Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4)

by Ben Sheffield

  They sat down in the baroque chairs, arranged in a semicircle around a canopy table. The fifteen warriors didn't move. Raya didn't offer them a seat, and they didn't ask for one.

  “A gift, you say?” Ryush Narya said.

  Raya nodded her head in assent. “Fifteen of them, to be precise.”

  Ryush and Kyth gaped and looked again at the soldiers. A gift?

  “The gift is protection,” Raya said. “And defense against attempts on your life. I know you think you're secure here, and that nobody would seek to harm someone who is – I will be very frank – a very replaceable government. But that was exactly the logic my old friend and mentor Emil Gokla used. He paid with his life.”

  Raya opened a file on her nanomesh suit, and projected some holograms into the central. Crime scene images. Video recordings.

  The goblin-like visage of Emil Gokla, now many months dead, loomed in front of them.

  “He was found poisoned in his mansion on Titan,” Raya said. “We assumed that this was an accident. But we cannot afford to make that assumption any longer.”

  She brought up more files. “Toxicology reports revealed that he died of gastroenteritis and internal bleeding of the digestive tract. He had trace amounts of a highly toxic compound called helenalin in his veins. This compound can be extracted from the aconite plant, of which he has several in his garden. Careful examination of his security recordings reveal a figure harvesting that same plant, the same day he passed away. An eleven year old orphan called Vante.”

  She played a holographic video, and they all stared.

  There was a sickly boy, skeletal and pale. As he happened to turn his face towards the camera, they caught a glimpse of the sunken-in eyes beneath the sandy mop of his hair.

  “What an ill-looking boy,” breathed Kyth.

  “Nonetheless, this is the killer of Emil Gokla,” Raya said. “And it is highly likely he was an assassin in the employ of Sarkoth Amnon, or Sybar Rodensis, or both. There were no records of his existence before or after, just informal mentions around Gokla's mansion. Gokla trusted him. He thought that he might be teachable in the art of business. In both counts, he was proven wrong. The boy fled before he had cause to suspect foul play. No matter. We will find him. But I need to protect the governors overseeing the solar system on my behalf.”

  The fifteen warriors still looked blankly ahead, not in the room except in the crudest, most physical sense.

  “I don't need bodyguards,” Ryush said bluntly. Especially not these bodyguards was the part left unspoken.

  Right now, he felt more at risk from Raya Yithdras than all the eleven year old assassins in the solar system combined.

  “Please,” Raya said. “Don't let confidence blind you to the reality of your position. At any moment, someone close to you – perhaps Chancellor Kyth here, perhaps a nameless sexual partner – might turn on you, and you will need immediate protection by unilateral force. These bodyguards are quiet, efficient, and noiseless. They will not disturb you, or bother you. But in moments of danger, they will be ready to protect you.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Why don't you ask them?”

  Ryush turned to one of the masked men. “Excuse me, but what is your name?”

  “X-301,” the bodyguard spoke in an accentless voice. His mouth was the only part of him that moved. “And I am a razor in a world of flesh.”

  “Very well,” Ryush felt disconcerted by this. He had no idea who these odd people were. And who would seek to kill him, now that the war had ended?

  But there was an ineluctible sense that this was an offer he wasn't allowed to refuse.

  “It's ironic,” Raya said. “Emil Gokla's death was the thing that motivated me to create this corps of bodyguards. Not only that, but the Razormen were created using Black Shift technology!”

  “What?” Ryush was aghast.

  “They are prisoners. They have had their memories removed. In their place is a false identity, a two-tone world of positive agents and negative agents. They will blindly serve their masters the way a computer program would.”

  There was silence. Ryush Narya couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.

  Half a century ago, Mars had undergone a savage civil war. Rebels had thought to establish a sovereign kingdom on the red planet. The Solar Arm, unwilling to risk the chance of a rival sovereignty gaining power in the solar system, had deployed its full force of arms against them.

  The war had largely been won thanks to a fanatical battalion of warriors who’d had their brains modified by Black Shift. They'd been revived, and told they were avenging angels, fighting against demons. Failure in this war would result in them being cast down from heaven.

  This deception was the most controversial act committed in war in a century.

  The rebellion had been defeated, but that was not the end. For years, thousands of broken mercenaries wandered around the solar system, unable to adjust to the fact that they'd been inducted into a lie. They filled prisons. They committed a fantastic number of crimes. The Solar Arm had apologized, and recompensed the brainwashed soldiers' families, but no recompense was enough.

  Killing a man's body had happened for thousands of years.

  Killing a man was an entirely new theater of war.

  The incident had forever scarred and shaken Mars. It was a black mark that the planet would never erase, in the same way that Auschwitz and Bunker Hill would never become scenic holiday attractions.

  And unless he was badly misunderstanding Raya Yithdras, she'd just done the exact same thing, all over again.

  Let him take a stand on this, at least.

  “You must be speaking in error,” he said. “What you've just done is illegal.”

  “On what grounds? State the statute.”

  Before entering politics, he'd been a constitutional lawyer. “Section 10-7.”

  “This has been repealed. You may want to review the changes we are making to the union’s constitutional code.”

  “What? Repealed?” He hadn't heard anything about that. The consent of the governors was required for such matters. “I can’t be a part of this. This is a foreign and unknown amendment that will surely be challenged in a matter of days. I mean, the ethics alone...”

  “Yes,” Raya said “you may find this act ethically wrong, but legally, I have not been challenged, nor will I be. And I'd encourage you to think more than twice about the ethics of the situation, as well. These men were prisoners, convicted of serious crimes. Their chance of rehabilitation was virtually nil. But I've scrubbed their minds clean of all the poison, and given them a chance to start again, as killing machines.”

  “Well, now the poison is back in their minds,” Ryush said. “You've revealed to them that their true identity is prisoners. Now there will be a downward spiral, mirroring that of the Martian mercs.”

  “You are wrong,” said X-45, speaking up for the first time. “I am a Razorman, not a prisoner. The things Prime Minister Yithdras is telling you are a falsehood, meant to assuage your mind. I am the metal. The world is the flesh.”

  “You see?” Raya smiled. “They will never believe that they are anything other than supersoldiers. Why? Because it was the first memory I put into their minds. The first cut is always the deepest. Now, not a single thing will ever shake their identity. Imagine if I told you that you are a prisoner, indoctirinated with a false identity. You would probably never believe me, no matter how strong a case I laid out, no matter how much evidence I put on the table. The Martian mercs lost the ability to reconcile their new reality because they could not see God. The Razormen do not have this problem. I am their god.”

  “This is an outrage,” Kyth said, looking disgusted. “It goes against all of our values.”

  “Then change your values.”

  “Look,” Kyth said. “For the sake of your future career, we will extend you a deal. You will take these....these fucking 'Razorman' ghouls out of our building, out of Valashabad, and then off
our world. We will never speak of them again. If any members of the press ask about them, we will deny any knowledge or involvement on your part. But we want them gone. We want them out of here. This is despicable, and I think you are utterly bereft of your senses. I give you one chance to correct your course. One.”

  Ryush was glad to have a man in the room on his side.

  He wished he could get up and cheer. He wished he could call for security, and have all of these eerie spectres thrown out on to the street, with Raya thrown first and hardest.

  But he couldn't.

  He loathed his own cowardness, his inability to take a stance on anything. But he was also a pragmatist. He already had a feeling that this would end with Raya Yithdras having her way, whatever it was. She always got her way.

  “I think I see the problem,” Raya said. “You don't want the Razorman protecting you because you don't think they'll be effective. And that's fair enough. You haven't seen them in action.”

  “That's nothing to do with it,” Kyth said. “We want them gone.”

  I wish I could join in and be a part of that 'we', Kyth, Ryush thought wearily. But I will stay out of this one, I think. You’re on your own, Errtu, and I wish you the best.

  “Oh, I think it has everything to do with it, and you're just too polite to say otherwise. But nontheless, we proceed. B-31, please give Chancellor Errtu Kyth a demonstration.”

  The chief of the Razormen nodded assent. Then he lunged, leading with an armor-clad arm, siezed Kyth by his lapel, and hauled him to his feet.

  “Hey!” Kyth barked and sputtered at the rough treatment. “What do you think you're doing?”

  B-31 drew a plasma-edged scimitar from his side. It glowed and crackled. He took, fingers shielded by anticonductive gloves, and held the weapon hilt-first to Kyth.

  “Take the sword. Try to strike me.”

  “No,” Kyth yelled. “You're fucking joking.”

  “No joke,” B-31's voice held all the emotion of a potted house plant. “Take the sword. Then, try to strike me.”

  Kyth waved an indignant arm at Raya Yithdras. “What do you think you're playing at?”

  “I'm showing you how good these bodyguards are,” Raya smiled demurrely. “I suggest you do as he says. Trust me, you'll be impressed.”

  “So he can hurt me?” Kyth said. “So he can throw me across the room? Is that the point you're trying to make? Do you think that will impress anyone?”

  “You do not understand,” B-31 said flatly, impenetrable beneath his mask. “We are not adherants of blind violence. We do things in the most professional and efficient way possible.”

  “B-31 knows what he’s doing,” Raya said. “You’re in good hands. I promise you that you will not be hurt.”

  Kyth looked to Ryush for help. None was forthcoming.

  Ryush was terrified, but his fear didn't burn half as much as the shame of his own cowardice.

  I should stop this. I can’t and I won’t…but I should.

  Finally Kyth nodded. “Very well. If I will not be hurt, let's just get this pathetic charade over with.”

  He took the plasma scimitar from B-31's hand. The weapon buzzed and crackled. Any contact with flesh would detonate it like an exploding blood-filled balloon.

  He lined up an angle…

  And swung.

  A fraction of a second later, he was utterly destroyed.

  B-31 was a blur. He was seemingly doing six things at once. Sharp-edged metal blades popped out all along his armor, along his wristbands, along his shoulder pauldrons. Instanty, he transformed into a human weapon, less man than armory. Surgical steel sang from every point and vertex on his body.

  Ryush’s jaw didn’t even have a chance to fall as B-31 moved on Kyth like a nest of striking snakes.

  The scimitar in Kyth's hands swung down, but never connected. One armored arm blocked the downward stroke. Another crossed laterally, a vicious barbed hook ripping the blade from Kyth's hands. Ryush winced as severed fingers flew through the air.

  Then B-31 pounced on the unlucky chancellor, pummeling him with fists, knees, feet, elbows, headbutts, and every other protuberance on his body. Each strike was tipped with metal.

  A blade sliced across Kyth's throat. Another one ripped open his chest, exposing it to the open air. Two more gored out his eyes. A thunderbolt of a punch disemboweled the man.

  B-31 was a thrashing whirlwind of movement, barbaric hooks whickering out, reducing the man to his component parts. Arms and legs flew free. A savage circular blade buried itself in the man's clavicle, quenching itself in flash.

  Blood sprayed and filled the room, flung in steaming clots from the razors covering every inch of B-31's flesh. Ryush screamed and ducked for cover as bits of flesh peppered his face.

  Raya gave no response to the bloody rain.

  Neither did the other Razormen.

  Finally, it was over.

  B-31 retracted all his blades back inside his body. A swiss army knife, reduced back to pocketable safety.

  It took nearly thirty seconds for Ryush's heartbeat to slow down enough for him to talk.

  “He's dead,” the man choked.

  “Your observations are astute,” B-31 said, his eyes drilling into the terrified governor behind the blood-splattered mask.

  “He's dead. He died. You killed him,” babbled Ryush Narya, his thoughts tumbling out of him like a brubling brook. “You said he wouldn't be hurt!”

  “And he wasn't.” the Raya Yithdras said. “he felt not a single atom of pain. It was over as suddenly as it began. Would that we could all pass as easily.”

  Ryush was robbed of the power of speech.

  The room had been used as a place to celebrate art, and culture. European theatre. Japanese kabuki. Refined entertainment for the effete and the elite – a little bubble of sophistication in an city of steel on a planet of red dirt. The carpet and natural wood had been imported at huge expense.

  Now, it was an abattoir.

  The fine baroque chairs were now stained and soaked with blood. There was a steady dripping sound, almost like the applause of ghosts for a play that should never have been performed. The carpet was strewn with viscera.

  And it had all happened for no reason at all.

  Just who are these people? His brain raved. He wasn’t sure whether this was directed at the Razormen, or at Raya Yithdras and her coterie.

  He was completely out of his element here. His training was in matters of court, and diplomacy, and balancing tradeoffs so fine that the seesaw didn’t waver between any two parties.

  This was something so beyond his area of expertise that he had nothing.

  “This is murder,” he said.

  Raya shrieked with laughter. It was so loud that it hurt his ears, and he cringed away from the sound.

  “This is not murder,” she said. “This was security. B-31 detected a threat to your safety, and responded.”

  What?

  B-31 stepped forward, boots leaving stark jagged footprints in puddles of blood. He reached down to Kyth’s forearm, and popped open the clenched fist.

  The palm opened, revealing a cylinder that Ryush could barely identify from a weapon survey course he’d once taken.

  A thresher.

  The ultimate riot control weapon. It released a fine spray of a high velocity, low impedence particulates, and was fatal to up to several hundred yards.

  If it had gone off, it would have killed everyone in the room.

  “As you can see, your friend Errtu Kyth was an assassin, and he nearly succeeded in ending you,” Raya said.

  “That’s insane,” Ryush muttered, his voice having all the force of a bat made of feathers. “I’ve known him for twenty years. We were in the same school year. We did everything together. We were friends.”

  He stared closer at the metallic cylinder in Kyth’s hand. The hand that had shaken his in congratulation of so many mutual achievements and accomplishments.

  And Raya wanted to believe
that the hand had tried to destroy him.

  “Then you see how a man in your position cannot afford to have friends, Governor Narya,” Raya said. “Threats can come from anywhere and anyone. You trusted this man. And yet he meant to kill you. So what value your trust?”

  Anger burned in his heart. “You set this up. You planted that thresher in his hand.”

  She tutted, as though he was an emotional child. “You’re upset by this. I understand. But it’s best not to say anything rash. You are safe, and alive, thanks to B-31. And any of the Razormen can do what he does. You would do well to surround yourself with these guards, rather than any other supposed old school friends.”

  Blinking tears from his eyes, he looked at the Razormen.

  Fifteen men and women, regarding him through the eyeholes of masks. He wondered what he’d see if he pulled the masks off. He wondered if they were even human.

  Their gaze was imprecise. They seemed to not be looking at him but through him, gazing into his motives and reasons. They were the razors, and he was the meat.

  Suddenly, he understood. They weren’t bodyguards. They would never obey his instructions, or respect his wishes. They answered only to Raya.

  So this is how she’ll control me, he thought. Whatever she does, whatever insanity she tries to visit upon the Martian populace or the Solar Arm as a whole…I have to support it. If I fail to do this, I’ll get torn to pieces, and they’ll find a thresher in my hand, too.

  He wanted to spit in their faces.

  But the fear of those barbed blades of metal was too great.

  Neo Jericho – June 23, 2143, 1800 hours

  Years ago, Terrus had been called Earth. Before then, it had been called Tierra, Monde, Erde, and still other things. And before then, it hadn’t had a name at all, because there had been no men to name it.

  At the start, it had been entirely ruled by nature. Forests and grasslands, shifting in an unplanned vector of change that nobody could predict, just understand in retrospect.

  But then humanity had arisen.