Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1)

by Ben Sheffield

  “I apologise, with a few caveats.”

  “’With a few caveats?’ God, Zandra, are you even capable of giving a pure, indiluted apology? You always need to spike it with something.”

  “My personal style.”

  “Well, here’s my personal punishment. Relieve subcommander Emeth, and perform recon duties for three days across the eastern hemisphere, as the moons allow.”

  “That’s an unfair punishment, and I do not accept it. I will perform recon duties for one day.”

  “Two.”

  “You still love me, don’t you, father?”

  “Of course I do. But your actions have put us in an incredibly difficult position. We need to be careful, and we need to be mindful of duty. In that moment, you didn’t even manage one out of two.”

  “I love you too, father. I’ll be back in a day and a half.”

  Proxima Centauri – March 13, 2136 - 2300 hours

  They entered the Alpha Centauri star system, and endured hours of nausea as the ship slowed to a comparatively placid Mach 20. Radio communications were now possible, and Circe Yath was soon in communication with Konotouri Space Station. She obtained clearance to dock, and then turned procedures over to the on-board flight computer.

  The soldiers crowded around a holographic window that displayed their first glimpse of Caitanya-9.

  A purple ball of rock, wreathed by clouds, orbited by a pair of solid black moons. Long periods in isolation often gave spacefarers pareidolia – the attachment of human characteristics to inanimate objects. All of them knew better not to feel threatened by the planet, not to feel like its moons were two fists, but they still felt faint stirrings of unease.

  Orbiting far above the turbulent planet and its two moons was Konotouri Space Station. Their new base of operations.

  By the light of Proxima Centauri, Wake saw four rotating wheels, one within another, the largest nearly a kilometer across. They were connected by massive supports that jutted beneath the rings, like an orrery. Inside these supports, elevators allowed transport between the rings.

  Ships buzzed and swarmed, like bees around a hive. He saw small skiffs, smaller than the one that was carrying them. He saw huge cargo ships, some nearly as big as the habitat wheels. Between several hundred and several thousand people called Konotouri home – although that was perhaps not impressive. They’d all been transported here via the Black Shift, and they had no memories of their real home. This flimsy structure above an uninhabitable planet was all they’d ever known.

  At least they’re all still alive, Wake thought. If there’s an interspecies war happening, clearly it’s not burning too brightly.

  Azipods mounted for and aft began to fire, counterclockwise to the revolution of their space wheel. As the spinning slowed, gravity grew weaker. Wake’s footsteps each had to be judged individually, as each step jolted him up more and more. Eventually, he was floating freely in the air. Nausia constricted his stomach. A pen left his pocket and started spinning in the air.

  The ship was guided to the docking bays of Konotouri-Alpha, the largest of the wheels. There was a suctioning whoosh as they sealed themselves to an airlock. The six of them passed through, filled in admittance forms (UBRA ZOLOT, Pte, YURI CALYPSO, Pte, MONGHOI ZORDRAK, Cpl, YEN ZELITY, Sgt, CIRCE YATH, Gnry Sgt, AARON WAKE, Commander) and then spent an undignified ten minutes getting patted down by Konotouri’s security detail. Sabrok found nothing of interest and curled his lip in disgust, as if Wake had offended him by not bringing contraband aboard the station.

  “Got a name?” Wake asked the leader, a musclebound bruiser with a prognathous jaw. The man hadn’t spoken a word to them.

  “Joran Sabrok. Chief of Security.” The guy ripped open a crate and started pawing through it.

  “I’m surprised. I thought we were the security.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  Well, these people are going to be a barrel of laughs to deal with. Wake thought. “We’ve responded to an emergency call, and we need to be briefed on the situation. Do I talk to you about that?”

  “You talk to Warrant Officer Enoki Kai.” Sabrok said. “He’s the one who put out the call. Your men can stay here – I’ll get them billeted in the storage room on Konotouri Delta. Kai wants to talk to you alone.”

  When his further attempts at conversation were rebuffed, Wake went silent. He got the feeling he was unwanted. That they were all unwanted.

  He and his men were issued with passes, granting them use of the elevators. Wake was granted an honorary induction into the Konotouri Security Corps, granting him use of communal ships and vehicles. Then, he followed Sabrok up a series of passageways to the main meeting hall.

  His passage was marked by many stares. He had no idea what set him apart as an outsider. His clothes? He was wearing much the same thing as everyone else – skin-fitting nanomesh computer suits. He had armor underneath and he was pretty sure they didn’t, but that wasn’t visible.

  Was it his appearance? Could they tell an outsider by sight?

  Konotouri was nearly a fifty years old, and barely a few dozen visitors reached it per year.

  Perhaps they could just sense the outside world, sense it like a goldfish reacts to a tapping finger on its bowl.

  He entered into a reception room, where he waited along with for an audience with Sabrok and several other people. He twiddled his fingers. The chairs were hard, and uncomfortable – designed to be light enough to be transported across space, not for creature comforts.

  A child, cradled in his mother’s arms, was openly staring at them. The oldsters at least pretended to be discreet. The young didn’t care. Wake met the child’s gaze, gave a little smile, and waved. It wasn’t returned.

  Shit. We’re going to go along just great here. I’m making so many friends.

  Finally, he was summoned into the main conference room.

  As he passed, he heard a young child’s voice.

  “Mama, he was from Terrus…”

  “Don’t talk to them, Tomas. They have diseases.”

  Konotouri Alpha – March 14, 2136 - 0800 hours

  “I’m sorry, Commander Wake, but your services are not needed.”

  Wake was standing in a small room, but the holographs on the walls made it seem massive. The backdrop changed from moment to moment – one second they were in the depths of the Terrestrian sea, surrounded by brightly coloured fish. The next, they were high in the air, clouds floating by like cosmic sperm. The next, they were sitting in a lush, verdant field.

  The illusion was lifelike and vivid. Wake tried to touch one of the flowers, and his finger was stopped by an unyielding wall.

  “I’m sorry, Commander, did you hear me?” The cadaverously thin man on the opposite side of the desk said. Unlike the beautiful holographs, he looked like a Black Shift mummy who’d been imperfectly rehydrated. His hair formed a stark widows’ peak. His mouth was a negative parabola, existing in defiance of things like humor.

  “Yep. Heard you.” Wake said.

  “The emergency message was a false alarm. Nothing untoward has happened on the planet, as far as we can see.”

  Is he just saying that I’ve had my identity erased for no reason? “Can you please explain what happened? From the beginning?”

  “A geologist and his team were down on the planet, and we received a report that they’d been attacked and killed by Spheres, the planet’s natives. I immediately requested a response team from Terrus. As soon as the request went out, we received a second report from the planet, contradicting the first. We were wrong, there was no danger, and I am sorry.”

  “Can I hear the recordings?” He asked, ashamed that he felt disappointment. At least they’re safe, but…

  “Let me play them for you.”

  Kai touched the hem of his collar, activating the computer there. The sound of a man’s voice – panicky, crackly, filled the room.

  It cut the air like a jagged knife of worry.

  “My name is Zane G
olestani. I’m about to die. I’m a research mission specialist for the Solar Arm…fuck it, just look it up on my file. We landed at 0400 hours, six of us, we were supposed to take rock samples from the planet’s lithosphere. We bored a full kilometer down, or tried to, but our drill shaft broke. We radio’d to Konitouri Station for a new one, but they told us to they couldn’t spare a dropship and we’d have to do the best we could. The drill shaft had a nanofiber filament running through it, and we used it to take observations. Temperature. Chemical composition. When we logged the pressure, that’s when things stopped making sense. The drill bit at 1km recorded ambient pressure of about 50psi, but every couple of seconds, there would a spike to 100psi. And every couple of minutes, there would an even bigger spike to 200psi. Pulses running through the ground. Regular. Exact. No way it could be a natural phenomenon. It was numbers, encoded in base-12, incrementing down. Not just numbers. A countdown. One ending at ten years from this date. We’d broken a drill on the discovery of the decade, if not the century. There’s something beneath the surface of this planet, something we’ve never seen before. But we didn’t have much time. Detsen was about to sweep twenty degrees from the meridian, and the drilling site would get buried. Before we radio’d for a surface-to-orbit ship, I set a beacon. Then one of our team did something idiotic. Batshit insane. She found a Sphere and showed it the pulses. It went berserk. Killed her, killed two other members of the team, tried to kill Omai Nyphur and me. We escaped in a dune buggy, hot-tailed us until we forgot where we were, and forgot when we were. We went right into the mouth of a double apposition event. It trashed the dune buggy. Nyphur and I ended up injured in a narrow crevice, while it hunted for us. Nyphur…uh…he didn’t make it. 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 recording cut out.

  “Well…okay.” Wake says. “Sounds pretty unequivocal. This geologist guy discovered something he wasn’t supposed to see, and one of the natives took him out.”

  Kai gave a tiny, insincere smile. “And that’s exactly the kind of snap judgment that made us transmit a distress call to the Solar Arm. And now we’re paying the price. Because not long after that, we got another, entirely different message. It from Nyphur, who was alive and well.”

  He played a second clip. A different voice filled the air. While Golestani had been terrified, panicking, on the edge of incoherency, Nyphur’s voice was perfectly calm.

  Bloodless, even.

  “I’m sorry, please disregard the past message. We have not been attacked. We have not been attacked. Regardless, there are men down and I need emergency medical evac. Our dune buggy had an accident. It lost its front wheel, and was hurled into an open gorge. I was the only one who escaped, and I cannot find any survivors. When I found Professor Golestani he was drawing his final breaths. He hit his head rather badly. There was blood everywhere, and he was babbling nonsense about the Spheres attacking him. I believe he sent you an alarming message. Please disregard it – there are no Spheres anywhere, and nothing happened except a terrible accident. I am alive, but shaken. Please get me off this rock.”

  The clip ended. Kai extended his hands in a helpless what can I do gesture.

  “So you’re telling six men spent five years in a tin can because a research geologist got hit on the head?” Wake wanted to laugh-cry. “Well, at least everyone’s safe.”

  “Yes. That is the main thing.” Kai’s face bespoke a different sentiment. The main thing is sweeping you Terrestrians out of my colony before you get up to mischief. “I have great regrets that such expense was spent to get you here. I will arrange transport for you and your command back to Terrus. Unfortunately, all the transport shuttles are occupied, or away, and I cannot guarantee when that will be. You might be cooling your heels here for a couple of months.”

  “Hey, I spent five years as a dried out Halloween mask, and I woke without a single memory in my head. And when I wake up back on Terrus, It’ll happen again. I suppose that’s what I signed up for, but hell.” Wake said. “By the way, that business about a strange signal coming from the planet…was that ever followed up on? And is that geologist asshole still on the station?”

  “He’s in this very room,” Kai said. “Nyphur, please stand.”

  Wake almost jumped out of his skin as a man stood up from a chair in the background. He’d been so still that he hadn’t even registered in Wake’s vision.

  He was old, with the dignified bearing of a scientist. But he had a hungry look – a grey-furred wolf all the more dangerous now that his teeth were falling out.

  “Thank you for coming to our assistance, Mr Wake,” Nyphur said. “And thanks for the compliment. ‘that geologist asshole.’ That’s going straight on the resume.”

  Wake shrugged, feeling sheepish. “Sorry. Didn’t see you. So what happened down on the planet, exactly?”

  “Am I on the record?”

  Wake wondered if that was a joke. Why would he not want to talk to me? “I’d just like some answers.”

  “You’ve heard the recording.” Nyphur’s voice was cool. “I have nothing to add, and nothing to take away. A dune buggy crashed. Professor Golestani was fatally injured, and hallucinated before he died. He did send some data to the space station, but it was badly corrupt, and we have no way of tracing exactly where it came from or what it means. It might have been something he just tapped out with his fingers while delirious. None of the other bodies were recoverable. The landscape of the planet has charged hundreds of times. You know how the moons work, I guess.”

  “Hell yeah. Caitanya-9 is like this room we’re in” – he gestured at the room as it transformed into a fiery volcano. “New scenery every time you turn around. So there’s nothing else?”

  “Nothing else. I swear.”

  He said “I swear.” That’s a tell. “Well, then I guess there’s nothing down that avenue.” Wake said. “What about the Spheres? How are our relations with them?”

  Sabrok spoke up his post at the doorway. “We never had a relation with them. They just hover around down there, sometimes in groups of two or three, mostly alone. We know nothing about them. They don’t seem to eat, they don’t seem to sleep. We can’t trade with them – they have nothing we want and vice versa.”

  “But are they aggressive?”

  “No.”

  “If they see a human, they don’t attack?”

  “Not as far as we know.”

  “So speculate about the terrain beyond ‘as far as we know’. Has there ever been reason to suspect that they’re aggressive? I mean, this colony’s been around for fifty years years – enough to collect some folklore. There’s no urban legends about a guy who threw a stone at one and got blasted?”

  Nyphur and Kai shared a momentary glance. It lasted only a second, but Andrei noticed it.

  “First point,” Kai said, “dozens of people have died on Caitanya-9. Miners. Crazy people. Radical freedom whackos who exercised their right to pitch a tent on a landscape that will swallow them up at any moment. I can’t say for sure that no Sphere has ever killed a human. But has one ever been documented and confirmed as having done so? No.”

  One has been documented, the way I see it. Wake thought. Whether that report is accurate is what I’m here to figure out.

  “Second point, we do not have fifty years of history with the Spheres. The first sighting of one was made thirty years ago. In the all the years before, the planet was believed to be uninhabited. Why they’ve only come out of hiding now is anyone’s guess.”

  “Interesting. Well, then I suppose I don’t need to be here, then.” Wake laughed, trying to fake a levity he did not feel. There were now four pairs of eyes drilling down on him, and he felt uncomfortabl
e. “You’ve radio’d the all-clear back to Terrus, I suppose?”

  “Of course. We did it the same day. You and your men had evidently left before the message was received. But with the five year delay in comms each way…”

  “Yeah, back on Terrus they probably send me out, got your next message, and are still kicking themselves to this day. You guys must have half-forgotten we were even coming.” Wake said. “Well, I’m sorry to have arrived on your doorstep like unwanted baggage. But now that I’m here, I might as well be thorough. How do I get down on the planet?”

  “There’s nothing to see there.” Kai said. “Just rock. Rock and some aliens we can’t begin to understand.”

  Wake tapped his head. “The things I can’t begin to understand would fill quite a book. I think I’ll authorize myself to take a look around down there, if it’s all the same to you. Or even if it isn’t, quite frankly.”

  Kai looked alarmed. “You can’t. It’s dangerous.”

  “Danger is my pay grade.”

  “Your transport ship is not…uh…equipped to make a LEO to surface descent.”

  “Which is why I’m requisitioning one of yours.”

  Kai looked flustered.

  So many things were wrong here.

  Even without Golestani’s previous report contradicting him, Nyphur’s story sounded like utter bullshit. Wake knew that the time from LEO to surface for emergency rescue was measured in minutes…but nobody had found the bodies of the missing team members? Golestani had conveniently hurt his head and hallucinated an alien attack, yet he was still conscious enough to send this message back to the station?

  Odds were high that it would just be some innocent misunderstanding. But that didn’t mean there was nothing to find, or that he shouldn’t look.

  Kai was stonewalling. “Descents are dangerous, each one is an expense on our budget. And there is nothing to see. It is not our wish that you go down to the planet.”