Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1) Read online

  Black Shift

  The Consilience War Book One

  Ben Sheffield

  Contents

  1. Induction

  2. Caitanya-9 – November 2nd, 2126 - 1330 hours

  I Am Awake

  3. Dravidian – March 10th, 2136 - 0900 hours

  4. Mission Interruptus 1

  5. Dravidian – March 13, 2136 - 1200 hours

  6. Whispers – time and date unknown

  7. Proxima Centauri – March 13, 2136 - 2300 hours

  8. Konotouri Alpha – March 14, 2136 - 0800 hours

  9. Caitanya-9 – March 14, 2136 - 1200 hours

  10. Mission Interruptus 2

  11. Caitanya-9 – March 14, 2136 - 1300 hours

  12. Konotouri Alpha – March 14, 2136 - 1315 hours

  13. Caitanya-9 – March 14, 2136 - 1330 hours

  The Teeth Between the Stars

  14. Solar Arm Aerospace Corps – March 14, 2136 - 1350 hours

  15. Konotouri Alpha – March 14, 2136 - 1400 hours

  16. Konotouri Beta – March 14, 2136 - 1420 hours

  17. Konotouri Alpha – March 14, 2136 - 1450 hours

  18. Caitanya-9 – March 14, 2136 - 1700 hours

  19. Mission Interruptus 3

  20. Konotouri Gamma – March 16, 2136 - 2000 hours

  21. The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 0900 hours

  22. Konotouri Delta – March 18, 2136 - 1200 hours

  23. Konotouri Alpha – March 18, 2136 - 1220 hours

  24. Konotouri Delta – March 18, 2136 - 1220 hours

  25. The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 1300 hours

  26. Konotouri Delta – March 18, 2136 - 1300 hours

  27. Mission Interruptus 4

  28. Konotouri Delta – March 18, 2136 - 1400 hours

  29. The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 1420 hours

  30. Konotouri Delta – March 18, 2136 - 1430 hours

  Sky May Be

  31. The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 1440 hours

  32. Mission Interruptus 5

  33. Caitanya-9 – March 18, 2136 - 1540 hours

  34. The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 1600 hours

  35. The Wipe – March 18, 2136 - 1700 hours

  36. The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 1800 hours

  37. The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 1300 hours

  38. The Wipe – March 18, 2136 - 1400 hours

  39. Terrus – December 10, 2141 - 0100 hours

  Induction

  “…Some planets damage your sanity. For example, Zezembi-13 in the Cygnus cluster has a atmosphere composed of nitrogen, oxygen, and neon. A space traveler would breathe it for a couple of minutes before experiencing waking hallucinations and eventually nitrogen narcosis. You might be there now, hallucinating me giving this speech. If so, I apologise to those bored-looking upperclassmen at the back. Some people get beautiful women. You get me.

  “Then there’s Caitanya-9. You don’t need to travel there to go mad. Merely reading about it takes you most of the way.

  “It’s a rocky world with a radius of 2000km, and a volume of approximately 3.105x10^23 cubic kilometers. It is notable for many reasons, chiefly for being the most violent and unpredictable planet ever documented.

  “Its twin moons orbit at a close enough distance to induce tidal flexing more severe than any seen anywhere. At any moment, there are six thousand thunderstorms in progress over Caitanya-9. They generate more than ten million million watts of electrical power – more power than all the plutonium reactors on Terrus combined. Low pressure systems lash and batter the planet, with windspeeds exceeding 750 kilometers per hour. Volcanoes erupt like festering wounds.

  “Nobody has ever established a permanent colony on Caitanya-9’s surface. Even mapping Caitanya-9 is impossible, as it has no lasting features. Earthquakes and landslides reshape the landscape by the hour. The closest the planet has to a colony is a small space station in geosynchrynous orbit. Planetary descents must be carefully planned, and conducted in only the most optimal conditions.

  “The planet orbits Proxima Centauri, a main sequence star in the Alpha Centauri system. Its late discovery date – 2075 – is a mystifying anomaly in galactic cartography. By that point, we thought we’d documented every planet in the Milky Way - and here was a new one, just four light years away. Even more puzzling, an object that size would have introduced noticeable peturbations in surrounding bodies, none of which were observed prior to 2075.

  “There’s little else I can tell you about the planet. The Solar Arm has established a full-time colony to study it, but we still know nothing. We cannot model how the moons interact. We do not know how such a bizarre dual-satellite system evolved. A textbook on Caitanya-9 might as well consist of a question mark repeated several hundred thousand times. Everyone who goes there believes that they’ll be the one to crack the mystery. If you think you’ll be the next one, I have three words: enjoy your hallucinations.”

  [Emil Gokla, “Shifting Towards Tomorrow”. Speech presented to the 2105 graduate class of Titan Academy. Rights resolve with the Black Shift Archives.]

  Caitanya-9 – November 2nd, 2126 - 1330 hours

  Clouds thundered overhead, the color of bleached bones. Professor Zane Golestani crawled deeper into his hole. He heard the beast’s metal-throated noises as it passed, searching for him.

  He pressed himself to the ground, trying to slow his racing heartbeat. His life was made of pieces, each shorter than the last. Twelve years; his schooling. Six years; his training. Five years; his transport from Terrus to Proxima Centauri. Three weeks; a layover on the station orbiting Caitanya-9. Eight hours; field work on the planet. An hour; a whirlwind of events, culminating in the slaughter of his entire team. Several minutes; hiding from the thing that had killed them.

  Soon, it would find him. What happened afterwards would be the shortest part of all.

  The nanocomputer mesh woven into his field suit scanned for open comlinks, and then his left cuff glowed a gentle blue color.

  He had a connection to the space station.

  He spoke, hoping he wasn’t dooming himself just by opening his mouth.

  “My name is Zane Golestani.”

  They know that, idiot. When the commlink reached the station, it would have the distinctive prefix MG-SOL-432-NMP. His initials. His affiliation – the research department of the Solar Arm. His unit number. The last three letters were his location. Caitanya-9 was sometimes referred to as “No Map Planet”.

  The planet was a devouring mouth, every bit as much of a beast as the thing stalking him. They would never find his body.

  “I’m about to die. I’m a research mission specialist for the Solar Arm…” stop telling them things they already know. Seconds are passing. Value them. “Fuck it, just look it up on my file. We landed at 0400 hours, six of us, we were supposed to take rock samples from the planet’s lithosphere.”

  (More generally, he was supposed to try to figure out how this planet exists. It shouldn’t. And until fifty years ago, it apparently didn’t. The job provided a paycheck, but beyond that, he was ambivalent. As a scientist, he loved mysteries. As an engineer, he hated them.)

  “We bored a full kilometer down, or tried to, but our drill shaft broke.”

  (They sunk it vertically into the side of a mountain – a mountain now gone, wiped out by a moon. Mountains survived only slightly longer than humans did on this world.)

  “We radio’d Konotouri Station for a new one, but they told us to they couldn’t spare a dropship and we’d have to do the best we could.”

  (Konotouri Station also called them idiots. Erith Rahn cried.)

  Golestani quietened as he heard
the humming of the Sphere pass again. He covered the blue light on his suit cuff with his hand, in case the ambient glow was visible.

  The wait was agonizing. Like being crushed between two hands on a clock. The sound retreated.

  “The drill shaft had a nanofiber filament running through it, and we used it to take observations. Temperature. Chemical composition. When we logged the pressure, that’s when things stopped making sense. The drill bit at 1km recorded ambient pressure of about 50psi, but every couple of seconds, there was a spike to 100psi. And every couple of minutes, there would an even bigger spike to 200psi. Pulses running through the ground. Regular. Exact. No way it could be a natural phenomenon.“

  (The team stood around the defeated drilling unit, digesting this.

  “What’s going on here?” Golestani said, as another sharp jolt registered.

  “Maybe the pressure spikes broke the drill,” Rahn said.

  “Fuck the drill,” Omai Nyphur said. She looked sharply at him, and he glared back.

  There was something very anomalous going on here.

  They watched the readout as each spike came through like clockwork. Pulses. Rhythmic pulses. From two kilometers inside the solid rock of the planet crust.

  “Could it be aftershocks from an earthquake?”

  “The moons aren’t in the right place to generate earthquakes. And we’re not seeing the variance you’d expect – it’s always hitting at exactly 100psi and 200psi. It comes back to those two numbers, over and over.”

  Golestani unclipped a tiny metal beacon from his belt, and attached it to the drill. This mountain wouldn’t exist tomorrow, and he wanted some way of finding his way back to this spot. He now agreed with Nyphur.

  Something very odd was happening here. Fuck the drill. Fuck the drill, indeed.

  “How much time do we have?”

  Nobody asked “until what?” Golestani meant the moons. It was always the moons. Every single plan had to be carried out in light of the position and interaction of Caitanya-9’s two moons, Somnath and Detsen. Positioned just inside the planet’s Roche limit, they exerted so much gravity that they wracked the planet with near-constant earthquakes and tremors.

  He’d timed their descent for when both the moons were on the far side of the planet. The clock was ticking.

  “A few hours. Then we’ll have Detsen sweeping over the meridian, with Somnath following in apposition. Once that happens, they won’t be able to send a drop shuttle for us. What do you want to do?”

  “Collect data,” Golestani said. “For as long as we can.”

  So it was done, the strange pulses being recorded and logged on the system computer. The six of them paced around, all of their thoughts roughly triangulating around the same point.

  A rhythmic pulse in the ground.

  Like a heartbeat.

  “You’ve heard that the Spheres sometimes dig?” Rahn said.

  “No, I haven’t,” Golestani said. He knew little about the planet’s natives. They’d been declared a protected species, inaccessible to study. Any time you approached them, they hovered away, oblique metallic mysteries.

  “Sometimes we’ve observed them remotely,” Rahn said. “They emit beams of particles, and use them to excavate the soil. When you examine the holes, some of them are dozens of meters deep.”

  “Huh. What are they looking for?”

  Rahn shrugged.

  Ahead, the sky was rumbling. A thick sheet of gray clouds was forming overhead, like blankets knitted from steel wool. It never rained on Caitanya-9. Its atmosphere was too light to condense into droplets.)

  “It was numbers.” Golestani said. “Encoded in base-12, incrementing down.”

  (It was Nyphur who finally figured it out. He looked at the stream of pressure pulses recorded by the drill, and brought up the nanocomputer mesh in his field suit. They all knew the signs of someone retreating deep into a mental landscape.

  Finally, he spoke.

  “Ordinal numbers.”

  He scatterplotted the pulses on a holographic computer screen. Immediately, the pattern was obvious. There would be a 200psi spike, followed by variable number of 100psi spikes, separated by pauses.

  “The pulses represent numbers, the pauses are duodecimal places, and the 200psi spikes represent interrupts, where one number ends and the next begins.”

  Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.

  “…A duodecimal place?” Kyrudo said.

  “Like a decimal place, but in base 12. You seriously didn’t know that? The Solar Arm’s brain trust strikes again.”

  “You can be brains, I’ll be the beauty”

  “All the same, that’s weird,” Golestani said.

  “It’s the opposite of weird. It’s a nice composite number, with 6 factors. 12 divides to 6, then 3, then 1.5. 10 divides to 5, then 2.5, then 1.333333. We always speculated that if an alien race evolved that didn’t have ten fingers on each hand, they’d use base 12 for their numbers.”

  “Interesting, but what’s the sequence?”

  “Look for it yourself. You’ll see.”

  Golestani studied the scatterplot, trying to awkwardly shove the square peg of base 12 into the round hole of a base 10 brain.

  12-06-08-11… 12-06-08-10… 12-06-08-09…

  He soon noticed that all the pulses were the same number...except for the final duodecimal place.

  Which was steadily incrementing down.

  “…A countdown,” Steinbeck said, shaking her head.

  “Yep.”

  “To what?”

  Nyphur let his silence draw out. They watched as it went from 12-06-08-00 to 12-06-07-11.

  As the clouds rumbled and threatened fanglessly, they watched the pulses, mentally transcribing them. It was now impossible not to see them as numbers. It was clear as day.)

  “A countdown. One ending at ten years from this date,” he whispered. The sound of the wind had dropped.

  That was bad. He needed the wind.

  “We’d broken a drill on the discovery of the decade, if not the century. There’s something beneath the surface of this planet, something we’ve never seen before. But we didn’t have much time. Detsen was about to sweep twenty degrees from the meridian, and the drilling site would get buried. Before we radio’d for a surface-to-orbit ship, I set a beacon. Then one of our team did something idiotic. Batshit insane. She found a Sphere and showed it the pulses.

  (The Spheres moved and drifted like gigantic metallic spores. Nobody knew how intelligent they were. Nobody understood their behavior. It was difficult to make a trip down on to the planet’s surface, and like most of the planet they were largely unstudied.

  On a dune buggy, the team weaved through the purple dunes and sand-drifts, plumes of dust snaking out above them. The land was recently formed, only hours old, but in the absence of water and foliage it seemed ancient.

  The Spheres levitated about a foot off the ground, but some unknown energetic interference disturbed the dust where they passed.

  They followed the trail, Handsel and Gretel in space, until the thin, warbling hum filled the air and a giant glowing silver ball came into view.

  They choked off the dune buggy and dismounted, Nyphur at the lead. His hands were out – a show of peace that would probably be lost on a species with no visible hands.

  The sphere was it was several meters across, an imposing circle of liquid-looking metal. It seemed to be regarding them. Investigating them. They felt strangely naked before that featureless ball.

  “Show it a video feed of the pulse. It can’t talk to us, but maybe it’ll recognize a base-12 number…” Nyphur said.

  Rahn holographically projected the feed they’d captured from the drill – each pulse now a 3-dimensional dot suspended in mid-air like columns of stacked teardrops.

  The sphere flashed, changed color. Now it didn’t look like cold metal, but glass heated red by a glassblower’s torch.

  A high-pitched shrill sound came, grew louder and louder.)

&n
bsp; “It went berserk.”

  (A beam of light flashed from its center, aimed straight at Rahn.)

  “Killed her.”

  (Once, on Terrus, he’d played games with a flashlight with his sister. Pretending that beam was a sword, or a laser beam. It was always good for a laugh. He’d always felt a sense of relief when he shone it into his sister’s face and she was unharmed.

  This beam cut right through Rahn’s face, blasting through her skull the way the drill had gone into the earth. Blood and brain matter fanned out in a superheated starburst. A whickering bone fragment cut his cheek.

  I’ll need the medikit, he thought dully, stupidly, feeling blood drip from his cheek. Maybe if I ask Nyphur nicely, he’ll patch me up. Hopefully it won’t leave a scar. Hopefully…)

  “Killed two other members of the team.”

  (“RUUN!” Nyphur’s scream almost shattered the sky.

  They fled to the Dune buggy, Nyphur and himself in the lead.

  Two more flashes of light. Two more wet thuds of detonated humanity. Two more blasts of hot wet blood showering over him.

  “Tried to kill Omai Nyphur and me. We escaped in a dune buggy.”

  Nyphur took the driver’s seat, threw the Dune buggy in first gear. It was a cheap thing, assembled in-field from polymetals and polyrubber, and they now trusted it with their lives. Nyphur tore away in a spray of sand and dust, and they went hurtling down a dune.

  The maddened whine of the Sphere shrilled like a buzzsaw. It was in pursuit.

  The buggy dropped a foot as it hit a pothole. A white beam of light sizzled overhead, close enough for the heat to flip Golestani’s thinning hair.

  They tore out of the pothole, and sped away through the dunes. Golestani gripped a handlebar, his knuckles bone-white, knowing that neither he or Nyphur knew were they were going.

  If we stay, we die, he thought. Our destination is just a negative. Somewhere that’s not here.

  The wind blew into his face, making him blink. They were going brutally fast, but still the Sphere was on their tail.

  “Can you go any faster?” He shouted at Nyphur, who either didn’t hear him or didn’t have an encouraging answer.