Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1) Read online

  It was just a twisted, blackened hulk, cored out like an apple by the storm of fire. Wires sparked occasionally. Detritus littered the floor, blown by Caitanya-9’s purple hued winds. He’d taken cover behind a control panel, and that was the only reason he wasn’t a human cinder.

  There was a body to his left, burned black by fire, and cut almost in half by a broken support girder. Very faintly, on the scorched shoulder, he could make out the imprint of a bra strap.

  Circe Yath.

  He swore, and stood up on legs that felt as shaky as his hopes of survival. His body was a mess of bruises and 3rd-degree burns. He needed medical attention, and there was none out here.

  He tried to activate his nano-mesh computer suit. Nothing. Wouldn’t even power on.

  He wasn’t surprised. The nano-filaments didn’t handle extreme heat well.

  Looking around the destroyed Adagio shuttle, he saw a second body, this one burned away to a bundle of bones. It was missing a tibia. Calypso.

  He wondered what had become of Wake. He’d lost visual contact of the second Adagio, but surely what was good for the goose was good for the gander. The Sphere ship had destroyed his Adagio with consummate ease, and that meant there was little chance the second one had escaped. Wake and his entire command had likely perished.

  But I’ve survived, he thought, trying to banish thoughts of how long that would be true.

  He half-walked, half-crawled from the shuttle, and stood, gawking at the huge purple landscape around him.

  And the glossy black moon ascending.

  He tried to activate the Vyres on his back. They buzzed ineffectively for a moment, then were silent. So those are fucked too.

  He tried to think of things he could do to save his life. It wasn’t a long thought.

  No food. No water. No wings. No communication. Don’t know where I am. Wouldn’t matter if I did because it’ll be a completely different place tomorrow. Probably the only human on the entire planet. A moon about to induce massive earthquakes.

  No point in worrying. After all, there were pangolins.

  They didn’t give a shit, and neither would he.

  So what were the things he could do to take his odds of survival from 1% to 1.1%?

  The earth started to shake, a low rattle that vibrated stones on the ground. Like an engine warming up.

  Soon, the demolition derby would begin.

  He started to run, then he realized his mistake. Somnath’s band of tidal flexing would extend hundreds of kilometers across. Running was no escape from the moons. He’d fail to do anything except tire himself.

  And he’d landed in a reasonably flat area. As soon as he reached the hills, he’d probably be crushed by falling rocks.

  The tremors grew stronger and stronger. He just stood helplessly, the gears of his brain paralysed by fear and helplessness. If there was a way to survive, he couldn’t see it.

  The moon was now three hundred arc-minutes above the horizon, staring at him like a massive, bloodless eye. Each shake of the ground, each disorientation to his sense of stability and realness, seemed like another blink from that eye.

  Soon you will be mine.

  “Fuck you.” he muttered, throwing himself down on the ground, spreading his hands out.

  The vibrations still increased, until this was impossible – the undulations of Caitanya-9 were actually throwing him up in the air.

  Purple dust was rising in a thick blanket, choking his lungs, blinding his vision. He moved with the tormented energy of an insomniac, of a torture victim, trying to find a spot where comfort was possible.

  Minute after minute passed with excruciating slowness, marked only by the spasms underneath him and the rising roar that filled his ears.

  He waited until the moon was at forty degrees past the horizon now, and the ground was starting to break.

  Little hairline cracks darted and split through the landscape all around him, some staying small, others widening into chasms. The splintering was a sharp treble counterpoint to the omnipresent rumbling.

  He couldn’t take it any more.

  He had to run.

  Zelity dashed across the plane, jumping over old splits, side-stepping new ones, trying to be as aware and present in the moment as possible.

  He made it to the low hills, and marveled at how the pillars of rock were visibly swaying from side to side – millions of tons of rock behaving with the physics of jelly.

  He darted down a side-alley in the canyon, listening for the sound of imminent destruction falling on his head. The moon was blotted out, save for a small sliver of a disc intruding on his vision.

  Then, he came upon the Sphere.

  It was lying on the ground, not hovering. And it was silent, not warbling.

  Was this the Sphere that Wake had killed earlier?

  He dashed past it, looking for a way out of the canyon.

  He heard a thunderous crash at his back, and spun. Boulders were sliding and bouncing down the slope, down to where he’d been standing a few seconds ago.

  He rolled behind another rock, until they smashed themselves to splinters on the ground. He did not want to risk being blinded by a fleck of quartz.

  Moving back out, he inspected the Sphere in greater detail. And what he saw took his breath away.

  “Oh. Wow.”

  It was strange how a single thing could shift his perspective, make everything else seem small. He was in a canyon with no escape, rocks raining down, but just for one moment, none of that was in his universe.

  The Sphere was now open.

  There was a blurring hole in it, with the liquid surface swirling around it like liquid mercury. Inside was a curved interior dotted with countless trailing blue trendils, which seethed and crackled like sea anenomes.

  Inside it, limbs gripped by the tentacles, was a naked human man.

  He walked closer, astonished.

  The man was dead. He slumped forward, his flesh an ashen gray. His face was like a swollen red balloon, refulgent of burst blood vessels. Typical indicators of death from a concussion grenade.

  Zelity couldn’t believe it, but he had to. The evidence was in front of him.

  Ever since landing on this godforsaken world, they’d known they were dealing with an alien entity. Their every briefing assumed this. The natives were something different to them, an alien race they would negotiate with if possible, kill if necessary.

  Logical, but wrong.

  He gaped, staring into the human face.

  The Spheres were not aliens.

  They were men.

  Mission Interruptus 3

  One of the most interesting phenomenon of war the last stand. Armies that stick a flag in the ground and fight on, until eliminated by firepower or starvation.

  Thermopolyae. Shiroyama. The Alamo. Stalingrad. Deimos.

  What makes these battles remarkable is that they’re rare. Armies usually do not behave like this. When a defeated army has the chance of surrender, they normally take it. Last stands look good in books, but to read about them, you have to live. Usually, they occur under two sets of circumstances. The first is when the enemy allows no chance of surrender. The second is when their allies allow no chance of surrender (in the words of Zhukow, “in the Red Army it takes a very brave man to be a coward.").

  Last stands are definitely not “business as usual.” Something unusual has to create them.

  But could that be changed? A nation that figured out how to motivate soldiers to fight without regard for their lives would enjoy a large advantage in war.

  The perfect soldier would have no commitments, no attachments. Nothing to look forward too except victory. Nothing to fear except defeat. Soldiers can be raised to the level of excellent by giving them things: training, equipment, motivation, morale. To raise them to the final point of godlike, you must take something away.

  Everything else.

  As the Solar Arm gained ascendency over earth and started seeding colonies through the solar
system, it found human decency was…constrained by the brutality of space.

  Explorative missions, even at 99c, would take years, or decades, or centuries. Any command to visit a remote outpost was effectively “spend most or all of your life in a metal box.” When Black Shift technology emerged, it allowing men to pass between stars at no expense of years to their lives. You’d go to sleep a 20 year old, and wake up a 20 year old…even if a century had passed.

  Unfortunately, the loss of the isochemical states in the water produced an interesting side effect: massive and sustained amnesia.

  Men dehydrated and rehydrated would emerge in a fugue state, with no sense of their own identities. It was as if their names were drained out of them along with their bodily fluids. The result at the end was a human blank slate, ready to write on anew.

  This is obviously ethically turbid. For decades, it has been constitutional policy (Section 10-7) through the entire Solar Arm that 1) only consenting individuals may use Black Space transport, and 2) all rehydrated humans must re-educated with their former identity.

  But the constitution’s a piece of paper. It’s not like the Vogons come and zap you when you break it.

  In 2081, during the war of Martian seccession, a combat division of sixteen hundred was dehydrated after being told they’d be manning frontier outposts throughout the Oort Cloud. They were rehydrated after only a few weeks, and told that they were nameless, interchangeable clones without pasts or histories, drafted to fight the secessionists on Mars and Phobos. They were also inducted into a crypto religion that said that anyone killed in battle would enter paradise on wings of flame.

  They fought like savages. A blanket communication ban extending prevented word of this from reaching their families. This later led to the censure and arrest of several high-ranking Solar Arm officials, and the legal settlements cost trillions. But the rebellion was defeated.

  This is the first and the last breach of Section 10-7 in recorded history. Is this proof mankind can be trusted with Black Space technology?

  The truth is, we are at peace, and we have no need to resort to such drastic measures.

  But just let things get out of hand, even a little. Watch our civic morals disappear. Watch us go where we swear we’ll never go. Science and technology has given us a “PULL IN CASE OF EMERGENCY” switch. At the moment, it’s rusty and covered in cobwebs. But it’s still wired up, still hot, and should the Solar Arm ever see a threat to its own survival, it will get pulled again.

  Supersoldiers, with no memories, no identities, and no morals. We can tell them they’re literally the warriors of God, and that the enemy is from hell itself. We can tell them they don’t have families. We can even mindfuck them with Cartesian skepticism, tell them that no universe exists outside of the barrel of their gunsights.

  It seems ridiculous.

  But here’s what I’ve realised from all my years in the public sector: if something seems ridiculous, this virtually guarantees that the powers-that-be are already doing it.

  [The Black Shift Project, by Emil Gokla, 2100 edition. Rights resolve with the Black Shift Archives.]

  Caitanya-9 – March 14, 2136 - 1750 hours

  Clouds tumbled across the sky, driven by superwinds. He was choking on purple dust. The ground was shaking so much that it was painful to stand on. The walls of the canyon oscillated in and out. The moon was minutes away from its peak, and he would not live to see it.

  He reached inside the glowing hole in the Sphere, ready for anything.

  Nothing happened.

  He grabbed the dead man by the shoulder, feeling the tentacles grip the corpse and then relax as he pulled with the desperate strength of a dying man.

  As if they know what I’m trying to do.

  He hauled the dead man from inside the cockpit – was that what it was? Some sort of vehicle? – and climbed inside.

  As he put a hand in, some of the crackling tentacles touched him, wrapped around him, and started pulling him in.

  He clambered through the hole, and sat down in the central portion of the Sphere. Hundreds of points of cool energy were now brushing his skin, enveloping him like a new suit of armor to replace his broken once. They touched, and then did more than touch, they knotted themselves into his flesh, painlessly sliding through his pores, meshing with his nervous system system.

  He gasped, feeling the wind blowing against the outside of the Sphere. Really feeling it, the liquid metal now part of his body.

  The Spheres weren’t alien lifeforms, and they weren’t vehicles. Somehow, they were both of those things at the same time.

  A cluster of tentacles wormed their way into the base of his spine, and his brain registered surprise at this new input.

  It was biokinetics, he understood now. The Sphere became a part of the wearer’s body. It was far more sophisticated than the Vyres, but perhaps they worked along similar ilnes.

  Now in control of the Sphere, he closed the hole he’d climbed through, closing it the way he’d close an eyelid.

  Now he was insulated. Protected.

  He felt boulders crash down on top of him, not hurting him at all.

  He started to ascend, the Sphere rising with the same effortlessness he used to raise a finger, or raise an eyebrow.

  He rose out of the canyon, in a straight line upwards. The surface of the Sphere was semi-translucent, and he could see the churning destruction he’d just escaped.

  No part of the land looked solid, it now moved and looked exactly like water. A choppy surge and swell of breaking waves and swells, moving with dynamics that were almost fluid.

  Only the rising gasps of purple dust gave lie to the illusion. If he’d still been down there on foot, he’d be torn into paste by grinding rocks.

  He floated higher, like a dandelion seed caught by the breeze. He started laughing, a raw, hacking laugh that was more of a cough. All across and through his body, he felt the embedded tentacles wriggle, as if in sympathy.

  For a long time he flew, piloting the Sphere through the canyons and passageways. The Sphere responded as smoothly as the muscles of his own body. He now had extra senses, extra modalities – when he closed his eyes, he knew his proximity in three dimensions, the same way he knew where his hand was without seeing it.

  That moon was now at dead noon overhead. He had to crane his neck to see it.

  There was a large thick sheet of cloud coming in from what he instinctively knew was the north. As he approached it,

  He wanted more height.

  The Sphere ascended at his unspoken will. The air grew cooler. The storms were now a torrent of rarified air, without any of the dust and grit of the ground. All around him, Caitanya-9 spread out like a tumultuous chessboard, areas changing before his eyes.

  Far to the south, he saw with enhanced vision the Spheres that had clustered around the beacon. He knew what they were doing, digging for the thing beneath the soil.

  Or they’d tried to. No doubt the moon had erased all of their progress.

  Progress towards what? What are they doing?

  He flew closer, and then another strange experience joined the menagerie of them he was experiencing.

  Someone talking, directly into his head.

  “Dedenki?” The voice, which coded itself as female, spoke inside his brain. “You’re alive. That’s good. We thought we lost you when the offworlders attacked.”

  He didn’t answer. Wasn’t sure what he could say, or if speaking at all was a good idea.

  Speaking would instantly reveal that he wasn’t Dedenki.

  “We drove them off. Took down one of their shuttles, too – the other one had Nyphur on board, and we couldn’t risk losing him. Still our only contact on the station, damn him.” She said. “There was a female marine that I killed and polyfleshed, but her friends arrived before I could implant a new set of memories. She’s up on the station right now, probably wondering what her name is. A shame: I probably should have left her dead.”

  Zelity
wished he could say something to not look suspicious. Was there a general way to indicate ‘affirmative’, or ‘message received’, without revealing your voice?

  He flew in a wide circle around the digging site, trying to look like he was on patrol. Remember, you’re meant to be here, he told himself. You’ll only stand out if you look like you don’t belong.

  “They’re probably all Sons of the Vanitar, or their agents. It might have been smart to shoot down the other shuttle, even if it meant losing Nyphur. Anyway, they’ve led us to the Doorway, now we just have to dig and find it. Damn…all these years and it’s the offworlders who discover it…“ He line of thought suddenly became sharp. His silence had aroused suspicion. “Dedenki? Are you listening to me?”

  He started flying away, hoping to put himself out of her range. Both her speaking range, and her firing range.

  “Dedenki? Wait, let me run a remote scan on your Sphere. Ah. How awkward. You’re not Dedenki. He’s 78.1 kilograms and you’re 82.6 kilograms.”

  Zelity started sweating. He’d been rumbled.

  He flew faster and faster, moving in a straight line.

  “I see now.” She said, laughing. He shivered at her laughter in his brain, like a parasite. “There must have been a survivor when we routed them. You somehow found your way to Dedenki’s Sphere. Clever!”

  He sensed and felt something moving above him. Something closer than the moon. Something more dangerous.

  “You’ve shown great initiative. I almost wish I could let you go, but…”

  With a whirring sound, the enormous flying cross descended from a cloud. It filled the sky, four gigantic arms spanning above him like the crossbars of a cage. Above were massive zeppelins, keeping it aloft and hidden in the cumulonimbus clouds.

  It had blasted one of Konitouri’s Adagio from the heavens at more than ten times the range he was at now. He started taking evasive action – darting and jigging to delay sudden death.

  The woman laughed girlishly. “Why are you doing that? It’s funny!”

  A translucent beam flooded out from beneath the flying cross, catching him its path.