Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3) Read online

  Skyline Severant

  The Consilience War – Book Three

  Ben Sheffield

  Contents

  Quote

  Prelude

  1. The Atrium – Selene – Jun 5, 2043, 1430 hours

  2. Villas Beyond the Atrium – Selene – Jun 5, 2043, 1400 hours

  3. Titan – June 6, 2143, 0800 hours

  4. Terrus LEO – June 6, 2143, 1130 hours

  5. Terrus Gravity Well – June 6, 2143, 1200 hours

  6. Assault on Terrus – June 6, 2143, 1500 hours

  7. Los Neo Angeles – June 6, 2143, 1600 hours

  8. Arrakhia Mountain Hospital – June 9, 2143, 1200 hours

  9. Assault on Terrus – June 7, 2143, 0800 hours

  Interlude

  10. Arrakhia Mountain Facility – June 8, 2143, 0800 hours

  11. Terrus-Mars Interspace – June 7, 2143, 1800 hours

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

  13. Location Unknown

  14. Orbit Beyond Mars - June 8, 2143, 2100 hours

  15. Arrakhia Mountain Hospital – June 8, 2143, 1600 hours

  16. Titan – June 7, 2143, 2200 hours

  17. Titan, A Long Time Ago

  Occlude

  18. Arrakhia Mountain Hospital – June 9, 2143, 1400 hours

  19. Titan – June 9, 2143, 1600 hours

  20. Location Improbable

  21. Arrakhia Mountain Hospital – June 9, 2143, 2000 hours

  22. Descent to Valashabad – June 9, 2143, 0200 hours

  23. Terrus-Mars Interspace – June 10, 2143, 1600 hours

  24. Arrakhia Mountain Hospital – June 9, 2143, 0800 hours

  25. Arrakhia Mountain Facility – June 10, 2143, 0000 hours

  26. The New Empire – June 14, 2143, 1200 hours

  27. Location Indescribable

  "If humans go extinct, literally no one will care,” - anon

  Prelude

  The stars drank blood.

  The Solar Arm was in a state of civil war, and the spacelanes from Terrus to Neptune were alive with fighting. Thousands of ships were deployed across dozens of fronts, clashing with enough firepower to end worlds.

  Space combat proceeded at hyperspeed, a tangled web that could do nothing but fray more and more, all order and sanity vanishing amid the fire and howling metal.

  Orders were issued, and then countermanded. Entire platoons were annihilated by surprise attacks, friendly fire, and accidental collisions.

  The reasons the war had broken out were unclear, and rapidly receding into the mists of meaninglessness.

  It was now just a singular fact, its founding cause almost irrelevant. A hurricanes so massive that nobody had any interest in cataloguing the first air molecule that moved.

  As often happens, there were multiple currents in the river of the war. On the surface, there was a frothy, churning wave, noisy and visible. This was what most were focused on.

  The Reformation Confederacy had broken free from the Solar Arm, and were ingressing further and further into their territory.

  But beneath the surface, there was an even stronger and greater swell, moving unseen and undetected. An aphotic black riptide that spelled doom not just for the warring parties, but humanity itself.

  Then, the blackness rose to the surface.

  Geiger-muller counters mounted in sentry probes detected the release of radiation, over a patch of empty space. Seconds later, there was a new planet in the solar system.

  Caitanya-9 had returned.

  The Atrium – Selene – Jun 5, 2043, 1430 hours

  “You know that antimatter warhead you've got parked near Mars? Give the order. Detonate it.”

  At the control room above the Atrium, bodies littered the floor. Some were dead. Some were alive. One was in an unknown category in between.

  The traitor Wilseth, had Prime Minister Sarkoth Amnon on the ground.

  Sarkoth shook his head. “No. Never.”

  Wilseth’s face looked like it was carved from granite, every vein lit by the blue backlights from the computers. His nimble fingers tapped on a keypad feeding into the quantum computers. In seconds, he established a link with the warhead-loaded Dashka-class probe, and typed the access code from memory.

  There was a two-minute delay that passed with excruciating slowness. He knew that the computer had authenticated him. It was just the simple matter that signals needed two minutes to reach the probe on Mars.

  Sarkoth looked up, fascination coloring his fear. “We were thrashed at the Asteroid belt. They countered us, move for move. It was like they knew all the locations of our units, and our precise order of battle. That was you, wasn't it?”

  Wilseth didn't answer.

  “You're a Son of the Vanitar, aren't you?” Sarkoth said. “There's a scar on the back of your neck, and that's why you have your hair long.”

  Wilseth didn’t even give a reaction.

  “How long have you been betraying me for, Wilseth? How much can I lay at your door?”

  “Just do it, Sarkoth. You don't have to die.”

  “You know very well that if I fire a missile at this distance, everyone dies. Either at Andrei Kazmer’s hands or mine.”

  Wilseth pulled something from his pocket. The color drained from Sarkoth's face when he saw what it was.

  “Please. Mercy.”

  It was a phobia resonator.

  The small, cool device touched Sarkoth's skin, and immediately his brain was a horror house. His worst fears were brought to life, and magnified until they were ten times life-size.

  The existential dread he'd felt on Caitanya-9 was multiplied. Fear of being trapped, shackled down on a purple rock of windstorms and earthquakes. The planet occupied his vision, distorting it until the entire universe was just a single roadway pointing there.

  It was a bloodless purple eye, a rank pustule, something swelling with enough venom to inundate the universe.

  Then he saw it split in half, as though the planet was a mouth. The jaw unhinged itself, teeth gleaming in the starlight, all of astronomy's terrors strap-honed on a lathe and aimed at him.

  He screamed. “Get it off me!”

  Wilseth didn't. He pressed it deeper, the phobia resonator digging deeper into Sarkoth's pasty flesh.

  “You can make it stop, Prime Minister. You know how.”

  Sarkoth cried out again, feeling the existential fear of a child against a monster – all the more horrible for being undetectable and phantasmal.

  He suddenly realised there was a microphone in front of his lips, and knew that a Daksha probe was on the other end.

  “Fuck you!” he roared, driving his knee into Gatag Wilseth’s groin.

  Wilseth wasn’t ready for the sudden defiance. This wasn’t the plan. This wasn’t protocol. Normally, if you gave a tortured person an escape route, they took it.

  The phobia resonator lost contact with Sarkoth’s flesh.

  Wilseth doubled over, and came face to face with pure rage.

  A hard punch slammed into his cheekbones, and he heard a dicelike click as something inside broke. His face was now split by a fracture line of agony, and he cried out.

  Sarkoth was wriggling free.

  He crawled across to the corpse of his Defense Minister.

  Shirow Agamume had carried a gun on her – just a ceremonial piece, but maybe it had live ammunition in it and would fire.

  Gatag Wilseth felt panic spiking through the pain.

  He knew the Sarkoth likely wouldn’t even try to kill him, but just kill himself.

  Only with his voice would the antimatter warheads fire, and only thereb
y could Caitanya-9 be provoked. If Sarkoth died before issuing a voice-coded launch command, then they had failed. Not just failed at one particular task, but failed at everything.

  Wilseth roared and went after him.

  The Prime Minister had to live.

  Villas Beyond the Atrium – Selene – Jun 5, 2043, 1400 hours

  Mykor was roused from a mid-afternoon slumber. Someone was knocking on the door of his villa.

  He pressed his eyes shut, and tried to ignore it. Then it became a hammering fist.

  “Everyone out! We need to evacuate!”

  He dragged himself from his ottoman, and put on some shoes, utterly knowing what it was.

  The planet’s come back, and we’re all doomed. Will I vanish into a subatomic mist before I cross the threshold? Before my hand opens the door?

  He picked up a bag, checked its contents, and slung it around his shoulders.

  He lived in a sea of villas and manors beneath one of Selene’s air-filled bubbles, alongside thousands of retirees and wealth tourists. Everyone he spoke to was panicking over the war, obsessing over half-decoded reports of ship movements and strategic plays.

  Want know what you should really be afraid of? He’d always wanted to ask, but couldn’t.

  Sarkoth Amnon allowed him his liberty under the condition that he remain anonymous…and silent. Nobody could know who he was, or what he’d done. Such was the minor price for a life of luxury. He’d provided Sarkoth with a great deal of help, and being useful paid.

  He opened the door, and found himself looking at a fierce military buzzcut over a military-spec nanomesh uniform. Mykor recognized him. A somewhat less than competent security chief called Ruven Schottkein, who’d somehow failed his way upwards into the upper levels Solar Arm Defense Force.

  “I’m sorry, Lennoth,” the man said. Mykor never got over the shock and wrongness of the fake name. “We need to get everyone into the underground bunkers.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Yeah, isn’t that the goddamned question? Positronics have recorded a planet-sized object that’s just appeared in the sky. Technicians are hoping that it’s just a glitch in the software, but given the invasion we need to assume it’s some kind of weapon.”

  “Thanks for your concern,” Mykor said, trying to preserve his sangfroid. Everything I feared, everything I fought to stop…it’s happening. “But I will stay.”

  “No. Everyone goes. This is an order.”

  Mykor protested as Schottkein’s men gripped him by the arms, and started frog marching him out the door.

  A path of pale moonrock, lit by streetlights, led to a gathering area where dozens of people had gathered. Selene’s civilians looked like cattle with even fewer survival instincts.

  Once they were all together, Schottkein started giving a speech on safety procedures underground.

  “We assume this is some sort of diversionary tactic from the Reformation Confederacy,” he said. He was the sort of person who would never stoop to calling Raya Yithdras’s rebellion The Sane. “The front is in flux, and surface bombardment of Terrus and Selene is now a possibility. There is nothing to fear, and I urge you not to panic. The bunkers were specifically designed to resist Yakulst-class MOABs, and will keep you safe throughout the war.”

  Do you really think you’re keeping us safe, Schottkein? Mykor thought. Caitanya-9 has arrived in the solar system. Three words: gamma fucking rays. The bunker would need to beneath a hundred million miles of rock to save us from Caitanya-9.

  He looked up, trying to see the intruder in the sky.

  Selene’s artificial air bubbles were not very large, and the moon still looked out on to a pitch-black vista of space. Stars hung like dew in Mykor’s vision, and he could pick out Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Just over the horizon was a large lemon-shaped wedge of blue ocean and white cloud. Terrus. Mankind’s home.

  He groaned out loud as he saw it.

  There was a new object in the sky, three hours’ right ascension from the equinox. It rivalled Mars in size. And it was purple.

  Memories tumbled through his head of all the decades spent in secrecy on that planet, trying to understand it and bashing his head into a wall. His daughter had died, had almost been slain by the planet directly, and as he’d left he’d hoped to never return to it again.

  He hadn’t needed to. Now, at the end of all things, it had come to him.

  He looked away, feeling pierced by the planet’s gaze.

  Why hasn’t it done anything? Why are we still alive?

  He had no way of answering that question.

  The planet had the ability to instantly disintegrate Terrus, the Sun, and nearly every other planet in the path of the gamma ray bursts. Yet he still drew breath.

  It wasn’t attacking.

  With no ability to penetrate the mystery, he looked a few hundred meters away to the Atrium, the Solar Arm’s place of governance.

  It was like a white fang rising from the surface of Selene, hundreds of white steps that ended in an apex of the main structure. Beyond was the spaceport, now set aside for the sole use of military forces as the Sane legions pressed further and further in.

  He suddenly noticed something.

  No security lasers.

  After Raya Yithdras had tried and failed to oust Sarkoth Amnon by force, security around the perimeter of the Atrium had been greatly enhanced. Laser-based tripwires would detect any unexpected entrance to the building, and neutralize it with target-seeking rounds from the nearby command towers. Mykor had enjoyed watching more and more defense systems installed as time passed, the number of glowing red lines growing in step with Sarkoth’s paranoia.

  Now they were dark.

  What’s going on in there?

  He looked for signs of guards standing post on the steps. There weren’t any. In a solar system full of danger, with enemies bearing down fast and a planet-destroying superweapon now stalking the skies …the Solar Arm’s seat of power stood open to the world.

  The door’s wide open. Sarkoth isn’t this stupid. A few men with guns could walk in and massacre him and his entire cabinet.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  Schottkein cocked his head to one side, a gesture Mykor recognised as a man listening to a message on comms. "Uhh...I'm now being told that there's waves of ionising radiation being emitted, and we might lose...oh, damn."

  There was a surge of electrical transformers failing, and the artificial lights failed. All of the military installation were protected from EMP strikes by Faraday cages, as was the Atrium, but every single civilian light in the bubble had gone. The square was shrouded in darkness. There were cries of alarm, and questions. For some of them, it might have been the first blackout they’d ever seen.

  "Stay together!" shouted Schottkein. "We need to wait until power's back on. Stay calm, and don't move!"

  Mykor wasted no time in violating all four orders simultaneously.

  He ascended the steps at a low crouch, hands out in front of him to guard against a fall. The bag at his side was a burdensome weight, but a strangely comforting one. It had things he needed, including one thing he hoped to never use.

  Inside, it was as quiet as a crypt. No security to stop him The Doric pillars and statues were his only greeting.

  He walked through the hallway, studying the statues. Snakes. Insects. Tardigrades. The aesthetic was one of deathlessness and immortality, a promise that man could fulfill, least of all the Solar Arm.

  “Hello?” he called, and didn’t get an answer.

  Where is everyone?

  The hallway led to an antechamber, and then the main floor.

  Representative government in the Solar Arm had died a sudden death, and now both the Solar Arm and the Reformation Confederacy were ruled by something only slightly more dignified than military juntas. The masses of chairs in the house and senate stood empty, gathering dust. It was the soldier class that held power now. But there weren’t even any soldiers here.


  He crossed the hall, approaching the stairway to the upper levels. It was carpeted with thick red shag, and it took him a moment to notice that he was walking through a puddle of fresh blood.

  At the foot of the stairway, he found the bodies that had made it.

  One was a guard, a man with light blond hair. His hands were frozen in rigor-mortis over a wound on his stomach, and when Mykor prised them away, he saw a puncture wound through a hole in his uniform.

  Goddamn.

  The second body was a woman.

  It was hard to confer personhood on the dead body. She was a human fuck-doll, engineered through surgery to satiate male lust. Almost disgustingly huge breasts. A heavy, meaty ass. A waist Mykor could have spanned with his two hands.

  Sarkoth Amnon’s concubine, Mykor thought. She’d bled out from a savage gut-wound – a very hard way to die.

  He climbed a few more stairs, and put his ear to the door beyond.

  He heard movement. And talking.

  Whoever killed these two is still up there, Mykor thought. If this is an assassination attempt, then it will kill the one person who can stop Caitanya-9.

  A dark thought occurred to him, and he studied the bodies in closer detail.

  The puncture wounds were very small, and didn’t look like they’d been caused by bullets. Bullets tended to transfer all of their kinetic energy into their targets, and cause bruising and contusion to the surrounding tissue. These wounds were clean, almost surgically precise. Little holes, as pristine as the typesetting on a piece of paper.

  He thought of flechettes. Little noiseless darts. The weapons of stealth killers and assassins.

  He also remembered the bizarre experience he’d undergone after being reawakened from his Black Shift pod, just a few months ago. A terrifying interrogation at the hands of Sarkoth Amnon’s torturer, a man called Gatag Wilseth.

  A man who had carried a flechette gun in a well-disguised hip holster.

  During the interrogator he’d tried to call Wilseth’s bluff, tried to unmask him as one of the Sons of the Vanitar. Wilseth hadn’t answered in the affirmative, but he’d given Mykor enough tells for him to be sure that he was on to something.