Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4)

by Ben Sheffield

  When it passed underneath she felt it as a thunderous change in air pressure that popped her ears and hurled her even higher in a white-flecked spray. She went badly off course, the gust of wind pulling her sideways, and she saw the descending side of the tidal wave.

  Her mind had no reference point for billions of tons of water.

  The coruscating blue-black mass covering the earth registered only as some sort of optical illusion. Her eyes crossed as she focused in on it, only half aware of her wings flapping madly, trying to regain altitude, or at least stability.

  She screamed as she felt solid water touch her face.

  Her wings were instantly bedraggled and waterlogged. She would not be able to fly. She beat them gamely in the rushing water even as it threatened to suck her down, burying her in rips so strong that a whale would be torn apart.

  Saltwater filled her lungs, and the scream choked out.

  What...?

  She blinked in the sun.

  She sat in front of a rock, on a high point of ground. All around her, sludge-thick water was flowing. She was in an isolated outcrop in the swell. A few meters higher and it would have drowned her.

  She wasn't quite sure she hadn't drowned.

  She had a splitting headache. Her body was covered in bruises and scrapes. There was a foul taste in her mouth.

  She coughed and spluttered, staggering upright.

  She tried to flap one of the Vyres on the back, and it responded only weakly.

  It was crumpled and damaged by her impact. She would need to have it repaired, and as she was the only person on this planet that she could see, that meant it would not be repaired.

  It would never fly again, and neither would she.

  The raging tidal wave must have thrown her onto this outcrop, she thought, checking out the landscape around her.

  She seemed to be at the foot of what had once been called the San Gabriel mountains. Looming far to the easy was the imposing bulk of Arrakhia.

  Or what she thought was Arrakhia.

  It had changed somehow. The mountain she remembered – seen briefly on a train coming into the facility, and only slightly longer when she'd left it, gun in hand, eyes only focused on killing the man who'd hurt her baby – was an inscrutable peak, cleaving the sky like a fang. It was tall, and slightly more regular than most mountains, but it was still fundamnetally something shaped by nature.

  This one had steps.

  All up its height was a stepped terrace effect, and as she studied it, she realised they spiralled around the mountain peak.

  It was like a pyramid.

  She remembered the time she'd woken up on Caitanya-9, and seen a ziggurat that had appeared out of nowhere. Around and around she'd walked, and at the top, she'd found Wake.

  At the time, he'd given them water, and allowed them to survive.

  Perhaps she'd find the answer on the top of this pyramid, too.

  She waited long hours before the water quietened enough for to be safe to swim across the gulf separating her little landing from the pyramid. The thudding pulse running through the ground was inescapably loud.

  Her wings served an unexpected new use as she swam. They buoyed her up. As she got to the other side, she tore them out of her spine and discarded them.

  She now had nothing else but the rags of her clothes. No technology, no weapons, no friends, and no hope.

  But she started walking up the pyramid.

  When one has nothing left, that is when one puts their faith in God.

  The pyramid on Caitanya-9 had taken her a matter of minutes to climb.

  Arrakhia Mountain was far higher. This one took her most of the day.

  Almost immediately, she was parched with thirst. The salt-water taste in her mouth was only deepened by the fact that her saliva glands had nothing to wash it out with.

  Why didn't I at least save a bottle of water from my field gear? She thought, panting. Even her eyes now seemed to be drying out. I would have still made it to safety. And I'd have something to fucking drink.

  She started to feel like she wouldn't even make it to the top.

  The first time she fell over, she persuaded herself that it was because she had tripped on an errant rock.

  The second time, she persuaded herself that it was the pulse running through the ground. Hard to make your footsteps fall in a coherent rhythm when there was a jackhammer attacking the soles of your boots.

  The third time, she admitted that it was because of critical dehydration.

  Her mile-eating soldier's stride became a sedate walk, then a drunken sway, then a struggle just to put one foot in another.

  She plodded on in a daze, hardly aware that she was going in the right direction. At one point, she nearly forgot to turn as she reached the edge of the pyramid and almost plunged off the side.

  How far am I from the top?

  She didn't know, couldn't know, and didn't want to know.

  The fact was, if it was even ten meters up, she wouldn't have the willpower to keep going.

  Pace...pace...pace...

  At first her footsteps were faster than the pulse that matched them on the other side, then slower, and then much slower. Where her human body weakened and then failed, the awesomely perfect and inhuman force animating Terrus was deathless and immortal. It would stride across the cosmos in a wave of gamma ray sparks, purging all life wherever it found it, and she would die. At the end of the day, all of her struggles would have been for nothing. As irrelevant and pointless as nonsense scrawled on a blackboard set against e mc 2. When the curtain closed on her race and the universe, she and Raya Yithdras had contributed the same net amount to the species survival.

  She fell down again, and wanted to cry. But she had nothing in her tear glands.

  Not even any water, now.

  Fate was whittling her away to zero. She realized that if she found Yalin right in front of her, she would die in her baby's arms, not the other way around.

  It's so pointless. She put one hand in front of another, hardly aware of the fact that she was still creeping forward.

  Then she reached another turn, and went around it.

  And there were no more turns left to make.

  She was at the apex of the pyramid, staring down from several kilometers up on a sea of water and purple rock. It churned and thundered, stirring in reciprocity with the endless storm clouds boiling overhead.

  There was a man standing before her. Her glazed-over eyes regarded his bare feet, then travelled upwards.

  As a human, he’d been an overweight middle-aged man. Unprepossessing. Unintimidating.

  But now, he had a massiveness to him. The density of a nuclear reactor undergoing critical mass.

  And he had purple skin.

  Some part of her brain recognized the figure before her, and cried out.

  He was on the space station, before things went truly bad. He’d imprisoned Wake. And I set myself against him.

  Sarkoth Amnon looked down on her, not saying anything, just waiting for her to speak.

  “Save me,” she croaked, and instantly everything changed.

  A mental earthquake rippled outwards, its epicenter in her head, and she screamed. The stars and clouds convened overhead, the life force of worlds beyond worlds flowed into her veins.

  Instantly, she understood.

  How many times had this happened? How many times would this happen?

  Sarkoth had obliterated Caitanya-9 with a missile – in doing so, he’d slain the guardian. The physical manifestation of Wake.

  The planet was gone, but it would be replaced. Terrus was the new site of the Wipe.

  The pulsating ground was vibrating hard enough to lift rocks and pebbles into the air. It coruscated through ever bone and fiber of her being.

  Counting down to the end.

  Sarkoth Amnon touched her shoulder, and the loop of history started to rewind.

  She was pulled back into the past, aeons ago, her mind circumnavigatin
g a narrowing gyre into the times before man.

  And she saw how it had ended, and would end again. The great inevitability of death, hanging over the universe like a stench. The planets were like rotting eyes hanging in the sky, bloated and distended, watching dead worlds fester. The star ways were open and running sewers. Look to the heavens above and witness an endless panorama of a graveyard, aphotic decay spreading out in all directions.

  The Vanitar had arisen countless ages ago.

  Perhaps at the start, they had been not unlike mankind. Optimistic, and hopeful. They had emerged on a world, and their hands had fashioned tools that made them masters of the world. Why would this pattern not hold true to the very end? Surely, it was only a matter of time until they had tools that would subdue the stars beyond, then the galaxies beyond, and finally all of reality.

  But they grew stronger and wiser, and each step up the ladder brought them closer to their own doom. Existential horror crushed them. Despair at the millions of souls lost to secure their reach among the stars. And finally, the understanding that mere existence was just suffering counted and measured.

  “They did not destroy themselves,” Sarkoth Amnon spoke into her head, “we were wrong to think that. They merely froze themselves. Suspended themselves. A high-level version of Black Shift. They locked themselves away from in a plane of reality higher than this one, trusting that one day the universe would be safe to exist in once more.”

  They left one of their number alive to destroy all civilizations that sought to replace them. And to continue a search for a way past the trap.

  A way to end all suffering.

  Once this was achieved, the last conscious Vanitar would obliterate the planet, reviving its long-frozen brethren from cosmic subatomic sleep.

  If the guardian was slain, then its killer would inherit the ghastly world of Caitanya-9 and the powers inside.

  In the ages since, the surviving Vanitar had been met by failure upon failure. It could not puzzle out a way to escape the entropic bonds that damned all matter. Meanwhile, a new sentient species was beginning to spread across the galaxy.

  Humans.

  It had initiated a Wipe, a gamma ray burst that would purge that section of the galaxy. Unfortunately, through the combined activities of Andrei Kazmer, Sarkoth Amnon, and Kymmure Mykor, it was thwarted, and slain. And Kazmer had unwittingly picked up its mantle.

  When the antimatter warhead had obliterated Kazmer, the guardianship had transferred itself onto the dying body of Sarkoth Amnon, moments before he bled out from an assassin’s attack. He’d been transported back to the planet…

  …But there was no planet left.

  The signal had been thrown that it was safe for the Vanitar to return, to cross on ectopic chariots the gulfs of subatomic reality back to the physical universe.

  What they’d find dismayed them.

  They’d been tricked, and led back to a universe still brimming over with misery and anguish. Their long-awaited salvation was a falsehood. A lie to end worlds.

  “What are they going to do now?” Ubra asked. Stormclouds thundered overhead.

  “Punish us,” Sarkoth said.

  And then the ground imploded beneath them.

  They descended right through convulsing kilometers of slate, falling until they were inside a cryptlike hollow deep within the bowels of the mountain.

  There were millions of insectile eyes swiveling on stalks, all of them looking at her.

  Ubra lost all awareness of her body as she saw the Vanitar for the first time. They had no shape. They were beyond shape. Razor sharp spiral patterns scoured gray luminescent flesh, vast conical organisms with tentacles that birthed still more batches of tentacles, pendulous bladders oozing a sluggish discharge of viscous black mucus, twisting and knotting cilia and flagella, pulsating with a rhythmic light that was not of this universe.

  They were all tongues, all eyes, all organs, all sensation. Aberrant assaults on the senses, rendering psychoplasmic carnage. Their disgusting physiognomies obliterated vision, hearing, smell, and every other instrument of analysis Ubra could bring to bear on them. They were impossible to categorize or even think about. They among all creatures would have sought to purge the universe from pain.

  She drifted amongst them, her body as weightless as it had been under Wake's unknowable touch.

  “So deep is their anger that there is only one fitting fate for humanity,” Sarkoth said. “Life. The Wipe will not be released. They will retreat to the world beyond this one, and the suffering will not end.”

  And then she saw the people.

  They drifted with her, spores in the storm that included her life.

  They were cold, pale, and dead. Untombed corpses, regarded by an infinity of alien eyes.

  A nondescript male in his thirties. A genehacked woman, with enormous breasts and buttocks. These two, she couldn't recognise.

  There were a few soldiers who had fought with her on Caitanya-9. The Defiant, finally in a place where they could defy no longer. Many of them were destroyed, and remade. They had become the Razormen, elite assassins of Raya Yithdras, items of the state which were simultaneously immensely valuable and utterly disposable.

  There were a pair of men that she recognized as scientists from on board the Konotouri.

  Zane Golestani. Omai Nyphur. Numbered as two of the tragedy's very first victims.

  Why are these people here? She wondered. Why am I seeing them?

  She wished she would wake one of them, and ask. But they ashen flesh was pale and clammy, and no pulse animated their veins.

  All of them were dead.

  Then she saw her baby.

  Yalin was drifting among them, an infant template of these adult human beings. Her baby girl, brought into the world in desperate circumstances.

  She tried to cry and scream, but no sound would leave her mouth.

  She embraced the cold stone that had been her baby, pressing kisses to Yalin's face and cheeks, her insides burning to ash as her lips touched icy coldness.

  She's dead. She's dead.

  I'm sorry I wasn't here, she thought. Please, come back to me. Just so I can apologise, just so I can explain.

  "I am sorry, Ubra," Sarkoth said.

  "Bring her back," she snarled. "Bring them all back. They're innocents. They didn't deserve this."

  "I can't," Sarkoth said, gesturing around him at the glimmering eyes, the throbbing nodes of tentacles. "Only they can. I am but their guardian. And they regard us with vast hatred and loathing. But these ones are special. These ones are different. They have bear the mark of the Vanitar, and they have been chosen to escape the universe, living with the Vanitar in perfect, eternal sleep."

  In the pain clouding her head, a thought spiked through. So brilliant and clear that she couldn't ignore it.

  "Where's Zelity?"

  "I do not understand."

  "I know why these people are here. These are the ones who have been reborn through the Vanitar polyfleshing. The Vanitar know them as their own, and they are taking them away."

  "It is so," he said.

  "But Zelity was slain and reborn also," she said. "And he isn't here."

  "Zelity is still alive," Sarkoth told her. "Only the dead partake in this release."

  Clutching her baby close, she suddenly noticed her own skin.

  How pale it was, and how her fingers were growing mottled gray at the tips.

  Then, finally, she understood.

  "I am sorry, Ubra," Sarkoth said. "You have passed on, into a world that is not your own. You did not survive."

  Mars – September 28, 2143, 1200

  One moment, Wake was asleep.

  The next, he was awoken with guns to his head.

  “Get the fuck up,” a woman’s voice said. The same voice he’d heard vocalize orgasms in his ear the night before.

  He felt leather gloves grip his limbs, and haul him from the soft sheets.

  He staggered, blinking back confusion, uns
ure of what was happening.

  Raya Yithdras was there, as was Yen Zelity and many of her guards.

  In the background stood Ryush Narya, who looked like he was trying to blend in with the potted plants.

  “Traitor,” breathed Raya. “Mendacious bastard. Come. Get dressed, and then we’re going to the dungeons.”

  “What’s going on?” he said, picking up clothes from the floor. He struggled to think with a brain that felt like soggy cotton.

  “You helped that bitch escape. I just received word that an emergency clearance was granted for a Dravidian shuttle bound for Terrus, with her on it. I haven’t done that, and neither would have Governor Narya or any of my court.”

  “I didn’t do it,” he said. “And why did you just use the word escape? We’re not prisoners. We’re your honored guests.”

  She picked up a glass ornament from the bedside and struck him with it. His head snapped to the side, and when he touched a hand to the explosion of pain his fingers had blood on it.

  “Interesting that you bleed,” Raya said. “If I had even slightly less certainty that you weren’t a god, I would order your death right now. As of now, we go below.”

  “Do as she says, Andrei,” Ryush said, sadly. “You might have known this was coming.”

  They all rode one of the pneumatic capsules to the very bottom level of Valashabad Palace, and stepped off into a pristine white vestibule.

  Beyond were countless rooms, surrounded in dark.

  Zelity was shaking slightly as his feet crossed the impossibly clean threshold.

  Raya saw this and giggled. “This upsets you, doesn’t it, B-31? This is where I trained you. Where I reprogrammed you. Remember the electric shocks applied to your teeth?”

  Zelity shook his head. “I remember nothing at all.”

  His hands still shook.

  They passed through from one room to another. There was a stink of misery and pain coming from these rooms, something amplified by their inhuman cleanliness. This was the one place in the palace you never wanted to visit.

  The prison floor.

  In the shadows, polished and embossed surfaces gleamed. Light would reveal restraint and torture equipment. Wake was in no hurry for there to be light.