The body slammed to the ground. Then Ubra turned the gun on the remaining guards.
“Two choices,” she said, speaking with icy calm. “Run, or shoot. And if you use the second one, I shoot back.”
There were four of them left, and two were wounded. Only one had a gun that Ubra could see. All of them had the scruffy look of half-cooked privates.
She knew she could stare them down. They could be cowed.
“Dead serious,” she said. “You can just turn around, go, and I won’t stop you. Think on that. You get to live. Nice deal.”
One of them shook his head. Ubra didn’t know what that meant, but when he started walking away from the digging site, and his friends started following him, his intent was clear.
She watched them go, panting with exhaustion.
No time to rest.
She turned to the twelve people on the ground. “Get up. There’s still a shit-ton of them out there, and not all of them are as green as that batch I scared away. They’ll be back. We just happen to be low on the long, long list of their problems.”
“’We’?” A bald-headed man stood. “Who’s this ‘we’?”
“My name’s Ubra Zolot,” she said. She offered a handshake, but he didn’t accept it. “And I guess I’m on your side.”
“I recognize you. One of the marines who came out here and set this whole pot boiling. We had a contact on the station who sent us your headshot.”
“I’m friends with that guy.” She immediately felt shame, and issued corrections. “Well, I knew him for a couple of hours. And he’s dead now, as far as I know. And…”
“Fuck this noise,” the man said flatly. “Take her down.”
She opened her mouth but two of them pounced on her, taking her to the ground. She had immediate flashbacks of Andrei Kazmer pinning her to the ground, and swore and fought. But her limbs had no strength.
“Examine the back of her neck,” the bald man said.
She was turned over, and she felt probing fingers touch her nape. She shivered.
“No, she’s honest. Not one of the Sons.” A woman behind her said.
“We know she’s not one of the Sons, Sankoh” he said, “but she could still be a traitor. We don’t know what her motives are. Right now, we can trust no-one.”
“No good deed goes unpunished, huh,” Ubra said, trying to wriggle free and not succeeding.
One of the Defiant was pacing around, looking at her anxiously. Shocked, she realized she recognized him. A buzzcut of blonde hair, now starting to grow out. His bare chest had some faint yellow letters.
Yen Zelity.
“Hey, Yen, remember me?” she said.
He shook his head. “No.”
“Not even a little bit?”
He wouldn’t make eye contact. “No. I’ve never seen you before.”
“I remember you. We were in the Solar Arm Marine Corp together – I was a Private and you were a Sergeant.”
Zelity shook his head. “She’s lying. I’ve never seen this woman before in my life.”
“Then how come I know what the tattoo on your chest means? ‘Pangolins don’t give a shit.‘”
His jaw fell open.
“Let her up, Emeth,” he told the bald-headed man. “And find her some food and water.”
Soon, Zelity and Ubra were searching the wreckage, talking as they walked.
All of the survivors were now engaged in a flurry of activity. Some were trying to repair their Spheres. Others were furiously looking for supplies, weapons, and ammunition with which to make another stand.
None of them knew where they stood with the hundreds of soldiers out on the plains. Given that Ubra had killed several of them, relations were probably not congenial.
Ubra munched another high-calorie energy bar with the hand that wasn’t busy carrying a stack of Repulsors. They were looking for anything that might be useful. The Solar Arm had left literally thousands of tons’ worth of equipment out here, and if they didn’t act now it might all be buried by the next overpass of the moons.
“The pressure’s off,” he said. “The Vanitar have a shielding technology that the Solar Arm can’t penetrate. The moons disrupted it for long enough for them to get inside, but we won’t have another double apposition for days, maybe weeks. We can bunker down there for a long time, and plan our next move.”
Ubra wasn’t so sure about that, or any other topic involved with this planet.
The whole thing was bizarre, from top to bottom. There were different patterns of stars in the sky. She saw the beginning of dawn creeping over the horizon, but the light wasn’t the burning red of Proxima Centauri.
It was blue. Fucking blue.
Where exactly are we?
“Obviously, you’ve had your memories altered,” Ubra said.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “I fought knowing that at first. From time to time I still fight knowing it. But Mykor confessed to me that he’d done it, not long before he was captured, and it’s the only scenario that makes sense. No way was I born on this rock. The tattoo’s just the start of it. I keep having memories of playing in the snow, and skiing down mountains. All of my fondest memories, burned out of me. Fucking Black Shift.”
“But it wasn’t Black Shift who did that, Yen,” she said. “The Defiant did. If you’re mad at anyone, it should be Mykor. I’m not contradicting you, but it’s important to face the facts. The Solar Arm, Black Shift, and the Sons of the Vanitar are manipulating people like puppets. But there was a puppetmaster controlling your side, too.”
He shot her an irritated look that said won’t you please let me have a villain?
“Don’t dwell on it, anyway,” Ubra said, picking up a rangefinder half-buried in rock and trying unsuccessfully to free it. “It won’t do you any good. I can show you a man who let anger at Sarkoth Amnon consume him. It wasn’t a pretty story.”
“You’re talking about Andrei Kazmer, the guy they threw down the hole?” Zelity said. “He saved my life. I won’t hear a word against him.”
Ubra shook her head. “Then you don’t know the full story. Not even the smallest part of the full story.”
“Maybe not, but that makes two of us. I went down there to investigate what was beyond the Doorway. I found a room that played tricks with my head: a magic eye puzzle I could never solve. Then the room came alive, and there was something there…this presence. It was so wonderful that I started to bow and grovel. Hours and hours. All the while, there was a pulsing sound, numbers getting smaller and smaller as we approached the end of the world…and I didn’t care. I just wanted to worship the Vanitar.”
He’d gotten so engrossed in the recollection that he’d dropped all the supplies he’d been carrying. Patiently, Ubra knelt down and put them back in his hands.
“And then what happened?”
“Then a man came through the Doorway. Just burst right through. I hardly noticed him, but then he flew right at the Vanitar and started attacking it. Clawing and ripping and tearing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Maybe you have. Your memories are fake.”
“I’m sure I haven’t. He was so consumed by it, it’s like he wanted to destroy it as much as I wanted to worship it. He tore chunks of squirming ectoplasm out of the thing’s body, just burying himself arm deep in it and going to town. My senses were linked to it. It felt such pain, such anguish…I wanted to get up and fight the man. I might have won, and then it would have lived.”
“So, why didn’t you?”
“Because as much pain it felt, it also felt relief. I think it wanted to die, wanted something to kill it. It was a guardian of some sort, I guess. A keeper of the keys. The one that oversees the countdown and fires the Wipe. And it was shackled to its post for eternity.”
“Until Andrei Kazmer came along to set it free.”
“Exactly.”
There was a distant pop, and a small brightly lit rocket fired into the sky, a few kilometers away. Ubra shielded her eyes against
the eerie blue sun, and watched its ascent. “Huh. A flare.”
Already, there was a sea of tents on the plain, soldiers streaming in by the minute.
Very well. That was to be expected.
Despite the panic and chaos, training eventually reasserts itself.
She ignored it. She had to. “What happened after the Vanitar died?”
“I blacked out, and when I woke up I was lying on the rock with a guy holding a gun on me. All around I saw the ships going up in flames, and a few of them escaping. Exactly what happened out there?”
“Andrei Kazmer happened.”
“Where’s he now?” Zelity stared at the gathering sea of Solar Arm soldiers.
“I don’t know where he is. And let me just say that I hope that never, ever changes.”
They stood in silence for a second, watching and thinking.
“That flash in the sky…do you think that was the Wipe?” Ubra asked.
“I don’t think so. If it is, how are we still alive?”
“Caitanya-9 is a weapon, and weapons don’t normally destroy themselves,” Ubra said. “Unless you consider human personnel to be weapons. Then the Solar Arm destroys pretty much all of them it can get its hands on. Honestly, I can sympathize with Kazmer, up to a point.”
“Jesus, and I’m the one who’s supposed to not feel bitter.”
“I didn’t say you can’t feel bitter. Just don’t let it make you a sheep. Be a person without a master – no Mykor, no Sarkoth Amnon, no paralyzing anger. They’re all the same thing, something trying to hijack your brain and make you become not yourself. Don’t fucking let them.”
Just then, they heard some unmistakable sounds.
Gunshots. Echoing across the landscape like rolling thunder.
- Ka-Boom -
- Ka-Boom -
- Ka-Boom -
- Ka-Boom -
Zelity hit the ground, thinking they’d been discovered. Ubra just laughed. “Get up. You’re safe.”
“They’re shooting at us!”
“That was a pistol. Small arms. Pretty nice shooting if they could hit us at a range of four kilometers.”
“Ah,” he got back up, and dusted himself off. The planet’s dust no longer quite looked purple by the blue light of this new sun. It was now puce, the color of crushed blackberries. “When you pilot a Sphere you start forgetting how regular weapons work.”
“Hey, that was four shots, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“No reason, except I can’t help but remember that there were four guards who were supposed to be keeping us prisoner.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “What do you think? That he was making an example of them? Why? He needs all the manpower he can get.”
“He needs all the food and water he can get. And he needs all the fear he can get.”
They stared at the distant camp, looking into the gloom for the slightest clue as to the source of the shooting. There was nothing, and they imagined all sorts of outlandish scenarios.
“We’re in a different world now,” she said. “When these guys landed, they were part of a conventional army. They had a nice cushy system of court martialing and paperwork and all sorts of carrots and sticks to motivate good behavior. But that’s all gone. Now they’re a guerilla force, and they’ll only stay together if they have a strong enough leader. So yes, he probably needs to make examples. If those four hadn’t forgotten their orders, he might have picked four others for some different fuck-up.”
Zelity nodded. “Makes sense.”
“The only thing is, he can’t stop there. He needs to keep the ball rolling, otherwise his enlisted men will talk about how he’s gone soft. If those were Example Number 1, we’re going to be Example Number 2. Mark my words.”
They ignored their mission, watching as columns of soldiers spread out, going left and right around the Defiant camp.
“They’re throwing a cordon around us,” Zelity said. “Which means that if you want to run for your life, you’ve only got a few more hours to do it. Then we’ll be completely surrounded.”
“I’m not running. There’s nowhere to run too.”
“We could surrender.”
“That’s nowhere by a different name.” She kicked a stone, and started back for the camp. “I want to fight. While we’re shooting, we’re surviving.”
“There’s something going on here we can’t fight, at least not with guns.” He shrugged. “Ever heard of the Comanche?”
“No. Is this some other embarrassing tattoo you want to show me?”
“Or maybe it was the Lakota. I forget. They were a warrior culture, a few hundred years ago. They rode horses all across the plains of North America, terrorizing their foes. They liked to fight, too. But there was an enemy they could never beat. As they grew older, they grew weaker, and eventually they passed away. How do you fight that?”
“I bet they tried,” Ubra said.
“You’re damn straight they did. They tabooed the subject. They refused to even talk about it. When one of them tribe died, his family abandoned their dwelling and built a new one, as far away as convenience allowed. If the person had children, those children would be raised by someone else and given new names, in the hopes that they'd forget their parents.
“It got to the point where they tried to pretend that the dead person was still alive. The dead were walled up within their huts, so that nobody would stumble upon their bodies, and everyone would pretend that the dead man was wandering around, attending to his business. If a feast was in order, someone would formally invite the dead person via a third party, and that third party would formally decline the invitation, saying that the dead man could not attend because he was on a buffalo hunt. That’s how they fought death.”
“Did it work?”
“They still died.”
Terrus - Neo Sydney – August 1st, 2142 – 1200
The queue at the Solar Arm Defense Force veterans’ center was winding down. Rose Rohilian shifted from one foot to the other, chewing her lip. Mere seconds left until embarrassment, or ostracism.
“This was a mistake,” she said to the woman beside her, waiting in line. “Let’s bounce. I know some clubs.”
Yves took her hand in hers. The eyes under the blonde fringe were concerned. “No, you need help.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Bullshit. Talking in your sleep. Going out at night without telling me. I’m finding fucking pieces of paper all over the apartment with your handwriting. If that’s ‘nothing wrong’, then keep your actual crazy far away from me.”
“What am I writing?”
Yves smacked her palm to her forehead. “You should know that, Rose. That’s the thing about writing – it happens under your full control. If you can’t goddamn remember what your own hand is doing, then that’s…”
“…Yeah, yeah, a disassociative state. I’m about to go crazy like that lunatic who wasted all those people in White Sands. Whatever.”
“Did you know that he was a veteran? Not from the Caitanya-9 expedition, but from the war of Martian succession. Would have been nice if he’d taken advantage of the SADF’s mental health fund, and it’ll be nice if you do too.”
The shiny tiled building was more than a hundred stories tall, but it wasn’t even the thousandth tallest point in Neo Sydney. The matrix of antennas and comm towers stretched several kilometers high, and above that was a thick layer of geosynchronous satellites, which could block the angle of the sunlight with kilometer-wide wings. On the underside of the satellites were powerful thorium-powered warm lights. The climate and temperate were completely controlled, and whether the city enjoyed day or night at any particular moment was up to daily popular vote.
Down on the ground, there was just the same scurrying rat flood of humanity that there always was. Beggars and weirdos. People who pressed religious pamphlets into your hands.
Rose lit a cigarette, and took a drag. The genetically modified toba
cco had its polysaccharide chains denatured at critical points, neutralizing the toxins. “I just feel weird about it. The fund is supposed to be for people who’ve suffered actual trauma. And I’ve always been a person who stays out late at nights, right?”
“Just do it. I’m not saying you need to graft a therapist to your hip, but at least do the fifteen-minute consultation.”
In a few minutes the last person at the Solar Arm Defense Force veteran affairs center left the line, muttering blackly about thorium reactors. The way was clear to a self diagnosis machine.
Rose discarded the cigarette to the sidewalk. Immediately the liquid crystal display that carpeted the city started glowing, and the cigarette levitated six inches above the ground, moving by itself to a nearby waste gutter. Lithostatic levitation made litter a thing of the past.
“Name, date of birth, age, and service number,” the computerized voice was bland well beyond the point of comfort.
“Rosemary Rohilian, my dee-oh-bee is the second of January, 2102, my age is thirty, and my service number is 342-6723-435.”
Ever since Black Shift had made interstellar transport possible, you had the curious phenomenon of ages not quite matching up birth dates. Rose had spent ten years of her life agelessly preserved, during transit to and from Caitanya-9.
She hadn’t aged, but everyone she’d ever known had. All her old friends had new lines on their faces. Cities had changed. Fashion and culture was entirely different.
Shit, if anything’s making me crazy, it’s that, not whatever happened on that stupid purple planet.
No doubt they had something figured out for her. A nice pill to make her problems disappear. Surely this wasn’t anything Black Shift or the SADF hadn’t seen before.
“I have you on record as a private who performed a tour of duty in Proxima Centauri. Correct?”
“Yes. Close enough.”
What a joke the whole thing had been. A puzzling, sad joke. There had been reports of a strange alien attack in the remote outpost on Caitanya-9. Two thousand troops had been sent out – only to find an empty planet and a false alarm.
Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2) Page 4