Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1)

by Ben Sheffield

  “You think you know the truth?” Zandra leaned in and whispered so that Andrei could not hear. “Here’s the truth: I’m the one who has a Sphere. I’m the one who has water. I killed you once and brought you back – remember that time you woke up on the ground with no memories? You’re a brainjacked and refurbished marine. Just let it go.”

  Wake stood up. Calm, collected, composed. He had the gait of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing.

  “I have no way of knowing which of you is lying, and which of you is telling the truth. I think I’ve seen Ubra before, but what does that prove? I think my name might be Andrei, but how can I know that? You’ve confused me, but because you’ve done that, you’ve given me perfect clarity. Since all paths are equally meaningless, the future is mine to write. Goodbye, Zandra.”

  “What?”

  “I’m killing you.”

  She opened her mouth, but the blast from Andrei’s pistol swallowed her scream.

  She was hurled back, a gaping hole punched through her torso.

  She writhed on the ground, her body convulsing upon the metal slug now embedded in her and choking the life from her. Andrei stood over her, expressionless.

  He mock-waved goodbye.

  Then shot her twice in the head.

  When the body had stopped jerking, he turned and pointed the gun at Ubra.

  “Goodbye, Ubra.”

  She blanched. The barrel of the gun was a chrome borehole, reflecting purple. “Why are you doing?”

  “Because I want to”

  “Don’t. Please don’t.” She said. “I help you. I can tell you about yourself. I know things.”

  His grin was insane. “You know things, do you? Can you bring my past back? Can you tell me if I ever had a choice to be out here?”

  “No, I can’t. No, you probably didn’t. But what does it matter?”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” He snarled. The gun was unwavering. “What ghosts we are. What zombies. Shambling along, pieces falling off. No meaning in our pasts, no meaning in our futures. Just pawns. But no more – it ends here! I’m killing you and then I’m killing my fucking self.”

  She stood there, under the barrel of a gun, not daring to move or even to breathe. Seconds passed in excruciating tension. She counted them under her breath.

  She got to thirty before she realised he wasn’t going to pull the trigger.

  For whatever reason, maybe he couldn’t.

  He was muttering to himself, his voice the wavering cadence of a lunatic. Although his eyes were pointed straight ahead, he no longer seemed to be looking at her, but at a point on the horizon, a curve he might ride to find his missing memories.

  Finally, the gun was lowered.

  Then he turned it around, and put the barrel in his mouth.

  “No!” She shouted, launching herself at him.

  She tore the gun from his mouth just as it went off, sending a bullet shooting skywards. The reverberation numbed her hands, and she immediately dropped it. It landed on the ground like a waiting snake, cold and patient, ready to resume its business.

  Andrei shrieked in horror and rage, and lashed out at her. She parried the blow, and lunged for the gun, sliding across the sand.

  She got to within a few inches of it, and then his boot crunched down on her hand. She cried out, and recoiled as he pounded some kicks into her torso. She coiled up and then bounced to her feet, adopting a fighting stance.

  He went at her. Fists flashed at her head, at her body, a blur of feints and body blows. She blocked and stopped most of them. One of them went too close, and she caught his hand, and twisted it, applying ruinous pressure on the radial nerve. He roared, and lashed a spinning kick at her side. She deflected it with her fast moving hands, then kicked the gun back behind her body.

  He was too big, and too powerful.

  She blocked two of his next three blows. The third took her feet out from under her. He pounced on her, his hands digging into her sides.

  Then she was face to face with an inhuman monster. Anger, deepening from red into black.

  Then he started tearing away the remaining shreds of her clothes

  “I just hate everything about you.” His hot breath blasted in her face, and she felt his hardness pressing into her. “You want to live? I can’t see why, but still...do you?”

  “Stop,” she whispered, trying to close her eyes.

  His hands were groping her, caressing her without love or kindness.

  He realised that she had her eyes closed, and he hit her, hard. “Fucking look at me.”

  From there, it was short and ugly. The hard gravel cut into her skin as he penentrated her with short, brutal strokes, and she had to stare into his madness-filled eyes.

  “Tell me about Sarkoth Amnon.”

  His hands dug deep enough into her shoulders to leave bruises.

  “Tell me about the Defiant.”

  The hard bones of his pelvic shelf grinded against hers.

  “Tell me everything.”

  Through it all she babbled uncontrollably. She wracked her brains for things to tell him, little minutia she’d picked up from brief conversations with Nyphur. She spoke faster and faster, as if that would speed up what was happening. Louder and louder, as if that would drown out what was happening. Words flowed out of her like a torrent, trying to appease him, trying to make him stop.

  Finally, he cut across her voice with a single grunt, and she felt him ejaculate inside her: a crawling flood of semen spilling into her like the manifestation of his hate.

  He pulled back, looking half-stunned.

  Ubra rolled to one side, and immediately vomited, her stomach clenching with the force.

  “The planet’s murdered me.” He told her. “That, or Sarkoth Amnon. Does it matter? Are they any different? They’ve destroyed everything good that was in me.”

  “You’re a monster.” Tears streaked her face. “There was never anything good.”

  He scowled and didn’t deny it.

  Then he went over to the Sphere. It was wide open, in anticipation of the rider that would never ride it again. The one with her brains leaking out of two holes in her head.

  He climbed inside, feeling momentary wonder at the tangle of tentacles and cilia that moved in sympathy to his body, wrapping themselves around him and inserting themselves into his pores.

  When one prised its way into his cortex, he felt his senses deepen. He had more knowledge now, and the planet was no longer an unreadable map. He now vestiges of control.

  He would go to the digging site, where the Doorway was supposed to be. If he’d decoded Ubra’s shrieks correctly, he would find a weapon there of all-surpassing strength. No need to ask her where the digging site was. There was a column of smoke, many kilometers high. The remnants of shelling and high explosives.

  Ubra…

  Before he sealed the opening on the Sphere, he took one last look at the girl lying on the ground, her clothing torn away. She was sobbing.

  She was a liar too. He knew it. Could sense it in her. They were all liars, every last member of his race.

  In a way, that was freeing. If the world was a horror, he would feel no shame in being a horror too, of ripping apart Sarkoth Amnon, his entire army, and anyone else who tried to stop him.

  Then he was speeding away, the ground beneath him a motion blur.

  Andrei Kazmer died today, but his heat beats still.

  The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 1600 hours

  The spasms of Golestani’s drill were being recorded. Whatever the drill bit was biting into a kilometre below ground, it had the merciless rhythm of a ticking clock.

  11-12-12…11-12-11…11-12-10…

  With the ticks dwindling away at the digging site, Mykor was verging on panic.

  Two of his most valuable personnel had vanished. The first was his daughter, gone over the horizon to investigate the falling debris. The second was Emeth, his second in command. It had been hours since he’d gone down the bore
hole in his Sphere, meaning to investigate quickly and report back.

  Both of their signals had gone dark.

  Zelity hovered closer. “We’re starting to see movements of Amnon’s troops. They might be getting ready for another crack at us.”

  “That’s fine – they can get ready for whatever the hell they want. We can throw the Shield at a moment’s notice,” Mykor said. “Just to confirm, there’s no word at all from Zandra or Emeth?”

  “As soon as I hear something, you’ll be the first to know about it.”

  “Thank you. I truly mean that – thank you.”

  The Spheres were strangely intimate, but strangely impersonal. You had superhuman senses, could move in three axes…but you were prevented from doing basic human things. Such as throwing a comforting arm around a friend’s shoulders.

  They hovered together over the hole. The metal shaft was resting on one side of the shaft, wobbling every few seconds with each new vibration. Oscillations of the earth had warped the integrity of the hole, shaping it into something almost oval-shaped, fluting away at an angle.

  All of their lore of what existed underground was fractured and inconsistent, based heavily on the testimony of an insane miner. And all of it had been passed down through countless iterations of the Sons of the Vanitar, no doubt growing a new layer of myth and incorrectness each time.

  The Wipe had been unleashed once. Patterns of gamma radiation found on certain rocks throughout the solar system made this clear.

  If it was going to happen again, then it was the enemy, with Sarkoth Amnon’s Sons of the Vanitar an irrelevant afterthought.

  “We need to know what’s down there.” Mykor said.

  “Emeth isn’t coming back.” Zelity said. “Let’s face the facts. And whoever goes down there next probably won’t come back, either.”

  They pondered the inscrutable black pit.

  Most things are defined by a presence. A hole is the inverse. Like semantic dark matter, it’s defined by its absence.

  A chasm, a crevice, cleavage, a crack. Something that only has meaning through nonexistence.

  “The recordings said that the Vanitar effected an immediate trance state on the people who viewed them. The miners who stumbled upon one fell to their knees in worship, and never got up.”

  “We don’t know that the Vanitar are still alive.”

  “If they are…”

  “Can I ask you something? Something small and stupid?” Zelity said. “It’s causing me a bit of existiential grief.”

  “I suppose,” Mykor said.

  “Why are there yellow marks on my chest? How did I get them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve lived here all my life, and I can’t ever remember getting them, or having them. Then I looked one day, and I had goddamn letters on my chest. In fact, it happened the day after I hit my head, and needed my memory replaced.”

  Mykor shook his head, like an elephant bothered by flies. Inside, a battle seemed to be raging.

  Finally, he spoke.

  “There’s no point in keeping it from you. You are not one of us.”

  “What?”

  “You’re an offworlder, captured after your shuttle was shot down in a skirmish. We captured you. Implanted false memories into your head. Nothing in your mind is more than a few days old.”

  Zelity shook his head. “But I remember everything. My earliest memories are of this planet. My childhood. My youth. Everything. I remember you teaching me to fly a Sphere.”

  “If those memories are real to you, then it is your prerogative to trust them.” Mykor said. “But I have my own. And they tell a very different story.”

  Zelity was very quiet.

  “It might be that we’ve lived on this planet for too long,” Mykor said. “It does things to your head. There is nothing normal or natural about this world – it is the domain of the Vanitar. But if anyone is immune to its effects, it might well be you. An offworlder.”

  Zelity seemed to understand. “You want me to go down.”

  “If you refuse, I will go. In fact…”

  “No.” He raised a hand. “Stay up here. I’ll go down. And if I don’t come back, don’t try to rescue me.”

  There were no goodbyes. He got in his Sphere, and vanished down the hole.

  Mykor watched as the glowing silver light was swallowed by the depths of Caitanya-9.

  Zelity plummeted down at speeds slightly exceeding a freefall.

  The hole was no longer straight, it wavered and bent like a diviner’s fork. The next overpass from Detsen or Somnath would probably close it. Holes didn’t last long. Nothing on the planet did.

  He was soon in darkness, relying on the light from his Sphere to guide himself. Sensory data from his Sphere soon reported increasing ambient temperatures. He was deep enough to feel a first kiss of the heat that started in the upper crust and culminated in an orgasm at the center of the planet.

  The pulsing was so loud he could feel it. It was so regular, so methodical, that he soon entered a state of light hypnosis. It had the cadence of a chant.

  At the bottom, a kilometre down, he found a cracked patina of rock, hot to the touch and vibrating with each pulse.

  He projected a particle lathe from the Sphere, and scraped away the rock. Soon, he was staring at a brilliant reflective surface, aquamarine blue.

  It glowed, catching and reflecting the silver of his Sphere like a sympathetic mirror. It was had a strange liquid quality – he could blow air on it with his particle lathe and watch it ripple.

  It pulsed in time with the vibrations running through the drill bit shunted through it.

  He immediately knew that this was the same race that had made the Spheres.

  It seemed they’d beaten Amnon to the Doorway, and perhaps the Wipe – the most fearsome piece of Vanitar artillery.

  Perhaps he could go no further. Perhaps if a mortal man tried to go through the silvery surface, it would kill him. Perhaps he’d find themselves amidst alien technology so far beyond ken and comprehension that he would do nothing but stare.

  Perhaps the Wipe would go off and they could do nothing to stop it.

  He did not know if he was a brave man, or a coward. His memory was a space of time only a few days long, if Mykor was to be believed. That, and some nebulous back-projections of a mind that needed to make sense against itself.

  He had to go further.

  I’ve found the Doorway, he pulsed to the Spheres more than a kilometre in the air. And I’m going through.

  And then he just let himself fall downwards into the unknown.

  The Wipe – March 18, 2136 - 1700 hours

  His senses were immediately in disarray. Everything around him was clashing color, colors that seemed to not be from the universe he inhabited. Violent changes of tone and contrast played havoc with his eyes.

  He tried to relax. He knew that he might not be able to get back.

  The rhythmic pulsing was now a world-filling throbbing sound, the planet’s beating heart.

  He didn’t know whether he was falling, or hovering in place. His Sphere, normally well integrated with his nervous system, now felt like it was going in every direction simultaneous.

  Carried along a slipstream of chaotic sensation, he found himself at the center of a large chamber, the walls teeming with trailing tentacles. They thrashed and agitated in time with the pulse, like seaweed.

  The size of the chamber was indeterminate, unclear. Its physical dimensions were unfixed and ever-changing. Sometimes small enough to induce claustrophobia, sometimes large enough to make him feel like he could get lost. His perception was distorted in here. Wrong.

  He couldn’t trust his eyes. Sadly, they were all he had.

  He saw bones on the floor, surrounded by waving tentacles.

  He floated around the room, allowing his Sphere to chart its curious ever-changing dimensions, brushing the swaying tentacles with the underside of his hull.

  Then, eyes
started to open.

  First one, then two, and by the time he warned himself to stop counting he was past a hundred.

  Flaps of skin around the wall opened and closed in time with the pulse. Mouths. Anuses. Maybe both. Everywhere, distended, wattled skin flexed and contracted.

  Then, a vast node of eyes split wide open, thousands or millions of them, and the Vanitar invaded his head.

  He was overcome with ecstasy, overwhelmed by the kind of visceral miracle that can only happen to a nonbeliever.

  There was perfection in this room. Godlike resonance. Perfection.

  Perfection that drew him towards its center like a moth to a flame, condemning him as a sinner even as he started to praise it.

  His mouth opened and closed like the anuslike lips on the wall. His tongue pushed out syllables in a language he’d never spoken before.

  He loved the Vanitar. Adored it. The last of its kind. A vision of purity and beauty that damned man just by its existence.

  He knew that he would never go back up. This was his final resting place.

  His Sphere floated closer next to the huge nest of eyes. He was vaguely aware of a second Sphere to his right.

  Emeth? Is that his name?

  The thought was ripped right out of his head by his world-spanning love. His head had no room for thoughts that were not of the Vanitar. His tongue had no room except for worship of the Vanitar. His knees had no motion except to bend. He was a vessel filled with supplication.

  He had no idea what he’d come here to do, but now he’d found his true purpose.

  The Wipe occurs soon, something spoke into his mind. Complete your race’s remaining seconds with me.

  His Sphere came to a rest beside Emeth. They settled down to adore the Vanitar for the rest of their lives.

  The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 1800 hours

  Sakharov shielded his eyes against the sun inside his Spidermecha. He articulated the suit’s eight limbs back and forth, working a good coating of oil into the folds.

  Two hundred Spidermecha, six hundred buggies and ATVs, light aerial drones without number. All of his units were in position, and soon it would be time to attack.