Empire: Book 2, The Chronicles of the Invaders (The Chronicles of the Invaders Trilogy) (23 page)

CHAPTER 41

T
he 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 she 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

V
ena 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.

“Where’s the signal coming from?” she asked.

“Under the bridge, Commander.”

The shape of the bridge, and its shadows, made it impossible to see what might lie beneath.

“It could be a trap,” she said. “Send out a drone.”

The shuttle dispatched a small drone fitted with a camera front and back, and sensitive microphones. The drone began to transmit sound and images as soon as it left the shuttle. It went in low over the water, the splashing of the Orchy filling the cabin of the shuttle as the river itself was displayed for Vena. It drew closer to the bridge, then stopped. A shape moved in the darkness.

“Give me some light,” said Vena.

The drone shone a beam into the gloom beneath the bridge. It picked out Cynna’s body, hanging by the neck from a rope, her feet almost touching the water flowing below. A hand-lettered sign was pinned to her uniform. It bore one word:

MURDERER

“Meia,” said Vena. “Meia is responsible for this.”

But she was wrong.

Meia was long gone.

PART III

TOGETHER

CHAPTER 43

S
yl Hellais was not in class.

“She’s not feeling well,” explained Ani, when the register was taken. “She stayed in bed.”

But Syl wasn’t in her bed at all.

Instead her hair was wrapped in old sheeting and she was wearing Elda’s faded, off-white robe as she slipped quickly through the Thirteenth Realm—home of the senior Novices and Half-Sisters—all the while studiously avoiding eye contact and keeping to the quieter corridors, carrying a mop and a bucket half-filled with soapy suds in case anyone doubted her disguise. She’d been here so often now that she knew her way around the network of hallways and service lanes, and she knew too that this was the best time to be here, when most of the pupils were in class. The occasional girl who passed her while running an errand or going to the loo paid no heed to the drudge she pretended to be.

Syl was more nervous than she’d been since starting her illicit investigation of the Marque, for in her pocket was the set of keys, shiny contraband wrapped snugly in a washcloth so that they wouldn’t jangle in the quiet.

But it was time to be fearless. Swiftly, silently Syl made her way to the rear of the Thirteenth Realm, to the large sliding doorway with the wide red eye of the Sisterhood emblazoned on it. It was through this entrance that the Sisters who taught the Novices flooded every morning. She had been as far as the door several times before, placing her palms flat against the cool metal, peering cautiously through the glass slats that showed yet another corridor disappearing tantalizingly
around a bend beyond. But this one was different from the other hallways she’d been down so far, for this was the entrance to the Fourteenth Realm, and the end of the line for Novices. Beyond here, only full Sisters could venture. It even looked different, for on the other side of the door, the curved walls, ceiling, and floor were not the stark rock face and grimy whitewash of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Realms. Instead they gleamed deepest red, the surfaces twinkling slightly as if dusted with crushed rubies, creating the impression of a healthy artery pumping life into the Marque’s core.

Now Syl stood before the door once more, her heart a piston in her chest. She was panting slightly as she studied the keypad in the wall, with its silver hole awaiting a pinlike key. Next to it was a fat, rather old-fashioned-looking button, browned with age, but she knew that pressing this would only summon a Sister to the door, for she’d made that mistake before, cowering and staring at her feet as the red-clad guardian peered at her through the opening.

“Why did you ring?”

“My apologies, Sister. I was cleaning and must have leaned against the button by accident,” she’d muttered, and the door had purred shut again.

Another time she’d pressed it on purpose and a different Sister had appeared, her face furious.

“What?”

“May I come in to clean, Sister?” Syl had said, and the quake in her voice had been real.

“Of course you can’t! Where’s your key? No one can unless they have a key.”

“Uh, then who cleans at that side?” asked Syl.

“Are you new here? The Service Sisters, of course. They have keys! Speak to your superior and stop wasting my time.”

This time, though, Syl did have keys. After another quick glance around, she slipped the bunch from her pocket. She held up the red-tipped one and took a deep breath.

“The woman that deliberates is lost,” she whispered, adding automatically, “
Cato
, by Joseph Addison,” because her father had always
thought it important to acknowledge the source of your quotes and aphorisms.

She slotted the pin into the keyhole. There was a welcoming beep, and with a hiss, the door slid open. Syl was in; it was as easy as that.

•  •  •

It smelled different here beyond the doors, fragrant, sweeter, the air almost sugary, thick and rich and exotic, like spiced wine.

It smelled of Syrene; it smelled of her father’s breath after Syrene had infected him.

Syl swallowed down the urge to retch. Instead she looked around.

The ground beneath her feet was softer, a little springy, and when she touched the walls they had gentle give in them too, calling to mind spongy red seaweed, although her hand came away dry. Her fingers left temporary indentations when she pressed down, but the dark sparkle did not come off on her fingertips. It seemed ingrained, twinkling like a mineral catching the light down a mine. Natural stalactites pierced the red of the ceiling—there must have been water here once, thought Syl—and particularly striking rock formations had been allowed to jut out from the carved walls, a stark contrast to the soft red sparkle. The effect was lush and decadent, yet tasteful, and as she made her way down the wide passage, automatic light lit her way, dimming to a faint gleam again behind her once she’d passed.

It was like being inside a working model of a large, bloodless organ.

She passed doors now, three of them set into the burgundy walls, unmarked. She hurried on, unsure what to do, for what would she say if she opened one and was faced with a Nairene when she was prying where she shouldn’t be?

A little farther on, the passageway dipped steeply downward, heading deeper under the ground, and the red on the walls melted from solid color to coiling patterns, breaking off like the roots of a felled tree sprouting from a thick red stem. Between the red spirals the rock face now showed, polished smooth to best display strata of granite and quartz and shining stone that Syl didn’t recognize.

Again thoughts of Syrene flooded her head, Syrene with those
striking red filigree tattoos that spilled across her smooth, pious face, and coiled like snakes into her shaven hairline, tattoos that found an echo in these very walls. Perhaps the artwork on Syrene’s skin was based on these markings, or perhaps her apparently legendary beauty was the inspiration for the decoration. Either way, it seemed like great vanity, and Syl felt as if she were an ant walking across the face of her enemy. Surely her presence must be felt here; surely she would soon be brushed away, crushed with no pity or feeling. And oh, that smell, the smell of her loss and sorrow . . .

Enough of this! I am Syl Hellais.

The words were spoken only in her head as Syl once again shored up the mental defenses that she hoped would protect her.

I am here to do a job, to find out what lies at the cold soul of the Nairene Sisterhood.

She walked with more purpose, growing headstrong and fierce deep inside, feeling the shields coming down like cast iron, feeling the barriers in her head clanging shut, weighted with lead, sealed with blood.

I have powers of which you have no knowledge.

She thought of her father, of Earth, of Paul and Steven, of Althea and Meia, of Fremd and Heather and Just Joe. She thought of all the death and destruction she’d seen, and for what? For what?

I have powers beyond your dreams, powers beyond your nightmares.

She thought of the thing she’d seen inside Grand Consul Gradus’s head before it had torn him apart, of the mysterious parasite wrapped around his brain stem, and the irony didn’t escape her now.

I’m within you, Syrene. I’m inside your nerve center. And you don’t know what I’m capable of.

And she saw again the human who died at her bidding, throwing himself on his own bayonet because she willed it, and for the first time she didn’t squirm away from the memory. Instead she took strength from it, for had she not taken up arms now, and was she not fighting the war he declared was his own? She smiled grimly.

Even I don’t know what I’m capable of . . .

The automatic lighting faded away now, for through the rock ran a seam of glowing stone that provided illumination as flattering as fire
light. Trailing her fingers along it, Syl rounded a final bend and then stopped short, gasping, partly in fright but also partly in wonder. Before her the artery had exploded into a vast chamber that soared up from the deep, high into the dark night sky, the walls curlicued and twinkling and red, tendrils of burgundy and claret reaching as tall as church steeples, twisting into a honeycomb ceiling of jagged boulders and distant crystal domes, breaking up the stars. Around the sides of the chamber were ornate stone balconies and landings, beautifully carved and twisted from the rock. Rows of well-spaced doors opened off these high galleries, each shiny and black, each bearing a name plaque. There were even plants down here, blue-black fronds growing rich and lush, their greedy red and purple blooms reaching toward the faraway ceiling and its promise of the ultraviolet light that this curious Illyri flora lived for.

At its center, the chamber was furnished with plump cushions of scarlet, vibrant purple sofas, and recliners fashioned from heavy tapestry and brocade. Ornately patterned red rugs covered the floor. And far above this opulent seating area the wall was adorned with yet another red eye, staring down unblinking on those who lived in its name.

It was the beautiful, sterile heart of the Fourteenth Realm.

But right now that heart was beating. It was alive.

And everywhere was the Sisterhood.