Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3) Read online

  “How did he do that?” asked Kazmer. “I understand that Black Shift memories are saved as binary data, but they're memories. You can't bring them up on a computer and snip parts of them out like they're photographs. How did he know which parts of the data coded for which memory?”

  “He didn't, at first. He had to brute-force the problem, using binary tree searches. Suppose there was a memory of meeting your wife you wanted to preserve as a partial memory. That would be there somewhere in a memory, several terabytes of data in size. So you'd delete half of the memory, load it into a person, and see what happened. If it didn't contain the memory, you'd throw that half away, and start again with the “good” half. After enough pruning and reduction, you could isolate the exact part of the data that held the memory. It wasn't perfect. Memories often blend together, and the memory of meeting the wife might be coloured with an unpleasant argument you had with your boss, or the pain of a stubbed toe. When they weave together into one fabric there's usually no way to disentangle them. But nonetheless, it could be done with as few as ten or twenty tree searches.”

  As Kazmer listened to this, his expression soured. Vadim could put the point across in the politest terms possible, but it was still everything that had ruined his life. Meddling. Destruction. Climbing into a person's head and crossing all the wires.

  “You talk about a 'test subject'”, he said. “Who was this?”

  “There was more than one,” Vadim admitted. “He was a volunteer for my great-grandfather's clinic. He knew the risks.”

  “Bullshit. This was new technology. Nobody knew the risks.”

  Vadim shrugged. “They'd dehydrate his body with Black Shift, rehydrate it, give him the altered memory, and see if he could remember the desired event. After this, they'd dehydrate him again, and rehydrate him with a different altered memory. This happened many times across many people. After the experiment concluded, he would receive his original memory back.”

  “And these test subjects,” Kazmer had a wry but humorless smirk. “They all lived long and happy lives? They ended up sane, hale, and healthy?”

  “That's an unfair question.”

  “It's a question I would like answered nonetheless.”

  Vadim just ploughed through, the truth an unpleasant vintage. “Two ended up insane. Two ended up normal. One seemed normal until he stole a thresher and activated it outside Emil Gokla's laboratory. It was built to withstand such blasts. Sadly, this was not the case for the forty or fifty people outside.”

  Kazmer crossed his arms. “Seriously, are you proud of what your great grandfather did?”

  Vadim shook his head. “I will not defend Emil. He was brilliant, but he was...reckless. He flew too close to the sun. I wish he'd been more careful, more empathetic, more conscious of how he applied his technology. But many great scientists have a black mark like this on their records.”

  “I'd be impressed if you really thought this was the worst thing he'd ever done. Or even the fiftieth worst thing he'd ever done. Some day I might tell you the full story of him.”

  I'd rather hear the full story about you, Kazmer, Vadim thought.

  “I have the technology to build partial memories from the ones encoded in this headset, Andrei,” he said. “The ones from your early life. Do you want them put back into your head, if it means you will still remember all the subsequent events of your life?”

  “We've been down this road before,” he said. “I want nothing more to do with Black Shift.”

  “But this would disrupt none of your current memories! Or at least, very few. You'd understand your early life for the first time, but you'd retain your current memories.”

  “Hell, neither my past nor my present memories are very desirable, if I'm being honest about it.”

  “So, a plain answer?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what conditions you’ll attach to a ‘yes’? Because I have a feeling there’s plenty.”

  Vadim waved a hand, as if none of this was of much concern.

  “The Solar Arm is currently bogged down in a difficult and perhaps unwinnable struggle for survival. Wars are not just about weapons and ships, they’re also about hearts and minds. The Reformation Confederacy knows you, and they know your face. They also know that you were on Caitanya-9. If you would consent to assisting General Rodensis in the manufacture of certain videos…”

  “I do not want to help the Solar Arm,” Andrei said.

  Vadim had run out of time, and called an end to the day's session.

  As he left the white room, he saw Andrei Kazmer staring at his back.

  Zero progress.

  Whatever had happened to him in the past, he now seemed like a normal man. And yet Rodensis was convinced he was a superweapon. Or at least, a superpropoganda weapon.

  He felt an incoming commlink on his shirt. It was from a ward sister.

  I received another message from the General. Is Kazmer ready to perform his duty? He wants you to give this mission your fullest attention.

  He sighed.

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

  Deep in space, Gunnery Sargeant Yaga Calixtus was feeling the anxiety build and build.

  He was supposed to be on a goddamn patrol mission.

  "We have planet lock on Mars," the pilot said to Calixtus. He was strapped in to his chair in the control module, making infinitesimal changes to the craft's yaw. "We need to return there soon, before the Mars-Earth conjunction ends. After that, Mars will be moving away from us at eighty thousand kilometers an hour and we won't be able to put on enough speed to catch it."

  "One more patrol," Calixtus said. "Then we return to base."

  "You're cutting it fine."

  "Make it happen."

  He was stalling for time. There was a very big problem on this craft, one that had nothing to do with the conjunction.

  He’d captured prisoners. Fifty of them. Jesus, what the fuck am I going to do here?

  A few days ago, he'd been assigned patrol duty. Once Mars had surrendered, Raya wanted some human eyes surveying the interplanetary zone between the planets in case Sarkoth Amnon mounted a counterattack. It was supposed to be easy. Make big loops between a few key points and make sure there was nothing there to see.

  Apparently, there had been something there to see.

  His craft had been crippled by a sudden pulse of radiation, and had spent several terrifying hours cruising a chartless course with no guidance systems. He’d switched on sat-comms and listened to hours of terrified babble that a wormhole had opened up in the Solar System, and that the planet Caitanya-9 had returned. It was so outlandish that he put it in the mental bin soldiers put ninety percent of what they hear in war.

  When it doubt, assume propaganda.

  But once he'd regained control of his craft, his very next action was to capture an ancient, junked Dravidian, floating through space. Inside were people, clad in rags, looking as though they'd spent the last several years in a slop chute. And they'd claimed to be from Caitanya-9.

  The story was insane, and he didn't believe it for a second. Most likely they were either space pirates, or deserters from the failing Solar Arm war effort. He'd taken them prisoner, and they were held captive in the storage hold.

  Gunnery Sargeant Yaga Calixtus had been born on Mars, and like everyone else who lived there, he had little attachment to the planet. It was a desert world, nearly the least photogenic habitat in the Solar System, and his early life had been a steady march towards the day when he would be old enough to go into space.

  What's attractive about space? he sometimes wondered. Mars was a desert, but space was an uber-desert. Everything bad about Mars was there in space, in spades.

  Maybe it didn’t matter, maybe his body just instinctively knew that Mars was the wrong world for it. He was a biological organism, unpredictable and irrational, designed by stochastic processes that cared about nothing beyond the fact that he survived. He wasn't the only one born on the remo
te colonies who felt an irresistible urge to run. Even into a pitch-black void.

  Everyone, at some level, knew that Terrus was mankind's home.

  Space was utterly terrifying, which made the fate of the prisoners all the more galling.

  He’d received orders about how to handle captured prisoners. He’d both expected and hoped to never have to fulfil those orders.

  "How safe is the space-field?" Calixtus asked.

  "The space-field is fine. The most recent clearance Dashka passed through our route just hours ago. We're getting a few collisions, but nothing more than a few macrometers in size. We're as safe as houses."

  That was one of the things everyone feared about space travel. Fast movement meant massive kinetic energy when you collided with something. Grains of sand became the equivalent of TNT detonations.

  The Solar Arm, seeking to defend its assets against the incoming storm of ships, had scattered millions of tons of debris all throughout the orbit. Transit of any craft had to be cleared by probe droids. Failure to do this meant suicide, or weeks spent stranded in a crippled ship.

  Which, as the crew of the captured Dravidian would discover, was often just suicide by a different name.

  "Then we make another circuit, and then return to Mars."

  "Copy," the lieutenant adjusted some flight parameters on his glowing dashboard.

  "And patch me through to General Orzo," Calixtus said. "I need confirmation on some orders."

  "You're only supposed to do that when it's something really important. Just saying, is all. He likes people who are self-starters."

  "Holy fuck, are you my career adviser now? Just get me on a secure line with the man."

  They dialled an outbound line. General Orzo would not be in a good mood whatsoever. He'd thrown everything he had at Terrus, and the planet had held. Millions of tons of munitions had been dumped on the planet's surface, but no surrender order had come, and eventually the mounting casualties led him to call a retreat. Apparently he’d had a near miss when a railgun slug had penetrated his ship’s reactor core.

  Calixtus intended to walk on eggshells regarding the prisoners, but his conscious demanded that he at least confirm their orders.

  Surely, he can't mean I have to kill all these people. That's ridiculous. We're not monsters.

  The call pinged from relay station to relay station, searching for a connection. Using bidirectional sat-comms while travelling was always a nightmare – dropouts were endemic, especially in a war zone with millions of signals cross-contaminating each other. Calixtus watched the controls with trepidation.

  Finally, green light.

  “General Feroce speaking. You have ten seconds.” The guy sounded pissed.

  “This is Gunnery Sergeant Yaga Calixtus, Commanding the SOL-944. I am on a border patrol, and have picked up some fugitives. They claim to be from Caitanya-9.”

  “They’re lying. You know what to do.”

  “No, sir, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Then get your commanding officer to explain it to you.”

  “I need confirmation before I commit myself to a course of action that might be a war crime, sir.”

  “Listen, whoever you are. Our entire front’s in retreat, I’ve just had to hot evac a crippled ship, and we now need every Dravidian we can get to staunch the bleeding. Whoever the fuck you’ve picked up, shove them into an airlock, and blow them out into space. Kill them, refuel at Mars, and then get back to the front. Got it?”

  Calixtus opened his mouth, and then shut it after the call abruptly ended.

  “Well, there you go,” First Mate Vallancz said, shrugging. “Not a lot of wriggle room.”

  Calixtus couldn’t make eye contact. “So this is how it goes. No time to ask questions. No time to check the terrain. So, I guess we don’t give a fuck about Caitanya-9 any more?”

  “We give a fuck about not dying, and right now the Solar Arm is pounding us. We need to stabilise a tight boundary around Mars, or we’ll lose that too. Hey, if it makes it any better, I’ll tell people that it was a joint decision. You and I made it together.”

  “Thanks. Well, I’d better get on it.”

  Then it was settled.

  All the prisoners in the back are dead men walking, he thought. And I have to pull the trigger.

  He hadn’t signed up for this. Bile crawled up his throat.

  The Reformation Confederacy Dravidian passed like a thunderbolt through the canopy of stars.

  Its destination was Mars.

  “We'll be fine,” Zelity said for the thousandth time in the cargo hold. The sentiment bled additional sincerity each time he said it. The fifty men and women no longer even acknowledged that he had spoken.

  They were all very worried about what the future held.

  The Caitanya-9 survivors shuffled on the benches, trying to be comfortable in a place where comfort was impossible. They were now approaching their third straight day in flexicuffs. They'd received eight meals, eight drinks, and four bathroom breaks apiece. They slept when it was possible. And they talked, in low, quiet voices, conscious that speaking was a privilege that would revoked the second it annoyed one of their captors.

  They were in the cargo bay of a Dravidian, in crude seats bolted to the floor. As far as they could tell, they were prisoners. There seemed to be about twenty to thirty crew on the ship, depending on who was being counted twice or not at all.

  Once or twice, Haledor had tried asking someone what would happen to them.

  “Good question,” someone said.

  They figured out through overhearing snippets of conversation that they were at war, and that the side they'd fallen in with was not the Solar Arm.

  That was bad, but surely they were valuable prisoners. They had first-hand knowledge of the mysterious Caitanya-9 planet, a superweapon that made every single aspect of the war a non-event.

  “When we get to Mars they’ll roll out a red carpet for us. Don't you doubt it,” Zelity said.

  Every half hour there was a precious minute of privacy before the crews rotated, changing duties with a fresh batch of men from the revolving habitat wheel up front. In these windows of time, they leaped at the chance to have actual, real conversation.

  Such as where their loyalties lay in this new war.

  “Sarkoth Amnon led the forces that attacked us on the planet, so we should probably assume that the Solar Arm isn't our friend,” Jagomir said.

  “I heard someone gossip that Sarkoth Amnon is dead,” a former Solar Arm commander called Vilanthus said.

  “I heard he's in prison,” Haledor said. “Either that or panhandling on the streets of Neo Los Angeles. The guy seemed a bit confused on the specifics.

  “Let's allow that he's such a dipshit that he's all three of those things at once,” Zelity said. “But reversed evil is not good. What do we know about this rebellion?”

  And then the door whooshed open, and conversation had to end.

  Half an hour later...

  “Where were we?”

  “We were discussing our humble hosts. They call themselves the Reformation Confederacy. I've also heard them call themselves 'The Sane'“.

  “Bad sign, right there. Can never trust people who give themselves names of traits they hope they embody. Have you ever met a girl called 'Chastity' or 'Purity' that hadn't taken miles of cock?”

  “Nevermind,” Jagomir said. “We don't know who they are or what they want, so let's just work out an optimal plan that doesn't depend on us being mind-readers. How do we pitch them?”

  “Do we want to?” Zelity said. “I don't want to be working for a slightly different bunch of assholes. Truthfully, I don't want to be a soldier at all any more.”

  Woosh

  Half an hour later...

  “Why can't we just play things straight?” Vilanthus said. “Just tell them the truth, and nothing but. We came. We saw. We failed to conquer. And thanks to the god of Caitanya having a change of heart, he let us leave.”
/>
  “We tried that,” groused Haledor. “And they didn't believe us. Thought we were pirates.”

  “Okay, so how about we roll with that, and pretend to be pirates? They'll probably impress us into the ranks, once they find out our level of combat training.”

  “Didn't it register with you that I don't want to be a soldier?” Zelity said. “The second I'm free of these handcuffs and on the ground on Mars, I'm just going to start running towards no particular horizon. I’ve had enough of this. It’s gotten too big for me, and probably too big for you guys, too. There's a bullet storm out there, and I'm not going to stand there, pointlessly plinking away along with a million others.”

  “I want all kinds of things too, Yen. Doesn't mean I'm gonna get them.”

  Woosh...

  More conversation...

  “Can you pass it along to the ones in the back that one of my flexicuffs isn't secured properly?” Haledor said. “As in, I have at least three inches of hand movement that I'm not supposed to have?”

  “Could you get a hand free?”

  “Not without breaking my hand. It's very tight around the wrist, and I can't get free. But still...”

  Vilanthus was growing frustrated. “This is fucking stupid. Nobody's talking to us. Doesn't that seem like a problem to anyone? Not even remotely? We aren't being asked to explain ourselves, we aren't being told where we're going, we aren't being told what our current combat classification is...they're not saying anything.”

  He kicked out irritably against the wall, rousing the ire of a guard in the next room.

  “Hey, take your xylophone act elsewhere, jackoff.”

  “I'll be glad to,” said Vilanthus. “Drop me at this mythical elsewhere and I'll be on my way.”

  The guard glared from above a prognathous jaw. He had the humor cross-section of a hornet. “And that means no loud noises of any sort. From any of you. If I have to come back here, I'll gag you.”