Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2)

by Ben Sheffield

  Raya Yithdras poured herself chamomile tea. “Is it really possible he could be controlling Caitanya-9?”

  “That completely depends on the exact nature of Caitanya-9, which we don’t know. Oh, I have theories. It’s hard fact we’re short on, not theory. My thinking is that the planet is a superweapon, but like all weapons, it needs to have a conscious controller. At one point, it was this was a Vanitar. We have only one tape recording of the person who claims to have seen one, but his impressions – take them for the unreliable gibberish that they were – were that the creature was ancient, sick, and miserable. Most of all, it was lonely. It had detonated the explosion that had sifted its own race. It existed only to control the weapon, and to continue annihilating life as it appeared in the universe.”

  “But if that was true, how has our civilization gotten as far as it has?” Raya asked. “Why has humanity been spared?”

  Emil spread his hands in a universal I don’t know gesture. “I’m only speculating, but remember that Caitanya-9 apparently did not exist prior to 2075 or so. All scans of that region prior to that record empty space. If we imagine that the planet is hopping around using short-lived wormholes, maybe it was about to annihilate us. Standing five light years out around Proxima Centauri, it would have had an excellent vantage point to blast us with gamma rays. It could have done this, but it didn’t. Why not? Maybe it was biding its time – evidently there was a countdown, which Mykor and his digging interrupted. Either way, if we assume that there needs to be someone with their finger on the button, maybe Andrei Kazmer is now that man.”

  “This is wonderful,” Yithdras said.

  “Couldn’t imagine better news.”

  “We’ve never had the means to terminate the human project. Even antimatter warheads would leave a few lives behind, from which the species would repopulate. But a gamma ray burst ripping through the Solar System…”

  “It would be the end. Instant, and impossible to stop.”

  They were silent for a moment, digesting the implications that their work might already be done.

  “We need to get rid of Sarkoth,” she said at last.

  “Naturally. Do what you think is best, I’m not able to be in the thick of politics and scheming any more. Plant stories about him. Tie as many connections to terrorist attacks to him as possible. We want him drowning in scandal.”

  “I can do better than that,” Raya said. “If his own party considers him insane, the job is done. I have nearly half of his cabinet in my pocket. Once he’s out of the picture, I can decommission this silly defense network he’s building. Then I might pardon him – why not be magnanimous? Then we just sit back and wait for Andre Kazmer to light up the sky.”

  Emil Gokla smiled, and gave a mock toast. “May I live to that day. And not one day further.”

  Caitanya-9 – February 28, 2143, unknown time

  The lakes and seas that girdled the planet caused rain, and there was still a constant need for more shelter. Pointless sheets of metal that had been discarded in the battle were now eagerly sought after. Primitive shanty huts now clustered together, forming a village that nobody had yet named.

  It was a peaceful time, filled with backbreaking labour that almost felt like rest. There was nothing to do, nothing to avoid. Caitanya-9’s tidal flexing was regular enough to ensure a constant termperature year round, and there were no planting or harvesting seasons. Every drop of the water on the planet was fresh, and there was no such thing as drought. Building materials were a constant concern, with some of the Defiant breaking off from the main group and dwelling in caves.

  Ubra and Zelity didn’t count themselves among them. There were things about caves that they both had reason to dislike.

  Wake could sometimes be seen striding across the hills, a liminal space going from nowhere to nowhere. Nobody ever spoke to him, or invited contact from him. He was the master of the planet, but they wanted him to treat it with benign neglect.

  He was happy to oblige.

  One day, Ubra confronted Zelity. He was tending a garden of genehacked pines. Some fruiting exoderms had been collected off the sideboards of a dune buggy, and to everyone’s surprise, they’d grown when planted. The hope was that they’d reach maturity in another six months, and ease their shortage of building materials.

  “How’s it looking?” She stood alongside him, their shadows growing across a field, backed by a blue sun.

  “I’m optimistic,” he said, leaning against an improvised rake made from snapped-off bayonet heads. “A few of them are taking root. Of course, we’re not out of the woods yet, or in the woods, I should say. Not everything we plant grows. The soil’s very different to Terrus’s, as is the light. But if we get a few seed harvests done, we’ll be looking at hundreds of trees. That would help hold down the fertile soil, and stop so much of it from being washed away by the rain.”

  She nodded, seeing the tender shoots poking their heads through the ground. Incredible that this barren ball of rock could harbor life, but it wasn’t the only thing proving to be fertile.

  “Do you have a moment to talk?”

  “I have all the moments to talk.”

  But suddenly, she didn’t seem to have anything to say. Her tongue was like glue, sticking to any side of her mouth she put it against.

  “Yen, I’m pregnant.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You have permission to name the baby after me.”

  “Don’t make fun of me. This is serious.”

  “Who’s the father?”

  A large number of soldiers were now in some relationship or another with each other, the strictures against fraternization gone along with any other semblance of Solar Arm law.

  “It’s Wake.”

  Zelity suddenly made himself very busy spreading out another layer of synthetic nitrogen over the topsoil. His bare arms bulged and flexed in the blue light, but his tongue had gone slack.

  “It happened not long after I broke him out of prison,” Ubra said. “We fell from low earth orbit, and hit the ground not far from the drilling site. Zandra found us, and used polyfleshing to restore us to health. Wake didn’t survive, and she brought him back from the dead.”

  “Risky,” Zelity said. “It’s never a good idea to revive the dead. Nyphur was the most successful case we’ve ever had, and even he became a creepy half-a-zombie.”

  “Zandra, it seems, had a limited ability to process risks. She brought him back, and tried to convince him that she was his wife. Unfortunately, he discovered my dying body, and forced her to revive me, too. Her deception was uncovered. After she died, Wake was still very angry. There was…an event. I think he wanted to punish me. Or punish someone else, through me. That’s not the point, and I don’t want to talk about it. The point is, I’m pregnant.”

  She stared at the sun, which glowed too dim to burn her eyes. “For weeks I’ve been ignoring the signs. When my monthly flow stopped, I assumed it was because of the stress. When I started getting sick, same story. But now my stomach’s growing. I know it, and soon everyone else will too.”

  Zelity threw down the rake. He could haul sacks of rivets and salvage for many kilometers, but here was a load he had trouble bearing. “So you want me to pretend the baby’s mine.”

  “Please.”

  “Holy fuck,” he shook his head. “Hell, I’ll do it, I guess. You can say we shacked up on board the Konotouri. The timeline would fit, and none of the Defiant would have any way of contradicting you. You’re the only one who has memories of that period, including me.”

  She shook her head. “This isn’t to trick the Defiant. I don’t care what anyone down here thinks. I’m worried about Wake. What would he do, if he found out?”

  It was a good question, and the longer they probed at it, the closer they were to their ignorance.

  This was a black box, an uncrossable veil. They just had no idea how Wake would react to him having a child.

  “Right now, we’ve got him on a knife’s edge,” she sa
id. “There’s a bunch of contradictions in him, and I don’t think he wants anything in a particularly sane or methodological way. He made the planet give us water, but he still wants to destroy the solar system. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. He’s crazy. If there was a reason for his behavior, he wouldn’t be crazy.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple, but anyway, we need to not rock the boat right now. He cannot know that he is a father. We’re not manipulating him into keeping us alive, we’ve somehow lucked our way into our own survival. This is exactly the sort of thing that could cause our luck to change.”

  “Okay, so what’s the story? That you and I were in flagrante delicto on the planet? Is that the story we stick to?”

  “I guess so,” she said. “Though that story makes marginally less sense. We were at war, we were this close to dying. And we’re surrounded by people who witnessed our every movement, our every coming and going. Will the other Defiant cover for us? I’m not as close to them as I am to you.”

  “I think they will. I’ll get a few of them alone and talk about it.”

  “Thanks, I really appreciate it. This means a lot to me.”

  “There’s no chance at all you could be tempted to…uh…remove the fetus?” Zelity wondered at all the eloquent words, just out of reach when you needed them. Remove the fetus. Jesus.

  “I don’t know how. We have a few basic medical supplies, but no abortifacients. There’s natural remedies that I put no faith in. And anything dramatic or visible is going to attract attention. Plus I have my own objections.”

  He sat down, and stroked one of the sprouting pines with his finger. “And what would those be?”

  “Understand that I hate Wake, and I have strong negative feelings to having his child,” she said. “But consequentialist killing is the logic of the Sons of the Vanitar. I will not walk that road.”

  “You really should. It’s a comfy road. Full of spas and foot massage parlours.”

  “Maybe that’s where the Defiant went wrong all along – they gave up the moral high ground. Black Shift alters peoples’ memories for their own purposes, so Mykor did the same. The Sons were willing to kill and sabotage to achieve their ends, so Mykor did the same. But that came back to hurt them – when Wake recovered and learned of what’s going on, he saw a planet full of people who were basically the same: each thought they were white and the other was black, but in reality they were all shades of gray. Why don’t we try something different? Why don’t we try actually being white?”

  “You’re condemning a child to a harsh and difficult life,” Zelity said. “If that’s your great moral stand…”

  “No great moral stand. I’m just doing the opposite of what the people I hate do.”

  “Well, okay, it’s your prerogative,” then he smacked his head. “Shit, it won’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Wake will know the child is his. He is God on this planet. He knows everything that happens here, even inside us. Chances are good he’s listening to this conversation. And I’m absolutely sure he can sense his paternal DNA inside a fetus.”

  It was a substantial problem.

  “We have to tell him, and face the consequences,” Zelity said.

  “No, we don’t. He definitely has powers, but he’s not godlike. He still has to ask us questions, he can’t just read our minds. Let’s keep this under our cap, and see. If he asks, we’ll tell him you’re the father, and he might not even ask. It’s been months since he’s even bothered us. If there are other babies born at around the same time, this might be a tree he misses for the forest.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zelity said.

  “You haven’t done anything wrong,” said Ubra. “I have.”

  “No, you haven’t. How could you say that?”

  “I knew he had issues. He was apparently a criminal before getting put on the shuttle out here – I know this because he told me himself. I even encouraged him to bring his violent side to the forefront, to help us escape. I only had the best of intentions, but I still got the ball rolling.”

  “Yeah,” Zelity said. “Well, no. You didn’t know what the consequences would be. How can you take responsibility for something like that?”

  “Turns out that it doesn’t matter whether you know what the consequences will be. They still happen.”

  They looked over the horizon, where Somnath had recently fled and Detsen was now going.

  They could see and hear faint undulations from earthquakes hundreds of kilometers away. Enormous dust devils were rising in purple columns. Beyond, a new ridge was forming, volcanoes erupting in pinpricks of light.

  The narrow band of antigravity protection only existed far enough for them to still see the devastation they were missing, and might someday have to endure again. Wake wanted them to watch.

  “When you think about it, the Sons of the Vanitar had the right idea,” Zelity said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just sit back. Don’t go near Caitanya-9, don’t expose yourself to any risk. They’ll live long and happy lives. It’s the heroes and the revolutionaries who die in this game. Mykor. Sarkoth Amnon. All of them are amateurs. The true winners are the ones who stayed far away, stirring up storms from across the universe.”

  The flash of distant lightning was reflected in Ubra’s eyes. “Stirring up storms is all well and good. But then comes the day when you’re caught in one.”

  In Wake’s madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by his own predatory brain.

  Everything in the planet was connected to him. When a volcano erupted, he felt pressure released from his skin. Every single flake of dust touched him. The footsteps upon his surface itched.

  In his bipedal body, he descended. Just willed away the electrical bonds in the ground beneath his feet, and let himself fall through kilometers of solid rock. The space between atoms is vast, and atoms themselves are just glorified empty space.

  He plunged down, an arrow aimed at the planet core, trying to banish his sense of misery.

  He was longing for a finish line. An end. Anything. Exhaustion overwhelmed him. He could not break, and that was his curse. He wanted to break, and had wanted it almost since the very first day.

  Unthinking, he’d torn the last Vanitar from life, and inherited its ghastly fate.

  Eternal life.

  What is the reason you exist, Wake? The voice said in his head, louder every time it harangued him. How can you possibly justify the disaster and horror of your existence for even a single second, let alone all of the seconds?

  “Get out of my head,” he muttered.

  He was destructive. Worse than that, he was a destroyer. That was it, and that was all. His only job. He'd come out of God's crucible with no mandate or purpose other than to wreck things. At first he’d found it amusing. He hated so many things, and now he had the ability to make good on that hate.

  But what about when the hate was directed inwards?

  It had all been so simple at first. Just gamma ray bursts in every direction, until everyone who had ever done the slightest bit of wrong to him was devoured by his vengeance.

  The society on Terrus, which turned me into what I am.

  Emil Gokla, for building the dread architecture that stole my mind.

  Sarkoth Amnon, for imprisoning me.

  Nyphur, if he still lives, for manipulating me like a pawn.

  Mykor, if he still lives, for the same reason.

  His brain churned on and on, thinking of more names. Occasionally he remembered facts from his past life. They flitted through his mind like leaves, trash blown by a neural wind.

  But between those names, he sometimes thought of other things. Of other people.

  The billions living on Terrus, humanity’s cradle. The planet had once been called Earth, full of beautiful sights and sounds.

  The millions living on Selene, drifting above Terrus like a pe
arl snapped free from a necklace.

  The millions living on Mars, on Ceres.

  The thousands living on Saturn’s moon Titan, on Jupiter’s moon Europa.

  The hundreds living on Neptune’s moon, Triton, or the scattered outposts throughout the Oort Cloud.

  Did he have a grievance with all of them?

  They’re cut from the same cloth. Only by virtue of my not knowing them do I not have reason to kill them, and that is reason in itself.

  But now parts of himself argued against that, argued strongly.

  You see the universe as a mirror. You are corrupt, so you see corruption looking back everywhere. You would never dare look at the world as it really is. No spider wants to think the universe is full of anything other than flies.

  He was near the core of the world now, in a crucible of immense heat and brightness. With the gravity equal on each side, he floated.

  He existed in a bubble of air he’d conjured, despite the immense pressure on each side. This world’s physics were his command. He thought, matter obeyed.

  He created life.

  He extracted slivers of hyperdense slag from the core, and dragged them into the bubble. They boiled and smoked, releasing cascades of exotic particles. He experimented, stretching them out, tying them in knots, making them bounce and oscillate.

  Then fashioned them into creatures.

  Just simple ones at first, but increasingly complex. They could crawl, they could fly, they could look around and perceive some of the planet they lived inside.

  Soon he had simple bipedal creatures, dozens of them, all sculpted from magma but acting with the behavior of the animals on Terrus.

  The magma creatures started playing and gamboling around him. One sniffed his hand with a nose that was almost 6,000C. He stroked it, feeling not affection but just loathsome guilt, as though he was made of slime and had only just realized it.

  He’d created creatures far more kind and worthy of existence than he was, and it had taken no effort at all.

  Out of cooling columns of magma, he engineered environments for the creatures. Habitats they could nest in. Territorial zones, as well as areas of neutral ground. Dozens of magmabeasts started splitting up, forming pairs, forming trios, and occasionally entire packs.