Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2)

by Ben Sheffield

  Entire days passed, with Wake trying different scenarios and arrangements to see what would happen.

  He could not encode much intelligence into the creatures: magma at the center of a planet does not vary in state very much, and there was no real way for him to model the complexity of a human brain. And he did not want to give them intelligence, he didn’t need to hear accusations of guilt from their mouths.

  As the number of creatures grew, he started to notice that their goals were not always in harmony with each other. Some wanted to mate when others didn’t. Some wanted the spots on the structure that offered the best view, even though others were already there. He conjured up little particulates of food, and made them irresistibly delicious, this added another stratum of complexity: limited resources. When he granted an unlimited supply of these to certain creatures, they didn’t share them out among the group, they monopolized them, doling them out little by little, so as to control the others.

  An elaborate social order teetered higher and higher, and soon it toppled into the flux of war.

  Magmabeasts honed white-hot talons and started fighting, ones and twos at first, then dozens. He widened the game, making the sphere ten kilometers across, and creating thousands of creatures. He observed the battles that took place, all the mischief and casuisitry and misdirection, and all of the cold blooded cruelty in a battlefield with no blood and no coldness.

  Finally, he got tired of the fighting, and de-animated all of the magmabeasts. They dissolved into ultradense slag, and then he imploded the sphere. He was surrounded by the earth’s core once more, a community of one.

  This had brought him understanding, and a deeper sense of pain.

  Fighting was endemic to conscious creatures. Space was finite. Resources were finite. Even altruistic animals disagree on what altruism means.

  He realized that the bad creatures made it hard to notice the good ones

  He’d seen much cruelty and unkindness. But then he realized that this was what he’d been looking for. This made sense, from the perspective of how his brain was programmed. Miss an opportunity and another will come along. Miss a threat and you die.

  For every creature enthusiastically tearing the metal-riven throat out of another, there were two or three living peaceably, and perhaps another couple grudgingly tearing the throats out, compelled by self-interest. They would have loved a peaceful life. They wouldn’t get one, because they lived in a universe that wouldn’t allow it.

  And he was one of them.

  In fact, he was the worst of them. The magmabeasts sometimes killed a few of their friends. He’d killed all of them, and for even less reason. They had their lives to live. He just thought he’d seen all he needed to see.

  Now they were still, their bodies dissolved and compacted into the rest of the super dense material that comprised Caitanya 9’s crust. They would never be animated again. They would never play and nuzzle his hand again.

  He felt like a very powerless god as he rose to the surface, passing through hundreds of kilometers in one of his destruction-promising heartbeats. He broke through the rock, and stared out across Caitanya-9’s landscape, feeling the pressure of the moons, the whirling dervishes of air, boulders tumbling across the ground and leaving rake-marks in the dust, massive waves oscillating in the lakes and seas he had made, the purple salted hell, and somewhere…fifty or sixty humans, all of whom wanted nothing more than what he could never give them.

  His anger was growing cold, and that saddened him. Because it was all he had.

  I’ll destroy the Solar System, and then stop. He told himself. Surely getting rid of the Solar Arm would be enough. After that, I can rest.

  Until then, he couldn’t. He was Wake, destined to remain ever vigilant and ever conscious, with the eye of every twisting storm on the planet staring at him, judging him.

  The Atrium – Selene – February 28th 2143 – 1230 hours

  At the Atrium, Sarkoth Amnon's head was swimming, overwhelmed by the task in front of him.

  On the computers he made calls and affixed digital signatures in an endless procession. Daksha-class sentinels were being outfitted and deployed with antimatter weapons. Each one required a massive amount of paperwork, all of which needed his personal attention. The stream of digital data in front of him seemed to be swelling until it was an actual sea. The numbers were in forment, frothing and boiling up from abyssean depths, a tide coming in for him.

  Then he was tapped on the shoulder.

  It was Raya Yithdras.

  His Second Minister had her hands on her hips, and he immediately braced for unpleasantness.

  “How can I help?” he asked.

  “I've just sent you a document through netmail,” she said. “You will find the signatures of myself and 25 members of the Reformation Party. It is binding and quite irrevocable. We are removing you from office.”

  He accessed it, and projected another holograph out onto the desk. Another river pouring into the sea.

  It was a legal document.

  Pursuant to the Solar Arm Constitution, materially Articles V, VI, and XI articles, now comes a plurality of the sitting party in the Solar Arm Atrium, moving that Prime Minister Sarkoth Amnon be immediately suspended from active discharge of his duties.

  The factual basis for this declaration relates to the visibly declining mental state of Prime Minister Sarkoth Amnon, and Second Minister Raya Yithdras et al's responsibility to ensure the Solar Arm and its territories enjoy effective governance.

  The plurality moves that Prime Ministerial duty devolve upon Second Minister Raya Yithdras, until such a time as Sarkoth Amnon's mental ability stabilizes.

  Overseen and underwritten pro tempore by Undersecretary Dexan Molinzhi…

  Below was a list of names. Sarkoth’s backbenchers, now in support of Raya Yithdras.

  Sarkoth Amnon deleted the netmail with a single stab of his finger. “Eat shit, Raya.”

  "You are no longer Prime Minister,” she said. “It’s over. Do not make this unpleasant. Your erratic behavior ends now.”

  “This is a coup. You're trying to pull me out of this seat.”

  "This is not something you can stand against us on."

  Sarkoth quickly counted the number of names. "You don't have a plurality. You have twenty-five for, and twenty five against. That's what we call a split. You're hung."

  "Twenty-five against twenty-four, once we’ve discarded your voice. And we will. Any medical professional will find you insane, and would want to keep you under observation."

  "Obviously, that requires I submit myself to medical examination. And I refuse.”

  “Then you will be involuntarily tested.”

  That was the response he’d been waiting for, and hoping for.

  Now he had a threat.

  Sarkoth Amnon dialled a number on his suit. The very first number. The emergency number, connected to his private security corps.

  "Hello, can you please access the weapons register on Raya Yithdras's shuttle? Yes...yes...I believe she landed here earlier today. I just need to know what she has."

  "Uh, I’m seeing two Raylon personal defense sidearms, and…"

  "Thank you, that's fine. Raya Yithdras is now extorting me to leave my seat, has stated her intent to have me involuntarily committed, and she has brought weapons to help effect that goal. I would like her detained.”

  "We’ll have men there in seconds,” the voice said. A dispassionate voice who received a paycheck no matter who sat on the Prime Minister’s seat.

  He ended the call, and smiled at Raya. "Men will be taking you into custody soon."

  She shot up from her seat, and started to run from the near-empty building.

  He watched her run awkwardly in heels, accidentally tripping over a chair. She made it to the end, and escaped through an open door to the moonstone stairway beyond.

  A door on the other side of the building crashed open, and armed guards poured through.

  "She was ma
king threats," he pointed at the open door. "Arrest her."

  Raya Yithdras fled the building, heading straight for her personal shuttle. It had a flight preprogrammed for Ceres and the asteroid belt, in case she needed to make a swift getaway. She was utterly thankful she'd done that. A vein pulsed in her jaw. She'd played her hand, and Sarkoth Amnon hadn't folded like she'd hoped.

  But her shuttle was hundreds of meters away, and she knew she would be caught by Sarkoth’s men.

  Very well. She had a contingency plan in place for that, too.

  The Nanomesh computer suits allowed for near-silent communication. With the microphone wrapping the person's diaphramn, the rhythms and displacement of a human chest could be recorded and deciphered into speech.

  Anyone watching Raya Yithdras running to Selene's main spaceport might have heard her muttering softly, under her breath.

  "Freeze!" shouted the chief of security, voice amplication giving him the voice of a thunderclap. "We need to take you in for questioning!"

  She stopped, just a hundred meters away from the thorium stack of her personal craft.

  "Turn around," the man said.

  She obeyed.

  "Hands up."

  She obeyed.

  "We need to search you for weapons."

  Armed men swarmed over her, patting her down, searching for bulges of plastic or metal hardware.

  "We need you to step back to the building, Second Minister," the chief said. "You have not yet been charged with an offense, but there is an incident that needs to be resolved."

  She cocked her head, as if listening to someone.

  "Hey," the chief of Sarkoth's guards said. "Who's speaking in your ear?"

  Immediately, she snapped her arms to her sides, narrowing her profile. The soldiers on each side were now wide open.

  One of them caught a glint of something metallic, from the crates around the shuttles. Some of them might have thought it was the glint of a gun barrel, but when you saw the glint, it was already too late.

  Ka-thukk

  Ka-thukkk

  Ka-thukkkk

  The three guards around her fell like ninepins, killed by the high-velocity steel snakebites. A fourth started running. A fifth stood his ground. None of them made it.

  Blood and brains salted the lunar regolith.

  The sniper came out of hiding, slinging a red-hot Orizen R-9 across his back. He took her hand, and escorted her the remainder of the way to her thorium shuttle.

  The man was wearing a balaclava, even though temperatures on the moon’s sunlit side were very hot. He whispered, in a voice that some might have said bore a similarity to Wilseth, Sarkoth’s chief interrogator.

  “Remember, I was never here.”

  Soon, the shuttle was soaring into the air, plumes of exhaust covering the bodies as klaxons wailed.

  Titan – March 10, 2143 – 1330 hours

  Emil Gokla went to get some fresh blood.

  Parabiotic therapy was a wonderful thing, and almost all the Sons of the Vanitar used it. But some of them were squeamish in the presence of children, so he’d started making things impersonal. Liters of blood would be drained from prepubescent donors, and stored in bags in his mansion.

  Amazing how easier it gets when you don’t have to see how the sausage is made, Emil thought, shuffling towards a refrigeration unit. In the first Martian war, kill counts went up when tanks switched from optical targeting to automatic rangefinders. Probably for boring reasons – humans were less efficient than the computers. But I like to think it’s because with optical targeting, you had to look at your target before pulling the trigger.

  The trip took him nearly five minutes, even though the fridge was in eyesight. Everything took so long now that his body was slowing down. The shop was nearly at closing time, but he refused to believe it.

  He would bring about the extinction of humanity and its bottomless pits of suffering. It was his destiny. He could not die with this purpose undone.

  I’ve been ordained by the god of entropy to see Andrei Kazmer return, along with Caitanya-9.

  And then my eyes will shut at the precise same instant everyone else’s does.

  He retrieved a bag. It was slick and shiny in his hands, like a cold heart ripped from an animal.

  He returned to his chair, opened the bag, and spiked a vein. The blood started to flow through the IV.

  Across the room, he heard Vante started to stir. He liked the boy, and liked seeing him move. His continued life was reassuring. When the boy finally died, it would be dreadfully inconvenient disposing of the body.

  This is all going to plan.

  Sarkoth Amnon’s antimatter warhead defense system would never be built. And if it was built, it would never be fired. Raya Yithdras would tear it out of the sky.

  She’d sent him a message earlier that day. She and her allies in Sarkoth Amnon’s party would be staging their power play, and attempting to oust him for reasons of insanity. They were using a method that might be legally sound, or it might not. If it was not…when had that ever stopped a coup?

  Soon she’d be in control of the Atrium, and hence the Solar Arm. Then she’d dismantle all of Sarkoth Amnon’s efforts, and they’d clasp hands and wait for doomsday together.

  If she failed, there would be a civil war that she would almost certainly win. The massive armaments and ironworks were in the asteroid belt, her domain. Their loyalty was assured. And further out at Saturn there was the Black Shift facilities, and their abilities to stage near lightspeed attacks from anywhere in the Solar System. He had bequeathed all of these to her, in the event that he was no longer fit enough to command them.

  War would shake the solar system, rattle the planets around their orbits, light atom-blue fires across every surface.

  And while Sarkoth was fighting her, he wouldn’t be able to build defenses against Caitanya-9.

  He smiled, imagining the gamma ray bursts.

  The bag was almost half empty, and he waited for the feeling of rejuvenation to sweep over him.

  Instead, he started to shiver.

  The shaking began at his hands and worked its way in, spreading from joint to joint and muscle to muscle like some galvanizing electrical current. The spasms lifted his back from his chair, and he realized that he was choking.

  What?

  Specks bloomed in front of his eyes. Stinging needles nipped his skin.

  He tried to speak, to call for help. But he found that his mouth was almost devoid of moisture, and his tongue felt as large and as swollen as a monstrous slug.

  The convulsions wracked him, cramping him inwards like a leaf before the fire. He heard footsteps approach, and felt relief. I’m saved. Someone’s heard me, my physician…

  But they were the footsteps of a child.

  “I heard you talk to Raya and Sarkoth,” Vante said. “You lied to me. Tricked me. You don’t care about me at all, you’re just using me to live.”

  He struggled to deny it, but could not move his tongue an iota. His head felt swollen and heavy, the glands swelling around his neck, throttling him.

  Anaphylactic shock.

  “I drew some of my blood for you, like you showed me. But it has something else in it too. I crushed up one of the aconite plants you keep in your garden.”

  Wolf’s bane. Years ago, he’d started keeping a garden of Terrestrial plants. The mauve and orange murk of Titan bored him, and his private garden had become quite a talking point.

  All of the plants in the garden were poisonous. Belladonna. Cuckoo pint. Rhubarb. He’d felt very clever at the time.

  A dry rattle clacked from his mouth, and then he fell forward, face down.

  He heard something break as he fell. Didn’t even feel curious about which bone it was. Some part of him, more than a century old, but nothing he would need any more.

  The cold marble floor radiated coolness through his burning head.

  And he realized he didn’t want this.

  I don’t want to
die.

  Just then, the computer spoke.

  “Message received from Second Minister Raya Yithdras on Selene – local time 08:00.”

  He heard Vante slide into the chair he’d just vacated. Then the boy put a foot on his fallen back.

  Raya’s voice crackled form across space’s vastness.

  “I’ll be brief – it didn’t work. He tried to have me arrested, and I ran. With Wilseth’s help I made it offworld, but, uh…a few of his security guards ended up dead. As soon as I hit Ceres I’ll get on a long-range Dravidian to Titan. I’ll be there in a day or so, and then we can discuss options.”

  Emil Gokla clawed at the ground. He actually felt the sensation of his hands scratching at the marble…but then he managed to look at his hand and saw it wasn’t moving.

  He desperately didn’t want this.

  He’d been born in the first half of the 20th century, a prolific and wildly intelligent inventor and businessman. When he’d struck upon the discovery of a lifetime – a way to prolong a space traveller’s life indefinitely, over decades or centuries – he knew he’d go down as a kind of immortal. Legendary, the same way Newton and von Neumann were.

  Now, that form immortality wasn’t enough. He wanted to live. He needed to live. He just couldn’t understand dying, just couldn’t face it happening to him.

  Drool came from his mouth. Inside was anguish and horror, but all that came out was a thin and pathetic trail of saliva.

  “Can we get a message to Wilseth?” Raya’s voice went on. “Any time he can get close to Sarkoth would be a good time to strike. He’s the only agent we’ve got who even gets close to the man on a regular basis. Will you pass on the message for me? If he dies before he can move any of his pawns into position, so much the better for us.”

  Someone help me, he thought, color fading from his vision, as though the whole world was a cooling ember. I’ll do anything, just help me.