Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2) Read online

  Extinction Level Event

  The Consilience War – Book Two

  Ben Sheffield

  Contents

  Quote

  Prelude

  The Experiment Ends

  1. The Atrium – Selene – July 30th 2142 – 1400 hours

  2. The Horsehead Nebula – time and date unknown

  3. Caitanya-9 – March 18, 2142 - 1500

  4. Terrus - Neo Sydney – August 1st, 2142 – 1200

  5. Caitanya-9 – March 18, 2142 - 1500

  Rose Defiant

  6. Terrus – Neo Sydney – August 1st 2142 1900 hours

  7. Prisons Beneath the Atrium – Selene – August 2nd 2142 0600 hours

  8. The Atrium – Selene – August 2nd 2142 - 0800 hours

  9. Titan – August 2nd 2142 1000 hours

  10. Terrus – Neo Sydney – August 2nd, 2142 - 1600

  11. Cygnus Cluster – time and date unknown

  12. Caitanya-9 – March 19, 2142 - 0800

  13. Konotouri Gamma – March 20, 2142 – 1000 hours

  14. The Atrium – Selene – September 30th 2142, 1500 hours

  15. Selene – October 1st, 2142, 1200 hours

  Doom

  16. Just Beyond Terrus – December 1, 2142 – 0000 hours

  17. The Atrium – Selene – December 2nd 2142, 1500 hours

  18. Titan – December 3th 2142, 0800 hours

  19. Caitanya-9 – February 28, 2143 – 1400 hours

  20. Titan – December 3th 2142, 1000 hours

  21. Caitanya-9 – February 28, 2143, unknown time

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

  23. Titan – March 10, 2143 – 1330 hours

  24. Terrus – Neo Sydney – March 12, 2143

  25. Caitanya-9 – Jun 5, 2043 – 1600 hours

  26. The Asteroid Belt – June 5, 2143, 0800 hours

  27. The Atrium – Selene – Jun 5, 2043, 1400 hours

  28. Orbit Beyond Caitanya-9 – June 5, 2043, 1480 hours

  29. Mars – June 6, 2043, 0800 hours

  30. Location and Time Unknown

  31. End

  "No friends but the mountains" – Kurdish saying

  Prelude

  They were alone in the mansion’s innermost room, the central chamber of a heart too dark and cold to beat.

  “Sit on my lap. I want to show you something.”

  The boy was young. The man was old. This was the first of many asymmetries.

  The man was incredibly wealthy, and powerful – his name a byword on eight planets and uncountable colonies. The boy was just an orphan. The man had taken a liking to him, and he lived in the mansion now. But he was fundamentally still a nothing. He knew that if he displeased Emil Gokla in any way, he would become a nothing once more. Perhaps less than a nothing.

  He sat down on Emil Gokla’s lap, obeying the instruction as he did all others.

  “You’re a kind boy, aren’t you?” The man whispered in Zante’s ear, his breath a fetid swamp stench of drugs and stomach acid. Bony fingers scratched his shoulders.

  The boy shrugged.

  “Have you ever seen an insect, kind boy? Up close, not in a book?”

  He nodded.

  He’d been raised in a foster home on Terrus. There were still insects there – a few. Although mankind had spread throughout the solar system and beyond, their pests, for the most part, had not come with them.

  But Zante knew insects well enough to know that he himself was a variety of insect. Unwanted. He didn’t know his parents, or perhaps his parents hadn’t want to know him. He’d spent a dreary and soon-forgotten childhood inside various foster homes on Mars, Terrus, and Ceres, before he’d received a tap on the shoulder and a voice in his ear, informing him of his changed situation.

  Emil Gokla had taken him in.

  The man in the chair steepled his fingers. “What would you do if you found a half-crushed insect, struggling along on the ground with its guts on the outside of its body?”

  “I’d step on it.”

  “I thought you were a kind boy.”

  “It’s in pain,” Zante said. “It’s kind to make pain stop.”

  Emil smiled. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Rumors said he was more than a hundred years old. Age had wattled his neck, receded his chin, turned him into something that looked like a turtle. The more you knew him, the more you considered him a turtle of the snapping variety.

  “Isn’t life always better than death, no matter what the cost? And isn’t there a chance that you might find a way to heal the insect?”

  Zante shook his head. “I’d still step on it.”

  Emil’s laughter wheezed out of him, as if his body was a shattered accordion. He touched one hand to the boy’s hip, them moved it a little below. The skeletal hand was only there for a second, but Zante had to restrain a shiver.

  “Let me show you a holographic video from Terrus, your birth world. Something is going to happen, and I find it…interesting,”

  “The new Prime Minister?” Zante had made a few friends on Titan. It was a moon full of universities, most funded by Emil’s purse, and the children here tended to be weirdly, obsessively didactic. He had all sorts of political knowledge floating around in his head.

  This was the day the executive branch of the Solar Arm changed hands. Or so people thought.

  “You’ve heard of that, have you?” asked Emil. “But no. This is something else entirely.”

  Emil looked across the empty room – a sepulchral space that was empty by design. It was for the display of holographic videos.

  He tapped the edge of his chair, activating the computer that wove and sparked through every square inch of the mansion. In a voice scarcely above a low whisper, he issued instructions to the voice recognition software.

  “I want live video of the SA-532 shuttle dock on White Sands, Terrus. Access the panoramic cameras to the fore and aft of the concrete platform, and syncretize the videos.”

  “Access code required.”

  “35212-52.”

  “Access granted.”

  The empty space was filled with brilliant light, illuminating a scene on Terrus, millions of kilometers distant. The blue sky was a shock after the murky amber tones of Titan, or the Hadean dark of Emil’s mansion. So was the liquid water lapping the edges of a concrete platform.

  At the center of the platform was a shuttle, its fuselage gleaming obsidian-black in the sun. Zante knew a little about such craft, enough to recognize the multiple stages: a cylindrical delivery module up on top, an antimatter impulse drive beneath, and a thorium-powered launch stage beneath.

  This was a craft meant to reach for the stars.

  There were three men and a woman working on the launch platform, garbed in yellow protective suits.

  Emil spoke again. “I want audio of the on-deck microphones. Equalise the volume and blend fifty-fifty with a regional Terrestrian news broadcast station.”

  “Any particular one?” the computer asked.

  “No.”

  Instantly, the speakers thrummed to life, filling the room with the voice of a DJ, overlaying the hum of a cycling thorium engine.

  “…And for those just tuning in, we are now watching the inaugural launch of the Solar Arm Ark. This is ten years in the making. I have confirmation that it is t-minus twenty minutes to launch time, and I must say how honored we are to bring this moment into your homes.

  “We’re looking at a daring new method for ensuring humanity’s survival, in the event of an astronomical catastrophe. Inside is the entire store of the planet’s biological wealth - a human man and
a woman, preserved through Black Shift processes, along with various types of grain and nitrogen fertilizer. The shuttle, and soon hundreds like it, will be launched at distant planets that seem suitable for human habitation. When the Ark lands, and the humans are reawakened, they will have the means and resources to establish a colony. When they are sufficiently established, they can unlock the shuttle’s cache of biodiversity. Over ten million genomes exist on the shuttle, for all kinds of species, living and extinct. We will sow the seeds of Terrus all across the galaxy, and then the universe. Hold on…”

  Zante watched, spellbound. He could vaguely see a black-paneled maglev van pull up to the blacktop, fifty meters distant. A green-suited figure stepped out of it.

  “We are now receiving word that the tower clearance technician has arrived on the site. When the tower yaws out of the way, the thorium engines will ignite, and we will have lift-off.”

  The man approached the shuttle. The other four turned to face him. Their posture suggested they were having a conversation, but the words were drowned out by the humming of the engine.

  “He seems to be saying that…uh…” The deejay’s voice, perfectly trained, now stumbled and tripped. “…The Ark will not be leaving.”

  The green-suited man pulled out a gun.

  The shooting was horrifically loud, each gunshot pounding through the sound system like final punctuation points on human lives.

  Zante’s mouth fell open.

  The two nearest men were cut down, falling like ninepins. Then Mr Green Suit shifted position, re-aimed his weapon, and shot the last remaining man. He hadn’t run. He barely even moved.

  All he did at the end was gently raise a yellow-gloved hand in front of his chest, as if this was all a misunderstanding. The bullet passed through his hand, ripping into the chest behind it.

  The woman ran. Two shots to the back, and the run turned into a tumble. She fell, and then thrashed for nearly half a minute in the shadow of the monolithic shuttle. Her blood leaked across the salt-swabbed concrete platform.

  The radio deejay just babbled senselessly, his voice barely audible over the shooting.

  “Well, uh, there seems to be an unexpected technical issue with our cameras…can we get that looked at? Someone? Do we have b-footage we can go to? Hello? Am I talking to myself here?”

  “No more audio.” Emil Gokla whispered, and the DJ and his panic was gone. Now they were alone with the man in the green suit.

  Zante was struck by the idea that this wasn’t a moment of terror and confusion, that this was all the well-lubricated movement of a machine sliding down a track, as premeditated as the Ark that would now never launch.

  The green-suited assassin walked closer to the shuttle, extracting a tool from a voluminous coat pocket.

  “He has a small pneumatic drill,” Emil said, and Zante looked at him.

  Climbing the tower ladder, the man blasted through the screws holding the protective heat shield above the thorium bed. He was fast, efficient, knowing exactly what points to attack. The section swung out on metallic hinges, and the man tossed nearly half a meter of cladding and insulation to the ground.

  “Without that insulation, the thorium’s decay to uranium-232 produces lethal gamma rays,” Emil said. “These propagate throughout the shuttle. Regrettably, everything inside is now destroyed. The DNA is ruined. The man and the woman are dead. Plant the seeds and they’d never grow.”

  Then the man stepped back, and dropped the tool to the ground.

  He raised one arm in a mock salute…and then fell. A marionette with no strings.

  “The radiation killed him,” Emil said.

  “Why didn’t he run?”

  “Because then I would have killed him.”

  Zante’s gorge rose. “What?”

  “That man has never met me, and I’ve never met him. But let us say that we have a mutual friend or two. He has a small implant in the base of his neck, as do all of my associates. At the slightest time I wish it, I can press a button, trigger a tiny explosive device, and fire a single gram of metal into his spinal column and speeds several times faster than sound. His insides will be shredded. Desertion of his mission is grounds for instant execution.”

  “You did this,” Zante’s mind tried to rationalize this turn of events, doing mad flywheels to avoid the obvious truth. “You’re behind it all.”

  Emil said nothing. He gestured at the holographic video. Keep watching.

  With the insulation torn away, light blazed from the engine. There were ripples in the air from the incredible heat, and Zante started to sweat just watching it. Finally, flames burst from the engine, stabbing the air with white-hot irradiated knives.

  Soon, the entire shuttle was engulfed in conflagration nearly fifty feet high.

  “There will be criminal investigations into the Solar Arm Ark project.” Emil said. “What evidence they’ll find I haven’t yet decided, but it will be bad. They accepted bribes, paved the road for their pet project with graft. Maybe that man was a jilted ex-employee. There are so many ways this could go.”

  The yellow hazmat suits melted away before the awesome heat, exposing human flesh that was cooked to a charcoal black. As they were exposed to oxygen, they instantly erupted into flame.

  “But that’s just for openers,” Emil said. “Next, an independent engineering analysis will be done, and they’ll discover that the Ark would never have worked. It was just a scam that bilked the taxpayer out of several billion ducats. People will go to prison. The aerospace company behind it will be shut down. A scandalous tale of hubris and criminality will deter anyone from trying something like this for decades. Maybe centuries. It will be a long time before anyone tries to save the human race again, at least through this method.”

  The air started to heat until there was a dull amber glow across the launch shuttle. The bodies scattering the ground were now blazing firebrands

  “It’s a shame that you have to step on an injured insect, Zante,” the old man continued, “and it’s a shame all those people had to die. But look at it this way – what’s the best case scenario? The craft would have departed, landed, and a new human civilization would have begun. But then they would have killed themselves in war, as we have almost done several times. Or they would have been destroyed by an impact event. Or wiped out by a gamma ray burst. Or slain by the heat death of the universe. This is the fate that awaits us all - at least these five people, died swiftly, without decades or centuries of suffering. My only regret is that I cannot provide so easy a fate for the rest of humanity.”

  Something hit home for Zante. He touched the base of his neck, where there was a scar healing.

  He’d been told that it was an inoculation shot.

  “Yes, you have one too,” Emil said. “But don’t worry. You’re a nice boy, and nice boys don’t have to worry about suddenly dying. So long as you remember to remain a nice boy, you can forget you even have it.”

  “You lied to me.”

  “Did I?”

  “You said it was to immunize me against disease.”

  “Betrayal is a disease. Revealing my secrets is a disease. In case you’re wondering, it will automatically fire if you attempt to remove it by surgery. I could not take it out of you even if I wanted to.”

  Zante shivered. “So what will I do?”

  Emil shrugged. “Whatever you want to do.”

  Then, the camera feed cut out. The fissile radiation had destroyed all the electronics on the White Sands launch platform.

  “Prime Minister Sarkoth Amnon’s inauguration should be happening soon. Want to see it?”

  Emil Gokla reclined further back in his chair, and issued another series of orders. The scene changed. Now they were on some fine marble steps, watching a fat sluglike man before a podium. He was talking.

  “Sarkoth Amnon was a good boy, once,” Emil said. “Sadly, he is now a very bad boy. He defies me, and his fate is uncertain. Perhaps this very press conference will decide it.”r />
  They sat back in the crypt-like mansion, and watched it together. It was a long time before the flames stopped dancing behind Zante’s eyes.

  The Experiment Ends

  The Atrium – Selene – July 30th 2142 – 1400 hours

  “…through challenge and adversity, under my leadership we will stride into tomorrow’s light with clarity and purpose. Citizens of the Solar Arm, I thank you for this appointment, and I will be happy to answer your questions.”

  Sarkoth Amnon stared out across at the sea of reporters crowding the Atrium, and the islands of raised hands.

  The Atrium was an imposing edifice, carved out of solid moon rock. It was difficult to find the point where the moon’s regolith ended and the Atrium began, leading to the sensation that the moon was all Atrium, that it was just a honeycomb of tunnels and catacombs and halls stretching like calcified veins right through the moon’s surface.

  This was where the human race was governed. The Solar Arm’s name invited implications of unity, and strength. All the muscles in an arm, the biceps and triceps and forearm flexors and extensors, all working in unity. But behind the muscle was a brain, not part of the arm at all. And the brain was Selene, the satellite orbiting Terrus.

  The Atrium existed beneath an artificial bubble of air, several kilometers across. Terraforming was underway, and by the end of the century the moon would have a thin atmosphere. Thousands of asteroid harvesters in the belt were harvesting skyscraper-sized chunks of ice and directing them on collision course with Selene, and already thin patches of blue were accumulating on the surface.

  Soon the Selenites would inhabit a world just as lush and beautiful as the one they’d been exiled from, the one they’d later conquered.

  Sarkoth Amnon was conducting his first press conference as Prime Minister.

  He stood above the expensive marble flagstones, fielding questions from a sea of delegates from as far away as Neptune. Halor Sumitar’s resignation was a shock, and everyone tried to gauge Amnon’s reaction. Was this something he looked ready for?