He only a tiny sketch of an idea of what he would do.
He started throwing things off the side. Every box, every crate, everything that wasn’t nailed down. He disconnected the artificial hydroponic beds, and watched them slide to the ground, splashes of incongruous green on Caitanya-9’s harsh surface. Hopefully he’d be able to find it later, if there were such things as laters.
Almost the very last thing he found was the polyfleshing device, at a time when he didn’t even need it. It was an odd triangular thing, about the size of his fist. He attached it to his belt, where it emitted a silvery glow.
He dumped as much ballast as he dared, and then started releasing balloons, letting them drift among the clouds. The platform sagged, gravity hauling it back down to the ground with punishing slowness.
He sprinted over to the control panel, and he fired up the rear jets. They surged to life, and the platform started to move sideways. Just a gentle motion at first, like the drifting of a barge in water. He managed to convince himself that it wouldn’t be terrifying as the Skyfortress fell to the ground.
His state of calm lasted about five more seconds.
As the platform picked up speed, he clutched the controls and adjusting the ailerons. His heart thundered as the wind rushed against his face, and the force of descent seemed to be sucking his stomach out through his mouth.
So many things could go wrong. The Skyfortress had the aerodynamic stability of a coin in mid-flip – a sudden draft of wind could completely upend it, or spin it straight down to the ground in a fireball.
He needed to glide back to the digging site.
Taking into account drift, he was about twenty kilometers away. His knuckles were white on the controls as the falling platform accelerated, sliding sideways with precarious stability.
He reconnected to Ubra. “Are you still alive?”
Shooting crackled through his earpiece. “What the fuck are you doing?
“If I was to drop a piece of metal somewhere, a hundred meters across, where would you need it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just tell me where most of the enemy are concentrated.”
“Due north of our position. They’re nearly here.”
Then the platform plunged through the bottom of the clouds, slicing through them like a knife through an exit wound.
Now he was looking out on to a thunderous purple landscape, lit by a blue sun.
The platform seemed to shriek as it glided through the air.
He felt dizzying vertigo. He hadn’t even looked once at the ground when flying up this way. The sight of the patchwork landscape far below summoned a scream, and then stole it. His tongue was stilled by the incredible height. At what could be his final moments, he had no noises left to make.
The ground passed below as he clutched the controls. In less than a minute, the battle site was visible.
The earthworks had been raised up into a slight hill by tectonic forces, and the hill was covered by a cloak of ruined bodies, both metal and human. Muzzle flashes illuminated the scene like a strobe.
At the center was a tight ring of bodies, shooting back. He smiled when he saw that.
The Defiant hadn’t cracked, and they never would.
He blasted a blanket message to everyone on the comms channel.
“I’m back. Hope you missed me. If you’re on the hill, take my advice and be literally any fucking where else.”
He killed the channel as the ground rose beneath him.
Flying low at terrifying speeds, he entered effective firing range. One hand dropped from the controls, and reached for the weapons. At the slightest touch, the energy guns mounted at the four corners of the falling cross snapped to life.
Volleys of energy bolts poured from the guns as the craft hummed low over the earth. Most of them missed, but the ones that hit killed everything and everyone they touched. Solar Arm soldiers fled on both sides, but there was no time to escape. Zelity tore through them like grass in a haymow.
Squeezing the trigger, wind in his face, he was vaguely conscious that the craft was barely a few meters above the ground. He angled the craft, so it was directly positioned over a wide column of troops. He held on to his nerve until the last possible second, the last possible fraction of a second…
Then let go.
The wind pressure tore him from the craft as it raced ahead of him, spinning like a shuriken. He was blown and buffeted into the air, inertia still carrying him towards the ground at terrible velocity.
He activated the Vyres on his back and spread them,. He was moving at speeds approaching the speed of sound, and there was little he could do to control his fall.
You idiot you idiot you idiot – spinning uncontrollably, on the verge of blacking out, he wished fervently for a more dignified internal monologue.
He regained his balance just as the purple rock rushed towards him.
He landed at an acute angle, bouncing across the ground, until his Vyres caught on a boulder, nearly tearing out of his spinal column.
An explosion tore the air about a kilometer away. Stifling a pained scream, he stared ahead into the path of destruction the Skyfortress had left.
It would never move again. That went double for everyone in its path. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay strewn, still fresh enough to spurt, still hot enough to smoke. The hydrogen tanks had exploded, leaving brushstrokes of fire illuminating the ground nearly a kilometer beyond.
Skimming across the ground, it had annihilated everything.
Black specks crowded his vision like flies as he stood up. He tried to walk in a straight line, and ended up falling on his ass again.
“Can anyone hear me?” he asked into comms.
“Just what the hell was that?” It was Noritai’s voice. “Something big and black just went over my head.”
“I guess we know it wasn’t Jagomir’s cock.“
“That was the Skyfortress, wasn’t it? You landed it, didn’t you?”
“Yep. Saved you all. Thank me and pay it forward.”
He looked at the digging site, and the Defiant streaming out. He went to meet them.
They were the only seven people he could see still standing on the blackened, smoking landscape. With bodies dead and alive hurled to the four winds, they were the last men standing.
Victory. Or something close.
They came down, guns in hands. With an extra one for Zelity. He found a Meshuggahtech pressed into his hands.
“That was either the worst thing you could possibly have done, or the greatest,” Haledor said.
“You’re still alive, so my vote goes for ‘the worst’.” Zelity said.
They all laughed, and embraced. Ubra held back, a wry smile on her face.
“Come on,” Noritai said. “Let’s do it.”
“What?”
Their taciturn leader chambered a fresh clip. “The job’s half finished.”
They walked among the wounded.
“Noritai, I don’t want to do this,” Ubra said.
All around were blackened and twisted corpses, and not quite corpses.
Some squirmed and writhed, and clutched ghastly wounds. Some babbled and shouted, their tongues unhinged by pain or insanity. Others were completely quiet, watching their conquerors with eyes that flickered like serpents’ tongues.
Those with enough consciousness to think all had the same question on their faces.
What happens now?
“What you want,” Noritai said, tightening a bolt on his Meshuggahtech, “is not foremost on our list of priorities.”
“I’m not killing the wounded.”
“Tough shit. I’m ordering you to.”
“And I’m disobeying your order.”
He glared at her, eyeing her up and down. Despite her performance in the battle, she was aware of her position in the pecking order: at the very bottom.
She had no rapport with any of them, save Zelity. All they knew was that Nyphur had vouched for her
on the station, and that was thin gruel indeed.
“A military unit works as the sum of many parts,” Noritai said.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve been known to hang around military types once or twice.”
“Then you know that the grunts with the guns don’t get to have opinions. Nobody’s asking where you stand on things. Nobody cares. At the end of the day, there’s one law, and with Mykor gone and Emeth dead, that law is me. Obey me, and we stand. Disobey me, and we’re smoke on the wind. Remember Sankoh, and how she thought she’d take some initiative? And got turned into a human cheese grater for her efforts? That’s where independent thinking gets you in this game. We need to work together.”
“First thing, Mr Squad Lawyer,” she said. “is that I’m not your grunt. I never signed up. All I did was rescue you because I’m a chickenshit traitor and I had nowhere else to go. Second, imaging the fucking word no running on a ticker tape in front of your eyes forever. That’s where I stand on shooting prisoners.”
The other Defiant took a step back and started getting conspicuously busy. Nobody wanted to get between these two.
“Then leave,” Noritai snarled. “If you stay here, and take advantage of our resources, then you do so on my terms. And if you do that, my terms are that we’re a fighting unit, a band of brothers, and I’m the father.”
“Kill them, and you’re also a war criminal.”
“Then so be it,” he said. He gestured at the dying soldiers. “Look at them. They’re in pain. It’s an act of mercy.”
Ubra pointed at Zelity. “Hey, did you remember the polyfleshing device?”
He nodded, unhappy to be dragged into this. “Got it right here on my belt.”
“Then we don’t have to kill. We can heal. That’s an even greater act of mercy.”
Ubra pointed at the nearest crushed mass of humanity. “Come on, Yen. One at a time. Fix him up.”
For a moment, Zelity stood still, and Noritai looked on in triumph. But then he took the device off his belt, knelt down, and Noritai expression soured.
Waves of particles lashed out from the instrument, exerting oscillatory forces that broke the bonds between molecules. Their faces were bathed in light that didn’t seem to be light from this world, or even this universe, and the wounds began to heal.
A broken leg straightened itself, the bone-resetting along fracture points with dicelike clicks. A black-red burn the size of a dinner plate rippled and shrank. His limbs shuddered uncontrollably as torn muscle fibers reconnected. From chaos, order. From damage, wholeness.
In minutes, there was a man sitting before them, shaking his head. He was dazed, awed, and completely healthy.
“Where’s General Sakharov?” he asked.
“Who’s…” Ubra began, but Zelity cut her off.
“He’s dead. Out of the picture. Probably strewn across five or six acres.”
“You’re the bad guys, right?” he asked.
“Right,” Ubra said. “We’re the bad guys.”
Noritai’s face was permanently fixed in a snarl. “See what you’ve done? You’ve brought back an enemy, who wants us dead. Want to try for fifty more like him?”
“I don’t want you dead at all,” the soldier said, his expression that of a child doing simple maths very slowly. “I can’t fight you, and anyway, it seems I owe you for something. Will you hear my surrender?”
“Sure,” she said. “Guns down. Cessation of conflict. We find a way off this purple rock together. That sound good?”
“Not really, but I’ll take it.”
Noritai seemed close to apoplectic rage. “It is not your place to offer terms, Ubra Zolot. You are not in charge. What’s the critical part of this that you’re not getting? You are not in charge.”
“Wait,” Zelity said, “this is none of my business, but isn’t this the outcome you wanted? To not have enemies popping out of the woodwork? Let’s just ride this thing out. When it stops working, then we can discuss plan B’s and C’s.”
He went from person to person, using the polyfleshing instrument to mend wounds, reattach severed limbs, pull men back from the brink of death.
The other Defiant started helping them – locating injured personnel, carrying them closer if their injuries permitted, making them comfortable if they didn’t, and performing emergency triage so that they’d go the distance. Tourniquets. CPR. Electroshocks from their commsuits. Anything to stretch the thread of life another few minutes until Zelity could get to them.
Few of the healed Solar Arm troops showed much interest in continuing the fight. Some snarled and mouthed threats that lost all intensity and conviction while their lips were still moving. A few wouldn’t talk. Many thanked Zelity and Ubra.
One man thanked them profusely...and then lunged for a rifle between Zelity’s legs. Haledor put him down with two bullets to the skull.
Once or twice, soldiers died while he was attempting the polyflesh procedure. Zelity always terminated the procedure when that happened. “We don’t reanimate the dead. Bad things happen. Trust me.”
Noritai still sulked and fumed, his authority in tatters. The other Defiant walked around him, not making eye contact. It was clear that none of them shared his lust to complete the victory.
Thirty healed survivors became thirty, then forty. Eventually, nearly fifty men sat or sprawled on the black, ashen ground, talking quietly among themselves. One found a packet of genetically modified tobacco, and they started rolling and sharing cigarettes.
“Any more?” Haledor asked Zelity.
Zelity cast a glance around. “Not unless someone was hurled six hundred feet and survived the trip. I think this is probably all of them.”
Solar Arm soldiers and Defiant insurrectionists. They’d been staring at each other from the business end of a gun just an hour ago, and there was an awkward rift that nobody was sure how to cross. Haledor coughed and opened his mouth, before Noritai got the chance to make it wider.
“You have been abandoned,” Haledor told the seated men. “I don’t know what lies this Sakharov man told to keep you fighting, but that’s the truth. You have no ships, no shuttles, and no method of entering orbit. And in any case, we now seem to be in a place that is far from Proxima Centauri.”
“You’re the ones who controlled the Spheres?” A woman with private stripes said. “And the Shield?”
“We were.”
“Damn. Beat us without any of your toys.” She didn’t sound ashamed, angry, or even regretful. Just awed.
“That’s fact one, here’s fact two,” Haledor said. “We’re in the same boat as you. We’ve got no way out of here. If you’re imagining us to be the guardians of secret knowledge, we aren’t. If you’re thinking that by killing us you can discover the secret of life inscribed on the far wall of the universe, you won’t. All you’ll do is waste a bullet. And there’s been more than enough wasted already.”
“So, what happens now?” A man asked.
“We’re staying together. You can do as you damned well please. Perhaps we can pool our resources and figure something out. Maybe we’ll just die. I don’t know. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but lifelines are in kinda short supply at the moment.”
Zelity stepped in. “One thing I would ask…” he said, “does anyone have a method of cutting through polyglass? A heavy duty arc cutter, maybe? We have a soldier who is…er…spatially confined.”
“I have one in my kit,” someone said, “take me there.”
“Good lad.”
As they walked away, Ubra cast a glance at Noritai. He stood on the hill, watching them with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face. Never had anyone been so unhappy about a victory.
He’d been in his element, killing the demons. And now the men under his command had brought fifty of them back.
Rose Defiant
Terrus – Neo Sydney – August 1st 2142 1900 hours
Rose walked through the streets of Sydney, towards the industrial tenements.
> By night, Sydney was a silicon-lit wonderland. Lights covered every surface, glowing like neon barnacles. Giant holographic samurai duelled in the street, swinging katanas that were thirty feet long. Drones buzzed overhead, taking her photo and offering printouts in exchange for money. But as exhaustion took hold, she wished for quiet, wished for nature. Large swathes of Australia were designated as nature reserves. She vowed to move there as soon as her finances allowed.
Damn, I wonder if I called Yves and apologized, she’d let me back in. It’d have to be a fucking brilliant apology. A twenty minute speech accompanied by a Greek choral section from the Muses themselves.
Gradually, she entered a less ritzy part of Sydney. Cracks split the glass-covered streets, and in places the LCD screens had gone dark.
A man with a trenchcoat down to his ankles approached her, leering. “How much, luv?”
“Pardon?”
The guy’s face was a minefield of pustules. “For a full service, I mean. I’m disease free. Absolutely. Got papers on me, somewhere.”
The situation hit home. “Sorry, I’d have to charge hazard rates.”
“Don’t have to get mouthy.” He strode off in a sulk.
Two more people mistook her for a prostitute before she realized she was still dressed in the leather dominatrix outfit she’d put on after returning home.
“Great.” She looked at her reflection in the nearest LCD display, and cringed. “Just great.”
There was a spatter of blood on her corset, and she felt a stab of guilt.
She finally reached the address on the note. It was an abandoned building, well off the main tributary road, and just a few kilometers from the Sydney Spaceport. Motion sensing cameras whirred and focused on her as she knocked on the door.
A woman opened it. The same woman from the SADF office.
She did a double take at the corset and leather choker.
“Look, this isn’t a joke,” Rose said. “Someone gave me this address earlier today at the Veteran Affairs Office. I’m sorry if this is a bad time, but…”
She was already being escorted inside as the words tumbled from her mouth.
Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2) Page 8