Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4) Read online

  And humanity needed to understand things.

  They needed to know the times the river deltas would be full of rich silt, so they could grow crops. They needed to know the stars, the weather patterns, the diurnal patterns. The world was not predictable enough for mankind’s purposes. So they started making it predictable.

  They shaped and refashioned the globe on the lathe of man’s desires. Dams, to trap water. Fields of genetically modified crops, rotated periodically to preserve the nitrogen balance in the soil. Fisheries, controlled and rationed so that when you pulled a living creature from the sea you always knew that there would be another one left for tomorrow.

  From that day on, nature and technology had been slamming against each other, each in a struggle for control of the Earth. Mankind was the progenitor and supporter of the side of technology – the side that meant cities laid out in straight gridlines, magnetic levitational roads graded to micrometer precision, thermal vents tapped to provide free and nearly limitless energy, everything girdled and locked in place by a wondrous framework of high tensile steel.

  Mankind loved technology – which made things awkward, because man himself was part of nature.

  In the war between biology and computers, the computers seemed to be winning. More and more land was claimed from Gaia’s blind eyes, transformed into gleaming cities of steel. Pest species’ were exterminated, or genetically modified so that they became docile. There seemed to be no brakes on the road to a technological eschaton, where anything and everything made of cells was irrelevant, too useless to even be worth documenting in a museum.

  But occasionally, there were incidents.

  Reminders that perhaps man and his engines of creation perhaps didn’t have the best hand, after all.

  Later that month, a series of inexplicable earthquakes occurred all over Terrus.

  Magnitude 6 and 7 earthquakes were reported in Okinawa, in Madang Province, in Oaxaca. Buildings were toppled, and mines were caved in. Fault scarps permanently lowered the Aleutian islands beneath the waves. Rifts and faults split along the usual fracture lines – the planet bursting the same seams it had burst many times before.

  But there were earthquakes reported in places they had never occurred before.

  In the Ethiopian Highlands. In deep Siberia. Tidal waves destroyed cities along the coasts of France and Great Britain, radial patterns spreading out from a point in the English channel.

  Seismologists were mystified by these earthquakes. They were impossible to explain or understand.

  Generally, the movement of the tectonic plates happens to a depth of about 600 kilometers. Intra-continental earthquakes have only one cause: activity happening below that.

  Cities fell, and their dust occluded the sky.

  Some more interesting discoveries occurred in the wreckage.

  Geologist Nerai Enker was standing in the ruins of Neo Jericho.

  That morning, earthquakes had leveled the city. The first earthquake in Israeli history. Emergency crews were busy bulldozing wreckage, and rescuing trapped people.

  And Enker had nothing better to do than to stare into a fault line.

  The deep chasm seemed to extend many miles into the ground. He’d already laser-plumbed the depth, and knew the truth. 1740 meters at the deepest point.

  It was a classic slip-dip style fault, usually caused by two plates separating in horizontal space, creating a cavity which the upper crust slides downwards into.

  But in Israel, there were no plates that would allow this to happen.

  Neo Jericho was the lowest city in the world, positioned sixty meters below sea level, just north of the infamous Dead Sea. The point closest to the interior of the planet, which made it a place of ongoing fascination for geologists.

  Over the sound of the bulldozers excavating rubble, he heard excited talk. There were other teams, examining other faults.

  He wondered if he should walk over there, and tell them what he’d learned. He was worried that they’d laugh, or call him crazy.

  Fascinating that no matter how many doctorates you got, your brain was still motivated by fear of schoolyard-level taunts.

  There was a pulsing rhythm in the ground. Sudden surges of pressure coming and going.

  They measured rhythmic spasms in the 100-150 psi region. At first, it was presumed that these were aftershocks from the quake, and that they would die down.

  They weren't. And they didn't.

  As the chasm in the ground was monitored over the next few, a disturbingly regular pattern of pressure pulses was recorded. Something too rhythmic to be natural, coming from deep within Terrus.

  He’d thrown the data over to a neural net, and had it sort through it for a pattern.

  The neural net was 99% sure that it was a descending number, in base 12.

  The number would hit zero in exactly three months.

  Valashabad, Mars – June 24, 2143, 1200 hours

  “What does it mean?” Saldeen Zana asked. “Other geological teams are drilling into Terrus, and finding the same base-12 countdown. It’s happening all across the globe.”

  The Sons of the Vanitar convened at Ryush Narya’s palace in Valashabad. Emil Gokla’s mansion had been closed, as part of a scaling down effort that would eventually close the curtains on the entire colony. Just a few years before, millions had lived in Saturn’s orbit. Now, there were barely eight hundred thousand souls. In time, there would be none.

  Everything was moving inwards. Gathering towards the center, like rust flakes before the pull of a magnet.

  Tariffs. The threat of cancelled visas. Countless little annoyances, none of them threatening or sinister on their own.

  The days of mankind spreading across the stars were at a close.

  Now the eight remaining Sons occupied the ballroom in the Valashabad palace, their new base of operations.

  Several of the Razormen, Raya Yithdras’s inexplicable new bodyguards, stood near the back of the room. They had form-fitting chrome armor, and white masks.

  Nobody knew where they had come from.

  “This is certainly not my doing, if that’s what you’re implying,” Raya said. “Countdowns. Base-12. Where have we seen this before?”

  “Caitanya-9,” Saldeen said. “A kilometer down. Has anyone started digging in Israel, or any of the other sites?”

  Raya shook her head. “We can’t. This isn’t happening at a shallow depth. According to those who have analysed the waves, the pulses are coming from six hundred kilometers. We cannot dig anywhere near that far. And there’s danger.”

  “How?” Nolund Esper asked.

  “These earthquakes are unexplained and impossible. There’s a school of thought that whole continents are resting on a fragile bubble of superheated magma. If we start tearing up the ground, we might set off an even bigger disaster. Or so goes the theory.”

  “The theory’s stupid.”

  “I’m investigating this, believe me. It has the full weight of my attention. But let’s pile some more stupidity into the trough.”

  She steepled her fingers, staring at the carpeted floor. It had been steam cleaned, and there was no trace of blood.

  “I think Andrei Kazmer is behind this,” she said. “You’ll remember back to when we got that transmission from him, saying that he was the guardian of Caitanya-9, and that he’d chosen Sybar Rodensis’s side in the war. We weren’t sure what to make of that, and we ignored it.”

  “And we were vindicated,” Nolund said. He was a reedy fellow with strabismus and a hunchback. His lank hair was greasy and ill-washed. “When we attacked and eliminated the Solar Arm’s command, there was no retaliatory action from Andrei Kazmer. In fact, nobody even knows where he is. He’s either dead or has gone off the grid. Perhaps if some of Sybar’s command had lived, we’d have people to question about his whereabouts. As it is, they were all slain in space.”

  “But just because he seeks revenge, doesn’t mean that he seeks immediate revenge,” Raya said.
“The axe needn’t fall as soon as treason is committed.”

  “This is all speculative,” Saldeen said, “and I don’t even know what you’re speculating.”

  “I don’t know, either,” Raya said, “but there’s signs of the Vanitar in this. and of Caitanya-9. The base 12 numbers. The earthquake. The signal from within the ground. The countdown. I don’t know what powers Andrei Kazmer has or doesn’t have, but this has his fingerprints all over it.”

  “Caitanya-9 is destroyed,” Nolund said.

  “Oh?” Her eyes fixed him like the point of a laser. “And how do you know this?”

  “An antihydrogen warhead was fired at it, as soon as it entered the solar system. A wormhole occluded the planet from view not long after, but there’s no doubt the missile exploded. The planet could not have survived.”

  Raya shook her head. “Something I’m learning from this is that you need to see a dead body before the charge is murder. If I could observe the devastated ruins of Caitanya-9, I would believe it’s destroyed. But since I cannot, I don’t.”

  “But why the earthquakes here?” Saldeen asked. “There’s some goddamn fascinating things about Terrus, but it doesn’t really seem like an ancient alien superweapon. If the stories about Caitanya-9 are accurate, the planet’s capable of releasing gamma ray bursts. There’s no mechanism for such a process in Terrus’s crust. Your explanation still doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I’m not explaining anything,” Raya said. “I’m hoping there’s still a mundane explanation for this. Maybe there’s a magma bubble inside the planet, that has somehow affected the tectonic stability on multiple continents. But…”

  “…What if there’s something more?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You know what would help clarify things?” someone asked. “Andrei Kazmer.”

  Raya laughed. “Thank you for that insight. Yes, I would love to ask him a few questions. But where is he? He’s completely disappeared. That’s if he ever returned to the planet at all, except as a figment of Sybar Rodensis’s imagination. The only proof we have that he ever existed was a holographic video.”

  “If he does exist, I intend to get busy finding him,” Nolund Esper. “I’ll need full clearance to the flight records of every level of the Solar Arm’s aerospace network. I need to know who’s coming, who’s going, the wheres and the whens.”

  “Granted,” Raya said. “The space lanes have been a mess of piracy and desertion in the past few weeks. I’m still only getting a handle on the situation. Go and make your own day, though I don’t know what you hope to find.”

  “That’s what everyone hears the moment before they actually find something.”

  The conversation lapsed on to other things.

  With Raya now the Prime Minister, her status as a member of the Sons of the Vanitar was becoming almost secondary. And because few of the others could act without initiative, the organization had stalled.

  None of them minded.

  Things were being set in motion that could probably never be undone. Man’s habitats in space, instead of unfurling like the leaves of a flower, were closing inwards.

  None of them doubted that they were on a winning track. Whatever the future held, eventually it would hold the end to itself.

  They all hoped that the universe would end. If it didn’t, the fate that awaited humanity would be beyond horror. Their own deaths would be no balm to set against that horror, a shambolic mass of humanity progressing ever onwards, suffering and dying in their billions, towards some empyrean of eternal life that would always just be out of reach.

  Whatever was happening on Terrus would not disrupt their plans in any material detail. Most of them had already made up their minds to ignore it completely.

  As one hour collided into another, the Razormen showed no signs of tiring. They could stand on duty for twenty hours at a stretch. They could go without sleep for three or four days. They regularly went four or five days without food. The males were strong enough to bench press a hundred and fifty kilos. They were all, in various ways, superhuman.

  They were a curious creation of Raya’s, using some expedient prisoners she’d had no further use for. Through genehacking and biokinetic implants, they were the ultimate walking weapons. She was happy to demonstrate their abilities. Sometimes people didn’t survive these demonstrations.

  “By the way,” Nolund Esper said, “where’s our adorable friend Ryush Narya? I haven’t seen him all evening. He should have been overjoyed to meet the close friends of his Prime Minister.”

  “He’s…indisposed, at the moment,” Raya admitted. “I thought I’d give him a little demonstration of the Razormen. One of his ministers was the test subject. I’d hoped it would be a nonfatal exercise, but...well, mistakes happen. It was all cleaned up, but unfortunately, I can’t scrub his mind out with bleach. He’ll get over it. And if he won’t, we’ll find someone else to govern his sad colony.”

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

  The following day, Vante was cleaning the deck.

  He'd had a few small-paper customers. They'd purchased some souvenirs – Quetzal shaped medallions, and miniature wind-up dolls. They hadn’t even spent enough to cover the Quetzals’ food for the day, but it was something.

  Then a shadow appeared at the gate, and the good mood generated by his salesmanship evaporated.

  Aaron Wake had come back to complete his ride.

  Vante buzzed him through, already looking around for escape routes. The tall man nodded politely, and walked through.

  He'd gone to a friend in Zephyr city who had access to a civic database, and had run a background check on the name “Aaron Wake”. More than sixteen thousand Solar Arm civilians possessed that name, and two thousand had a criminal record. His guy dived into the data and done some searches based on Aaron Wake's identifying characteristics, but they hadn't been able to find anyone who was conclusively the one now selecting a set of Vyres to put on his back.

  I'm probably just being paranoid, he thought. Probably just a guy with a weird sense of humor. For fuck's sake, they'd never let him on a Dravidian if he had a record.

  “Good morning,” Wake smiled. “How are the Quetzals?”

  “Not bad.”

  …But then, they shouldn't have allowed an orphan involved in a murder case to board a Dravidian, either, yet here I am. The Solar Arm is corrupt. Lots of holes water can leak through. Lots of holes poison can leak through, too.

  “I did some research on them last night,” Wake said. Night on Venus was a joke. The planet took nearly a third of a Terrestrian year to rotate once around its axis. Zephyr City was built inside a bubble of oxygen that floated above Venus's ultradense atmosphere, locked in perpetual twilight, constantly moving to avoid the worst of the heat on the lit side and the worst of the cold on the dark. Day and night existed only by convention. “Into these Quetzals, I mean. A genetic experiment. Reborn dinosaurs. That's really something. Who breeds them?”

  “Nobody, at the moment,” Vante said. “It was a pet project from some guy. He messed around with embryos, not expecting it to work, and soon he had half a dozen hatchlings tearing up his apartment. They were soon too big and strong for him to feed or control, so he sold them to my boss.”

  “Any plans to bring back other dinosaurs?”

  “People have tried,” Vante said. “It usually doesn't work. You don't get any usable DNA whatsoever from your average fossil, and even when part of a dinosaur gets preserved in sap amber, usually it's pretty degraded. Every now and then somebody tries, but the dinosaurs usually die. If the government started spending billions and billions of ducats on this, then maybe...”

  “...Maybe you'd get somewhere, I get it,” Wake said. “I also understand why they don't. Because dinosaurs are uncomfortable. Things that are supposed to be dead, that are now alive. And because they remind us so much of ourselves.”

  Vante picked up a set of Vyres, and threw them to Wake. “What
do you mean?”

  “Look at humanity. Are we remotely equipped to survive in this universe, in your opinion? Take away this bubble of oxygen, and everyone in Zephyr city would burn. Titan is minus one hundred and eighty degrees in Saturn’s summer. Neptune has five hundred kilometer per hour winds. There's only one world where we're adapted to live, Terrus, and that's just a place where survival becomes difficult instead of impossible. Drop a person into the African savannah or the Amazon rainforest without tools or supplies, and see how long he lasts. Even in our cities, we’re menaced by asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, and threats from inside, like antimatter weapons. Frankly, none of us should be alive. Makes you wonder when the god or super smart alien running the universe will run the sums, decide we're not fit for life, and come to set the record straight.”

  “There’s earthquakes on Terrus now,” Vante said. “Really bad ones.”

  “I’ve heard. Twenty million dead so far. Maybe the time is now.”

  “Maybe.”

  They both had their wings in by now. Vante performed a final check of the safety equipment, then gave Wake thumbs up.

  They leaped from the platform like synchronised swimmers. But they would never strike the pool below. If they did, they would die.

  They spread their wings, going into a controlled glide that took them far from the platform. Side by side, they raced towards a floating buoy, hanging several kilometers away above the aqeous brown haze.

  Vante was far lighter, and he easily beat Wake. They sat on the rimmed metal edge of the buoy, gazing up at the massive hulk of Zephyr city. The sky above was filled with dancing points of light. Scimitar squadrons.

  “A lot of ships up there,” Wake said. “Anything going on?”

  “No,” Vante said. “Just a demonstration. Raya Yithdras has released the first budget for the government, and it cuts public funding to the colonies by twenty percent. And Venus is smack-bang in that twenty percent.”

  “So, what's Venus doing about it?”