Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3)

by Ben Sheffield

  “Damn straight you didn’t. But now, this fucking wrist is better than ever. Let me demonstrate.”

  With great aplomb, Yatz rolled up the sleeve until it was halfway up his bicep. Then he pulled an apple from a knapsack around his waist.

  He gripped the apple with his hand, and applied force. Tendons and muscles stood out on his arm like bunched ropes. A vein pulsed in his thick neck as he squeezed.

  POP!

  The apple burst apart in a shower of white flesh and pips.

  Juice flecked Andrei Kazmer’s unimpressed face.

  “I’ve seen that trick before,” Andrei said. “You took a knife and stabbed holes through the apple. Ruined its structural integrity. A twelve-year-old girl could have done it.”

  Yatz tossed the remains of the apple core away, and wiped his hand on his khakis. “You want me to practice that trick on your skull?”

  “My skull’s not for those who need practice. Come back when you’re a master.”

  Yatz swaggered closer, and whispered something, an inch from Andrei’s face.

  “Is that so?” Andrei asked in response to the words.

  Another whisper.

  “I have gate privileges,” Andrei said. “Soon I’ll be in prison, but for the next few days I can come and go when I want.”

  Yatz nodded, and turned around, heading back indoors.

  Andrei stood over the ruined apple, until his eye caught a particularly large and intact piece. There had been a worm in the apple. Key word, had. Either a knife or the massive tension had torn its body in half, and it writhed from its ruined home.

  He had to go back. Vadim would run a bath so he could wash the makeup off – a rare luxury. The water from the generator wouldn’t stay hot for much longer.

  Instead, he spent several minutes staring at the worm. Watching it die.

  The war was grinding to a lull.

  All conflict is a race to stability, and it seemed that both Raya Yithdras and Sybar Rodensis were close to the Nash equilibrium.

  The Reformation Confederacy had sustained massive losses in Orzo Feroce’s ill-fated assault on Terrus, and had fallen back to Mars.

  Everyone knew that the stability was short term.

  The Solar Arm had been united for so long that everything in it was built on a presumption of unitedness. The inner worlds, close to the sun, produced the bulk of the union’s agricultural produce. The outer worlds harvested minerals and siphoned gas. And now trade was disrupted by billions of tons of debris lying strewn across all the profitable roots.

  On Terrus, the lack of ore from the asteroid belt was imposing serious limits on their ability to rebuild their fleet. Virtually all of Terrus’s readily-accessible metals had been mined out in the centuries past, and they needed asteroids to replace their losses.

  In Reformation Confederacy territory, food prices were rising exponentially. Raya’s propaganda and vigorous secret police were suppressing public discontent, but not alleviating it. Soon, there would be famine.

  And famine brought rebellion. And those who live by the sword die by the sword.

  It was an uneasy stasis. Soon, someone would have to make a strike, even though neither side was prepared to make that strike. Even milk teeth can bite.

  At the end of the week, Dashka probes at the orbit of Mars registered bursts of ionizing radiation on Geiger-muller devices. This spiked alarm throughout the upper echelons of the Reformation Confederacy. The last time this had happened, Caitanya-9 had appeared.

  The planet was gone now, either destroyed or lost in regions unknown, but nobody could forestay the possibility to the past becoming the present.

  Then a transmission was intercepted, and decoded.

  A video of Andrei Kazmer.

  Titan – June 9, 2143, 1600 hours

  “…As of today, there is a line in the sand. If Reformation Confederacy forces launch another attack on a Solar Arm colony, I respond. If Reformation Confederacy forces kill another Solar Arm national by direct actions, I respond. If a Reformation Confederacy warship incurses upon Solar Arm territory without the knowledge of General Sybar Rodensis, I respond. This line in the sand must not be crossed, and if it is, it will be the last mistake you ever make. You will die, and the Solar Arm will live.

  “I have the power of worlds in my hands, and the power to end them. And I have chosen an ally in this fight.

  “Choose your next step carefully, Raya Yithdras. I come from a planet of earthquakes.”

  The video ended, and Raya Yithdras waited for someone to speak.

  Nobody did.

  “We have no way of knowing the authenticity of this,” Saldeen said, stress lines showing on her face. “It could be fake.”

  “We’ve matched the face and voice in the video with that of police sergeant Andrei Kazmer. He was the one selected by Sarkoth Amnon to lead the Caitanya-9 expedition. If it’s fake, it’s done with technology beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”

  “Damn it,” she said. “Sarkoth’s still fucking us, even though he’s no longer in power. He’s done ten times as much damage to our cause as any one of our enemies. What did Emil ever see in him?”

  To varying degrees, they all knew about Sarkoth’s experiment with a psychotic former serviceman. The guy had been blasted out into space with no memories, so they could observe his behavior – a human petri dish with a single wriggling cell.

  Emil hadn’t endorsed it, but hadn’t stopped it, either.

  That was the first mistake he’d made, and not the last.

  Their intelligence on what had happened to Caitanya-9 was incredibly poor. Every sign pointed to it being a powerful weapon, and if this weapon was now controlled by their enemies…

  It makes no sense, she thought. It’s a weapon of cosmic destruction. It’s not something you can use against one side or another in a war. Using Caitanya-9 to destroy part of the solar system is like using a nuke to destroy just one of a fly’s wings.

  There was something very strange about this whole thing, and the fragrance of bullshit was too strong to completely ignore.

  But ultimately, that didn’t matter. Small probabilities became important when they lead to incredibly bad results.

  What was the base chance that Sybar Rodensis had this card to play? 20%? 10%? 5%?

  That was still a 5% chance that everything beyond the orbit of Terrus would be destroyed, wiping away the visionaries who foresaw better things for humanity.

  There was a sense of disquiet in the room. Death was fun to think about, fun to hope for…but somehow everyone always found better things to do when it was bearing down on them.

  “There are…alternatives,” Saldeen Zana said.

  “Indeed. If we offer terms, we might still find ourselves in a favourable position, working within the Solar Arm government,” Raya said. “I think the time has come to reconsider whether this is a war we need to be fighting.”

  Location Improbable

  The nameless creature crawled over the surface of the purple world, bony limbs powerless against the impulse of gravity. Each kiss of rock scraped its face raw.

  Islands formed in the clouds overhead, and lightning flashed like skeins of veins illuminated on some vast, white skin.

  It crawled for untold aeons, perhaps billions of years, neither gaining nor losing strength, just searching in vain for some sort of understanding.

  Overhead, there was a gap in the cloud. Through it, it saw a black orb appearing on the horizon, like the pupil of an eye staring at him.

  Earthquakes rippled the ground, growing more and more powerful as the moon exerted its hold.

  He felt the earthquakes at a level far more intimate than mere physics allowed. As though he was not just the receiver, but also the causer. As though his breath, his footsteps, his endless journey through fathomless wastes, were creating the tremors in the ground.

  The realization itself was like an earthquake.

  Everything changed.

  Explosions sundered the
horizon, filling the air with noise. It was like a cacophonous bell, signaling the beginning of his dark wedding with the planet. He raised his head and stared, not with fear, not even with wonder, but in recognition.

  His destiny.

  The black moon watched him, and he it. It had a twin, somewhere on the other side of this world. Their dance made the planet uninhabitable, inhospitable, an unpeaceful place. They destroyed everything, and they were now part of him.

  He raised a hand, feeling gravity suck at flesh and vibrate his bones like tuning forks, and focused his will.

  Before him was a boulder, ten times as high as a man. With a thought so careless it hardly counted as thinking, he raised it into the air.

  A humming whine filled the poisonous air as the rock levitated, rising higher and higher. Chest height, then head height, then well above him. He understood then that there were no limits, he could hurl this rock into space or let it crash back down.

  He tore it to pieces.

  A fault line was riven right through its center, splitting it into halves that separated like those of a rotten peach. Then he broke the rocks into smaller rocks, which he fractured into pebbles.

  He was one of nature’s forces, as much destroyer as he was creator. The broken rocks still hung suspended in the air, rotating softly with spent kinetic energy, and he was still not satisfied.

  He split all the pebbles into sand, and then powdered the sand into dust, and even the dust he reduced down to bare tectosilicate minerals that were too fine to see, except as a single occluding barrier of purple.

  He breathed the purple cloud in, feeling its windy ingress into his lungs, clogging them, passing through the pores in his alveoli, and finally distributing themselves throughout his body.

  Even though the rock had been a thousand times his weight, he absorbed all of it into his being. It entered him as though the inside of his body was a vast sepulchral chamber. An altar for unknown rituals. An empty space field, entombing the dead aeons, millions of years rolling past like waves on the sea, unrememberable in their sheer number and drabness.

  One of these aeons had held a race called the Vanitar.

  Another of these aeons had held a race called humankind.

  He perceived the truth, and started to smile, then to laugh.

  Of course…of course!

  The clouds gathered and thickened, air cooling like jets of coagulating sperm. Thunder detonated over a head that filled as empty as a skull hollowed out by cosmic ants. The wind blew. The ground shook.

  I am alive!

  He shrieked. His scream became a din to swallow all of them, echoing into the cosmic night.

  I AM SARKOTH AMNON, AND I AM ALIVE!

  Arrakhia Mountain Hospital – June 9, 2143, 2000 hours

  Under the mountain, Rodensis arranged another meeting with Vadim. He was full of the joys of spring.

  “Would you believe we’ve received negotiations from Raya Yithdras?” he said, shaking the rattled psychiatrist’s hand. “This is still classified of course, and you will take it to your grave.”

  “Hey, you’re at the right place to talk about classified stuff, I guess.” Vadim didn’t like how often the general was showing up, unannounced.

  “And it’s actually a fairly acceptable compromise,” Rodensis said. “I’d hoped that this is the type of position we’d force her into. No more Sarkoth Amnon and no more Caitanya equals no real reason for the Reformation Confederacy to exist. The past few days have seen them fighting on pointlessly, powered by sheer inertia, but they no longer have the ability to crush us in war, and their dwindling supplies have finally made them wake up to reality. We need us for their mining capabilities, and they need us for their food. It’s a symbiotic relationship…the two halves of the solar system cannot be separate. So she’s conceded willingly to absorb the Reformation Confederacy back into the Solar Arm. Unless this is all a ruse, the war is well on its way to being over.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Vadim smiled, feeling like a bad person. War or no war, his life under the mountain followed much the same gait. But it was wonderful because of how this had been achieved.

  Andrei Kazmer’s message.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Yes, Kazmer’s recording must have weighed on the scales.” Rodensis said. “A silly trick. But I suppose it might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. They could have gone with harsher conditions for their surrender, and maybe the prospect of being blasted into subatomic plasma mollified them somewhat. We owe him a debt of gratitude.”

  “Yes, and he’s calling home that debt,” Vadim said. “He’s getting quite insistent that we imprison him. He wants to serve his debt to society – damned if I understand it, I’ve never encountered a patient with that kind of pathology. There’s two halves of him warring, and at the moment we’ve got the good one in charge. Let’s get him locked away before that changes.”

  Sybar looked away, seemingly embarrassed. Hard to imagine a slab of carved rock looking embarrassed, but he managed it.

  “We…might have to break that promise, Vadim.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Raya Yithdras attaches conditions to her surrender. The first being that we promise not to encroach upon her territory or kill any of her people. The second being that we hand Andrei Kazmer over to her. She wants to experiment on him.”

  “He won’t like those experiments, I gather,” Vadim said.

  “No, he won’t. And it will not be a conventional prison sentence of any variety. She, I think, wants to understand him even more than we do.”

  “You’ve heard, I suppose, of the Sons of the Vanitar?” Vadim asked.

  “Yes, and I’ve heard far too much testimony from far too many people to completely discount their existence.”

  “Then you’re aware of what she’ll want to do with Kazmer. She’ll want to see if she can gain control of Caitanya-9 herself, and use it against us.”

  “It doesn’t matter what she wants to use him for. He’s just a mortal man. He has no powers whatsoever, even allowing that he ever did.”

  “How much of this should he know?” Vadim asked.

  “None. Zero. Make him think he’s about to be shipped out to Ceres. In actuality, he’s going to Titan.”

  Later that evening, Yatz went missing.

  He ate dinner, and then proclaimed that he was going to the laboratory at the end of the tunnel, to see if Vadim had any stronger pain medication.

  Hours rolled by, and he didn’t return. There was an evening curfew that he completely missed.

  At first, none of the staff and orderlies bothered to check. There were few dangers in the facility, and it was very nice not having him around for a few hours.

  But the next morning arrived, and he missed breakfast call.

  All of the supposed “patients” at the breakfast table – Ubra, Nilux, Farholt, Mykor, and the rest – shared a knowing glance.

  Uh oh. We have a problem.

  A search throughout the facility was conducted by the security and orderly. There wasn’t long to search. It was a dismally brief interval of time before they found the body.

  Private Omen Yatz was lying under a thin and blood-soaked layer of grass cuttings, not far from where Mykor was growing his garden under the anemic fluorescent light. He hadn’t just been killed, he’d been savaged, ripped apart, disincorporated.

  Both of his upper limbs were removed, hacked off at the shoulder. His nose was amputated, and shoved into his mouth. His skull had been smashed in, apparently by a cinderblock. His stomach was a mess of stabwounds. Insects from the garden had already started to build their nests inside his guts.

  Nearby, a bloody hatchet and pruning shears were found.

  It was unknown at what stage in all of this Yatz had actually died. Among his other wounds, there was a surgically-precise knife wound in his voice-box, denying him the ability to speak or scream.

  The orderly who discovered this immediately tried to quit. Just tr
ied to walk out through the door into the outside world. Tragically, after walking several kilometers down the track track she found the doorway sealed off. She returned, and was promptly docked a week’s pay.

  Their resources were strained to breaking point, and they could not tolerate deserters.

  Staff collected the remains of Yatz, and put it in the cold room until such a time as he could receive appropriate state cremation.

  Immediately, the place was on lockdown, and Ubra and everyone else discovered the harsh truth about Arrakhia Hospital: for all its bland amenities and government-funded hospitality, its true state was prison. And now the mask was ripped completely off.

  Guards watched everyone, either in person or through pin cameras. Everyone had to communicate their movements to the guards: and these movements could be denied, if the guards thought it suspicious.

  Yalin cried and soiled herself, and Ubra had to endure a humiliating three minute interrogation with an unfriendly guard before she was allowed to use the changeroom.

  Now the orderlies were guards, and Vadim was their chief gaoler. They were allowed no privileges. Their every movement was watched.

  The murder of Yatz changed everything.

  Yet it changed nothing.

  Only the illusion was gone.

  Vadim had Andrei Kazmer in the white room. Thought was impossible in the room. Rebellion was impossible. The only thing you could do in this tomb of white was obey.

  “Explain yourself, Kazmer,” the Arrakhia Mountain psychologist said.

  Andrei didn’t explain himself.

  “Or perhaps I make a mistake, in talking to Andrei Kazmer,” Vadim said. “Maybe I need to address my questions to Aaron Wake. Is he available, perchance?”

  “There is nothing to explain, Vadim,” Andrei said. “I was in my cell, the entire time. I did take a walk through the garden earlier, but I never met Private Yatz.”