Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4)

by Ben Sheffield

  The Adagio worked mostly on autopilot, but it still needed manual corrections from time to time. This was soon proved true as it started listing unpredictable.

  Saldeen Zana and Ubra Zolot were the only ones left inside.

  “Look, set me free,” Ubra said. “I'll fire the guns. With him out of action, you really need another person. This is what I want. Him to die.”

  Saldeen looked aghast, but quickly relented. “Can you fly the Adagio?”

  “Yeah, but not while I'm handcuffed.”

  Saldeen ran over to Ubra, undid her handcuffs, and unfastened her leg restraints.

  Ubra was free.

  Saldeen immediately regretted her decision when the short former marine broke her jaw with a punch, and then landed on her, smashing blows into her face.

  “Once you're gone,” Ubra said as she hammered on the soft, domesticated civilian, “that entire deck goes up in flames. And you won't be around to put me back in handcuffs after I've finished your job, you incompetent fuck!”

  Blood flew from the woman's tiny fists as she reduced Saldeen's face to a pulp.

  Ubra relented, and Saldeen momentarily thought she might survive.

  It was a thought that vanished as soon as she saw that Ubra had a splinter of wood in her hands. One of the ones the Razormen had used to keep their talons sharp.

  It went right into her chest.

  Instantly, all apocalyptic fervor left her, as she realized that her apocalypse was now upon her.

  Ubra's face grinned down at her. “What was that you said on the spaceflight? That we should never assume someone's on the same team just because they're running in the same direction? Case. In. Point.”

  Saldeen spiralled away from life, her last thought a pathetic bleat.

  I don't want to die . . . someone save me.

  Ubra siezed the controls of the Adagio, and righted it.

  It wasn't the exact same model that Wake's marine detachment had used to escape the Spheres on Caitanya-9. It was tricked out. Sophisticated. Spinning rims and chrome. Plus lots and lots of things that could shoot. They were the easiest surface-level craft in the solar system to command and use. A child could rain down hell with these things.

  She fell in love with it instantly.

  Wake had used one of these to save her life. And she would use one to end his.

  She activated and primed the feed. Twelve hundred explosive rounds a minute, firing from spinning chainguns, and each one would penetrate through nearly a full foot of armor.

  “Goodbye,” she whispered over the outboard PA system. A blanket pronouncement of death over the entire dock.

  The wheeling Quetzals and Razormen battling in the air looked shocked by the sudden noise.

  Then she depressed the double triggers.

  Full auto.

  The chainguns spun up and fired.

  Three-foot tongues of flame fired, launching explosive tracer rounds. To the surface observer, it looked like laser beams of pure phase-coherent light, pulsing down over the dock.

  They sliced through everything.

  No matter what was in their path – metal, polywood, flesh, armor, concrete, feathers – the bullets passed through it as thought it was vapor.

  Explosions lit up the dock as Ubra raked it back and forth with her twin chainguns, pummelling it with the hatred of the dead. Hundreds of fireballs scorched and hammered the platform.

  She massacred everyone in her path. The Venusian sun was so bright it was almost blinding. But now she made it look as dark as night.

  The battle now had four sides, all of them clashing chaotically.

  They had wildly varying goals, and wildly varying levels of firepower.

  First, there was Wake and Vante, just trying to survive the hellstorm of shit raining down on them.

  Next, there were the six or seven surviving Razormen. Some had wings, while others were bound to the ground. They were propelled onwards only by their Manichean worldview, divided into MASTERS and NOT MASTERS. Their MASTERS all seemed to be dead, so they were propelled onwards by their ruinous mission, to eliminate Andrei Kazmer. They were the metal, he was the meat.

  Then there were the Quetzals, set loose by Vante. They were now in the full grips of freedom's ecstasy, particularly the freedom to fill their bellies. Their training was gone, and they were in an environment filled with delicious man-sized morsels.

  Lastly, there was Ubra, firing the chainguns in the Adagio. Her only mission was to make sure everyone else in the picture died.

  “Hurry!” Vante pulled Wake upright as the shooting started. Tracer bullets scorched the air. “It's too dangerous out here!”

  “Thanks, boy,” Wake grunted shoving the Razorwoman aside. Blood was flowing from the cut on his neck. A second longer and she would have cut right through his carotid artery. “You're just an insight a minute.”

  They ran across the burning platform.

  Then there was a thud up ahead as a Razorman landed on the deck, and furled his Vyres. He caught sight of Andrei Kazmer, and charged.

  Blades popped free of his body as he ran.

  Vante drew the gun, and started squeezing off shots. He was an inexperienced shooter, and all the shots but the first one went wide due to recoil. It bounced off the man's mask, leaving him unharmed.

  Just then, a Quetzal slammed down on top of the Razorman, burying him beneath its two ton weight. It reached out with a claw half the size of Wake's body, snatched the Razorman's arm, and tore it away from his body like a turkey drumstick.

  The Razorman didn't make a single sound. It merely twisted its body, and slid out its knives to their fullest extension.

  It started hacking and hammering at the dinosaur with its remaining arm. The metal sliced through feathers, gouging deep into the leathery flesh of the Quetzal’s breast.

  The Quetzal cried out in pain, and made short stabbing motions with its beak, trying to kill this wretched excuse for a meal.

  The Razorman lashed out in turn with a blade-edged first. It plunged the sharp edge over and over into the Quetzal's watermelon-sized eye, puncturing it. The Quetzal's screeches of agony echoed across the deck, even over the sounds of the shooting.

  Just then, a single tracer settled their dispute by piercing through both of them before exploding on the deck below.

  The tangle of Razorman and Quetzal was engulfed in flames. Feathers burned and the mask melted.

  It had all taken barely five seconds.

  “Let's go,” Vante tugged Wake's arm.

  “Coming,” said Wake. He lingered for a second more.

  Focused on the Razorman's face visible beneath the melting mask.

  Then he started running, straight off the edge of the platform, soaring out over the endless expanse of Venus below. Vante followed him.

  Ubra was still firing away in the cockpit,

  The entire deck was blazing now. The explosive rounds scattered highly flammable compounds all around, and it was like looking out on a sea of fire.

  With the bulk of the devastation done, she started picking out targets in the air and killing them with precise bursts of fire.

  A Razorman was wheeling through the columns of smoke. Firelight glittered on his barbed metal body.

  She sighted, and fired. She hit him dead on, blowing him to flaming pieces.

  Below, two Quetzals soared upwards, attacking her Adagio.

  She cantilevered the shuttle to meet them, and squeezed the triggers.

  Bullets ripped right through them. Their flaming entrails exited out the back of their bodies.

  She returned her attention to the skies around the deck, just in time to sea two humanoid figures swan-dive from the platform and unfurl Vyres.

  There were no metallic glimmers.

  “Hello, Andrei Kazmer,” she said over the PA address. The speakers blared out her words like the mouth of God. “Remember me? The one you raped?”

  She couldn't squeeze the triggers fast enough.

  Wh
ite-hot lasers pulsed out from the chainguns, stitching the air near Kazmer's body.

  She used the tracer rounds as bracketing fire, igniting the air all around his body, aiming ever closer to his fleeing figure.

  He barrel rolled. Spun. Conducted every evasive action in the book.

  Still, the tracer lines came closer and closer to his spinning body.

  She only needed one to hit.

  “Come on . . . come on . . . “ Ubra cooed, as thought the bullets were children involved in an athletic event, and their continued progress was making her very proud.

  She used all her memories of this wretched man to hold her aim.

  Pinning her down on Caitanya-9.

  Entering her.

  Injecting his DNA into her, making her his brood mare.

  Taking even the pleasure of a normal baby from her with Lucas Farholt's ill placed bullet.

  Die, Andrei Kazmer!

  Just then, as she closed the distance, a Quetzal rammed into the Adagio.

  It landed in exactly the spot the first one had weakened. Its enormous beak smashed right through the cracked glass, extruding several feet into the cockpit.

  The Adagio rolled dangerously in the air, and her precisely-aimed bead on Andrei Kazmer went wide..

  “Shit! Fuck!” She roared, flying out of her seat. The Quetzal's beak had gotten jammed in the hole in the glass, and it was stuck inside the cockpit! It couldn't even open its beak to caw.

  It was close enough that she could see the tiny hairs on the grooves of bone, and the little lice wriggling in them.

  “Fucking die, you cocksucker!” she yelled, grabbing the ceremonial sidearm from Saldeen Zana's corpse.

  She fired six shots, right into the bird's beak. They punched neat little holes, but the Quetzal didn't pull itself free from the Adagio. Very likely, it couldn't. It was too big, too heavy.

  And it was taking her down with it.

  The Adagio yawed dangerously. The dinosoid was massively heavy, and it had changed her center of mass in a way the thrusters couldn't compensate.

  She tilted more and more, the angle through the smashed glass bubble changing until it was angled down at the murky clouds of sulfur and methane. And there was an awful dropping sensation that gripped her stomach like a vice.

  This was disasterous. Any more, and she'd enter an out-of-control tumble, spinning down like a massive metal whirligig, striaght out of the bubble and into the harsh atmosphere of Venus.

  She scrabbled back over to the cockpit, which was tilted at nearly a ninety degree angle to its normal orientation.

  She furiously worked all the thrusters, tried to change their vectors and angles of incidence.

  No dice.

  There was only one possible way to survive. She had to land the shuttle.

  And there was only one place to land. The burning platform.

  With the determination of hopeless despair, she slammed down the afterburners, sending waves of flame scorching the skies behind her.

  Normally, this would have sent her upwards.

  With the heavy bird tipping the shuttle at a ninety degree angle and increasing, it sent her sideways.

  Right into the ocean of fire she herself had created.

  As she came closer to the inferno, feeling the flames dance reflected and refracted in a thousand silvery points of shattered glass, she reflected on a satirical piece of wisdom found in thousands of army manuals.

  It is generally ill advised to land in an area you have just bombed.

  Generally doesn't mean always, she thought grimly, as the flames burned closer.

  Rules, like glass barriers, were made to be broken.

  A falling hammer landed on the burning anvil.

  The few remaining Razormen on the deck dived out of the way as the sideways-pointed Adagio crash-landed on to the deck.

  It was obscene. An aberration. A mistake. A gigantic metal monolith, capped with glass, with a dangling Quetzal flapping its wings and kicking its feet in front of it.

  The Adagio landed directly on the Queztal, crushing it to a pulp and sending a blizzard of burning feathers flying skyward.

  The Adagio was circled by viewpoints at fore and aft. The foremost viewing ports were now face down, blocked by the Quetzal's corpse. The rearmost viewing port was jutting straight up.

  If anyone had bothered to look, they would have seen a pair of small hands reach out of the inside, manually deactivate the airtight sealing, and then kick the glass cupola outwards.

  In the seconds that followed, Ubra Zolot climbed out of the doomed Adagio, a pistol clutched in her hand.

  Nobody was bothering to look.

  Because by then it was obvious that the entire platform was about to collapse,

  There was a terrifying screeching sound, searing like vibrato on an out of tune violin. It was incredibly loud, and accompanied by a tilt of perspective.

  The platform was about to fall.

  Wake’s grenade had weakened it. Ubra’s shooting had done more than weaken it. And this new sudden weight was simply too much for it to hold.

  The remaining Razormen swiftly landed, and started running towards the exit that led back in the city. Without the platform, it would have been incredibly difficult

  There were two left.

  Devastation.

  The mission had been a catalogue of disasters from beginning to end. Wake, Vante, the Quetzals, Ubra.

  And as far as they could tell, every last one of the Sons of Vanitar commanding them had perished.

  Only Raya Yithdras was left, ensconced on distant Mars.

  They could have gone back to the Dravidian, at the spaceport, and reported failure through the on-board sat-comms.

  But that was not their ethos.

  The prevailing fact over all of this was simple – the job was still not done.

  Where had Andrei Kazmer gone?

  Through the ocean of burning metal, feathers, and human flesh, he was nowhere to be seen. B-31 spoke up. “Wait here. Guard this entrance. If Kazmer tries to land, finish him.”

  “Copy.” B-30 said.

  “I will go into the city.”

  “Copy. Why?”

  “To find the trapdoor,” B-31 said. “There is a second entrance into Zephyr City. Kazmer used it once to escape us. He will not use it a second time.”

  Ubra gingerly threaded her way through the puddles of burning turbofuel. She tried to keep her balance. The floor of the platform now seemed to embody almost every substance and quality known to mankind. Slippery, friction-coated, cold, hot. It was a contradiction that would kill her.

  The only prevailing constant was that it was falling.

  With every second, there was more screeching as more rivets and bolts failed. And each one caused the platform to sag.

  It was hopelessly weakened at a structural level. Her shooting spree had torn apart its fundamentals, and now the massive weight of the Adagio was pulling it down to the abyss of Venus.

  She held no hope that the decline would continue to be gradual.

  There would be a tipping point, where some vital final support would snap, and then the entire assembly would fall. And that would be that.

  She had to reach the exit.

  The platform was just a few dozen meters across. She could have crossed that distance in seconds, in calmer times.

  Now, the trip took her nearly two minutes. It seemed like hours.

  There was another danger. The Adagio was now burning, the cockpit consumed by hungry tongues of flame. She knew what kind of fuel mixes were on board the craft, and in what quantities. The explosion would probably level half a city block.

  I wonder if the magistrate of Venus City is reconsidering allowing the Reformation Confederacy free rein throughout its holdings, she thought, gingerly stepping over obstacles. This seems the sort of decision you might regret.

  Once, she nearly tripped and went sliding down the slope to her doom. She caught herself by wrapping her hand around a n
earby handhold.

  She pulled herself upright, and realised that her 'handhold' was in fact a severed human foot.

  Or rather, a Razorman foot. A single spike protruded from the calcaneus bone, and it had gotten wedged between two metal bars in the platform.

  Bone gleamed, shorn short by a Quetzal beak.

  Holy shit, he stomach churned at the grotesque sight.

  Finally, the squealing of failing metal became omnipresent and all enduring, she was within sight of the exit. There was a Razorman standing guard over the entryway.

  She approached him, hoping that it would be friendly.

  “Hey, mind if I pass?” She asked, politely. “I need to get off this platform. So do you.”

  As soon as it saw her, blades snapped out from its body with that hard shakk sound, and it advanced on her.

  She should have known better than to hope.

  “Your masters are dead,” she told the quasi-metallic beast. “You might as well give up. You have no worthy mission to fulfill, and you never did.”

  It didn't. It wouldn't. It couldn't. Its masters were dead, but that only meant that the world was comprised of nothing but NOT MASTERS.

  Full of nothing but meat.

  It advanced on her, ready to pull her apart for no reason other than the fact that she existed.

  “Stop, or I’ll kill you,” she raised Saldeen's stolen gun.

  It didn't stop.

  She opened fire, emptying the clip.

  Bullets thudded into its chest, into its stomach, into its mask. None of them halted it for even a second.

  Goddamn. What did Raya do to these things?

  There was the woosh of wings, and a small boy landed next to her, scattering the flames with his downdraft. “I don't know who you are, lady, but we need to get off this platform.”

  “I know,” she snapped. She pointed at the advancing human swiss army knife, coming to gut them.

  The boy was suddenly deep in thought. An odd time for a philosophical reverie, but off he went.

  He seemed to be doing calculations.”

  “Normally the skyhook is programmed towards a target on the customer's body,” he muttered. “But Krepsen showed me a way to free-aim them at a specific point…”