Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  REJOICE, A KNIFE TO THE HEART

  A novel of First Contact

  STEVEN ERIKSON

  REJOICE, A KNIFE TO THE HEART

  Copyright ©2018 by Steven Erikson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without prior written permission. This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Promontory Press

  www.promontorypress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Erikson, Steven, author

  Rejoice, a knife to the heart / Steven Erikson.

  ISBN 978-1-77374-013-3

  I. Title.

  PS8559.R552R45 2018 C813’.54 C2018-903261-8

  Cover Design by Jeff Brown

  To Mark Karasick, for sharing that first ride on the chariot.

  For reasons I’m not yet ready to disclose I would like to thank Malcolm Clark, Laura Heslin, and Jessica North-O’Connell.

  SE

  CHARACTERS

  Fictional:

  Samantha (Sam) August – a writer of Science Fiction

  Dr. Hamish Drake – her husband

  Ronald Carpenter – another Science Fiction writer

  Dr. Adeleh Bagneri – Secretary General of the United Nations (UN)

  Agnes Livy – Secretary to Dr. Bagneri

  Raine Kent – President of the United States

  D(iana).K(imberly). Prentice – Vice President

  Dr. Ben Mellyk – Science Advisor to the President

  Daniel Prester – Security Advisor, Homeland Security

  Kenneth J. Esterholm – Director of CIA

  Gus Riesling – astronaut

  Konstantine Milnikov – President of Federation of Russia

  Anatoli Petrov – retired cosmonaut

  Xin Pang – Leader of the People’s Republic of China

  Liu Zhou – Head of Chinese Space Exploration Program

  Hong Li – astronaut on Luna Mission

  Captain Shen – Commander of Luna Mission

  Lisabet Carboneau – Prime Minister of Canada

  Alison Pinborough – Science Advisor to the Prime Minister

  Mary Sparrow – Minister for Parks and Recreation

  Will Camden – Minister for Natural Resources

  Marc Renard – Canadian astronaut

  Joey Sink – Blogger and Conspiracy Buff (Kitchen Sink News)

  Nonny Mouse (alias) – whistleblower at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

  King Con (alias) – conspiracy buff

  Joakim Malleat – Cardinal in the Vatican, Officer of Public Communications

  Ira Levy – rabbi based in New York City

  Richard Fallow – televangelist

  Abdul Irani – imam

  Simon Gist – self-made industrialist, Kepler Industries

  Jack Butler – Chief Engineer, Kepler Industries

  Mary Lamp – Personal Relations Director at Kepler Industries

  Douglas Murdo – media tycoon

  Chrystal Murdo – his wife

  Maxwell Murdo – his son

  James Adonis – billionaire

  Jonathan Adonis – billionaire

  Lois Stanton – Personal Secretary to the Adonis Brothers

  Annie – an American citizen

  Jeff – an American citizen

  Kolo – death-squad commander in the Republic of Congo

  Neela – slave-girl to Kolo

  Ruth Moyen – soldier, IDF (Israeli Defense Force)

  Casper Brunt – an arms dealer

  Anthony ‘Tony’ – a resident of Los Angeles

  ‘Adam’ – AI communicant of the Intervention Delegation

  Non-Fictional (in his own words):

  Robert J. Sawyer – Canadian Science Fiction writer

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Stage One: Count to Fifty (Initiation)

  Stage Two: Warning Shot (Contemplation)

  Stage Three: The Elegance of Ennui (Rejection)

  Stage Four: Rebirth (Resurrection)

  Stage Five: Another Breath Taken (Who Are We?)

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  There is not and never has been an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. It is important for you to keep believing that.

  This is why.

  PROLOGUE

  Space was astir. In the scatter of asteroids in orbit between Mars and Jupiter, small objects burst into being, like clouds of gnats rising from an unseen pond. They were small, none larger than an average SUV, but as one moment led to the next, these machine-clouds proliferated. Before long, the swarms numbered in the hundreds, and the objects numbered in the tens of thousands.

  The clouds, mostly unlit barring the faint reflection of the distant sun’s light, dispersed from their point of origin. At astonishing velocities, they set off among the asteroids. Others winged outward, quickly leaving the relatively crowded space of the asteroid belt’s field of rubble. Others raced toward Mars.

  Over the next few hours and days, the machine-clouds among the asteroids settled on select chunks of rock, some metal-rich, others more comet-like and heavy with frozen water, methane, ammonia, and a carbonaceous skin of space-dust. On each of these asteroids, the objects clustered exclusively on one side. Extending filaments, they linked up and then settled in. A dozen other clouds converged on the largest asteroid in the immediate area. These too linked up, only to then disgorge smaller machines. These began devouring rock.

  Out beyond the swath of rubble left behind by over four billion years of planets being born and planets dying, of still-birthed moons, of impacts and collisions, lone machine-clouds sped through the dark, hunting comets.

  Inward of the asteroid field, the clouds heading toward Mars converged on the smaller of the planet’s two moons, Deimos, and like their kin, they settled upon its dusty, pitted surface, concentrating upon one side of the misshapen moon, and then linked up.

  Nothing on Earth, or in Earth-Orbit, was capable of detecting these events.

  That only came later, when the machines began dismantling orbital mechanics, and asteroids and comets broke from their ancient paths, and set off, at considerable velocity, toward the heart of the solar system. And when Deimos shifted orbit, to slowly, incrementally, collide with Phobos.

  By then, however, very few on Earth were really paying any attention.

  STAGE ONE: COUNT TO FIFTY

  (Initiation)

  CHAPTER ONE

  City of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada May 19th, 2:19 PM

  Three smokers were hanging out outside the bar on Cook Street. A woman was carrying a cardboard box filled with old clothes, heading for the consignment shop. Across the street, three house-painters had just climbed the stairs up from the hardware store, burdened with supplies for repairing drywall. A man was walking toward Pandora Avenue and the grocery store on its corner.

  The street itself was crowded with traffic, congested despite the suicide turn-lane running down the center. The pace was a crawl in the lane heading south as the last few vehicles caught up to the line awaiting a change of lights down at Pandora. A UPS delivery van had just turned from Pandora, heading north.

  In total, eleven cameras caught the event, as stills and video. There was an exceptional amount of concurrence among the witnesses when later questioned by journalists and police officers. The event had already gone viral when the official inquiry began.

  A middle-aged woman had been walking down Cook, on the same side as the consignment stor
e and the bar. She had been well-dressed, her stride assured, her hands in the pockets of her charcoal-grey mid-length coat and her fiery red hair long enough to lift in the wind coming up from the south, but not so long as to fantail out behind her. Her face—as the nearest witnesses recalled—was curiously memorable. High cheekbones, flat cheeks, a wide jaw, a face that hadn’t seen much sun.

  There’d been some clouds overhead, scudding in from the Sooke Hills to the west, so at first no one had paid much attention to the shadow settling across the street.

  One of the smokers, a Mister John Allaire, was wheelchair-bound. His angle of repose afforded him the privilege of being the first person to sight the dispersal of the cloud overhead, revealing the slightly curved shape of something solid and huge.

  “Like the underside of a plate, a china plate,” John said. In the course of his life up until now, this was his defining event. Things had been pretty shitty for some time. His smoking was killing his legs below the knees. His drinking was pickling his liver. He was sixty-three years old and living on assistance. He’d never won the lottery.

  “Like the underside of a plate, a china plate. That then started glowing in the middle. Dead center. Glowing like you wouldn’t believe. I had to shade my eyes, but that didn’t stop me seeing the beam of light come down. Right on that woman—who wasn’t twenty feet from me. She never knew what hit her.”

  Margot Revette agreed. “She was just walking. And then the light swallowed her up, and then the light was gone and so was she. I was bringing old clothes in, you know? And an old pair of high heels—can’t believe I bought those. Not meant for human feet. I must’ve lost my mind. But consignment, right? There’s always the chance, I mean, people will buy anything.”

  “The light hit,” said Rick Shultz. “We were just out from the store, me and Jack and Naadi. Carrying shit to the back of the truck. The fucking light stabbed down from that fucking UFO, and bam! The woman was gone. Then the ship just folded up and vanished.”

  “Holy fuck yeah,” added Jack. “She was, like, incinerated.”

  “Folded up and vanished,” Rick repeated. “Damned thing didn’t even fly away.”

  Who was she?

  No one knew. They would have to await reports of someone gone unexpectedly missing. It might take a day or two, and if the woman lived alone, maybe a lot longer.

  None of the video or still shots caught much of her face. Too bad about that, but then, not surprising. Everyone was filming the UFO.

  Dr. Hamish Drake worked too hard. People who knew him agreed on that, especially his wife. For the past five years, Hamish had been one of only three General Practitioners in Greater Victoria who was accepting new patients. It was something of a crisis.

  He was between patients that afternoon, stealing a few minutes trying to work his way into a stack of test results appended to patient files, when his receptionist, Nurjehan Aziz, entered his office. Startled by the absence of a knock, Hamish looked up over his reading-glasses. There was an ashen hue to her face, the kind of look he had seen before, usually when red-flagged results came back on a long-standing patient.

  Death had a way of stalking the living, a detail both Nurjehan and Hamish understood all too well. It arrived in a pallor, the blood draining from a living face. In Nurjehan’s visage, the shadow was there for him to see, and a cool, dispassionate dread rose in answer from the depths of his gut, even as in his mind he searched his memory for who might be in trouble—someone he’d seen the past week, someone he’d ordered tests on, someone—

  “Something’s happened,” Nurjehan said.

  Hamish frowned. This was different. She was trembling. He’d never seen his receptionist so rattled. Removing his glasses and setting them down on the desktop, he said, “Close the door. Explain.”

  His calm, dulcet tones failed to settle her. Instead, she winced.

  “I was online—forgive me—”

  “Not again. Nurjehan, if you’re not here to tell me that a nuclear war has just erupted, I will be—”

  “There was a UFO. Here in Victoria. There are recordings all over Facebook and YouTube. I looked at the CHEK news-site. The police have posted a photo of someone … disappearing. Inside a beam of light.”

  “A UFO.”

  Nurjehan held out her cell-phone to show him the image she had called up.

  Too close. He could make out little more than a blurry figure on what looked like a street. Hamish retrieved his glasses, put them on and then leaned forward.

  “That’s Sam.”

  As if from some distance, he heard Nurjehan say, “The beam of light. From the UFO. The whole thing was recorded.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Hamish said, reaching for his own phone. He fast-dialed his wife’s number. The response was immediate. Connection failed. “Doesn’t mean anything,” he muttered, dialing again. “Even with her online presence, she hardly ever picks up. Sometimes she forgets to even turn the damned thing on.” Same result. He pocketed the phone and rose. “Let me see that video. I cannot believe this.”

  It had been barely three blocks away from the city’s police station. John Scholes set the phone down. Ignoring the flashing lights of multiple lines left open and on hold, he rose from his desk and walked over to the window.

  Traffic churned past and there seemed to be a new edge to it, although that was likely his own imagination. He looked up. Innocent tufts of cloud scudding past and, much higher, a smear of haze paling the blue of the sky. He watched a float-plane bank to make for a harbor landing.

  “That sounded tough,” said a voice behind him.

  “Dave,” he said by way of greeting, not turning around. “Yeah, it was. We’ve got a positive ID. That was her husband on the line.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, surprised I didn’t see it the first time. Granted, the shot was blurry … but that red hair …”

  His beat partner moved up to stand beside him. “Still got to be some kind of hoax.”

  John nodded. “Maybe especially now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The woman. Samantha August. The sci-fi writer. You know, Chasms, the one they made that movie of. That, and other stuff. Vlogger. Politics. Social justice.”

  Dave snorted. “An SF writer got zapped into dust by a UFO? Man, you can’t make that shit up.”

  John shot his partner a sour look. “Like I just explained to her husband, we’ve got a missing person, not a dead one. No evidence that she got incinerated—”

  “Can you hear yourself? Evidence? What evidence? That’s the whole point of incineration, isn’t it?” He waved a hand at the scene outside. “A gust of wind. Poof! Gone.”

  “No one saw her burn up or anything. Just vanish. The light swallows her and then it’s gone, and so is she. Man,” he added, “I’ve watched the fucking vid about a thousand times already.”

  “More sightings?” Dave asked.

  “Sightings, kidnappings, anal probes—they’re all coming out of the woodwork.”

  “But nothing else on vid.”

  John shook his head. And then, as if amending his judgement, he shrugged. “The web’s full of that stuff.”

  “Yeah, grainy, blurry crap in the age of HD. Bad photoshop shit.” Dave paused, and then said, “It all gets debunked sooner or later.”

  John shrugged. Truth was, he had no opinion on the subject either way. The days were too damned full as it was, and the darkness growing in his mind made his nights an ordeal. He’d heard an old veteran call it ‘The Walk’ and now he was on it. The walk … away from faith, away from any expectation except the worst when it came to humanity. A gathering up of sorrow, like soiled clothes into a bag of laundry, kicked to the corner of the room. In the meantime, you just got on with things.

  At the walk’s end, he’d stop caring.

  Maybe there were other ways through it all. He knew he’d keep looking until … well, until he gave up.

  “Want me to take some of these calls?”<
br />
  John nodded. “Appreciate it, Dave.”

  “This one’s fucked you over.”

  It had. It took a leap of faith he didn’t have in him. But without it he had nothing. He turned to his partner and said, “Her husband was pretty messed up.”

  But Dave was already on the phone, taking another hysterical call.

  She was in the house, no matter which room Hamish wandered into, as if he was tracking her passage, with his wife always just out of sight, just past closing the door or turning the corner. He could smell the rank cigarette smell on the stairs leading up to her garret, but it was an old smell, and the faint cloud above the carpeted steps was nothing more than dust lit by the sun’s rays slanting in from the skylight.

  Her notes and old coffee cup and overflowing ashtray flanked her home laptop, its lid down, its blue power light slowly pulsing.

  But something of the ghost she had become now infected Hamish, and he wandered like a spirit trapped in the house, the house itself trapped inside a memory already growing stale and lifeless.

  A marriage of thirty-three years, a practice of twenty-nine. No children. She wasn’t the kind of woman to sacrifice personal habits and pleasures. Besides, children took time, energy, youth, a prison cell and a life-sentence willingly walked into. She’d say that with the usual challenging glint in her eyes, as if on the edge of a harsh, possibly bitter laugh. For all his sensitivity and training, Hamish always had trouble reading his wife. She had knife-edges and a habit of dancing on them. It was a personal trait made into a professional persona. Her vlog, Here Now, was loved and was hated, depending on the political divide. She was fearless and a lot of people in the world didn’t like fearless women.

  The home phone had been ringing, its antiquated jangle of bells startling Hamish every time, the sound insistent and strangely cold. That would be her agent and maybe yes, he deserved a few words, but Hamish left the answering machine to do its work.

  Her genre compatriots would be on her Facebook page, filling her Twitter feed with endless unanswered queries and pleas for more information from somebody, anybody. They’d be frantically knocking on the door of Here Now. Hamish left them to talk with each other. Beyond the blunt official statement from the police, and all the recorded interviews from the witnesses, there was really nothing else to be said. She was gone, but gone was now a word with a thousand possible meanings.