Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1)

by Ben Sheffield

  Two more flashes shot at them, the first whipping over Nyphur’s head, the second cutting through the handlebar he was gripping, as neat as an oxy-acetylene torch. He let it go, his hands stung by sudden heat. An inch closer and he would have lost fingers.

  The buggy whipped and turned, Nyphur attempting to lose their persuer. Golestani glanced behind.

  They hadn’t gained any speed on the attacking Sphere.

  We can’t escape. He thought. Even if that thing doesn’t blow us to pieces, the dune buggy will fail soon. His main concern was the lithium ion battery, and the engine it powered. The buggy wasn’t meant for performance. Already he felt the handling get rougher and rougher, the turns getting stiffer, the whirring of the engine becoming a throaty purr.

  They drove over the latest of an intermineable series of sand dunes, and suddenly the hard rubber tires bit down on rock.

  They’d arrived at a series of canyons.

  Purple veined rocks jutted and thrust through the ground, like fingers and thumbs of an entombed giant, clawing through the earth.

  The dune buggy sped around and between them, still followed by the liquid blur of metal.

  It fired. It missed, the white blast vaporizing a nearby column of rock.

  It only had to hit them once.

  They momentarily slowed down, Nyphur goosing the controls for another burst of speed on the flat. Then Golestani realized that the ground was shaking)

  “…and lost track of where we were...and when we were. We went right into the mouth of a double apposition event.”

  (“What the…?” Nyphur noticed it to.

  Pebbles were skipping madly up and down, or vibrating in place. Outcrops of rock were gently swaying, as though the giant within the earth had been animated to a ghastly kind of half life.

  Then, there was a cracking sound and an enormous split appeared in the ground, just a meter away from the buggy’s front wheel.

  Nyphur swore and yawed hard left as the chasm opened wider and wider. They felt a gust of stale air on their face, as a trapped reservoir of stale air from days or weeks ago was freed.

  The noise of the collapsing landscape filled the world and every inch of their minds.

  Speaking was unspeakable. Thinking was unthinkable. They even forgot about the glowing sphere chasing them.

  All around them, the hard rock was tumbling, or rising from the ground. Splits appeared everywhere, and previously made splits clove back together. Everything was plastic, everything firm and unmovable was now in dark flux, everything was happening in every direction at once.

  Nyphur furiously pushed the buggy through the rapidly dissolving canyon, swinging left and right, going up on two wheels to avoid craters, speeding past outcrops of rock even as they tumbled down.

  Golestani couldn’t bear to look at the ground before them, or the thing behind them.

  So he looked up at the sky, and screamed.

  The clouds had parted, and he saw the moons.

  There was Detsen, huge, a featureless black sphere filling nearly a quarter of the sky. Behind it, half the size, was Somnath.

  The two moons were tearing the planet apart with tidal forces.

  Everywhere was crash and calamity. He felt clouds of dust scour his face. The world vomited and purged itself under the weight of Detsen and Somnath’s gravity.

  Even when the moons were safely behind the planet, they could create earthquakes and seismic events. And when a moon passed overhead, it left devastation in its wake. The planet bulged outwards towards the superheavy satellite’s gravity, a tidal effect strong enough to distort solid rock.

  Over the years, dozens of colonists had been killed by a single moon sweeping through. Buried in landslides, swallowed by ravines, crushed by collapsing buildings. There had been many attempts to build a permanent colony on the ground. All of them had failed.

  Only the Spheres could survive on Caitanya-9. How, nobody knew.

  This constant destruction made scientific analysis of Caitanya-9 difficult, or impossible. It had mountains, valleys, flatlands, highlands, lowlands…but they were constantly changing. Any map would obsolete in hours. Caitanya-9 was a masterwork circled by two frustrated artists who constantly wiped away and begun anew.

  The passage of a single moon was dangerous. Double appositions were far, far worse. The moons didn’t cross too often, but only a few people had seen them both in the sky and lived to tell about it.

  Clinging to a failing dune buggy, dodging falling rocks, Golestani did not feel good about either himself or Nyphur adding to those statistics.

  With a hard jolt they cleared the worst of the outcrops, and entered a patch of relatively flat land. Looking over the hills, Golestani saw the plains rippling like water. It was a mesmerizing sight.

  He completely forgot about the other threat facing them.

  That was until a flash of light illuminated the rocky plain, and the ‘them’ became ‘him’.

  Nyphur was a slender man. When the bolt of light hit his right shoulder, it wasn’t temporarily blocked like the one that had hit Rahn’s skull. It just tore right through.

  Nyphur screamed, spun widdershins from the controls, and half-fell out of the dune buggy. Blood jetted and sprayed in crazy arcs, wetting the dry canyon rock with its first-ever moisture.

  The buggy crashed.

  It went sidewise, then upside-down, hurling them both out. The buggy careened on for a few seconds, airborn, then slammed into a rock.

  Golestani landed hard in a rocky crevice, a sharp jagged edge ripping open the knees of his nanocomputer suit, tearing his knees. A red flash appeared in a gentle holographic projection: CRITICAL DAMAGE DETECTED TO NANOSUIT.

  You and me both, he thought.)

  “It trashed the dune buggy. Nyphur and I ended up injured in a narrow crevice, while it hunted for us.”

  (The Sphere whirred in closer, less than twenty meters away. Golestani realized he was directly in its path, closed his eyes, and waited for the end.

  Then, it thrummed past.

  It wasn’t after him, it was after Nyphur.

  “Oh God,” Golestani turned his head to watch.)

  “Nyphur…uh…he didn’t make it.”

  (He’d assumed the man had been killed by the fall. Even now, he wasn’t fully sure he was wrong. Nyphur’s entire torso was drenched in blood, and there was a fist-sized hole in his shoulder. His arm dangled uselessly, spasming occasionally as if electrified.

  His face was bloodless and pale, but he staggered towards the Sphere with the fearlessness of the dead.

  The Sphere paused. It was motionless, but the humming sound thickened and fattened, like condensed cream. A sense of expectation settled over the proceedings, despite the rumblings of passing earthquakes.

  Why isn’t it killing him? Golestani thought.

  “You want to know where the beacon is, huh?” Shouted Nyphur. Any last trace of his upper class Terrus elocution gone. “UP…YOUR…ASS!”

  Then he picked up a stone, and flung it at the sphere.

  But he was dying, and the world was shaking. The stone missed, and Nyphur fell.

  The sphere shrieked again, and fired. The bolt of light struck his ribcage, and it imploded like a soufflé collapsing. Several meters of entrails were flung out a hole in his back, spilling across the ground with a wet thump. They were followed almost instantly by the rest of him.

  Nyphur crawled across the ground, most of his midsection gone. It seemed impossible that he could still be alive, but his bloodied fingernails scraped at the hard ground for almost two full minutes before the meat puppet finally realised its strings were cut.

  Hovering not close behind, the Sphere oversaw his death, both his judge and his executioner.

  While it was distracted, Golestani scrambled into a narrow trench that led into a deep crevice. There were many such crevices. It might buy himself a little time.

  Soon, it started its search. The warbling started looping in circles from around his l
ocation, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but never gone.

  Golestani thought that Nyphur might have been on to something. Perhaps the Sphere had intended to kill them, and then sieze control of the drilling site. Their running away had been an unforeseen development, and now it would need one of them alive to return to the site.

  So he thought he’d broadcast a signal of his own.)

  “While he died, I crawled into a hole. I’m still there now, waiting for it to find me. Listen, forget about me. There’s two things here – the Spheres are not friendly. Not only are they capable of killing, they already have. Second, there’s something really interesting going on this planet. I’m miles from the drilling site, but I set a beacon, and I’ll…

  The signal dropped off then. His suit went dark.

  No matter. He’d gotten most of it out.

  He wondered if he should have said something else. A farewell to his family, perhaps.

  But he didn’t know that he had one. Nobody on the space station did.

  A curtain had been drawn over that part of his life, the second he’d agreed to submit himself to interstellar transit.

  He’d woken up on board a spacecraft, cruising through the dark chill of space, with only one memory.

  Men in dark uniforms, ushering him into a claustrophobic metal coffin. The uniforms had the words BLACK SHIFT on them. Before arriving at the space station, he’d had to re-acquire his memories through a device of Black Shift’s creation. He still had his geological education. He still knew cordierite from chalcanthite. But he couldn’t remember his own name.

  Supposedly, this was consensual. He’d known what would happen and had signed up for it.

  He wished he could believe this was true.

  The earthquakes had almost died away now. The moons had mostly passed, two goliaths going their separate ways. Now, there was nothing left except himself and the sound of the Sphere searching for him.

  He felt very weary. And unconcerned about his own fate.

  I’ll die soon, but it wasn’t much of a life. Black Shift took my entire past from me.

  Just then, the whirring stopped.

  And he heard footsteps. Approaching footsteps.

  He didn’t dare poke his head out of the crevice to look.

  Crunch…crunch…crunch…

  Had whatever was inside the Spheres dismounted, and was approaching on foot? He’d always thought it was ridiculous to assume the Spheres themselves were alive. Most likely, they were transport vehicles, no more alive than the buggy that had flung him into the ravine.

  But still…the rhythm of the footsteps sounded human. It didn’t sound like something with six legs and seven joints.

  Then the walker stood over the crevice, looking down on Golestani.

  He felt a confusion as deep as the Marianas Trench on Terrus.

  …What?

  “Where’s the beacon?” Nyphur asked. His voice was cold. “Show me. I need to find the drilling site.”

  There was no blood splattered over Nyphur’s body. No sign of injury. No shoulder blasted to bloody ruin or entrails dangling from his stomach.

  “You’re not Nyphur,” Golestani said. “This is a trick.”

  Nyphur’s voice was like slate. “You left a beacon on the drilling site. Take me there. Now.”

  In Nyphur’s undamaged right hand there was a small triangular device, about the size of a dice. Golestani’s suit started to glow faint blue around the cuffs – it was picking up an open channel he could send signals through.

  Nyphur’s left hand held something more brutal and primal: a rock. Golestani realised that if he did not comply, it would be used to crush his skull.

  Fuck it.

  “Give me a second. I’ll transfer the location of the beacon.”

  His next act was accomplished without any thought whatsoever.

  He summoned a holographic computer screen from his suit, and before Nyphur could react or stop him, erased the beacon.

  BEACON DEACTIVATED flashed briefly on the holographic display, and then it disappeared.

  “Kill me now.” Golestani said. “The signal’s gone. No matter what you do, you’ll never find it again.”

  Nyphur’s face went slack. And then he screamed.

  It wasn’t a human scream, it was the metallic howl of a Sphere.

  In a flash, the gigantic Sphere reappeared beside Nyphur, bigger and more terrifying than either of the moons.

  Golestani closed his eyes. Then his retinas were illuminated by a massive, flash of light, so bright it pierced through his eyelids, and fried the brain behind them.

  His headless body slumped on the rock, leaving a heat-flash behind.

  Soon the planet would bury him, just as it buried everyone.

  I Am Awake

  Dravidian – March 10th, 2136 - 0900 hours

  “Please wake. Your attention is required.”

  He rose to consciousness through pain so thick it could almost be climbed.

  “Please wake. Your attention is required.”

  A chiaroscuro of misery and sickness choked his mind. His head felt like it was being constricted by an iron band. Every movement tightened the band a few notches. His body was wracked by spasms.

  He was lying face down. Almost kissing the floor...

  “Please wake. Your attention is required.”

  …And his mind…

  …Was empty.

  “Please wake. Your attention is required.”

  No, not empty. Worse than empty. Emptiness is a beginning, creation, a blank piece of paper, Zen. The nothing that becomes the everything.

  This was worse. His brain was plundered.

  Everywhere there were holes where he felt something should be, but nothing was.

  I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who I am. I don’t even know my own name.

  He had nothing to fill those holes. Nothing except a silent scream.

  He coughed and spluttered, forcing his eyes open a crack. Agony blinded him.

  His vision cleared, pristine white settling into focus. There was a metal tray in front of him. It was fortunate that he noticed it, because then he was overcome with waves of nausea.

  Vomit rose from inside him, spraying out of his mouth. A highly-pressured jet of rank slime blasted on to the tray, then another, then a third. His head swam, and he thought he’d black out.

  “Please wake. Your attention is required.”

  The voice was generic, female, robotic and repetitive. Clearly a recording.

  All around him, he heard voices. Cries. Vocalisations. Vomiting. He wasn’t suffering alone. There were four or five other people in the room.

  His stomach started to settle, and he opened his eyes and looked around.

  He was in a room with gentle curved walls. A gentle resonant hum ran through the floor, the walls, the ceiling. As if they were in the belly of a whale, and this was its song. Harsh lights made him blink.

  The robotic female voice spoke again.

  “The ship’s on-board sensors have detected that you are all fully conscious. Listen carefully, do not be alarmed, and realise that you are here by your own free will.”

  He was lying down on a bed, and he realized that he was strapped in, with his head facing down. He tried to undo the clasps, still fighting away waves of dizziness and nausea, but the movement of his hands were restricted.

  The basin he’d vomited into emitted a sucking sound. He saw the vomit disappear down a drainhole, and after a few seconds, holographic words flashed. 784 KILOCALORIES RECLAIMED.

  “You are riding in a Dravidian-class Transport, chartered by the Black Shift corporation. They have saved you five years of your life by dehydrating you, and rehydrating you at the other end. This process has now been completed. Unfortunately, this has re-set the chemical states in your frontal lobes, erasing much of your long-term memory.

  “You are soldiers – a six-man response unit for the Solar Arm Marine Corps. You have been dispatched to Cai
tanya-9, a planet in the Proxima Centauri colony, in response to an emergency call made nearly ten years prior to this date. Your antimatter impulse drive has taken you nearly 1.3 parsecs at 99.99% of the speed of light, after a journey of nearly five years. Breaking will soon slow you to non-relativistic speeds, allowing you to dock with Konotouri Space Station in approximately seventy-two hours. The system is entirely automatic.”

  He realized that there were tubes running into his veins. Two in his wrists, two in his ankles, two in other parts of his body.

  Working gradually, he pulled out the intubations in his wrist veins. Blood welled and then coagulated. With his hands free, he undid the clasps. They popped free, allowing him to sit upright.

  On the edge of the hard plastic bed, unplugging still more tubes from himself.

  Transparent liquid gushed and gurgled from each one. He touched a finger to the liquid, and touched the finger to his lips. Water.

  “Why are we here?” A woman spoke from the bed to the right. Like him, she was naked. She was in her late forties, and her left breast sported a massive mastectomy scar.

  He noticed that there was a metal engraving on the side of her bed. I AM CIRCE YATH – GUNNERY SARGEANT

  “I don’t know,” a woman muttered to his left.

  This time it was a girl. Mid twenties. Dark stubble poking through her scalp. Engraved on her bed was I AM UBRA ZOLOT – PRIVATE.

  “I feel like I should,” Ubra muttered to herself. “Like I once knew, and now it’s all gone.”

  “I want to go back.” Circe said, seemingly on the verge of tears. “Back to where my memories are. How do I go back?”

  He stood up, and started exploring the room. The robotic voice continued talking.

  “Do not panic. Once you are well enough, disconnect yourself from the rehydration tubes, and reach your hand to the foot of your bed. When you find a headset with the Black Shift logo on it, put it on your head.”

  He heard a scrabble of hands as people searched for the headsets. He felt too sick. He’d worry about that in a moment.

  He walked forward on legs that wobbled like a newborn calf’s – a calf, he thought, his confused brain free-associating. Meat? Food? Cattle? Moo? Hamburgers? Terrus? A few errant memories were flitting back into the holes in his head, but they were few in number, and mostly stupid.