Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4) Read online

  Foreverlight

  The Consilience War – Book Four

  Ben Sheffield

  Contents

  Quote

  Terrus Launch Facility March 10, 2131, 1600 hours

  The Great Hunt

  1. Arrakhia Mountain Facility – June 10 2143 - 0100 hours

  2. Zephyr City – Venus – June 14, 2143 - 1200

  3. Los Neo Angeles – June 21, 2143 – 1200 hours

  4. Valashabad, Mars – June 23, 2143, 1200 hours

  5. Neo Jericho – June 23, 2143, 1800 hours

  6. Valashabad, Mars – June 24, 2143, 1200 hours

  7. Zephyr City – Venus – June 25, 2143, 1200 hours

  8. Los Neo Angeles – June 26, 2143, 1200 hours

  Assault on Venus

  9. Zephyr City – Venus – June 27, 2143, 1800

  10. Los Neo Angeles – June 27, 2143, 1800 hours

  11. Valashabad, Mars – June 28, 2143, 0800 hours

  12. Los Neo Angeles – June 28, 2143, 1200 hours

  13. Zephyr City – Venus – June 29, 2143, 0600 hours

  14. Terrus – June 29, 2134, 0400 hours

  15. Zephyr City – Venus – June 29, 2143, 1200 hours

  The Rebuilding of Caitanya-9

  16. Venus-Mars Interspace – June 29, 2143, 1500 hours

  17. Valashabad, Mars – June 30, 2143, 0800

  18. Valashabad, Mars – September 27, 2143, 1200 hours

  19. The World Once Called Terrus – September 28, 2143, 0800

  20. Mars – September 28, 2143, 1200

  21. At The Conflux of Two Worlds

  22. Terrus - Many Years Later

  "Behold, I have created the smith who blows the fire of coals and produces a weapon for its purpose. I have also created the ravager to destroy." - Isaiah 54:16

  Terrus Launch Facility March 10, 2131, 1600 hours

  Pneumatic doors hissed open, and the five marines entered the cargo bay of the shuttle.

  “So where’s our commander?” a twenty year old Private called Ubra Zolot said.

  She was answered by a chorus of mumbles and shrugs.

  The Dravidian shuttle’s interior had the shiny aesthetic of a product just taken out of factory packaging. No dust was gathered in the cracks and corners. Every surface was sleek and glossy. They were all extremely conscious of the dirt they were tracking inside from the launchpad.

  They’d be inside this shuttle for the next five years. And although a civilian would have leaped at the chance to ride a brand new Dravidian, they were all a bit concerned.

  About three to five percent of spacecraft suffered a serious fault within one year of service. By riding an old craft, you dodged the break-in period. With a brand new shuttle, you rolled the dice that it might just explode on the launchpad.

  Freshness and shininess is not a virtue in the military. You want dirt, and grime, and the battering of time and elements. Whether you were talking spacecraft, guns, or soldiers.

  Ubra looked at the plate over the cargo bay door.

  SOLAR ARM MARINE CORPS, in conjunction with BLACK SHIFT ENTERPRISES

  “Doesn’t it seem weird, that we’re getting shot out into space in an hour and we haven’t even met the guy who’s supposed to be commanding us?”

  “I asked a few questions,” a taciturn private called Yuri Calypso said. “The upper brass was secretive, but apparently our commander is en-route from Gaue Correctional on Ceres.”

  “Gaue Correctional?” a sergeant called Yen Zelity said. “Isn’t that a…”

  “It’s a prison. Yeah, I know. Doesn’t make a whole ton of sense to me, either.”

  “So he’s a prison guard? You need a commander for a front line unit in deep space, and you pick a prison guard?”

  “I don’t know. Apparently he’s got some skills.”

  The craft was spacious. Three sets of habitat wheels, locked together by interconnects. Its thorium reactor animated the walls, vibrating them gently like the bristling hide of a strange animal.

  The thorium engine would lift them out of Terrus’s gravity well, at which point antimatter propulsion would accelerate them to relativistic speeds. They were beyond the solar system. Far beyond it.

  They were responding to an emergency call to a remote colony on Proxima Centauri, the furthest human habitation in the universe. It would be a long journey. Thankfully, they wouldn’t be conscious for most of it.

  The cargo bay had six black capsule-like spaces, ringed with sophisticated diagnostic equipment and trailing IV lines.

  Although they were as sleek and modern as the rest of the craft, it was hard to escape an involuntary mental association when you saw them.

  Coffins.

  When they entered those capsules, the marines would have their biological processes suspended, and then every last trace of water in their bodies sucked out. They would pass the trip as mummified human remains, ageless and unconscious, only to be rehydrated at the other end.

  Apparently, they would lose all their memories in this process. They'd already had their brain recordings stored for the trip.

  The phrase "brain recordings" was also concerning, but they didn’t show it. They were marines. Discipline was a watchword, unconscious, unassumed. They were journeying into an unknown and potentially dangerous situation, many lightyears away. Things could go wrong at any stage of the journey.

  Things are already going wrong now, Ubra thought.

  T minus fifty minutes, and there was still no sign of the man who held their lives in his hands for the duration of the mission. A man who was coming from a goddamn prison.

  What’s the hold-up? She thought, feeling butterflies in her stomach. A jailhouse tattoo that needed some quick touching up?

  They bantered, as soldiers always do to allay fear. There were jokes. Little zingers about whose brain recordings were just empty silence.

  "I still can't believe they can do that," Zelity said.

  "Do what?" Monghoi Zordrak replied.

  "Record our brains, and then reupload them into our heads."

  "I don't mind that they can do that. I'm more worried that they need to. Did you hear what the Black Shift guy said? That when we wake up we won't remember anything? Not even our names? What happens if one of the headsets breaks or gets lost? Seriously, think on it. Your identity would basically be erased."

  Calypso waved his hand in a comme ci, comme ça gesture. "Think of the alternative. We're going to a star that's five lightyears away. Do you want to spend the entire time conscious and awake, staring at a wall?"

  "That actually happened," an older gunnery sargeant called Circe Yath said. "There was some lady who used Black Shift, but it didn’t work for some reason, and she woke up just as the flight was about to begin. She ended up eating her fellow passengers to survive. Hey, Zordrak, you hear about that one?

  "It's an urban legend,” Zordrak said. “You left out the part where she wakes up in salt bath, missing a kidney."

  Just then, there was a clanking sound from outside, and a towering silhouette filled the open doorway.

  A man.

  He was tall, and broad, with gray eyes. His hands were fixed behind his back, and as he walked through, they saw that he was wearing a set of magnetic handcuffs. He was flanked on each side by an armed escort.

  This is a joke, Ubra thought. We aren’t being commanded by a prison guard. We’re being commanded by a convict.

  “Hello,” the man said. “I’m sorry that I’m late. My schedule isn’t up to me, obviously.” He turned to one of the guards, irritation on his face, “hey, can someone get these cuffs off me? We’re on a clock here, and I need to get ready for the
trip.”

  All of the marines looked at him dubiously.

  “So what’s your name?” asked Zelity.

  “Andrei Kazmer, and it’s a stupid answer to a stupid question" he said. "Our brain recordings have already been taken. We’re going to wake up not knowing who anyone else is, so we might as well skip the names. When you get your identity get shoved back into your cranium, this conversation will never have occurred."

  "It's not a waste,” Ubra said. “We might never wake up, or never arrive. Don’t you at least want to die with someone people you know the names to?”

  “We’re not going to die,” Andrei Kazmer said. “These people are professionals.”

  Talking to him, he seemed normal.

  But knowing the government, nobody would have gone to the expense of restraining him without a goddamn good reason.

  Black Shift technicians were entering the cabin. They escorted the marines to the capsules.

  "I don't like this," Zelity said. "It's fucking risky."

  "Black Shift has done hundreds of flights like this," Andrei Kazmer said. "You're in good hands. It's probably me you've got to worry about, when we get out on the other side."

  Ubra decided to interpret that as a joke.

  The Black Shift orderlies were busy strapping down marines in the capsules, and inserting IVs and cannulae. Everything was double checked and triple checked. There was no chance of anything going wrong.

  "It's like betting on the stock market," Zelity said, babbling to allay his nerves. "Yeah, in principle you know the market's going to be stable long term...but if it blows you out, you're not going to be in for it long term. You'll be broke. And maybe over a thousand Black Shift flights, the average passenger comes out okay, but that's no comfort if you're the one that doesn't."

  "You’re worrying about nothing," Andrei Kazmer said. "Everything will work out. See you boys and girls on the other side, in five years."

  The lid closed.

  The Great Hunt

  Arrakhia Mountain Facility – June 10 2143 - 0100 hours

  Vadim had accepted his post underneath the mountain because it had seemed like a quiet retreat.

  In the fraction of a second before the bullets tore into his chest, he reflected on how badly plans can go wrong.

  A MeshuggahTech KA-52 assault rifle fires 1200 caseless rounds minute on full automatic. The rounds have a muzzle velocity of two kilometers per second, and can penetrate an inch of austenitic steel. A hollow cavity means they detonate like miniature frag bombs. They are not generally survivable.

  The line of fire pummelled across his chest, ripping it open like a swipe from a steel-clawed tiger. He was hurled backwards, against the concrete wall of the bunker, a starburst of his own blood flying into his eyes, blinding him.

  He fell down, limbs thrashing. He suddenly had no control over anything below his neck. There was no pain. Just an overwhelming sense of loss. A bird with its wings suddenly removed.

  I’m a cripple, he thought. Best case scenario.

  And as he blinked the blood free from his eyes, and stared into the gaze of a lunatic, he knew he was fresh out of best case scenarios.

  “I was a fool,” Andrei Kazmer said, “trusting you. Believing you.”

  Vadim made a heroic effort to talk. He couldn’t even get his tongue to move.

  “And I was a fool to submit to your justice. You know nothing of the word.”

  Blood gurgled out of his gaping chest wounds, and his vision started to dim.

  The dark storage bunker was reprieved only by the glitters of weapons. Embossed chrome. Gunstocks polished until they almost screamed. This was where the weapons were stored. The armament of Arrakhia Mountain Facility’s defense. The facility was secure from invaders from any quadrant. Nobody had thought an attack would come from within.

  Kazmer started changing into a nanomesh body armor suit. “I’ll be getting out of this facility, back to the outside world. If your people are smart, they’ll stay out of my way.”

  He loaded a fresh clip into the smoking Meshuggahtech. Then he slung a second one over his back. Then he fitted a helmet over his head. Then he put a brace of grenades on his belt. Then he seized the triangular device that had belonged to Kymmure Mykor, the one that whose purpose they still hadn’t been able to puzzle out.

  “Don’t know what I’ll do afterwards,” he said, his hands a blur as he armed himself. “But I’ve learned one thing. I have two men in my mind. I listened to the part that was Andrei Kazmer…and ignored the warnings from Aaron Wake. I will not make that mistake again.”

  When he’d finished looting the armory, he nodded at Vadim Gokla.

  “Die slow.”

  Then he was gone. In time, he heard distant shooting from the facility beyond.

  Vadim was too weak to even struggle as his lifeblood poured out over the cinderblock gray stones.

  His assistant, Ernst Yakub, lay slain in an identical spreading pool of red. An onlooker would have glanced from one body to the other, and been unable to detect a single difference.

  There was a theory that nobody ever consciously experiences their own death. That time dilates, each second stretching further than the last, until the final one lasts for an eternity. The dying man is forever locked out of the final release of death, groping for that final doorway which grows ever closer, but still unreachable.

  Zeno’s arrow, piercing a jugular.

  An eternity spent trapped under a train’s crushing wheels. An endless passage of time after a hangman’s rope snaps your neck like a twig.

  He wondered if that was happening to him now.

  Are minutes passing? Are seconds passing? God, it feels like I’ve been here for days.

  He sat slumped against the wall in the dark, his entire chest a dripping and shredded mass of spongelike tissue, which almost seemed to buzz.

  The buzzing spread across his body, rapid vibrations that almost stung with their progression.

  Then he realised that it wasn’t coming from his body. It was coming from the earpiece he had inside his ear.

  It was one of the few links to the outside world he had inside Arrakhia. When General Rodensis needed to give him urgent information, it buzzed. It was tiny, completely secure, and so much a part of him that sometimes he completely forgot about its presence.

  At the moment, it was wired to a VLF transponder, broadcasting signals from the surface.

  Soon, there was a voice from the outside world in his head.

  “Attention – this is an urgent message for all C-321 classified personnel in the Solar Arm and surrounding colonies. Roughly an hour ago, a conflict was initiated in the Terrus-Mars interspace. Combatants include General Sybar Rodensis and the majority of his fleet. We will update you with any further news.”

  He coughed, a sudden ghost of pain gripping his chest and then disappearing.

  He wished he could believe he was hallucinating all of this.

  He looked around the room, at the supplies and belongings of the hospital staff and inmates. Officially, the hospital’s charges were patients. But off the record and out of earshot, the staff referred to them as inmates.

  The process by which you left Arrakhia Mountain Hospital was long and winded, filled with hairpin bends of bureaucracy. Unsurprisingly, many people failed to manage it.

  What will happen to everyone here? He wondered.

  There was the Mars veteran Lucas Farholt – blind, old, and insane, triply cursed. There was that botanist, Nilux Red, who’d been arrested after cannibalizing several passengers in a Black Shift flight gone wrong.

  Actually, do they ever go right?

  There was Ubra Zolot, a former associate of Andrei Kazmer, and the mother of his child.

  There were various staff members and orderlies, all of them still keeping the line of security nice and tight and all of them believing with all their hearts that the war was ended, and that soon they’d go home to their families.

  Some jokes you couldn�
��t laugh at.

  Another update came through.

  “Urgent message for all C-321 classified personnel. We can report that a massive and unilateral strike was taken against the Solar Arm fleet. Positronic indicate that thousands of ships were caught out of position, with their weapons down, against a near lightspeed foe. We are still trying to assess the damage. Reports are coming in every second.”

  He didn’t want to listen to this.

  He was in a dark, chilly bunker, meant to survive wars. But he wouldn’t survive the war, and perhaps nobody else in the facility would. Andrei would massacre everyone, and he was glad the walls would muffle the sound of gunshots.

  In a thousand years, this room would still be here, filled with decaying bodies.

  It was minutes or hours before he received an update through the earpiece.

  Staying conscious now required constant effort – it was like pulling on a rope that weighed heavier in his hands with each passing second.

  Soon, staying alive would be too heavy a burden for him to carry.

  “Urgent message – repeat, urgent message. General Sybar Rodensis, and De-Facto Executor of the Solar Arm, is missing and presumed killed in action. We have had no reports from his ship in hours, and no reports from his cabinet or any of his crew. We are trying to determine exactly what happened up there, but it seems they were eliminated in a surgical strike by Reformation Confederacy forces under the command of Raya Yithdras.”

  He thought back to Sybar.

  The impetuous general who had taken command of the Solar Arm following Sarkoth Amnon’s mysterious general had taken a keen interest in the case of Andrei Kazmer, and his strange tale.

  Andrei had been found wandering naked in northern California, claiming to have been the power controlling Caitanya-9. Almost immediately, facts started to appear supporting his tale. All he’d asked for was the resumption of his previous prison sentence. As Vadim had later learned, there was a curious Manichean aspect of Kazmer’s personality, light and dark braided in his heart.