Earthfall: Retribution

by Mark Walden

  Just when Sam thought all was lost, a Hunter swooped across and hit the Grendel’s face hard, its poison-tipped tentacles viciously stabbing at the behemoth’s eyes. The startled creature recoiled, releasing its hold on Sam and clawing at the silver Drone attached to its face. Black blood oozed from the Hunter’s torn shell as the Grendel’s claws raked across its surface. A moment later a crackling bolt of yellow energy slammed into the Grendel’s shoulder, blowing chunks out of its armoured carapace as it bellowed in rage.

  Sam looked up and saw a small swarm of Hunters descending from the ceiling, the glittering surfaces of their shells glowing with yellow light. They fired at the Grendels, spitting bright yellow energy bolts. Other Hunters swooped down, their barbed tentacles seeking the holes that had been torn in the armour and snaking inside. The Grendels flailed uselessly, quickly succumbing to the tide of energy blasts and stabbing tentacles. Sam didn’t stop to think about what was happening – he just sprinted across the hangar towards the drop-ship that Jay was frantically beckoning him towards.

  ‘You need to get on board,’ Jay yelled as Sam approached. ‘Shaw needs you to help him get this thing moving.’

  Sam didn’t have time to tell Jay who Shaw was; he just nodded and ran up the ramp. Inside the others were waiting, their faces a mixture of confusion and fear. At the other end of the drop-ship Stirling was standing talking quickly and quietly to a man who had his back turned to them. Sam felt his heart jump as Stirling glanced over the man’s shoulder at Sam and the man turned round.

  ‘Sam,’ Shaw said, ‘thank God you’re OK. I know I have a lot to explain, but there’s no time. I’ll answer all your questions when we’ve got out of here, but now I need your help.’

  Sam stared back at the man whom he had thought he might never see again, his father. His mind was filled with a thousand questions, but the expression on his father’s face told him that they would indeed have to wait.

  ‘What do you need me to do?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Help me fly this thing,’ Shaw said, walking towards Sam and placing his hand on the side of his head. Sam felt a moment of confusion and then he heard his father’s voice inside his head.

  Don’t panic, just let me in.

  A moment later the drop-ship lifted from the ground with a lurch, its startled passengers fighting to keep their balance as it turned and powered across the hangar, heading for the glowing force field at the far end and the open sky beyond. The black triangular aircraft shot through the glittering field and out into the pre-dawn sky, the throbbing roar of its engines increasing as it was pushed to the very limits of its performance envelope.

  On board the drop-ship Shaw closed his eyes and the aircraft dived towards the ocean, thousands of metres below them. They flew along in silence for a couple of minutes, Shaw kneeling next to Sam, his hand still pressed to his son’s head, his eyes closed.

  ‘Thank you,’ Shaw said, finally opening his eyes and smiling at Sam and lowering his hand from the side of his son’s head.

  ‘For what?’ Sam asked, his senses returning in a bewildering rush.

  ‘For trusting me,’ Shaw replied. ‘We should be beyond their reach now.’

  ‘How did you do that?’ Sam asked. ‘How did you know how to fly this thing?’

  ‘I can explain,’ Shaw said. ‘There’s –’

  Shaw suddenly felt something cold and hard press against the back of his skull.

  ‘Who are you?’ Stirling demanded, pressing the muzzle of his pistol into the back of Shaw’s head and cocking the hammer.

  ‘Iain, it’s me, Daniel,’ Shaw replied.

  ‘Doctor Stirling, what are you doing?’ Sam asked, his own look of bewilderment matching the expressions of the others in the cabin.

  ‘I know Daniel Shaw – we were friends and colleagues for years,’ Stirling said, scowling. ‘Whoever you are, you’re not him.’

  ‘Iain, I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Shaw said, raising his hands.

  ‘If you were Daniel Shaw, you’d be fast asleep in a building somewhere in London right now,’ Stirling said, ‘because the Voidborn implant that would have protected you from the control signal is inside Sam’s head, not yours. You have no protection from the signal, so how come you’re standing here in front of me? I knew something was wrong when Mason told me that you had arrived in Edinburgh, but now maybe you can explain to me in person why you suddenly seem to be inexplicably immune to the Voidborn control signal.’

  Sam suddenly realised that what Stirling was saying was true. The device in his own head had been the first of its kind when it had been surgically implanted, but it had been reverse engineered from the implant the Voidborn had given his father when he was working for the Foundation. His father should have been just as vulnerable to the control signal as anyone else.

  ‘Iain, please, I really can explain,’ Shaw said. ‘You don’t need the gun.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ Stirling replied. ‘Now, tell me who you are and what you’re doing here.’

  ‘I am Daniel Shaw,’ he replied, ‘and I was Andrew Riley, but before that . . .’

  He paused for a moment and looked at Sam with a sad smile. A moment later his entire body flared with blue light and Stirling stepped backwards with a gasp. Shaw grew in stature before their eyes, his shirt and jeans vanishing, replaced by loose-fitting white robes as he looked down with new eyes at Sam’s startled face. The thick mop of brown curly hair was gone, replaced by a pattern of blue lights that danced across the pale skin covering the creature’s crested skull.

  ‘Before that,’ the creature said, its voice now deeper, ‘I was Suran, last Sensate of the Illuminate.’

  He looked down with a sad expression at the startled faces of the humans facing him, his eyes seeming to speak of a thousand witnessed horrors.

  ‘And I need your help.’

  9

  ‘No, that can’t be true,’ Sam said, backing away from the eight-foot-tall creature standing in front of him. ‘What have you done with my dad?’

  ‘I am your father, Sam,’ Suran replied. ‘I am Andrew Riley; I am Daniel Shaw. To the Illuminate, the physical form is meaningless – what matters is the consciousness within. All else is subject to change.’ He stepped towards Sam, raising a hand.

  ‘Stop,’ Stirling snapped. ‘If you take one more step, I’ll kill you where you stand.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Suran said, turning back towards Stirling. ‘You’re still the man I knew for all those years, Iain. You’re no killer.’

  ‘He may not be, but I am,’ Jay said, raising his rifle.

  ‘Do I really need to remind you who is piloting the assault vessel travelling at hyper-sonic speeds, within which you are currently standing?’ Suran said, turning towards Jay with a frown. ‘And was I not the one who piloted that primitive machine that brought us on board the colony ship? Why would I have done that or assisted you in finding your friends if I wished you harm?’

  ‘Maybe you just wanted to hook back up with your partner,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Partner?’ Jay asked.

  ‘Yeah, that guy Mason turned out to be another of “the last” of these things,’ Rachel said. ‘He called himself Talon. He released the Vore on London.’

  ‘Actually, that might not have quite panned out the way he was expecting it to,’ Mag said, still staring wide-eyed at Suran.

  ‘Yeah, we took care of the Vore,’ Jay said. ‘London’s safe. Thanks to Mag and Jack.’

  ‘Oh thank God,’ Rachel said. ‘What about the others?’

  ‘They’re still in London,’ Jay said. ‘Jack stayed with them. They’re safe – for now, at least.’

  ‘It is true,’ Suran said, looking down at the floor. ‘Talon is the last of our warriors, just as I am the last of our Sensate. I am what humans would call a scientist. What he is doing, what he has done already, sickens me to my very core. The light has gone from him. He has lost his mind to grief.’

  ‘Why are you here?’
Stirling said, lowering the pistol. ‘If what you say is true, why have you been hiding amongst us for all this time?’

  ‘To understand that you must first understand the Voidborn,’ Suran replied. ‘If anyone truly can.’

  ‘And you do understand them, I suppose?’ Stirling said.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Suran replied, ‘because I fear I may have inadvertently helped to bring them to your planet.’

  ‘You did what?’ Sam said, sounding horrified.

  ‘Please, let me explain,’ Suran said. ‘My people were vastly more technologically advanced than your species. We had long been explorers, just like the human race, but we had reached the boundaries of the possible. Your Einstein was right: if there is a means of super-luminal travel our finest scientists could not discover it.’

  ‘Super what?’ Mag asked.

  ‘Super-luminal, meaning faster than the speed of light,’ Suran replied. ‘We realised that the only way we would ever be able to explore the far corners of our galaxy and beyond would be if we could divorce ourselves from mortality. Time is the great enemy to interstellar exploration. No living being could conceive of a journey that might last tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. Only machines have the infinite patience for that, but what good is it to send a machine on such a mission when the civilisation that despatched it might be ruins and dust by the time it reaches its destination? It had long been a conundrum that even our greatest minds could not solve, indeed many thought we would for ever be trapped within our own little corner of the cosmos.’

  ‘So what changed?’ Sam asked, still struggling to believe that the creature who stood before him might actually once have been his father.

  ‘We achieved immortality,’ Suran said, ‘and it changed everything. It was one of the greatest scientific endeavours we had ever undertaken, to digitise the consciousness, to record and store the electrical activity within an individual’s brain.’

  ‘The scanning technology and storage requirements would be inconceivable,’ Stirling said, shaking his head. ‘How would you even know if what you recorded was actually you at all?’

  ‘A philosophical question that my people spent many years debating,’ Suran said, ‘but to the average person it was actually quite straightforward. There was no break in consciousness, one was simply transferred instantly and completely to the Illuminate, a waking dream where time was meaningless and the only limitations to what you could do or experience was your own imagination. But first our society fought a long and bloody civil war over the technology that lay at the heart of the process. After the war, it was decided that this technology would be entirely forbidden. The dream of immortality seemed lost, rigidly controlled by a society that feared its consequences.’

  ‘You sound as if you didn’t approve,’ Stirling said.

  ‘Indeed, I did not,’ Suran replied with a frown. ‘I was – I still am – a man of science. The idea that my people would continue to strip their own home system of resources as their numbers increased geometrically had only one possible end point. Unless we found a way to expand outwards beyond the stars we were doomed to extinction. Limited resources and an ever-expanding population can, after all, only end one way. So I spearheaded a project to create the first interstellar mission, a project that could only ever work if the vessel in question was controlled by a digitised consciousness. A ten-thousand-year journey is not so terrible when you can be stored in a perfect dreamless sleep for the vast majority of it. For that to be possible we had to persuade our leaders that in this one limited instance we should use the digitising process to create our pilot. Finally we were granted permission and we chose our subject, a brilliant scientist. The vessel in question was called the Primary Architect, or Primarch as it came to be known, and its mission was to travel to another nearby star system and assess its suitability for colonisation. If it discovered a suitable system, it would begin construction of the facilities required for habitation before signalling that the system was ready for colonisation. When the Primarch was launched, we knew that some of us might not live to see it complete its mission, but it was the first small yet essential step in interstellar travel. A lone Illuminate mind crossing the gulf of space and preparing the way for the rest of us.’

  ‘And that was how you encountered the Voidborn?’ Sam asked.

  ‘No, that was later,’ Suran said. ‘You see, something went wrong. We lost contact with the Primarch only two years into its journey. It was, for a long time, the worst day of my life. The scientist whose consciousness had been digitised, the pilot, was a dear friend of mine and his loss was hard to bear. The hardest part was not really knowing what had happened to him and, rightly or wrongly, I blamed myself for his loss.

  ‘Over the next two decades things went from bad to worse for my people. There were simply too many of us and our society was being torn apart by plagues and constant war. It was against this backdrop that our people finally decided to allow the widespread use of consciousness digitisation. In the years since the civil war we had made useful advances in the technology required for the process, but more significant were the advances we had made in nano-technology. We had perfected the means to create machines that were infinitely flexible, adapting their form and function to whatever task was required of them. When coupled with the digitisation of our consciousnesses, it meant we could live as electronic versions of ourselves for the vast majority of the time and then construct bodies for ourselves when we needed to interact with the physical world. At first the forms we could assume were rudimentary, but in time they became more sophisticated.’

  He held his hand up in front of him and it momentarily disintegrated into a swirling cloud of dust before solidifying again into its original shape.

  ‘The irony was of course that once connected to the Illuminate, as the network that stored our consciousnesses was called, most of my people lost all interest in the physical or “real” world, instead choosing to spend their entire lives immersed in this new reality. For some of us, though, now we were truly freed from the bonds of out mortality, the stars still beckoned. We travelled across the galaxy, the speed of our vessels now irrelevant; a journey that lasts ten thousand years is the same as one that takes a second if you are not aware of the time passing.’

  ‘What about the people you left behind?’ Rachel asked. ‘Did you not have anyone you loved? Anyone who cared you were gone?’

  ‘For a mortal who is still bound by the restrictions of organic life, it is perhaps hard to understand what the Illuminate became. Many individuals merged into collective consciousnesses, sharing all thoughts and experience.’

  ‘That sounds horrific,’ Stirling said, his brow furrowed.

  ‘From your current perspective, yes, I suppose it does,’ Suran replied, ‘and, as it happens, I agree. For some, it was less of a concern. Traditional notions of family and loved ones ceased to be relevant for many of my people. Our society changed irrevocably: our concept of time, our understanding of our place in the real universe and perhaps most dangerously of all our sense of our own vulnerability. Our home planet was struck by a gamma ray that burst from a hypernova in a nearby star cluster. It was utterly devastating and many billions of digital consciousnesses were irretrievably erased. We thought we had protected ourselves by distributing the data storage sites for the Illuminate across the planet, but we had never considered that the planet itself could be so devastated in an instant. If we were to ever avoid a repeat of such a disaster, we needed to distribute the Illuminate across the universe. So that was exactly what we did. We sent our colony ships across the galaxy and they built a vast web of networked storage sites on countless worlds, and like fools we thought ourselves truly safe once more. Then, one day, a colony ship reported that it had found the Primarch in orbit around a world nine thousand light years away from the point where we’d lost contact. I was amazed but also excited, because it was entirely possible that my friend’s consciousness had survived, encoded within the ancient vesse
l.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Sam said, ‘you said that your people never worked out how to travel faster than the speed of light. How had the colony ship that found it managed to travel just as far?’

  ‘Because we found the Primarch seventeen thousand years after it was launched,’ Suran replied.

  ‘You’ve lived for seventeen thousand years?’ Sam said, his eyes wide with astonishment.

  ‘A little bit longer actually,’ Suran replied, ‘though I’ve only been truly conscious for a tiny fraction of that time. I had thought the Primarch lost for ever and I was stunned that we had found it, but then something odd happened. We lost contact with the colony vessel. More ships were sent to investigate, but we lost contact with them too. The consciousnesses stored on board those vessels were safely backed up within the Illuminate network so there was no real harm done, but still it was a mystery. Very shortly after that we had our first encounter with the Voidborn. One of our ships reported coming under attack by unknown forces that were using one of our own colony vessels and then we lost contact, the consciousnesses piloting our vessel were gone, erased without trace.

  ‘Barely a year later our home system was attacked. The Voidborn created a singularity, what you would call a black hole, in the centre of our system, destroying every shred of our home worlds in the space of a few hours. It was catastrophic, but not the disaster it might have been if we had not already spent thousands of years distributing the Illuminate across the stars. We had no idea who the Voidborn were, only that they were using our own technology against us and were utterly malevolent. We were not warriors, though we were soon forced to become so.’

  ‘And you think the Voidborn had something to do with this lost vessel, the Primarch?’ Sam asked.