Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3)

by Ben Sheffield

  “If you want to believe that, then I can't stop you.”

  “Damn right, you can't.”

  “Whatever the truth is,” she continued, “I’m sure you were a brave fighter, and that you performed your duties to the best of your abilities.”

  He stared at her with those eerie sightless eyes. “Oh, really? Then why am I not in heaven?”

  Then he doddered off, gently touching the walls as he moved in case his positioning equipment was in error.

  An angel on a mission to find the latrines and take a shit.

  Then there was Nilux Red, who, bizarrely, had also gone to Caitanya-9, albeit only to Konotouri Station, and many years before any of the drama had happened on the surface. She was a botanist, with an interest in how plants would grow in the thin, sandy soil of Caitanya-9.

  I could tell you a thing or two about that, Ubra thought, remembering Zelity and his pine forest.

  Nilux had arrived on the planet, only to discover that her grant had been cancelled mid-flight and she wouldn't get to study plants after all.

  That was unfortunate.

  What was also unfortunate was how, on her return flight to Terrus, the Black Shift procedure had failed to fully dehydrate her. As the ship accelerated towards lightspeed, she'd suddenly awoken, halfway between alive and dead, her electrolytes chronically low from the liters siphoned from her body.

  She'd staggered to her feet, surrounded by eight or nine dehydrated fellow travelers who were sleeping peacefully, struggling to comprehend what was going on.

  “I spent days and days just drinking,” Nilux said. “I didn't realise it was possible to be so thirsty. Once that was over, I realised I had a big problem.”

  “Yep,” Ubra smirked. “I bet you did.”

  The Black Shift pods were one-time use only. It was impossible to crawl back into one and reactivate the procedure. If it failed, it failed.

  And Nilux had been forced to make a five year trip through space in a tiny metal box...fully awake and conscious.

  “It was my worst nightmare, come true. I was fucking scared when they put me in there, and I tried to comfort myself by thinking 'it's okay, they know what they're doing, I'm in good hands.’ she said. “I didn't hate the government before then, but I do now, you better believe.”

  Ubra cradled the baby and leaned in closer. “So what did you do?”

  “My first thought was, do I have enough food? And it turns out that Black Shift does kinda plan for this eventuality – there was a cache of about a hundred kilos of food.”

  “But that's not enough. A woman your size needs about least fifteen hundred kilocalories a day,” Ubra did some quick mental math. “You had nowhere near enough food.”

  “I rationed myself down to a thousand,” Nilux said, a bit of defensiveness now creeping into her posture. “And then, to eight hundred. And then to six hundred.”

  “Holy shit, you must have been starving.”

  “At the end of the trip, I weighed less than eighty pounds. I could pinch three inches of skin off my arm. It was horrible.”

  Something didn't make sense to Ubra. “Wait a moment, help me follow this. If you had a hundred kilos of food – let's call it calorie rich stuff, with about five thousand calories per kilo. Five hundred thousand in total. Does that sound about right to you?”

  “I guess so. It was nasty orange shit, but it filled you up.”

  She quickly did some mental multiplication. “Let's suppose you ate six hundred a day for the entire trip. And let's say the trip was fifteen hundred days, just to make it simple. That's nine hundred thousand calories you would have eaten, waaay more than the food you had available. You would have run out of food with about two years remaining.”

  “Well, maybe it was more than a hundred kilos. Might have been a hundred and ten.”

  “And you weren't eating six hundred calories a day, only for part of the trip. So help me out here? What did you eat after the foot ran out? The lining in the walls? Your own fingernails?

  Nilux Red shuddered. “Listen, I hate talking about it, okay? I even hate thinking about it. God, I wish I'd never even mentioned it to you. I can tell what you're thinking, and I didn't do it.”

  Ubra couldn't help but laugh. “Didn't do what? I haven't said anything.”

  Nilux looked away. “You're going to accuse me of the same thing everyone accuses me of.”

  “Seriously. What?”

  “Eating my fellow passengers.”

  Ubra giggled. It was a reflex, like a dam bursting, and soon she was laughing,

  “It's not fucking funny!” Nilux said. She sounded genuinely hurt. “I've lost jobs over this shit! My boyfriend broke up with me! People keep telling me there's human flesh on my breath and to use a breath mint. Just fucking quit it.”

  “I didn't accuse you of anything!” Ubra said, interrupting the tale of woe. “But you have to admit, there is a caloric shortfall. If not by cannibalism, how did you survive?”

  “I don't know!” Nilux hissed, clutching the table until her knuckles went white. “There just...always seemed to be enough, alright? Towards the end, I was dreaming constantly of food, and I'm not ashamed to admit I did think of cannibalism. Just bite into someone's leg, and my hunger would be over. But I always had another scraping of orange substitute, and then the urge would disappear. I was three days out from Neptune when my supplies hit bottom. I carefully rationed the last scraping of orange gunk into three identical piles. Just having it there gives you psychological strength. When I hit the trans-Neptunian orbit and docked on Triton, I was so proud that I actually left the last dollop untoched. I survived, without resorting to cannibalism, and I even had supplies left over!”

  “Pretty fucking incredible,” Ubra said. “Were you a local celebrity?”

  “I was, until the rumours started. Apparently, the register from the computer had been lost, and nobody was quite sure of how many people had been on the Dravidian to begin with. But I swear before God, I never touched anyone.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ubra held up her free hand. “I believe you. Wasn't accusing you of anything, I was just a little curious.”

  “I got a message from Black Shift, offering me twelve million ducats if I didn't tell my story to anyone in the press. I took it, but I guess it must have leaked out anyway because soon I'm getting detained by spooks from the government. They say I'd endured a 'completely novel experience' for a human, and they wanted to see what a protracted period of relativistic space travel has on the conscious mind. Not to mention such a long period of caloric reduction. Next thing I know, I'm here. And I’ve been here ever since. Any more questions?”

  “Yeah. How do you get splintered human bones out from between your teeth? Is dental floss good for that, or...?”

  Ubra dodged a thrown coffee cup.

  Lastly, there was Omen Yatz. He was a new arrival, a surly malcontent who never spoke a kind word to anyone, not even by accident.

  His reason for being here was...a broken wrist.

  Ubra couldn't believe it. He was an anomaly here in this collection of freaks and misfits – a normal patient.

  She'd tried to probe his story, convinced that he must have been lying. But after speaking with many patients and orderlies, it really did seem like this was the long and short of it. He was here with nothing more than a broken wrist.

  His stay would be short. Just a simple problem, with a simple solution. A broken bone was nothing a graft of marrow and some implanted stem cells wouldn't fix in a matter of days.

  He wasn't like most of the others. No complicated mental issues to untangle. No exotic diseases that required him to be put in stasis suspension. No dying internal organs that would need to be replaced by implants grown inside genetically modified pigs.

  Truthfully, his broken wrist was worsened by the fact that whoever had set it had done a sloppy job, and allowed it to partially heal along a fracture.

  After several days of listening to him grouse and backtalk to everyon
e in sight, Ubra was fairly certain that this had been done on purpose. She was of the inclination to break his other wrist and badly set it, too.

  One day, he came upon her while she was breastfeeding Yalin.

  “You've got some nice big titties,” he leered, by way of conversational opener. “Fuckin' wish I was that baby.”

  “You'll have to settle for being a baby, not this particular one,” Ubra said.

  He leaned in closer, and made loud kissing sounds.

  “How's the wrist?” Ubra said. “Bet it's a bitch having to learn how to jack off with your other arm.”

  He scowled, his smile vanishing. “Bit of a mouth you've got on you.”

  “Take a joke, bozo.”

  “I'll tell you something that isn't a joke,” Yatz said. “You've got company.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You wanna know how I got here? Because of an injury made by one Andrei Kazmer. Your old squad leader. He’s being detained at this very facility.”

  Ubra's shock was palpable. Her arm drifted downwards, and the nipple popped free of Yalin's mouth. The baby mewled softly, and reached for it.

  “I haven’t seen him,” she said.

  “And you probably won’t. He actually arrived before you came, and he’s detained at the research facility. A few kilometers deeper into the mountain. From what I here, that’s where they put the really bad cases.”

  “Jesus,” she shook her head. Wasn’t the planet destroyed? Shouldn’t he be dead?

  “I heard on the grapevine that you were from the Caitanya expedition”, Yatz said. “And that you were rediscovered not long after the planet got hit with an antimatter blast and disappeared into a wormhole. Man, just what the hell happened there? Kazmer isn’t saying much, or so my source claims.”

  “It's a long story,” she said. “Basically, my squad was stranded there, and it was either survive or die. We survived. Not much else I can really say.”

  He shook his head. “He's claiming that he was God. Don’t let Farholt hear that. Kazmer’s saying that he controlled the planet, that he made the wormholes, that he nearly used some intergalactic superweapon against us but decided against it. It's completely nuts. He's totally insane, and even mouthier than you. Can't wait until this wrist heals. First day I can throw a punch again, I'm beating the shit out of his punk ass.”

  “Well, I'm surprised to learn that he's still around,” she said. Except not really. He's too canny to let himself die. “Does he know I'm here?”

  “No. Patient confidentiality, and stuff like that. But I'll tell you one other thing my source said...” he leaned in closer, and Ubra recoiled from his foul garlic-smelling breath. “He's asking after you. Wants to know that you're alive and well. Wants to know about the baby.”

  Ubra felt like insects were crawling beneath her skin. Ordinarily she would have dismissed this as postpartum derangement of her nervous system. Not now.

  “Does he?”

  Yatz had a grin on his oily face. “You know what I think? This is just a hunch, but I got a feeling that your baby girl is his.”

  Ubra shrugged, and started rehooking her bra. Feeding time was over.

  “I think you and him got into some horizontal action on the planet, and now he's a daddy.”

  She couldn't handle any more of this conversation. She stood up, and started walking away. “Well, it's your prerogative to think stupid thoughts. All the best with beating his ass – and I’m not being sarcastic.”

  It wasn't long before the questioning started.

  Hospital orderlies were soon inviting her for walks. She was socially adept, and good at picking up vibes. She didn't think that these requests were things she was allowed to decline.

  The hospital had taken her in, and given her and the baby shelter in one of the worst shitstorms to ever hit the planet. She owed the Arrakhia Mountain Hospital both of their lives.

  But she was still left greatly uneasy how much these meetings resembled interviews.

  In fact, resembled interrogations.

  She would be led into an iridium-sealed door at the end of a long tunnel, and then escorted through a labyrinthine assembly of dials, readouts, holographs, and other scientific equipment.

  This high technology belied her eventual destination. A plain white room, delineated by tinted panes of glass. She would sit on one side of a table. On the other would be her interlocuter, making eye contact that would sometimes last for two or three hours at a stretch, while he bombarded her with question after question.

  Occasionally it would be a tall dark haired person in a white coat. Sometimes it was an older, heavyset woman. Both of them were pretty hard to read. They had some of the bearing of scientists, and some of the bearing of soldiers, and perhaps they fell into the endless gray morass in between. Some scientists fired guns. Some soldiers used slide rules.

  They wanted to know everything.

  Her age.

  Her service number.

  Her date of birth.

  Her early life.

  Her ambition

  Her hobbies.

  Her previous military record.

  Her decorations, recommendations, and demerits, where applicable.

  With the groundwork laid, they started systematically extracting the Caitanya-9 story from her.

  She told a condensed version that was over in fifteen minutes. That wasn't enough, and soon they were pumping her for ever longer and expanded versions. She covered every single aspect of the story over and over, and each time recrossing the terrain seemed to yield new details which had sunk into the mud of her subconscious.

  She was surprised by how much she remembered of that dreary purple world.

  She told them everything, as truthfully as she could remember, save one. There was no need for them to know about Kazmer's rape, and she didn't feel like talking about it, so she didn't.

  She was expected to talk, and answer everything. If she needed a drink of water, she got one. If Yalin needed her nappy changed, she was allowed to do so.

  The only rule, the only constant in the equation, was that every question needed an answer. Although they were superficially friendly, there was that hint of soldierlike steel in them. They passed no commentary on the story, even though it contained countless crimes against person and property. Soon she felt that she was speaking to a dispassionate recording device, something that was mechanically incapable of feeling any emotion or offering any reaction.

  She wasn't stupid. Having undergone basic training on Mars to withstand interrogation, she realisd that they were likely using her as a control – a way to check the answers of Andrei Kazmer. He was the valuable thing in this picture, not her.

  At the end of each long day, the questioner stood up, shook her hand, and thanked her for her time.

  Then she'd be escorted back out those iridium-sealed doors, it would close behind her like a portal to a magic land she'd been expelled from. Then she'd walk through the tunnel, slate-gray walls lit by floorlights, all those hundreds of meters until she was back at the hospital. The distance of the liminal space made it all seem unreal, like she was imagining her walks to and from the research facility.

  She wasn't Farholt. She couldn't retreat too far into this delusion.

  Because it was always a matter of time until they summoned her again, for another walk, another closing of the doors...and more questions.

  The questioning was a one way street.

  She wasn’t allowed to know what was happening on the surface. She was told nothing about the war, or the Solar Arm’s political situation, or Caitanya-9, or anything.

  Occasionally, she could feel a bomb impact on the mountain. Each one was like the belated answer to a question she hadn’t been able to ask.

  One day, she was in the rec room, along with Nilux and Farholt. They were playing credstack – a 22nd century variant of poker seemingly designed to subtract any last vestige of fun from the game. But it passed the time, and allowed
Ubra to care for the baby.

  Yatz sulked in the background. He'd been banned from the game after the second time he'd been caught marking cards.

  There was an intercom set up in the room, through which news and announcements filtered. Mostly they were boring – mission statements seemingly drafted by a robot, location of emergency exits – but sometimes they provided the rarest currency at all inside the mountain...news from the outside world.

  Nilux got crushed in the flop, and yowled in misery. Ubra listened to the intercom as the voice changed. That was interesting. It meant the usual speaker had been evicted and someone else was now in his place.

  “Attention, please. We can report that the invasion of Terrus has been repelled. I repeat, the invasion of Terrus has been repelled. The forces of the Reformation Confederacy have not been able to penetrate our destroyer shield, and they are falling back to the orbit of Mars. Acting commander of the Solar Arm, Sybar Rodensis, will be giving an address at zero-oh-eigh-hundred hours. Thank you for your calm, and please await more information on the state of battle.”

  “You hear that?” Ubra said. “We knocked them back.”

  “We didn't do anything,” Farholt said, his expression that of one who has seen divine grandeur. Every time he dealt himself a hand, he had to get a nurse to tell him what was on the cards. The game proceeded at a snail’s pace.

  “We've been buried under a mountain, trapped in an air-conditioned tomb, awaiting news of our fate. Disgusting, and disgraceful. We have not contributed one iota to the Solar Arm's victory.”

  Ubra shrugged, and shuffled the cards. “I guess I won't lose too much sleep over that.”

  “It's probably all a lie,” Farholt said. “How can we tell? Maybe we've lost, and they're landing on the planet now.”

  “Be careful with arguments based on ‘how can we tell?’,” Ubra said. “Maybe Omen Yatz really does have a brain, and it just happens to switch off every time he opens his mouth.”

  “Go fuck gravel, bitch,” Yatz said.

  “What I want to know is how soon we get out,” she said.