Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3)

by Ben Sheffield

“Sorry,” Vilanthus made a profuse apology, comically bowing and scraping to the degree that his confinement allowed him to. Then just as the guard turned to leave, Vilanthus erupted. “We were on the other side of the universe! We saw gamma ray bursts! We faced the man who was making them, and we stood him down! Let us out of these fucking handcuffs, you jackoffs!”

  Whap!

  The guard savagely king-hit Vilanthus, causing him to snap back in his chair, a sudden spray of blood flying from his nose. The guard siezed a handful of his hair and pulled him forward again.

  “You're going into solitary, cocksucker.” The guard said. “And the best part? There's an air conditioning vent, right in front of you. I'll make sure it's chilled as cold as it will go.”

  He summoned two other guards, and they put Vilanthus in a steric straightjacket. The nanofiber dynamically attracted and repulsed itself, straightening his limbs but allowing him to walk at the guard's discretion.

  They hauled him out, eighty kilos of screaming and kicking human cargo. The door to the main bay wooshed wide open, and then he vanished into the light.

  Shocked, they followed the footsteps clanging through the thin metal floor, tracing his progress. The Sane mariners were taking him to a spot on the ship to the left. Zelity winced as they heard him get thrown to the floor. Then, there was the sound of a door being bolted shut.

  The prisoners had privacy, but now none of them talked.

  Fifty or so people attracted noise, like a surface attracts dust. Constant stirring and shifting. Boots brushing against the floor. Whispers of conversation. It was almost impossible to maintain quiet for any level of time.

  But somehow, they were in one of the profoundest silences Zelity had ever heard.

  It was broken by Haledor, who was positioned on the wall to the left side. With the movement allowed by his poorly cuffed hands, he swung them behind his chair, thudding them into the silver chrome of the wall.

  Bang

  A second later, there was an answer of sorts from the restraint room.

  Bang. Bang.

  “At least he's alive,” Haledor muttered. “Who knows when we'll see him again.”

  “Hey, does anyone still think we should tell them we're soldiers? Does that sound like a line they'll buy? If so, please speak up.”

  Vilanthus was sitting in a room slightly larger than a broom closet. Up above was a single light, shining down on him like an ill-earned halo.

  Lieutenant Sorbek smirked at him, and shut the door. A few seconds later, he heard a couple of thuds through the aluminum panelling. Let the fucker kick. He'd get nowhere.

  In the area beyond the restraint room, he met with Gunnery Sargeant Calixtus.

  “Natives are getting restless.”

  “What happened?”

  “Some idiot started sounding off, so I put baby in a corner, so to speak. I take it we will not be troubling with these people for much longer?'

  “No,” Calixtus said, gravely. “And I'm thinking this is a decision that'll hang over me for a lifetime, and give me nightmares every single night that I'm still alive. I never thought I'd end up doing this, but it’s all of our careers if we don't do it.”

  “So what's the plan?”

  “Orzo suggested we just throw then in the airlock and shoot them out into the great beyond. We'll do it in fours or fives. We'll tell them that they're being 'processed', and they'll imagine they're being cleared to go. If we keep the door closed and run the air conditioning at max to disguise the sound of the airlock, they won't suspect a thing. Not until it's their turn to ride the vacuum.”

  “Damn,” Sorbek said. “And I've got to do this all myself.”

  “Of course not,” Calixtus put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Well take turns. Do it in shifts, if you like. We'll make it all very corporate and mechanical. There will be processing and induction forms to sign, and we won't look at them, and we'll just pretend we're...I don't know, throwing logs into a fire.”

  “That's even worse.”

  “Or something. We'll find some way to make it impersonal. We can make it a game,” Calixtus had a maniacal zeal on his face. The quest of a middle manager to make a horrifying job seem tolerable. “We can make it fun.”

  Sorbek shook his head. “Let's just get it over with, then never talk or think about it again.”

  Zelity was woken from his light sleep by a repetitive banging from inside the restraint room on the other side of the wall.

  Bang … bang … bang …

  Vilanthus was throwing a shit-fit.

  Zelity sighed, tried again to get comfortable, and tried to filter it out. There had always been a divide in their little clan between the dyed-in-in-the-wool Defiant, the original group commanded by the rogue Mykor, and the larger group of Solar Arm soldiers subsumed into their group after the death of General Sakharov. It had become almost invisible with time and their many shared experiences. But it was like a crack in pottery that had been glazed over, smooth to the touch, but still visible, still there.

  Vilanthus was one of the ones who hadn't assimilated. He had a good head for strategy and could improvise well on the fly, but he'd never been much of a team player. At least not for their team.

  Zelity shifted again in his bonds. The utter boredom was sending him mad. Every single whisper of air around him, every single abrasion on his wrists, all of it was like torture meant on breaking him. Even just a few minutes to straighten his legs and walk around.

  The banging continued. Zelity caught the crew sharing an ominous glance, and he hoped Vilanthus would be OK.

  Don't do anything stupid, friend. He tried to send positive thoughts through the wall. In a few hours we'll be docking in Valashabad, and then maybe we'll get some kind of due process.

  One of the crew hooked a thumb at the wall. “Do we have to put up with this racket? I thought he was in a straightjacket.”

  “He's whiplashing his entire body against the wall.”

  “Reckon we should ask him to stop?”

  “I reckon we should make him stop.”

  The noise stopped for a second, like a calm before a huge wave. Then there was a loud crash that visibly vibrated the containment wall.

  “Fuck this guy,” one of the crew said. “If he's going to play, let's play. I'll restrain him, you get a syringe.”

  “What do you want in it?” the other man.

  “MD-55. This jackass can count sheep for the rest of the flight.”

  They filed out of the cargo bay.

  “What's MD-55?” Jagomir asked.

  “Sodium thiopental,” Haledor said. “Liquid sleep, basically. Put a few ounces through someone's skin and they’re out cold for at least 24-48 hours.”

  There was still that repetitive kicking sound. It wasn't a frenzied thrashing, like the crewmember had said. It had taken on a rhythmic nature, repetitive, like a sequence looping around on its self.

  BANG bang bang

  bang

  bang BANG

  BANG

  bang bang bang bang

  Memories stirred from Zelity's past, like mud raked from the bottom of a pond with a stick.

  As soon as he'd made the decision to become a marine, he'd spent days trying to live the lifestyle, or at least the lifestyle he fancied marines possessed. Dozens of push-ups. Hours spent riding his public school's anti-gravity elevator, to simulate the effects of fighting in zero-G. Countless holographic books consumed on utterly pointless minutiae that no soldier had needed to know for a hundred years, such as semaphore signs and Morse code.

  BANG bang bang

  bang

  bang BANG

  BANG

  bang bang bang bang

  A loud bang might be a dash. A quiet bang might be a dot.

  He remembered that a dash and two dots meant D, and that a lone dot meant E, and that four dots meant H, and...

  Zelity didn't even try to finish this hangman's game.

  He's trying to signal to us.

 
His legs were anchored to the ground. His wrists were flexicuffed behind his back, which was ramrod straight. He had no ability to use any of his muscles.

  And yet adrenaline flooded through his system, energizing it like NOS in a high performance engine.

  He's heard something through the door to the main bridge, and he's fucking signalling to us.

  He heard the door swing open, and the low murmur of voices from the crew. Soon Vilanthus would get his medicine. MD-55, straight through the heart, out of the blue and into the black.

  “Haledor,” Zelity said, “you mentioned that MD-55 knocks you out for 24 to 48 hours.”

  “Sometimes longer. It depends on the dose. Why?”

  “Strange, that they'd zonk him out for so long when we'll be landing on Mars in a couple of hours.”

  Haledor nodded. “Yep. It is strange. Very strange.”

  Hospital in Los Neo Angeles – June 6, 2134, 0800 hours

  Mykor was having a dream. It was a light-filled dream, a balm that soothed the cracks in his soul. A dream that made him forget about the searing pain in his abdomen.

  He was on Terrus, far from the hellworld of Caitanya-9.

  He was swinging his daughter in his arms. He and Zandra were surrounded by blossoms, their lives frozen eternally in the glaze of dawn. He wept, and for once, not from sorrow.

  But soon the dream started to end, as it always did. The girl swinging on his arms grew lighter, the weight of her body vanishing in concert with her reality. He started to hear less of her laughter, and more of the wind, cold and lonely.

  But her smile was still there, a smile that glowed and gave light to the day. It stayed in the air even as the rest her body faded.

  Finally, even the smile was gone, and he was left standing alone.

  Shivers ran through his body as the grass around him died. It rotted away, collapsing into rank putrescence in a matter of heartbeats, decaying and being sifted away by the wind.

  Leaving purple rock behind.

  He was on the planet, Caitanya-9, shorn from everything that had given life meaning, staring at the sky and waiting for the moons to kill him.

  Somnath rose in the east. Detsen rose in the west. Their arcs intersected in a double convergence, due overhead, and the earth quaked like a palpitating heart from a ripped open chest.

  At the conjunction of the moons, he realized that they were now eyes in the sky.

  Pitch black eyes.

  "The experiment ends," Andrei Kazmer said.

  Then he woke up, in a hospital bed. There were tears drying on his face, but he was used to that. He cried constantly now. There was a bandage staunched around his waist, and he supposed he would get used to that, too, if the time came.

  But there were things he would never get used to. such as dreams being dreams.

  "You're awake," a nurse said. She didn't even look up from her work folding bandages.

  He wondered why she was doing this by hand. Wasn’t this normally done by sterile robotic limbs?

  Then he noticed that there was no electricity. No lights, no air conditioning, no sixty cycle hum.

  He heard explosions overhead, beyond the fragile protective shell of the building, and heard sirens and alarms from distance places. He put the pieces together. They did not have power right now. And his stay at the hospital might be a permanent one.

  "Where am I?" Mykor said. "I know I'm in some sort of hospital, but geographically speaking..."

  "You're in Los Neo Angeles,” she said. “Your body was found on Selene, and you were taken down to Terrus for medical care.”

  "Am I..." he tried to remember what had happened on Selene, and shuddered as pictures of violence and mayhem filled his head. "...under arrest?"

  "Not as far as I know."

  She busied herself changing his bandage, pulling the combine dressing away and washing away the clinging layer of pus. The wound was fantastically painful. His every breath stretched his abdominal muscles, no matter how he tried to limit it to his chest.

  The woman expressed no interest in the violence in the Atrium, or anything else beyond the task in front of her. He realized that this was her pay grade, and she had no interest in anything beyond the wound in front of her. The reasons and causes were just irrelevant distractions, except insofar as they affected his medical care.

  “How much longer will I be here?” he asked, hating how even talking was misery.

  “Until your condition is stable enough to travel. Could be another day or so.”

  Ah. Travel. “And where am I travelling to?”

  She didn’t answer him. Just went quiet, like a Gorgon snipping away the thread of conversation.

  There will be consequences.

  He’d been the sole survivor of the bloodbath in the Atrium, the one that had seen the deaths of Wilseth, Agamune, and countless others. The one that had seen the launching of an antimatter warhead against Caitanya-9.

  The one who had precipitated the launching of the warhead, but perhaps they didn’t know that.

  Memories of the planet gave him the shivers, and he couldn’t stand not knowing.

  For all I know, Caitanya-9 survived my attack, and obliterated everything in the universe except for the patch of rock this hospital stands on.

  “Are we still at war?”

  An airburst bombshell thudded overhead, rattling the hospital’s foundations.

  The nurse nodded, and gave a now redundant answer. “Yes. Apparently, the center of command has left Selene, and has been taken down to Terrus. It was too exposed up there, too vulnerable. You went down on the shuttle along with some pretty important muckety-mucks. General Sybar Rodensis. Vice Admiral Ypres Covin. You’re in good company, and I’m to instruct them on when you’re ready to leave.”

  “That’s a tall order, given that I’m not sure where I’m going or what they require of me.”

  “They want to know exactly what happened,” she said.

  “I can tell them this from my hospital bed. No need for me to travel anywhere.”

  “They’ve decided that there is a need. Have you heard of Arrakhia Mountain Hospital, in northern California? That’s your new home.”

  “Is it, now?” Mykor wasn’t entirely happy with how little say he had in all of this, but he felt relief.

  Caitanya-9 had been banished, in no small part thanks to his efforts. The beast he’d wrestled with for more than half his life had been defeated, the monster that had taken his daughter was no more. This was victory, unending and eternal.

  War? Let there be war. The dreams of the Sons of the Vanitar were ashes. Fight though they might, humanity would survive. The one method of universal extinction they’d had at their disposal had been defeated.

  I suppose I have to thank Sarkoth Amnon, he thought. He is nasty and unpleasant, his late-life repentance mostly caused by his own fear, but from a practical standpoint he did nearly everything he could have done. He didn’t have to keep me alive, but he did. He didn’t have to build an antimatter defense shield, but he did. He didn’t have to foolishly hire a double agent who went through his entire security corps like a scythe through rotten wheat, but he did.

  The memory of Sarkoth provoked another thought. The woman hadn’t mentioned anything about him coming down on the shuttle with them.

  “Where’s the Prime Minister?”

  “Nobody knows,” the woman said. “Apparently, you were found on the ground, bleeding out in the Atrium, surrounded by bodies. The Prime Minister wasn’t there. We have evidence that a missile was launched, and it could only have been done from an order by the Prime Minister’s lips, but his whereabouts are unknown.”

  “Did they find his dead body?”

  She pulled away from the dressing, as if he’d crossed some plague zone and was now infected with a disease.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” she said. “But I’ll give you some advice. You were the only person still alive up there, and you alone know the full story. Why would they fin
d Sarkoth Amnon’s dead body?”

  Good point, he thought.

  He fundamentally didn’t care anymore about being arrested, or imprisoned. Whatever happened after this was an afterthought to the stunning success of his play up on Selene.

  But it would be nice to have freedom. To have a place of his own, not on the austere environments of Selene but here on Terrus, one that he could decorate as he had decorated the places in his dreams. Seasonal flowers. Nice long grass. Enough decorations to distract him from the fact that his daughter would never join him in the midst of them.

  And his thoughts went back into space, and the dark between the stars.

  He’d joined the Sons of the Vanitar on the back of a lie. Emil Gokla was dead – a good start. But what of Raya Yithdras, and Orzo Feroce, and Saldeen Zana, and all the others? It would be excellent to continue pulverizing their group into atoms, sending them into the same dust-covered infamy of the Thuggees and Aum Shinrikyo.

  He couldn’t do that from a prison cell.

  He had a gnawing sensation that not even that would satisfy him, that he needed to quench his vengeance on the one who had done the greatest wrong in his life.

  Andrei Kazmer. The murderer of his daughter.

  Sadly, Kazmer was most assuredly dead. Slain by an antimatter explosion. Sarkoth Amnon had pulled the trigger on that, and even though he could claim some responsibility for Sarkoth’s actions it still wasn’t personal enough, wasn’t direct enough.

  I wanted to look Kazmer in the eye, and tell him “I am everything that you fear.” I wanted to have a gun, and then throw it away, and reach for a knife. Anyone can shoot someone. But murder with a knife is a work of art. I wanted to feel it slide into his body. I wanted to feel the death shudders, the spasms, blankness overcoming fear in his eyes as his life slides away on a wash of blood. And then I want to bring him back with the polyflesh unit, and do it a hundred times.

  That thought snapped him back to the real world. The polyflesh unit. Drat.

  “What happened to the…crime scene in the atrium?” He said. “What happened to the possessions of all the members of state?”

  “I have no idea,” the nurse said, answering with five percent of her attention. “Probably sealed and bagged as evidence. We found a few things on your person that seemed like they belonged to you. You’ll find them in storage, if you look.”