Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2)

by Ben Sheffield

  “We’ve recorded the thorium flight passage of a shuttle leaving Caitanya-9, Prime Minister. Should we investigate it further? It looks like someone’s trying to get off the planet.”

  “We have word that the minister of Mars is now preparing to offer his surrender to Raya Yithdras, sir.”

  Wilseth stepped around the corner. The floor was a single glowing LCD screen. Hard glass. Not even he could stop his feet from making noise.

  “Who's there?” called Defense Minister Agamune at the sound of the footsteps.

  “Me,” he whispered. He put the flechette gun away, and drew a Orizen handgun. The time for silent death was over.

  Agamune's mouth opened just as the thunder of shooting filled the room. The mouth never closed.

  As her body fell to the ground, Sarkoth Amnon tried to run.

  But he was the wrong side of fifty, and he hadn't used Emil Gokla's parabiotic therapy in a very long time. He was old and weak, and Wilseth caught him easily.

  Sarkoth tried to draw a hidden knife strapped against his thigh, but Wilseth casually broke the hand that drew it. The knife clattered to the floor.

  Then a punch thudded into him, knocking him to the ground. Wilseth stood over him. “Good afternoon, Prime Minister.”

  Sarkoth Amnon looked up, utterly helpless. His wriggling on the floor was sluglike, ungainly, not an escape from his uselessness but a reinforcement of it.

  “I need you to do something for me, Prime Minister. One tiny little thing, and then I'll be out of this building. Hell, I'll even turn myself in to your security guards. You know that antimatter warhead you've got parked near Mars? Give the order. Detonate it.”

  Sarkoth shook his head. “No. Never.”

  Wilseth's nimble fingers tapped on a keypad feeding into the quantum computers. In seconds, he established a link with the warhead-loaded Dravidian, and typed the access code by memory.

  There was a two minute delay that passed with excruciating slowness. He knew that the computer had authenticated him. It was just the simple matter that signals needed two minutes to reach the probe on Mars.

  Sarkoth looked up, fascination colouring his fear.

  “We were thrashed at the Asteroid belt. They countered us, move for move. It was like they knew all the locations of our units, and our precise order of battle. That was you, wasn't it?”

  Wilseth didn't answer.

  “You're a Son of the Vanitar, aren't you?” Sarkoth said. “There's a scar on the back of your neck, and that's why you have your hair long.”

  Wilseth didn't betray the slightest trace of an expression.

  “How long have you been betraying me for, Wilseth? How much can I lay at your door?”

  “Just do it, Sarkoth. You don't have to die.”

  “You know very well that if I fire a missile at this distance, everyone dies. Either at Andrei Kazmer’s hands or mine.”

  Wilseth pulled something from a pocket. The color drained from Sarkoth's face when he saw what it was.

  “Please. Mercy.”

  The phobia resonator touched Sarkoth's skin, and immediately his brain was a horror house.

  His worst fears brought to life, and magnified until they were ten times the size of life.

  The existential dread he'd felt on Caitanya-9 was multiplied. Fear of being trapped, shackled down on a purple rock of windstorms and earthquakes. The planet occupied his vision, distorting it until the entire universe was just a single roadway pointing there, in one direction.

  It was a bloodless purple eye, a rank pustule, something swelling with enough venom to inundate the universe, a foul soul-sucking orb that sunk deeper into his perception, seemingly installing itself into his mind.

  Then he saw it split in half, as though the planet was a mouth. The jaw unhinged itself, teeth gleaming in the starlight, all of astronomy's terrors strap-honed on a lathe and aimed at him.

  He screamed. “Get it off me!”

  Wilseth didn't. He pressed it deeper, the phobia resonator digging deeper into Sarkoth's pasty flesh.

  “You can make it stop, Prime Minister. You know how.”

  Sarkoth cried out again, feeling the existential fear of a child against a monster – all the more horrible for being undetectable and phantasmic.

  He suddenly realised there was a microphone in front of his lips, and knew that a Daksha probe was on the other end.

  Orbit Beyond Caitanya-9 – June 5, 2043, 1480 hours

  Sarkoth Amnon’s voice was transmitted to the Daksha.

  “Fire the missile.”

  It took three minutes for the command to reach the Dravidian.

  It took another five minutes for the pilot to redundantly double-check and triple-check that the order was legitimate. It took another five minutes still for the pilot to get up the courage to actually fire the missile.

  This was the first time such a weapon had ever been used in war, or anywhere beyond a few limited tests in the outer regions of explored space. It was a dreadful threshold to break.

  He was overlooking the purple planet. Its two moons did funny things to his controls, subtly skewed the guidance on all his systems.

  It didn't matter. Antimatter warheads didn't have to hit, they just had to explode close enough to you.

  The enormous purple demon had appeared out of nowhere. One second, empty space. The next, everyone was getting sucked by a brand-new gravity well, pinged by a brand-new magnetosphere. There was no known way the planet could have gotten there.

  In the end, that was the logic the pilot used,

  Caitanya-9 was an affront against nature. It could not and would not be allowed to exist.

  Wake watched the receding shuttle until it disappeared, then he watched the column of thorium exhaust until it dissipated.

  They were rising through the clouds. Beyond was a veldt of stars – not an unfamiliar sky, in some remote corner of the universe – but that of the solar system, the place where they had all been born. Somnath and Detsen were at opposite points on the horizon. It was as if the moons had gathered in a parting salute.

  The Defiant were coming home. A journey that had lasted forty years for some of them was now at an end.

  Then he methodically destroyed the camp, tearing buildings from their foundations, shredding the remnants of human habitation.

  He did not know why he did this, any more than he knew why he did anything. His hands were crushing engines of destruction, with a rationalizing brain chasing far behind, gasping for air.

  Ubra Zolot was on the ground, gasping and wheezing. He tried to ignore her, feeling like a coward for doing so. Even to ease her pain would be to touch upon a world of shame and guilt.

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  “Fuck your sorry.”

  He nodded, accepting her reaction.

  “I have two things for you,” he said. “The first is a piece of information. The ones on the shuttle will probably never make it to Terrus. The solar system is now a battlefield. They will either be shot out of the air, or they will be captured. With no papers and documentation, I think they will find it hard to convince any party that their intentions are honest.”

  She screamed, contractions wracking her.

  He waved his hands, and instantly a numb sense of relief filled her spasming lower body. She wondered at the lack of pain, probing it the way a tongue probes a missing tooth.

  “The second...I have a way for you to survive. You and the baby.”

  He waved his hands, and there was the now familiar rumbling of the earth.

  Ubra lacked even the energy as something burst through the rock, showering her with flecks of purple feldspar.

  It shot through the air, hit peak trajectory, and then gradually returned to the ground. But it didn't touch it, it hovered.

  A glowing ball of light.

  A Sphere.

  Ubra's tear-streaked face was lit by an iridescent light that hardly seemed to be from this world, or this universe. Its glow masked a metallic s
heen, like a decorative light that is also battle armor.

  A hole widened and opened in the polymetal, revealing a nest of waving tentacles and cilia.

  “I will send it to Terrus at the speed of light. You won't get caught, and you won't die,” he told her. “If you step into it, you can go home. Then you can forget me.”

  She struggled to her feet, and failed. Eventually, he lifted her in.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't want to touch you. Not even with my mind.”

  The tentacles wrapped around her body, piercing it and penetrating it. Her mind rapidly fading, her final sensation that of cataclysms happening to her lower body. She couldn’t talk, couldn’t think, couldn’t exist.

  She was blacking out.

  Consciousness, sucked into a wormhole.

  There was no goodbye as the Sphere lifted into space.

  Wake intercepted an echo from a strange object out in space. It was 4092-bit encryption. His mind deciphered it instantly.

  An antimatter warhead was cruising towards Caitanya-9.

  He understood the structural integrity of the planet, it pulsed with the same nerve network that animated him. He knew that he faced destruction from a weapon of that power.

  I can stop it. He thought.

  He could tear apart the atoms of the missile as soon as it entered the atmosphere. He convert it into whatever substance he required. He could turn it around and fire it back at the ship that had launched it.

  Beyond that, he had the power to make the antimatter missile an utter non-event. Inside him was the Wipe, and it was ticking down to a launch.

  He touched his wrist, counting the beats.

  Twenty…

  Nineteen…

  Eighteen…

  The gamma ray bursts would fly, and this time it was the human race staring down the barrel. The race to which he’d once belonged.

  It would simply blitz everything, turning everything from the sun outwards into a shower of neutrinos.

  But then he realised and accepted, something. He did not have it in him. Probably never had it in him.

  The people of Terrus would die, and he didn’t want that to happen.

  Sarkoth Amnon had desired apocalypse, but turned his face away at the final moment. Wake had desired to bring the apocalypse, but turned his hand away at the final moment.

  The could almost laugh at the irony. In the end, he and Sarkoth Amnon were brothers. Two snakes chasing the other’s tail, around and around in a circle, each believing itself a snake of honor.

  I have to let it hit me.

  I have to let it destroy me.

  He knew the properties of the Solar Arm’s antimatter weapons. It wouldn’t be enough, to merely absorb the explosion, he would have to contain it. Otherwise the radioactivity would affect Terrus.

  A wormhole, then. The final wormhole.

  He stared up at the heavens that had once been his home. He tried to see the stars that where the Sphere, and the Dravidian shuttle, even though both of them were massively beyond visible range. He also tried to see the antimatter warhead, even though it would strike so fast he would never get to see it.

  Reality fluxed as he bent time and space, creating a gravity well that nothing could escape, not even light. And he felt himself start to sink.

  If only there was a road to redemption, he thought, but there isn’t. I’ve gone too far, done too much, and there’s nothing I can do except burn.

  But the second voice in his head argued with the first. But it wasn’t an argument that felt like an argument. It was a syllogism, it was a value-adding agreement, it was two tones layering to form a chord.

  The entity called Wake must die. For a corrupt god, salvation is an empty hope. But the entity called Andrei Kazmer was but a mortal man, and can be punished in the manner of mortal men.

  He realized that wormholes could have irregular edges in the spacetime matrix, and that a wormhole might contain a tiny local exception through which a man-shaped body might pass.

  He felt around in the ground, digging with phantom fingers through kilometers of solid rock.

  Then he found it. Another Sphere.

  He shed his first tear. Not in mourning of Wake’s death. In mourning of Wake’s birth.

  The Wipe erupted at the same time the antimatter missile exploded. Dark forces tore apart that corner of the universe.

  But nothing could escape the pull of a wormhole. As the combined explosions happened, a giant black maw erupted around the planet, enveloping it, and sucking everything in, even light.

  When it was over, nothing remained where Caitanya-9 had once stood.

  The wormhole generated waves of exotic particles, overpowering the tracking systems of the Solar Arm and Sane ships alike. None of them noticed that a few bright specks of light were leaving the zone, only a meter or two across.

  They were bound for Terrus.

  Mars – June 6, 2043, 0800 hours

  They’d travelled for many hours in the broken-down Dravidian. They were blind, deaf, and dumb. None of their guidance or proximately systems worked, and none of them knew how to fix it.

  They were still flying at non-relativistic speeds, in directions unknown.

  Zelity was almost sick with worry, fear, and regret that Ubra had been left behind.

  “How did you dipshits not notice that she wasn’t on the ship?” he railed a thousand times. There was never any answer.

  Zelity’s misery was interrupted by the sound of the comms crackling to life.

  It was a broken, fuzzy sound, coming from speakers clogged with dust and grit. But it was unmistakably a human voice.

  “SOL-463, identify yourself.”

  Jagomir spoke. “We are non-military refugees. Who are we talking to?”

  “SOL-463, I repeat, identify yourself. You have entered a no-fly zone.”

  Apparently, they had speakers, but no microphones.

  Jagomir yelled and swore, to no effect.

  “You realise they’re absolutely going to blow us out of space?” Haledor said.

  Zelity nodded. “Yeah. This isn’t looking good.”

  “SOL-463, we are now launching azipods and commencing boarding action. If there is anyone on board, buckle yourself in, and please make sure your hands are free from any form of weaponry.”

  The azipods were directional rockets mounted on other rockets. They slammed into the hulls of ships, angled counter to the ship’s direction, and fired to slow the ship down. They were the only way to slow a ship down, short of a collision.

  “Guess we live, for the moment,” Zelity said as ominous thunks reverberated through the hull. Soon, he felt a queasy twisting in his stomach as they shed velocity.

  Then there was a louder crash, this one impacting directly on the side door.

  “If they’re bringing boarding gear around, someone should tell them that it’s jammed,” Jagomir said. “They’re not getting in.”

  Soon, the white-hot ribbon of a laser cutter sparked from around the door as it relentlessly sliced through the metal.

  “They’re not letting that stop them,” Haledor said. “Mind if I do the talking?”

  “Please do.”

  Soon the door crashed inwards, leaving a blackened ring in the fuselage. Armed soldiers poured through the interconnected.

  The Defiant raised their hands and surrendered.

  “Why didn’t you respond?” one of them said, puzzled by the shuttle full of sixty completely defenseless men and women. “I was ready to take you out with a missile.”

  “Microphones failed,” Haledor said.

  “What? All of them?”

  “This is an old ship.”

  He glanced around, looking at the caked on filth, dirt, and rust. “Jesus, what the hell happened to this ship? And who are you?”

  “We’re refugees.”

  “Refugees from where?”

  “Caitanya-9.”

  The man swore. “If you think this is a joke, I’m not laughing
. You are currently in the biggest, deepest piss puddle of your life.”

  “I somehow doubt that.”

  “They’re soldiers,” one of the men said. “I can tell from their old nanosuits.”

  “What company were you with?” the leader asked.

  “Varies,” one of the Defiant said. “Personally, my service number was 253-3262-643. Look it up yourself, boss.”

  The man hastily brought up his nanosuit computer, and punched in the number.

  He did a double take. “This says you were KIA in the year 2137.”

  “Yep. Caitanya-9, like the dude said. We just escaped the planet.”

  The soldiers looked at each other, utterly gobsmacked.

  “I don’t suppose I could know your name?” Haledor asked.

  “Gunnery Sargent Remus Calixtus, of the Reformation Confederacy,” he said.

  “Never heard of them. What happened to the Solar Arm?”

  “Jesus,” Calixtus said. “This is a joke. This absolutely has to be a joke. All of you men are dead.”

  “Are you going to argue with your own lying eyes?”

  “Where have you been the past six years?”

  “Well, we could tell you a story or two.”

  Calixtus shook his head, and issued commands. “Place them under arrest, and get them on board the ship. This junker can be shot off into space. I’m making a report to Raya Yithdras – this sounds like something she’d want to know about.”

  They filed into the depths of an unknown ship. As Zelity was about to board, a hand shot out, stopping.

  “And what the hell’s that on your chest?”

  He looked down at the rip in his suit, exposing a swatch of yellowed skin. “Oh, it’s a tattoo. ‘Pangolins don’t give a shit’.

  “A tattoo, huh?”

  “Yeah, it was supposed to be an inspirational thing. ‘Hang loose, take it easy.’ You know, I’ve since realized that I was wrong. Pangolins pretty much do give a shit. They give a shit more than any creature on earth. People hunt them for their skins, their scales, their meat. Their bones are ground up and used to make medicine. They evolved to be covered with hard, protective armor, and at the slightest sign of trouble they curl up in a tight ball. That’s how much a shit they give.”