Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4)

by Ben Sheffield

  “You mean to tell me,” Ubra said, “that out of the millions of points of communication from Terrus, they've all stopped?”

  “Yes,” he sounded sarcastic. “I do mean to tell you that.”

  “I’m not calling you a liar. I believe it. It's insane, but I believe it.”

  “We suspect that there is some sort of electromagnetic interference happening now on Terrus.”

  “But there's non-electrical means of communication. Flares. Timed pulses of light. Rockets.”

  “Yes. This hypothesis explains some of Terrus's silence, but not all.”

  “Jesus,” Wake said. “Talk about out of the silent planet.”

  “And there's something else.”

  “What?”

  “A cloud.”

  “Can you get in on visuals? Project it holographically back here?”

  The pilot dutifully performed his task. There was a faint hiss of particles, an automatically sensed dimming of the light, and then the home world of mankind filled the center of the Dravidian.

  They stared at it.

  For Ubra, horror.

  For Zelity, indifference.

  For Nolund, vindication.

  For Wake, fate.

  Terrus was utterly transformed.

  The planet was now veiled beneath tenebrous gray cloud, so thick and suffocating that not a single trace of the land formations below could be seen. It hung in space like fused bulb, a thick and foggy intrusion into the vast map of stars.

  They'd been born on that world, raised on that world. But whatever the past had held, it was their home no longer.

  "My baby..." Ubra muttered. “Just what’s going on down there?”

  Wake shook his head. “Do we even want to find out?”

  They passed millions of kilometers from Terrus. The changing gravity and altered magnetosphere meant that it was too risky to chance a close transit.

  Which meant they had no chance to watch the destruction of mankind’s greatest treasure.

  Monuments are meant to take a passing thing, and carve it into eternity.

  The pyramids of Egypt lasted thousands, of years after the Egyptian dynasties that had built them were mummified and sealed away, in eerie prescience of Black Shift.

  The engraved golden record on Voyager-1, silently moving away like a capsule of the species, filled with music, imagery, and art.

  The flag of the United States, waving on Selene even after the United States was extinguished in World War III. It had been put inside a vacuum sealed bubble, so that the air now filling Selene wouldn't cause it to decay. It would stay there for millions of years.

  But these monuments have an ugly catch 22.

  They can preserve a piece of the past, but there's no way to preserve the culture that is necessary to understand it.

  The Pyramids make no sense except in light of the divine godhood of the pharaohs. Without them, they are piles of precisely-cut stone. The plate on Voyager 1 would make no sense to an alien species that fails to recognise anything carbon as being a form of life. The Flag of the United States only has power when the United States exist – otherwise, it’s just stars and stripes.

  They preserve only the very shallowest part of a vast semiotic iceberg.

  The only immortality is found in the immortality of a culture, of the shared understanding when people march the same path to the same goals.

  Ultimately, the most enduring monuments are the things that were never intended as such in the first place.

  In the year 1998, the International Space Station was launched.

  It was both a fantastic feat of engineering, and a stirring symbol of international unity. Like a Statue of Liberty woven from palladium and titanium.

  The project was worked on by various governments, each engineering its own strengths into the hard aluminum chassis. It was thought that this could be a sign pointing towards the future. A future where the invisible national borders ceased to exist, becoming the least meaningful of mankind's barriers.

  The space station was made antiquated, a Model T Ford in a V1 supercar world, and soon it was left up there. A junked tin shell that somehow mankind's hopes had once ridden in.

  Yet as the Solar Arm formed, it remained an icon, far larger than its place in history.

  Steps were taken to preserve it.

  Every year, countless tiny micrometer sized dust particles slammed into it, the last leftovers of the dust storm that had birthed the planets of the solar system. The effect was corrosive, like sandpaper, and over many decades the ISS would have broken apart. Probe droids were engineered that would crawl over the surface of the ISS. Buffing it, repairing it, and reinforcing it where it seemed ready to fail.

  Soon, mankind spread from Earth to Mars, Venus and Titan, and the quaint little flying object up in the sky went from being a worldwide icon to a worldswide icon.

  People loved it. It was the topic of films innumerable, songs uncountable. When the first currency of the Solar Arm was issued, the digital ducat, the floating shell of the ISS was used as its symbol.

  Religions formed that worshipped it.

  A few starry-eyed believers even married it.

  It wasn't just an out of date spacecraft, repaired at the expense of millions of ducats a year. It was humanity.

  It was hoped that it would orbit for a few hundred years more before it finally succumbed to the cosmic tide of destruction. If no other method was found to preserve it before then, they would let it descend through the planet's atmosphere, burning away.

  It was mankind. And like mankind, it was destined someday to pass from the world.

  But it would fight. It would dare. It would try.

  If a space traveller had been inside the ISS, he would have seen an incredible sight on the planet's surface over the past few days and weeks.

  The volcanoes erupting, splashing firestreaks of red over entire continents. The earthquakes radically altering the position of cities and entire nations. The tidal waves, so huge that they could be seen rolling across the globe from space.

  All of it was to the damnation of man.

  It was impossible to state or describe the scope of the damage. Billions were presumed dead. Nobody was counting, and nobody cared. There were nightmarish stories of human cannibalism on half-submerged Japan, and people waking up in Puerto Vallarta to see hundreds of thousands of bodies washing ashore like human logs.

  Occasionally, the earth split into fissures, hundreds of kilometers across – seemingly with no regard to where the geographical fault lines stood. As magma surged forth from the sundering rock, a massive pulsing sound was heard on the ground, at nearly deafening volumes. Some went mad listening to it. They said it was like a song.

  The devastation was colossal. It made the recently ended civil war look like the apex of civilized modernity.

  But there was something worse going on than the mother of freak weather events.

  Communication towers started to fail. The Global Positioning System began to give inaccurate predictions. Civil aircraft radars were going awry. This was unusual. Cities rose and cities fell, and that was predictable. But now the solid foundationing facts of Terrus was in doubt. It was as if everyone had woken up to discover that Pi was 3.145.

  Then, clouds spread out, covering the globe.

  Terrus went from a blue-white marble to an inscrutable crystal ball of cloud.

  All communications failed from inside the planet.

  The remaining space stations in orbit tried in vain to contact their bases. Selene tried to probe beneath the cloud with its advanced radar batteries.

  But there was nothing.

  The gravity of Terrus was changing, waxing and waning. ISS was knocked asunder from its well-traced orbit, sucked into the planet.

  It broke apart in the upper atmosphere, disintegrating in the cloud.

  After one and a half centuries in orbit, humanity’s beacon to the stars had fallen.

  Valashabad, Mars – June 30,
2143, 0800

  The Dravidian entered the Martian gravity well, and antimatter breaked to non-relativistic speeds.

  Valashabad beckoned.

  Raya Yithdras had received the communique from Wake. Honestly, the fiasco didn’t completely take her by surprise. There had been a long period of silence, quite unusual, and she suspected that Nolund Esper and Saldeen Zana would have some bad news to report.

  When she listened to the recording, she was filled with rage. She'd kept her emotions under tight control all her life, but now she couldn't. Anger burst through her inner defenses and walls, overwhelming her.

  She had sent eight Sons of the Vanitar to Venus, along with fifteen Razormen. They were apprehending a man who didn't even know they were coming.

  Somehow, all of them were dead except two.

  With her regime struggling to retain hold over its colonies, and an unprecedented crisis effectively removing Terrus from the map, it was a palpable blow. Countless valuable allies and military assets had been lost.

  And now…the man responsible for it all was delivering himself to her.

  She had never met Andrei Kazmer before, or even seen him beyond Sybar's ill-fated attempt to secure peace.

  In the last days of Sarkoth Amnon's prime ministership, she and Emil Gokla had shared a congratulatory conversation when it seemed like Caitanya-9 was returning to the solar system. All their dreams, realised at a stroke.

  Was it too much to hope that this was still an option on the table?

  She knew from Kazmer's psych profile how unpredictable and dangerous he was. If he'd been manipulated in the wrong direction by his masters on Terrus, whoever they were, then perhaps he'd been pushed into her arms.

  Perhaps it was all a ruse, as she'd suspected. Maybe he wasn't a god. But she would know, in time.

  I have so many questions to ask you, Kazmer, she thought when she received word that the Dravidian was getting ready to land. And if you think you're answering them on your own terms, you are mistaken.

  Once the radiation had dissapated to a safe level, she met them on the tarmac.

  She was alone. No guards. No sign of anyone covering them with sniper rifles. A charming show of solidarity and trust.

  Of course, if he made a false move, the Dravidian would be instantly destroyed. True strength is always invisible.

  Andrei Kazmer stepped down the platform, dwarfed by the craft. With him was a woman that she didn't recognise, and the Razorman titled B-31.

  B-31 had taken his mask off. Odd. They were not supposed to do that.

  “Prime Minister Raya Yithdras, one presumes?” Wake asked.

  She nodded. “I received your message. There is much to talk about. You will be quartered at the Valashabad palace until we decide what turn this is to take.”

  “Thank you.”

  She cast a glance up the stairway, looking for a fourth person. “Where is Nolund Esper?”

  “You have my regrets,” Wake said. “He was badly injured in an accident. He did not survive.”

  There was the ghost of a smirk on his face.

  From there, a whirlwind of events.

  That evening, Wake and Raya dined together in the ballroom. B-31 stood guard by the door.

  He had washed, and showered, and was wearing silk loafers and a well-tailored shirt. It felt odd and opulent, and he didn't like how his clothes restricted his ability to move. Why were shirts made? To restrict one's ability to fight?

  “So, what do you want?” She asked.

  “I want to be a Son of the Vanitar,” he said.

  She stared at him, and stared at the food on her fork, as if noticing both of them for the first time.

  “That is...” she had to struggle for words. “An odd request.”

  “I know,” he said. “Normally one does not request admission to secret societies. If you can do that, they're not really secret, are they? I understand you normally choose the people to join. I want you to make an exception in my case. I want to join you. I've learned more about you, and what your goals are, and I find myself surprisingly in agreement with them. Please, make me one of you.”

  She couldn't think of what to say. She poured herself more wine.

  “What do you know about Terrus?” she said.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Nobody can contact anyone on the planet. No signals in, no signals out. Every time a spacecraft lands there, we never hear from them again.”

  “Were you able to retrieve the three civilians from Neo Los Angeles?” Wake's tone turned curt. “As you recall, that was a critical term for me coming here.”

  Raya shook her head. “You misunderstand the situation. It's impossible to get down there and get out. As soon as a craft passes down through the cloud canopy, that's the last we see of them. It's like there's a filter. A bubble. And it only allows admission one way. I am sorry if these civilians are friends of yours, but we cannot contact them, or even determine that they're still alive.”

  Wake was disappointed. “It is of small concern. They are companions of Ubra Zolot, not mine.”

  “And the baby is yours, I believe?” Raya asked.

  He restrained himself from showing any reaction. “Who told you this?”

  “We have a contact on Terrus who helped us join the dots between Ubra and yourself. A cryptologist called Moritz Edel. He was able to retrieve classified government files written by one Vadim Gokla, alleging that you are the father of the child.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m the father of Yalin. But let us set that aside for a moment, and talk about Terrus. I have initiated the Wipe on Terrus. You know what this means. Unless some factor means the process is aborted, a gamma ray burst will be released throughout the solar system, destroying everything.”

  “I can see why you are not concerned for the welfare of the child,” she said. “Against this, what fate is any of our lives?”

  “It's quite pointless, isn't it?” he agreed as she poured him more wine. “You struggle and struggle, and eventually you're swept away anyway, wishing you'd just given up at the start and saved yourself the misery. I'm not just talking about myself, I'm talking about mankind. What the hell are we fighting for? There's no way out of this box in the end. I've had enough of suffering, and I've had enough of seeing suffering. I just want to do two things: end it all, and enjoy myself as much as possible while I wait.”

  She giggled, her face flushing. “You mentioned that some factor might stop the Wipe. Please tell me more.”

  “I am just a man who inadvertently became the guardian of a planetary destruction device by killing the old guardian,” he said. “I did not create any of this, I only oversee it. But I know that if I die, control will pass to someone else, and that person.”

  “Ah,” she said. “So, if I kill you...I would control it?”

  “You do not want to do that,” he told her. “Eternal, unnatural life – that would be your fate. I am vulnerable, but I do not age. I will still be here, trapped in a universe of suffering, for millions of years. The Vanitar I encountered beneath Caitanya-9's surface positively begged me to destroy it, and free it from the crushing weight of its own existence. I will adopt this duty, if you will keep me alive. Killing me would cause you to inherit a fate beyond horror.”

  Raya's eyes were all over him now. “You're an incredible man, Andrei Kazmer. Or do you prefer Aaron Wake?”

  “I am but a humble guest, and you may call me what you want.”

  “So, to repeat, you are submitting yourself to my care and custody.”

  “Yes. If you do this, I will give you what you want.”

  “What do you know about what I want?”

  “An end?”

  “Also, a finish.”

  He nodded. “I think we understand each other.”

  She giggled drunkenly, and turned to Yen Zelity. “B-31, close the door. No more appointments for the rest of the night.”

  The Razorman turned his head and regarded her with dis
dain. “I have a name.”

  “What's he talking about?” she asked Wake. She was already unbuttoning her blouse, exposing her plunging neckline.

  “He rediscovered himself on Venus,” Wake said, tearing open his own shirt. He was glad to be free of it. “With my help, of course. Take that as proof of my godhood, if you like.”

  “Oh, I will need much more proof yet,” she laughed.

  She pulled the tablecloth from the table, and they fucked like the world was ending.

  Half an hour later, there was only the sound of Raya's heavy breathing in the room.

  “Andrei...?” she asked. His arm was wrapped around her naked upper body.

  “What?”

  She seemed to be getting up the courage to talk. Finally, in a tone she had to strain to hear, “...do you think I'm too fat?”

  He almost doomed himself by laughing.

  He probably didn’t have his arm wrapped around the worst person in the solar system, but surely he was close.

  She'd massacred millions of peaceful soldiers, based on an event she'd known was a false alarm. She'd taken a handful of harmless refugees, hoping to escape a doomed world, and had brutally transformed them into elite assassins, gouging their souls to shreds in the process. She'd stolen Vante's blood from his body, emptying him out like a vial. She was using every single atom of her power to make the solar system a worse place. And she was succeeding. She'd killed the man who had mentored her. You could start digging in her atrocities and never stop.

  And yet…

  Do you think I'm too fat?

  “You won't be too fat, when the Wipe comes,” he said. “It will annihilate us all, fat or thin. I will survive. It is my curse. I must oversee the Vanitar's creation for eternity, sparing sentient creatures everywhere the pain of existence, unless I'm killed first by someone else.”

  What man could want more than to stick his cock into pure evil? He thought, and yawned. He felt no sexual desire, not for her or anyone else.

  But he knew what things he had to do to protect his own life.

  And protect Zelity's life, and Ubra's life, and perhaps even Yalin's life.