Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1)

by Ben Sheffield

  “They realized that they were proliferating misery throughout the universe.” Gokla said, unplugging the intubations from himself and applying a coagulant gel to the pinpricks. The child lay on the table, sallow and yellow, her breath a bare rasp, inches from death. “The more of them existed for more years, the more suffering spread out like a plague. Their godlike omnipotence was a curse. Their immortality was nothing less than a plague that seethed and formented and never abated. So they found a way to destroy themselves.”

  Amnon and Mykor had wanted to know more.

  “I can give you knowledge, but that knowledge will come with a responsibility. You must become one of us.”

  “Yes, I want responsibility. Give it to me.”

  “No, think, boy. Now you ride in a car. Your life can go in any direction – you have enough talent to succeed at anything you put your mind to. If you say yes, you ride in a train. Your life can only go in one direction, the same direction as the Sons of the Vanitar. Secrecy. Privacy. No friends. Nobody who can ever know your innermost thoughts. You must be willing to use parabiotic therapy – it is a waste to induct you if you’ll only live another eighty years. So what do you say?”

  “Do it now.” He felt like he’d go mad if he didn’t know.

  Gokla hadn’t spoken to him for a month after that. He worried that he’d failed some critical test.

  Finally, he recieved an invitation go Gokla’s mansion.

  He arrived, alone as instructed. There were no introductions, no pleasantries, no banter. Just eight men, wearing masks of various Terrus beasts, pinning him down and attaching a biokinetic implant to the back of his neck.

  He didn’t ask why. He wasn’t stupid, he already knew.

  So they could track him, so they could monitor him.

  So that, if necessary, they could kill him. A push of a button and his lights would go out. Boom. A little dress-rehearsal of one for upcoming global extinction.

  Words were spoken. His initiation.

  “We are the sutures of sanity’s wounds,

  We are the accelerant on entropy's axle,

  We are the teeth between the stars,

  We are, and that alone is our crime.”

  Then they allowed him back to his feet, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Enough.” Even when Gokla was buggering him, he’d never allowed the man to kiss him. “Show me. I want knowledge, not companionship.”

  He was escorted deep inside Gokla’s mansion, as the man explained.

  “What I’m about to show you is something known to only twenty people, and most of them are in this building. You understand, of course, that nobody can know about this. Otherwise any hope that we can precipitate a universe-wide extinction event is lost.”

  The tale had begun, decades ago, when a strange event had been recorded on a distant planet.

  A cave had appeared in a mountain face. Inside, echoes could be heard. Word spread, until nine miners stood at the mouth of the cave, listening in.

  They shivered. The echoes left strange welts on the air, as if the air was now a solid, moving material that clung like film and exerted pressure on their skin.

  One man went in to investigate. Then another. Then a third.

  After an hour, two more men went in.

  An hour later, three more.

  Not a single man returned from the cave, even days later. The last miner was too frightened to enter the cave, and see what had become of his friends. Finally, his supplies running critically low, he rigged a camera on a nano-carbon fiber filament, and poked it through into the tunnel.

  He heard sound, an unearthly pulsating rhythm that sucked embankments away from his sanity. His subconscious mind communicated things to him, things he could disregard but couldn’t forget, such as how he was clearly listening to music. Perhaps even to singing.

  He poked the nano-fiber several meters further in, until it entered the mouth of a large chamber. He saw his eight friends, haggard from lack of sleep and with their eyes sunken in. Their faces were transmuted into skeletons by a terrible light that flickered and cast impossible shadows.

  The miner turned the camera towards the center of the chamber, and saw some giant beast, some creature, something he had no words for in the language of his birth or any other, a mass of thrashing tentacles and cilia, glistening in an alien light that didn’t seem to be the same as the light in the cave.

  Mouths opened and closed, all of them chanting a single guttural syllable of an endless name. Hair twisted and knotted, as if every part and corpuscle of it had its own ghastly life, its own sentience, as though it was not a single creature but a hive of them, all stitched together

  He zoomed in then all of its hundreds of eyes swiveled to look at him, and he screamed, his sanity gone, evaporated by the massive pulse which now seemed to come from inside his head.

  He was found, nearly a week later, staggering around the wastes. A conflux of two miracles.

  The first was that he was found at all. The desert was large and inhospitable, and he had no food or water. The second was that he was found by the proto-cult that would someday become the Sons of the Vanitar.

  The madman and his ravings provided much information of interest to the cult. In fact, he was perhaps too interesting for his own well being.

  They couldn’t allow him to return to civilization. Couldn’t allow him to see his family again. They ruthlessly extracted every scrap of knowledge with torture both psychological and physical, and then buried him on the planet. None of this was ever reported to any kind of authority. It was one of the secrets kept by the Sons of the Vanitar. Perhaps their ur-secret.

  Gokla played a few video recordings of the man’s ravings.

  “The monster came into my head,” the battered human relic muttered, eyes dulled by drugs and suffering. “It spoke to me, in a pulse…hooks in my head…it filled me. I’m a bag filled with its shit. But I want to worship, I want to praise it, and I want to join my friends. I was scared, and weak…but now I want to go back. I see the truth now. The monster was God.”

  “What did it tell you?” A nameless interrogator asked.

  “That it was the last of the Vanitar. The guardian that oversaw The Wipe.”

  “And what’s the Wipe?”

  The man was able to give no clear answers. Picked from the dung of his answers were a few nuggets of what might have been truth, and these were passed among the Sons of the Vanitar as shared secrets.

  For millions of years, the Vanitar had groaned in mortal terror upon their thrones, feeling the universe fill up with the stink of misery and suffering, all at their instigation. Their technological development soared impossibly high, impossibly low, deforming the space/time matrix with pain.

  The Wipe was their solution. A gigantic galaxy-killing bomb that would rid the universe of all life, including themselves.

  The Vanitar in the cave – the monster, the God – had evidently been the one who controlled the Wipe, and who had unleashed it, aeons ago.

  There was confusion as to why it was still alive.

  Was its survival an accident? Did the gun fail to slay its own gunner? Or had the Vanitar been overcome with doubts, and contrived some way to spare its own life?

  Elements within the Sons of the Vanitar had spent years debating this in smoke-darkened rooms.

  For his part, Gokla took a third point of view – that the Wipe was not a one-time weapon, but something that could be repeatedly used. Life had come from nowhere once, and it might arise from nowhere again. A true life-ending weapon might need to fire more than once.

  If this was true, perhaps a single Vanitar was needed to control it. A single lonely, deathless being, everything it had ever known destroyed by its hand, lingering onwards until the time came to bring death to the galaxy again. And again. Forever.

  All this, of course, was conjecture. “We have some evidence of a gamma ray burst throughout the galaxy,” Gokla said. “But this can happen naturally. But think of th
e possibilities. A single weapon out there, perhaps user-controlled, perhaps operating on a timed loop. If we could get it to fire…”

  “And nobody knows of this, except us?” Amnon asked.

  “If you value your life, boy, that’s how it will stay.”

  “No, you misunderstand, I could never tell anyone this. You don’t have to threaten me. This is wonderful, precious. The informational equivalent of gold and jewelry. Why would I cheapen it by spreading it around?”

  Gokla smiled. “And anyway, who in the world would believe you?”

  “Have we looked for it?” Mykor asked.

  “Looked for what?”

  “Has anyone ever looked for that cave, and the Vanitar, and the weapon? It seems like it would be easy to find.”

  Gokla shook his head. “The planet exists in the Alpha Centauri system. It’s called Caitanya-9.”

  His memories were complete.

  The woman was bucking and riding him ferociously under the harsh spacelights. His hands gripped and pumped her breasts. Her moans were overly loud, and that bothered him. The presumption! As if her pleasure mattered to him at all.

  They finished, Amnon purposefully making it as brutal and unfulfilling as possible, He stood up, his shrivelled penis dangling like a weed.

  “Has my command awoken from their sleep? Have they had their memories reinstalled?”

  “Yes, sir. Two divisions.”

  He smiled, imaging two thousand human blank slates who were now being re-introduced to the fact that they were ruthless killing machines, bent on serving him.

  They wouldn’t understand why they were here, or the sublime pleasure of dark knowledge. They wouldn’t get that any more than they’d get a woman to fuck. This was a privilege for him alone.

  I like the poetry of using humanity to end humanity. He thought.

  He’d almost wept for joy when the emergency transmission had come in from Caitanya-9, five years ago.

  Scientists, killed by a Sphere. After discovering a strange ticking countdown in the planet.

  Firstly, this was utter proof that there was something strange about the planet. Secondly, it gave Amnon a pretext to openly search it.

  The Sons of the Vanitar had launched countless clandestine expeditions to Caitanya-9. They’d failed on every front. They hadn’t been able to locate the strange cave and its secrets. They’d lost countless men – his childhood friend Mykor among them. Thirty years ago he’d taken fifty or so mercenaries, the largest number he could wrangle without arousing suspicion, and landed on the planet. None of them were heard from again. Official records claimed that a poorly timed incidence of the moon Somnath had killed them.

  The Sons had their hands tied. They were limited in how aggressively they could explore the planet, because they had to conceil their existence, going there under the guise of geologists or astrophysicists.

  Now, he could abandon all secrecy, and strip the planet bare to its very mantle.

  It had come down to a vote in parliament. He’d pushed for large-scale military intervention – this could be the beginnings of war! His opposition had struck back with the fact that a second message had come through, apparently disconfirming the first.

  His coalition had squeaked through. Fifty two votes to forty eight. He had his mandate.

  All of this was aside from the fact that he’d already sent six men there, under the command of Andrei Kazmer. Parliament had no reason to know about that.

  The woman cleaned him with a sonic exfoliator, and then dressed him in a form-fitting nanomesh suit. “Would you like to be put in contact with General Sakharov?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  Then, he was at the bridge of the ship, at the main computer. Chrome gleamed on a thousand controls.

  “As soon as we’re at non-relativistic speeds, shunt me through to Enoki Kai of Konotouri Space Station. I need his co-operation.”

  A ticking. Inside the planet.

  He had no idea on whether it was an automated advice, or whether the Vanitar was still alive, still buried within the earth, with its finger on the trigger.

  But clearly the Sons of the Vanitar had not been wasting their time by looking.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  Konotouri Alpha – March 14, 2136 - 1400 hours

  “Warrant Officer Kai, Commander Wake and his men are returning.“ the guard of Konotouri-Alpha’s docking station said.

  “Slightly off from the truth, if I’ve what I’ve heard is correct.” Kai had a massive headache that only threatened to get worse.

  “Well, some of his men are returning…”

  “He lost half his team, and found nothing.” Kai snapped. “Everything else is a footnote to those two facts. Tell him that he has access to our docking bay. Also, tell him he doesn’t deserve it.”

  He was fuming.

  He wanted to just fucking arrest Wake, or Kazmer, or whoever the fuck he was. Put him a cell and throw away the key. He’d engaged the Spheres in a firefight, lost, and permanently damaged relations between his colony and the natives of the planet. Kai was squinting to see the funny side.

  But he still has plausible deniability, the bastard. Kai thought. He’s just going to spin it around as an innocent situation that got out of hand. I don’t really have jurisdiction over the actions of a Solar Arm rescue officer, anyway. I can only act if I feel the welfare of my people is at risk.

  The thing was, he now knew Wake’s full story. His real name was Andrei Kazmer - a brutal criminal, memory-erased and re-created as a boy scout at the strange whim of Sarkoth Amnon.

  Kai certainly felt that the welfare of his people was at risk from someone like Kazmer, but nobody was allowed to know about that – Amnon was just enough of a friend for Kai to want to keep his secrets.

  At the spaceport terminal, he heard the muffled thunks and thuds of docking. Then, the woosh of the airlock.

  “Only one craft, when I sent two.” Kai said. “It’s callous, but I care about them more than Andrei’s men. If you tell anyone I said that I’ll deny it, but it’s true. His men belonged to the Solar Arm, but the landing craft were mine. Now I’ll have to put in request for a new one, and it’ll take years to get here.”

  As the door whooshed open, he came face to face with Kazmer.

  “No.” Kai said. “That didn’t go well, did it?”

  “There were…problems,” Andrei agreed.

  He looked haggard, ridden hard and put away wet. His expensive nanomesh body armor was torn and ripped, and coloured purple with the dust of Caitanya-9. His gunbelt was nearly empty of ammunition. One eye was blackened.

  “Is that all you have to say? ‘There were problems’?” Kai was incredulous. “If I was even ninety percent convinced I could arrest you without consequences…”

  “…You probably can.” Andrei said. “But that’s the least of your worries. The Spheres are an intelligent species, and they’ve shown themselves to be hostile.”

  “Shown themselves to be hostile? You provoked a fight with them!”

  “No, I didn’t. I saw a Sphere and I sent one of my lieutenants to chase it. No doubt it read her intentions as hostile.”

  You’ll read my intentions as hostile, Kai thought. Then he saw Ubra and Nyphur trying to slide past him, and he barred their way. “Stop. You can’t go until you’ve debriefed.”

  “There’s nothing you’ll learn from them that you can’t learn from me. Additionally, Private Zolot seems to have lost her memories on the planet. Let them go – we made an interesting discovery around the beacon, and I want to get it to a lab for analysis. That’s the only way we can salvage something positive from this disaster.”

  He took Ubra by the shoulder. “Go. At the spaceport there’s a Dravidian-class transport docked. Get access, and you’ll find a headset with your name on it. It’s already restored your memory once.”

  Kai waved them past with a look of contempt. “Nyphur said you opened fire on the Spheres.”

  “Then he’s wrong.
Or lying.”

  Nyphur glared daggers at Kazmer. “The Spheres wouldn’t have attacked without provocation. I don’t know that Ubra fired on your orders, but I know they didn’t fire the first shot.”

  “You know nothing about me, nothing about Ubra, and nothing about the Spheres,” Kazmer snarled. “Why the fuck didn’t you just stay on the ship, asshole? I didn’t need you down there. I really didn’t.”

  Kai felt sympathy for Nyphur. I don’t know if you’re lying, Andrei Kazmer. But given what I know about your past, it’s certainly an option on the probability table.

  Nyphur and Kazmer continued to argue, their shouts growing louder and louder until they rattled the concourse. Ubra just stared at her boots, barely in the room.

  Just then, Security Chief Sabrok grabbed him by the shoulder. “We need you at headquarters, sir. There’s been a transmission – Sarkoth Amnon is coming to this planet.”

  “What?” The words didn’t register.

  “He says he’ll be docking in a few hours, and that he has two divisions of soldiers. Parliament approved a military excursion to the planet.”

  Kai slammed his fist into the wall. Kazmer and Nyphur went silent, sensing that discretion was the better part of valour.

  Kai looked up. “Just go. All three of you.”

  “We discovered part of a skull on the planet.” Andrei said. He held up the bone fragment. “Want us to test it?”

  Kai’s breathing was a harsh, ragged thing, like wind in a torn sail. He started to chuckle humorlessly. “I want you to go to your quarters, Commander Wake, and never talk to me again about any topic whatsoever. The second in command of the fucking Solar Arm is now coming to the planet, with two thousand troops. I cannot spare even the slightest fraction of a thought dealing with your bungling and idiocy.”

  Konotouri Beta – March 14, 2136 - 1420 hours