Revelation Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Andrew Lane and Nigel Foster and Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Leave us a review

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  REVELATIONS

  BOOK III OF THE

  NETHERSPACE TRILOGY

  ALSO BY ANDREW LANE AND NIGEL FOSTER AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE NETHERSPACE TRILOGY

  Netherspace

  Originators

  REVELATIONS

  NIGEL FOSTER

  TITAN BOOKS

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  Netherspace: Revelations

  Paperback edition ISBN: 9781785651908

  Electronic edition ISBN: 9781785651915

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2021

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 Nigel Foster. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  To my parents and their grandchildren

  Unless it involves giant asteroids or zombies in frocks,

  when the world ends chances are no one will notice.

  Not at first.

  The end of the world will sneak up on us.

  And when we do notice it’ll be too late.

  It always was.

  Truth is, we never had a chance.

  In the left corner, wearing a hopeful smile, humanity.

  In the right corner every lethal being in the universe.

  Many of them so advanced we’re less than cockroaches.

  We should be amazed we survived as long as we did.

  Aliens know no rules.

  Unless.

  There’s always hope. Miracles do happen...

  1

  The insanity began with insult followed by death.

  So far, so human?

  Not in a trillion years.

  * * *

  On 3 July 2067 the city state of San Diego told the city state of Houston to stick the new tariffs on joss where the sun never shines, and it wasn’t the far side of the moon. San Diego produced particularly fine and popular varieties of joss – that family of smoking drugs with all the classic varieties of high and so much more. The end of cancer and the advent of lung-scrubbing technology had made inhaled drugs everyone’s high du jour.

  Joss was Brave New World’s soma, without the vacuous morality and state control. Joss was both companionable and perfect for the solitary minded. Higher tariffs weren’t just trade posturing. They meant war.

  Houston said okay, we’ll make our own and by the way, any citizen of San Diego who commits a crime in Houston gets double the sentence that a Houston citizen would. Even if that meant executing the same person twice.

  San Diego said good luck with that, we also have several Houston citizens in jail and the sharks are hungry. Surf’s up!

  It was a short-sighted and curiously stupid exchange, since the pleasantries came not from fallible, emotional bureaucrats or politicians but from two black metal globes the size of watermelons that resided in airless, armoured vaults, one in each city. No one had ever imagined that the artificial intelligences who ran the world’s city states could be so... well, childish. Reckless. Human. Worse, the AI overseers at Earth Central merely shrugged and said “time you all grew up, work it out, we’re busy”. This in itself was cause for alarm. Those big old AIs never miss a chance to prove how superior they are.

  Experts had long theorised that awareness and indeed intelligence was an emergent characteristic of an initially simple system that increased in complexity. Make a system complex enough and it will start exhibiting behaviour that can’t be predicted from the sum of its parts. This could be the first real evidence the theories were true.

  But not the last evidence. Not by a long, squealing chalk.

  There again, if you want proof take a look at humanity.

  * * *

  Texas as a state and a political entity may have vanished in the Great Upheaval following the arrival of aliens, but Texan character and culture lived on. Within two days, a six-man posse set off to teach those pussy, oyster-sucking San Diegan pimps a lesson. They rode latest-model jitneys that sounded like galloping horses. Their weapons looked like Navy Colt 45s and Winchester 75s but fired uranium-depleted ordnance rather than bullets. None of the posse had ever killed another human, but they’d watched the most violent vids.

  The trail would lead into the Wild and through the Mojave Desert, allowing a Las Vegas stopover for posse R&R. They wore custom-made long yellow leather coats called dusters and battered Stetsons. They pictured themselves riding out of the Mojave, indistinct against the glare yet still carrying menace. The posse was not good on regional geography. TK Jones led them. His day job was interface for a medical-surgical AI, meaning he sat behind a desk and looked wise. He planned to be remembered by an eternal hologram that would outlast cockroaches and even tardigrades. TK Jones saying “We have good news” would play as the sun bullied a naked Earth to death.

  * * *

  The posse had their personal AIs blanked out for the duration. What they had in mind was best unobserved by third-party witnesses, especially the planned R&R in Vegas. Besides, Major General Sam Houston hadn’t needed an AI at the Battle of San Jacinto. The posse was also fighting for freedom, as TK frequently reminded his comrades. Not many Houstonians were at the send-off. Most thought it a bad idea.

  * * *

  Around noon and deep in the Wild the posse came across a spherical, warty-skinned floating alien, a metre and a half across, wearing a many-pouched belt and nothing else.

  They killed it.

  The killing wasn’t intentional, they were only trying to make it jump. A modern version of firing bullets around a man’s feet. They meant no harm.

  They just weren’t very good shots.

  “Better bury the sucker,” TK
instructed. He supposed he should say a few words at the graveside.

  “Little guy died long ways from home,” TK intoned. “It were purely an accident. We’re truly sorry, ever meet his kin we’ll make it right.”

  That night they camped by a rock pool with rushes and sweet water, at the base of a steep, boulder-strewn hill. TK thought it perfect. They made a fire and ate stasis-packed chicken-fried steak followed by pecan pie, washed down with hi-alc Dr Pepper. Afterwards they sat drinking margaritas (okay, Dallas invented them, but so-o-o good), smoked a little joss and called home.

  Family and friends all agreed about what was beamed from the Wild. First their loved ones’ smiling faces. A few happy words. Then, as Mary-Ellen, TK’s fiancée, sobbed prettily to the media, screams and hard, angry rainbows.

  Only their jitneys were ever found. And their twisted chassis were so melted and fused with each other, the Houston rescue party was glad their people were gone. Even more so when a lone survivor was discovered naked and burbling half a kilometre from the campsite. Something had scooped away his eyes, nose, lips, teeth and half his tongue. No blood. The missing parts had been replaced by soft, newly grown skin. He could breathe through his mouth, and maybe hear through his perfectly shorn ears. It was, many of the relief party thought, with the hysteria that often comes with horror, the worst loss of face they’d ever seen. No one said so. Instead words of encouragement were intoned in case whoever it was could hear. Then they injected him with a massive dose of horse tranquilliser, a sentimental addition to many Texas rescue parties. The dead man was buried deep where he died and no one spoke of it again.

  Many Houstonians got angry with the Wild... until the Wild released surveillance drone footage of the accidental death of an alien.

  Mary-Ellen took up with a reporter. TK Jones never got his hologram.

  * * *

  Madness across the globe.

  The same day the posse set off an event occurred seven thousand, seven hundred and ninety-one kilometres away.

  Andrea Mastover, honorary mayor of Esher-within-Guildford, a protectorate of London City State, was told to “dress her age” by her personal AI. Who then added that she shouldn’t bother because her clothes draped like worn sheets thrown over a chair. The AI added that her husband was sleeping with the man next door, her children never came to visit because “you bore the fuck out of them”, and it, the AI, heard good things about a euthanasia clinic on the moon called The Last Dawn.

  * * *

  Both Houston and Esher were unthinkable, and dangerous in their implications. If anything the Mastover event was the worst. A personal AI was meant to be an unconditional friend, to love and support you until death or a newer model.

  It wasn’t only the AIs who were misbehaving. Even as Andrea Mastover was sobbing brokenly over a large gin and tonic, the Pacific Riots began. There was much burning, killing and rape for no apparent reason other than fury and hate.

  “I just felt angry,” a captured rioter from Sydney City State said, before he was taken away for the ceremonial shit-kicking without witnesses. “I mean, it’s all crap, right? Fuck 'em. So I did.”

  Yet people still believed it was only a blip. Alien tech would triumph. Mummy would kiss it better.

  Wrong.

  * * *

  On 5 July Berlin’s AI announced that the famous 7 restaurant, made possible by alien anti-gravitational technology, was (direct quote) “a massive architectural carbuncle and has to go”.

  Anson Greenaway was in his office when Twist, the GalDiv AI, passed on the news. Greenaway’s first reaction was what the fuck?

  The Berlin AI was behaving, well, out of character. It had always been scrupulously correct. But now it was more like Houston and San Diego.

  Greenaway’s next reaction was a mixture of fear and excitement as he realised this was the final battle of a galactic war played out over millennia. Countless races and civilisations had vanished or been subsumed into an alien pre-cognition empire that lacked a ruler or even an army. Less an empire, in fact, than a way of existence that allowed no other.

  Greenaway had taken Kara Jones to meet Marc Keislack at the 7 restaurant. A time of relative innocence for them both. Later they were linked by the simulity training and introduced to Tse. Much later they’d recognise the lies Greenaway had told, and understood why. He wouldn’t miss 7. It was where he’d privately regretted deceiving Kara Jones, albeit for a cause more important than human morality. Keislack could look after himself. Jones was a soldier, like Greenaway. She’d deserved the truth.

  * * *

  Greenaway stood in the crowd, wondering how 7 would be taken down. Berlin’s AI had marked out a safety perimeter in bright gold. Greenaway knew that if it wanted them dead, there were easier ways of doing it.

  There I go again. Applying human emotions, logic, to an alien device.

  He thought he heard Twist laughing, but it could have been the crowd.

  * * *

  Three hours after Berlin’s announcement 7 fell down. Slowly and gracefully rearranged itself into a neat cube with no entrances or exits. There was a smell of roasting meat and several people near Greenaway licked their lips.

  “No real harm done,” a woman said. “No one died.”

  “And a hell of a show,” a man agreed. “Glad I saw it for real.”

  Greenaway wanted to shout that this could be, it was the beginning of the end. Even if they believed him, what good would it do? If Earth was to be lost – and there was still a Kara Jones-shaped chance for survival – let the people be happy for as long as possible. Instead he returned to his office.

  “No interruptions,” he told his latest PA – the last one had been murdered when he was kidnapped – and for the first time wondered how she saw him. “Unless the world ends.”

  “It wouldn’t dare!” She saw him as an attractive man in his mid-fifties who looked fifteen years younger. So many people did these days, another benefit from alien tech. Looked and biologically were younger, part courtesy of their personal AIs, and part from serums developed from the native plants found on several of the colony worlds, which had the effect of shocking the human body into rejuvenation. No one was sure of the long-term effects, or if there were any. People assumed that if there were problems, they’d be cured by more alien tech: Mummy would make it better.

  Wrong.

  The PA liked Greenaway’s salt and pepper hair, his eyes green as the North Sea, the strict mouth that never quite hid humour and sensuality. She wondered when he’d "proposition" her. HR had used the word without being precise. Only that he might and wouldn’t be upset if she said no. She’d almost walked out – why the fuck should he be upset? And proposition was very old-fashioned, as if she wouldn’t be expecting or hoping to be asked, like a dumb-ass heroine on a vintage vid. Glad she took the job, though. It was time to do some propositioning herself.

  * * *

  For Greenaway there was enough time to write another letter to his long-dead wife. Letters that were burned as soon as finished... for the secrets they held, for the weakness they betrayed.

  He took out the hand-made paper and old-fashioned graphite pencil. Poured himself a seventy-five-year-old Talisker malt. Thought about the first sentence.

  Nothing.

  Writer’s block.

  Instead thoughts of Kara Jones sidled into his mind.

  He knew why. It was obvious. His work was done and now it was up to Kara and Marc and Tatia – when they got back together – to save Earth, as his dead friend Tse had forecast. Greenaway’s only friend had been the "good" precog who’d masterminded the resistance against the alien pre-cog civilisation who, along with their human allies, wanted Earth owned and changed.

  * * *

  “How,” Greenaway had asked many years earlier, “could three people make such a difference?” Which was when he learned that pre-cognition never showed the why, only the events and way stations necessary for success. In fact even trying to discover the why affected
the possibility/ probability matrix that underlay reality.

  It was then he also learned the major players had been bred to their roles, including himself. It had made him feel alone.

  “Never so cold-blooded,” Tse had soothed. “A precog saw that if a couple had a child, and that child met a specific person and they had a child, then chances were that one day their descendant would, somehow, defeat the alien pre-cogs.”

  “So only somehow. Hell of a gamble.”

  “All we had. Have. Kara Jones, Marc Keislack, Tatia Nerein. One day they’ll be in a position to save us. And you’ll have put them there.”

  But nothing guaranteed. Pre-cognition was never that precise. The way stations to success could change. Other human pre-cogs wanted Tse and his people dead. They were very old money, determined to be in control.

  * * *

  He didn’t like to think about Tatia. His daughter, given up for adoption in order to save her life. Save the world. So noble the first reason, what any loving father would do. The second? Problematic. Greater love hath no man than that he give up his child for the common good. Never Tatia’s choice, though. Instead she had been nudged by probability, as read by Tse and other good pre-cogs, throughout her life. An oh-so-minor action here, a faint influence there until she was ready to go Up and experience the nightmare of aliens slaughtering humans for no apparent reason. She’d come through, as Tse had predicted. She’d become a leader. Had developed those psychic powers necessary to defeat the alien pre-cogs. Had matured from spoilt princess to responsible woman...

  ... had become the Trojan horse she was always meant to be, the virus that would destroy the prime alien pre-cog race, wherever and whatever it was.

  As the head of GalDiv, a man who’d devoted his life to protecting Earth, Greenaway knew satisfaction and pride. But as a father he only knew guilt, regret and a deep longing for the daughter he’d never really known.