Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4)

by Ben Sheffield

  Zephyr City hummed and vibrated above him, a trillion tons positioned precariously above his head on a bubble of air. He zigzagged between columns and struts, angling towards the perches.

  Normally, he just followed the sounds of their cawing voices. Now, there was only the sounds of the city. They’d gone quiet, which always meant something was afoot.

  He ducked under a pipe, and found them. Eleven surly feathery sentinels, resting on metal perches as thick as his waist that nonetheless sagged under their weight.

  "Good morning!" he called out. You were supposed to keep talking to them, so that the residual imprints of their trainer stayed on them. He liked the Quetzals, and enjoyed keeping one-sided conversations going with them.

  One of them croaked, but none of them looked at him.

  He got close, and landed on the perch.

  And was immediately knocked off.

  It was a buffet from one of their wings. He'd never dreamed that feathers could be so powerful, or pack so much of a punch, as he went flying head over heels.

  He pulled himself back up, and saw that the Quetzals were glowering at him. They were all turned, and their eyes were hostile.

  These were not happy dinosaurs.

  "What's wrong?" he asked, making his way closer. "I'm just trying to check you for lice. You like that, don't you?"

  he drifted inside some critical circle that was invisible to him, and then the foremost among them screeched, and snapped with its beak. The sound was like a colossal bear trap snapping shut.

  The message was clear.

  Stay away, biped.

  "Goddamn it," he just didn't know what was going on with them. First their attack on one of his customers, and now they were rejecting basic care.

  Not only did he not know how to handle this, he had a faint feeling that he wouldn't be able to handle this. When a dog's a pup, you can discipline it. Teach it things. And if it gets pissed off, you can bring it back into line with a cuff of your hand.

  When a full-grown dog is pissed off, try that and you'll lose the hand.

  They were too massive to control. Whatever had gone wrong with their training or imprinting, it would just have to stay wrong.

  Krepsen might be able to figure out something. She was good at figuring out the impossible, which is why their business was still solvent even with the Reformation Confederacy stomping on everyone's neck.

  But involving her in this would mean she'd discover that Cuahtemoc was lost, and that would begin a chain of questions that would end in his dismissal.

  "Okay, you win," he told them, trying not to show fear. "I'll just feed you, and then I'll go."

  Feeling bruises swelling down his side from the wing flap, he flew over to the latch, on the far side of the perches.

  Immediately, he heard a chorus of outraged caws and screeches.

  And then the sound of flapping wings.

  He immediately abandoned his ambition to open the latch. Suddenly, feeding the Quetzals was the furthest thing from his mind.

  He snap-dived straight down, the direction that they'd find hardest to follow him. He thrummed low to the bottom of the air bubble and then gently curved back up. As he did so, the rushing wind in his face and drowning out all sound from the city above, he heard the sound of eleven feathery bodies snapping taut against their restraining ropes.

  None of them had figured out how to cut through their own ropes. Luckily, none of them were as clever as Cuahtemoc, who in the end had been just bright enough to kill herself.

  But as he pulled up and saw them flapping and screeching maniacally in their attempts to rend him limb from limb, he wondered again . . . why? Just why?

  They would not be fed that day.

  He returned to the ledge, pondering how he could get food to them if they wouldn't even let him open the latch. Pondered what he'd do with eleven soon to be rotting sheep carcasses.

  As he landed on the ledge, there was someone waiting for him.

  "I jumped the gate," Wake said.

  "Okay," Vante said, a look of despair on his face. He was caught in a world where nothing worked quite the way it said on the tin.

  "There's been a new travel regulation," Wake said. "A stringent approval process, requiring in-process evaluation by a human being. And that means I cannot leave the planet."

  As with so many things about this man, Vante didn't know what to think about that. On one hand, Wake's continual presence would make things more interesting. On the other, interesting that was exactly what he was trying to avoid at the moment.

  “So you don’t think you’d get approved?”

  “I know I wouldn’t.”

  “You’re lying about being a cop, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not. I just said that I wouldn’t get approved.”

  “What’s your new plan?”

  As Wake sat and dangled his legs off the edge of the platform, Vante was led to believe that this was the first time the man had ever considered the question.

  Maybe he hadn’t even had a first plan.

  “I want to see where this goes,” Wake said. “Might be just a paranoid shitshow and it will all blow over. But somehow, I doubt it.”

  “I’ve met the Sons of the Vanitar,” Vante said.

  He just blurted it out. The words shocked him as they left his mouth.

  The dreamlike unreality Wake was in suddenly shattered, and he was all business. “Wait. What?”

  “I was an orphan. And I was adopted, I guess, by a man called Emil Gokla.”

  Wake stared into the abyss as his mind quickly assembled the pieces. “He’s dead now, isn’t he? A poisoned blood transfusion, or somesuch.”

  Vante didn’t reply. Just matched his stare.

  It was incredible to think of the vast depths of Venus’s atmosphere. How you could drop a blue whale through the atmosphere and have nothing hit the ground but a few bones.

  He wondered if any part of Cuahtemoc had survived. If even a single molecule of flesh remained.

  “He was a great man,” Wake said. “Not in the sense that he was good. In the sense that he was Attila the Hun. The type of man eras will be written around. I think mankind will look back on this period, and remember him. This won’t be the era of Sarkoth Amnon, or Raya Yithdras. It certainly won’t be the era of you and me. He’s the one that will go into the history books as the headline story. I’m glad you killed him.”

  “I didn’t,” Vante said.

  “And in public I will help keep up that pretense. I’m just saying, I’m glad.”

  They sat in silence.

  Occasionally, there was the caw of a Quetzal. They were hungry.

  Stay hungry, you jerks, Vante thought.

  “On second thought,” Wake said. “I don’t think this era will be written around anyone. If the Sons of the Vanitar remain in power, there might be nobody left to write it. Once all of humanity is corralled back on Terrus, as I think is the plan, then we will be vulnerable to existential risks once more. An antimatter bomb, perhaps. All the old stock was tied to Sarkoth Amnon, and became useless when he disappeared. No matter. They will build new ones.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Vante said.

  “And you probably won’t, not even at the end. One moment we’ll all be crowded in some megatropolis on Terrus, and the next…boom. Our atoms sowed like cosmic seeds that will never flower. I envy the world our ancestors lived in. Small rock means small pain. Big rock means big pain. They never had to deal with weapons the size of a truck that could destroy everything.”

  “Are they causing the earthquakes on Terrus?” Vante said. “They’re getting worse. Whole cities are being swallowed.”

  “If you have any reason to think they are, I’m all ears.”

  They just sat and waited for nothing, minutes ticking by.

  Vante had no customers to attend to. Wake had no duties of any kind. Vaguely, the boy wondered how Wake was filling his hours.

  He was no longer s
ure that the man was violent, or a murderer.

  He was a totally different person to the one he’d met a few days ago. Relaxed. Friendly. Now, Aaron Wake seemed almost nice.

  “Tell me,” Wake said, “how was Emil Gokla’s mood during the final days? Was he happy? Sad? Tell me about his emotions.”

  “I don’t know about his emotions. He kept pretty uptight about that. But I hear that as he died, the person who killed him put a foot on his face.”

  Wake smirked. “Good.”

  Not too nice, Vante thought.

  Los Neo Angeles – June 27, 2143, 1800 hours

  More quakes, more palpitations of the ground. Whole northern sections of the city were reduced to rubble. Earthquake sirens wailed continuously, in elegy of the dead.

  As soon as it was safe, Ubra took to the shaking streets. She’d made another appointment with Moritz Edel, her hacker.

  My hacker. Like he’s a housepet. Goddamn it, if he was my housepet I wouldn’t let him be so unkempt.

  It was near twilight, as always. The point where city watchmen were exhausted, waiting to be relieved by the night shift. The stage where the floodlights were dimmed, to aid in the furtive sleep of twenty million citizens.

  The underground commune had hit the overgrown. With the earthquakes devastating Los Neo Angeles, it was deemed no longer safe to access the tunnels.

  They’d set up shop in an abandoned apartment complex, not far by rail from the city center. There were many such places now. Neo Los Angeles had been hit savagely by the Reformation Confederacy attack, and a large portion of the populace had fled to the sierras and plains of the countryside, taking their chances in the wilderness to escape the falling armature of destruction. Ubra didn’t blame them. Her plans were much the same for her and her daughter, when all of this was over.

  She entered without knocking. She felt a stab of cruel glee as everyone looked up from their computer terminals, meerkat-alert at what might be a police raid. She nodded at the few of them she recognized, then made a line straight for Edel.

  “I’ve compromised the packet-switching on the third party authentication,” Ubra said. “It’s now 256-bits, all day and every day. And that means you can do your thing.”

  “How?” Edel asked.

  “Turns out I have a friend who has mil-grade access. Yeah, I have friends, as astonishing as that is to believe.”

  “I’m not one to believe or disbelieve anything,” he said. “Very well, I can presumably send a request to the database and receive a rip of all their files. If you come back in the next few days, I should have it for you to look over.”

  That wasn’t good enough. “I need it now. I want you to hack into it in front of me. Come on. You’re on the clock. Time for you to do what I’m paying you for.”

  Edel sighed, and rubbed his eyes. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Make it happen.”

  He projected a holographic space into the middle of his work area, enlarged the text so that she could see, and began typing commands into the shell. “Why the rush?”

  “Because he probably realizes that he can be tracked this way. If he wants to go to ground, he’ll take a Dravidian where he needs to go, then travel as far as he can by conventional means. Whatever data we find on him, it’s time sensitive, and will age fast.”

  “Very well,” he sent a request to the Solar Arm Aerospace Commission, and received back a green ACCEPTED message.

  Ubra’s heart leaped. Rosemary Rohilian’s sabotage had worked. They were in.

  Edel typed lethargically, switching from table to table of data. Every space flight was a monumental undertaking, a syntarchy of technology, economics, raw physics and somewhere in the assembly, a few fragile human being.

  “Alright, I think I’ve found what you’re looking for,” he tapped and a list of names appeared. It went on for tens of thousands of pages, glowing in front of them. “Everyone who has ever flown a commercial-grade shuttle since space itineraries started being kept.”

  She squinted, amazed at the data unspooling before her eyes. “Well, let’s run some search terms on this bitch.”

  “Pleased to.”

  “Look for passengers named ‘Andrei Kazmer’. Within the last two weeks.”

  He entered it, and was hit with a screenful of nothing. “Nope. No dice.”

  “A dot Kazmer. Andrei dot K.”

  “No, and no.”

  “Could they have misspelled his name? Try ‘Andrie Kazmer’ and ‘Andrey Kazmer’”.

  “No results. Listen, why would this guy have stepped on a shuttle using his real name? Wouldn’t he have used a pseudonym?”

  “Don’t they have some way of tracking your real name?” Ubra asked.

  “And as you’re discovering, there’s ways of getting around that tracking, especially if you’re willing to throw away the rulebook. I looked up ‘Andrei Kazmer’ on my own time in a few public databases. Jesus, that’s some kind of story. A perfectly normal police officer, and then one day he starts going whacko. Why? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Ubra wracked her brains.

  She thought back to her terrifying ordeal on Caitanya-9, sucked beyond civilization in a wormhole. She and a few others had struggled to survive against Sarkoth Amnon’s remaining forces, and the rage-filled god that now stalked the world.

  Mykor’s second in command had been called Emeth. He’d inadvertently brought a death sentence upon himself by using Andrei Kazmer’s real name. As soon as the name had left his lips, he’d been burned alive.

  Andrei had wanted to be called Wake.

  She leaned in closer. “Try ‘Aaron Wake’”.

  Edel entered it.

  “One match. Outbound, June the fourteenth. Steerage class in SOL-924, destination Zephyr City on the Venus colony.”

  “What do we know about this person?”

  Edel brought up Aaron Wake’s extended itinerary. “Caucasian male. Black hair. About a hundred and ninety four centimeters tall. No tattoos or identifying marks. Gray eyes.”

  He winced as Ubra’s fingers suddenly dug into his shoulder. She glared at the computer screen, eyes alive with a messianic sheen. “It’s him. It’s fucking him.”

  “Maybe this is ‘need to know’ information, but why Aaron Wake?”

  “This all started when he was shipped out to Caitanya-9, missing his Black Shift memory module. The black shift pod just had the letters ‘I AM AWAKE’ engraved at the base, so without any idea of his real name he started calling himself Aaron Wake. Jesus, that all feels like a million years ago. I’m surprised we weren’t sent out to deal with Caitanya-9’s dinosaur or mastodon epidemic.”

  “Stupid of him,” Edel said.

  “Yes, it was stupid, but it makes sense from his perspective,” Ubra stood back, her mind alive with plans of how to get to Venus. “He’s a man who prizes authenticity, and truth telling. It’s like there’s two sides of him, very neat and distinct. There’s Andrei Kazmer, and there’s Aaron Wake. One mouth, two people speaking through them. Somehow, when Aaron Wake gets mistaken for Andrei Kazmer, he goes into a rage. Yes, he could have disguised himself better. You should not mistake him for a man with functional brain chemistry. But the guy I knew, when he was controlled by his Aaron Wake persona, would have found it absolutely unbearable to be known by any name other than that one, which he identified as his real one. He wouldn’t even have allowed it for a single fraction of a second, not even to protect his own safety.”

  Edel seemed to understand. “In security, there’s a saying called PEBKAC – problem exists between keyboard and chair. Super-strong cryptographic systems always break for a simple reason, they are held by a glue of weak humans. Steel framed bunkers don’t hold when the doorway is a fucking dropcloth with a hole in it. Human error is always how you trip up. Frankly, I kinda want Andrei Kazmer to die before he breaks any more systems. Guy’s a walking infosec nightmare.”

  “So there’s no other records on the system?”

  “Ju
st the one. Looks like it was a one way trip.”

  “He might have been arrested, and extradited.”

  “Listen,” Edel said, “if you want to sound like a plausible cop, bone up on your terminology. Extradition is when judicial force compels a person to stand trial at a place different to where they live. If I commit a crime in Narnia and then return to my home in Hobbiton, the act of bringing me back to Narnia would be extradition. But if I commit a crime in Hobbiton and then flee to Narnia, the act of bringing me back to Hobbiton has a different name. Rendition. You’re talking about rendition.”

  What the fuck’s Narnia? Or Hobbiton? “But couldn’t he have been arrested?”

  “Even convicts or suspects appear on these sorts of itineraries.”

  “So he’s still on Venus,” Ubra was elated. The innermost colony, a place where the sun was like a beating fist. That’s where she would find him. That was where she’d have her vengeance.”

  “Sure looks like it. You hit the jackpot. Venus only has the one city, along with a few space stations. You’ll easily find your man. The only challenge is getting off this planet.”

  Ubra sighed. “More immigration restrictions?”

  “From Raya Yithdras’s desk, to your ears. All people attempting interplanetary travel must submit to a thorough screening process. And since no thorough screening process exists, interplanetary transit is a closed door indefinitely. Sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m a cop. I can get myself screened in a heartbeat.”

  “No, you’re not, and you can’t. Say it however many times you want. Your shitty credentials will fall apart within five minutes of scrutiny, and they’ll give it a lot longer than five.”

  There was a rumbling sound in the ground, and then a movement that they all felt. Computer terminals swayed from side to side. Cups of coffee sloshed.

  The power blinked off, and then on again. When it came back, the commlink through to the Solar Arm Aerospace Commission was gone.

  They’d lost their hot line.

  “Time to go,” Edel said. “I’m a meatless meal, and you’ve eaten me. I’m sorry, Ubra. There’s nothing more I can do to help you. And that’s bad, because you do need more.”