Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3)

by Ben Sheffield

  He was a thin and small man. Against the imposing edifice of the house, he seemed less human than rodent. But this was a glorious age that exalted the small, and made possible insane dreams.

  Small wonder Raya Yithdras did not seem to mind Emil Gokla dying.

  Terrus LEO – June 6, 2143, 1130 hours

  Admiral Ypres Covin bounded into the control room on his ship's habitat wheel.

  A ring of anxious faces looked up as he entered, backlit by computer lights. Nearly the entire surviving command structure of the Solar Arm was in this room. The Vice Admiral, the Rear Admiral, the Field Marshal, commodores without number.

  They were in orbit around Terrus, waiting for the end. They’d just received word that tens of thousands of Reformation Confederacy ships were descending on Terrus.

  "This is dangerous," Covin said, shaking his head. "No more than thirty percent of the Solar Arm's commanding officers are supposed to be on board one ship at one time. A single torpedo could penetrate our destroyer shields and kill us all. It's in the rules, the revised 2103 Code of Conduct, subsection thirt..."

  "We're doomed," Major General Romitha Clio said.

  Covin’s mouth opened in mid recitation of the rule.

  "There was an attack at the Atrium, hours ago," Clio said. "Agamune is dead, and the Prime Minister's whereabouts are unknown."

  "With those two gone, leadership defaults on to Sybar Rodensis," Covin said. "Where's he?"

  "Nobody knows. He went missing during the battle for Mars. The last transmission from his fleet division is that they were above Valashabad, and there were enemy ships coming in. After that, there's nothing but noise from his comm-sat channel."

  The scale of the disaster humbled them.

  Caitanya-9 had disappeared, but even that was little comfort.

  Covin had spent his entire life adhering to rulebooks, almanacs, and guidelines. He’d always believed that things had to make sense. Debits had to equal credits. He'd always assumed that a general's job is to play by the rules, and then let the cards fall as they may.

  In military school, he'd always felt that perhaps this wasn't quite accurate. He saw too many incompetents rewarded, too many dangerous flaws in ships unreported, to have much faith in the process of law.

  Now, catastrophe had destroyed the last of his faith. They'd reached a point unlike any in the Solar Arm's history, where doing things by the book was impossible.

  He sensed it was time to take the initiative.

  "Then we assume he's dead, too," Covin said. "Then command of our forces falls on to me. And my first and last command will be the surrender of our military operations to Chief Reformate Raya Yithdras and General Orzo Feroce."

  An intake of breath.

  "That's a...drastic turn of events," someone said.

  "It's a drastic end of events. Our armies are caving inwards. Feroce was victorious at the asteroid belt, was victorious on Mars, and will be victorious here. It's not a case that we cannot win, it's a case that we've virtually already lost. They've devastated so much of our fleet that we cannot hope to mount more than a token defense of Terrus. And you know what happens then? Saturation bombing over cities, and then over whole continents."

  "We cannot confirm that Sarkoth or Sybar are dead," Clio said, looking mortified. "You’re rushing. Let's wait, let the dust settle, see if either of them emerge."

  "We cannot wait!" he shouted. "We're surrendering, now. I'm not going to stand here and let ourselves get torn apart. Imagine a ticking clock. Each tick reduces more of our ships to scrap metal, reduces more civilian dwellings to rubble, devastates more of our homeworld. We do not have an obligation to continue a pointless fight until our dying breaths. We have an obligation to protect our people. And I will not add a single drop of blood to my hands or my conscious more than what I have to."

  None of them argued the point.

  Everything he said was correct.

  Stranger things had happened in warfare than victory under these circumstances, but it wasn't the way to bet. And the civilian casualties would be terrible for every minute that the conflict prolonged itself.

  "Authenticate a commlink to Orzo Feroce's ship," Corvin barked to a comms officer. The harried man hopped to work, weaving through the maze of interdictions and security clearances necessary to transmit a message to an enemy-coded vessel. "This is the only choice remaining to us. If he accepts our surrender, the war will end with Terrus very nearly intact. If we fight on, the entire world will be nearly depopulated, and they will crush us in the end anyway."

  "We have connection," the comms officer said ruefully. None of them looked very happy at the speed Corvin was ending the war, nor the unilateral way he was applying authority.

  "Stop!" a voice shouted. It was a bridge officer at the other side of the main deck. "We're getting a signal from a Yakulst capital ship, SOL-542...it's General Sybar Rodensis. He's alive."

  "And we're sure it’s him? Asked Corvin. Everyone simply ignored him. They dashed around the officer, and the computer that glowed with an active link.

  "Of course it's me, you blithering idiot," the General's voice came through, crackled and distorted by space, but unmistakably his. The computers voice-authenticated everyone, and they logged this as Sybar Rodensis's voice with 99.8% certainty.

  Corvin sulked, his authority utterly evaporated.

  "Why weren't you in contact?" Clio said. "We were assuming you were kay-eye-aye at Valashabad."

  "I had to extricate myself from a messy situation, and I had reason to suspect my outbound comms were bugged," Rodensis said. "I had to go dark. If I communicated my movements, they would have intercepted me. I'm heading through the Mars-Terrus lane, as fast as I can go through the shrapnel minefields. What's happening?"

  "Surrender. That's what's happening," Clio said. "They're closing in, and we were just about to down our guns when you showed up."

  "I'll talk to Orzo Feroce myself. Leave it with me."

  The signal went dead.

  "So, he wants to issue the surrender order himself?" Clio said.

  "Sounds like it. He's seen firsthand what they're doing to our forces. I can't imagine he has any more heart to continue the fight than I do," Corvin said.

  In a way, he was glad to have this decision lifted off his shoulders.

  Responsibility, he’d decided, was for failures.

  Terrus Gravity Well – June 6, 2143, 1200 hours

  The Reformation Confederacy fleet cleared a hole through the space debris, engaged antimatter impulse engines, and began their assault on Terrus.

  General Orzo Feroce was on board a Yakulsk-class capital ship, a million kilometers away from the planet. They’d braked, at a key vantage point where he could receive communications both from his own forces and from the defenders on the planet. He only wanted one communication from the planet: surrender.

  On the bridge of the ship's habitat wheel, white chrome surfaces belying the chaos behind and beyond, he poured himself another cup of choline-infused tea.

  He liked contrast.

  On the ground were billions of panicking civilians. Discord in the streets, an overstretched military coming apart at the seams.

  Ten kilometer above, there were Solar Arm railgun emplacements frantically loading themselves to shoot enemy targets entering the upper atmosphere.

  At hundreds of kilometers above were General Sybar Rodensis's defensive ships, stretched perilously thin. They’d suffered defeat after defeat, and this next one might break them.

  At a hundred thousand kilometers out his fleet was now crashing down on them, and at a million kilometers…

  …vaguely sweetened and lukewarm water, stirred in a cup.

  He smiled.

  The strata of conquest. A fragile cherry blossom tree sitting above thousands of kilometers of molten, churning rock.

  "Units 41, 53, 61, and 64 are now commencing surface attacks."

  "Copy." He said.

  He imagined swarms of thousands
of killer hornets, descending on a nest of bees.

  He had no delusions about what the result would be: massive casualties, and probably not much damage to Terran targets. The initial strike would be a misdirection attack. They would launch thermobaric missiles against surface targets, and then disengage. The true damage would come as soon as he established enough of a beachhead to bring Yakulsk heavy bombardment ships into the fray. Then they would be able to annihilate entire cities.

  Terrus had an immensely sophisticated anti-missile shield. Infrared aliasing, electro-optical targeting, the whole nine yards. Railgun slugs would immediately shoot and disable the bulk of the missiles as soon as they entered striking distance.

  No matter.

  You only needed a few of them to hit.

  War, Orzo knew, was all about hearts and minds. The Solar Arm was still battered but defiant. As their cities were gradually reduced to irradiated rubble, so too they would lose their heart to fight.

  Terrible casualties weren't a side effect, they were a goal.

  He had to operate within certain limits. No biological weapons, nothing beyond what could be dispersed by the wind, and no nukes bigger than ten kilotons or so. Raya Yithdras hoped to command a powerful, vibrant world with most of its infrastructure intact, not a sea of vitrified slag, or an irradiated hellzone.

  As the fleet descended on the planet, effortlessly raking aside the feeble remnants of Rodensis’s fleet, he received an incoming connection over sat-comms.

  It was from General Sybar Rodensis. The Solar Arm commanding general.

  Beaten you twice, Rodensis. You want to make it a hat trick?

  Orzo put him through. “General! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  There was a delay of several seconds. An unfortunate consequence of conversations at a distance of millions of kilometers.

  Then, crackly and faint, came the rejoinder. “Good to talk to the puppet. Is the puppetmistress available?”

  “I presume you are offering us surrender terms,” Orzo said. “You show wisdom.”

  What came back over the comms was the harshest, bitterest laughter Orzo had ever heard. It puttered from the speakers like black mud.

  “No.”

  Assault on Terrus – June 6, 2143, 1500 hours

  The sky above Terrus was alive with points of light. A thin line, holding back the vastly superior Sane forces. In time, the line broke, and the devastation began.

  Only about 5% of the planet's surface was an urban center, and traditional Dresden-style saturation bombing didn't work against such a diffuse and spread out foe. Little damage would ultimately be sustained against Terrus, at least with the kind of firepower Orzo could bring to bear.

  The bombing was largely psychological.

  With Sarkoth Amnon gone, the Terrestrians were already down, and the time was ready for a symbolic gesture of domination. Men forced to their knees immediately think of submission, regardless of how defiant they were on their feet.

  Squadrons of Hammerheads and Exhorders descended, darting in just low enough to avoid targeting from the Solar Arm defenses. Then they'd launch a payload of cluster bombs, taking out targets across a wide area.

  A light coverage of defending ships picked off as many as they could. The ones that made it through faced batteries of railguns firing up from the surface.

  The first wave in would be utterly decimated. The defenders were fresh and alert, the railguns fully charged.

  In the medieval spirit of rewarding the first warriors to break into the keep, Raya Yithdras had promised any survivors from the attack an immediate and unconditional Medal of Honor.

  The destroyers descended. Either whole, or in flames, or in pieces. To victory, to death, to engine failure.

  But nevertheless, they descended. And cities burned.

  On the ground, a curfew was put in place.

  Heavy-grade Orizen railgun installations on the ground whirred to life, firing tens of thousands of shots upwards, hoping to rake through the incoming storm and thin it out as much as possible.

  The weapons fired metallic projectiles that disintegrated in the air, slicing upwards in shotgun style blasts. Each hyperfast slug would turn into a slurry of metal moving at many times the speed of sound.

  Soon explosions rent the sky as the volleys of slugs raked the incoming attackers. Dozens and then hundreds were shot down or crippled, causing no comfort to anyone below. A downed Hammerhead or Exhorder falling on a city block was only slightly less damaging than its missiles.

  Some cities had noise suppresant shields cast over the cities, but everyone else had to listen to the sound of distant thunder rumbling down from the planet's exosphere. Thunder, along with a rain of flaming metal.

  Hundreds of low-flying ships were shot out of the air by hyperfast railgun slugs, turned into flaming whipstrokes of debris in the sky, several kilometers long. But enough made it through to stoke fires of terror throughout the Terran population.

  There was an official freeze on all media. The power grid failed intermittently. The terror in the streets was subdued, both by the curfew and the imminent danger.

  The battle for Terrus’s surface raged for several hours, causing great devastation. A lucky strike hit Neo London, turning it into a sea of flame. Many millions died. And countless shots were sustained to Terrus’s rail hubs, shipping ports, space ports, and centers of production. Spaceports were systematically targeted and destroyed, preventing Sybar Rodensis from getting reinforcements in the air.

  Society is held together by threads – subtle, just barely out of sight. The more the threads loosened, the more they wanted to loosen. A tipping point.

  Despite Terrus’s technological splendor, it was still a society.

  And all societies are three missed meals away from anarchy.

  Still Rodensis continued to fight, even as the world burned. He would not surrender.

  Across west California, a woman staggered on foot with her baby.

  She’d crossed many kilometers naked, and covered in blood and drying placental fluid, before a sympathetic stranger had given her some clothes.

  A less unsympathetic member of the Constabulary had given her a bruise with a nightstick when she’d tried to hitchhike on a train.

  Ubra Zolot was a mess of suffering, blood, and postpartum debris. Endless kilometers through the wilderness, conscious of nothing but her feeble legs tracing steps over the ground, and the crying, squalling lump held to her breast.

  She was still discharging, and she was weak from hormones and the rush of amniotic fluid.

  She shouldn’t have been able to walk at this stage. She wondered at what exactly Wake had done when he’d dulled the pain on Caitanya-9. Repaired her torn muscles? Rebuilt her abdominal wall?

  She wished she was back on Caitanya-9. At least there, she knew her baby would have had a safe life.

  If this was Terrus, it was a Terrus she couldn’t recognize. It was a persistant waking nightmare version of Terrus.

  The constant explosions overhead were terrifying at first, then stultifying. The sky was no longer blue but a dizzying crosshatch of smoke. A constant stream of debris was falling, leaving contrails of smoke. She saw open blazes consuming whole fields. Brushfires left to burn, while mankind tended his crumbling cities.

  She felt exposed on the open ground, under the upon sun. This was a time to find a bomb shelter, or a deep cave. It was like vertigo in reverse, a constant and crippling fear of exposed sky.

  Finally, she made it to the perimeter of Los Neo Angeles. Armed guards at the border stopped her, and asked her questions. She babbled incoherently, showed them the baby in her arms, and they let her through.

  I’m just too much trouble for them to deal with, she thought, aware that she was on her last reserves of strength, and that soon she would be too much trouble for herself to deal with. She was very weak, shivering constantly in the burning sun. She had little sense of what was happening in her lower body. Her next step might be to collaps
e.

  As the sun started to set, the civilians started filtering away from the roads, like white blood cells leaving the veins and arteries of a body. In their place was an oppressive military presence. Loudspeakers had been rigged on poles and military installations, blaring a cacophonous mixture of instruction and propaganda.

  “Unless you are duly authorized to assist the defense, it is your duty to be off the streets by eighteen-hundred hours,” a pre-recorded voice squalled. “You are not safe out in the open. Trespassing is an offense punishable by detainment.”

  She kept walking deeper into the concrete jungle until it was nearly dark, and a thought occurred for the first time.

  Where will I go?

  She was alone and totally adrift.

  She tried to think back to the chapter of her life before Caitanya-9, before Wake. She could hardly remember her parents – like most people, she’d been raised communally. Her schooling had been equally impersonal. She had few friends. Her eyes had been fixed on the stars, and as soon as her enlistment papers were accepted, she almost forgot about any of the little lives crowding Terrus.

  She was a soldier.

  The Solar Arm Marine Corps. They’re my family, they’re my friends. They’ll take care of me, and the baby.

  The power was phasing in and out, rolling blackouts knocking out whole neighbourhoods. The city was a checkerboard, some white squares with power, heat, and light, and some black squares mired in cold squalor. From time to time, she heard the throaty roar of completely illegal diesel generators.

  In an intermittent moment of power, she accessed a map, and searched for the nearest office of the SAMC. There was one in the western district.

  Just a few kilometers away. Walkable, for a normal person. In her current condition, she wasn’t sure if she could make it there. She started moving anyway.

  Every few blocks, she was stopped by someone in a uniform, and asked to show papers. Instead, she showed her baby. Every time, it worked.