“I want to find him,” he said, “and this has nothing to do with solving old mysteries. I want to find him, wrap my hands around his neck, and just squeeze harder and harder until they're undergoing nuclear fusion with his spinal column. Do you understand what this much hate feels like? Imagine if it was your baby he'd killed. Just imagine.”
Ubra sat down with him, not sure what to say. She felt somehow that her presence here was simultaneously completely useless and completely necessary, an ingredient for some dark ritual that only made sense inside his head.
“The cold blooded bastard...” he muttered. “He was your squad leader, wasn't he?”
“Yes,” she said. “And everything that happened after happened because of me. I broke him free from prison. And then I brought him down to the planet.”
“And I hate you for it,” he said. “I hate it like I hate God for putting me on this path. It wasn't your fault, but I still hate.”
“The story of all our lives,” she said.
Vadim and Andrei were in the white room, locked in a staring contest neither had discussed or agreed to.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Kazmer finally said. “I'll help you.”
Vadim's face lit up. It was a face that seemingly did not admit smiles, and the sudden appearance of one was a shock, even to Andrei. Like seeing a firework display underwater.
“That's wonderful!” he said. “We'll give you scripts to say, and we'll beam them out to the Sane. They're terrified of you.”
“From what I hear, they're controlled by a terrorist cult that desires the extinction of the human race. I truly don't understand what you hope to accomplish with this.”
“I know very little about that,” he said. “But the gamma ray bursts can be fired in a narrow arc, can't they?”
“They can.”
“Then you can make a credible threat to destroy a part of the solar system. The part that contains them, everything from the asteroid belt outwards. And you can promise to preserve Terrus inside a wormhole. They'll be destroyed, and the human race will survive.”
“And what alternative will they be offered?”
“That remains the remit of General Rodensis. I believe that he will offer them the chance to surrender, and to re-unite our territories into one. There might even be a chance for Raya Yithdras to resume her political career.”
He nodded. “It would be a smart play.”
“Once, there was a man who escaped from prison by threatening guards with a carved wooden replica of a pistol. We'll do the same, but for the entire solar system. If it works, it'll be the ballsiest play in military history. And even if it fails...”
“...he will still be in no worse a position than he is now.”
“Exactly.”
The cold white-panelled box they were sitting in now seemed full of warmth and light. Vadim's mood was ebullient. If he could deliver this great victory to Rodensis's lap, his career would be nothing but roses.
His unlucky ancestry would be forgiven, then forgotten.
Goodbye, great grandfather, he mentally blew a kiss to the ghost of Emil Gokla. Now, nobody will even think of you when they talk about me. Everything you sought to destroy, I will rebuild.
“But I attach three conditions to this,” Andrei said. “First, you isolate my memories and re-insert them in my head. I want my past back.”
“Done.”
“Next, you have said that Ubra Zolot is in this facility, along with her daughter. That daughter is mine.”
“Is she?” Vadim faked surprise. Paternity tests had resolved the question of Yalin Zolot's father days ago.
“Yes. If I'm to help you, I want to see my daughter. I want full privileges throughout the entire building. And when you deem that I've served my purpose, and I want to continue my prison sentence.”
It was a tiny set of requests against a magnificent boon. Vadim nodded. “Done. One hundred percent.”
He didn't tell Andrei that he was not an officer of the law, nor a prosecutor, nor a judge. He had no authority to lock up Andrei Kazmer in prison.
But surely, when he explained Kazmer's psychosis to Rodensis, the general would understand, and get the appropriate gears turning. Surely.
This would be easy.
“Thank you,” Kazmer said. “I'd say 'thank you from the bottom of my heart', but that’s not exactly a benchmark of great depth. Still, it means a lot to me.”
“Did you ever think you'd be working for the Solar Arm again?”
“I'm not working for the Solar Arm. I'm doing a single small favour for them, and they're giving me a single small favour in return. Quid pro quo, right? My memories. My daughter. My punishment. One, two, and three.”
“Yeah, right. Quid pro quo. Exactly. I'll get in contact with Rodensis and we'll get you out of here.”
“And into somewhere else. Correct?”
“I have to say, I’ve never seen a man so eager to get to the wrong side of the bars.”
Titan – June 7, 2143, 2200 hours
After the Reformation Confederacy’s defeat at Terrus, Orzo Feroce was summoned to Emil Gokla's old mansion on Titan. It was a personal invitation from Raya Yithdras.
He spent the morning throwing up in fear, the afternoon planning ways to escape, and the evening convincing himself that it wouldn't be that bad.
He'd be chastised, surely, but not harmed. He was a valuable commander, with a lot of experience and institutional knowledge. A replacement for him would not be found in a heartbeat, and the Solar Arm was rebuilding its strength for a counterattack. They had to keep him alive.
He was too valuable to kill.
And they'd sworn an oath of brotherhood to him. He'd betrayed none of them. His only crime was making a mistake, and overplaying his hand – and he'd previously led the successful battles in the asteroid belt and on Mars. Didn't he have ample successes to offset his failures? No general since Subotai had a record with no defeats.
He boarded a Dravidian, exctied the orbit of Mars, painstakingly taxi'd through the debris field for many hours, and then accelerated with antimatter impulse drives until he was in the gravity well of Saturn. His crew docked at Titan's starport, descending into one of the habitable bubbles. Then he proceeded to the mansion on foot.
He'd delegated responsibility to a series of subcommanders, and given them the instruction that he'd be back perhaps in a day or so.
The Sons of the Vanitar convened, in the dark unbeating heart of the mansion.
There were fewer now. And an aura of suspicion and fear had settled between Raya and the others. He wanted to ask questions. Wanted to know about the disappearances, wanted to know what crimes they'd committed, wanted to know if they’d ever sit at this table again.
Wanted to know about his own fate. That, most of all.
They drank blood. Parabiotic therapy. Blood flowed into them through cannulae in both arms.
Immediately, Raya's eyes were on Orzo. He tried to match her stare, tried to be brave, but couldn't.
“So,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “Explain yourself.”
“What is there to explain?”
“Your behavior during the battle of Terrus.”
The mansion was cold, deathlessly and hellishly cold, but he found himself sweating bullets as he talked.
He talked her through the battle, blow for blow. Explained the positioning of his units, their strategic goals, the order of battle.
He explained the early successes, establishing a net around the planet and raining hell on dozens of Terrestrian cities. The Solar Arm had lost many of its spaceports, grounding many of its deep space fighters.
They'd been pushed to the edge of surrender.
Then he went over the setbacks. The destruction of one of his Yakulst capships. The sudden appearance of reinforcements from the Venus colonies. The tipping point that had started slowly at first, and then swung in his disfavour with horrible speed.
Soon, their victory had become a stalemate, a
nd decayed into an outright rout before their eyes.
As he recounted the tale, Raya did not speak and did not move. The cigarette burned down to her fingers, and she stamped it out, and lit another one. She was like a cold stone statue, a logical outgrowth from the cold chill of the rest of the mansion. There was no hint of an expression showing through the marble of her face.
“...The last thing that happened was that Scimitars launched a surprise attack through our destroyer screen, and succeeded in crippling the thorium reactor on my ship. Radiation flooded the interior, and I was forced to make an emergency evacuation. With that, the battle ended. I had no further ability to command my forces.”
He spread his hands out, as if to say, well, there it is.
“So where’s the rest of the story?” Raya asked.
“What?”
“I do hate it when I get only the boring parts of a tale. Why don’t you tell us about what happened after your ship was damaged, and the brilliant method you used to survive?”
“I did not surrender my ship, or any of my forces,” he said, choosing his words with great care.
Her eyes twinkled. She was enjoying this, and he realised he’d made a terrible mistake by coming here.
“Yes, but you surrendered something, didn’t you? I have viewed the access logs on the libraries of Black Shift, and do you know what happened at the exact moment your ship was crippled? Someone with full authentication opened a data port and requested a complete rip of all our records. We triangulated the signal, and it pointed towards a target around the orbit of Terrus. In other words, it was you.”
He waited for an answer to pop into his head. An explanation. An alibi. Anything.
His brain stayed dead. There were no straws to grasp for.
“You betrayed us in exchange for your life, General Feroce,” Raya said. “You allowed priceless intelligence to fall into the hands of our enemies.”
“I had no choice,” Orzo said. “If I resisted him, I wouldn’t have survived.”
Raya exploded into laughter. Shrill laughter cut at him like a buzzsaw. She clapped, as if in appreciation for a wonderful performance that had come to an end.
“You should have known that I am him, and a thousand steps further in the same direction,” she said. “If you wouldn’t have survived Sybar Rodensis, what makes you think you will survive me?”
“I did what was necessary to preserve the lives of my men.”
“Your men were already to safety, barring the ones on the Yakulst. It was your own cowardly life you saved, and in exchange you traded our vital secrets. What a worthless deal. Your life isn’t worth a ducat. You should have gladly died.”
He tried to think of a counterargument, but the thick, oppressive presence of the mansion choked him up. It was as if the mansion was a thick wad of cloth, blockng his throat, stopping all thoughts and ideas from leaving his brain and then his mouth.
“Remember the past, Orzo,” she said. “I requested that you be included in this group. Emil protested, but I was insistent. I saw some traits in you that I liked. You have a bit of cunning, and a bit of fight, which isn’t impressive. A rat will fight, too, when it’s cornered. But most of all, you’re disposable. I hoped the attack would succeed, but I knew that if it failed I would need a sudden change of brass to put fresh heart into my men. And that brings us to the here and now.”
Her voice seemed to be coming from across a vast distance, a ravine that separated him from the rest of humanity, yawning wider minute by minute as he was stranded on the far side, watching a parade that he could never rejoin.
He tried to stand up, but remained sitting. Then he tried to raise a hand, but it wouldn’t move.
He tried to panic.
But didn’t even manage to do that.
“And you had one other trait, the most valuable one of all,” she hissed. “You’re stupid. If Saldeen had failed me the way you’ve done now, she would have run away. Or defected to the Solar Arm. You didn’t have the wit to do that. You came right back here.”
He couldn’t talk. Tried to signal for his tongue to move. It felt huge, an expanded slab of contractile tissue that spilled past his gums, cutting into his teeth, so massive it threatened to cut off his air flow.
He was shaking. A lock of his brilliantined and pomaded hair fell down in front of his face, dangling like a suspended worm.
Blood. The blood.
Health. Vitality.
Sometimes, death.
Everyone just looked at him, piercing him with half a dozen sets of eyes. He wanted to yell at them, wanted to make them stop. They were staring at him, like a circus freak, like an animal that should be put down, like something too loathsome to even be countenanced or allowed to exist.
“Ae….” He managed one vowel, one lonely dipthong, and then he fell face first.
As he did, the cannulae and IVs pulled out, splashing a few drops of poisoned blood across the parquet floor.
“Remove his body,” Raya told Saldeen. “And then empty the rest of the blood down the drain. Make sure it doesn’t go back in the refrigerator, there’s half of a wolfsbane plant in there.”
She nodded.
“We need to work on the…optics of this,” Raya said, staring at the body. “We don’t want to be too clear in how he betrayed us. If we say he betrayed state secrets, everyone will ask what state secrets. Let’s sell it a different way. He was in the pocket of Sybar Rodensis from the very beginning, even before the start of the battle, and allowed a weak and crippled enemy to destroy much of our fleet.”
It would be believable. The sudden transformation of the Solar Arm from a defeated army on the run to one that had successfully staved off a full-scale assault on Terus was sudden. The intelligence officers of the Reformation Confederacy were still trying to puzzle out where the Solar Arm’s sudden martial spirit had come from.
“Would you like me to forge some documents?” a talented young initiate called Nolund Esper said.
“Gladly. And can you make it seem like he poisoned himself?”
“Anything’s possible when you’re dealing with the dead. It’s only the living that are complicated.”
Andrei was having his memories reinserted.
Vadim Gokla had warned him that it was going to be a difficult and protracted process. They wanted to isolate the memories from his past while merging them with those from his present.
They stood upon the frontier of technology, a surface of cybernetics too raw to even bleed.
“We’ll do A/B testing inside your own head until we find the portions you want,” Vadim said. “If I make a mistake, I’ll blank your mind and start again. How many times will this happen? Many. Will your mind suffer some small damage? Possible, but I will do my very best to avoid this. But I guarantee it that you will come out the other side a whole and intact man.”
“Thanks. That sounds good.”
All my missing pieces, finally back in place.
Kazmer put his head down on the hard polyplastic of the scanning bed as he was wheeled into an apparatus that looked nearly as large as a tank. Whirring electronics drowned out the outside world, and the light disappeared.
Inside the dark, he felt claustrophobia wrap him inside corpselike arms.
There was hard polyplastic pressing down on every side. His breath was arrested by it, was blown back into his face by a surface just a bare inch from his nose.
Long minutes passed in the intolerable dark, and Andrei didn’t dare move a muscle. He knew that if he twitched, he would panic. Once snapped, that rope could never be reknotted.
He heard eerie tones in his ears, and could almost feel the radiation spiking through his skull.
He could also hear Vadim Gokla’s voice, muffled by the machine. The psychiatrist was murmuring things of small comfort.
“An electron microscope can reveal the tiniest details of structure in a plant or animal cell, with one great disadvantage. The cell can no longer be living when it does so. It
must be treated, prepared, bathed in toxic chemicals, and the stream of radiation with which the electron microscope plucks its secrets from the substrate would kill it anyway. This has been a great disadvantage in medical casework – you can’t see a film, you can only see a snapshot. Now, technology has progressed. We can lay bare the exact architecture of the human brain, understand its secrets, and in the case of Black Shift, even encode a few of our own. And you don’t have to die, even though you might wish you could.”
Andrei tried to relax as his brain was probed.
Unconsciousness still seemed so far away.
He knew that nothing of significance had happened yet, but his imagination went berserk, imagining invisible hooks slicing apart the lobes of his brain, bagging and tagging them, holding them up like hunting trophies for Vadim to display on his wall.
And here we have an orbitofrontal cortex! Excellently preserved, a magnificent specimen!
He just wanted punishment. Wanted to stop the nagging feeling that his existence was an atrocity.
He realised that Vadim worked for the government, and although he might be more benign than someone from the Sons of the Vanitar, a government worker is a government worker.
Nobody in the Solar Arm cared if you were guilty or innocent.
They only cared if you were useful or not useful.
Gradually, he began to drift away, into the past.
Titan, A Long Time Ago
The past was like a landscape entombed under a glacier. Unreachable, and untouchable. But as it melted, the things it revealed were vivid in their clarity.
It was the year 2090.
The two giggling young people disembarked the spaceport on Titan, and followed one of the tunnels to the town of Cresyth on Titan.
Andrei Kazmer was twenty years old, fresh out of the academy. He'd made excellent marks. He had a bright future ahead of him.
Gamma ray burst bright!
The Solar Arm was gripped by expansionist fervor. Colonies were appearing on Neptune, on Venus, on the larger asteroids, even on a remote world orbiting Proxima Centauri called Caitanya-9. There was a massive demand for men and women who could patrol space-routes and enforce the law. Andrei Kazmer had just negotiated his way into a sweetheart of a salary and benefits package with the Solar Arm Constabulary.
Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3) Page 14
