Contents
Cover
Also by Andrew Lane and Nigel Foster and Available from Titan Books
Title Page
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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
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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
