Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3)

by Ben Sheffield

  He nodded, and relaxed. Or tried to relax.

  Because of Caitanya-9, the sulphurous disc of purple that haunted all his nightmares, he would never relax again. He knew that everything had worked out for the best. Humanity had been saved. Kazmer was defeated. The Sons of the Vanitar would surely crumble from the inside out (or the outside in, depending on which way the war went.) This was all he could reasonably hope for.

  But somehow, it wasn’t enough.

  Damn it, he’d wanted to see Kazmer’s guts.

  Location Unknown

  In the stillness of space, it moved. Without eyes, without hands or feet, without a heart to beat or a brain to think.

  It almost lacked an existence.

  Just a tiny vapor of consciousness, a fireless flame.

  It phased between matter, between states. Its temporal location changed, bridging the colossal maws of space, pausing occasionally to weave a path around a single photon.

  Its final destination was not in this universe, but in another.

  It reappeared in another space, another time, governed by different rules and axioms. In the aphotic void, it started to grow a body.

  A black mass of particles crusted themselves together, gathering gradually into bones like a single silicon-edged grain growing into a perfect purple pearl. It sprouted wings, hard and sharp as alien metal.

  The shores of chaos receded, revealing more details of the islands of its body. It was a riot of planes, angles, perspectives. Many dimensions, wrapped into a contradictory thundercloud of a creature.

  Out of the ever-changing body glared purple eyes, bloodfilled and ignited with hate. At first there was one. Then there were three. Then there were hundreds, and thousands, and finally it settled on the correct number: two.

  The wings unfurled in cosmic ectoplasm, becoming black, becoming white, becoming colours not even on the spectrum.

  Its many limbs and appendages changed, some detaching, new ones growing, morphing like mephitic clay. It was still drifting, changing its location at the same time and rate it changed everything about its existence.

  But its movement no longer felt random. It was coming to a point, to a defined place, as though spacetime curved inwards towards an ever-accelerating asymptote and it would meet its extinction as it finally converged on this unreachable point.

  Bloody eyes.

  Teeth cleaving the flesh of their own gums.

  Claws sprouting hair that waved in space like cilia.

  What am I?

  It shuffled through a grotesque number of costume changes, assuming and discarding identities by the thousands of millions. It was searching for the right one, for the right combination.

  Around it, a canopy of drifting rocks was coming together, converging at the same central point it was.

  A gravity well.

  Accelerating as it fell, it realised it was entering an atmosphere, one that gathered and thickened in line with the ideal gas law.

  It was rushing down to a landscape far below, or perhaps the landscape was rushing up. Space has many conflicting reference points, and though they can contradict each other for eternities, none can overrule any other.

  It hit the surface, pain ringing its body like a bell.

  It stood for the first time, on legs that no longer changed. It had settled on a bipedal shape for its body. It felt this was right and correct, although it knew not how.

  It looked up, and reached with many hands to the sky.

  It was standing on a world of purple.

  Orbit Beyond Mars - June 8, 2143, 2100 hours

  Zelity and the prisoners could do nothing but await their fate.

  They were slowing down. They could all feel it. The slightly different way the gravity wheel affected the weight of their bodies as the ship shed velocity.

  Haledor could feel his body subconsciously become excited by impending freedom. His hands seemed to sing with pleasure, as if they knew they’d be free to move again, and could hardly wait.

  But his mind wasn’t so sure.

  His mind thought that soon the hands would be still forever.

  He moved his hands back and forth for the millionth time on the loosened flex cuffs. They still had a small amount of freedom, yet they were still fundamentally restricted.

  The guards left the cargo bay, and they had another precious minute in which to speak.

  “Maybe Vilanthus was just angry,” he heard Jagomir say. “And he was signaling that he wanted to kill them.”

  “Then why tap a morse message on our side?”

  “Shit. Oh, shit.”

  He wriggled his hands back and forth, two appendages in a marriage that they strived to annul. His heart-beat accelerated. He did not want to die.

  When he heard a dull snap, and felt his hands break free, his brain was paralysed.

  His lips moved, seemingly with no thought behind them. “I’m free. My flexcuffs broke.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not.”

  He started unbuckling the belt that held his chest to the chair, and it snapped free. Then he twisted his head around, and looked at the wall behind his body. Through sheer luck, he’d been positioned against a weld line in the fuselage. His flexicuffs had been rubbing against the hard metal edge for hours.

  “Fucking move,” hissed Zelity.

  The drag started to intensify, becoming a wrenching sideways motion. Everyone moaned softly, feeling like their guts were trying to osmose out through their abdomens. They were shedding velocity hard, and soon they would be stopping.

  Soon it would be possible to open the airlocks.

  Haledor freed himself from the restraints around his ankles, stood up…and immediately had to sit down. The rush of blood to his legs was like a crippling blow. Black spots swarmed in front of his vision, and his entire lower body was a hornet’s nest of pins and needles.

  “Uhhh…”

  “Hurry,” whispered Jagomir. “There’s two guards coming back. We need to deal with both of them quickly, and without making a sound. Get me free at least.”

  On the main flight deck, Calixtus watched a hologram projection of what lay ahead. Mars was rising before them, a red copper disc of unspendable size. In less than an hour, they’d be docking at Valashabad.

  He’d authorized ingress with the perimeter watch around Mars. He would have to do this a second time before they entered the outer atmosphere, but in a few minutes, they would be in a magic window. Slow enough to dump bodies. But not too close to civilization that they’d have to account for their human passengers, or explain the presence of human-shaped fireballs burning up the air.

  The last rotation of guards left the cargo hold, and he gestured at their replacements. Sorbek and his partner scowled unhappily. Sentry duty over the prisoners was the booby prize on the ship.

  Sorbek unlocked the restraint room, and took a final look at the drugged body of the troublemaker inside. It had been a pain hauling him in there and it would be a pain hauling him out, when the time came. At least the kicking had stopped.

  He slammed shut the door, hoping the noise induced bad dreams.

  “Come on, we’re relieving,” his partner said. “Shouldn’t be more than a few more minutes of babysitting these guys. Then it’ll be time to throw out the trash.”

  He scanned his way in to the cargo bay with the fingerprint lock on the door, and they went inside.

  It was quick as poison through an intravenous cannula.

  Jagomir and Haledor struck, pouncing on the guards, whipping a hand around the mouth and jamming a shard of broken crate into their windpipes.

  Zelity suppressed a shout of alarm as a massive column of blood fountained out from one of the guards’ hosing him down with blood pressurized enough to sting.

  Jagomir had the easier time dispatching his man. The piece of polywood went straight in, and he died in seconds.

  Haledor was lighter, less powerful, less skilled at wrestling. The man bit down on th
e hand covering his mouth, throwing him off his game, and the man was able to get a hand in front of his windpipe.

  But flesh is flesh, and sharp edges are sharp edges.

  There was a moment of resistance, and then the man’s fingers tumbled to the ground, severed by the driving edge of wood. Haledor plunged it home, sawing it upwards into the arytenoid cartilage, holding on as blood sprayed and fountained and the man thrashed and struggled.

  Soon, it was over.

  The two bodies dropped to the floor, and Jagomir and Haledor started freeing their friends.

  When Zelity’s restraints were cut away, he was up in a flash…and fell down, his legs turning to mush.

  “Take it easy,” Haledor said, an odd sentiment for a man covered in blood. “You’ve been sitting down for fucking days. Give your legs a chance to figure out they’re back in the picture.

  The freed men and women jumped up, and started ransacking the supplies.

  This was a ship designated for scouting, and transport. It had never been intended to take prisoners, and there was no separation between human cargo and cargo of the usual sort. After seconds of frantic searching, they found weapons.

  Knives, bayonets, sonic cannons, assault rifles…

  “Get guns on the door,” Haledor said. “Rather than show our hand, let’s pick off as many as possible.”

  He was unable to believe how good it felt to be packing heat again. It was like an addictive drug.

  A drug more dangerous to other people than himself.

  “It’s time,” Calixtus said. None of the crew bothered to ask what for.

  They needed to offload their human cargo, and do it quickly. The airlocks could hold ten or twelve people, and the expectation was that they could quickly winnow through the Solar Arm prisoners before the survivors figured out what the problem was.

  Several men strode to the cargo bay door, and activated it. They were wearing form-fitting nanomesh suits and helmets, all the better to withstand sudden changes in chair pressure, but they had no weapons. There would be no trouble, not from fifty bound and secured prisoners.

  The trouble would come later, maybe. Nightmares and perhaps suicides, as they tried to confront what they’d done and found that they couldn’t. But by that point, Calixtus’s would have cashed out and found something else to do. He didn’t like this shit any more than they did.

  As the fingerprint scanner gave them admittance, Calixtus noticed a thin red line seeping beneath the door.

  Hey, that looks like…

  The door slid open, and the guards found themselves staring down the barrels of guns. Meshuggahtechs. Orizens.

  The gunfire was massively, unbelievably loud.

  Calixtus sprung into action, hurling himself out of the field of fire. Every single other man standing near the door was pounded by the wave of bullets, hurled concussively backwards by the most sustained volley of fire they’d ever seen.

  The prisoners were free.

  The main bridge became a hailstorm of metal and shredded flesh.

  Calixtus activated the computer in his wrist, and immediately shut the door. It whirred as it closed, sealing the escaped soldiers inside.

  He took a moment to breathe, to gather his thoughts.

  He didn’t get that moment.

  The door opened again, the sensor detecting an encoded fingerprint and granting access.

  There was a bearded man at the doorway. In one hand, there was a smoking Meshuggahtech. In the other, there was the severed finger of one of the guards.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Haledor roared, sprinting through the narrow doorway before they figured out a way to shut it again.

  He sprayed a wide crescent of bullets that ripped through the main flight deck of the Dravidian. Sparks flew and bullets rebounded. Two of the Sane were caught inside the whipstroke of fire, and nearly cut in half.

  As the smoke cleared, the Defiant poured through.

  They had few weapons – just whatever they had salvaged from crates in steerage. What they did have was surprise, momentum, and training.

  There were nearly two dozen of the Sane in the flight deck. If they’d had even five seconds to prepare, they could have drawn their own weapons, set up a chokepoint at the doorway, and turned it into an abattoir.

  They didn’t have five seconds.

  They had zero.

  Calixtus and some others drew handguns and started shooting, trying to hold back the human tide. Some others struggled to bring heavier artillery to bear – Meshuggahtechs and Orizens of their own. But the Defiant were too numerous. They rolled down the length of the flight deck like a tidal wave of meat.

  The man next to Jagomir took a bullet to the head. Jagomir ducked behind a crate, sidestepped to avoid the falling corpse, and opened fire from the ground. He killed one and wounded three before his clip was exhausted.

  The hammer hit an empty chamber and he tossed the Meshuggahtech, scooping up his dead comrade’s pistol from the ground.

  Zelity didn’t have a gun. He moved forwards, using a slain Reformation Confederacy soldier as a shield. Bullets thudded into his shield, one of them nearly taking off his hand. He kept moving. Had to. Once they lost the initiative, they would never regain it.

  The floor was awash with blood now. The cries of pain mingled with orders, wires getting hopelessly crossed as the unprepared Sane were killed in droves. Bodies littered the floor, their death cries unheard against the deafening steel-limned backdrop of sound.

  Haledor fired his gun empty and tossed it. One of the Sane stepped out from behind a pillar, drew a bead on him, and was taken down by a headshot from Jagomir. He nodded in approval at the bearded soldier, and launched himself across the piles of dead at a computer’s control panel.

  He madly hammered the controls, hoping for some fuckery to emerge from his fingers that would throw the Sane still more off their game.

  They were facing determined defenders with vastly superior weaponry. All they could do was cause the maximum amount of trouble in the minimum amount of time.

  “Habitat wheel of A2 and A3 sectors force-deactivated,” a bland robot voice informed them, all but inaudible over the running gun battle. “Activating breaking.”

  There was a harsh grinding sound as breaks clamped down on the habitat wheel, rapidly robbing it of speed. Everyone on board felt their stomachs twist, sudden loss of momentum distabilising them. In some cases, their stomachs were on the outside of their bodies.

  Jagomir was nearly halfway to the end of the shuttle, firing from a Weaver stance, hopping from obstacle to obstacle. A dense knot of Sane soldiers had gathered near the doorway, and caught his eye. He managed to shoot one of them, but the remainder opened up on him, and a bullet tore through his shoulder and his thigh. He fell…

  …sideways?

  He softly bounced against the ground, his pain warring against his wonderment and actually losing.

  The artificial gravity was disappearing. Spent shell casings were floating up off the ground, suspended in the air like a wondrous magician’s trick. The bodies stacked like cordwood were also rising, the dead seeming to regain their life as they floated in the air.

  The shooting went on and on in this strange, weightless world. With no gravity anchoring them to the ground, soldiers found that the recoil lifted them off their feet, pushing them back into the walls.

  Gunnery Sargeant Calixtus wedged himself between a desk at the end of the bridge and the doorway to the cabin, an Orizen R-7 pinned against his shoulder. He fired shot after shot, killing many Defiant as they floated through the dull metal shell, struggling to kill as many of them as possible before they were overwhelmed.

  The weightless battle took on an eerie three-dimensional quality. Men sprung through the air, alighting on the roof like spiders, scoring headshots from the ceiling. Other men used platforms and upended tables as springboards, propelling themselves forward like human missiles.

  Ammunition was running low, and Haledor had two rounds left in
his pistol. He tried to shoot Calixtus, but the Gunnery Sargeant saw him, and ducked low. Haledor and Zelity shared a glance from opposite sides of the hull…and then Haledor tossed Zelity his pistol.

  Zelity caught the projectile as it lazily spun across the room. He aimed around the corner of the computer screen where Calixtus was hiding, and fired.

  The first shot went wide, thudding into the throat of the man next to him. The next tore a hole in Calixtus’s side. The man screamed, and dropped his R-7.

  Dozens of the Defiant pressed forward, crowding the surviving Sane into the far corners. Floating in mid-air, they clawed their way forward on whatever surfaces they could lay a hand on – rock-climbers, in a place with no gravity. The Dravidian had become a tube glutted with bodies, both living and dead, and floating ammunition and particulates of blood.

  The Defiant had spent almost all their ammunition, and many were killed by sharp bursts of fire from the last holdouts. But there were so many targets that it would be only seconds before the Reformation Confederacy marines were overpowered.

  Carrying the wounded Calixtus, two or three of them buzzed open the door to the cockpit, and escaped through to the foremost stage of the Dravidian transport.

  There was only one defender left.

  The final Sane defending the ship was in a well-covered position, covered by a floating table and the bodies of his friends. With a Meshuggahtech he blazed away with the fury of the damned. There were several spare ammunition clips hanging in the air, and when he ran dry he just ejected the clip, snatched a new one out of the air, and reloaded.

  “Get him!” roared Jagomir, clutching his wounds as blood spilled out into the air.

  The Defiant, waving empty guns, rushed forward as one. The last Sane soldier fired at the attackers. He killed five with a single volley, just pounded them to pieces with bullets that hurled them back into the far wall where they’d come.