“Quiet,” said the MASTER Nolund Esper.
“We're on the same team, moron,” the NOT MASTER said. “I want the same thing you want. Andrei Kazmer out of the picture. Getting arrested was the best thing for me – now you're taking me straight to him.”
“Something to realise, Ubra,” MASTER Saldeen said, “is that two people are not on the same team just because they happen to be running in the same direction. In any case, we do not want him 'out of the picture'. We want to find out what the picture is. The conditions on Terrus deteriorate by the day. The planet is undergoing upheavals that will soon make it uninhabitable. We want to ask him questions. What's the gain in pointlessly killing him?”
“From what I hear, pointlessly killing things is what you people are all about.”
MASTER Saldeen Zana sighed, and gestured in B-31's direction. “B-31, Ubra Zolot is saying extremely unwise things, and I am becoming pissed. Please gag her before she endangers her own life any further.”
B-31 retrieved a wad of cloth, and started fastening it around the NOT MASTER's mouth. The NOT MASTER began to struggle. It extended a sharp plane of metal from its tibia, and it touched her Adam's apple. If it extended it all the way, it would cut the NOT MASTER's throat.
The NOT MASTER stopped struggling.
“Good,” MASTER Esper said as the gag went on. “Raya wants you on this team, as you seem to have a fair bit of knowledge into Andrei Kazmer. To be honest, I don't see the point. He won't run. And if he does, we will swiftly find him.”
B-31 had overheard some of the intel work that had gone into this flight. It seemed that the target, Andrei Kazmer, had a highly repetitive routine. He would sit at some shitty Vyre rental for hours, talking to a young boy. Same pattern, day after day.
This would be ridiculously easy. You'd have a harder time catching a cold.
The plan wasn't challenging to execute, and Andrei Kazmer wouldn’t be, either.
They'd descend, land in Zephyr City spaceport, and the MASTERS would rent an Adagio shuttle. It would be brought to the front of the platform, ready to take him out of the air if he tried to fly away with Vyres. The Razormen would approach the Vyre rental from the other side. Caught between a hammer and an anvil, both Andrei and the child would be swiftly incapacitated and captured.
The pilot spoke over comms. “We've slingshotted past Terrus. Evasive action and antimatter braking was necessary to get clear of some space shrapnel. We give an updated ETA of three hours.”
B-31 was annoyed.
It would have mis-timed its glycogen dump, and slightly missed peak energy.
The annoyance was like a flower bud, unfurling in the sun into a blossom of pure concentrated anger.
The prison. A crucible of torture. Every single thing done to a man's nerve endings that can possibly be done. They destroyed me. Remade me. Changed me so that I can only do the first and not the second.
It found another piece of wood, and extended its blades again.
There was much stress to be gotten rid of.
Zephyr City – Venus – June 29, 2143, 0600 hours
They watched a descending star through the outer Venusian atmosphere.
An incoming spacecraft, it looked like. With the spacelanes closed and the Scimitar divisions grounded, it was the first such star they'd seen all day.
They were wearing Vyres. Wake still paid Vante handsomely, to keep Krepsen's books in order, even though most days he only flew for a few minutes. Sometimes he didn’t fly at all, he just sat, and reflected.
“So why are you here?” Vante asked Wake.
“You wouldn't believe even the half of it. I guess, basically, because I'm a criminal.”
“And if they catch you, you'll go to prison.”
Wake shook his head. “If only it was that simple. Because I wouldn't go to prison. I was involved heavily in the Caitanya-9 debacle, as well as the civil war. I would be questioned, but I honestly have not done anything the current government finds objectionable. They would find me interesting from a scientific perspective, but that's not what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“For a while, I thought I wanted to destroy everything. Then, for a while, I thought I wanted to be a convict and pay my debt to society. Now I've decided to want nothing at all.”
“That doesn't make sense,” the boy said. “Everyone wants something.”
“That's just the thing, I no longer want to be an 'everyone'. I want to be like the Quetzals, just happy to feel the sun on my feathers for a few minutes each day. Happy to eat a sheep. Higher brain functions are for suckers. Especially when the brain establishes higher ideals that the world then fails to live up to. Did people ever disappoint you, Vante?”
The boy thought for a second, decided that it never had.
From the orphanage to Emil Gokla's mansion, he hadn't ever had cause for hope. Even at the end, when he'd murdered Emil, he'd felt like he was just exchanging a shade of murky gray for a shade for a different murky shade.
A difference, without a difference.
“I guess not,” Wake said. “But believe me, most normal people go through childhood thinking there's golden ideals society works by. Then, at varying ages, cracks appear in the fantasy. Maybe someone who doesn't deserve it getting an honor we thought was ours. Maybe our family letting us down – which happened to you, in a way, even if you weren't old enough to remember it. But the world is never the same. And all those years spent internalizing those ideals feel wasted. Why become a saint in a world that loves sinners? If society is criminal, why not become a criminal yourself? The hypocrisy, the falseness... it hits us all at different times, but it always leads to bitterness. Rage. Violence, in some cases.”
“You don't seem violent,” Vante said, and meant it. The man he was now talking to seemed completely different to the one who'd gone into rhapsodies about body disposal methods.
“You know, I think this planet might hold the secret for me.” Wake said. “Even as I stepped off the Dravidian – one that I'd bribed and bullied my way on to, I felt vicious, and dangerous to everyone around me. If a single person had called me by my real name, I'd have snapped and tried to kill everyone on the spacecraft. But now that I'm here, with nothing to do and nowhere to be, I'm starting to come back to my center. It's a good feeling. I hope it continues.”
“You think you’ll stay?”
“I have no choice. But even if I did…”
“Yeah,” Vante said. “You were lying. You still want something.”
Just then, a faint humming filled the hazy air.
It thickened into a single massive chord, and they started to feel vibrations running through the dock.
Vante was about make an observation, when suddenly it came into view, rising up over the platform.
A steel juggernaut,
An Adagio-class surface-to-space shuttle.
It powered up from beneath the deck, looming in front of them like a battleship out of water. It was nearly five meters across and ten long, unpainted metal girdled by viewports of nanoglass, kept aloft by a scaled-down fusion reaction engine. Waves of heat washed across the platform.
“What the...”
Above the surging throb of the engine, they saw rectractable flaps emerge from the Adagio. Two of them.
And then a double thwap-thwap sound.
There was no time to react. The nets unfurled as they spun themselves loose in the air. They hit Wake and Vante with enough force to hurl them from their feet, and pin them against the far wall.
Wake roared with fury as he struggled against the mountaineering pitons now embedded an inch deep in the concrete. They were utterly stuck. Trapped.
The Adagio hovered ever closer to the deck, and the front cupola swung open with a mechanized hiss. A retractable platform extended to the deck.
Eight or so people stepped off. All ages, both sexes. None of them looked like soldiers.
The strangeness when you saw people who have never met b
efore, and yet have been with you for years.
He immediately knew that these, finally, were the Sons of the Vanitar.
The shadowy group that Sarkoth had first worked for, and then spent the sad remainder of his life fleeing.
The ones Sybar Rodensis had arrogantly set himself against, even while denying their existence.
The ones who always, in the end, won.
They approached him, studying him like an entomological specimen.
“Good day, Andrei Kazmer,” a man with messy lank hair said. “I am Nolund Esper. How would you like to come with us?”
“Very much,” Wake muttered. “But I left my good suit at the cleaners.”
“We've been following your activities. You fascinate us.”
“Thanks,” Wake's smile was glum. “Animal magnetism. Where's Raya Yithdras?”
“She did not see fit to attend this.”
At his side, Vante was still struggled. The net had tangled him up even worse, and his arm was pinned behind his back.
He looked sidewise, and from his contorted angle he saw something fascinating.
Wake had one hand behind his back, and that had was drawing a small razor-edged knife from his belt.
With tiny, almost imperceptible sawing motions, Wake was cutting away at the net.
Nolund Esper looked to the boy. “And I see you've already made contact with another person of interest for the Reformation Confederacy. Do you know who this man is, boy? A murderer, a rapist, and a potential genocide.”
“And those are just the actions I've performed that you endorse,” muttered Wake.
“You're a saint next to him, Vante,” a woman said. “At least Emil Gokla would have died soon of natural causes. But no matter. Now both of you will face justice for your crimes.”
“I would like to propose something different,” Wake said. “First step, you all fuck off back to Terrus. Next step, I point and laugh as you fuck off back to Terrus. Go plot the assassination of your species on your own time.”
The woman laughed. “Stupid bravado when your back is against the wall.”
“Then let's fix that,” Wake's knife tore through the remainder of the net, and he leaped free, settling into a fighting stance. His knife glittered in his hand.
He expected them all to bolt and run. None of the Sons of the Vanitar were fighters. They were far too smart to be fighters.
But they didn’t move. There was a blur of motion to his side, and he half saw, half sensed an imposing armored presence standing two feet away.
He was a masked figure, dressed in a skintight suit with numerous rips and tears at symmetrical locations on his body.
“You are under arrest,” a voice said from underneath the mask.
“Die,” Wake snarled, and slammed the knife into the chest, in a chink in the body armor.
It didn't penetrate the man's skin.
The knife snapped against the man's flesh.
Wake was so shocked by this development that he had no chance to avoid a lighting fast spinning kick that hurled him several feet.
“Ugh,” he crashed to the floor, just a few feet from the edge of the platform. Whoever this person was, a Brahmin bull had nothing on his kick.
He got up, wincing at the pain in his side. The Sons of the Vanitar were now standing to his left and right, amused by the spectacle. Poor Vante was still pinned to the wall, looking forlorn.
And the masked figure was taking determined strides towards him. The freak had no guns, and no visible weaponry of any kind.
This would be hand to hand combat.
“Time for round two,” he muttered, tossing the knife, and cracking his knuckles.
“Are you sure that's a smart idea?” asked the woman. “B-31, show this low-level thug what he's dealing with.”
The masked man underwent a sudden and incredible transformation. At dozens of points all across his body, knife blades burst through his skin.
Huge hooks, serrated and scalloped. Single points, meant for penetration. The man's body was a topography of murder, a canvas of vivisection.
Wake's jaw dropped.
There was no need to face his fists.
Hugging him would be death.
The strange soldier kept advancing, a walking swiss army knife.
Wake made a break for it.
He went to the left, scattering the Sons of the Vanitar. He heard the sound of air singing past countless blades as the warrior gave chase.
Desperate to escape, Wake snatched Nolund Esper and flung him into the path of the charging attacker. As soon as Esper came close, the warrior immediately retracted all the blades in his body, and the Son made a harmless collision. B-31 set Esper aside, extended his armature once more, and resumed the chase.
Wake had gained several meters on his pursuer, and was running through the tunnel towards the labyrinthine depths of Zephyr city. Once past this main bottleneck, he was confident that he could lose anyone who tried to chase him.
But then he stopped.
There were fourteen identical warriors ahead of him, exactly the same as the one he'd just faced.
Light glittered from savage barbed points.
They advanced as one, and he retreated.
“You've met the Razormen,” the woman said. “Ready to give up?”
Wake continued backing up before the ineluctable wall of killing steel. The first one was standing aside, allowing him to return to the deck.
“That's the trouble with relying on a knife to get you through life,” Nolund Esper said, dusting himself off. “There's always someone out there with a bigger one.”
Vante watched from his position on the wall. Wake had retreated all the way to the edge, and had nowhere left to go.
He was standing with his heels to the edge of the platform. Beneath him was the smothering atmosphere of Venus. In front of him was a semicircle of lethal supersoldiers.
“No places left to run,” Esper said.
“Story of my life,” said Wake.
And then let himself fall off the edge.
He free-fell from the platform.
Downwards velocity, sickening, lurching. The wind of Venus filled his lungs.
He'd kept the Vyres tightly concealed against his back, beneath a light shirt. None of the Sons of the Vanitar had seen them. If they had, they would have dealt with him a completely different way.
He spread the Vyres, feeling them tear apart his shirt. He unfurled them, filling them with air, and pulled out of the fall.
Above, he saw the flaming trail of the Adagio, and felt the heat of its flames. It had come around from beneath the platform. The same way he'd go to escape. Clearly, this had been a planned strike.
They know who I am. And they know who Vante is. Someone's ratted me out. But that's a problem for another day.
There were so many problems. He could only hope that there were enough days to deal with them all.
He flew underneath the platform. He remembered where Vante kept the Quetzals. There was a trapdoor which he fed them through.
A trapdoor has two sides. If he went through one side, perhaps he'd make it back to the surface.
He chanced a glance, and saw ten glittering metallic beings soaring after him.
The Razormen had raided the Vante’s Vyre stock.
Damn it, he thought. Bogies on my tail.
They'd chase him for as long as it took. He'd have to return to the platform at some point, at which stage they'd be ready.
The Quetzals, he thought. The trapdoor. Maybe they'll be pissed off enough by the Adagio that they'll give me enough of a distraction to escape.
Soon, he saw the place. The Quetzals were all asleep, as they did for at least fourteen to sixteen hours a day. Huge feathery buses that had learned how to breathe.
He flew among the perches, slowing down so as to not wake them with an accidental flap of his wings. He scanned the metallic platform up above, looking for some crack, some kind of access point, and then he
saw the trapdoor.
There was a bolt. You could pull that out, and the door swung out. The hinges were hidden, and allowed for bi-directional movement.
The Razormen were coming up behind him.
They would tear him apart in the air.
He struggled to get the rusty bolt out, aware that the Quetzals were beginning to stir into wakefulness from all the commotion. Finally, he yanked the pin out, and the door swung out.
He wasn't ready for what was behind the door. Eleven rotting sheep carcasses.
“What the fu…”
They were tied by their hindhooves to ropes, so that the birds could feast on them like grisly pinatas. As soon as the trapdoor open, they all fell in his face.
Venus was a hot world, and meat didnt keep long. And the birds now had not been fed in nearly two days.
The good news was that he didn't even notice the smell. The massive adipose deposits intended to feed the Quetzals had instead provided provender for literally millions of teeming maggots, and these fell on him in a hot white shower regurgitating rancid chinks of meat.
He soared through the disgusting mess, closing his eyes and fighting back the instincts that told him to vomit. He arrived on the topside, seeing the first of the Razormen arrive at the scene, receiving a maggot baptism of its own.
That was the least of the Razorman's worries.
The Quetzals were now fully awake.
With an enraged caw, one of them lunged, snapping with its beak. The Razorman tried to pull back, but didn’t quite make it. His body was caught dead-center by that snap.
Wake had no knowledge of what had happened to these men. Obviously, some sophisticated amalgamation of man and technology, quite beyond his understanding. All he knew was that they deflected knife stabs, were incredibly strong and fast, and could turn themselves into walking cheese graters.
But it didn't matter.
When you're caught between those enormous beaks, you are in the very worst possible place to be.
The gnashing beak pulped the Razorman in two, his ultra-tough skin and dozens of jagged points of metal not even remotely saving him. A shower of blood splashed through the trapdoor just as Wake finished unhooking the last of the sheep carcasses and dropping them through. With that, he picked up the dangling trapdoor, hauled it back up, and then crashed it down on the next Razorman's head.
Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4) Page 12
