Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2)

by Ben Sheffield

  But occasionally, in these trillions of trackless kilometers, there were stars. And around these stars were wandering threads of gas, shapeless, coiling around the spindles of gravity wells, until they solidified into planets. Tiny refuges against the sucking, all-encompassing black.

  On these improbable refuges, sometimes long odds prevailed, and systems started to arise that were more complex than nothing.

  300AUs from Alnitak, a blue supergiant in the Horsehead Nebula, something was happening.

  An unprepossessing ball of rock and gas was positioned in precisely the right place, with precisely the right composition, for gas to condense into liquid. Warmed by thermal energy and Alnitak’s wan light, the liquid soon became a swamp. Soon, proteins and hydrocarbon chains were floating in the swamp. As each aeon gave way to the next, these chains grew more complex, more long-winded, more advanced in their behavior.

  Finally, they were capable of replicating themselves.

  It wasn’t quite the same as Terrestrian DNA and RNA, but nor was it wholly dissimilar. The sugars were different. The chemistry lent itself to different formations arising by chance. But something small arose, ex nihilo. And then something great arose, ex parvo.

  Life.

  Unsightly creatures were swimming the murky waters. Ribbed fins flagellated the thick ichor, while jointed claws searched for nutrients. Plants gave shelter from oceanic currents. Soon they’d give shelter from something else: predators. Evolution hadn’t gotten that far yet. Nothing that existed above plankton size had anything to fear from any other creature.

  Nature invents mouths before it invents teeth.

  The protofish would soon become postfish, would soon become creatures crawling and climbing up on to the outcrops of land rising from the miasma. They’d continue to change in the new environment, unfit ones dying and fit ones sometimes surviving.

  They might have had hands at some point in the future, and eyes. They might have pondered Alnitak and the stars beyond, and wondered what it would be like to go there.

  But the fish never had a chance.

  Complexity is an aberration, a mistake. Sometimes it persists onwards in defiance of the odds for a while, and gains traction by seizing upon non-natural systems. Usually, it’s a ladder that doesn’t take more than a gentle knock to take down. And when the ladders fall, they fall completely.

  In the skies above, the stars started bending.

  It looked like a star-patterned curtain was being spread, collapsing around itself. The lensing bubble showed only a gaping black hole in space…and then…

  …Something was coming through.

  The refracted light through the wormhole gave only hints. Flashes of purple. Dashes of black. The palette was confusing, violent, destructive.

  A planet was emerging from the wormhole, girdled by two moons. It occupied the sky, blotting out the blue light of distant Alnitak.

  And then the moons unleashed a gamma ray burst.

  It was unsurvivable at almost any distance. At distances of millions of kilometers, it was utterly lethal. Not just to life on the surface. To the planet.

  Doomsday.

  There was a flash of light, hundreds of times brighter than a supernova and trillions of times brighter than the sun.

  Nothing in the swamp died in the traditional sense. It just immediately ceased to exist and became plasma, swept away by the burst that unmade the planet, dissolving it right to its very firmaments, overcoming the planet’s gravitational binding energy in a single massive pulse.

  There were consequences for the rest of the system.

  Two more planets were hit directly by the beam, taking broadside hits of more than 1.5x10^30 joules. They were likewise vapourised.

  Several planets in the adjacent system were more fortunate. They merely had their surfaces stripped away, leaving them glowing red balls of protoplanetary magma once again. It would take millions of years for them to cool.

  Some others had their surfaces melted to slag, or vitrified to glass.

  Thousands of lightyears away, planets lost their atmospheres. Some were wreathed by glowing red halos of ultrahot air, photons warming the atmosphere through Compton scattering. Orbits of small celestial objects were influenced, and there were countless planetary collisions.

  Days or weeks after the short-range burst occurred, the planet still stood, paired by its ominous polonium-dark moons. It is completely unscathed, even though there was a fan of Compon-scattered light particles glowing like a million Auror boreali right before it, countless AUs in diameter and spreading out fast.

  Soon, the stars split again, and the planet disappeared. The curtains enveloped it and its secrets once more.

  But they could not envelope the gamma ray burst, one of the most disastrous events in the known universe.

  Millions of lightyears away, intelligent observers might watch the diffuse beam of gamma radiation, and observe that a great disaster had happened somewhere.

  They wouldn’t observe with worry or concern, just scholarly interest. Space is large, after all. Plenty of room for something to go wrong in.

  At least it didn’t happen here, they’d tell themselves. We lived through it.

  Caitanya-9 – March 18, 2142 - 1500

  Caitanya-9’s moons were receding, and so were the earthquakes and windstorms that they dragged across the planet like a funeral shroud. As the howling wind passed, it left desolation in its wake.

  Two thousand men had landed. Only three hundred had survived. The landscape was littered with wrecked vehicles, most openly burning, their clouds of smoke tattered to rough edges by the wind.

  Sakharov spat into the sand.

  It was as awful a victory as had ever been achieved.

  They’d disabled the remaining Spheres, and evacuated them of their surprising human cargo. Twelve men and women were now sitting on the ground, watched by armed guards.

  Against the double convergence of the moons and their freak weather events, he’d flung all the manpower at his disposal against the holed-up defenders. They’d fought bitterly, all for a hole in the ground. Just as the battle had been won, an earthquake had sealed shut the hole. Their strategic objective no longer existed.

  But that was only the start.

  The ground had split, revealing devastation and death. Sarkoth Amnon had fled with part of the army, leaving him and the surviving troops to their fate.

  Abandoned.

  He’d spared a single glance at the Adagio-class shuttles rising like birds of prey, soaring far above the, and realized that this planet would probably become his grave.

  He activated the comms on his suit, and spoke. “Colonel Vilanthus, status report.”

  He heard back from the colonel, a young career climber with an uncomfortable pencil-thin mustache.

  “Our status, sir, is complete shit.”

  “Can you be more definite?”

  “No, general. I can’t, and that’s the problem. Ever since the moons fucked our communications sideways I’ve been trying to keep this army under control, and I can’t. Whole units and companies are either dead or not responding. We’ve got people literally miles away from where we positioned them. I have no idea of our numbers, our KIA, our MIA, our combat readiness, our personal hygiene, or any other factor. My ‘status evaluation’ consists of looking around me and blinking against the smoke.”

  “We need to regroup. Someone find a flare, and set it on the plains beyond the digging site.”

  Vilanthus laughed. A crackly sound that cut in and out, like a sawtooth wave.

  “Nobody will see a flare.”

  Sakharov eyeballed the debris field, and realized he was correct. Hundreds of fires burned, and smoke plumes occluded the air. Soon everything would be salted in a thick layer of ash – a combination of aerosolized dust, metal flakes, and burned flesh.

  “Look, the moons are leaving, and nobody’s shooting at us. Get the situation under control.”

  “I’m open to suggestions.
”

  “Have we tried contacting Konotouri Station?”

  “No dice. Either the magnetic interference has permanently hashed our systems or they’ve switched to internal comms only. Last we heard, they had some sort of disaster on the station and they needed to drop one of the habitat wheels.”

  All of this was dancing around the real issue. Something that might be bigger than any of them, or the war they’d tried to fight.

  He’d seen the silhouette rise from the ground, the purple-hued thing that had spoken into his mind with tongues of flame. He was hard at work trying to forget it. Like everything else he’d tried since landing on the planet, he assumed he’d fail at that, too.

  Something was incredibly wrong here, and they were caught in the middle of it.

  “Well, first things first,” he said. “Let’s consolidate our victory, such as it is. Round up those dipshits at the drilling site, and make sure they stay down.”

  Then the sky disappeared.

  At first, it looked like an expanding bubble.

  The bubble warped light at the edge of its curvature, twisting the backdrop of Caitanya-9’s atmosphere until it was a ribbon of crystallized light around a hole in the sky.

  Inside the hole was pure black.

  The bubble grew in size, filling the world above until it wiped away the sun. Proxima Centauri was swept aside, distorting into a tiny sliver as the black void displaced it.

  What’s happening here?

  A high-pitched keening came from the surface. Sakharov realized he was listening to screams. Hundreds and hundreds of screams.

  The captured Defiant stared up from where they sat or kneeled. None of them were screaming. In their expressions was knowledge, but no less fear.

  Sakharov’s senses disassociated from his body. He could not look at it. He could not look away from it.

  He tried to talk to his men, found that communication was impossible. Tried to move his limbs, found that they were frozen.

  He and everyone on this world were helpless as tomorrow crashed down.

  He stared, transfixed by the light show up above. He felt no sense of his own position. He might have been a moth, sucked into fan blades, or a spider, spiraling down a drain. The only thing he knew of was that he was going somewhere.

  It was as if the sky was paper, and he was being folded through it.

  At the furthest point on the empyrean, there was a confusing scatter of light, bending and refracting like an optical illusion.

  This speckling turned into a solid disk of not-quite-black, a shade that stood out against the wormhole. Then the disk filled the sky the way the bubble had, and Sakharov realized he was looking at stars.

  He stood looking out on a celestial canopy of stars, so bright they stung his eyes. His other senses returned to him. His men and women had so many things to say. But one thing he didn’t hear were answers.

  He realized that all the stars in the sky had changed.

  Caitanya-9 was about 4.7 light years from Terrus. Most of the constellations were only slightly changed, the positions of various stars parallaxed out of equilibrium. The Big Dipper had an elongated handle. Ursa Major sprouted an extra leg. But you could still recognize most of the same features.

  But now, everything had changed.

  He tried to find just one familiar constellation in the sky, one arrangement of stars that made sense and he could wrap his mind around. He could find nothing.

  No Cassiopeia, no Bootes, no Lynx. Not even single stars like Sirius.

  Our location has changed, he thought. Wherever they were, it was far away from home.

  “General, are you there?” Vilanthus said over comms.

  “Copy.”

  “Our systems cut out for a moment. Glad to have you back.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on, so don’t you even dare ask.”

  Hundreds of troops stared at stars together, injuries and panic forgotten. They were all lost in the horror and awe and mystery of the situation, weaving together in a braid.

  Few saw the winged woman approach the digging site, rifle in hand.

  Biokinetic wings beat the air. She’d taken a brief pause to find a weapon, rummaging through a trashed dune buggy.

  Her hands had closed on the cold metal of a gun barrel. She picked the weapon up, holding it to her bare chest, feeling its heft, its balance. She opened the chamber, checked the load.

  It was a Orizen R-9 sniper rifle. Forty centimeter barrel. Sixteen shot magazine. From beneath the cold endpoint of the muzzle ran a slender laser of 20,000 angstrom infrared light.

  The rifle was simple to operate, a veritable three-step waltz. Line up the beam, pull the trigger, and stop someone’s heart.

  Ubra Zolot took to the end again, scoping out the situation.

  Dazed and shell-shocked soldiers were running, crawling, climbing, or just lying still. The disastrous turn of the battle below and the insane celestial calisthenics above had robbed them of their morale.

  A small, fast moving team could have cut a swathe right through them, going straight for the prisoners held captive on the ground. Hit them with firepower and they’d crumble.

  She didn’t have the strength. She’d been flying for hours, the Vyres burning the glucose in her blood, and she had no plans to run.

  Nyphur’s people are down there. Mykor’s people. They’re the closest thing to friends I have right now, and they’re deep in the stew.

  She hit the ground, looked up, and saw the different stars. Interesting, but not important. The stars weren’t going to kill her. The people on the ground might.

  She crawled along the ground another hundred meters, her bare knees getting scraped on the purple soil, moving from downed plane to burning ATV, ignoring pockets of soldiers.

  She tried to read the mood of the Solar Arm forces, tried to ride the clues. There was little sense of discipline. No signs of orders being relayed and carried out.

  That was good. No unified reaction when she started popping people.

  She stuck her head up behind a narrow ridge.

  There were twelve of the Defiant on the ground. Most of them were naked, having come straight from the alien Spheres. Armed guards patrolled them. About six or seven.

  She didn’t like those numbers.

  She put the stock of the Orizen to her shoulder, hoping she could whittle them down to four or five before they noticed she was there.

  She was about to fire, when a burning flash of light erupted overhead.

  It was soundless, and so utterly, all-consumingly bright she couldn’t even look at it. It covered the entire breadth and depth of the horizon, and she had to press her head to the ground and close her eyes to shut out the light reflected off the rock.

  It only lasted about ten seconds. Each one an eternity.

  There were men scrambling around now, blinded, who hadn’t looked away in time. A golden opportunity. She took advantage of the situation. She had a brilliant talent for compartmentalization. For the moment, everything that didn’t make sense was thrown in one bin – DOESN’T COMPUTE.

  There were still plenty of things that did compute. Men. Rifles. Bullets.

  She sighted and fired at one of the guards.

  - Shokkk -

  The rifle kicked back into her shoulder. A cupro-titanium jacketed round entered his chest soundlessly, bloodlessly. He clutched at the chest wound for a second, and fell.

  She turned, and sighted on the next one.

  She fired too quickly, and the bullet buzzed over his head. A shout of alarm went up then, and they split up and went to the ground, fanning out quickly. She saw the glitter of weapons.

  Shit. I’ve been made.

  Counting on the fact that they didn’t know where she was, she popped her head back up, and squeezed off a series of rounds. None struck, but each one shattered their resolve.

  It was terrifying to hear sniper fire and not see the sniper.

  A single man in a hidden place can hold
up the movements of an entire company, or even an entire division, for days. The fear is overwhelming. Every soldier feels anxiety like a pressing fist, wondering if the crosshairs were even then settling on his center of mass, alighting like a fly that swats the man.

  Under normal situations, they’d have motion sensing equipment set up that could detect her movement down to an atom’s width. With the convulsions the planet had undergone, all of that was offline.

  I’m too far from the prisoners, she thought. And if I crawl, I’ll lose the element of surprise. Fuck it, here we go again.

  She fired another scatter of shots, then took to the air.

  She ascended with the last dregs of her strength, and hurled herself towards the patch of chewed-up rock and tangled machinery that was the center of the drilling site. There was a cluster of rock with a hole at the center.

  If I can get there, I won’t be safe, but at least I won’t be 100% guaranteed to die.

  Wind on her face, she flew straight down. She heard the chatter of gunfire, and closed her eyes.

  Immediately, she felt a round whipping past her face. Another one punched a hole through her left Vyre. Then she landed on the ground, went into a tumble, and righted herself, Orizen in hand.

  Open ground. She was exposed. The rocks were to her left.

  Shit.

  Plumes of dust exploded to her left and right as bullets missed her by inches.

  She dived for cover.

  She was desperately low on energy, and mis-judged her jump. Her head struck rock, and she staggered to her feet, aware of movement to her right.

  She was face to face with a woman with Solar Arm Defense Force stripes. A corporal. The woman looked surprised, then went for her gun.

  Ubra had no time to get the rifle to her shoulder.

  “Die,” she said, and fired from her hip. The round tore through the woman’s stomach like an ice auger, spiraling her guts out the back of her body.