Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3) Read online

  The conjunction of Mars and Terrus had ended days ago, and the planets were swinging far apart from each other. It would be a risky meeting, for both parties. With their seats of power now far away from their respective borders, it was decided that she and Rodensis would meet at the midpoint between Mars and Terrus.

  The remnants of her fleet, a dozen capital ships and thirty thousand destroyers and frigates, hung a few million kilometers back. If negotiations broke down, they would soon be by her side.

  “We’re nearing the spatial co-ordinates you chose.” her captain said. “With the comm satellites coming back online, soon you’ll be able to talk to Rodensis.”

  “Good,” she said, trying to plan out her next move on a chessboard the size of a solar system.

  The negotations would likely be brief, and probably almost pleasant. She knew Sybar Rodensis. He had been too unimaginative and dull to ever be a candidate for the Sons of the Vanitar. He knew penetration ratios, and the stress point of steel, and how to manage a landing operation. He had no ability to think of the big picture. His pragmatism made him useless for the starry-eyed dreamers that the Sons of the Vanitar were, but it made him highly useful in this situation.

  The war had been fought over Sarkoth Amnon’s sanity. And he was no longer in the picture.

  The war had also been fought over fiscal mismanagement, and a ballooning defense budget. Again, this had come from Sarkoth.

  For her part, Raya Yithdras would be happy to accept a minor post in the Solar Arm. Somewhere close to Andrei Kazmer, where she could learn more about what his powers and capabilities were. Or even if they existed at all, which was uncertain.

  They would be no closer to their goal of ending human life that Emil Gokla had been throughout all the long years of his life, but at least they were better informed now. Wiser.

  A long game would begin of sowing discord through the Solar Arm once more. And through it all, the Sons of the Vanitar would grow stronger, more united, harder to penetrate. A stupid, surface-detail forcused government like Rodensis’s would be ideal for them. Connecting dots and uncovering conspiracies were exactly the things he was bad at.

  Her generals and commanders were at full alert, their fingers poised on the trigger. If negotiations broke down, they would be ready to launch a counterattack against Terrus.

  And this time, there would be no holding back.

  The only thing that might hurt her was the massive data-dump Orzo Feroce had given them, to save his own life. No doubt there would be some things in there that were incriminating to her and her cause. She just had to hope that in the chaos of the war, nobody had time to thoroughly search through it.

  There were dividing lines where she had to authenticate herself to relay stations. Each one was a Dashka-class probe, suspended in space like a buoy.

  The relay probes gave her a chance to receive communications from Titan.

  One pinged through on her suit. It was Saldeen Zana.

  “Just listen for a second, something massive just happened,” the voice on the recording sounded breathless with excitement. “A Solar Arm craft has attacked Mars.”

  Raya drew in breath sharply, her fingernails cutting into the armrest of her seat.

  “It’s a reconnaissance-class Dravidian, SOL-944, and until recently it was commanded by Gunnery Sargeant Yaga Calixtus. It appears to have been hijacked and taken over by Solar Arm personnel. They’ve slaughtered everyone on board, faked Calixtus’s voice to slip through the planetary defenses, and landed within Valashabad. About twenty of them were captured. All of them have Solar Arm Defense Force tags, and they are in clear violation of our peace treaty. Do whatever you feel is appropriate with this information.”

  The message ended.

  Raya Yithdras felt ripples of excitement pass through her.

  A covert attack, by Solar Arm commandos.

  Heaven or hell only knew what they were trying to do on Mars. It was a newly captured colony. Not remotely the center of the Reformation Confederacy’s governance and industrial output.

  But still…the peace had been violated.

  And even more remarkably, it hadn’t been by her.

  Ssaldeen transmitted some images to the ship’s computer, and she viewed a few of them.

  Captured prisoners, held in stasis cells beneath Valashabad.

  They were photographed in harsh light, emphasizing their bruises, and burns, and acid scars. All of them had sustained heavy and brutal torture, and they stared at the world through pain-dulled eyes.

  Nametags and service numbers flashed in front of her.

  Yeltsin JAGOMIR

  Feldka HALEDOR

  Corin VILANTHUS

  And many others.

  She paused on the last scarred human wreck (Yen ZELITY), wondering what the yellow patch of skin on his chest was. Caught by the harsh light, it almost looked like words. Maybe some of his gaolers had taken it upon themselves to write degrading messages on his body.

  She deleted the photographs.

  And another point stuck in Raya’s craw. If a battle was fought to take control of Calixtus’s ship, some of them would have been killed. And the message from Andrei Kazmer said he would unleash the gamma ray burst on us if that happened. And he hasn’t…so…

  She nodded, disappointed but not surprised.

  It was a ruse. All of it. Rodensis had tried to trick her, and he’d failed badly.

  The video’s fake, she thought. Andrei Kazmer doesn’t command Caitanya-9. I can safely ignore this or any other threat I get from him.

  She thought of where this left her, in the next few minutes.

  Rodensis would have his own ships arrayed past the meeting point. But they wouldn’t be on high alert. This was a peace meeting. They were expecting nothing.

  She sat-comm’d a message back to her fleet.

  The peace is broken. Attack. Destroy them all.

  Arrakhia Mountain Hospital – June 9, 2143, 0800 hours

  Mykor’s hand was on Ubra’s shoulder as she fed the baby. There was no warmth or fatherly quality to the gesture. His hand was like a clamp.

  “My daughter’s murderer is at this facility,” he told her. “Did you know this? Was this piece of information in your head, and you chose not to tell me?”

  She wavered between truth and a lie, and settled on something directly in between. “Yes, I knew, but I’ve never met him. And you said you didn’t want to discuss anything about Caitanya-9…”

  “And I still don’t. I want to destroy it. And he’s the last piece of that fucking planet that remains. Once he’s gone, Caitanya-9 will be consigned to the dustbin of history.”

  Ubra’s eyes flickered across his shoulder, hoping for the surprise appearance of a guard. Someone who could break this up, end this awful conversation.

  But nobody came.

  Exhaustion was setting in for the guards, and their formidable watch over their charges was starting to slacken. It was inevitable. And now she was caught like a mouse of the teeth of that inevitability.

  She could have conversations with other people now. She didn’t have to answer questions in every hallway. She could even sometimes go places unattended.

  And now she had to answer to a grieving, angry father.

  You don’t understand, she wanted to say, Andrei Kazmer lost his godhood when the planet was destroyed. He is just a regular man now. Almost powerless.

  But then she remembered Zandra.

  This wasn’t about Caitanya-9. This was about Andrei Kazmer. God or mortal, Mykor would have his revenge.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” she said, “but leave me out of this.”

  “You deceived me, Ubra Zolot,” he said. “A mild deception, just a little lie by omission. You thought you would protect him from me, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t care about him!” She protested. “For fuck’s sake, all I want is a quiet life! I thought you would stay in the hospital, and he would stay in the research facility, and your paths wou
ld never meet, and then I’d never have to worry about finding one of your bodies in that goddamn garden.”

  “Well, that plan didn’t work,” Mykor said. “You did a disgusting and ignoble thing, trying to keep this from me. There’s murderers, and then there’s people who spread sand over the bloodstains and claim that there was never anything there. We will settle our score another day. I will not forget this, Ubra.”

  Then he was gone.

  Arrakhia Mountain Facility – June 10, 2143, 0000 hours

  Mykor closed the door to the hospital, feeling the uncomfortable in his own skin beneath the hospital gown.

  It had taken a lot of wheedling to obtain one. First, he’d scoped out the guard who always seemed to be complaining about money. A few minutes of gentle conversation had uncovered the precise depth of his debt. He owed more than fifty thousand ducats, thanks to some bad beats in the guards’ late night poker games.

  As it happened, Sarkoth had given Mykor ample funds before his disappearance.

  “How much would it cost for me to get a gown?” he’d asked.

  “What do you need it for?”

  “My garden. The plastic in them can be boiled down to release excipient compounds that kill aphids. I was going to cut it into strips, and use it on my plants.”

  “A thousand ducats.”

  They’d finally settled on seven hundred and fifty, and Mykor had gotten his gown.

  He had the hood pulled up over his head, and fastened the zipper. Now, he was almost unrecognizable. In the dark, he would disappear. Nobody would question him.

  He practiced a few noncommittal grunts and noises, designed to deflect attention if he was ever stopped and questioned. Satisfied, he started walking towards the facility.

  The back storage room of the hospital led out into a long sealed road. Black tarmac crunching gently underfoot, he followed a straight path through near darkness. At the end of the darkness, Vadim Gokla’s research facility.

  It was late at night. There were no clocks permitted inside the hospital, and nobody seemed to have much of a circadian rhythm, but the guards were yawning too frequently for it to be anything earlier than midnight.

  He hoped to enter through a chink in the facility’s wakefulness. An arrow passing between gaps of consciousness, aimed straight at a man kept within.

  It had taken slightly longer probing to determine the exact room where Andrei Kazmer was kept.

  The guard had grown vaguely suspicious then, and had started giving noncommittal one-word answers. But Mykor could be very persuasive when he wanted something.

  He’d come to Terrus as a prisoner of war, dehydrated into a human burlap sack. Within a few weeks of his reawakening, he’d been installed in a villa on Selene, and had overseen the destruction of mankind’s most terrible foe.

  Fast rises were kind of his thing.

  And now there was just a minor bow to be tied on the package. One loose end.

  One final mistake of Sarkoth Amnon’s to correct.

  He trudged through the gloom, head down, eyes forward. In the pocket of his hospital gown, there was a length of garroting wire.

  He had no access codes to the front door. But one of the facility orderlies saw a man wearing a hospital gown, and happily buzzed him in. Nurses and doctors often toured the facility. There was nothing unusual about this.

  Inside was a reception room of dull, iridium-plated steel, like a rotten tooth of metal decaying inside the mountain.

  It looked like an apocalypse bunker that someone had foolishly tried to convert into a hospital.

  “Rough night, huh?” the orderly said, shutting the door.

  Grunt.

  “You keeping up with the latest news from the topside? War’s over. General’s meeting up with Yithdras to hammer out some terms, and then the Solar Arm will be whole again. Not bad, huh?”

  Grunt.

  “And keep this on the down-low, but I hear Vadim’s trying to wrangle a covert medal of distinction for everyone who worked down here. He says it was a trying time, but he was grateful for our help and our secrecy. It’ll take time and there can’t be any public ceremonies, but…”

  “Gotta go…” Mykor muttered, shuffling away and pulling his gown around him.

  The rooms were all quiet and chilly, as though everything was coated with a thin layer of ice.

  He counted off the numbers on the doors. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

  He stopped outside the door marked 12.

  There was almost some poetry there. The Vanitar, sunk deep into the planet’s crust, had tabulated its numbers in base-12.

  It’s gone. When you die, Andrei, may you find it standing at the entrance to hell, holding the door open for you.

  There was an old-fashioned mechanical door. Vadim was such an adorable luddite.

  He extracted a pin from within his pocket, and bent it in half.

  He wondered how many tumblers were inside the mechanism. He guessed five.

  Levering the bent edge of the pin into the hole, he started attacking tumblers, hunting for that magical sound. Click.

  He was on a clock. Someone might come and disturb him. And any noise might wake Andrei Kazmer.

  He focused, pouring his essence into the keyhole. His conscious mind went away, was shattered by the moment, aware only his daughter swinging on his arms in fields of grass, aware of all the tomorrows that would never come, and the man who had stolen them from him.

  When the lock finally yielded, he wanted to cry.

  The pin went into his pocket.

  The garroting wire came out.

  With great care, he eased the door open.

  His eyes adjusted to the darkness almost instantly. There was a thin bed in the corner, and a large man lying on it. His chest rose and fell with the rhythm of sleep.

  He moved, and that move turned into a run, into a sprint, into a pounce.

  Then Mykor was on top of Andrei Kazmer, looping an arm around his shoulders, twisting behind him on the bed in a wrestling hold, and wrapped the garroting wire around his neck.

  Andrei got out a single gasp, and then the wire went taut.

  Vadim Gokla finished writing up his case notes. The end was finally in sight, where he could be rid of Andrei Kazmer.

  He had only vague clues of what was happening above the surface. This was the mountain's strength, and also its weakness. To be a mountain is to not hear the clouds, or the stars. But he could guess.

  The peace process would run its way towards a fruitful conclusion. Neither party genuinely had any cause to fight – especially when it was thought that civilization-ending technology was in the game. The halves would reform into one, and that would be that.

  He started to wonder about his own career. This would be a launchpad to bigger and better things. He'd always dreamed of being a celebrity psychologist, and he longed for the day when the Andrei Kazmer matter was declassified and opened for public perusal.

  He felt he'd done some exceptional psychiatric work on Kazmer. It would be a shame to think of it ending up in filing cabinets inside an overgrown military bunker.

  He highly suspected that Kazmer had murdered Private Yatz, but had decided to try and skate over that unpleasant fact.

  He'd spent several hours systematically shredding and erasing every piece of paperwork that existed on the subject. He'd even deleted Yatz's admission forms. His career was at stake, and it would be most convenient if Yatz had never been there.

  Yes, any number of people could testify to Yatz's presence there. The trouble was, most of them had undergone transport via Black Shift. Ubra. Mykor. Farholt. Nilux. Their testimony was junk, from the perspective of the legal system. Black Shift tended to create a lot of crazy people, and for once, he was glad of that fact.

  In a court of law, nobody could overrule him if he pretended that the murder had never happened.

  The various other research subjects had faded from view in his mind's eye ever since he'd confirmed Kazmer's account. He'd been p
icking some of those mixed nuts for years, without success. Truthfully, he was of the opinion that they should either be set free or sectioned and rehomed in a mental institution. As society's axis shifted back towards peacetime, no doubt some funding for that would magically appear, especially at the request of the Solar Arm's star player.

  He put his files away. He allowed himself a brief feeling: satisfaction, and then banished it after a few seconds. Professionally, satisfaction was like very strong wine. Better to allow yourself only a little.

  Then, he heard a little tone.

  Rrriiiinnng

  He'd set up a series of buzzers in each of the patients' rooms. Most of them connected directly to one of the nurses or orderlies. All except one.

  He'd requested that Andrei Kazmer have a direct line into his office.

  There was intensive care, and then there was high intensive care. Given that he held both incalculable strategic secrets in his head, held the potential to make the careers of everyone who worked at Arrakhia Hospital, and was perhaps a murderer, Kazmer was arguably two or three rungs above even that.

  Rrrrrriiiiiiinnngggg

  He pressed a button, connected the call.

  “What can I do for you, Andrei?”

  There was a pause from the other end before he got an answer. “Something terrible has happened.”

  His voice sounded threadbare, substance less, like a thundercloud that only let out a tepid trickle of train. Vadim wanted to laugh at the bad melodrama.

  “What's happened?”

  “So, so terrible.”

  He wished he could switch on a camera to Kazmer's cell. But cameras were a weak link. Prisoners could devise ways to communicate through them. Their wires could be ripped out of the wall, spliced together, and used in all sorts of dangerous ways.

  There was a reason this was the most secure place in the Solar Arm.

  He paged a few security guards, and got no answers. Finally, Ernst Yakub answered in the affirmative. He had backup.

  “Hurry,” Andrei's voice said. “It's very bad.”