It was shockingly small, a tiny three pounds encased in a massively protected shell. Once you saw it, it was curiously anti-climactic. Just a fragile organ, easily taken for granted but easily destroyed.
Looking at Noritai’s brain was like looking into their own mortality. Ubra realized the same thing existed in her head, in Zelity’s head, in everyone’s head, and could be just as easily destroyed.
Maybe by Black Shift. Maybe by Wake. Maybe even by herself.
Wake waved his hands, and Noritai collapsed to his knees, and then fell face down – or close enough, given that he didn’t have a face.
They got a final glimpse of the tiny porridge-like brain before Wake raised his foot and stomped on it.
- SHLORK -
All of them looked away, gorges rising. Ubra gagged, feeling stomach acid squirt into her mouth.
She realized she now had flecks of something wet drying on her combat boots.
It’s just the MRE I ate, she told herself with the religious zeal of a catechism. Reconstituted frankfurts and oats. Some must have ended up there, that’s all. Nothing to be worried about. Nothing at all…
“I hated him,” Wake said, staring at the ground. Then he sat, sullen and listless, playing with the fire. He made little swirls and arches. Curlicues of flame whirled around his fingers.
The moon was now almost directly above them, affecting them not at all.
Except for the part of it that was down here on the ground, encased in flesh.
Finally, after a long minute of the soldiers sitting in terrified silence, Wake shot to his feet, a look of joyous determination now on his features.
“Is that a clock?”
Someone, hours ago, had piled some random equipment salvaged from trucks and storage depots. Resting on the pile was a black unit with an LED readout on the front.
Nobody dared speak, but it was indeed a clock. It had readouts for the second, minute, hour, and day.
A simple thing, but Wake stared at it.
“That might be useful,” he said, and the clock vanished.
Then he turned his attention back to the living humans.
“Ubra, come with me,” he extended a hand to her. “I’d like to spend a little bit of time alone with you.”
Oh no, she thought. God have mercy.
She tried to protest, but almost immediately she found the muscles of her legs controlled by a different brain. She took one involuntary step forward, then another, the horror of what was happening crashing in like a wave.
“We’re going underground,” he said. “To the chamber. There will be a little bit of a fall.”
There was a soft sigh of splitting earth, and a crack appeared before them both, widening until it was big enough to accommodate both of their bodies.
Wake took her by the arm, his fingers gentle but giving the impression of impossible strength, and then he pulled her down.
Ubra and Zelity shared a final look, and then the world above was replaced by cold purple rock.
Descent.
They were going down, hand in hand, an eerie weightless descent through Stygian blackness. The only light was the faint purple glow coming from Wake’s body.
He’s going to rape me again, she thought. And there’s nothing at all I can do. At least before I could scream. Now, he’ll make my tongue disappear if I even try.
Then, after long minutes, they stopped. Ubra’s feet weren’t touching anything, and when she looked up at the tunnel, she could see only a tiny spot of light.
Wake spread out his heads, and the tunnel widened.
The rock just…disappeared. Sections dozens of meters across were erased from reality like bubbles popping under strong breath. At first Ubra thought it was an optical illusion, or a trick of her mind. The rock was being destroyed with no sign of drill, chisel, or explosive. And there was no dust, no heat, no rubble. Every surface Wake excavated with his hand had a clean and precise finish.
He says the planet is his body. If only I had this much control over mine.
Then he made additional hand gestures, and furniture appeared. Ubra gaped, unused to the sight of two fine European rococo chairs, a drawing room table, even a small candlestick.
The insanity and surreality became too much for her, and a giggle escaped her throat. She couldn’t control it. It was as involuntary as the steps she’d taken.
“Sit down,” he said. “I will not force you. Your muscles are your own now.”
And she felt her nerves reporting back, singing with joy that she had legs again.
And she instantly started planning an escape. Any kind of escape.
There were still some jagged shards of rock to the back of the room, a few meters from the table.
One of them looks nice and sharp. Like a spear. If I jump on it, and it hits my throat with enough force…
She’d be free. Free with her blood pouring from her throat, staring at the monster who’d brought her down here, and mocking his godhood with her last breaths.
But Wake saw where she was looking.
He waved his hand and the sharp point disappeared.
She started crying, tears rolling down her cheeks.
There was no escape. She’d been foolish to even dream that there was. Wake had the powers of God, at least on this world, and she was caught in his hell. No human entomologist had ever possessed an insect so completely as he possessed her.
He saw her tears, and shook his head. “Are you worried about me…taking advantage of you?” Wake asked. “I desire nothing of the sort. But crying annoys me. Stop it, and sit down.”
Choking back sobs, she sat down in the chair.
“I need to know more about myself,” he said. “Without using my real name, what sort of man was I before I lost my mind?”
“What do you mean?” She shifted uncomfortably. The chair was solid rock, and had none of the natural spring or give of a real rococo chair.
“Was I a kind man? A good man? Or was Sarkoth Amnon right to use me as he did? It worries me a great deal. How valuable was the clay he molded into me?”
She wracked her brains for events that now seemed as long ago as the age dinosaurs and mastodons.
What sort of man had Andrei Kazmer been? What sort of man had Aaron Wake been?
Her knowledge of him was brief, and punctuated with violence. The battle on the planet. His attack on a scientist. The desperate fight on Konotouri Delta, which couldn’t possibly have succeeded and obviously, in the end, did.
She had few facts on him. His past life was as mysterious to the other marines as it was to him.
“We had…some pleasant moments.”
Wake pinning her to the ground flashed through her head, and she banished it.
“There was a bit of comradeship,” she said. “A bit of team spirit.”
For a different man. A man a thousand times removed from whatever dark thing you are now.
She couldn’t face the intensity of that stare. He was hanging on her every word, hungry and needy. As though this faint praise was the sustenance he needed to keep him going.
“I don’t understand anything I’m doing,” he said. “I wish I’d shot you when we first woke up. But I’m glad I didn’t shoot you. I don’t mean I’ve changed my mind…it’s like there’s two brains in my head, each overlapping the other even though they have different contents. I want to understand myself, and I can’t. What if I’m broken?”
He droned on and on, growing sentimental and maudlin. From time to time he cast a glance back to her, to make sure she was paying attention.
She nodded in the right places.
Gave perfunctory answers when he asked her questions.
Trapped in a near-lightless cave, sitting in a garish piece of furniture, she wondered how many hours or days of this would pass before he let her go.
She was beginning to grow sleepy in spite of herself, and her eyes drifted shut.
“If you were me, what would you do?” he asked her. She dra
gged herself up from.
“I’m sorry?”
He snapped his fingers and she was whiplashed from her chair, landing face-first on the hard rock, smashed down by a brutal and unseen force.
“If I have to ask you again…if you were me, what would you do?”
The rock was like a cold slap against her cheek. She tasted blood in her mouth, thick and coppery.
“I would let everyone on this planet go. You can control wormholes. You can travel across the universe. Bring us back to Terrus. Let us live our lives.”
“No!” he shouted, and his voice was like a symphony, as dozens or hundreds of shouters were joining him in a choir. “You all have to die!”
“Then kill us now,” Ubra said, suddenly finding that she had no more emotions, no further ability to care. “You can do it. Just end it. Please.”
The white veins threading through his purple face flexed and unflexed with fury, and suddenly he couldn’t meet her in the face.
“I don’t want you to die and I don’t want you to live,” he said. “I’m an arrow pointing two different ways. A bullet shooting the shooter. This is fucked. Maybe when I’ve destroyed Terrus, it will all become clearer.”
“Return us to Terrus,” she said. “Not for our sakes, but for your own peace of mind. When you decide our fate, you can annihilate us then and there. We won’t be going anywhere. What purpose is served by keeping us here on the planet? At least take us to Konotouri Space Station.”
He’d had his face downcast, like Atlas sagging under the heavy weight of the world. But when he heard the final three words, his face slowly rose.
Then he met her blue eyes with his jet black ones. Beneath, there was a smile.
“Would you believe that I forgot all about them?” He said. “That’s the place where I was held captive, wasn’t it?”
“It was…complicated.” She said, suddenly remembering all the civilians up in space, and dreading for them.
God, there’s more than a hundred people up there.
“They certainly deserve to die,” he said. “No question there. And when they’re all gone, I can use the Konotouri Space Station for a purpose. Thank you, Ubra. Thank you for trying to help.”
He extended his hand, and she was lifted from the chair and propelled towards him.
They journeyed back to the surface, rising through the tunnel like bubbles in a vein of blood. Soon she was back on the surface, and felt a hard push on her back. She fell forward, her legs on solid, normal ground once again.
He kept rising past her. Higher and higher. Up into the sky, soaring like an Icarus that never needed feathers.
“What happened?” Zelity asked, as Wake vanished from view. They’d already disposed of Noritai’s body. The wet patch of brain fluid was covered by a discreet shovelful of soil.
“He’s going to kill us and not going to kill us at the same time,” she said, exhausted and angry.
“What?”
“Ask him for clarification, next time you see him. I wouldn’t mind knowing the answer.”
Haledor shuffled closer. “How should we…manage this?”
Ubra was tired of being helpless, and was also beginning to suspect that their powerlessness was somewhat illusory. “We appear to be managing just fine.”
“He’s crazy.”
“Then let him be crazy.”
“He’s killing us.”
“Not all of us. I draw breath still, as do you.”
“Damn it,” Haledor was angry. “At any second we could die for any or no reason. Because we said the wrong word, did the wrong thing, or existed at the wrong moment. You’ve spent more time with him than any of us. You and he went down on the planet together, didn’t you?”
“Yes. And before that, we fought together. But I don’t have any deep insights into his personality. All I can say is that this isn’t something we can strategise our way around. Madness is madness. He could end everything for no reason. And I’ll tell you something else, he’s very sensitive to people trying to manipulate him. Any sort of psy-ops thing you’re thinking of is going to backfire. Count on it.”
“He must have some psychological flaws we can exploit. What else do we know?”
Jagomir spoke up. “Ubra’s right. Trying to predict insanity is a mug’s game. Ever boil a cup of water? Really, you’d think that would be pretty predictable. Heat raises the water to a higher energy state. Eventually, the vapour pressure is high enough to equalize with the outside atmosphere, and your water starts to escape. You lose heat through thermal dissipation. Yeah, it’s a predictable system. A child can understand it, and run the sums to find out what happens next, and when. You really do know anything about it.”
He threw a peanut into the fire, and watched it explode.
“So just try and predict where the next bubble will rise.”
Konotouri Gamma – March 20, 2142 – 1000 hours
“Docking procedures initiated.”
When docking engineer Revon Tertius heard that, he thought it was probably a mistake.
Telemetry would have noticed the approach of a ship, even if there were still such things as ships after the disaster.
The station was as clean and quiet as the coils of an empty snail shell. Little fragments of sound echoed throughout its length – the humming of engines, amplified abnormally loud. Beeps and tones from computers, suddenly spiking to the forefront of perception.
Cast adrift, the survivors of Konotouri had learned that nothing was as loud as quiet.
The thing with being inside a snail shell, Tertius thought, passing time on another endless day with nothing to do, is that the creatures inside are dead.
He yawned, and stretched in his chair. Once, the customs room on the station’s third habitat wheel had been full of activity, full of people to talk to. Through the portholes you could see a matrix of spacecraft, their vectors weaving a net of commerce and exploration.
Now, since the disaster, everyone was keeping to themselves. The hundred or so people remaining on Konotouri were like miniature versions of the station itself, each separated from the other by the void.
Dear God, what was there to talk about?
It had all gone wrong when the marines arrived. Tertius remembered the day well, he’d signed for all their equipment when they’d landed. He remembered Aaron Wake, the marines’ affable commander, and how he’d tried to crack jokes with Security Chief Sabrok.
Within 24 hours, Wake was under arrest, and an army had landed on their doorstep.
Tertius had spent those few days asking as few questions as possible. He didn’t have to. Rumors and gossip were flying around the station like a cold virus. All you had to do was hang around others and allow yourself to be infected.
Soldiers had landed on the planet, and a battle was being fought against the planet’s inscrutable natives. Enoki Kai had hoped to keep Konotouri Station aloof from the Solar Arm’s adventurism, but like so many hopes, it hadn’t come to pass.
Wake had broken free, with the help of a few seditious elements on board the station. The ensuing carnage had claimed the lives of Kai, Sabrok, and a dozen others. In the end, newly minted Warrant Officer Mazin Nemuta had sealed the outer habitat wheel.
All civilian personnel had been kept cooped up in Konotouri Alpha, in an information blackout. But when Tertius had come out to take inventory of missing items, he’d seen it.
The outer wheel had been dropped. He couldn’t believe it.
This was the place you went for a quiet life, or to wind down a career.
You didn’t come here for this shit.
Nobody would tell him why, or under what circumstances. He resigned himself to several days of painstaking lost inventory – billions of ducats worth of supplies were in the outer ring, and they all needed separate forms from various insurance carriers. He’d had to calculate the rate of inflation, knowing that it would be five years before Terrus could process any lost property claims. The river of paperwork would be e
nough to drown him.
But as it turned out, that was the least of their worries.
Nemuta had ordered that the station be “airgapped”. No contact with the ground, lest a hostile force capture Sarkoth Amnon’s communication devices. They were to go into isolation, transmitting nothing and receiving nothing. Konotouri was mankind’s furthest outpost in the fathomless stars, and though they were bound by Solar Arm law they’d already started thinking of themselves as something different.
Then had come the day when everything stopped working.
All of their navigational and positioning systems went haywire, and had to be recalibrated from scratch. Everything tied to the position of a star no longer worked. The solar wind had changed frequency and direction. The station was now receiving light from a completely new angle, and it was blue light.
As far as anyone could tell, they were no longer orbiting Proxima Centauri. Where they’d gone, and why, and how, were three out of many questions that had no answer.
A huge pulse of ionizing radiation had fried all of their communications. Now they completely isolated from the outside, and not by choice.
Days of apoplectic panic had turned to dull shock, like a bruise fading. Finally, they were in a state of utter boredom and isolation.
No more transports from Terrus. No more news from home.
And critically, no more supplies.
Konotouri Station existed only because a major interstellar transit lane had been built, animating it like a nerve. They had a few years’ worth of supplies left now, and then they’d have to explore other options.
And there weren’t any other options. They were crippled and stranded in space, around a strange star.
Days became weeks. Everyone walked around like zombies. Conversation dwindled to the bare minimum. Every single topic of discussion was carefully engineered to avoid the single fact that all knew and none could say.
We are not coming home.
In the customs lounge, Tertius heard the robotic female voice speak again, shattering his torpor like glass.
“Airlock access code accepted.”
His gaze shot over the imposing airlock doors, four meters wide. That was what it normally said towards the end of the docking procedure, after the craft had been secured and the vacuum seals fastened.
Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2) Page 13