Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2)

by Ben Sheffield

  Rose’s cell: “’The Experiment Ends.’”

  Mykor’s cell: “nothing. He didn’t say anything.”

  Oops. A lie.

  Sarkoth Amnon arched a wry eyebrow. He’d heard Andrei Kazmer’s final words as he was flung down the hole to the Wipe, and even though Mykor was being hauled off, the war’s one and only POW, he would certainly have heard it too.

  Very well. Mykor was jerking them around. That was his prerogative, but it didn’t bode well for them, and even less so for him.

  Wilseth singled in on Mykor’s cell. “You’re absolutely sure. Nothing at all?”

  “Wait, now that I think about it, I think he did say something.”

  “Well, what was it?”

  “Something about how you should stop experimenting on him, or something. I don’t know. For fuck’s sake, I’d just lost my daughter.”

  Wilseth thought for a second, and decided that it added up, to a point.

  He gave Mykor a tentative pass.

  Very well, your stories match, and you’ve both proven yourself fairly reliable arbiters of the facts. Now the interrogation truly begins.

  “We don’t need Ms Rohilian anymore,” Wilseth said. “She’s confirmed that Mykor isn’t completely full of shit, so we might as well let her go.”

  Amnon nodded. “I’ll arrange for her to be released.”

  “Would it be too much trouble for her to have her memories re-set? Just a quick dehydration and rehydration. We captured her brain waves as of the moment she stepped on the shuttle.”

  “Sure. Why not. Make this whole thing go away for her.”

  “Now,” Wilseth cracked his knuckles. “Let’s get some blood from this stone. This should be easy. The guy has definite answers, and we just need to find a way to get them.”

  Sarkoth nodded. He didn’t notice Gatag Wilseth’s hand, obscured by the desk, as it activated a recording device on his suit.

  Wilseth kept all expressions off his face.

  He was a consummate professional, and Sarkoth Amnon kept him near at all times. It was useful to have a man with no emotions, who viewed humans as meaningless boxes.

  But Sarkoth didn’t realise that he himself was one of those boxes.

  The recording of the interrogation was now being beamed to a relay station, amplified, and then beamed all the way out to Titan.

  Titan – August 2nd 2142 1000 hours

  “We’ve received something interesting from your mole on Selene,” Second Minister Raya Yithdras said. She’d contrived to be in Emil Gokla’s mansion on party business.

  “Eh?” Emil Gokla was groggy, half asleep. He spent much of his life in this state. Old age was a robber.

  He’d infused nearly two litres of Zante’s blood into his body. The boy had slept for twenty hours straight afterwards, and was still barely conscious. Old age was the robber there, too.

  “Wilseth.”

  Sarkoth Amnon supposed he’d vetted his inner circle so that they were free of the Sons of the Vanitar. He supposed incorrectly.

  The rail-thin torturer had been putting whispers in Emil’s ears for months. It had been a shock to discover that Mykor was still alive. He remembered the boy very well, and had even felt a momentary sadness at the news of his death: something that would likely not be afforded to the likes of Zante.

  Sarkoth Amnon thought this would be his big secret – a little bit of knowledge asymmetry he could leverage in whatever game he was playing against the Sons of the Vanitar. Again, he was incorrect.

  “He just rehydrated Mykor, and is asking him questions,” Raya said. “It takes thirty minutes for signals to reach here from Selene, so what you’re hearing is old.”

  She spoke, activated the computer, and soon the feed was playing through the speakers.

  Q. Hello, Mykore.

  A. Hello.

  Q. Are you comfortable? Can I get you anything to eat or drink?

  A. Some water would be good.

  Q. What are your long term aspirations? Assuming you don’t want to stay a prisoner.

  A. I honest don’t know what I want. Everything I based my life around is on Caitanya-9. And it’s gone. All of it. Do you know what that’s like?

  Q. No.

  A. Like a shadow, with nothing casting the shadow. The thing I existed for is gone.

  Q. Well, the planet’s not around any more, but you can help us bring closure to the events that occurred there. I assure you, we are quite mystified.

  A. I know who you are. Sarkoth Amnon’s employee. I assume he’s listening in the next room, ready to pass along my story to the Sons of the Vanitar. I was one of them. Any information I give you will end up in the hands of a group that believes in extinction for the human species.

  Q. You have no reason to believe me, but Prime Minister Amnon no longer has any sort of connection with the Sons of the Vanitar. He has rescinded his involvement.

  A. Of course I don’t believe you. But given that the planet has proven itself beyond the control of any man, I’ll happily answer your questions.

  Q. Why did you defect from the Sons of the Vanitar, forty years ago?

  A. One man went into the Black Shift shuttle. A different man stepped out. Nothing more to it.

  Q. What were you hoping to achieve down there?

  A. Find something and use it to positive ends. Or if I failed, make it so that nobody could possibly succeed.

  Q. Operationalised, what did this look like?

  A. I searched the surface for signs and wonders. I abducted men, and converted them into spies. The memory implantation devices Black Shift left behind were quite useful. I left any sense of morality in tatters, but I never felt like a villain. That’s the good thing about setting yourself against a cult that wants to destroy existence. Easy to have the moral high ground.

  Q. And nobody knew you were there? Was Konotouri Station in cahoots with you?

  A. They knew nothing except that some pretty balls of light sometimes floated across the surface of the planet, in between storms.

  Q. We know that you captured the location, and that you dug a hole there. What did you find?

  A. A measured pulse. Duodecimal. That’s significant, because any kind of terrestrial device uses either binary or base 10. At the bottom of the hole, the pulse was apparently emanating from some kind of silvery surface. One of my lieutenants went through, and didn’t come back. A second one went down a few hours later. Same story. That is the extent of my encounters with the Vanitar. For a while I wished I’d gone down, then I was glad I hadn’t, but now

  Q. What do you think was down there?

  A. We – meaning the Sons of the Vanitar, meaning you, I suppose –

  Q. A quick interruption: I am not one of the Sons. I’m aware of their existence and know more than a little about them, but I have nothing to do with them. Whatever you tell me will not end up in their hands.

  A. Weren’t you listening before? It doesn’t matter. Mail this right to Emil Gokla’s door, for all that matters. You can’t control the planet, let alone use it as a weapon. Nobody can. And I absolutely believe you are one of the Sons.

  Q. Your belief is in error.

  A. Listen, stop talking to me in this cell through a loudspeaker and come in here. I’m an old man, I can’t possibly hurt you. I want you to prove that you don’t have a little dimple of skin above your neck, where Emil implanted the killswitch. Only then will I believe you.

  Q. Your belief means little, Mykor. In any event, we wander from the point.

  A. I think we’re still on it. Who can a man trust?

  Q. What happened to your two men, do you think?

  A. That mad miner said in his recordings that all his friends were hypnotized by the sight of the Vanitar. Immobilized. Reduced to puppets that did nothing but worship their puppetmaster. Maybe my two men met the same fate.

  Q. Did you perform any scientific tests on what was going on there down the hole?

  A. Between the moons and you assholes she
lling us, I confess we didn’t. Amazing what slips your mind.

  Q. Fair enough. What do you know about Andrei Kazmer?

  A. I’ve never heard that name before. Ever.

  Q. He’s the one who killed your daughter.

  A. Then I’ll carry his name with me for as long as I live.

  Q. Do you remember anything else?

  A. Just that I was overcome with grief, that I was taken prisoner, and that I wanted a flying rock to crush me. None did. I never get the things I want, it seems.

  Q. You’re a valuable strategic asset, and your defection from the Sons might be…forgiven.

  A. Yeah, see, you’re one of them. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to promise that.

  Q. I have promised you nothing. Do you know why the planet disappeared as the countdown ended?

  A. That would be conditional on me knowing things about the planet. I don’t. I cannot comprehend Caitanya-9 even an inch deep. But I’ll say this – remember how the planet just…appeared? In 2075? And all the astronomers tripped over themselves in their haste to explain it as an error in telemetry? Well, suppose it actually wasn’t there prior to that year. I don’t know how, but if it can appear, it can disappear. And if the Vanitar are as powerful as we’ve been lead to believe, maybe that sort of thing’s within their grasp. Wormholes that can be generated arbitrarily in spacetime. Whatever. That makes the planet even more dangerous – at any moment, it can pop right out on someone’s doorstep.

  Q. Obviously, you’d see the advantage of possessing a weapon like that, even if you never used it. You could cross the universe instantly. FTL travel would finally be here. Don’t read omnicidal motives into us asking you these questions.

  A. Well, I think the questions more or less end. You’ve basically tapped me of everything I know. You didn’t need to go through this whole rigmarole, you know. You could have brought me face to face with Sarkoth Amnon and I would have told him everything.

  Q. The Prime Minister is a busy man.

  A. Well, hell, he’s Prime Minister now? Even after the disaster on the planet? Fuck, talk about failing upwards. Well, I guess nobody knows what happened there except for the few survivors that returned. A tiny bottleneck of information, easy to control and distort. Everyone probably thinks he’s the biggest hero since Patton. Tell him that he’ll never fulfill his dream of destroying the world.

  [Sounds of a door slamming open, and a man shouting]

  Q-2. Listen, you goddamn fool. Keep telling yourself that I’m the enemy, even though I’ve kept you alive. Wilseth wanted to torture you as a first option. I stopped him.

  Q. Prime Minister, please. This is counterproductive…

  Q-2. Mykor, you want to fulfill your dreams? You want to neutralize the risk of Caitanya-9? Then swallow your pride for a few seconds and listen to me.

  A. I’m listening, Amnon. Doesn’t mean your words are worth jack shit to me, but I’m listening.

  Q-2. I have left the Sons of the Vanitar. This is at great personal risk, and I’m only still alive by bluffing and luck. I no longer agree with their goals. I made a mistake in allying myself with them. What do you want from me? I was young and stupid. So were you – it’s a fixable condition.

  A. Granted. But what about being old and stupid?

  Q-2. As the planet vanished, I received a message from space. I presume it was from Andrei Kazmer. He basically told me that he controlled the Wipe and that he was delaying it for a simple reason: to let me suffer. But he says that at some unspecified time in the future, he’ll return and destroy our civilization with a gamma ray burst.

  A. So who’s Andrei Kazmer again?

  Q-2. He’s a complicated situation all on his own. Both I and Emil were curious, at the time, about what happens when you wipe a man’s memory and don’t replace it with anything. In Kazmer’s case, it apparently destroyed any sense of personal morality. Your daughter is dead because of him, and so are many others beside. He was thrown down the hole to the Wipe – a mistake. We thought he wouldn’t survive. And maybe he didn’t. But somehow, he’s been able to take control of the device, or whatever powers the planet, and

  A. If he made the planet disappear, that’s compelling proof.

  Q-2. Suffice to say, I need to stop him. And you’re the person with the best idea how.

  A. Did you listen to a word I just said? I can’t do a damned thing. I’m a failure. You think I have a weapon in my pocket that can shoot Caitanya-9 out of the sky? Forget it. If he can teleport anywhere and unleash gamma rays at will, you’re doomed.

  Q-2. So you want me to despair.

  A. You know I do! You’re a stupid fool. Don’t grovel and make little shows of redemption. None of this would have happened without your interference. And…wait…what was that you said about my daughter?

  Q-2. That was not my fault. I had Kazmer locked up after what was apparently a psychotic episode. He escaped, along with a female private, and got down to the planet.

  A. So it was your fault, you imbecile. I want a gamma ray burst aimed right at your forehead.

  Q-2. I resent your blame.

  A. I resent your existence. Remember when we were schoolfriends? We’d make jokes that went over everyone’s head and act like we were smarter than everyone else? I matured out of that. You remained a schoolboy forever. Everything’s a game, everything’s a joke. Well, you stole from me the thing I valued most in all this world.

  Q-2. [silence]

  A. Choke on this piece of advice: what are Kazmer’s motives? You know what they are, I don’t. Does he just want vengeance, or does he want something else?

  Q-2. He is quite the lunatic. What he wants probably changes every the sun passes his eyes.

  A. Wait…do you still have his memories? You withheld his Black Shift headset, but you must still have it somewhere? If you get in a position where you can bargain with him, maybe that’s an approach to take. You get to live. He gets his identity back.

  Q-2. I don’t believe it’s that simple. I think the Black Shift headsets change you who are, and Kazmer knows this. He’d probably think that whatever headset I gave him was full of misinformation and lies. How could I prove otherwise, when he has so many other reasons to mistrust me?

  A. Of course it’s not that simple. You’re the one who’s tied this knot, so excuse me if I do not know how to untangle it for you. Where’s my water? Is it going to arrive any time this lifetime?

  Q-2. I cannot recall the last time I gave an honest apology, but Mykor, I’m sorry. You think your life was a failure, but at worst it was a noble failure. Well, mine failed so hard that I now see I should never have wanted to succeed.

  A. Sops. Bring my daughter back, and then I’ll accept your apology.

  There was more arguing, more backbiting, more uselessness. Two men, utterly powerless against tomorrow.

  “End audio feed.”

  The speakers went silent, and Emil mentally thanked Wilseth for this most welcome of gifts.

  In another chair, Raya Yithdras nodded. “Fascinating material.”

  She was short, and thick. The impression she left was a massive amount of woman packed into a very small cubical dimension. Magistrate of the Asteroid belt, and an influential player in the scattered colonies beyond, she was next in succession for control of the Sons of the Vanitar.

  “I really like this Andrei Kazmer fellow.”

  “As do I. He could show up in the sky at any time, and vaporize our entire species. We’re almost out of a job.”

  “Ironic that the ultimate Son of the Vanitar is someone who probably has never heard of us.”

  Emil stood up, and began pacing. His bones creaked like furniture fit for the axe. “But we can’t count on him to follow through on his promises. For all we know he’s incapable of controlling the planet, just as everyone else was. But still, I pray that I live to see that day.”

  “And pray that you don’t live to see the day after.”

  Emil chuckled, and went to the back of the mansi
on.

  Titan was cold, and the methane that blanketed the moon had a strange way of coloring your perception. Even indoors, you imagined yourself sinking into an orange swamp, funneling deeper and deeper into the earth until you were landlocked in a semi-solid sea of putridity.

  Emil had tried to decorate his mansion to look as much like a Terran habitat as possible. With mixed results. It gave people the creeps.

  He located the boy, Zante, in a bed at the back of the building. He looked up, a pale and wan shadow.

  “How do you feel, lad?” Emil asked.

  “Cold. Weak.”

  “Rest up. You’ve been a good boy, and you’ve done everything I’ve required of you. But tomorrow I will need to take another liter of your blood.”

  Terrus – Neo Sydney – August 2nd, 2142 - 1600

  Hours later, Rose was back in Sydney, walking with the wobbly gait of someone suddenly having to acclimatize to Terrestrian gravity. “Gravity fucked” was how they sometimes put it.

  She wandered the city until the artificial dawn was turned on. The liquid crystal streets blinked off, and the city returned to some of what it had been like Rose was growing up.

  It was as if that city had been a dream, just like the experiences it had brought her.

  She remembered what the police officers had said as they undid her handcuffs and set her free at Sydney Spaceport.

  “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Bring this up through internal and there will be a court case. A court case that gets thrown out precisely the instant they discover you’ve underdone Black Shift transport. All your testimony is inadmissible, and your mental illness will become public record. Have fun getting a job after that.”

  “I understand.”

  “Say nothing. Imagine it’s a hallucination.”

  “Maybe that’s what it was.”

  The door shut in her face.

  The advice fell on receptive ears. In a way, this was exactly what she’d needed.

  It was terrible having all this shit bouncing around your head, and having no release valve other than to write THE EXPERIMENT ENDS over and over on every surface that held ink and a few that didn’t.