“Don’t get too close. This could be a…”
With terrifying speed, the Sphere rose again, snapping back into the air as if pulled by spring-loaded wires, and fired two bursts.
Zordrak was killed instantly, the bolt of light vaporizing everything from his chest upwards.
Calypso tried to gain altitude with his Vyres, but the blast tore away his leg. His screams filled their comms like static.
The Sphere shrilled as it rose unhurt from the carnage. It might have been laughing.
Wake circled it, firing his remaining acid rounds to little effect. Calypso was on the ground, face ashen white behind his helmet, trying to fit a crude tourniquet around his spurting stump.
Jesus. Does anything kill this beast?
There was no time to think. The Sphere was fully airborn and speeding towards him like a wrecking ball. He reloaded with titanium-tipped explosive shells, designed to drill deep and then detonate.
Zelity’s voice came through, just as Wake ducked under the huge thing’s bulk.
“If we’re leaving, we need to leave now. Soon gravitational interference from the moon will enter the picture.”
“Do we have covering fire?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Shit. That’s no good to us.” He fired, then ducked back behind the rock as a fusillade of blasts flashed out towards him. Explosions shook the ground. “We’ve got this thing stalking us. It’ll trash the shuttles before we get off the ground.”
“Any ideas?”
He soared aloft on his Vyres, squeezed off another round. Before he could see if it hit, he had to drop to avoid retaliatory fire.
“Just go!” He yelled to the others in between explosions. “Get back to the Adagios! I’m play things out down here, and maybe you’ll get a chance to rescue me later!”
He took to the air with his biokinetic wings, spraying it indiscriminately with fire. Explosions flared to the left and the right, before he landed several concussive shots right to the center of the Sphere.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
It burst through the cloud of smoke, rising into the air with ghastly speed.
It started to chase him, shooting as it did.
He enacted evasive countermeasures, dodging and rolling. White blasts slashed the air, some missing him by inches.
“Come on! That’s all you’ve got?” He shouted.
The Sphere paused for a second, then fired a large globule of light. Wake anticipated its path, side-stepped to avoid it.
As the ball of light hurtled towards him, it changed its shape, flattening into a wide disk, nearly a meter across. It was set to cut him in half.
“Oh, shi-“
He wasn’t ready, and desperately tried to avoid the blurring buzzsaw of light. He was only half successful.
There was a shakk sound as it tore away one of his Vyres, disintegrating it in a shower of polymers and wires. He spun in mid-air, screaming. Then he started to fall.
His single remaining wing flailed and spasmed, unable to do more than counterbalance him and send him corkscrewing to the ground in a dizzying spiral. Biokinetics had no nerve endings and he was unable to feel pain, except as an overwhelming impulse in his brain. You’ve lost a wing! You’ve lost a wing! You’ve lost a -!
Thank you, he thought, closing his eyes to limit his dizziness. Couldn’t have figured that one out.
He discarded his gun, and tried to use his hands as ballast to control his fall. When he thudded to the ground ten meters below, the impact drove all the breath from his lungs. He gasped, fighting back against the blackness spilling across his vision.
“Fuck.” He slurred over comms, not knowing if anyone heard. “I’m down. Lost a wing.”
He tried to stand, knowing that he’d be a sitting duck without wings even if he was able to run, and stumbled. His groping hand came upon a seismic grenade clipped to his side, and he detached it, only half-aware of what he was doing.
His hearing returned just in time to hear the warbling sound approach. The Sphere loomed over him like a tombstone, ineluctable, inescapable.
“Eat shit,” he told it. He set the seismic grenade for two seconds, and gripped it inside his palm. I don’t know if you can be killed, but if you can, I’m taking you with me.
He’d never seen how a Sphere attacked up close. Maybe nobody had. There was a soft change, and then a small hole appeared in the surface of the silver, sucking streaks of material like a whirling drain. From inside, there was only dark.
This is how it attacks, he thought. A gap appears in its armor.
Then he snapped his hand up, throwing the grenade straight into that hole. It vanished inside the Sphere, and it immediately recoiled, as if in shock.
The explosion whammed through it from the inside out, like a single life-ending heartbeat.
There was an enormous soundless pulse that emanated outwards through his surface, hard enough to throw Wake to the ground with its pressure, then the Sphere fell.
It crashed into the ground, burying itself several inches in Caitanya-9’s hard regolith. Its light went out.
Wake stood up. Disbelief was soon flushed away by elation.
“Holy shit,” he muttered. “Holy…fucking…shit.”
He started laughing
“What’s going on out there, Commander?” He heard Yath say over the comms. “We’re waiting. The shuttles are ready to go.”
“It’s dead.” He couldn’t stop chuckling at his narrow escape. “I think I killed it.”
“Save it for your memoirs, boy. We need to leave now.”
“If I wrote a memoir it would be about three pages long, with the final two pages being events that happened today. You should have left already. I was going to hold it while the rest of you got away. Aren’t we doing this whole ‘obey orders’ thing any more?”
“I’ve never seen someone so unhappy about living. Get your ass on board the ship.”
“We need assisted evac for Calypso. He’s hurt.” Wake chuckled, got to his feet, reached behind his back, and ripped the remaining Vyre out of his spinal column. One on its own was worse than useless.
He was about to say more, but then he froze.
“Oh no.”
Metallic screeches filled the air. There were three more Spheres coming down the hill.
Konotouri Alpha – March 14, 2136 - 1315 hours
At command center of Konotouri Alpha, Enoki Kai dismissed his underlings. He was now alone at a table that saw somewhere between two hundred and three hundred pressing orders of business every day. The job was aging him rapidly, the cool blue glow of computer screens siphoning away his life.
He allowed himself a few minutes of peace and quiet. Some said that water was Konotouri’s most valuable resource. Some said heat. Some said metal. His own opinion: privacy.
He savoured the empty moments. No chaos, no confusion, no shouting voices, no dipshit commander publically overriding him and insulting his authority.
The thought of Commander Wake – though that was not his real name - filled him with unease. The best case scenario was that Wake would find nothing, and finally face the music that he was irrelevant.
The worst case…
He’d received another message from Terrus, one sent only a few weeks after the rescue team had left. The hard cap of lightspeed meant that communications and manpower arrived nearly simultaneously. Like Wake himself, the message had come on a ten year time lapse.
He accessed the computer and re-read it, hoping to banish the bone-deep sense of dread.
To my good friend, Enoki.
Be advised, I am about to jeopardise our friendship. After reading this, you will probably never want to talk to me again. With my recent appointment to Second Minister I am now responsible for two much of the Solar Arm, three hundred colonies and fifteen billion souls. Hard decisions must sometimes be made, decisions that go beyond individual lives.
The Solar Arm has heard your distress call, and is debating the
appropriate response. I am issuing an executive order to remit military aid, but this must be approved by Parliament. I am, however, allowed to send a six man rescue team. I have exercised this option also.
They are commanded by someone called Andrei Kazmer. He is a dangerous, psychopathic criminal.
Kazmer’s been called a “good cop gone bad”, only we’re not sure about the first part. I’ve attached a full dossier on him. Broken home. His parents belonged to the “traditional parenting” fad, where there’s a single mother and a single father raising the child, and it didn’t work out. A history of delinquent violence. At age 21, he entered the Solar Arm police academy. By age 26, he received an appointment monitoring illicit asteroid miners beyond the orbit of Mars.
He earned a reputation for competence, and for violence. Soon, complaints were flooding in about his hardball interrogation tactics. Punching. Kicking. Broken ribs. Solar Arm policy is that officers cannot yell, but must speak to suspects at a reasonable volume. Kazmer got around that rule by speaking softly into a microphone connected to a 200 watt speaker next to the perp’s head. His slightest whisper was louder than a supersonic jet.
Eventually, his behavior became too bad to ignore.
First he killed a suspected drug dealer by ramming a Killhammer grenade into his mouth and detonating it – he claimed the guy had insulted his shoes. Then he “interviewed” a perp by surgically burning away his toes one by one with a blowtorch. The officer who turned him in recalls walking in and thinking someone had been frying synthetic chicken meat.
He was immediately suspended from the Solar Arm Constabulary (in which I was Commissioner at the time), and interred on Ceres. A date was set for his trial, but he never got a chance to attend it.
He escaped, breaking out nearly ten other convicted criminals in the process. Together they went on a one-man rolling crime wave through the trading outposts in the Asteroid Belt. Robberies, standovers, petty vandalism. Then he looted a military depot from the Asteroid Rebellion. Now we had a major situation: dumbfuck thugs running around with mil spec gear.
Forty members of the Solar Arm Constabulary were marshalled to stop them. As Commissioner, they acted under my orders.
We chased Kazmer all across Ceres. He was smart, and knew how to play the game. He stuck to heavily populated areas, so that any attempt to engage him would cause civilian collateral. I tried to avoid that. I always try to avoid that. Everyone was urging me to fuck the civilians, to just open fire and turn him to slag, no matter who happened to be standing next to him. After six of my men were KIA, it seemed like they had a point.
Finally, we tracked him to Kuvar, Ceres’ main spaceport. He and the three surviving members of his gang were trying to escape offworld. We cornered him in the loading bay. There were two hundred civilians with him.
As I was fretting about what to do, a Very Important Person contacted me (ah, why be coy. It was the Prime Minister. Remember, you’ve never read this letter!) “Use a thresher. I give you authorization. Just clear the whole area. I can make it look like an accident.” Let me refresh you on what threshers an. An antimatter charge in the center of material engineered to be immensely hard and immensely brittle. When they blow, they send particles the size of dust outwards, immediately turning everyone in a hundred yard radius to a bloody spray.
I refused. Seconds later, a civilian tackled him to the ground, and we were able to nail him with a blast from a sonic cannon. Nobody had to die. In my opinion, there’s seldom a case where they do.
His arrest was a major coup for my career. In a way, I can credit him for the Second Minister part of my name. He made me.
He was arraigned, tried, convicted for more crimes than the court had docket paper, and imprisoned back on Terrus. This brings us to the current day…and the part where things get interesting.
Kazmer still has a Solar Arm Constabulary membership. Even though he is a convict, he is still, in a titular sense, a police officer.
It is well within my mandate to appoint him to lead this rescue effort. But here’s the part I cannot do: violate the Solar Arm Constitution.
If I give the all-clear for someone to be dehydrated for interstellar travel, they lose all their memories. It is law that I must sufficiently re-educate them on their past, and their background, once they re-awaken.
In Kazmer’s case, I have chosen not to do this.
The five men and women under his command have received the standard memory chip, as per Black Shift spec, re-introducing them to their past lives. Kazmer has received nothing.
When he wakes up five years from now, he won’t know anything I’ve told you in this message. He won’t even know who this is.
Why am I doing this?
I make no excuse. Curiousity.
What makes a man a man? Will a psychopath, disassociated from his past, continue to be a psychopath?
This might be a new start for Kazmer. Maybe his early life was just a compounding series of mistakes, until he found himself warming up a blowtorch. Perhaps with a different past, he would have been a different man.
Or maybe our nature is our nature, and Kazmer’s just a compass that points straight to hell, damn the details.
You’ll meet Andrei soon. Of course, use him to investigate the anomaly on Caitanya-9. But keep an eye on him. Based, on what I’ve told you, would you have guessed him to be a brutal cop-turned-criminal? Or does he seem like a different kind of man?
Thank you, Enoki.
PS. Delete after reading. There are not enough locks in the universe to keep this message in sufficient secrecy.
- Sarkoth Amnon, Second Minister of the Solar Arm
When he’d received the message, it had ruined Kai’s day, ruined his week, and the verdict was still out on whether it would ruin his life.
As if I didn’t have enough to deal with, without a brainwashed criminal running around the planet.
He summoned a holographic image of the planet, watching it rotate in a slow gavotte, caressed by its two moons.
Somewhere down there Andrei Kazmer was wasting time up a blind alley to nowhere.
You’ll meet Andrei soon…. Based, on what I’ve told you, would you have guessed him to be a brutal cop-turned-criminal? Or does he seem like a different kind of man?
Just then, a red glow started to appear on the table. It was being shunted from his comms center, and was coming from the planet. It had the signifier: URGENT.
He tapped the table, and started speaking.
“This is Warrant Officer Enoki Kai. Go.”
A choppy, static-filled voice started speaking. It took Kai some seconds to realise it was Nyphur.
“Oh, thank heavens, I’ve got someone. There’s shooting. Andrei and his men are engaging with the Spheres. There’s men down. The shuttles are taking off as we speak.”
“What…shooting? What happened?”
Kai gripped the table as he heard explosions and screams coming through the commlink.
“It’s Commander Wake. He opened fire on the Spheres.”
Caitanya-9 – March 14, 2136 - 1330 hours
Wake tried to steady himself as the Spheres approached. He was getting a handle on them now, he thought – how fast they moved, what their effective firing range was, how predictable their movements were.
Against this were the small problems that he had no weapon, no wings, no hope, and was going to die.
He guessed that they’d fan out, and lay down intersecting vectors of fire – then he realized that they’d just kill him. He was no longer an opponent. He was an insect to be crushed.
Suddenly, he heard the whickering of Vyres at his back, and saw two figures swooping out of the dark.
“Damn it, I told you all to get off the planet!”
“Hey, Wake!” Yath’s voice over the radio. “Stay where you are – we’re deploying a Repulsor at your twelve!”
There was a wooshing sound, and a small object the size of his fist landed in front of him.
Sh
akk. Two horizontal spokes shot out, six meters across. Shakk. A single vertical spoke shot two meters in the air. Spokk. A single spike drove into the ground, anchoring it. Then, a protective membrance engaged across all the spokes, glistening like fresh spidersilk.
Wham! Wham wham!
Volleys of light crashes into the barrier, which buckled but didn’t fold. Wake dashed in the direction of Circe Yath.
“Here, get these on. Everyone else is on the shuttles – we’ll have to rendesvouz in the air.” Yath threw him a new pair of Vyres, then paused to admire the downed Sphere. “Damn, you fucked that thing sideways.”
“I’ll tell you about it later.” He hastily attached the new set of biokinetic wings as they landed beside him, dodging a few shots that whipped over the top of the barrier.
They flew closer, still firing relentlessly at the Repulsor. The energy-based shield was starting to flicker ominously. It had only seconds of life left.
The new wings sunk their connections into his spine. He winced as it re-opened the wounds on his back and neck. Then, they took to the air, just as the Repulsor exploded.
They gained altitude and speed, heading back in the direction of the beacon. Andrei cast a quick glance back at the five Spheres chasing them
Five? He wondered. Wasn’t it three before?
Detsen was rising, a dark disk ascending like a tumor on the horizon.
We’re almost out of time.
Volleys of shots flashed around them, illuminating the hills and canyons. Then, they saw them: the two jet-thrust Adagio shuttles, riding plumes of smoke and gaining altitude fast. They had open backs.
“Come on!” He heard Zelity shout over the intercom. “Commander, the one on the left!”
He angled the aelerons on the Vyres and shot upwards into the murky sky, feeling the ground recede beneath him. The Adagios would soon be at the limits of the Vyres’ range, and they’d only get one shot at entry.
With a wrenching spurt of speed, he arrowed towards the Adagio, the planet’s foul smelling air in his face as he fought to gain on the rising shuttles. Angling in on the door, Wake closed his eyes, furled his wings, and let momentum close the rest of the distance to the hatch. There was no point in worrying. He’d either make it or he wouldn’t.
Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1) Page 7
