The boy’s foot was on his neck, pressing him down, crushing him…
Like an insect.
Terrus – Neo Sydney – March 12, 2143
“I got a draft paper,” Rose said to Yves.
They were at breakfast together. Yves was putting braids in her hair.
“I saw it. It came through on your netmail.”
“Please don’t look at that stuff. I need some privacy.”
“Great idea to become a soldier, then. Don’t forty of you share the same latrine?”
Rose stood up, and started absently throwing more things into a half-packed bag. “The point is, a draft means war. The coup on Selene, the Second Minister defecting to the Asteroid belt, the party dissolved and a military junta in place…yeah, something bad is coming. This isn’t going to end with a big group hug at the Atrium.”
Yves had only slightly more interest in politics than the table they were sitting around. “Where are they stationing you?”
“Nowhere, yet. They just need a pool of reserves to draw on. I might be deployed on Mars. I might be kept on Terrus. Somehow I have a feeling it’ll be Terrus. Given my mental health history, they probably won’t let me board a shuttle. Either way, the Solar Arm only controls half the game – the rest of it is the Sane, and what moves they make.”
“The Sane? Is that what Yithdras’s forces call themselves?”
“Hey, they tried to get the Prime Minister of their own party arrested, and killed some of his men escaping. If that’s not what sane looks like, then I don’t know what to tell you. I just don’t get why they tried to pull the eject lever on him like this. He would have been voted out in the next election.”
Yves didn’t say what Rose could tell she was thinking.
The space station had six months carved on the side. Sarkoth Amnon was trying to build a defense network against that. This isn’t about stopping Sarkoth Amnon. This is about stopping the defense network.
“I’ve given up on reading the news,” Rose said. “Depending on who you read Sarkoth’s a pederast, Raya Yithdras is a war criminal, Sarkoth got killed on Caitanya-9 and the person in parliament’s an alien, Raya Yithdras belongs to a doomsday cult that wants to end the world… At some point someone figured out a foolproof way to beat bad press – spam so much disinformation and bullshit through the channel that the signal’s gone.”
“Is there any way you can get out of this?”
“If I put a bullet through my head, that would probably do the trick. Hard to patrol or do PT when you’re dead. But realistically, yeah, I’m happy to go. Keeps me busy. Plus the Solar Arm’s more likely to keep paying for my medication.”
Rose’s fugue states were gradually going away. There were no more incidents like the night with the candle, and Yves had only caught her writing THE EXPERIMENT ENDS a few more times.
Bruises heal, she thought. No matter how big and black, at the end I always have clean white skin.
“What classification are you in?”
“Infantry. I’ll see if I can wrangle a job calibrating computers. That will keep me close to comms, so I can talk to you.”
They hugged, and Yves helped her pack.
The streets of Sydney no longer glowed. With the Solar Arm on wartime footing, power was an even more limited resource than the humans that used it. The EMP blast as the space station had landed a few hundred kilometers north of here had done an incredible amount of damage. Nobody was in any hurry to pull up hundreds of square kilometers of glass and repair the electronics underneath.
Without a neon glow throbbing beneath their feet, the crowds in Sydney looked drab, uninspiring. And scared.
Rose could still remember the day the fireball had fallen through the atmosphere, describing a trajectory to the north.
It could have been shot out of the sky, but they’d let it land, even though it had caused billions of ducats worth of damage. It was the space station from Caitanya-9, and it should not have been there.
Now that the Solar Arm was no more – dissolved into a pair of atomized quasi-states rapidly sliding towards the brink of war – everyone wondered whether there would be more fireballs entering the atmosphere. Some of which might have antimatter warheads.
“The smallest fucking one can destroy a city, and do it so quickly that you’d die even if you could run at the speed of sound,” Rose had said when Yves raised this up. “The larger ones can tear out a significant amount of the planet’s mass. And now those things are floating around in space, fully armed.”
“So the defense network’s active?”
“No. It would have taken months and months to build, even in peacetime. There’s a few probes out there, but most of them are close to Terrus.”
“Reckon they’ll be used?”
“By whom, for what? Both sides want to control a wealthy, prosperous, and stable solar system. As soon as an antimatter war begins, everything will be wiped out except a couple of small outposts. If there’s fighting, and I think there probably will be, it’ll be done with conventional arms. Frigates and destroyers. Nuclear missiles. Cyber ops. Besides, the antimatter warheads are in Sarkoth Amnon’s hands. They don’t fire without his codes, and they cannot be reprogrammed. I was up last night researching all this. And honestly, I mildly trust Sarkoth more than I do Raya Yithdras.”
The Solar Arm enlistment office had a long line. They settled in to wait, re-checking what Yves had packed.
“I’m imaging a permanent standoff, both sides unwilling to make the first move,” Yves says. “This comes from someone who’s military knowledge consists of listening to you bitch about PT, but it might be a while until this ends.”
“Then again, it might be a couple of months.”
War broke out later that month.
There was a first move. As so often throughout history, the first move was unclear.
Encroachments lead to bigger encroachments lead to pretend-fire lead to not-pretend fire lead to open hostilities.
Several million kilometers outside the asteroid belt, there was a skirmish between Exhorder-class destroyers, commanded by a regional deputy of the Solar Arm, and a handful of Hammerhead-class frigates. The indecisive dogfight, over in five minutes, was a flash point that set the war ablaze.
The Solar Arm controlled the viable and resource rich inner worlds, from Terrus out to Mars, as well as the bulk of the population, as well as several dozen antihydrogen warheads.
Sarkoth Amnon mandated that production of these would go ahead at full speed, to the dismay of his generals and advisers.
The Sane was far more decentralized, commanding trillions of square kilometers of space and hundreds of small border outposts all the way out past the orbit of Pluto. They were in an ideal positive for unconventional warfare, hopping from rock to rock and striking out of the shadows.
Soon, close to a billion soldiers were deployed across all fronts, spreading out in a concentric ring in the 3D field. Soldiers in search of a battle to fight.
One of the most valuable weapons in the Solar Arm’s arsenal was the space shrapnel. Ships would patrol valuable space-roads in sweeping arcs, covering them in billions of tiny pieces of gravel, each only a centimeter apart.
This deadly detritus made high-speed travel was impossible, outside of specially cleared lanes. If a spacecraft struck a piece of rock at even the slightest fraction of the speed of light, the energy released would be more than a hundred nuclear bombs.
With these rocks scattered everywhere, each one representing death, the tempo of war slowed down. All approaches and attacks had to be done at non-relativistic speeds.
They would be there for years or decades – the landmines of space – before they finally spiraled into accretion disks or were sucked down to the surface of a nearby planet. Even if the war ended tomorrow, trade routes would be jeopardized for a very long time.
But trade routes require that there be someone to trade.
It was a game of negotiation and counter negotiat
ion, of left jab and right hook. The tension built, as more and more forces were scraped together and mobilized.
Sarkoth Amnon made speeches, championing unity and solidarity against a force that threatened to split them apart.
Raya Yithdras rallied her followers with tales of Sarkoth’s madness, and amply-evidenced accusations of crime.
Somewhere in all the madness, Emil Gokla’s death was reported – hardly noticed, and soon forgotten.
Apparently, he’d passed away from a botched blood transfusion while alone in his mansion. No other people were found on the scene.
He was given a brief state funeral by Raya. She was present for only five minutes before stepping on a Dravidian supercarrier, bound for the war zones.
Caitanya-9 – Jun 5, 2043 – 1600 hours
Finally, the day came when they left Caitanya-9 behind.
The days seemed to pass faster and faster, Wake’s deadline thundering towards them like a wall that none of them could bear to look at.
They’d come to the planet with various ambitions. The Defiant, seeking to thwart the apocalypse. The Solar Arm soldiers, seeking only a paycheck. Ubra and Zelity, the original marines, caught between so many conflicting parties that they prayed for anything like a unified goal. But now, they’d all been graded flat and equalized. One man was the same as any other down here…with the exception of one.
The day before they re-entered the Solar System was a stream of events, everyone trying to pack as many hedonistic pleasures into the remaining hours they had left.
Life. Death. Preservation. Extinction. Nobody knew what lay on the other side of the veil save Wake himself.
Ubra was now perilously close, early contractions seizing her abdomen. She cried almost constantly now. She didn’t know whether this was irrational.
Zelity tried to comfort her, his every hug undercut by the fact that this was a charade. A pretense.
At the final dawn, all of them were woken by a single thought, hooking insistently into their minds with the sharpness of a talon.
Arise. The digging site. Go.
The sixty surviving members of the colony put on the frayed remnants of their nanosuits – all the electronics had long since gone dead – and shuffled from their huts and caves.
Nobody spoke. None of them could completely disabuse themselves of the hope that all of this was a dream, one that they might still awaken from.
They walked across the purple surface of Caitanya-9, looking at the fields they had tended, the forests that had started to grow. It felt so cruel, that the little lives begun here would now be shorn away.
Ubra struggled along at the rear – Zelity had tried to help her walk, she’d waved him away. She hadn’t slept in days. Her stomach was massive, and she kept apologizing every time it touched someone.
Maybe my species ends with this dawn’s light, but I haven’t forgotten my manners, she thought, and the tears started flowing, roughening into sobs.
They gathered at the digging site that had played a role in so many turning points in their lives.
Fifteen years ago, a man called Mikhail Golestani had noticed a strange pulsing sound. Ten years ago, a Black Shift transport was dispatched from earth, carrying on board it one Andrei Kazmer. Five years ago, he’s arrived, shortly followed by Sarkoth Amnon.
A kilometer down there was a chamber, where the last of an alien species had existed. There was symmetry there, as they might end up being the last members of their species. But they likely wouldn’t receive a polite burial underground. There might not even be an underground to bury them in.
There they waited, and waited. The delay was agonizing. Talking was confined to vague mutters.
Zelity fell in beside Haledor and Jagomir. They were sharing a cigarette that had been saved for the occasion. It was starting to rot, and tasted bitter as marshweed in their mouths. They smoked it anyway.
“I just wished I could have seen the birth of my child,” Zelity said, pointing at Ubra.
“So, the kid’s yours?” Jaginov asked.
“Yeah, didn’t you know? Thought I’d told everyone.”
“Congratulations.”
“That depends on whether or not I wanted a kid, right? Put not your faith in the pull-out method, boys. Out of all the supplies we salvaged, you’d think at least someone would have brought a pack of condoms.”
“Not really part of a usual soldier’s kit.”
“You’d be surprised. You can stretch a condom right over a blade or a gun barrel and it will keep that shit dry and rust free. Protects it from blood and everything.”
Haledor’s fist thudded into his shoulder. “Quiet. I just need quiet. Is that OK with you?”
Zelity nodded. “Sure. Sorry.”
Wake appeared then. Just phased into existence, as if he was stepping from behind a curtain that was itself invisible.
He stretched out a purple-hued hand, and flexed his fingers, as if unsure about whether the atoms in his own body still worked.
Then they heard his voice in their heads.
I have established a temporal wormhole from here to the Solar System. We will debark at slightly beyond the third Legrange point of the sun, close to Terrus. What will I do then?
That depends on how the Solar Arm responds to me. If I am attacked, I will immediately deploy the Wipe. If not, I will depart the Solar System, and release the Wipe somewhere else. Peace will be repaid with peace, war with extinction. Either way, you will not see me again.
Where does this leave you, children of Caitanya?
You have a part in this exact same fate.
From over a close hill, there was the sound of tons of shifting rocks. The crashing sounds rebounded off every flat surface on the digging site, causing men to wince and block their ears.
Then a large shape hovered into view, a giant cylinder of metal floating on a cushion of air.
They all stepped back as it crashed down in their midst, like a monolithic spire. It was several meters across, and nearly twenty long. The sleek metal was pitted and scarred and stained by many long years in the ground, but there was a paint decal visible on it.
SOLAR ARM DEFENSE FORCE
It was a Dravidian-class transport. These hulking beasts had transported soldiers by their hundreds to the planet. Most of the soldiers had died, along with the transports. Every viable one had been taken by Sarkoth Amnon and his men, with the remainder left behind as salvage. After the battle the Defiant had gone looking for one – they had a lot of valuable metal, for one thing. Sadly, every last one of them was buried by the earthquakes.
But sometimes on this world, the dead lived again.
I have repaired and reinforced the structural integrity of this carrier. I have refueled it with both thorium and antimatter stages. You will not find it a comfortable ride, but it will take you off the planet and into space. Beyond there, your destiny is your own. Know that if I deploy the Wipe, you will not escape, no matter how far you flee.
Jaginov reached out to touch the huge spacecraft, improbably brought back to life. His fingers stopped a few centimeters from the fuselage, as if he was frightened of being electrically shocked by the reborn beast.
Pack whatever supplies you think you need. Ten kilos per person. And then enter the Dravidian, and remain there. I cannot guarantee the safety of any person left on the outside.
They filed inside, into the musty darkness of the junked and refurbished ship, thinking that Wake would have been more honest if he’d left off every word after “person”.
The hum of a thorium engine was a low and steady distraction. They switched power over to the 60hz circuit that powered the lights and electronics, and they found themselves in a flickering hellhole sculpted from metal. There were the remains of nearly a hundred Black Shift pods, now defunct and deactivated. Near the fore were rows and rows of seats.
Most of the soldiers strapped themselves in, and reclined the chairs. It was still very early in the morning, and snores filled the re
verberant hull.
Zelity climbed a ladder up to the control module at the front, and tried to activate the computer.
It wouldn’t start. A jolting red flash indicated a critical system failure. He sniffed, and recognized the smell of burned-out electronics.
“Damn,” he said to whoever was listening. “This ride’s a lemon.”
“Not working?” Haledor asked.
“The thrusters are fully mechanical, but we have no guidance system or steerage. Once we de-orbit, we’re basically stuck travelling in a straight line.”
“Fascinating.” He heard Haledor clip in his seatbelt, and soon there were even more snores.
Zelity explored the ship, trying to quell his worry about what would happen to them.
It was a long time before he realised Ubra Zolot wasn’t on board. And when he tried to get out, he found that the airlock had sealed tight.
The Asteroid Belt – June 5, 2143, 0800 hours
The order was given to scramble the Solar Arm fleet. Incursion had been detected.
Officially, the limits of Solar Arm territory were now at the asteroid belt, but the belt had a fuzzy edge, and there was no clear point on the gradient where it ended. Throughout the past couple of weeks there had been many near misses where Hammerheads and Exhorders had drifted dangerously close to Mars, only to pull back.
And the fuzzy area became fuzzier still when it became known that the Sane were building near-lightspeed probes that they fired through a deliberate space. Suicide missions that cleared the dragnet of asteroids and space shrapnel.
It was immediately obvious what they were doing.
Once a narrow window was free of debris, thousands of ships would come pouring through that window.
Their next destination: Mars.
When scout beacons detected the assault, General Rodensis marshalled the bulk of the Solar Arm fleet, took it out to beyond the Martian orbit, and then hung back, ready to defend the breach.
Space combat was an extension of naval combat, a tradition going back thousands of years. From the ramming galleys of the Greeks and Romans, to the late medieval age of sail, to the battleship tactics of the 20th century, the line ended here.
Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2) Page 19