Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2)

by Ben Sheffield

  But there was no craft out there, and nobody had used the airlock in literally years.

  “Damned thing’s misfiring,” he muttered to himself. “That’s all I need.”

  “Equalising atmosphere inside airlock with an 80-20 nitrogen-oxygen blend... “

  “Hey, stop that,” he stood up, suddenly angry. “Oxygen’s precious. Don’t blast it into space…”

  “Opening airlock.”

  There was a woosh, and the pale armature of the doors slid open.

  A giant figure stood in the doorway. And when no invitation was forthcoming, he let himself in.

  For a moment, all Tertius could do was look. His brain was unable to process what he was seeing, and started spitting random gibberish at him. Don’t spend too much time on this. You’ve got to check the pipework in the main foyer for rust. You’ve got to make sure all the spare nanomesh suits are accounted for. You’ve got to adjust the temperature in the ducts so the pipes don’t freeze. You’ve got to...

  The man was a mountain, perhaps seven feet tall. And his skin was a thick, refulgent purple, laced with white.

  Tertius’s mouth fell open on its own accord. He wanted to ask a question that started with who… but as he looked into the face, he realized that he already knew.

  “You’re back,” he breathed.

  Wake nodded, and passed Tertius by.

  A second later, the customs officer collapsed, an embolism instantly forming and bursting in his veins. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  Then Wake turned around, and with a single gesture, tore a hole in the wall.

  “What do you mean there’s a loss of pressure in Konotouri Gamma?”

  Nemuta was at his desk in the control room. The dramatic panoramic holograms had been switched off years ago, to save power.

  With the illusion gone, it was impossible to escape the truth. He was a man sitting in an aluminum tomb. The bare walls were now not protection, but a prison.

  There were still scratches on the wall, still places where equipment had been torn out and inexpertly replaced. In another of the station’s comedy of terrors, one of their scientists had gone berserk and tried to destroy the controls. He’d been dealt with.

  His underling in Konotouri Beta was talking in a panic “We’re detecting a hole in the wall, located near the airlock. We’ve tried to hail landing dock engineer Revon Tertius, but he’s not responding. Wait a second…”

  Nemuta paced the office anxiously.

  Enoki Kai’s sudden death had forced him into a post he was neither qualified for nor capable of doing.

  The first call of action had been to completely isolate the station from outsiders. No communication with Sarkoth Amnon, nor with anyone from Terrus. They would be self-sufficient and independent.

  Well, they’d gotten their wish.

  He vacillated between the suspicion that something great and terrible had happened on the planet, and the belief that something great and terrible was still happening.

  “This is really weird. We’ve now lost all communication with Gamma. We can’t shut the doors there, we can’t see through the cameras, we can’t do anything. We’re, wait…no…no…wait...”

  Words continued pouring from her mouth, losing meaning with each new syllable and each rising inflection of terror. He looked down at his computer system, and saw that every piece of data from the third wheel was now just marked ERROR.

  “What’s happening, Lin?” He said into comms.

  “He’s here! He’s coming down the hall! I don’t know how, I didn’t hear anyone use the elevators.”

  Nemuta started shouting. “Look, can you tell me what’s going on? Can I get some plain fucking information from you?”

  “Look, never mind me, just shut off Konotouri Gamma and Beta. Let them both drop. He says he’s going to kill me and open a hole, but maybe you can stop him, maybe you can save….”

  Her line went dead.

  He furiously tried to access the controls for Konotouri Beta, but found that he didn’t have any access into the second ring. He couldn’t see through the cameras.

  Like Konotouri Gamma, it was sealed off. Locked away.

  By why?

  By whom?

  First Gamma, then Beta. Whoever was doing this, disabling the habitat wheels and tearing holes in their walls, was working from the outside in.

  And I’m next.

  In the end, there was no fight, no final stand. He wasn’t a captain going down with the ship, he was just another mouse to be exterminated.

  He heard footsteps approaching.

  They were coming from the bend around the hall to the control room. Their slow thud erased any thought from his mind. Even his animal survival instincts fled him at the sound of their steady, mournful tread.

  His palms sweating, he accessed the computer and locked the door. Click.

  A second later, there was identical, symmetrical unlocking sound. Click.

  The door slid open, and a behemoth with purple skin strode into the room.

  “Who are you?” He asked as the apparition walked closer and closer, his tongue miraculously not stumbling over any words.

  “What you and your friends made me,” the purple-skinned man said. “I don’t know what I am, and neither do you.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “And you can’t. Not anymore.”

  Nemuta fell to the ground, clutching his chest, eyes staring up at the ceiling.

  Then Wake shredded a hole in the wall, a cavity that bulged outwards into space and then finally exploded, venting a gigantic chunk of metal out into the coldness beyond. The air almost screamed as it escaped, rushing outwards like the worst storms on Caitanya-9, until there was no medium left to transmit sound at all.

  The depressurization was rough.

  Everything that could leave the ground, left the ground. Nemuta’s cooling body spun through the air, corkscrewing through the hole.

  In the cold, silent vacuum, his body would float for a long time before descending to the planet. A rime of frost hardened over lips that would never move again. A thick bubble of mucus flowed from his mouth and nose, expanding like a blue-brown balloon, drawn from his esophagus by the suction. The bubble reached the size of his head before it burst.

  He tumbled around and around in space, entering an endless spin.

  The gaping holes ripped through the three habitat wheels had disgorged many tons of matter out into orbit, including dozens and dozens of humans. One or two had gotten their hands on oxygen tanks, and were thrashing and writhing, struggling to get a handhold in a place where they would never find one. But most were dead, twice-frozen, twice-chilled, both by the vacuum of space and the invisible hand that had destroyed their hearts.

  The bodies floated together, becoming a graveyard with no dirt. The purple planet loomed beneath them, and eventually, they would descend and burn up in the atmosphere. For now, they were united for the last time.

  Konotouri Alpha was finished for its original purpose. But there was now another one it could serve.

  After a few minutes, if any of the frozen bodies were still alive, they would have seen a strange sight: a bubble appearing in space, enveloping the space station…and the entire assembly just winking out of existence.

  Now Caitanya-9 and its two moons stood alone, unsullied by man’s vanity.

  The Atrium – Selene – September 30th 2142, 1500 hours

  Sarkoth Amnon convened a council of three on Selene.

  It was a “dark” council, unrecorded and undocumented, and one that would presumably escape the knowledge of the Sons of the Vanitar. They were alone, surrounded by a sea of vacant senate seats.

  They were plotting to avert the end.

  He shook their hands as they took seats at the long, empty table. First his General, then his Minister of Defense.

  He liked the title of “Minister of Defense” for its meretriciousness and bureaucracy. They all called themselves that. Fifty pe
rcent of such people should be called Ministers of Offense, but so far, he hadn’t met even one.

  Minister Shirow Agamune was an older woman, large-framed but curiously spaced out and insubstantial. Her dress coat hung on the spindles of her bones, betraying vast gaps of missing flesh. She reminded Amnon of a nebula – large and imposing, but spun from gossamer stardust. She spoke quietly, and only with great reservations.

  To her right was her antithesis, her walking contradiction. General Rodensis was the successor of General Sakharov, sadly lost on Caitanya-9. He was a thick-necked man, all ropy cords of muscle laced with pencil-thick veins. His voice continually reached shouting volume during the dullest of conversations. They called him “the madman of Phobos”. The bromide enraged him with its inaccuracy. He’d actually been born on Deimos.

  They were not discussing war.

  Of course not. One didn’t discuss war in the austere white palaces of Selene.

  War never happened. The Martian insurrection was an undeclared war. As was the Selene/Terran antimatter showdown. The Caitanya-9 episode had ended before it began. Even World War III had never had papers of conflict issued.

  These days, for more than a century, government entities preferred to conduct “armed conflicts”.

  “Be aware that there are things I can’t tell you,” Amnon said. “But I expect you both to assist me to your utmost ability.”

  “We received your netmail about this new…uh…security protocol,” Rodensis said. “I have no idea what to say about it.”

  A few days ago, Amnon had issued requirements for defense network that would span the solar system. He needed the ability to exert overwhelming firepower, at nearly a moment’s notice, anywhere out to the orbit of Pluto.

  “I’ve spoken with the officials in the outer regions, and commissioned some quick engineering reports,” Agamune said. She activated some holographic plans on her suit, and projected them on the jet-black drafting table in front of them.

  “And you’ve found…?”

  “Only one thing fits the bill,” she said. “Supercritical hydrogen warheads.”

  He digested that peace of information.

  “Their use is forbidden,” he said, thinking of the tangles of non-armament treaties that would now have to be shorn in two.

  “Then we’ll have to make them un-forbidden,” she said. “We’ve already got dozens of them, leftover from World War Three. They’ve been sitting in storage on Selene for decades, with the electronics aging out of their life cycle. Add in some new circuitboards, perhaps test one or two to make sure they still work, and they’ll be ready to fly.”

  Ready to fly…

  The weapons she was referring to were the absolute apex of the Solar Arm’s arsenal. Controlled antimatter explosions, delivered at nearly the speed of light.

  Antimatter was the opposite of matter – same substance, opposite spin and properties. Chiefly known for its violent interactions with regular matter. A single gram of antimatter was enough to level a city.

  Sarkoth Amnon had seen the relativistic antimatter torpedoes, just before they were disarmed and walled away in three-factor authentication bunkers. The Sons of the Vanitar had long desired to possess them, and their failure was a galling one for the organization.

  Sleek, shiny missiles, eighty meters long. Their aesthetic was voluptuous, almost sexual, like a glistening condom.

  Each one was fitted with an antihydrogen warhead. A metric ton of hydrogen, connected to a Majorana rectifier, an elaborate marriage of particle physics and garage engineering. As soon as the missile entered effective range, the Majorana rectifier would immediately convert 500 kilograms of the hydrogen to antihydrogen.

  The resulting explosion would rip apart a planet. It was antihydrogen warheads that the Selenites had threatened the Terrestrians with in their war for supremacy.

  “So what do we do with these warheads?” He asked.

  “So here’s the defense scenario you gave me,” Rodensis said. “We’re talking about a single object, of unlimited power, moving faster than the speed of light. It can pop up anywhere, at any time, and destroy anything. It has unknown goals and objectives. Fucked if I know what you’re talking about or whether this thing exists, but there’s only one way we could stop it – complete coverage of the Solar System with antimatter missiles. We’d build outposts, and stagger them all the way out to the Oort Cloud. Each one loaded with missiles. The second it appears, we nail it with antimatter missiles. Each missile projects a kind of shield, a few hundred million kilometers across in cubic space, where it can’t appear without getting struck back. Hopefully the object will emerge in one of these zones.”

  “Obviously, this has some caveats,” Agamune said. “If it’s just recklessly suicidal, we can’t deter it. It would attack and take us down with it. And if it doesn’t know about our defense capabilities, the story’s the same.”

  “Let’s put those concerns aside for a second,” Sarkoth Amnon said. “And talk nuts and bolts. How easily can we build this sort of defense network?”

  “Given the shield of influence for each missile, my guess is that we can effectively provide deterrent cover most of our holdings with about a thousand outposts, each armed with a missile.”

  “Well, we don’t have a thousand missiles,” Sarkoth Amnon said. “We have about fifteen or twenty, depending on how many ones are duds.”

  “Yes. We need to build them.”

  “Can we do it in secret?”

  Agamune and Rodensis looked at each other. Their expressions were ones of great concern.

  The Solar Arm had a front and a back. They knew it, just as everyone did. The thin layer of paint over the government said that it was a representative republic. In truth, it was a honeycomb of byzantine conspiracies, a Borgia’s paradise. Neither of them cared to get involved with the network of competing shadow councils that made up the political machine. You had to be a certain type of person to do that, and you almost always died before your time.

  Strange events littered the Solar Arm’s history. Terrorist attacks, but no terrorists were ever discovered. Somehow an aging inventor, Emil Gokla, had ended up the de facto governor of an entire colony on Titan. And recently, an impromptu military expedition that had ended with a planet disappearing.

  And now they were being asked to build planet-destroying missiles in secret. You didn’t have to be dog to hear the whistle.

  “We absolutely cannot do it in secret,” Agamune said. “You’re talking about a military buildup that’s absolutely unprecedented. Trillions of ducats. Mobilization of millions or tens of millions. These are difficult weapons to produce, and projecting power over lightyears of empty space is difficult.”

  Rodensis was blunter. “Where’s the money coming from to finance this?”

  “Look, that’s not your business,” Sarkoth Amnon said.

  “Glad to hear you say that. Let’s keep it that way.”

  “All I need is you to sign off on this thing theoretically,” Sarkoth said. “Suppose an infinite amount of money rained down from the sky. Could you make this happen in one year, yes or no?”

  “Yes,” Rodensis said. “With many caveats.”

  Agamune didn’t answer, except through a tiny nod that Amnon half-imagined he saw. He didn’t blame her for not being forthright. She was a career politician, and yeses and nos were suicide. Options. That’s what you needed in this game. Lots and lots of options.

  “Then let’s get to work,” Amnon said. “I don’t know how I’ll finance this thing, but the government can issue bonds until we get that sorted out. If we fail to achieve this, the consequences could be catastrophic.”

  As they spoke, they were hardly aware of Wilseth pacing around the back of the Atrium.

  He was Sarkoth’s enforcer and chief intelligence officer, and his loyalty was not in question.

  Nobody noticed as he slipped out the back, into a gallery of columns and statues. When he was sure he was out of earshot, he activated
the comms in his clothing, and sent a message to Raya Yithdras on Titan.

  “There’s something you should know. The Prime Minister’s trying to build weapons of planetary destruction. He thinks Caitanya-9 is coming back.”

  Selene – October 1st, 2142, 1200 hours

  Mykor was released from his prison cell, and confined to house arrest in one of Selene’s many comfortable villas.

  He planned to reflect and mourn, and to live out his days watching the air spread to cover the moon.

  “Your suit and your possessions, such as they were, are yours as well,” Sarkoth said. “I’ll arrange for them to be sent to your villa.”

  “Ah,” Mykor said. “Thank you. Incidentally, when you undressed me before the Black Shift procedure…was there a triangular metallic device on my belt? About three inches on each side?”

  “Yes, there was. It’s with everything else. What was it?”

  “Just a sentimental keepsake,” Mykor said. “Something my daughter carved for me out of feldspar. I’d love to have it back.”

  “It will be done.”

  “Alright, I’ll bite,” Mykor said. “Why the change of heart?”

  “Because I don’t know how much longer we have left.”

  “’We’ meaning the human race?”

  “Something like that. I might as well leave on good terms with someone, as I’ve spent the last few years burning every bridge I have. Emil Gokla threatens to kill me. Second Minister Yithdras has open contempt for me. The organization I thought were my brothers turned out to be nothing of the sort.”

  “I hear what you’re doing with antimatter warheads,” Mykor said. “Beginning industrial-scale production of them, and then scattering them around the Solar System.”

  “It will be a political disaster for me. The entire budget for this year will have to be scrapped, and the Solar Arm put on wartime footing. Countless departments will need to be cut in order to pay for it. This is the sort of thing that ends careers.”