Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4)

by Ben Sheffield

  “Captain Teit, please secure Andrei Kazmer,” Raya said to his security chief. “I will extract the truth from him, one way or another. This deception means that every single thing he’s told me is now suspicious.”

  “I didn’t do it,” Wake said.

  “Liar.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” a voice spoke up.

  It was Ryush Narya. He’d stepped forward, out of the shadows. “I was the one responsible. Private Zolot was distraught that her baby was still on Terrus, and I offered to help her. I told the customs officer that you had given her authority to make a flight to the planet, and he did not question it. She is gone now. Out of your control.”

  Raya looked him up and down. He held her gaze, not even blinking.

  “You will die for that,” Raya said. “And your pitiful attempt to protect Andrei Kazmer has failed. You’re both in cahoots on this, and he’ll have ample time down here to confess his sins. B-31, your attention.”

  “I am ready,” Zelity said, in tones almost too soft to hear.

  Raya pointed at the rebellious Martian governor. “Remove this man’s head from his shoulders. Make him dead.”

  B-31 nodded. “Confirming orders. Is there any other option?”

  She shook her head. “No, there is not. Will you perform your duty?”

  B-31 sadly stood between Raya and Ryush. “I will perform my duty.”

  Then he extended a blade from his wrist to its full length, and lunged.

  It flashed, quenching itself in human flesh.

  As Raya Yithdras’s head thudded to the grounds, the guards had absolutely no clue how to respond.

  It didn’t matter.

  They wouldn’t have had a chance to respond.

  In that moment, Wake lashed his legs forward around Chief of Police Teit’s waiste, and yanked her closer.

  She still had her Meshuggahtech in her hands. She could only stare in horror as he seized her hands, and her gun became his.

  He swung her body, using her as an extension of the assault rifle, and fired.

  Guards fell like ninepins. Two were nailed in the chest. One was shot in the head. One hit with a savage shot that severed the femoral artery in his leg. He limped away, screaming, to bleed out in the corner.

  The remaining guards drew their sidearms, and started shooting.

  Andrei Kazmer had no body armor. No wings to fly with.

  Now, not even a hollow lie about being a god.

  Steel-tipped bullets pierced his chest, ripping through his lungs. The pain was incredible, overwhelming, and he instantly knew the shots were fatal.

  He used the agony to raise both his legs, and crush them closed around Captain Teit’s waist.

  She screamed and struggled, unable to escape the man’s hideously strong grip. His legs tightened and tightened, and soon she felt ribs crack.

  As her chest cavity was forced inwards, shards of bone tearing her apart from the inside out, she died drowning in blood.

  The surviving guards spread out, shooting through Teit’s body in their haste to cripple the dying man. He felt more bright-hot wounds flare in his side, and the Meshuggahtech clattered to the ground.

  As they moved in to take a critical shot, Yen Zelity charged upon them in a storm of blades.

  Two went down, eviscerated. A third simply dropped his gun and started running.

  He almost made it all the way to the elevator, when a robed figure lunged out of the dark, tackling him.

  It was Ryush Narya. The portly governor grappled with the guard, and they twisted and turned like two mating snakes.

  Wake crawled forward, unable to breathe.

  He snatched up a dropped pistol, raised it, and fired it twice into the tangled knot of men. Both shots hit vital spots.

  Then Zelity was upon him, slamming an elbow drop into the guard that nearly cut his body in half.

  “Uhhh… ughhh...” Wake grunted, excruciating agony tearing his chest apart. How had this chamber ever seemed brightly lit? Darkness gathered everywhere, filling his world, and his thoughts spun loose from his skull as he started to die.

  Instantly the familiar figure of Zelity, covered in blood, was over him.

  “I did it,” Zelity said breathlessly. “I’m sorry – should have told you – there wasn’t any time we could be alone. I went to Ryush and we organized the entire thing.”

  Wake struggled to talk, struggled to get his final words out of his mouth.

  What could he say?

  That he was proud? That this brainwashed super soldier had done the only humane thing possible? That sending a woman away on a doomed mission was still the path honor demanded?

  Or that Ryush Narya was a hero?

  No words came out. Just a broken rattle from lungs that would no longer breathe, out of a mouth that would no longer talk, failing to speak words issued by a brain that would no longer think.

  Andrei Kazmer would cease to exist. Aaron Wake would cease to exist – if he’d ever existed in the first place.

  I’m sorry, he thought. At first he thought it was an apology for his failure to talk. Then he realised that he had so many other things to apologize for that he just rolled it back to cover

  An entire lifetime of choices.

  Even at the end, it had been Zelity, Ubra, and Ryush that were heroes, not him.

  He died as he’d lived, just a useless extension to a gun.

  “Raya’s gone now, and so are all her allies” Ryush said. “Mars is cleansed. The solar system is cleansed. The forest is razed, but a new one will grow. Rest in peace, soldier.”

  If any of us live, Wake thought.

  He sucked in a last breath.

  Blood came out on the exhale. Then he collapsed inwards, supported by Ryush and Zelity, grasping at the receding world and finding that it was beyond his reach.

  At The Conflux of Two Worlds

  In the crazed light of the chamber, the mass of tentacles was starting to seethe with agitation.

  “It is time for us to go,” Sarkoth told her. “An eternity of rest begins.”

  “Will Yalin ever wake?” Ubra asked, clutching the body of her daughter.

  “Do not think in terms of sleep or wake. Rather, think of it as you and your child existing on the same level.”

  She started to sob. “I don’t want this. I want my child back, and I want my life back.”

  “I know you want these things. But you cannot have them.”

  Just then, a disturbance registered among the tentacles. They swayed in genuflection to some unseen force, and then a ghostly shape flipped through the ceiling.

  It was a very large man. She recognized him from many dreams and nightmares. And now this was one she could not wake from.

  “You died,” she said as he approached.

  “That does not matter,” Andrei Kazmer said. “Raya Yithdras is dead, Yen Zelity lives, and I am certain beyond certain that he will mount rescue missions to this planet, looking for you.”

  It’s too late, she thought. We’re ghosts, phantoms, utterly beyond hope or rescue.

  “They’re taking us away now,” Ubra said. “I have failed.”

  “Humanity is safe,” Andrei said. “The Wipe is permanently deactivated, and the Sons of the Vanitar are no more. How have you failed?”

  She could not speak, and in time Wake discerned her meaning from the bundled lump in her arms.

  Ubra was not concerned about humanity so much as this particular piece of it.

  “You don’t want to escape with the Vanitar,” he said. “Even though they offer salvation. You want to go back to the human world.”

  “Can you help?” She asked.

  "Let me speak to them," Wake said.

  He was silent for a few minutes, and the thrashing cilia spasmed and dilated in excitement.

  "You are to be punished, Ubra," he told her. "I have told them that you are the most corrupt one of our kind, and they have devised a terrible fate for you."

  She stared
in confusion.

  "You will be returned to the version of Terrus that you knew," he said. "You will experience life, along with the rest of wretched humanity. But that is not all. Yalin will join you on the planet, and you will have to watch your child grow to adulthood. Every scraped knee. Every broken bone. Every cold. Soon, the heartache of adulthood. You will know the misery of a mother, seeing her child struggle and knowing that this is the only way it can possibly be."

  "What?" Ubra couldn't believe any of this.

  "As I said, you will be subjected to the greatest of punishments," he said. "Life, for you and your daughter."

  She couldn't think of a single thing to say.

  "Goodbye," he told her. "Please forget about me. I'm going home now, and if I could remove every last trace of my existence from the world, I would. I will join my brothers and sisters as we are merged into the Vanitar unconsciousness. There, we will wait for the suffering to end. Maybe we'll be waiting forever. And that might be the best thing of all."

  Ubra and Andrei embraced briefly, and then parted.

  "Close your eyes," Sarkoth said. "And let your punishment begin."

  Her eyelids dropped.

  Tiny flaps of skin touching the base of her eyes now felt as epochal and earth shattering as any of the earthquakes. There was a soft seething sound as the cilia rubbed against each other, then bright light bloomed inside her mind.

  A light was so bright that it seemed to illuminate the world beyond her, as if her skull was a lamp. She saw the reborn dead standing before her, Andrei Kazmer and Sarkoth Amnon foremost among them.

  They all waved in farewell, and she waved back.

  Then silhouettes were retreating - either that or she was moving away from them, she couldn't tell which, and soon they were separated by a chasm of vast and immeasurable distance.

  They were gone. Swallowed by a crashing quantum sea, to sleep a sleep without end in the eternal night.

  She closed her eyes, and found herself going under too.

  When she woke, all she could hear was Yalin crying.

  She shot to her feet and opened her eyes with the same movement. Blood flooded into her muscles just as light flooded into her eyes.

  She was back in the hospital that had been under Arrakhia Mountain.

  The room was devastated. Wracked by bullet holes, littered with broken polywood. On the ground was the body of Lucas Farholt, a neat black hole in the center of his forehead. But there was no sign of flood damage.

  Yalin? She wandered around, extending her hands and groping the walls. It was as if she’d inherited Lucas Farholt’s blindness. Where are you?

  The wailing baby’s voice tantalized her, led her in widening circles that eventually covered the entire hospital.

  Everywhere was destruction and desolation. Not the unearthly havoc visited by the Vanitar, but a more mundane sort, visited by foolish mankind.

  There were dead hospital orderlies littering the floor. At the entryway, she found the body of Nilux Red.

  She felt a stab of sorrow for the poor woman. She’d never had a chance. I’ll give everyone here a decent burial. Even Vadim Gokla. I don’t care if I have to find a shovel and do it myself. But first…

  Something was very wrong.

  Months had passed since these people had died. Their bodies should have been a boiling mass of flies and stench. But they were fresh, as if they were newly fallen.

  She touched Nilux’s wrist…and it was still warm.

  What the hell is going on?

  She still couldn’t find Yalin. The crying voice tormented her, seeming to come from six different directions at once.

  She started to suspect that she was imagining it, that this was the final loop track of her insanity running around and around in a circle. She might spend an eternity trapped down here, in a hell of the Vanitar’s creation.

  Then, inspiration struck.

  The pantry. I hid the baby in the pantry when Wake was looking for her.

  She ran back to the kitchen, the place where she’d first woken, and pulled open the door.

  She screamed again. This time for joy.

  She embraced her child, muttering things in Yalin’s ear, making promises to never let her go.

  Her surroundings now had an air of unreality. As if things had started falling upwards, and the sun shone dark. Things were not supposed to happen this way. Broken threads did not mend themselves.

  But here, in the dark of an underground medical facility, she’d found one that had.

  For hours she stood in this position, unable to do anything but process her incredible good fortune.

  Thank you, she muttered, not sure if she was talking to the Vanitar, or Sarkoth, or Andrei, or Yalin. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  She left the hospital. This time, she carried no guns with her.

  They rebuilt Terrus, she thought, walking along what she knew to be kilometers of utter darkness. They built it back the way it was before the destruction. I wonder if I’ll meet Andrei Kazmer at the end of the path?

  She knew she wouldn’t. Barring herself and Yalin, all of the reborn dead were still dead. Andrei Kazmer and Aaron Wake were both extinct, passed into the Vanitar world. They existed only in the memories of those who had known them.

  And she had been punished…By having all her dreams fulfilled.

  She finally made it to the gaping mouth of Arrakhia Mountain. She walked out into the hard Californian sun, feeling the fresh air on her face and the sun on her skin.

  No debris falling from the sky. No cloud canopy. No earthquakes. No tidal waves.

  Just a peaceful midwinter morning, and a road winding south. At the end of the road, many miles distant, she saw glowing lights from Los Neo Angeles.

  She just kept on walking into she found Rose Rohilian standing guard, and threw herself into the shocked woman’s arms.

  Terrus - Many Years Later

  It was spring on the reborn Earth, and Ubra visited a grave.

  The heat that would soon claim northern California in a boiling must of humidity was already beginning, but inside the cemetary it was still cool. She was surrounded by tinkling fountains and carp-cruised pools. Beyond, there were orchards awaiting the annual harvest of fruit, and her shoes crushed tiny flowers, erupting in riotous blue and red. Man and nature alike were looking ahead, except in this tiny spot, where they remembered the past.

  Yalin was at her side.

  The girl had just celebrated her fourteenth birthday. She was growing incredibly fast, and excelling at her studies. Ubra had much to be proud of her…and much to be thankful for.

  Her strange moods and eerie quietnesses were still present, but there was a warm and friendly side to her.

  Ubra accepted that she would be different to other children. Also accepted that the past did not always control the present.

  The new Solar Arm was rebuilding the networks of links destroyed during the war, and Raya’s misrule.

  Ubra had no part in the rebuilding. She’d retired from the army, and considered herself a vastly wealthy woman. This, despite the fact that the Solar Arm had not paid her a ducat.

  “You’re paying another visit,” Rose Rohilian said, at the wainscoted perimeter of the cemetery.

  They sometimes met each other.

  They had something that was at least as close to a friendship as anything else.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Does it still torment you? The memories?”

  “Not at all.” Ubra said. “The past is in the past. The gate has closed, and even the painful things are things are safely corralled behind closed bar. It’s the future that kills.”

  Rose smiled and pinched Yalin’s cheek. The tall girl pretended to enjoy it. Humoring adults was a skill she’d picked up early.

  “Do you like seeing gravestones, girl?” Rose asked. “Normally people want their bodies cremated now, and ejected into space. Immortality.”

  “That’s not immortality,” Yalin said. �
��That’s worshipping dust. We can do better.”

  “How?”

  “By honoring what the person stood for when they were alive. Giving money to a charity they cared about. Finding a cause they supported, and picking it right back up to put on our shoulder. Caring for their children. That’s immortality.”

  They met Zelity at the edge.

  He and Ubra had started living together, five years ago.

  Yalin had begun calling him father, something that seemed to spook and unsettle him.

  Spooking and unsettling adults was something else Yalin was precocious at.

  Zelity was a private security guard. He spent long hours away from home. Took long trips, sometimes far across the Solar Arm.

  He was a deeply private person. In a way, he was foremost a guard of his emotions, with his employee a distant second.

  His one weakness was synthetic alcohol, which he would drink until he’d start telling peculiar stories. About how he was a reborn pangolin.

  They left the cemetery together.

  The Solar Arm was growing powerful. Powerful, to the point where it would again pose a threat to itself.

  One man. Two men. Three men. A tribe. A clan. A community. A

  An extinction.

  All of the Sons of the Vanitar were gone, their empire ashes on the wind. But their ideals were just waiting to be picked up and rediscovered.

  Finding a cause they support, and picking it right up to put on your shoulder.

  Would that only good people received immortality.

  Dangerous times might soon lie ahead. Ubra was positively thrilled that she wouldn’t have to face them. She and Zelity had bolt holes all across the solar system.

  They walked away together, Ubra planning lunch.

  It had been raining softly on Terrus, and her small, precise feet left footprints in the mud.

  The footprints tracked in reverse to a tombstone. She herself had put the tombstone there.

  How do you honor a man who was neither good nor bad, but had elements of both?

  Elements of the very extremes of both?