Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3)

by Ben Sheffield

Babies are trouble. A burden. I suddenly go from being a person they can hassle to a ten ton anvil around their necks. I guess it’ll keep on working until it doesn’t.

  The public-address speakers still blared, imparting commands they seemed engineered to contain the bare minimal amount of information. She found a bit of interest in the overall strategic situation emerging inside her. Who was attacking the planet? Was the situation deteriorating? Could the attack be held?

  Eventually, cramps beginning to knot themselves into her legs and abdomen, she found her way to the front of a gunmetal gray building, lit by the steady cycling power of a thorium reactor. This was the place.

  She let herself in, took her place in the queue.

  Everyone ahead of her was visibly a soldier. And everyone that joined the queue behind her was visibly a soldier. She caught them casting odd glances at her, and dared a look at herself in a mirror.

  She looked a crude facsimile of a person, carved from mud and shit by a jeering artist. Her clothes were ragged and two sizes two big. She looked nearly twice her actual age. Her skin was so dark that she was compelled by curiosity to touch it with a finger. Her finger was black with the dirt clogging its pores.

  I’m a canvas, and whoever painted me liked to use a lot of dark.

  The baby was stirring weakly, making vocalisations that would soon be full-throated howls. She muttered placating words, and hoped that the shrieking wouldn’t cause her to be evicted before she could talk to someone.

  Soon, a listless woman called her to the front.

  She spoke, aware that she might only have ten seconds to make your case.

  “I am Ubra Zolot, a Solar Arm Marine Corps veteran, I had the rank of private, my service number was 254-326-144.”

  The woman entered it on a computer, and cocked a confused eyebrow at the result. “That’s strange.”

  Sskkkkreeeeee…..

  “It says here that you were last stationed on…”

  Ubra wasn’t listening. She’d already started running, as had most of the other marines.

  The piercing screeching sound from up above had become louder and louder, and there was no mistaking what it was.

  They piled through the door, jostling each other out of the way. Ubra, encumbered by the baby, was the last to safety.

  Another few seconds and she probably wouldn’t have survived.

  Tumbling down from the sky, wearing a dress of flame and smoke, was the burning remains of a Exhorder-class frigate. The wings and stabilisers had been stripped away, leaving just the chassis engulfed in an inferno.

  It plunged into the SAMC center, destroying it comprehensively. The explosion hurled everyone from their feet.

  The world was ripped away from her on a shockwave of light and heat. As she flew through the air, the ground a horrible blur of gray concrete, her first thought was the baby.

  Then she crashed into a lamppost, and lost even that thought.

  When she regained consciousness, she had no idea where she was. She opened her eyes to see a conflagration engulfing in the building, flames pouring through the collapsed midsection.

  Jutting through the roof was a huge metal shaft, rising out of the ruins with flames consuming its paint.

  The last remains of a shot-down Exhorder.

  Someone manning a railgun is pumping his fist right now, she thought blearily. He’s saying ‘I got it! I bet the public-at-large is feeling really safe right now!’

  She laughed, confusion spinning her head and her thoughts in a directionless whirl.

  She knew she was lucky to survive. The heat from the burning building buffeted her face like a blast furnace. It was like an all-consuming eye, a fire lighting the center of the universe, and it was long before she realised the people around her.

  The dead, the burned, the disfigured. Bodies and parts of bodies were strewn around the ground.

  The building had exploded outwards like a melon smashing. Metal girders had spanged free with decapitatory force. Bricks had flown outwards like projectiles humanity was never meant to survive. The shatterproof window had failed its one and only purpose and exploded like a fragmentation bomb, shredding everything in its proximity with lethal fangs of glass.

  The fall had re-opened the bruise flowering on her head, and caused it to weep a steady stream of blood into her eye. Beyond that, she was unharmed.

  The baby.

  And the thought was a thunderbolt of dread.

  Where’s the baby?

  She got to her feet, standing amidst the blood-slicked streets, screaming.

  Her baby girl was nowhere to be found. She pawed frantically, searching through debris and garbage, looking in vain.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder, and she turned.

  “My baby!” she shouted into the face above the military jacket. “Help me! I’ve lost my baby!”

  Instead, she found herself being dragged away.

  The tiny rational part of her brain understood. There could be a gas line ready to explode. This was an absolutely dangerous place to be.

  But she broke free, shoving him away.

  “I just need a minute!” she squalled, between her tears. “I just need to look, I know I can find her, I know I can…”

  Then her knees unhinged, as they fell into a puddle of blood.

  My baby…Andrei Kazmer’s baby…

  Unconsciousness claimed her a second time. As the burning world vanished, she felt strong hands pick her up and carry her away.

  Los Neo Angeles – June 6, 2143, 1600 hours

  “I have come to serve the remainder of my prison sentence.”

  Rose Rohilian felt like she'd been handed a potato hot enough to undergo thermonuclear combustion.

  She was looking at a ghost from the past, something she'd thought was safely graveyarded, safely exorcised.

  Yatz spat on the ground. “Waiting for policy here, boss lady. What do we do with this shitkicker?”

  She had no idea. No idea at all.

  What sort of fugitive returns himself to justice?

  “We are not a police force,” Rose said, choosing words carefully enough that they could be taken back at a moment's notice. “We are the military. As in, guns. We're not able to convict you, or try you, if that's what you're asking.”

  “I'm not asking you to convict or try me,” Andrei said. “That's already happened. I want you to imprison me. I want to do whatever I can to make myself whole.”

  She tried to get a read on this curious individual.

  She'd only caught a glimpse of him on Caitanya-9, and it was a memory twice distorted, both by the rage and the stress that had fractured his face along its many fault lines, and the fact that her own memories weren't especially trustworthy. Every day, she remembered new details...and some of them contradicted each other.

  Andrei Kazmer now bore little to no resemblance to the man they’d captured on that planet. He was tall, wide-framed, and lean. He wasn't embarassed by nudity, but oddly empowered by it. His hair was short, and his eyes showed no sign of the chronic lack of sleep that had plagued everyone since the invasion.

  “Then again, if you know anyone who can convict me, I have additional crimes to confess,” he said. “I killed many Solar Arm soldiers on the planet, but that was in a time of war, and I offer no apology. But I killed two men in a time of peace, as well as all the survivors on Konotouri Station. And I raped a woman on the planet, if memory serves. I want to make restitution for my crimes.”

  What? Rose glanced at her comrades, seeking some sign that she was hallucinating, just imagining all of this. They were busy staring at their boots.

  She raised a please wait hand to Andrei Kazmer, and conferred with her squadmates.

  “I'm breaking my cardinal rule, and soliciting opinions from the ranks,” she said. “What are we going to do about this?”

  “He's batshit,” Yatz said. “We're not trained for this. I say we just send him on down the road and let him become someone else's problem.�
�

  “We can't do that,” someone else says. “Suppose he does something really crazy.”

  “Because walking stark-naked up to a bunch of soldiers asking to be arrested is only moderately crazy, I guess.”

  “But if he gets arrested he's going to say that we passed the buck. Rose will get in trouble. We will get in trouble.”

  It was a good point. Rose chewed her lip, conscious that the city was now under emergency lockdown and she was needed elsewhere.

  They badly needed to sort this thing out, and fast.

  “I'm not getting in trouble,” Yatz said. “Mark my words, ladies, I'm here until my next pay packet comes through, and then I'm putting in transfer request to the Twain Division.”

  Everyone knew what the Twain Division was. It was named after the nineteenth century Terran Mark Twain, who prior to achieving fame as a novelist had deserted a different Confederate army to the one they were facing.

  “Joining the Twain Division” meant you were running away.

  Smart, to confess intent to desert in front of your commanding officer, Rose thought. I guess he thinks that one went right over my head.

  “He hasn't broken any rules,” someone else said. “Except wasting our time, and that's not an indictable offense, or every politician in the Solar Arm would now be behind bars. Yatz is right. Let's just tell him to send his dog and pony show down the goddamn road. Jesus, some assholes these days...”

  Looking over her shoulder, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

  Some incredibly stupid person – likely Yatz – had thrown his kit on the ground, and left it unattended.

  And he'd left a weapon unsupervised. A Skortek V990 Sonic Cannon.

  It was unsupervised no longer.

  Andrei Kazmer had it in his hands.

  “Hey!” Katz said. “What the shitfuck are you doing?”

  “Strange,” Kazmer said, staring at the glossy blue barrel, as if imagining the elaborate matrix of compressors and amplifiers inside. “I've been arrested on three separate occasions, and a sonic cannon was involved in all three. There's kismet there. I say that as someone who was recently a god.”

  “Drop it right now!” Katz said, his face transcending merely pink and becoming a deep red. It was definitely his weapon.

  He took a step forward.

  Kazmer casually aimed and fired.

  Private Katz was blown off his feet by a convulsive thunderclap of sound, and sent spinning into a tree. Sonic cannons were formally classified as non-lethal weapons, but life is anything but formal.

  They could kill you, and Rose winced as she heard Katz's bones break.

  She drew her sidearm, and was about to shoot Kazmer, but to her surprise he'd already thrown down the weapon.

  He had his hands raised above his head, a humourless smile parching the desert of his face.

  “I understand that you need a reason to arrest me, Corporal Rose,” he said, over the sounds of Katz's sobs and curses. “I've assaulted a soldier. Hopefully that's reason enough. If not, pass me a gun and I'll move to the next step.”

  Andrei was taken, but not to prison.

  Rose handcuffed him, and communicated to base her intent to charge him.

  This was immediately countermanded by her superior in Neo Los Angeles. Curiously - or perhaps not - this came as soon as they learned he’d said he was from Caitanya-9.

  “There is a train running to a classified military facility underneath the Arrakhia Mountains. Put him on there. We’ll take it from there.”

  Caitanya-9's sudden appearance and disappeance had shocked everyone. It shot holes in countless scientific theories, as well as provided support for Sarkoth Amnon's fanatical military spending – albeit too late to avoid outright civil war, or his own apparent death.

  In the few hours the planet had spent inside solar system, observation probes had scried the surface, scanning and documenting its surface features, its moons, and its weather patterns.

  There were indications of human habitation on Caitanya-9. There was a massive structure standing in defiance of the moon's gravity something that was redolent of a temple. And near a river, there were features on the surface that looked almost like shacks.

  Nobody had made it off the planet, as far as any of the probes knew. But then, for a period they hadn't been looking. An antimatter missile had been launched at the planet, apparently the final order Sarkoth Amnon gave in his life, and the planet had swallowed its explosion with a wormhole. The barrage of ions had destroyed all the observation probes within range.

  The planet had so many mysteries, and you could sift the sand for a very long time before finding hard fact.

  But the last traces of the Solar Arm were now very fascinated in any person claiming to be from Caitanya-9.

  Andrei Kazmer wasn't going to prison, no matter what crimes he had or hadn't committed.

  He was going to a hospital, ostensibly to perform a physical.

  The hospital was built deep within the bedrock of the Arrakhia mountains, the range that had once been called the Sierra Nevadas, sunk into them like an abscess in a tooth. The place was very defensible, and far from the center of civilisation. It would be safe from bombs. It would last until judgement day.

  Which meant that it rubbed shoulders with a top-secret military facility. The Arrakhia Labs were connected to the hospital by a courseway through the mountain.

  Andrei Kazmer was too valuable to imprison.

  Instead, he was going to be studied.

  Andrei was in a maglev train, one that rocketed northbound at several hundred kilometers an hour.

  They hadn’t told him where he was going. He was wearing a nanomesh suit, and was visibly uncomfortable.

  “It's been so long since I've worn clothes,” he said to his irascible new companion. “Months and months. You'd think that wearing clothes is a pretty basic human norm, but only after you've been nude for a while do you realise how odd the whole idea is. How...unnatural. I feel it even more than I feel the handcuffs around my wrists.”

  “Fuck you,” Yatz said.

  They were the only two in the cabin.

  He had a broken wrist, crudely splinted, and a bad temper which he was nursing with visible glee.

  “I can see we'll be fast friends,” Andrei said. “It wasn't personal, by the way. You just looked like the heaviest one of the group, the one who could best handle getting decked. Take it as a compliment.”

  Yatz glared daggers at him.

  They were going to Arrakhia together. Rose had decided to kill two birds with one stone, and treat her injured man at the same time she disposed of Kazmer.

  “When this wrist heals, you and I are going to have a problem,” Katz says. “Count on it, freshcut. A big, big problem.”

  Kazmer yawned. “I'm getting tired. This is depressing. I never needed to sleep when I was on the planet. Now I'm going to lose eight hours a night like every other mortal, aren't I?”

  “I was the best boxer in my year at boot camp,” Katz said. “My left hand brings pain. My right hand, even I'm afraid of. You might want to practice falling down. You're going to be doing it a lot when I'm mended. I don't give a fuck if you don't think you're mortal. I'd beat the shit out of Sarkoth Amnon himself if he insulted me.”

  Kazmer ignored the theatrics. He stared at the metal slats of the maglev train, feeling the infinitesimal bumps as it ran over and through meter-high obstacles.

  “How is Sarkoth?” Kazmer said. “I'm years behind on the news. Apparently, he's Prime Minister now. Is that correct?”

  Katz gave a surely, negative grunt. “He's dead.”

  “Dead?” Kazmer said. “How did he die?”

  “Eat a dick. You're not going to buddy-buddy up to me, pal. That ship sailed as soon as you shot me with a sonic cannon.”

  Kazmer wrinkled his face in frustration. “I don't want to be your buddy, I genuinely want to know. How did he die?”

  Katz lapsed into a cranky silence before speaking. “N
obody knows. One of his security staff turned traitor, and attacked him at the Atrium. His final order was to launch the antimatter missile.”

  “How can they not know how he died?”

  “Because they haven't found the body.”

  “Interesting,” Andrei said, staring into his meshed fingers. “So, he could be alive, couldn’t he?”

  “Then where is he?”

  “Well, I'm flattered that you believe I hold the answers,” Andrei said. “I hope he's still alive, though. He and I have a score to settle. I no longer wish death on humanity, just certain portions of it. And Sarkoth Amnon heads the list. I have multiple life sentences to serve, and it'd be a shame if he's not one of them.”

  “You're a goddamn moron,” Katz said, closing his eyes. “And stop talking. It makes my wrist hurt.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Kazmer actually did stop talking. In time, he rolled over on the hard metal seat, put his head down, and closed his eyes. Soon the humming of the maglev train was overlaid by the thin sound of soft snores.

  Katz glared hatefully at the sleeping man. In time, he stood up, trying to be as quiet as possible, and paced over to his side of the train.

  He allowed himself a single fantasy – of taking a field rope from his kit, wrapping it around Andrei Kazmer's neck, and choking him with it.

  He could probably get away with it.

  They were alone, with no cameras. Kazmer had already attacked him once. He could play it off as a fight. Kazmer had no friends, nobody who could speak or vouch for him. The court martial would be swiftly resolved in his favour.

  But he couldn't be sure of killing Kazmer with one hand.

  In time, he cursed softly, and sat back down.

  Kazmer's mouth moved, so softly that Katz had to strain to hear him.

  “Glad you didn't try anything. I stole a knife from your kit, too, and I'm sleeping on it. Another step forward and it would have gone straight into your windpipe.”

  They didn't have long to sleep, or pretend to sleep.

  After less than an hour, the train started to cycle down, travelling at slower and slower speeds as they approached the matrix of ingress checks.