Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1)

by Ben Sheffield

  He snapped his free hand out, and caught Sabrok by the wrist just in time to take most of the force from the thrust. It merely scraped off his helmet, sending sparks flying.

  There was a pause that lasted for a few seconds, both of them a few feet from the hole into space, with Andrei holding the man’s arm away.

  He was aware – not with horror or shock but rather with fascination – that the depressurizing environment was sucking blood from the shallow cut. A steady rivulet of blood, thick and almost unbroken, was streaming from the nicked vein.

  He noticed that the same was happening to Sabrok. Thick coils of blood were unspooling from a cut on his head and the gunshot wounds on his shoulder.

  It was mesmerizing. Humbling.

  As if they were ragdolls stuffed with red thread, and the wind was unravelling them.

  He let go of Sabrok’s knife, and instead dealt him a brutal open-palmed blow to the face.

  SPOKK!

  The guy’s nose broke again, sending more trails of blood flying.

  Then he used his other hand to twist Sabrok’s arm, causing him to roar in agony.

  “Let go of me.” Andrei said. “It will all be over in seconds once you go out that door. And you will go out that door. Don’t prolong your misery.”

  Sabrok pulled himself closer, and hawked and spat at Andrei’s face. Or tried to. The rushing wind just blew it back into his face.

  “Take your own advice,” Sabrok said, reaching out with his injured arm. Andrei realised what he was doing just a second too late.

  Unclipping the oxygen tank from my belt.

  Andrei roared, and pounded on him, trying to keep his hands away. He failed, and there was an ominous click as the oxygen tank spun free.

  It was still connected to the gas mask by the tube, and it dangled in space, like a tentacle pointing straight towards the hole.

  Sabrok waved goodbye, a mocking smile on his face. Andrei smashed a punch into his face, launching him out into space in a spray of blood.

  “Ubra! Do something!” He yelled, trying to reach out to the errant oxygen bottle. If he lost it out the hole, he was finished. It perversely darted away from his hands, blown unpredictably by the winds from the upper floor.

  Shit. It’s just a primitive vacuum seal. It’ll work its way loose as the pressure drops.

  His hand closed on the wind-blown cable just as the oxygen bottle popped loose, and shot like a bullet towards the hole.

  His heart suffered a massive, galvanising shock as the gleam of the metal cylinder receded from his gaze, out into space. It was over.

  It took him a second to realise that the metallic gleam wasn’t going away.

  In fact, it wasn’t even shrinking.

  He blinked his eyes, and saw that oxygen cylinder had a metal hook around the lip, and that ring had caught on a jagged piece of metal jutting from the ruined fuselage.

  He unspooled some more length from the Kevlar line around his waist, not daring to even try to draw a breath. Then he reached forward, snatched the cylinder, and reattached it with a hard click.

  The valve repressurised with a reassuring hiss, and he took a breath again. His first in almost forty seconds.

  The pressure of the escaping air had dropped exponentially – the wind was no longer enough to suspend them above the floor, and soon their feet touched the floor again.

  “Woah,” he muttered, the roaring of the depressurising room now replaced by a hideous, blank silence.

  The only sensation left was the vibration that constantly ran through the walls of Konotouri. Machinery and engines, animating the floor and the walls with their cold, impersonal life.

  And then he felt even those grind to a halt.

  What are they doing?

  Then, the lights glowing on the landing outside went out.

  He shared a glance with Ubra.

  They’ve turned off all the power.

  They stood alone in the near dark, not talking, but each having similar thoughts. They were in a powerless habitat wheel, with no link to the outside world. Clearly, whoever was commanding the Konotouri after Enoki Kai’s death had just decided to flush the entire crapshake and seal away the devastated Delta section away from the rest.

  With no motors, gravity and drag from the planet’s exosphere would slow down the habitat wheel. Soon, they’d be floating.

  And with no electricity to open the doors, there was no obvious way out.

  They had perhaps fifty minutes of air left in the oxygen tanks, but there was a more immediate problem to their survival.

  In a vacuum, blood begins to boil. Thought Andrei. The amount of energy needed for a liquid to vaporize into a gas is related to the pressure of the surrounding environment. At Terrus's sea level, water boiled at 100C. At 4 kilometers up, 85C. At 7km up, 70C. At 19km, it's 37C, the exact temperature of the human body.

  If they took off their helmets now, water would vaporise from their eyeballs and their mouths. Already, he was amazed by how dry and cracked his skin was feeling, despite the nanomesh body armor.

  They had about two or three minutes. Then, bubbles would form in their veins. Next stop: terminal hypoxia, as the embolisms blocked oxygen from reaching their brains.

  He grabbed Ubra by the arm, and they started running in the direction of the stairway.

  Mostly, he wanted to get away from the hole in the wall. It was terrifying, a horror, each revolution bringing them them in contact with Caitanya-9 and its moons, staring upwards like an eye with two pupils. Piercing them.

  They ran for the door, feeling half-dried blood vaporise around them, rising through the vacuum like a red mist. They climbed the stairway, feeling rather than hearing the thud of their feet on the slats. They ascended the landing beyond, chose the left turn on a combined impulse, and ran as fast as they could.

  They had nowhere to go.

  We just have to hope that there’s still some trace amounts of air pressure up here. Andrei thought. So we can…what, exactly? Live a few minutes longer?

  All around them was carnage and devastation, as if one of the windstorms that plagued Caitanya-9 had been transported on to the station. Electronics had blown out of the walls. Pipes had burst due to depressurisation. Occasionally, they saw a small, sentimental keepsake – a toy dog, a hand-cut metal key – lying on the floor, sucked from someone’s pocket or desk drawer.

  At the top, they got to the elevator, and a frantic Ubra pounded the comms, trying to get someone to answer. She pressed emergency buttons.

  No response. All channels were closed.

  “Calm down.” He said, “Keep your heart rate steady”. His own was going a mile a minute.

  Everything was closed. Everything was sealed. Everything was dead.

  This is no longer a station. This is a coffin, and we’re just corpses who haven’t got the memo.

  Then, ripping through the floor came a single hard jolt as Konotouri-Delta detached.

  And started to fall.

  The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 1420 hours

  Battle raged. Clouds of purple dust and smoke intermingled. The chaos and confusion had turned into something more methodical, groups of Spheres moved in circular rings, each one targeting a single tunnel. Overlapped lanes of fire slashed across them, crippling many Spidermechas before they’d even finished climbing out of the holes. Every time a new hole appeared, within minutes it was clogged with corpses, and completely inaccessible.

  Mykor’s wounds were healed with polyfleshing, and he was back in action, commanding another Sphere. He was seemingly everywhere at once, and still had the energy to hector Zelity and the others about the digging.

  The drills operated ceaselessly throughout the battle. Either they were incredibly lucky, or the Spidermechas were under direct orders to ignore them.

  Sarkoth Amnon clearly wants a passage to the Doorway as much as we do. Zelity thought. I hope we’re not doing his work for him.

  With the air under the dome almost a thick and
continuous black of smoke, and tangled wreckage piled nearly neck-height, Zelity felt that the situation was finally starting to go their way. Fewer and fewer Spidermechas came through the tunnels, and they were taking no more casualties.

  As the din subsided, and the shaft of compacted rock was extracted by the particle beam, they could hear the pulses coming from the earth.

  The throbbing pulsating sound from Caitanya-9’s mantle was audible now. It was so rhythmic, so orderly.

  So planned.

  As the last Spidermecha was turned into flaming scrap, as the last ingress tunnel was caved in, Mykor turned his attention to the hole.

  “Get the situation under control. Soon, there will be more, and worse. I delegate responsibility to you and Emeth.”

  “Going somewhere?” Zelity thought.

  “Down. Into the hole. We need to know what sort of weapon is down there, and how to shut it off.”

  Emeth had misgivings. “Remember the tapes of the first man to discover the wipe? He was driven insane, just by looking at a video feed. We can’t risk losing you. Let someone else go.”

  “Don’t take this from me, Emeth. Just don’t. For thirty years, I’ve been trying to find the Wipe.”

  “And you’ve found it. But someone else should be the first one down there.”

  Emeth looked at the smoking hole in the ground. The laser drilling had put an almost diamond-fine finish on its walls. Pure mathematical perfection, going down for hundreds of meters.

  The hole was just big enough to accommodate a Sphere.

  “I’ll go,” Emeth said.

  Detsen was crossing the sky like a wandering ghost. Although it was low on the horizon, the wind started to howl and tremors rippled the ground.

  At the first glimpse of the moon, General Sakharov called a retreat from Rorke’s Drift.

  As the armored hordes withdrew back from the untarnished glowing shield, he wondered how many were fooled by the pretext. Solar Arm forces were capable of fighting in all but the roughest of conditions. They could have remained an effective combat force even if Detsen had been directly overhead.

  The real reason was that they were beat.

  None of his artillery could penetrate the shield, nor could his infantry pass through it. He’d tried tunnelling under it, but everyone who went through the tunnels was massacred.

  He’d taken ruinous losses. Now, his only priority was to stop the bleeding.

  He’d underestimated how many advantages the Spheres had to work with. A dug in, fortified position. An otherworldly piece of shielding technology that blocked everything he’d thrown at them. The huge numerical advantage the Solar Arm possessed was neutralised by the fact that it was all having to converge on one point.

  It’s the way the Romans won their battles, he thought. History fascinated him. Because of the gladius, the short stabbing sword. Their infantry could fight when packed together shoulder to shoulder. No matter how greatly they were outnumbered in total numbers, at the point of battle, they held a numerical 2 to 1 advantage.

  The Spheres held the gladius in this fight.

  Enjoy your bare patch of rock, he thought to the surviving Spheres as he pulled out of Rorke’s Drift. I will repay you for this, and amply.

  He was still completely in the dark about why anything on Caitanya-9 was valuable, let alone this singular area. Ever since he’d been reawaken from stellar sleep and reacquainted with his life, he still hadn’t been briefed on what the overall strategic goal of the attack was.

  His instructions were just those: instructions. Secure the digging site. Neutralise resistance. Then pass the situation over the Sarkoth Amnon.

  Whatever was in the ground, it was breakable, and Amnon was anxious to have it.

  The thought of the overweening Second Minister made him turn a corner of his mouth in disgust. He only had to mention Caitanya-9 for Amnon to launch into delirious but vague rhapsodies about something called the Doorway, and how it was the answer. To what? To everything!

  He cringed as he felt a comlink open from Amnon. Their temperamental master and commander would be looking for a status update, and Sakharov had no good news for him.

  “Good day, General.” Amnon’s voice was rich and plummy. He was not fooled. It could reach a three-octave screaming crescendo at the slightest notice.

  “And to you, Second Minister.”

  “I am currently in a transport shuttle. I will be with you in perhaps an hour. I’d like to visit the digging site and examine the Doorway in person, if you don’t mind.”

  Sakharov shifted from one foot to another, tides of stomach acid washing around in his gut. “I’m afraid that will not be possible, sir.”

  “Oh? And why not?”

  He chose his words like an archer picking arrows from a quiver where half were broken. With great care. “There…are still defenders at the site, sir.”

  “So you haven’t captured it.”

  “That is correct, sr.”

  “You haven’t attacked yet.”

  “No sir, we’ve attacked.”

  “Then you’ve been defeated.”

  Sakharov fumed. Surely Amnon had already been briefed on the situation. He knew they’d been beaten at Rorke’s Drift, and he was just enjoying Sakharov’s misery. “That’s…a simplistic appraisal, sir. The strategic valence of the front line is such that a tactical re-organisation is advisable to…”

  “Yes, you’ve been beaten. I have friends seeded among your ranks, and they’ve already told me what you’ve failed to achieve at that miserable little digging site. Wasting hundreds of missiles on that shield, when the first one told you it was impermeable! Reducing countless expensive Spidermechas to ruin in sortie after pointless sortie! You should have withdrawn hours ago, and waited for an opportunity to present itself. It’s what I would have done. But, then, what do I know? I haven’t been a general in a long time, and I may have forgotten a trick or two.”

  Sakharov felt angry and slightly horrified. The Spidermechas. That’s what he complains about. Not the fact that each of those Spidermechas was commanded by a human soldier, and we sent nearly two hundred men and women into a pointless and avoidable death. All he cares about is the Spidermechas. They’re the important things here. Not me or my men.

  “I requested further instruction from you when we attacked and made no headway,” Sakharov said. "None were forthcoming.”

  “There were some stressful events on the space station, and I decided to make myself incommunicado for my own health.” Amnon said. “I thought that it wouldn’t matter, because I had a general who was capable of acting of his own initiative! Clearly, I was wrong. Why didn’t you retreat as soon as their defensive advantage became manifest?”

  Because you would have blamed me for derelecting my duty. Followed by a court martial and a dishonourable discharge, the very next day. Sakharov thought miserably. “Their limits are unknown, and I thought they might yield to force. And because I value your leadership and counsel, I wanted further orders.”

  There was a pause, and Sakharov could almost hear Amnon savouring and swishing the cheap flattery before spitting it out and finding it wanting. “That is not acceptable. We will meet later, and you will explain your incompetence in greater detail. Perhaps by then you’ll have a victory to present to me. For your own sake, I hope that you do.”

  By now, it was becoming dangerous on Caitanya-9.

  The moon was raking across the sky, dragging freak weather events with it. Their communications started jamming, skipping, and freezing from the dense magnetosphere. Amnon’s cloying voice started to crack and break up, as if it was treacle frozen solid and cracked with a hammer.

  The wind was a devil, blowing a purple storm of dust that left equipment buried inches deep.

  The compressional earthquakes had given way to wilder sheer ones, the landscape swaying from side to side, ravines shanking themselves into the ground.

  “I’m pulling back to more stable ground.” Sakharov said.
“This is earthquake territory.”

  “Very well.” Amnon said, sounding almost magnimonious by allowing the men under his command to save their lives. “But keep a loose net around the Spheres. Do not allow them to open supply links and refuel their rebellion. Incidentally, were you aware that they’re human? It might be profitable to look for a base. There must be some place where they have water and other supplies. It can’t be very well hidden.”

  Now boulders the size of Sakharov’s torso were tumbling across the ground in a howling gale of purple wind. He started to retreat, feeling the oppressive weight of Detsen above, as though it was some cold intermediary of Amnon himself.

  He began to answer in the negative, but he noticed that as the moon reached its peak, the shield over Rorke’s Drift…blinked.

  There was no over word for it. One instant, the shield was there, the next, it was gone, the third moment, it was back again.

  Over the next thirty seconds, he watched the shield with eagle eyes, noting that it blinked two more times.

  Does the moon disrupt the shield?

  “I’m waiting for an answer, General,” Amnon was imperious.

  “Here’s something your friends probably aren’t telling you.” He said. “The shield is vulnerable to the polonium moons, the same way our comms are.”

  “Ah, I see.” Amnon replied. “Detsen’s in the sky, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “You’re not. And I’ll tell you something else,” Sakharov brought up a holographic display console through his suit, started rapidly parsing through data. In exactly T-minus 6 hours, we get the rarest and most dangerous event on Caitanya-9.”

  “A double convergence.”

  “Exactly,” Sakharov said. “Two moons in the sky. Twice as much magnetic interference. If their shield goes down, the battle is over in seconds. We’ve fought them – their technology is otherworldly, but not invincible. A single missile in the right place, and they’re gone.”

  Amnon was very quiet. Sakharov hated trying to gauge his emotions over the intercom. If he was correct, the readings were now very intrigued.

  “Then the cards fall.” Amnon finally said. “Ready your men. And remember, it does not please me when the leadership I appoint fails to carry out my orders.”