…There is competition. There is misery. Every successful animal stands upon a mountain of bones of the ones that came before it…
…The Vanitar are the most successful of all creatures, and for them the pill of suffering is the bitterest of all…
…It will continue, hyper-intelligent creatures fucking and breeding and smearing the stink of suffering across every wretched world they colonise…
…Never suspecting that the thing that laid the groundwork for their civilisation and gave them a blank page for their species to draw on was still there…
…Recharging…
…Reloading…
…Counting down in base-12, time riding a dextral loop back to the start until it releases its energy in a pure blinding flash of sterility and cleanses the filth once more…
…And again…
…And again…
…Forever…
The last Vanitar stood before him. He was vaguely aware of two empty Spheres, and two humans kneeling on the tentacle-tiled floor.
Can the Wipe be stopped?
NO. NEITHER YOU NOR I CAN PREVENT THE END. IT IS INEVITABLE.
His mind was assaulted with a rattling wave of static.
LIFE IS A SPECTRUM. WE TRAVERSE ITS FINAL GRADIENT. THE DISTANT ONE, THE MOST PERFECT ONE.
WORSHIP ME. ONLY ONE TERRESTRIAN HOUR REMAINS UNTIL THE WIPE. IN THAT TIME, YOU WILL LOVE.
He laughed, openly and with crushing contempt.
He did not love. He couldn’t feel that emotion for this festering column of twitching cilia and swivelling eyes. He couldn’t even feel it for his fellow man.
The facility for love was scraped out of him, like the core from an apple. There was just a deathless loathing left, self-sustaining, a solution in search of a problem. He constantly sought targets to hate, none of them enough. Not even Sarkoth Amnon was a target worthy of his loathing.
I want to be the Wipe.
He tried to study the last of the Vanitar, studying it with unreliable human eyes that misreported everything from the size of the room to its shape to its color.
OBEY.
They couldn’t make any sense of the creature. Its position in space, its size, the way the light reflecting off it seemed to be coming from a different world than the one they were in.
He saw that around the creature were bones. Yellowed and cracked with age, their marrow melted away, but they were clearly human. Tibias. Femurs. Skulls, grinning away in extinction.
He would not die.
Pulses filled with air, the earth, his mind, the universe. His hands became part of the pulse, implements of extinction with a target of one.
The two humans screamed. He hated them every bit as much as he hated the Vanitar, but they were not obstructing him. For the moment, they were safe from his impulse to kill.
With his bare hands, he lunged on the wriggling eruption of tentacles, that loathsome spectre of the past and future.
His fingernails bit into its flesh, and tore.
Ubra flew across the wastes, her Vyres beating the air. The biokinetic implants were making her ravenously hungry. Her stomach snarled like a tormented beast.
She was heading towards the digging site. Although she’d been flying for hours, the plume of smoke still seemed so far away.
The moons were at their peak, one overlapping the other with its black disk. Over the distant horizon, she heard a rumble so constant and steady it was little more than a tone – the music of the planet self-mutilating. She tried to hear sounds of fighting, but there was nothing. Either the battle had ended, or it had never been allowed to begin.
She was happy for the hunger. It forced her mind away from everything else.
Kazmer’s brutality still scarred her. She felt unclean, as if she wanted to scrub herself until her skin peeled away like the crust on a wound. She felt like a torn and tattered flag, blowing raggedly in Caitanya-9’s sickly winds.
And she could recall something else happening to her. Limbs torn asunder, bones broken, flesh nearly boiled away. Her thoughts from that period were scattered and few, but she was pretty sure the woman had healed her. The woman that was now dead.
Ubra finally came within sight of the digging site, and saw the unfettered chaos.
The earth was an undulating tapestry of destruction. Tanks were half-buried in the debris. Men were fleeing, any attempt at battle abandoned.
At the center were a few Spheres, disabled and defeated, along with digging equipment that stood dormant.
A few people caught sight of her, but nobody fired. She got the sense that they’d lost track of who their friends and enemies were a long time ago.
She watched, spellbound, as the ground rumbled and vibrated, harder and harder near the epicentre. And with a bellow of exhaling dust, it split wide open.
She thought it was the start of a volcanic eruption. Caitanya-9 was plagued with them.
But this was something that defied classification.
From the crack in the ground, a spectral figure rose.
She screamed as he looked into the face of Andrei Kazmer.
With no wings, he ascended. His skin was a rippling tapestry of purple and black – the planet and its moons inhabiting his worthless flesh. His eyes flashed like fire.
He hasn’t stopped the Wipe. She thought. He’s done something different – become it.
Two men were floating out of the hole behind him, their bodies limp and unconscious. With another shock, she recognised one of them.
Yen Zelity.
Amnon and his forces scrambled into retreat, back into jets, back into shuttles.
A smile split Andrei Kazmer’s face, like the skin splitting on a rotten peach.
He spread out his hands, and the shuttles started erupting in flame.
Explosions shook the landscape as fuel tanks exploded without a touch of flame. Howling metal flew. Pilots escaped, some living, some dying, everyone’s fate arbitrary and meaningless.
Amnon and his surviving entourage fled towards the surviving shuttles, running blindly, trying to put as much distance between the terrifying spectre and themselves as possible. Then, a voice spoke in her head. Perhaps all their heads.
“Escape. For a little while. The Wipe cannot be delayed or stopped. But run, if you wish.”
The evac was done in record time, Sarkoth Amnon half-dragged and half-led. He was almost insensible with fear. Retrojets were fired, and soon they were gaining altitude, flying away from the convulsing planet.
Andrei Kazmer vanished back inside the crack in the world.
Ubra had seen enough.
She landed on the ground, with the nine or ten surviving Defiant. “I’m Nyphur’s friend. What’s happening?”
They stared at her in despair. Nobody knew. Not the past, not the present, and not so much as a single second in the future.
Nobody knew.
The evac ships took a badly shaken Amnon and several companies of soldiers away from Caitanya-9.
He’d taken heavy losses. Of the two thousand brought out here, only a thousand were coming back. Sakharov hadn’t made it. The chaos of the earthquakes had separated them, and there was no time to wait. Another minute would have destroyed the shuttles.
But they’d gained a surprising addition: Mykor.
His old friend sat in the corner of the shuttle, muttering insensibly.
“Sixteen…fifteen…”
“What the devil are you goin on about?”
“The countdown. I’ve memorized the pattern, and it’s nearly at zero. Enjoy humanity’s last few gasps.”
“What?” Amnon was horrified.
“Congratulations. The Sons of the Vanitar have won. You’ve won.”
No, he hadn’t won.
They fled the planet, and the terrifying beast that had risen from the ground. Amnon was struck by the sense that whatever had happened to Kazmer, he was letting them escape.
Did Kazmer embody the Wipe now? Did it matter? It was going to occu
r in a matter of minutes. The moons, the architects of so much destruction on the planet, would turn their gaze outwards, and level their destruction on a thousand thousand stars.
His escape ships had to weave past the ascendant moons to escape orbit – a tricky maneuver which crashed one of them, killing eighty men.
“They’ll get to hell soon enough to hold the door open for us.” Amnon said.
He knew how this misadventure ended, with destroying waves radiating out as fast as the inverse square law would allow. He would be one of the first bodies on the pile that would encompass the entirety of his race, and the Sons of the Vanitar would join their adopted fathers, their purpose completed.
He realised that he didn’t want this.
Once they’d achieved orbital velocity, he watched the planet from the bridge, Mykor at his side, blood coagulating from their various wounds under combine dressings.
“Five…” Mykor’s voice was like the tolling of an onerous bell.
“Four...
“Three…
“Two…
“One…
And then the planet vanished from space.
Where its colossal bulk had once stood, there were only stars.
After a moment, he felt a jolt as the ship started moving, no longer moving on an axle of gravity.
Shouts and cries of alarm from the bridge. Something had gone terribly wrong.
“Where’s it gone?” Amnon shouted, tapping his suit collar, as if it was malfunctioning. “Where the everlasting fuck has it gone?”
All their devices indicated that Caitanya-9, for want of better words, no longer existed.
There was no gravitational pull. The magnetosphere was gone. Every device calibrated to Caitanya-9’s location was going haywire. There was no response from Konotouri Space Station.
Then, someone spoke up. “There seems to be radio activity out there. Something transmitting a message. Wait…let me see if I can crack it…shoot. It’s gone.”
Just then, Amnon’s suit briefly glowed blue. He covered his wrist so nobody would see.
He’d just received a message from the space where the planet had been.
Terrus – December 10, 2141 - 0100 hours
Amnon and his remaining forces entered interstellar sleep, and returned to Terrus.
No hero’s welcome. The entire event was classified as top secret. All of the files from the case ended up with a UNRESOLVED COSMIC ANOMALY stamp.
Those three words were an eraser that absolved him of many sins.
His involvement was downplayed and reduced. The final story doctored up was that he’d spent the entire time on board the Solar Arm aerospace fleet, orbiting the planet, while General Sakharov and his men descended to investigate the strange matter of Mr Golestani’s transmission.
Then, Caitanya-9 had vanished from the heavens, along with its two moons and Konotouri Space Station. An inexplicable mystery that nobody could even hope to understand. All personnel were MIA.
It was, of course, necessary to implant false memories in some of the soldiers. Emil Gokla and the Black Shift Corporation were of great help in this matter.
And there were always rumors – so many rumors. They came back from Caitanya-9 like incubating eggs, hatching into a thousand wriggling maggots of doubt.
Veterens were applying for exemptions, citing mental health issues. Some were having curious memories pop into their head, memories that contradicted the official account.
Memories of strangeness, even of horror.
Black Shift claimed that this was normal. Travellers coming out of interstellar sleep often had false memories emerge unbidden from their psyches. Gokla and his theoreticians were divided on the origin of these. Some thought they were distorted refractions of actual memories – lingering chemical valence states that hadn’t quite been banished by the Black Shift dehydration regime. Others thought they were just nonsense. Fantasies spouting from the same vent as dreams and hallucinations. Generally, the second view had more support. The false memories were likely just stress-induced fantasies.
Hastily, a law was rammed through the senate that the memories of Black Shift passengers were not admissible as legal evidence.
The rumors ebbed away, but never quite vanished.
When the soldiers were released from active service, they spread throughout the Solar Arm and its worlds: the methane-surrounded bubbles of Titan, the technological wonderland of Terrus, the orphidian towers of Selene, the thriving mining towns of Mars. If you found a gathering of three or four ex-servicemen or women, and angled your ear to their talk, you’d hear some interesting tales of what really happened in “that Proxima Centauri business.”
One soldier, for example, kept insisting to anyone that would listen that he’d seen Sarkoth Amnon torture and then murder a civilian scientist. A man called Omai Nyphur.
When he was locked up for psychiatric treatment, he soon became a cause celebre, proof of the tragic need for better mental health services for veterns.
Black Shift issued a statement that they’d be happy to pay for the man’s therapy.
Sarkoth Amnon had much do to.
The political landscape was unrecognisable after ten years. Trusted backbenchers had retired. New names had filled the holes. Alliances had been brokered (and broken). Countless new pieces of legislature had been passed in his absence. His party, Seeds of Reformation, was in danger of losing its majority. Prime Minister Kalos was old, nearly ninety years old, and was simply getting buried under it all.
It’s like drinking from a firehose, he thought, trying to restore order to his party.
At the next election, the Seens of Reformation gained sixteen seats at the Atrium. With his position in the Solar Arm secure for another eight years, people remarked that he hadn’t lost his touch.
But he’d changed.
He’d lost much of his ability to make jokes, to laugh, and to smile.
He began pursuing policies of military protectionism. Defense spending reached its highest point in a century. New garrisons were established in the Asteroid belt. Probes were deployed around the Oort Cloud in their billions, giving the Solar Arm a vast gaze across its territory.
A referendum passed by sixteen votes, reinstituting the draft. Amnon was now free to suck billions of men and women into the Solar Arm’s reserve corps, spending and spending until it jeopardised his position in his own party.
Why are we gearing up for war? Everyone asked. The Solar Arm has no enemies. What’s he defending us from?
The day after his party’s crushing victory in the Atrium, he received a private message from some old friends.
Meet us on Titan. We need to know what happened. You cannot refuse.
Saturn and its rings presided overhead as thick pools of methane crawled against pressurized bubbles. Herds of commuters shuffled along polyglass tubes through the vivid, neon-hued landscape. Titan was like being in a museum, with mankind itself as the exhibit.
At Emil’s mansion, the lights were low. Twenty or so souls were bowing their heads, incanting.
“We are the sutures of sanity’s wounds,
We are the accelerant on entropy's axle,
We are the teeth between the stars,
We are, and that alone is our crime.”
Unconcious children were wheeled in by servants sworn to secrecy. Veins were torn open with needles, and the Sons of the Vanitar drank the blood of the young.
Sarkoth Amnon surprised everyone by waving away the IV line when it was offered. He was known as one of the most debauched of the group. “I have no taste for it at the moment.”
“Then let us speak.” Emil Gokla said. The ancient patriarch of the Sons of the Vanitar was still alive in his one hundred and fifth year, a deathless centenarian kept alive by parabiosis and hate. “What happened on the planet? You’ve been avoiding us for months.”
He realised everyone was looking at him. Twenty men and women – leaders, generals, visionaries, thinkers, all of th
em tirelessly working to end the universe. They looked at him, eyes full of hope that he’d found a key to the apocalypse on Caitanya-9.
“There was nothing there,” he muttered.
“Yes, there was.” Raya Yithdras asked. In the past nine years she’d extended her sphere of influence across the entire asteroid belt. “The official account is full of holes. A child could see through it.”
“There was nothing there.” Exhaustion and depression weighed on Amnon like an anvil, and their questions felt like pecking birds. “I landed on the planet, and could find nothing. The report was false. ” he told them. “We looked everywhere, searching for any slight trace of the Vanitar, and we found rocks and sand.”
“But the planet vanished.”
“Yes.”
“And you have no idea why?” Asked Belix, the Chancellor of Triton.
“It is a mystery I see no way to investigate.”
“But what about the transmissions, the reports of attacks, the…”
Amnon despised them all. His brotherhood of shared secrets could share in his secrets no more. “Do you think by asking me these questions my answer will change? I found nothing, and I saw nothing. Strange things happened before and after I got there, but I know nothing about it you don’t.”
“The planet disappeared.” Emil said. “Where to? Vaporisation of a rock of that size would release incredible amounts of energy, none of which were observed.”
“Just let it go.” Amnon said. “I could not squeeze blood from that rock, and neither can you.”
The Minister of Commerce spoke. “I believe you mentioned a little experiment you were conducting on that famous outlaw from the asteroid belt. What was his name? Something Kazmer, I think?”
“The experiment failed. He went psychotic and I was forced to court martial and execute him.” Amnon said.
The mood in the room was one of complete deflation.
Emil Gokla cornered him later, and pulled his head close. His breath was almost toxic. “You’re lying, Amnon. I wish I knew why. Our society cannot be a house divided against itself.”
“I no longer wish to be part of the Sons of the Vanitar.” Amnon whispered. “I resign.”
Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1) Page 23