their identity cards stuffed in their mouths. It helped with putting names to the corpses, because the Securitats’ torturers quickly progressed to the face.

  The Resistance would have lost more people if it weren’t for its strict cell structure. Operatives at the lower level only knew three others. One of them, the most senior, then reported to another cell of four, and so on up the chain. It made it harder for traitors to infiltrate the Resistance, and protected the majority in the event of the capture of one or two.

  But the Illyri were slowly and surely working their way up the command structure.

  What if he himself were captured? What if he were killed? He was one of only a handful of men and women who knew what the Illyri might be planning for all life on his planet, and that knowledge would die with him. Yet Meia had warned him to remain silent, while Trask’s instinct had been to broadcast the news as widely as possible, to force humanity to rise up against the Illyri. And what then? Meia was certain that it would simply accelerate whatever was about to occur, and there was nowhere for humanity to hide. The human race was trapped on Earth, just as assuredly as if it had been sealed under a glass dome. The Illyri could do with it as they wished.

  And now Trask was gambling what was left of his Resistance force on a plan to aid Meia’s escape: a series of near-simultaneous strikes against the Illyri, with the last of them the most daring and dangerous of all, just so a mechanical spy with vague promises of help could slip the net. Still, Trask told himself, a vague promise of help was better than no hope of help at all.

  When he was done, he returned to the zoo to wait for Meia. He arrived early and walked among the enclosures, silently watching the animals. He felt that he would not be returning here anytime soon, and perhaps might never see it again.

  Meia came. She looked different. That half-formed mannequin’s face was gone. He could tell from the skin around her eyes, even though her headscarf hid her features from the cheekbones down. He also saw marks around the knuckles of her right hand, like surgical scars on her ProGen skin.

  “You hurt yourself?” he asked.

  “Upgrades, you might say.”

  She gave him a time for the action to begin and made him detail the preparations he had already made, advising him to make changes where she believed it necessary. His head hurt by the end of it all.

  “Is that it?” he said. “You don’t want me to carry you personally onto a ship and blow you a kiss as you leave? To be honest, I think I’ll be happy to see you go after all this.”

  “Not quite.”

  She told him that a new governor would soon be in charge of Britain: Danis.

  While Trask was still absorbing this information, Meia suddenly moved closer to him, and a tiny voice in his head said, This is it. This is where she kills me. And after all we’ve been through together.

  But no blade pierced him, and no pulse blasted his organs. Meia simply hugged him, and after a moment he hugged her back.

  “If they could see us now,” he said, and she laughed in his ear.

  “I have one more favor to ask,” she said, her voice muffled by the material of the scarf. “Well, two actually.”

  “As if you haven’t asked for enough already.”

  “If I can help you, all this will seem like a small price.”

  “And if you can’t, then it won’t matter anyway.”

  “Exactly.”

  Trask sighed heavily. “So what else do you want?”

  “Firstly, send Althea my regards. And tell her I’m sorry that I did not get to see her.”

  “I will, but that’s already two favors.”

  Meia stared at him, unamused, until he relented.

  “Sure, of course I’ll tell her,” he said. “But what next? A pint of blood? A kidney? My firstborn?”

  “Simply that you take no action against Governor Danis,” she replied. “No assassination attempts, no attacks on his staff, no RPGs aimed at ships entering or leaving the castle in the hope of a lucky strike on him. Danis is to be left unharmed, and I want the word spread discreetly to all Resistance leaders on this island. Treat Danis as you would your own father.”

  “My father is long dead,” said Trask. He fumbled in his pockets for his cigarettes, opened the pack, and found it empty. It was one of those nights. He crushed the pack and stuffed it into his pocket again.

  “And tell me,” he said, “why would I do something so foolish as to try and convince the Resistance that their primary target on this island is not actually a target at all?”

  “Because Danis knows,” said Meia. “He knows.”

  • • •

  Danis was alone. He had not moved from his couch, not even when Meia slipped away and left him. He had been vaguely aware of the noise of a stone shifting, but he paid little attention to it.

  He felt a range of emotions: bafflement, rage, shame. If Meia was right, his race was about to commit a crime without parallel in the history of civilization: the sacrifice of an entire planet and every species that lived upon it to an alien parasite. Genocide, but more than genocide: mass extinction.

  And the final twist: they had made him governor of a people that would soon cease to exist, and he would die with them, for Danis was certain that none of the Corps’ enemies on Earth would be permitted to leave before the infestation began. In its final days, the planet would be returned to Military rule, and not a single Securitat or minor Corps functionary would be present for the destruction of all life upon it.

  The door opened, and his wife appeared.

  “I heard the news about Andrus and Syrene,” she said.

  She gave no sign of approval or disapproval. Such matters no longer concerned her. Danis stood and took her hands in his.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to return,” he said. “I have something to show you.”

  Danis made her join him on the couch. He waved his right hand, and a three-dimensional image of Ani appeared before them and began to move. They watched it together, and for a time they were at peace.

  CHAPTER 41

  The two black shuttles stood at the base of Beinn Dorain, a peak in Glen Auch, halfway between the Bridge of Orchy and Tyndrum in the Scottish Highlands. A steady rain fell on the squad of Securitats who had finished their cursory search of the mountain and come up with nothing. Cynna watched them unhappily.

  “We were misled,” said her sergeant.

  His name was Seft, and he wore a dark slicker over his uniform to protect him from the rain. It was not regulation attire, but Cynna did not concern herself with such details
. Those under her command followed her orders to the letter, and that was enough. They were trigger-happy killers of men, women, and children, and none of them ever lost a night’s sleep over what they did.

  The information they had received was believed to be cast-iron in its reliability and accuracy. It came from one of their most trusted informants, a bartender named Preston down in Merchiston who had fed them a number of Resistance members over recent months—minor operatives for the most part, although Cynna was convinced that bigger fish would follow if they were patient with him. So when the bartender told her that he had a lead on the Green Man, Cynna prepared her squad and flew at dawn to Glen Auch, where the Green Man was rumored to be meeting with two other leaders of the Highland Resistance in a copse by the southern foot of the mountain.

  But Preston, it seemed, had been misled. The terrain was grim and damp, and empty of any life worth the name as far as Cynna could tell. She would have to arrange a discreet interview with Preston upon her return to Edinburgh, in the course of which he would learn the importance of accuracy in his information.

  Unfortunately, although Cynna did not yet know it, that interview was destined never to happen. Preston was dead, but he was persuaded to make that final call to his Illyri paymasters before he was disposed of—“to atone for your sins,” as Trask’s voice had whispered to him in his last moments.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Cynna. “We’ve wasted enough time already.”

  She was halfway to her shuttle when the first RPG struck it, entering through the open cabin door and exploding as it hit the interior. The heavy hull contained most of the blast, which was good news for the Securitats in the vicinity but bad news for the pilots inside. Another RPG struck the plating of the second shuttle, rocking it on its landing skids but leaving it otherwise unharmed. Cynna heard gunfire, and suddenly the ground was opening up around them as the Resistance fighters emerged from the pits in which they had hidden themselves, the holes concealed by squares of wood camouflaged with mats of turf. Her Securitats responded with full pulse blasts, but half of them had already been cut down before they could activate their weapons, and were lying dead or injured on the ground.

  But the surviving Securitats’ training kicked in. They laid down covering fire while the injured were helped to the remaining shuttle, which had already powered up its engines. Once they were off the ground, the shuttle’s cannon and missile array could rain down fire on the Resistance fighters, and they would be torn apart. For now, though, the priority was to get everyone into the air.

  “Quickly!” Cynna shouted as the last of her troops ran for the shuttle. “Go! Go!”

  She drew a bead on a dark-haired young woman carrying a semiautomatic rifle, and fired. The pulse took the woman full in the chest, knocking her off her feet and destroying her internal organs. Bullets whined around them, kicking sparks from the shuttle and dirt from the ground, but Cynna remained unharmed. Behind her, the shuttle rose a foot from the ground. What was left of her squad was now safely on board. It was time to leave. They would come back for the bodies of the dead later, and in force. An example would be made of the people of Tyndrum for what had happened here this morning: two—no, four—of theirs for every one of hers who had died. That seemed fair.

  Cynna twisted her body and placed one foot on the skid. A hand reached down to pull her up, and then her body spasmed as two dartlike electrodes hooked onto her back. The shaped pulses penetrated her body armor, shocking her repeatedly, like a series of punches landing so fast as to feel almost like one. Cynna fell back as the shuttle continued to ascend, landing on her side, her body still jerking, the wires from the darts trailing behind her along the ground. She bit her tongue as the pulses kept coming, and then suddenly, thankfully, they stopped. Now she was being dragged across the damp grass, and her head lolled as she was pulled under the ground.

  The last thing she saw before the trapdoor closed was the shuttle exploding as the mine that had been attached to its underbelly did its work. The earth shook as the wreckage landed above her. Strong arms held her down, and she felt suddenly claustrophobic. This was what it was like to be buried alive.

  Then the trapdoor opened again. A face looked down on her: an Illyri face.

  “I hear that you’ve been looking for me,” said Fremd. “I am the Green Man.”

  • • •

  The message came through to the Resistance in Edinburgh. They had Cynna. Now another call was made to the Securitats, this time by one of the Resistance’s own agents, a woman named Hilary Simmons whose dangerous job it was to feed false information to the Illyri when possible. Simmons was old, and dying of cancer. If the Illyri discovered her game, then so be it. She knew no names, and her instructions came in the form of messages left under a stone in Princes Street Gardens. Let them do with her what they wanted. She didn’t care.

  “It was a trap,” she said, when her call was put through to one of Vena’s lieutenants.

  “We know that now, you old fool!” came the reply. “That would have been of help an hour ago.”

  “But there’s more,” Simmons whispered. “I heard them say that she wanted Cynna taken alive, and something about a facial scan.”

  “What? Who? Who wanted Cynna captured alive?”

  “Oh, what was the name again?” Simmons hummed and hawed. “May-something? Meia. Does that sound right? They said Meia wanted Cynna taken alive . . .”

  • • •

  The second attack came in the form of a series of car bombs close to the old Glasgow School of Art on Renfrew Street, which was now the headquarters of the Securitats in Scotland, and at Holyrood Park and Calton Hill in Edinburgh. Nobody was injured, for a warning had been phoned in minutes before the attack, and the streets were cleared before the blasts occurred. But they caused traffic chaos, and tied up the Illyri and the police, diverting attention from the area around the castle where the final and most important assault was about to occur.

  For as the Archmage Syrene and Lord Andrus, watched by Governor Danis, made their way to the big skimmer idling on the Esplanade, the skimmer that would take them and their retinue offworld for the first leg of their journey back to Illyr, the mortars began to fall in and around the castle. Vena herself should have been in charge of security at the skimmer, supervising as her Securitats prepared to check the identities of everyone intending to board, but Vena was otherwise engaged. She was already en route to Glen Auch to lead the search for Cynna, whose Chip had ceased to function.

  The noise and confusion of the mortars distracted everyone. The two Securitats at the skimmer briefly left their posts, their weapons drawn, as though pulsers could be any help against a low-velocity explosive projectile. For a few crucial seconds, all eyes were directed away from the craft on the Esplanade . . .

  Now Syrene and Andrus were trapped halfway to the skimmer, frozen briefly by an explosion from close to the gatehouse. Then Andrus’s old instincts kicked in, aided by Danis’s shouts. They were in real danger if they stayed out in the open, and they were closer to the skimmer than they were to any of the main buildings of the castle that might have provided some protection. He ushered the handmaidens and a pair of his own junior aides to the skimmer, ignoring the protests of the Securitats at this breach of Vena’s protocols, protests that were cut short anyway as more mortar shells landed, this time targeted with precision at the ditch between the gatehouse and the Esplanade. The cabin door closed and the skimmer ascended rapidly as the attackers ceased firing for a time, before resuming their barrage.

  Five minutes later, the two automatic mortars had been located, targeted, and destroyed by the Illyri from the air. The aiming had been done remotely, and no crews were directly involved, so no Resistance members were killed or captured. But the mortars had been among the most valuable of the Resistance’s weapons, and their loss was a considerable blow.

  “Tell me, Dad,” asked Nessa as s
he and her father watched the smoke rise above the castle, and the shuttles circle the ruined mortars. “What was all that for? Is it the beginning of something?”

  “I hope so, darling,” said Trask. “For all our sakes.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Vena walked the killing site at Glen Auch, counting the bodies and examining the wreckage of the ruined shuttles, while around her a team swept the area for DNA samples, footprints, anything that might be used to track down those responsible, and find Cynna. The message from Hilary Simmons had reached her. Cynna. Meia. A facial scan. Was it possible that Meia had hoped to create a ProGen face in Cynna’s image, and use her new identity to try to escape from Earth? If so, that particular plan was now doomed to failure. Vena had already placed Cynna on a watch list. If someone claiming to be Cynna tried to use her authority to get on board any craft leaving Britain, she would immediately be arrested.

  One of the search team called to her.

  “Have you found something?” she asked.

  “I think so—but not here.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s Cynna’s Chip. It looks like it’s been reactivated.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Just a few miles from here. The beacon says she’s at Bridge of Orchy.”

  • • •

  Bridge of Orchy had once been a small but pretty village of mostly white buildings gathered around the historic Bridge of Orchy Hotel, but the hotel had been destroyed when its owner was found to be storing arms for the Resistance, and the rest of the houses were burned. No one lived there now, and only the old bridge over the River Orchy still remained intact, built by British forces during the campaign to pacify the warlike Highland clans in the eighteenth century.

  Vena’s shuttle swept over the ruined hamlet, but could see no signs of life. She was not about to be ambushed the way that Cynna had, so she ordered seismic detectors to be dropped to determine if there was any activity below ground. The detectors found no trace of movement.