What's going on down there? Was his only thought as Raya had ridden him. I control the planet no more than I control the rogue personality in my head...so who is activating the Wipe now?
“Have you seen the Wipe before?”
“I have used the Wipe before,” he said. “Multiple times, in various points of the universe. No conscious beings were there to kill, but I wanted to test the limits of my own power.”
“What does it look like?”
“Gamma ray bursts. Indescribable. Your eyes go blind, looking at it. Your mind goes blind, thinking about it.”
“Describe them anyway.”
So he described the devastating that had blasted forth from Caitanya-9 at his hand many years ago, described the chiaroscuro of light and dark and rainbow hued particles that unmade reality to its coarsest gluon.
He painted pictures with words, elaborating to be more and more descriptive.
In time, she started moaning. A wet sound, almost tragicomic, like a dying sea creature.
She realised that his visions of the apocalypse were exciting her.
Finally, she could stand it so long and pounced on him, pinning him to the ground with her bulk.
“Fuck me,” she hissed, pressing a bejeweled hand over his mouth. “Fuck me and never stop.”
From her apartment in Valashabad palace. Ubra Zolot was becoming increasingly upset.
And her anxiety had a name: Yalin.
She was now furious that she'd left her baby behind on the planet. Her need to get revenge on Andrei Kazmer was so great it had overridden motherly love.
She'd thought she'd go to Venus, nail Andrei Wake, and be back on Terrus the same day. Then she would liberate Yalin from the incompetent bimbos who were supposed to be caring for her, and start a new life somewhere else in the solar system.
Now, all of that was shot to pieces.
Maybe I should have killed him, she thought. And maybe I still can. He thinks I've forgiven and forgotten. I can do only one of those things, and as of now, I’ve done neither. I could make things very interesting for him by spilling the beans that he's not a god, and has nothing to do with the disaster on Terrus. Then again, I could probably find where he is and kill him. It'd be quiet as a whisper. Just wander into his room one night, and stick him with something sharp.
But then she'd be in the same bind. Trapped on a planet, surrounded by enemies, with no way of getting back to her baby.
And if what she was hearing around the court was true, then there might not be a baby to return to.
Terrus was covered by white clouds now. Nobody who attempted landing was heard from again.
She'd been furnished with a nice room in one of the upper terraces of Valashabad palaces. She had aides and manservants, both robotic and human, to care for her.
And all of it counted for shit.
After an evening of running around maniacally, trying to think of a solution, she was still no closer to exiting this finger trap.
She’d learned that Raya, officially, was not the ruler of Mars. That honor was reserved for a lone Sarkoth Amnon appointee called Ryush Narya, who she’d buttonholed, and tried to win over with a tale of woe.
“I’m sorry, Ubra,” Governor Ryush had said. “But it’s the will of Raya that she must authorize all craft leaving the planet. And he has told me that you are not to leave.
“You control local affairs, surely.”
“Yes, of course I control local affairs,” he said. “I control them so well that not even I could leave if I wanted to.”
Then he brushed past her. He was surprised by his rancor.
Finally, in the early morning, she heard someone walking along the corridors.
It was Wake. He was shirtless.
He had a strong smell of alcohol about him. He had lipstick smeared across his face, and a woman's nailmarks stippled his broad upper back.
“I need to get to Terrus,” she told him. “I need to find Yalin.”
“I cannot help you,” he slurred.
“She's your daughter, top,” she said. “And this was all your plan. So why aren't you doing something about this?”
Her voice cracked, reaching an emotional crescendo.
He just stared at the ground in a drunken stupor.
“God, are you even listening to what's happening?” she wanted to scream. “There's earthquakes, and volcanoes, and tidal waves, and hurricanes so strong they're tearing out whole forests of fucking Canadian redwoods and sending them flying sideways like spears, and our fucking baby is in the middle of that! We need to get there, as soon as possible.”
He raised a finger. A simple gesture that said stop. “I am very limited in what I can do. Raya thinks I'm the one who is behind the events on the planet. At any point, she can prove this wrong by killing me and observing that the Wipe continues. We continue to survive by a delicate balancing act that I am still trying to keep stable. I have to be on my absolute best behavior, and at the moment she does not want me to leave the building. Look, let's take this one day at a time. Maybe everything on Terrus will end, everything will go back to normal, Raya will turn out to be sane or at least rational and self interested, and we can start looking for survivors on Terrus. But until then, please don't fuck everything up. We're very lucky to be alive, and we'll need far more luck if that’s to continue.”
He staggered away.
“God, I feel sick. I feel terrible. Some god I am.”
She heard the sounds of him retching.
Valashabad, Mars – September 27, 2143, 1200 hours
Days became weeks, which became months, each day taking the possibility of escape further away from them.
Wake shared Raya’s bed. Ostensibly, Raya Yithdras was taking care of him. But as soon as they were alone in a room, with the lights dimmed, he had to take care of her.
The frequency and ferocity of her sexual demands exhausted and nearly broke him. He sustained a fractured rib, a twisted ankle, and bruises and cuts without number. He was her stallion, the man from her fantasies, an apocalyptic death god striding out of an Aztec sunrise, and he had to perform the role to her satisfaction.
One night, she summoned Ryush Narya to her room.
He’d had only brief conversations with the governor of Mars. The man seemed perfectly pleasant, but it was now obvious that he had no power on his own planet. Every last decision was Raya’s, from beginning to end. And as the man entered the room, Wake realised just how powerless he was.
“Close your eyes,” Raya said, and the man obeyed.
Raya lit a cigarette then. It flared bright-red in the cruel gilded bedroom. Wake waited for her to take a drag, but the cigarette didn’t come anywhere near her lips.
She started burning Ryush with it.
She pressed it against his skin, and he stifled a sharp cry. She pulled the cigarette back, and relit it, admiring the coal-dark semicircle of burned flesh.
Then she did it again, and again. When the cigarette burned down to her fingers, she lit another one.
Wake watched helplessly, wishing he could do something. Anything. The simmering anger of his alternate personality was starting to return, but he suppressed it.
Raya was nearly the god on this world that he had been on Caitanya-9. If they wanted to survive, they could not do anything to upset the apple-cart.
Instead, he shared a despairing glance with Zelity, who was standing guard as he always did.
Wake had no escape, and no way to explore or investigate what was happening throughout the solar system. Instead, he became a psychonaut, plumbing the depths of Raya Yithdras’s mind.
She made no attempt to recruit new members into the Sons of the Vanitar. Partly due of lack of interest – it had always been Emil Gokla's conceit, and one she had found limiting. Why forge a brotherhood, full of people you had to protect? Why not a looser affinity network of spies and allies that could be favoured and then discarded when necessary?
Also, it was redundant.
&nb
sp; Why recruit Sons of the Vanitar when a harbinger of the original Vanitar was at hand, sharing her bed and helping fulfill her deepest wishes?
Terrus was still unreachable, still cloaked in cloud.
It was impossible to tell if the pulsing sound was still going on at ground level. If it was, there would be only a few weeks or days remaining.
What happened afterwards was a mystery.
Cosmic destruction? Nothing? The unveiling of a new earth? They were on completely new territory here, all of them.
Ubra monitored events on the world with sick horror.
She knew that with every passing day, the chances that a vulnerable newly-born baby had survived dropped.
She investigated every possible method of getting offworld, and there weren't any. Raya had clamped everything down, utterly stomped the space lanes flat. There was no escape from her kingdom now. The spiderweb with Raya at the center was too sticky and too taut to do anything more than dangle and buzz your wings in frustration.
She couldn't hijack a Dravidian. They were all well-guarded, she couldn't fly one, and she'd be shot out of the sky even if she got off the ground.
She couldn't use Wake to get Raya to help her. He told her that Raya would give her a place to stay, but beyond that her congeniality was at its end. Ubra had been responsible for the deaths of several of her men, and this was a fact that would color all of their relations.
Her last hope was Zelity.
He'd been utterly transformed by his experience in Raya's dungeons, and the metal blades woven into his flesh and bones were only the start of it. But she'd been closer to him than the other Defiant, and even the other marines. He'd always been one to help, when he could. He'd agreed to pretend to be the father of Yalin, way back in what now seemed like the distant past. Perhaps he'd stick his neck out for her again.
“I cannot help,” he told her, passionlessly.
“Please. I need to go. It's all I think about. My baby girl's down there, and she needs me.”
“What can I do about this?” he said. “All flights are grounded. Please relax as best you can, and make yourself comfortable. Sometimes situations change.”
But she refused to accept this.
She’d been waiting for the situation to change for months now. Day after day of this, chewing her away to rags like a grinding wheel. When was she going to be free?
“You can talk to Raya.”
“I cannot talk to Raya,” he flatly contradicted. “Do not make the mistake of thinking that she sees ne as you do. To you, I am a person. To her, I am a Razorman. My name is B-31. I am not allowed to speak to her on any topic except ones related to the current mission at hand. If I break faith with her, I will be immediately culled. I am no longer considered a member of the human race, not by her, and not by anyone else. I wish I could do something to help.”
“Then talk to Andrei Kazmer. Motivate him.”
“Why would I need to motivate him?”
“When he came here, I thought it was because he had a plan. A plan to defeat Raya, and reverse the disaster overtaking Terrus. Now? I'm not so sure. He wanders around in a daze. I know he's fucking her. I don't have any issues with that. But it's like he's just not motivated in any direction.”
"If I could hazard a guess," Zelity said, "it's because he's cared so hard for so long, that there is nothing left. Just apathy."
"You can relate, can you?"
"I do not care if the solar system is destroyed," Zelity said, flatly. "Everything that can possibly be done to human nerve endings was done to me in the chambers beneath this palace. There is only so much one can take, before that part is burned out like an overloaded circuit. And what's left? A shell."
"So in short, he doesn't actually have a plan," Ubra said.
Zelity shook his head. "I shouldn't think so, no."
"Then talk to Ryush Narya."
“He will not listen to me. He’s in the pocket of Raya.”
“Try anyway. I don’t care if I get in trouble. I’m desperate.”
Zelity looked disturbed. "I can promise nothing. But let me see what can be done."
“Is he a friend of yours?”
"I am B-31. Razormen don't have friend. This is a person whom I drenched in the blood of a close friend, so I am sure he's quite enamored with me."
“Can he get me off this red desert?”
Zelity shook his head. “I said I would talk to him. You make a mistake in looking for certainty in a place where there is none.”
Every morning, Raya avidly checked the news from Terrus.
In this case, no news was good news.
Everything was going to plan. Despite all the obstacles and setbacks and false starts, Emil Gokla’s quest would finally be fulfilled. The Wipe would go off, and then that would be that.
One morning, she was awoken by her private chief of police, a tall career soldier called Iridus Teit. “Something’s happened that you should know about,”
Andrei Kazmer was in the next room, washing his face and applying aftershave. He spoke less and less these days. He was in a place where his words counted for little.
Still, Raya had hoped for something more. Some messianic fire. Some indication that this was a task he would fulfill not just with duty but with joy.
He was bringing the greatest act of mercy ever seen to an undeserving solar system…and yet he seemed so utterly unconcerned by everything.
“Is it the planet?” asked Raya, not needing to specify which planet she was talking about.
Teit activated a video encoded into her suit.
“Around 0300 hours, all the eyes on Terrus went dead. A sudden burst of radiation. By the time we got probes back online, something had changed.”
“What?”
“See for yourself.”
An image of the ghostly white cloud-covered planet that had once borne mankind filled the room. Raya studied its featurelessness, looking for something different, something new, and found it.
“There’s streaks in the clouds.”
The pale cloud cover enveloping the entire planet now had vague brownish lines running through it.
“Exactly,” Captain Teit said.
“Is this all you had to show me?” Raya was disappointed. Streaky clouds were hardly a revelation.
Teit smirked. “That’s how it looked yesterday.” Here’s an updated image from a few moments ago.
Raya choked back a cry.
The clouds had largely disintegrated, and huge swatches of Terrus’ surface were now visible.
And it was purple.
In between the seas, the land of man’s homeworld was now a deep umbalite hue. It looked like badly mixed paint. The Himalayas were purple ridges. Africa was now the hue of color gemstones.
Across the surface, raking sweeps of white clouds were visible, and the oceans had crests of gigantic waves, visible from distant space.
“What is this devilry?” she asked.
Teit couldn’t tell her, and perhaps nobody could.
It was an utter mystery. Whatever had happened on the planet’s surface in the months of constant cloud, it was irreversibly transformed.
“We’ve made a mistake in thinking we are the only ones who can terraform planets,” she said out loud. “Others can do it too. And they have.”
Caitanya-9 was destroyed.
So what does that mean for the force that animated it?
It needed to find a new planet, and it’s found one.
It all fitted together. The sudden tectonic activity. The way the planet’s gravity had changed, imperiling countless craft.
The pulse.
Terrus is the new Caitanya-9.
Razorman B-31 stood post at the door, watching them.
He was an always ignorable presence, providing security and sudden violence whenever Raya Yithdras needed it.
But now his eyes were looking downward, hoping that he’d be ignored. And of course, he was.
In time, Raya Yithdras fo
rgot the planet, forget everything in the room except whatever nonsense was running through her head.
She was delirious with apocalypse fever. It occupied her every thought. And when everyone and everything around her except the rebuilding of Caitanya-9 was just a flickering shadow on Plato’s cave, he left his post.
He wasn’t supposed to do this. It was against his training.
But what training? He thought, his brain still wrestling with the remnants of his humanity, things that he tried to hold on to. I swore a marine oath to uphold the constitution that this woman has left in shreds.
I will serve the constitution.
I will betray.
Ubra was woken in the early hours of the morning.
“Time to get up, Private Zolot,” a voice whispered. “The biggest day of your life is at hand.”
Her sleep was always shallow, and always poor. Her brain was so focused on her loss that shutting her eyes was the very worst place to be.
The darkness of the Martian twilight made the opulent living quarters seem faintly sinister. The whorls and patches stitched on every quilt and comforter looked positively arabesque, like the invocation of some ancient hex. Mars would never be home, and not just for the sake of Yalin.
He was a silhouette against the cutting pale blue light filtering through the window of the Valashabad palace. She couldn’t make out exactly who it was standing in front of her, only it was a man with a voice she couldn’t place. She blinked sleep from her
“Meet my agent at Valashabad spaceport in one hour. He has packed some supplies for you.”
Spaceport? “What’s happening?”
“A one way trip to Terrus. I’m sorry I can’t do more, but this has to be kept secret from Raya.”
She struggled up, all traces of tiredness leaving her. “No. Don’t worry. This is all I ever asked for. When I’m on that planet with my baby, I’ll never need to go back. Thank you.”
“I’m glad to finally be of use to someone,” the man said.
“Are you Zelity’s friend?”
“After a fashion, yes.”
In time, she realised she was speaking to Ryush Narya, the governor of Mars.
She couldn’t believe her good fortune.
Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4) Page 20