Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4)

by Ben Sheffield

  I don’t even care if this is a trap. I’m in hell. Nothing they have in store for me could be worse than this.

  She was hustled out of the palace, through the chilled wind-swept streets of the half-deserted planet, onto the tarmac, into a Dravidian. The first spacecraft to leave Mars in many weeks.

  A feeling of relief swept over her as soon as she left the ground, as though her connection to the soil of Mars was a circuit of anxiety. As she watched the ocher red planet recede in her hindmost monitors, she could put that feeling to words.

  I'm free.

  But it was a dark sort of freedom. A freedom to have hope fail, a freedom to die.

  There was such a little chance that she'd find anyone or anything on Terrus. And there would be no way back.

  She blew the vanishing planet a kiss.

  She was alone on the shuttle. In the past, it would have been extremely risky to attempt a landing on Terrus on full autopilot. The space lanes would be full of traffic. There were storms to negotiate, and only a few limited places to land.

  Now, it would be even more dangerous, but for different reasons.

  The third world from the sun was now a purple monstrosity, every bit the aberration that Caitanya-9 had been.

  And inside it, a number counted down. Perhaps a few days now, perhaps a week.

  She had packed enough supplies to hold her for the course of that week. Everything that happened afterwards belonged to the unknown.

  I didn't say goodbye to Andrei Kazmer, she thought, clutching her knees in the brace position and rocking back and forth. She couldn’t figure out whether this was a good thing or not.

  Whatever water had passed under the bridge, it was strange that their relationship would end on such an inconclusive note.

  The transit lasted for intolerably long hours. She consulted the on-board computers multiple times a minute, and then virtually every couple of seconds.

  Every time hoping that a miracle would have occurred and the ETA 3:00HR ticker would magically unspool down to zero.

  She was travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, and it still wasn't fast enough.

  She thought of sending a message back to Zelity on Mars. They might have been her final words, but she couldn't think of a single thing to say.

  The ship slowed, breaking on a thin cushion of controlled antimatter reactions. The feeling twisted her stomach, though not nearly as much as anxiety and anticipation did.

  She checked and double checked her kit.

  Zelity had fitted her out well. Clothing, both for climates cool and warm. A dune buggy. Guns and ammunition. Field kit. Flares. Messaging and range finding devices. All of it stored inside an Adagio shuttle.

  He'd set the landing zone as the intersect of what had been south California and Arrakhia Mountain. She would see if anything remained of the city, and then head north.

  She had a continent to explore, but she had a hunch that Rose, Yves, and Yalin wouldn't have gone far, if they’d survived.

  That's the good thing about babies. They tend to stay where you leave them.

  Soon the braking sensation was matched and then overpowered by the pull of a large celestial object.

  Terrus lay ahead.

  She sat in the control module of the Adagio. Just a few months ago, she'd been in the cockpit of one as a genetically engineered dinosaur rammed through the plexiglass with its beak. She wished she could go back to then.

  Less fear, by far.

  In a sense, the landing would be simplicity itself. The Dravidian would slide open the bay doors, and gravity plus the Coriolis effect would send the smaller Adagio sliding out. Parachutes would deploy, aerobraking her, and the Adagio's retro jets would guide her flight on the way down.

  The Dravidian would then gain altitude once again, loop around the planet, and slingshot back to Mars on full autopilot.

  Without her.

  But in a sense, it would be extremely risky, full of unknown variables. Whatever had happened to the planet, it was a far different one to the gentle world that had birthed mankind. The gravity was different, and nobody had yet determined by how much. The calculations for the deployment times and speeds were full of guesswork and assumptions.

  Not the kind of assumptions that make an ASS out of U and ME, she thought. The kind that turn you into high-velocity toothpaste as you crash into a mountainside.

  But there was no other way.

  She closed her eyes as she felt the Dravidian vibrate as the bay doors gaped open. She was several kilometers in the air, in what would have been the planet's outer ionosphere, and she would have to endure a long period of virtual freefall in a metal coffin.

  Then, she was sliding out.

  She still couldn't stand to look. She tightened her core, still slightly weak from recent pregnancy, as massive forces were exerted on her body.

  Outside was the first air of the planet.

  The planet. The one they'd destroyed. The one that had come back, like a demon broken free from a Tartarean pit.

  Falling.

  The World Once Called Terrus – September 28, 2143, 0800

  Immediately, things started going wrong.

  Plunging through the upper clouds, she heard an alarm clang next to her head.

  She knew what that one was. She was drifting off her projected course.

  Why? Who knew. Unexpected turbulence. The fact that all the numbers and calculations for this trip were pulled from a computer's sphincter without reference to reality.

  She would have to try and correct.

  She opened her eyes, wishing she had taken more time to get familiar with this particular unit's controls. She saw a digital rangefinder, a squawk box, several controls both electrical and manual.

  She found the side azipod thrusters, and fired them.

  Tongues of flame lit up one side of the glass cockpit, and a sideways jolt slewed her sideways.

  If left to her devices, she would hit more than three kilometers west of her projected landing zone. It was a lost cause to correct at this point, but she could hopefully stop herself from falling even further afield, such as in the ocean.

  Adagios were good for many things, but they did not allow you to break the laws of physics. As she thundered downwards, the wail piercing through the rivets growing louder as the air grew denser, she realised she probably would not have any control at all. The craft's downwards velocity was too great.

  She looked out across the landscape. Her gear said seven kilometers up, but who knew where she really was.

  The world was forever changed. Looking at photos of Terrus, this was easy to see but hard to process. It looked like a giant purple marble. Just something for academic discussion.

  As she plunged down, it hit her like a gut punch just what had happened.

  This was the world where almost everything the human race had ever done had been achieved. Flint tools, pottery, agriculture, horses, cannons, cathedrals. Flight in the air, and then flight without. Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Gauss, Tesla, Darwin, Einstein, Watson, Gokla.

  All of them had lived here.

  And now it was gone.

  The landscape was a granite giant's skin, admitting no sensation other than utter hardness, no color except opulent purple. The rolling hills of veined feldspar, underneath an oppressive layer of stormclouds...this was their planet now.

  There was so much to take in, and so little time. Every second, she noticed some new detail, and then had it taken away by a sudden jolt from the craft, or the diminishing field of view.

  There was a whoosh, and then the yank of massive backforce.

  Parachutes deployed.

  She scanned the ground, panic mounting as her speed slowed.

  Where was everything?

  She wasn't naïve about what had happened. The weather events alone would have been enough to destroy most of human civilization.

  But there wasn't even a single trace that humankind had ever lived here.


  She should have been able to seen debris and detritus. The remains of old roads. Skyscrapers swept away by waves twice their height.

  This was like a virgin planet that had never been inhabited at all.

  She checked her map, trying to focus on a screen that juddered and blinked as the parachutes twisted the interior of the Adagio. The piercing squall of the sirens made thinking or focusing nearly impossible.

  Yes, she was still in a place that was recognizably southern California.

  North, she saw the mountain ranges. Somewhere, there was Arrakhia Mountain, and the facility it had held.

  This was the same place.

  And yet nothing would ever be the same again.

  Fwoooooooo!!!!

  The main retro jets fired.

  There was a lifting sensation, and the descent became placid, almost manageable.

  She had time to see things on the ground. Particles of dust blown by the incredibly strong winds. Recent fault lines engraved in the rock. Everywhere, wreckage, and still not a trace of mankind.

  She touched the ground with a thud that almost made her bite off her own tongue with its force.

  She popped open the cupola, feeling the wind against her shaven head, drying tears.

  She felt the pulse of the planet right through her body. It seemed to bypass her

  She looked to all four compass directions.

  Rolling hills of indistinguishable purple rock spread out in every direction.

  She had made a mistake.

  There was absolutely no chance at all that she would find her baby here.

  She unpacked her gear, and loaded it into the back of the dune buggy. One of the struts had popped loose, and she welded it back into place with a crude arc current from her suit.

  I'm going to die as I've lived, she thought, inspecting the shitty weld join on the cheap metal. Relying on gear provided by the cheapest bidder.

  With everything loaded and packed, she started trundling across the ground to Los Neo Angeles.

  Or at least the place that, millions or billions of years ago, had held Los Neo Angeles.

  The wind blew, her only companion as she journeyed further into this endless purple desert.

  Several hours travelling south, across ground so bumpy that soon her ass was sore. She could have crossed it in minutes in a maglev train. But there was no train here, and just as well, because there was no maglev track to run one, either.

  Had there been one here once, though? Hard to believe, but both her instincts and her positioning equipment told her that she was in the exact same place as the Los Neo Angeles rail line.

  When her buttocks were too sore to continue, she stopped. Had a bite to eat, and a drink of water.

  She still kept casting her gaze southwards, as if the fabled city would suddenly materialize out of the haze like a mirage.

  Los Neo Angeles.

  What fucking dumbass had called it the New City of Angels?

  As a young girl, Ubra had learned a bit of programming.

  Her teacher had impressed in her that it was a bad idea to call any bit of code final, or complete, or latest. What we think is the last is usually not the last, and you end up with fifty thousand scraps of code entitled super ultra final complete I MEAN IT THIS TIME, superseded three years ago.

  When Los Angeles had been rebuilt, its civic planners had been gripped by a similar disease of hubris. They'd actually thought that the city would last.

  That it would stand forever.

  She had to keep moving.

  The endless wailing wind was combining with the rhythmic pulse to drive her insane, chasing squalls over four equidistant horizons. And she was at the center, like a piece of fluff being blown by them.

  The weary cycling of her cheap dune buggy was a blessed relief to break the silence.

  Hours later still, it was nightfall.

  Ubra started to panic as she searched her supplies, thinking that Zelity hadn't given her any source of light.

  Finally, she found a torch. Old fashioned, with a lithium battery.

  Damn it, she thought, maybe I should give Raya Yithdras more credit. Whatever she did to Zelity, he's almost too perfect.

  The old Zelity would have forgotten to pack lights.

  She strapped it to the handlebars of the dune buggy, and continued chugging into the dark, the path ahead illuminated by a transient arc of light.

  But there was still nothing to see.

  No remains of old buildings. No relics of destruction. Just an empty space, excavated like a scoop out of the fabric of reality.

  Humanity had been excised, the way a surgeon cuts out a cancer.

  Soon, she gave up, and decided to sleep.

  Her maps told her that she was now in the heart of Neo Los Angeles. Last year, there had been buildings up to the sky here. Artificial lights blanketing the city. Glossy streets that turned into luminous LCD screens when night fell, flashing with each step you took on them.

  The only things that touched the light now were purple rocks.

  She unrolled a sleeping back, and laid it down next to the dune buggy so she could use the bottom edge of a tire as the pillow. Already, the goddamned thing was going flat. A few more hours driving and it would be down to the rims.

  Great. Fucking great. Nothing like a cheap ride.

  She was so anxious that she thought it would be impossible to sleep, and of course she was snoozing on the ground almost instantly.

  She had brief and fitful dreams, revolving around a few themes like cosmic mandalas. Andrei Kazmer and Aaron Wake – one mask holding two faces behind it. Yen Zelity, brutally treated but still loyal and heroic. Rosemary Rohilian – an average and perfectly nice person who she should never have bullied into caring for her daughter, both for Rose's and her daughters' sake.

  There were others. The Defiant, Emeth, Haledor, and Jagomir. Dead, all of them. Worse than dead, in some cases.

  But overlaid over it was a repetitive thumping sound, beating the air like an eviscerated heart.

  Bang...bang bang bang... bang...

  It grew louder, until the whole planet reverberated with it.

  Counting down.

  Always counting down.

  Even if you ignored it, even if you pretended that it wasn't there and you could safely go about your life, building for your future like a beaver, there was always a countdown. This one, just more literal than most.

  She drifted in and out of sleep.

  I need some Black Shift. At least I'd have less stuff in my head to bother me.

  A new day dawned, but that wasn't what caused her to wake.

  It was the loud rumbling, and the gale blowing against her face.

  She staggered upwards, instantly alert, adrenaline pumping through her veins.

  The steady, dolorous wind was replaced by an urgent high pitched keening that seemed to come over the horizon. And it was far stronger too – she had to hold on to the side of the dune buggy before she would.

  She fitted some optical enhancement goggles over her eyes, and stared in the direction of the sound.

  Strange...she thought, squinting and sharpening the focus. Yesterday, there was just purple rock, as far as I could see. But now there's something glittering on the horizon, miles and miles.

  She instantly realized what it was.

  And that she'd probably now die.

  Tidal wave.

  The planet would never be the same. It had inherited Caitanya-9's characteristics, down to every earthquake, every storm, every volcano.

  But where Caitanya-9 had only trace amounts of water – even Wake's unexpected miracle had been a drop in the not-an-ocean at the end of the day – water covered 75% of Terrus's surface. It existed in unfathomable quantities.

  And that meant that the devastating tidal pulling would cause devastating tidal other things.

  She had to go.

  She struggled to get her swag back on the dune buggy, and then gave up.

  I w
on't need a sleeping bag if I drown, she thought, hitting the ignition.

  The engine churned to life, woefully underpowered.

  She started moving across the landscape at top speed, aware that the rumbling at her back was becoming louder and louder, the wind more and more fierce.

  I'm fucked, aren't I? She thought desperately.

  The clouds tumbled overhead like knotted sheets of cloth, driven by windspeeds nearly as fast as the Dravidian that had scorched the skies overhead.

  The clouds would escape.

  But there would be no such exit route on the ground.

  She had a sudden thought.

  Do I have anything in that rucksack back there that I didn't notice?

  She throttled the engine and dismounted, running to the overloaded pile of gear on the back.

  Her hand reached through the mess, groping until it closed on something.

  A pair of Vyres.

  She had a moment of desperate mental wrestling, and she saw it.

  There was a racing wall of water, coming straight from her. It frothed and bubbled across the ground from horizon to horizon., rapidly building to a crest that seemed to be hundreds of meters high. It towered to the sky.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  She strapped the Vyres in, and started flying.

  There was no chance to save her supplies. All of her technology would be useless, all her food uneaten.

  At least there will be some remnants of human culture here, if anyone ever comes here to look.

  The heightened pulse still audible in her ears, even over the roar of the water.

  She made a straight line upwards, not looking down, just trying to minimize her frontal profile so that she traced as an efficient line directly to the sky as possible. The sky was safety. The ground was death.

  She hyperventilated as she felt spray start to wet the soles of her feet. With horrible speed, the water line reached her ankles, then her knees.

  I was an idiot to try and outrace the wave on a dune buggy.

  The gusts of wind rising up from the ground helped her, pushing her higher and higher even as the sound of crashing water reached a crescendo.