Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3) Read online

  Sarkoth’s entire was rattling. His healthy leg was spasming, his boot tapping like a man suffering from St Vitus Dance.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  Like escaping from one nightmare and finding yourself in a different one.

  The microphone hung in front of his face. Perhaps it was the pain, the endorphins, or the fear, but the microphone itself now seemed to be gaining sentience. Like an idol, something possessed by unknowable and primordial power, something that controlled him like a tool instead of the other way around.

  The microphone was a rounded bead, and it seemed to change color in front of Sarkoth’s eyes. It became purple, wreathed in thunderclouds. Specks of back floated before his vision, gradually resolving themselves into two moons, circling in orbit.

  The seconds passed, and Mykor clucked his disapproval. His hands were on the dial of the phobia resonator when Sarkoth broke.

  “Launch the missile.”

  The whisper left his lips, entered the purple planetoid microphone, was carried through the Atrium’s outbound comms system, was sent to a relay station in space, was amplified to the massive volume necessary to pass through space, was beamed on a starward course near the border of Mars…

  …And Sarkoth could only weep.

  “I’ve done things I’m not proud of,” Sarkoth said. “But now you’ve done everything I’ve done and a thousand steps beyond.”

  “Precisely,” Mykor said, putting the phobia resonator away.

  “Do you know what happens now?”

  “The planet is destroyed, and I can go to my grave a happy man.”

  “But when it explodes, we’re in the blowback zone! Terrus will be bathed in millions of Sieverts of radiation. Whole continents will be rendered uninhabitable. You’ve killed billions, Mykor. Billions.”

  “But I’ve saved humanity,” Mykor said. “I’ve destroyed an existential risk. Let those billions die. Billions more will survive. You’ve picked up an irritating habit, friend – you don’t think of the big picture.”

  Sarkoth whispered something, too quietly for Mykor to hear. When he put his ear to the Prime Minister’s mouth, he received a gobbet of spit.

  Mykor pulled away, unimpressed. He wiped the spit from his ear and stood up.

  “Where is the old Sarkoth Amnon?” he said. “Can I please reach him, somewhere in there? Can I leave a message? He would have understood my actions, if not agreed with my goals.”

  “Idiot,” Sarkoth whispered. “Maybe you haven’t saved us at all. Actions provoke reactions. Attacks provoke counterattacks. It wasn’t standing off in space for its own amusement, it was waiting to see how we’d behave. And now we’ve proven that we need to be destroyed.”

  This brought Mykor up short.

  “What do you think Wilseth was trying to get me to do?” Sarkoth asked. “He wanted to set the planet into motion.”

  The room was littered with death. Computers were smashed and upended, lights had blown out, every step risked impalement upon teethlike daggers of glass.

  But none of that played the slightest part in his impulse to get out. To escape. To feel the lunar breeze, and look at the sky.

  Is he right? Mykor thought. Just what was the planet trying to accomplish?

  The upper level of the Atrium had a balcony, normally accessible with a security code. Thanks to Wilseth, it was wide open.

  Moving with the last dregs of his adrenaline, feeling every one of his fifty five years, he tore open the door, and ran out, looking across the world of Selene and the starscape above.

  Caitanya-9 was gone.

  Bleeding from the inside, he scried the stars like a prophet of old, searching for any sign of the catastrophe in the heavens. But there was nothing to be seen.

  He wanted to feel elation, wanted to believe that the planet had been destroyed.

  But there was no celestial firestorm, no explosion, no trace that anything violent had happened.

  His final sight was a curious optical illusion. It almost looked like the stars themselves were bending...and…

  A wormhole.

  He ran back inside, aware of the pattering sound around him, aware that it was blood pouring from his body. The network of veins in his abdomen were being decanted and emptied at a rate of fifty beats per minute, his essence squirting out onto the floor. The Atrium was awash with blood. He needed medical attention, or he’d die.

  But first, he needed to talk to Sarkoth.

  Inside the computer room, he went back to where he’d left the crippled Prime Minister.

  He wasn’t there anymore.

  Mykor stared at the bare patch of ground. It was the only place in the room that didn’t have broken glass and debris over it, and it stood out as clearly as a mess would have.

  Sarkoth Amnon’s large body should have been there. Instead, there was an empty space.

  Where is he?

  He started to search. He looked behind computer terminals, behind stacks of equipment, he even found himself pulling open desk drawers before he caught himself, cursing his pain-addled stupidity.

  The Prime Minister was no longer anywhere in the room.

  There’s no way he could have escaped, Mykor said. Not in twenty seconds, not on a broken leg. Even if he’d crawled, it would have left an obvious trail for me to follow.

  He crossed and re-crossed the room, noticing fewer details with each time. His vision was now clouded with darkness. The blue LEDs were losing their hue. The red blood was transmuting itself to black. He knew he was now critically low on blood, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t even slow down, not until he found Sarkoth.

  Where’s the body? This doesn’t make sense.

  He pressed the wound shut with one hand. He expected to have to bite back a roar of agony, but he hardly felt a thing. That was a very bad sign. He should have been feeling many things, but not an absence of pain.

  He knew he should find the polyflesh device. But he had no more energy.

  He could hardly think, and his free hand was busy steadying himself against whatever surface he could find. He was dizzy and losing awareness. It was like drowning on dry land.

  Finally, he fell. He heard the rip in his belly tear open even wider, but he still didn’t feel anything.

  I need consciousness. I pray for consciousness. I’ve never needed to be awake more than I need to be awake right now.

  Still he slid further down, into a pit he knew he might not climb out of.

  It comes to this, he thought. His vision was so dim that he didn’t even know if he had his eyes open or shut. Caitanya-9 is gone. Probably destroyed. Sarkoth was right – there’s no proof it was ever hostile. Could I have gotten it all wrong? Was it harmless from the start, and were we the aggressors?

  His hands were still reaching into the darkness, hoping to touch Sarkoth’s.

  They need him. Even without the planet, they’re still at war, and his loss will devastate them. Where are you, Sarkoth?

  He heard footsteps approaching, and could just barely make out the sound of weapons brushing against nanomesh suits.

  “What happened here?” It was Schottkein’s voice. He sounded numb with shock. “Where’s the Prime Minister?”

  Mykor’s lips moved. He tried to say I don’t know, but the words lacked escape velocity.

  He was in no discomfort whatsoever. He was falling into a warm bed of darkness, a hot bath of nothing. The final part of the slide downhill was experienced with great joy.

  Save me, were his last delirious thoughts has he crossed the event horizon.

  Titan – June 6, 2143, 0800 hours

  “We are the sutures of sanity’s wounds,

  We are the accelerant on entropy's axle,

  We are the teeth between the stars,

  We are, and that alone is our crime.”

  On Titan, the surviving Sons of the Vanitar were meeting.

  Emil Gokla's mansion was nearly unchanged now that Raya Yithdras owned it. His personality - his stinking, p
ungent, personality - still pervaded the halls and chambers, just as it did all of Titan. The gardens outside still bloomed with brightly-colored poison. All that was different was the gold placard, commemorating the man and his life's work.

  This house stands in memorial to Emil Vangel Gokla (2042-2143), visionary, inventor, and polymath. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, from an early age he was fascinated by humankind, and its limitations. Where others saw wild jungles of thought where man was never meant to go, he strode forth with a machete…”

  The placard was kept well in the shadows. That wasn't difficult. The house was a bog and a swamp of shadow. But there was also the sense that Raya Yithdras wanted the focus kept on the house's present, not its past.

  And the present was her.

  She held court now, over the six billion souls that made up the rebellion. The Sane, some called them. The Reformation Confederacy, as they said on their papers of separation. The ones who would purge the delusional Sarkoth Amnon from his death grip on power.

  Very few knew the truth behind the movement. And most of them were inside the room.

  Orzo Feroce was on her right - a minor career soldier, now her general. To her left was Saldeen Zana, a former noble who'd been cashiered out of an inheritance. None of them had been in the upper echelons of Solar Arm society before the civil war, and now they were running Raya's entire war effort.

  The useful idiots she had around her - those who didn’t know about the Sons of the Vanitar - looked askance at all these unlikely appointments, and wondered if there was something they were missing, some critical fact just barely out of sight.

  Blood transfusions were spiked, drained hours earlier from the veins of children. Parabiotic therapy preserved youth, or so Emil Gokla had claimed. He’d lived to be a centenarian, before one of the transfusions had poisoned him.

  It was time to talk shop.

  "I've delegated responsibility, and I expect not to have to micromanage you too much," Raya said. "We're all on the same page, regarding our strategic goals."

  She smiled at the circle of blank faces. Despite their initiation into the arts of darkness, none of them were on the same page as Raya Yithdras. She had always seemed different from the rest. Inscrutable, and unknowable. They were in a completely different book to Raya’s page.

  She quickly laid out the facts of the war.

  They had rolled back the Solar Arm forces from Mars, and now stood poised to deliver a death grip to Terrus.

  Their agent on Selene had struck, and forced Sarkoth Amnon to fire an antimatter warhead at Caitanya-9. The planet had been curiously inactive, and they’d hoped that a direct assault would stir it into action.

  That part of the plan had failed. Caitanya-9 was gone. and the Wipe hadn't happened.

  Now Wilseth was dead, and Sarkoth Amnon had vanished.

  “Ultimately, we’re in much the same position we were yesterday,” she said. “The Solar Arm still resists. Until hostilities cessate and terms can be brokered, current policy is that we try to win the war through conventional means.”

  They nodded. War. Hostilities. Terms. This was getting more onto familiar territory.

  “Acceptable terms to end the war will be a reinstatement of my temporary cabinet, which I convened before Sarkoth Amnon expelled me from the Atrium,” Raya said. “There’s no reason things can’t go back to being the way they were.”

  “Of course,” Orzo said.

  His voice was tinged with irony. Things would never go back to being the way they were. Not for anyone in the solar system. Sarkoth Amnon, a promising Son of the Vanitar, had somehow turned traitor and had been obstructing them for months. Their every goal found itself impeded, strangled, and choked. The best they’d managed was a lone terrorist attack against some worthless vanity project meant to confer immortality upon the human race. They were an organization that was spinning its wheels and accomplishing nothing.

  But now, he was gone. With Raya Yithdras in charge of the Solar Arm, everything would change.

  There had never been a Son of the Vanitar occupying a position of Prime Minister. That had been Emil Gokla’s dream. He’d tried to turn Halor Sumitar, and failed. He’d nearly succeeded with Sarkoth Amnon. The ability to put the hand of utter authority on the gears of chaos, and effect change from the highest level – that was one of the organisation’s greatest goals .

  If Raya Yithdras was able to conquer Terrus and assume its sole leadership, they would be well on their way to finding a way to end humanity, even without Caitanya-9.

  A new era would dawn, and hopefully end soon thereafter.

  “How close are we to defeating the remnants of the Solar Arm forces?” asked Saldeen.

  Raya nodded to Orzo, and he picked up the tale.

  “We have an excellent material advantage. We have close to forty thousand ships deployed across all fronts, more rolling off assembly lines in the Belt by the day, and with the lanes coming more and more under our control, we can strike Terrus,” Orzo said. “Governor Ryush Narya has gladly surrendered Mars to us, and that would be an excellent staging platform for a ground invasion. All of this against a fractured enemy that has lost their leader.”

  “Excellent. Those are our strengths. What about our weaknesses?”

  Orzo accessed the holographic area in the central point of the room, and projected some numbers, figures, flowcharts, and diagrams. The Sons of the Vanitar were silent as they watched the vectors of millions of troops in space.

  “I’ll admit we are spread a bit thin,” he said. “Clouds of destroyers and frigates only become effective when they reach a certain saturation level, and we’re hovering at the lower end of that. Troop saturation coverage is an all-or-nothing thing – once you’ve lost it, you’ve lost it. Enemy ships can slip through your ranks. Carpet bombing becomes impossible. We’re throwing everything we’ve got at them, but we need more ships.”

  “So, what do you suggest?”

  “Re-prioritize away from reconnaissance and patrol. Every single ship needs to be on some sort of attack mission. The Solar Arm is down, but unless we can rapidly force a surrender, they’ll just get back up again.”

  “We can afford to allocate forces in this fashion,” Raya said. “All of our territories are secure, and they have zero ability to counterattack.”

  He nodded, “there’s one potential problem. Prisoners. Ever since we broke through their line at the asteroid belt, we’ve been receiving large numbers of surrender calls from crippled capital ships and remote outposts. We’ve been taking prisoners, and ferrying them to internment camps. But all of this is a drain on our attacking power.”

  Raya nodded, “then we’ll stop taking prisoners.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Ignore surrender calls.”

  “Maritime law requires that we aid stranded ships,” Saldeen Zana said, “regardless of combat affiliation.”

  “Whose maritime law?” Raya laughed. “I certainly don’t remember signing any law like that.”

  “It’s common policy,” Saldeen said skeptically. “Rescuing stranded ships has been a convention of the space age for more than a hundred years, and the sea age long before that.”

  “Then if we see a stranded ship, we’ll destroy it,” she said. “A ship isn’t stranded any more if it’s blasted into atoms. Pass this out among our commanding offers: If you see an enemy pinging on your radar, blow it up. No questions asked.”

  “Goddamn it, that’s an even bigger line to cross. You’re talking about massacring unarmed adversaries.”

  “Communication failures can be blamed if anyone holds to us account, which they won’t.”

  “You’re being blasé. We’re talking about hundreds of ignored surrenders,” Saldeen said. “and potentially tens of thousands of casualties. They’ll know we’re killing noncombatants. We lose bargaining power if we no longer even pretend to obey the Constitution.”

  “Stop overthinking things. I don’t think anyone on any side of this conflict h
as much of an opinion on the Constitution at the moment, given that the Solar Arm has breached decades of trust by ordering covert assassinations.”

  They glanced at each other in confusion, clearly wondering what she was talking about.

  Raya let the tension play out like a long fishing line before reeling them all back in. “It’s simple – they killed Emil.”

  Immediate laughter filled the dank room. Incredulous. Disbelieving.

  “It’s true,” she said. “His official cause of death was poisoning from an impure blood infusion. With everything else happening, I didn’t get a chance to follow up on that – hell, I hardly get time to breathe any more. But now it seems it was actually an agent working on behalf of the Solar Arm. A boy called Vante.”

  Some of them muttered. They either knew or could guess that he’d been the child Emil had been keeping at the house.

  “Vante’s eleven years old,” Orzo said flatly.

  “Which means nobody would ever suspect him as a killer. Brainwashing. Neuro-linguistic programming. You know as well as I do that there’s no line Sarkoth Amnon wouldn’t cross. Using a child as an assassin has been done before, and will be done again.”

  “Did we ever recapture him?”

  “No. He left the mansion the night of Emil’s death, and the trail has gone cold. With the tradelines in chaos there’s any number of ways he could have gotten off this methane-soaked ball of rock. We will never see him again.”

  “If someone does and he sings a different story, that would be bad for us.”

  “I thrive on ifs,” Raya said. “I damaged Sarkoth Amnon beyond repair with ifs. Should we require it, we can make evidence appear directly linking Vante to these actions.”

  They nodded.

  A lot of impossible problems became easy once you forgot about ethics.

  “We can’t afford to lose the element of surprise,” she told Orzo. “I want a general attack order going out against Terrus. With Mars conquered, they’re down to their last two worlds, plus the remote colony on Venus. Throw everything we’ve got against them, and see if they surrender. With Sarkoth gone, they probably will.”

  He nodded, got up, and left.