Wake crashed hard into the metal floor, rolled himself into a ball and hurtled to a stop at the far side of the shuttle. Friendly hands grabbed him, steadying him, as he clamped his hand down on the nearest guard rail and retracted his Vyres. When he opened his eyes, he saw Ubra safely restrained, and Nyphur’s terrified face behind the control console.
“Get in OK?” Asked Yath, from the second shuttle.
“Yeah. Who’s with you?”
“Zelity and Calypso. Poor guy’s hurt bad, but he was able to make it back to the shuttles.”
“Get us out of here, Nyphur.” Wake said, panting.
“What’s happening?” Ubra said, her eyes darting around.
“Shit happened.”
“Who are you?” She muttered. “Why am I here?”
Gnawing dread filled Wake’s stomach as he heard those words.
He was getting déjà vu to how she’d been on the spaceflight. A tongue with no memory behind it.
“You’re going home,” he said, trying to sound self-assured. “Don’t worry about it.”
The Adagios were ridiculously cheap and ridiculously efficient methods for ingress and egress for low-gravity planets. Their design was simple enough that they could be build in-field from polymetal, general purpose hydrogen engines, and a plug-in control dashbard. Wake felt his teeth rattle in his head as vibrations shook the craft, but he had no doubt that they would make it into orbit…assuming the planet’s unwelcome hosts would let them.
A bolt of light flashed outside the viewport.
He went to a window, choking back his vertigo as he saw how how high they’d risen, how the planet’s imposing ridges and canyons had receded to purple quiltwork.
There were a dozen glowing orbs in pursuit, and more were streaming upwards from the planet’s surface. They were elongating, becoming oblong, a faster and more aerodynamic shape. So they can change their shape, he thought.
Wake realized how incredibly vulnerable they were. These vehicles were unarmored. Made for civilian use. A direct hit would take them out of the air.
Bolts of lights spat from the Spheres.
Wake calculated the angles, and felt relief that none would hit his shuttle. Then he realized that they weren’t supposed to.
The lightbolts zeroed in on the second Adagio, hundreds of meters away. The one with the remaining members of his team.
Most of the bolts missed. One scored a glancing hit, caressing the hull with a whipstroke of fire.
Shit. I don’t know why they’re going after it instead of us, but soon they’ll kill it.
“Yath, they’ve got a hard on for you.” Andrei shouted over his intercom.
“Duly noted. I can’t perform evasive action at these speeds.”
“Can you use light-distortion rounds? Give them nothing to shoot at?”
“Damn, good idea.”
Wake through the viewport as the hatch on the back of the second Adagio shuttle opened. Yath’s MeshuggahTech poked through the gap, and started firing them at the oncoming Spheres.
They rounds burst apart in mid-air, throwing what looked like glitter across a wide spread. Then the particles started to do their magic, visuals in that area warping and distorting like a fun house mirror.
When a current passes from point A to point B, it follows the path of least resistance. When light passes from point A to point B, it follows the path of least time. Objects in water appear distorted because water retards light less than air, hence the light follows a curved path. The light-bending rounds generated a high-energy hotspot that slowed light down considerably, creating a blind spot for anything on the other side.
Functionally, Yath had just heat-shimmered her craft out of existence.
Soon, the fire from the Spheres grew less and less accurate, the Spheres guessing at where the escape craft were.
“Why the hell aren’t they shooting at us?” Wake said. Not a single bolt so far had even come in the ballpark of their Adagio.
Nyphur shrugged, and yoked the throttle harder.
They angled the thrusters, jetting further and further up into what passed for Caitanya-9’s atmosphere. They were now almost fully verticle, and the horizon beginning to regain its curves.
“Looks like we made a clean getaway.” Wake said to his team. “But damn, what a mess.” Calypso hurt, Zordrak gone… Wake realized that Caitanya-9 would be their Zordrak’s burial place. Nobody would ever find the body.
He realised like he should be feeling emotions. Feelings.
But he just didn’t.
How could he? He’d known them for days.
Then, Zelity’s voice brought him back to the present. “Sweet fuck. Just what the hell is that?”
Out the window, hundreds of meters above, the clouds were parting like curtains before a high atmospheric wind. An enormous shape became visible, a metallic floating leviathan a hundred meters across. It had four arms, like a cross. It was made of the same glowing metallic silver of the Spheres. Retention cords connected it to dozens or hundreds of balloons.
He gaped through the viewport. This is them, damn it. That’s how they survive the moons, and escape detection. They live in the clouds.
It was like a colossal spider, too heavy to spin webs, pouncing on its prey.
Appendages on the end of the arms unfurled. To Andrei, they looked like guns tracking into firing position.
“Shit. Get us higher.”
“I’m trying.” Nyphur said.
But it didn’t matter. A veritable hurricane of light bolts were ripping through the sky, aimed at Yath’s shuttle. The colossal spider airship had tracked her position and was leading them. Yath, Calypso, and Zelity were on a collision course with an overwhelming barrier of fire.
Wake’s shuttle didn’t seem to be a target.
He watched what happened next dispassionately, as if it was a pure exercise of physics. The escape craft had zero mobility. It could not dodge or swerve. It was built with one direction and speed in mind: straight up, and escape velocity. They were a twenty ton bullet, flying a nearly straight path into danger.
Seconds left, then moments, then no time at all.
Hopeless.
“Goodbye, Commander,” were Yath’s final words.
The shuttle was engulfed in a river of savage light. The windows blew out. The walls bulged outwards. It was simply torn out of the sky, spinning and then falling like a metal angel straight back down to Caitanya-9.
“Hell.” Nyphur said, watching the the blazing trail of smoke and debris.
“Were they your friends?” Ubra asked.
Wake glanced at her, at her earnest face, and wondered exactly what was going on.
“I’m sorry if they were,” she said. “It’s terrible, to lose your friends.”
In silence they rocketed further upwards, staring at the smoking thunderhead that had been three of their comrades.
The spider-ship, huge and refulgent, was soon covered by cloud.
“What’s that in your hand?” Wake asked.
Nyphur looked at the bone fragment. He’d forgotten he’d had it. “Uh, human remains. Zelity and I dug it up while we were looking for the beacon.”
“Give it to me.”
Nyphur handed it over. Wake sensed reluctance, and wondered about it. The sense that there was something lurking out of sight hung over him, but he couldn’t investigate it right now.
They were outbound, rising up into the exosphere. The purple vistas of Caitanya-9 were shrinking, having yielded up nothing except a chunk of bone.
This was no time to reflect on mission parameters, no time to debate profit and loss. This was a day to rage for the dead.
“Well, here we are. No going back from this.” Wake said.
“Where?”
“Humanity’s first interspecies war.”
The Teeth Between the Stars
Solar Arm Aerospace Corps – March 14, 2136 - 1350 hours
The man woke up from a five year sleep.
> He was shivering, naked, vomiting. There was a tube inside his mouth, needles penentrating his skin.
“Hello, sir.” A young woman said. “Your name is Sarkoth Amnon, and you have no memory. I am one of your maidservents, and I wish to assist you.”
“I don’t know who I am.” He said. He was in a bed, surrounded by hard metal surfaces. Spaceship? His mind suggested. But why? Why would he think he was in a spaceship?
More words, ripped and disassociated from any context. Vanitar. Solar Arm. Caitanya-9.
“That is normal.” The woman said, removing the intubations and cleaning his naked chest with a soft sponge. The woman was beautiful, eerily so – her attractiveness not natural but engineered.
Another pair of hands pressed a helmet down around his ears. He resisted for a second when he felt a gentle buzzing sensation on his scalp, but then relented. Something told him that this was normal, all part of the plan. The woman. The helmet. Everything.
Images flooded his brain, a riot of sensual, aural, and textual information. He shuddered, feeling himself beginning to grow sexually aroused.
“It is an honor to restore your memories, sir,” another female voice said.
Piece by piece, his past came back to him.
Little jagged edges that didn’t line up properly – faces with no names, names with no faces, half-facts that dissolved into milky nowhere.
But like any puzzle, once it filled in enough to see the main picture, he couldn’t unsee it.
He was a genius, a political polymath, a brilliant orator. He controlled the fate of twenty billion souls.
And I want them all to die!
He tried to relax, but the stimulation of his returning memory was overwhelming. He was a twenty watt bulb being powered by an electric storm.
“Can I have sexual intercourse with you?” He asked the woman. Little oratory skill there..
“I live to serve your wishes.” The woman said, emotionlessly.
She spoke like a piece of clothing that had learned to talk.
His memory was filling fast. I’m Sarkoth Amnon. I am Second Minister of the Solar Arm. I am second in command until Chancellor Sumitar dies (and he will die). I used to be a General. I used to be a soldier. These are my official roles. My unofficial roles? Savior of humanity. Destroyer of humanity. Guardian of forbidden knowledge. A discovery has been made. I have journeyed from Terrus to Alpha Centauri. I have been asleep. Five years. I am awake. Memories are returning. An attractive girl in front of me. This is the dialectic of my heart.
Lecherously, he pulled her close. He knew she wouldn’t enjoy it, and he doubted he’d enjoy it, either. His head still hurt, his joints still creaked like old furniture. His body was flabby and unattractive.
But he couldn’t stop.
As she kissed him, genetically and surgically engineered beauty locking lips with a reanimated corpse. Still, the memories came in a torrent.
From his early childhood, he’d thought little of the world, little of the people around him. Life was a serious of gaseous pretentions: philosophical, religious, and romantic ideals waddling on two tiny legs called survive and reproduce. Humanity was beneath insects – at least insects were incapable of self-delusion.
At fifteen, he’d been admitted to Emil Gokla’s academy on Titan. Gokla was a living legend – he was the founder and CEO of the Black Shift Corporation, and a cosmologist of incredible insight and puissance. The planet and its colony had an oppressive, opulant sense of doom. Studying there was like drowning in perfume. It was a place of learning, of culture, of beauty. A place where you were supposed to discern the cosmic spirit in a drop of water, or a snowflake. This was supposed to take the animal of man and exalt him higher.
Amnon had done very badly at his schoolwork.
He’d bonded with a fellow student, Mykor. The boy was an effete young aristocrat out of his time, disconnected just enough from the world by his social class that he never wanted to rejoin it. They shared similar values, laughed at similar things. They started daring each other to antagonize their schoolmasters. Small pranks. Flip answers on their exams. This was to have consequences.
One day in the marbled halls of Titan, Gokla himself pulled him aside. “I would have a word for you about the answer you put on a test. What number is the most perfect in the universe. I can think of five or six nursery rhymes that tell you it’s ‘three’. Your philosophical studies have told you about Pythagoras, and his findings. You’ve seen a tripod, and know the fewest and most elegant number of legs it needs to stand on. You’ve seen a dice, and know the smallest number of lines a Platonic solid needs to possess to have an equal chance of landing. Yet…”
“I wrote ‘any answer is the wrong one’”, Amnon had said.
He didn’t feel shame. Just relief that his intentions had been clear.
“The question remains, why did you answer the way you did?
Gokla could have gotten a lie. Instead, he got the truth, and Amnon was on the path of destiny.
Thereafter, the man gave him an address, and a time, and told him to meet him there. Gokla was a scholar of profound fame and influence, and Amnon had not even dreamed of not attending the meeting.
It had all been very quid pro quo. He’d performed some services for the man, some that he liked to remember and some that he didn’t. He was paraded around Gokla’s circle of friends, first as an aide, then a protégé, then, at last, a friend. In time, he was reunited with Mykor. It seemed that Gokla was actively looking through his studentry on Titan for apprentices.
In time, they were made aware of the Sons of the Vanitar.
In the Middle Ages there was a period where artists would steal cadavers, and study what was beneath the skin. From then on, medieval art had a creepy quality. Artists took great glee in drawing the bones, ligaments, and muscles moving like spokes beneath the skin.
For Amnon, his discovery of the Sons of the Vanitar was like that. Suddenly, so many events in history made sense, so many perturbing facts came together like the click of a key in a lock. He realized that the Solar Arm’s dominion was illusory. True power, now and always, is invisible.
The Sons of the Vanitar were something like a gentleman’s club, something like a mystic society, something like a terrorist cell. They lived by the creed that life itself is a running, weeping wound, and that one day they would stop it.
Life everywhere had to end. This was their goal. It was absolutely immoral that even a single paramecium live.
Underpinning their creed was the laws of Thermodynamics. Entropy ruled all. It was sometimes possible to offset entropy in a localized area with enthalpy, but over time, entropy must increase. Suffering was similar. All of life was misery, punctuated by brief periods of lesser misery. Utopianism was a foolish way to let the debt of misery pile higher and higher. Better to end it.
“When life becomes sentient,” Gokla explained, “it has the ability and obligation to end all suffering. Just as a man with fire in his hand has a duty not to burn people with it.”
“You mean us?” Mykor asked. “We’re the only sentient life in the universe.”
“We were not the first.” Gokla said. “There was another race that came before. When they realized what their existence meant, they made themselves extinct. And now it is our duty to do the same.”
They’d often asked the old man about this, about who had come before. But they got no answers.
In the present, he pulled the woman to him, and penetrated her. She was likely sterilized, and could bear no children by him (not that he wanted any). But he still felt sexual impulses. They stood alone, in an age that mocked such impulses and made them useless.
Like a pile of kindling, stacked and ready to burn…submerged at the bottom of the ocean.
No matter. Once a human climbed to the top of the pile and found an OFF switch for his race, those impulses would go away like everything else, would be obliterated into subatomic dust.
But where was the switch? How far
was the climb? The Order of the Vanitar made that their mission. They were not the first, but, fate willing, they would be the last.
They were not doomsayers, they were doom-makers.
Across six centuries, the Sons of the Vanitar had precipitated countless calamities and disasters. The Martian antimatter crisis. Documents had been forged by them, transmissions doctored, until Mars stood at the hairy edge of war with Terrus. They had tampered with the heat shield on the transport craft carrying ten thousand souls to Zezembi-13, so that they all perished, leaving another world temporarily outside mankind’s grasp. They had engineered diseases and bioweapons. They had sown the seeds of war, and occasionally, reaped a harvest.
“But mankind lives on,” Amnon had told Gokla. “You’ve failed.”
“Yes.” Gokla could not deny it, only mourn it. Humans were tenacious, ever multiplying, their blind survival instincts carrying on defiance of sheer common sense. “But I only need to succeed once. And I plan the live a long time. Speaking of which, would you two like to try parabiotic therapy?”
A drugged and comatose child was wheeled into the room. They watched, shocked and repulsed, as the old man siphoned several litres of blood from his body, and then connected his circulatory system to the child’s.
“This is the closest our hand has reached to eternal youth.” Gokla said, blood flowing from the child into him. “The blood of the young has a rejuvenative effect – within weeks, you’ll get improved markers on your immune system and lymph glands – and that’s just for openers. It’s been well-tested in mice, and I can vouch for its effects in humans, too. At least three to five children a month must be drained of blood.”
“Do the children…er…live?” Mykor said.
Gokla hadn’t seemed to have given this much thought. “Well, uh, yes. Quite often they do. But enough of this, would you like to know about the Vanitar?”
Both Amnon and Mykor had nodded.
Mankind was not the first sentient life in the universe, Gokla explained. Aeons years ago (or so the tale went), the galaxy had been under the thrall of an immortal species, the Vanitar. They had broken death’s shackles...only to realise that eternal life was the most fearsome chain of all.
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