Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1) Read online

  “Duly noted. Duly ignored.”

  Kai glowered. “I wish this to be a civil meeting. Please understand, Mr Wake, you are here at our forebearance.”

  Wake chuckled. “No. I’m here because you threw a fucking mayday signal. And you know the cool thing about mayday situations? They indicate that, one, an emergency situation is underway, and two, you are handing control of the situation over to emergency response personnel. Meaning, me. I’m the personnel. I can take command over any ship, sieze any weapon, do anything I goddamn want to until I’m satisfied the situation is under control. Solar Arm law.”

  Kai was visibly angry. “These laws cannot apply to emergency calls made in error.”

  “Well, you might be right. But it’s not my place to argue the law, just enforce it. And Solar Arm policy is crystal clear on this matter. Do you know any different?

  Nyphur spoke up. “Commander Wake is correct. He is free to utilize our resources, to a reasonable extent, until the emergency has passed.”

  “Jesus, the geologist’s now a legal expert.” Sabrok grinned.

  Nyphur glared daggers. “The geologist needed three hundred hours in interplanetary rescue law before they even let him operate a drill. Want to go to the library? Fifty ducats says I’m right.”

  “Quiet, both of you.” Kai said. “Let’s put the law aside, and be practical. The emergency is over. In fact, the emergency never existed.”

  “I’m the guy who decides that.” Wake looked to Nyphur. “What do you think? You were down there, after all. Would we learn anything at all from investigating the planet’s surface? For example, would we find the beacon Golestani set?”

  “The beacon probably does not exist, Mr Wake.“ Kai said.

  “My rank is Commander Wake.” I love outpompousing the pompous.

  Kai barely controlled his face. It was like watching a thin mask filled with ten thousand enraged, swarming beatles. “Commander Wake, there is no reason to suspect a beacon was ever deployed.”

  The background changed to a fiery pit of lava. I wonder if it’s keyed to his emotions, Wake thought, like a mood ring.

  “Wait, if you guys are so tight-assed for funds, Golestani and his team would have had to complete a requisition form for their load-out.” Wake said. “They’d have to sign gear out, and sign it back in, correct? So was the beacon brought back with Nyphur?”

  “I…honestly…” Kai shook his head. “I don’t recall if that was ever followed up. Professor?”

  “I have no idea. I was evac’d pretty fast.”

  “Get someone to look through your files.” Wake said. “I’ll wait. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  Sabrok spoke to Sabrok, and got him to scan the system files. Several tense seconds followed, while Sabrok accessed the records on his comm-suit.

  “Negative.” Security chief grunted. “We have no registry of a tracking beacon being re-entered into the system.”

  “Then it’s still down there.” Wake said.

  “It probably fell out when we crashed the buggy.” Nyphur said. Wake liked him even less than the Warrant Officer. Kai seemed like a blowhard, but that was understandable. Being a blowhard got you places.

  The scientist behaved like a thawed and reasonably gregarious corpse.

  “Don’t you find it suspicious, though, that after Golestani hit his head he specifically mentioned the beacon? Why did his mind go to that, specifically?” Wake said. “There’s another scenario here you’re not thinking of. What if he found something, planted the beacon, and then had the accident.”

  “But there’s no signal coming from a beacon. It was never activated.”

  “Or perhaps activated, and then destroyed or shut off.”

  Kai snorted and twirled a finger beside his head. The universal symbol for crazy on the loose. “Wild confabulations, Commander Wake. We have no reason to think any of that is true. You’re chasing phantoms.”

  “You don’t have to call me Commander Wake. I was just messing with you before. Call me Aaron – that’s what my mother did, if I ever had one. You think you’re better than my mother?”

  Kai swore softly. His nanosuit’s microphone picked it up and made it audible. “In any case, Wake, we have no way of locating this supposed beacon. Even if your conjectures are true, this gets us nowhere. Do you plan on just wandering around on the planet until you find the beacon?”

  “No,” Wake said. “I plan on reactivating it.”

  Suddenly Nyphur became animated.

  Animated. A crude yet fitting word. As if he’d just been a still-life drawing before, and was only now entering the land of the living.

  He moved from foot to foot. He glanced at him with hope, and excitement. “You can do that. How?”

  This is all wrong. Wake thought. He doesn’t believe his own stories about what happened down there.

  “These beacons can be remotely deactivated, and remotely activated. If you activated it down there, Nyphur, it will still be functional. Well, presuming it isn’t crushed under a ton of rock. It just as a ‘do not disturb’ sign hung over its digital front door. It won’t ‘handshake’, in parlance. It doesn’t want to talk to us. Accessing it would require we hack its security.”

  “Impossible.” Kai said. “It’s protected with terabit-level security. As are all our digital assets.”

  “Hey, relax. If I want to steal shit from you, I’ll do it the old fashioned way. I didn’t bring guns along for no reason. As a rule of thumb, digital security becomes out of date and vulnerable from t-minus three years. That’s why Solar Arm firmware gets patched on the hour. There’s an arms race between hackers and security, and if that beacon is years old, then frankly you guys have brought a knife to a gunfight.”

  He strode across the floor. It was polyrock, shaped in a passable imitation of marble. “Hey, can I have an image of the planet? Just so I can see what I’m shooting pings at?”

  Kai accessed the controls, and the glorious Roman ruins surrounding them vanished. Now, they were standing in the midst of space. A dinner party for four, communing with the void.

  Below the floor, from their perspective, was Caitanya-9. An enormous purple orb, swirling with threatening clouds and guarded by the two moons.

  “The first step is to ping for the beacon. It’ll be made of fairly dense metal, and if we hit it with a shortwave radio burst we can determine its location.” How do I know all this? It’s like the weapons, and my training. I have no memories of studying, but it’s all there in my head. “Is your radio hardware online, Warrant Officer Kai?”

  “Yes, yes.” Kai touched his sleeve, and granted Kai access to the station’s system.

  “Cheers.” The light blue glow indicated the presence of comms. He touched the wrist of his suit, and summoned forth the computer. He instructed it to send short-packet pings across the planet.

  Working with a battery of radio transmitters, it would pump out thousands of pings per second, aimed at random locations on the planet’s surface. It would be impossible to accurately locate the device. It could be dozens of miles off any given reading. The purpose was just to confirm that it existed.

  If they could establish the approximate space where the beacon had fallen, they could get to work finding it.

  “I warn you, this is a long shot.” He shunted the data through to Ubra, along with the instructions to get to the nearest supercomputer with a set of cryptosecurity reverse engineering tools. “Maybe the beacon’s broken. Maybe it was never activated. Maybe it’s buried under too much shit to ping. Maybe, maybe, maybe. If this ends in failure, I will humbly apologise for wasting everybody’s time.”

  “And if you find it?” Nyphur asked. His eyes gleamed with excitement. “What then?”

  Why the hell are you so excited to find that beacon, Nyphur? What aren’t you telling me?

  “Probably disappointment.” Andrei said. “Beacons are tiny, and the planet has undergone years of tectonic activity. Whatever it was marking won’t necessa
rily exist there now. We’re shooting long odds at every stage on this. Beats sitting around in a rec room.”

  Eventually, he heard Ubra speak. “OK, I’m into the control room of Konitouri-Alpha. Please bill the damage to the Solar Arm.”

  “The damage?” Kai asked. Seeming terrified of the answer.

  “The guy in the room locked the door on me. I was wearing civilian clothes, and he refused to believe I was part of the rescue team. I had to take the door off its hinges with four railgun slugs.”

  “Jesus.” Kai muttered.

  “The guy says he’s making a complaint to Warrant Officer Kai. He’ll live. Let me know what I can do next.”

  “Wait.” Wake continued pinging the looming hulk of the planet. At their distance from the planet, it took about a second at lightspeed to get a return on a ping.

  He’d racked up many thousands of negatives, as well as a couple of false positives as it struck some random metal object in the ground.

  Then, finally one came back.

  The ping reflected off an object in the northeastern hemisphere. It its diffusion pattern was consistent with electronics-grade metal.

  He projected it out to Kai, Sabrok, and Ubra. “Is this the composition of a beacon? Roughly speaking?”

  “Silicon. Surface density. Sharp diffusion of transients. Yeah, kind of looks like it hit something electronic. It doesn’t have to be the beacon, though. Maybe somebody lost some other electronic tool down there.”

  “That’s the next step.” Wake issued some more commands through his clothes, and spoke into the nanomesh microphone. “Wake, I’m sending some co-ordinates to you. I want you to crack it. If it’s a beacon, make it identify itself.”

  He heard her typing keys through the earpiece in his suit.

  “Well, look at that. I’m getting an identifier of BEAC-SOL-432-NMP”

  Nyphur was all smiles. “You found it! You found the beacon!”

  “Well, kinda. I know by spamming signals that it’s within a certain area, but it’s still not transmitting. That ‘do not disturb’ sign is still hung there. Ubra, do your thing. Hack it.”

  They heard her from the control room, muttering under her breath as she worked black arts upon the beacon. “Huh…encryption…dual handshakes…endpoint to endpoint scrambling…woah, this is stuff you don’t fuck around with.” One final keystroke. “There. Done.”

  “What? Just like that?”

  “Yeah. Solar Arm reverse-engineering procedures have obviously gotten a bit better since that thing was dropped on the planet. It was pretty low-key, actually. The transmission lockout on these devices is strictly hardware – there’s a circuit that has to complete, with a fuse. I pumped high-energy waves at it until the fuse melted, and then it started communicating with the station. ”

  A resonant beeping sound started filling the room. Wake heard Urba type some more interface commands, and a glowing red dot appeared on the curvature of the planet.

  They had tracking.

  They could fly down there and find the beacon, no matter where it went.

  Wake rounded on the stunned onlookers with a mixture of excitement and opprobrium.

  “This is proof positive. Golestani did set the beacon on something. If it had rolled out of his pocket and been left behind, I wouldn’t have been able to do that. Only an activated beacon can be accessed in such a way.”

  “I apologise,” Nyphur said. “I must be misremembering what happened down there.”

  Or you were lying. Wake thought. And still are. “Well, Caitanya-9 has now given us a little bon mot. Let’s go down there and see what we find next to that beacon.”

  “You can’t do that.” Mencius said.

  “How many times have I been told that during this meeting? And how many times did I listen?”

  “No, you’ll die. It’s Somnath, the planet’s second moon. It’s coming across the hemisphere, and in a few hours it will be directly over you. The earthquakes will kill any team you send down there.”

  Wake scratched his chin, deep in thought.

  He really wanted to strike while the iron was hot. The beacon was active now. But for all he knew, the battery would soon fail. The fact that Ubra had melted the fuse so easily indicated a device on its last legs. “So I have a few hours to look. What would happen if I went down there…but didn’t touch the ground?”

  “Didn’t touch the ground?”

  “Yeah. Imagine I was hovering above the earth, like those Spheres. They never die during earthquakes, at least not that you know of. Would I be safe in those circumstances?”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “Well, then that’s that. Ubra, communicate to the others, and tell them to suit up. Combat armor, helmets, full loadout of tactical gear. We’re taking a drop shuttle, and we’re doing a little poking around. And we’ll be using Vyres.”

  “And I’m coming with you,” Nyphur said, stepping forward.

  Now, suddenly it was Wake’s turn to stonewall. “Uh, with respect, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “I am. I’ve been down there, and you haven’t. I know geology, and you don’t. If Golestani found something important, then I’ll be in a better position to make sense of it than you do.”

  “Can you fly a Vyre?”

  “Sort of. They’re lithostatic wings, right?”

  “Yeah. Listen, we’re a combat unit, and you have no military training. If something goes wrong, we can’t guarantee your safety.”

  “But there won’t be any combat down there,” Nyphur said. “The Spheres are the only other thing down there, and they’re non-hostile.”

  Wake snorted. “I just heard a report saying that they’re hostile. That they killed people. And it happened after Golestani heard a pulse in the ground. If we go down in search of that beacon, we might be targeted for the same reason.”

  Kai and Sabrok sighed in resignation. Wake ignored them. He was calling the shots here.

  Both the shots up here, and the shooting down on the ground.

  Caitanya-9 – March 14, 2136 - 1200 hours

  Wake was in an Adagio-class drop shuttle, falling fast.

  His stomach lurched. His knees trembled. He felt pressure in parts of his body that nature had never designed to take pressure. If he wasn’t buckled in, he’d be free-floating just as he’d done in space.

  To his left and his right were Zelity and Ubra. Somewhere, there was another drop shuttle containing Gunnery Sargeant Circe Yath, Private Yuri Calypso, Corporal Monghoi Zordrak, and the scientist, Omai Nyphur.

  Out the window, he saw the gentle curve of the planet straighten out, and become a thick purple line, the terminating horizon.

  They spiraled down towards the surface, at terrifying velocity. Over the roar of the wind, Andrei’s ears were picking up every minor sound – the groan of rivets in the capsule, the explosive, target-seeking rounds in his MeshuggahTech KA-52 rattling like rotten teeth in a dry mouth. All personnel were strapped in brace position, with their knees bent at 90 degrees. No good. If the capsule failed to deploy its parachutes, the crash would instantly kill them. It was good for their peace of mind, and nothing else.

  When you’re hurtling at terminal velocity straight into the side of a planet, you want to be nothing less than relaxed.

  2300 meters…

  2200 meters…

  Once they’d descended to a depth where there was no risk of lightning, they heard the capsule’s parachutes detach with a whoosh. Immediately, there was a massive yank that they felt in every fibre of their bodies as the shuttle’s fall was arrested.

  1100 meters…

  1000 meters…

  They landed with a painful jolt on the hard bedrock of Caitanya-9. It had them. There was no buffer of air or space any more.

  “Check field gear and weaponry, then fall out.” Wake said.

  They stepped outside.

  The planet’s harsh air churned their lungs. All around was a purple landscape of rolling hills and cliffs,
scoured by a mournful wind. The clouds were an oppressive canopy. On a hill several hundred meters away, they saw the second Adagio shuttle. A tiny human figure got out and waved to them.

  It was strange, feeling the natural gravity of a planet. The gravity inside a gravity wheel kept you anchored to the floor, but it was always…off, somehow. Jarring. Disconcerting. Little variations in the wheel’s centrifugal spin always made you feel more or less heavy. Wake walked unsteadily, but it didn’t matter. Walking was something they’d be doing little of.

  “Deploy your Vyres.” He told the team, and they complied, pressing a button at their sides.

  Immediately, gossamer-thin wings swept out like knives, from discreet backpacks on their backs. When they were fully extended, they stretched several meters across.

  On Terrus, the Vyres were used for gliding. A man is heavy. Polyalloys are light.

  Assur’s gravity was a third of g, and that made the mathematics of flying considerably more favorable. Andrei felt a needle prick into the back of his neck, integrating the Vyres with his cortical stem. With a wince of pain, he felt two more threat their way into his blood stream.

  Then, he had sensation on his back. The wings were part of him. He could flap them, could articulate them like the fingers on his hands.

  “Ascend.”

  They rose into the air, their feet leaving the ground like a wondrous act of puppetry. Ubra was lightest, and she ascended the highest. Nyphur was heavy and out of condition, and he lagged behind the others.

  “By the way, did we bring snacks?” Calypso asked.

  “Yeah, we did. Back at the shuttle.” It wasn’t a stupid question. Vyres powered themselves using human CHO and glucose, and flying used a lot of energy. The usual rule of thumb among flyers was to eat a thousand extra kilocalories per each hour of flying.

  Ten meters above the ground, Nyphur located the reactivated beacon, and they set off for it.

  They flew single file, to take advantage of the slipstream effect. Wake wasn’t in the lead, he was in the back. They didn’t expect anything to go wrong, but the first soldier in was also usually the first soldier to die.