An End

The Silver Trilogy: Book Two

by Paul Evan Hughes

AMIDST SILVER

It was a beautiful hand.

A small freckle on the surface above the beginning of the index finger was the only deviation from creamy white skin, stippled ever-so-gently by hairs the color of nothing and sunrise and days she spent in happier times with people now long-dead or long-something-Else. She studied her hand with an intensity that she had not been able to summon for years in the moments before it left her forever, in those burning moments before her perfect white creamy freckled left useless left hand was severed from the rest of her trapped form in a flash of white and fire and pain.

“Fleur. You shouldn’t have tried that.”

The klaxon was wailing incessantly and piercingly from somewhere above her head, now pressed against the cool relief of the metal floor, but she could still recognize that voice, and the presence that accompanied it.

“Make that awful noise stop.”

She did not look up, but instead found some solace in the metal of the floor as her body began shaking, and as uncontrollable sobs emanated from places within that she had not wanted to acknowledge for years. Her slow tears mixed with the spreading bloodpuddle as she pulled her non-existent left hand back away from the shattered, useless control panel that would have effectively ended not only her own life, but the lives of these men who would be taking her home. If she had only been successful… If she had only been able to press that button in time… Things would be different. Better. There would have been certainty in death, but now…

“Stop her bleeding. We can’t take her in like that.”

She held her eyes closed and sobbed into the coagulating blood on the floor. She felt strange hands begin to lift the crimped and twisted metal of the collapsed bulkhead from her back. If the vessel hadn’t been torn apart in the boarding, she might have been able to activate the destruct sequence. If they hadn’t—

“It’s no use, dear. Don’t tear yourself apart about it. You knew we would be coming to get you eventually. You knew that Mother would not be pleased.”

A blissful moment of relief from crushing pressure as the final weight was released from her back. Might be a few cracked ribs. Perhaps a crushed pelvis. But altogether, the item was intact. The hand was an acceptable loss.

“You’ll be fine, dear.” Gentle hands lifted her to her feet, and to the surprise of all three residents of the chamber, she stood on her own, eyes blinking away her own blood, stump of a left arm held closely to her chest. Her breathing was fast-paced and labored, but still she stood defiantly. Silently.

The man who was Whistler lifted her chin up, looked squarely into her eyes. He brushed her hair out of her face and wiped a bit of blood from under her left eye.

“Minimal damage. Mother will be pleased. Let’s go.”

She recognized Whistler, but did not know the other man. Both agents of Mother were draped in the traditional long black garment that Fleur knew would conceal a multitude of weapons, each with a varying degree of effectiveness or pain-inducement. The man she did not know was at the present replacing the long, black weapon with which he had severed her hand with an energy burst back into one of the raven folds of his cloak. He eyed her coldly, as if she were the cause of his displeasure with life.

“Ah yes. Fleur, you have not met Nine. Nine, Fleur. Fleur, Nine. You’ll have plenty of time on the trip home to get to know each other.”

“The trip home?” It was the first thing she had said since the arrival of the agents.

Whistler smiled slyly. “But of course, dear girl. Mother wants to see you again.”

She began to sob once again as Nine pushed her forward, out of the chamber. Whistler walked over to the destruct panel and gingerly stroked the smooth black surface, wiping up a fair amount of Fleur’s blood. With Nine and the girl now safely out of the room, he quickly stuck the tip of his finger in his mouth, licking off and savoring the precious blood of the human girl. Mother would be pleased indeed.

Whistler’s vessel hung like a tumor from the underbelly of the ruined prison galleon. Already, Fleur’s former home was falling apart in great segments as bulkheads burst with the same squealing porcine terror that had impaled her on the bridge just after they had been boarded. With a shudder and a quick burst from the phase rudder, the agents’ vessel detached from the fiery wreck. Fleur watched silently from a porthole as her home of the last seven months drifted into the void.

“You don’t say much, do you?”

She turned to meet Nine’s gaze blankly. “What model is he?”

Whistler sat down in a swirl of black robe in the thrust chair facing Fluer. “How did you know?”

“I always know. What model?”

“Nine is a nine.”

She scoffed. “Figures… And you? How long until they deem your techbase obsolete, Whistler darling?”

The manufactured grin faltered for an instant, but then returned in force. “Dear girl, I will never be obsolete. I am one-of-a-kind.”

Fleur smiled her one-cornered smile and flexed her beautiful new hand, still held in place by a metal brace. It worked, but it would never be hers. There was no freckle to denote her identity. She wondered whose pattern had been sacrificed to give her a new prosthesis.

“Why?”

Whistler stopped twirling the shock of pure white hair that grew from his hairline for a moment and looked toward the porthole. “You should know by now, little flower.”

“What happened? Did Mother…”

“She did, and you will, and we won’t, and it does.”

“How many galleons are left?”

Nine’s eyes lit up. Whistler grinned.

“How many?”

“None.” Nine turned to her, his voice a basso growl. “Yours was the last.”

Tears threatened to erupt from her bloodshot eyes, but Fleur maintained her composure, at least enough to squeak out an almost-inaudible “Zero?”

“What, dear?”

“Zero? What about Zero?”

Again, Whistler’s grin dropped from his face for an instant. “We don’t know. We’ve not heard from him in quite some time. Machine could have been lost eons ago, and we wouldn’t know for decades.”

“I would know.”

“Of course, dear.” Whistler rummaged through the folds of his robe, his hand finally emerging with a silver flask. He unscrewed the top and took a long drag from the amber liquid within. He held it out to Nine, who silently shook his head, and then to Fleur.

“No thanks. I don’t drink.”

“Suit yourself, missy. It’s going to be a long ride home.”

Fleur turned to the porthole, looked out into black and nothing.

Home. A long ride home.

It was a dream, she hoped. A dream… Such peace in that thought. Such quiet. It was a dream, not a memory. It had never happened. She had never lived that. She could never have lived that.

Great silver teardrops falling from the sky, bursting open in the city center with flickering laser fury, spewing forth hundreds thousands tens-of-thousands of Mother’s perfect society’s rejects, each armed heavily with light and projectile weaponry, heavily armored with fields and shields and wielding their blessed black blunderbusses before them as they carved apart the unsuspecting inner sanctums of the worlds upon which they were unleashed… In the eon of civil war, Mother’s rejects were also her closest allies, her most precious resource on the planets that they were sent to pacify. Humanity was a failed experiment. Humanity was a brat of an offspring. Mother’s rejects were often sent to the colonies to correct mistakes that she never could have foreseen, or if she had, she simply sat in the earth and watched as thousands of her most hated and treasured children laid waste to those worlds who would not bend to her will.

She would have sent the Artificials to correct situations, but although they were fully capable of most tasks she asked of them, in younger generations, brawn had replaced brain, and brain was of course the key element of subduing any rebellion that took place billions of units and thousands of years away. She had tried to engineer their evolution so that the Artificials would be more like Whistler, but it would seem that Whistler was a fluke. An incurable, lovely, hated little fluke… How he was feared by the others. How Mother herself feared him. The fact of the matter was that Mother was somewhat grateful that there was one and only one Whistler… An army of him would have been unstoppable, and most of her pleasure came from watching her blessed organics blindly follow her orders. Let them revolt! Let them cut off contact with Mother! They knew the consequences… They knew that with the next tide, one or two or ten galleon prisons would arrive in system and end the unrest. Mother loved it. Mother required it.

“When was the last time you slept?”

Fleur blinked her eyes, shifted her blank gaze to the pile of blackness whose eyes glowed at her from the darkness of the passenger cabin of the Agent transport. Nine was beside her, his breathing implying a meditative sleep that could never be actual sleep. She had been lost in that near-bliss for a moment herself… But these were days of endless days. They were a species that could not sleep, in that void between existence and unknown realms that would have been perfect for a slumber of forevers.

“I don’t know. It’s been years. Decades. You?”

Whistler took another pull from his flask. “Fuck you.”

Fleur leaned forward in her vacuum seat. “What’s the matter, darling?” She said the word with all of the acid that she could muster. “Never slept, have you? My beautiful, flawed puppet. So tired, aren’t you?”

Whistler’s eyes blazed from the darkness. “No rest for the wicked, dear.”

Fleur swam to the porthole, looked out into the pure night. No stars to mar their beautiful passage through the ether. No other vessels, anywhere. All was perfect and nothing and somehow home. Somehow wicked… Somewhere out there were worlds that she had burned. Somewhere there were entire systems laid waste by the bastard spawn of Mother. Were the cities still burning in the Wound? A million planets, each throwing fire and the stench of death far into the very void through which she screamed.

She breathed onto the not-glass of the porthole, leaving a misty layer of exhalation. With her new hand, she awkwardly drew a smiley face. Spinning around to swim back to her vacuum chair, she caught Nine’s gaze. Whistler was otherwise engaged, studying the threading on the mouth of his flask. For an instant, a grin formed on one corner of Nine’s mouth, but then it was gone.

Zero, where are you tonight?

Nine was his exact image. It was deeply disturbing to see him there, the ninth incarnation of someone she never should have and never could again love. Zero, trapped on a machine sent into the edge of all that would be. Forever lost in the night, traveling too far beyond to ever return… His fate would be a solitary death, if ever he could die.

Whistler placed the flask back into the hidden recesses of his robe, rose from his seat, swam into the darkness beyond the passenger compartment. “I’ll see if we are within contact range yet.”

Fleur said nothing, watched as the man who was not a man slipped out of the compartment. She hesitantly looked up at Nine, who was looking back. She reached over with her new hand and looped her tiny fingers through his own, cold and distant and almost there. Instead of surprise, he gently squeezed her hand with his own. He leaned over to her little ear, whispered.

I contain multitudes.

swimming and drowning and gasping for air life breath past.

It swam in the heartbeat of the liquid expanse, the gentle resistance of fluid caressing every curve of his human-esque form. Inhale, exhale, lub-dub, lub-dub. It gagged on the viscous gelatin that kept its physical form from liquefying at the impossible speed of Light X Three. The machine within which it was housed was itself a liquid of sorts, splashing across the dark night of the Outer faster than anything before envisioned. A solid within a fluid within a fluid, Zero coursed into the future on a machine of inescapably-beautiful silverthought.

“Machine?” he asked into the featureless expanse of his prison with a voice of drowning liquid syllables, choking on the thick biological secretions that kept him alive and lonely and curious. “What time is it?”

Stop asking, Zero. It does no good to hope.

“She might have—She could have—Maybe…”

She hasn’t, and most likely won’t.

Zero touched his fingertips to the slick wet surface of his face, exploring his cheeks for any sign of the tears that he so desired to produce. He spun around in the bowl, his term for the sphere of liquid that had been his prison for seven months. Seven months? Was it really only seven months?

“Mother was wrong about us, Machine.”

Do not question our creator, Zero.

“You don’t have to be loyal to her out here… You’re going to die out here too, you know. No one will remember us. Seven months… They’re all dead already.”

They were dead before we left. The system had been initiated long before our exile began. There was never a chance that we could have—

“There was always a chance to stop it. There was always hope.”

Zero could feel the narrowing of non-existent eyes in anger. He could sense Machine’s subtle fury building in the vibrations of the ocean within which he floated.

“Machine, I command you to turn this bucket around and sail us back home immediately!” Zero smiled as he said it, but was meant with a silence that was probably only minutes, but could have stretched to hours in the nothing.

Humor doesn’t suit you.

“I wish—”

Wishing doesn’t suit you either. You know the impossibility of what you desire.

Zero knew full well that what he desired was an impossibility, and he knew the magnitude with which it was an impossibility. He had been forced to witness the construction of the system-sized engine that had hurled the Machine and its insignificantly microscopic prison into the Outer. He had seen the billions of labor drones harvested from countless colonies to construct the gigantic engine. He had seen the billions left outside to die when the construction was complete, as well.

You can’t go home again.

Zero frowned in the nothing. He would find a way. Somehow.

He would find a way to return to Fleur.

I contain multitudes.

Nine disengaged his hand from Fleur’s as Whistler swam back into the passenger cabin. There was a look of concern on Whistler’s shadowed face. Fleur could not tell if it was because of something he had seen in the cockpit, or if he had been watching the dance of digits that took place on the armrest between the vacuum chairs.

“Whistler?” Nine’s eyes had drawn to a concerned visage. “What?”

“We’re near… Very near to home. But there’s no signal.”

“No navigation signal?”

“No signal at all. Nothing is coming from the surface.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing at all!” Whistler snapped. He waved his hand in the air before him and a holographic display of the approaching planet appeared. Whistler grasped the globe of light and spun it around so that the dark side of the planet faced Fleur and Nine. “What do you see?”

Their faces spoke only of confusion, so Whistler answered for them.

“Dark. Black. Nothing. It’s nighttime. Do you see any cities? Any lights at all? Do you see any evidence that this planet is inhabited?”

“It’s been forty thousand—”

“It’s the extinction. Mother started it without us. That’s the only explanation.”

“There could have been a natural disaster… Massive power outages. Some cataclysmic—”

“She killed them already! She started the fucking extinction without us!” Whistler whirled around furiously, throwing the holographic globe at the porthole, where it silently shattered and dissipated. His black robe gracefully enveloped him as he slunk into his vacuum chair, sulking. “Mother owes us an apology.”

The vessel shuddered as it entered the thinning atmosphere of the dead world that had been Earth thousands of lifetimes before. Whistler sat, a scowling child, arms crossed over his chest as he dreamt of the extinction of which he had been no part.

“She owes us a fucking apology.”

The Vegas Gate was so named because of an ancient city that had once stood on the site where now the gargantuan alloy shield doors controlled access to the inner workings of a person named Mother on a planet named nothing anymore. Miles and hundreds of miles and thousands of miles down, the access tunnel stretched into the crust of the world. No one had ever measured the distance, but Hank suspected that they were pretty damn near the center. The other Gates had all been lost in the sporadic warfare that signaled the end of an era, before Mother’s mission had been successful. Hank sometimes dreamt of a simpler time and a simpler place where cowboys had been the norm. He felt out of place here at the Gate control. Hell, he felt out of place anywhere on this rock. How many tens of thousands of years had it been since he had seen another human being? How many hundreds of thousands of years since he had felt the soothing touch of a lady?

He stepped back from the edge of the Vegas Tunnel, which stretch vertically as far as he could see in both directions. Gate Control was little more than a ridge around the tunnel’s interior, a massive metal construct built over the course of centuries by the slave populations of entire systems. Hank leaned back against the safety cage that kept him within the confines of Control and prevented him from falling thousands of miles to his death at the center of the planet. Mother would not be pleased at all if her only surviving human fell to his death.

Hank retrieved an ancient pack of Marlboros from the front pocket of his denim shirt. He took great pleasure in removing the cellophane from the pack and tossing it over the side of the Control cage. It floated lazily down into the blackness of the tunnel. How long would it take for the wrapper to finally hit bottom? How many millions of wrappers would it join on the bottom of the Vegas Tunnel?

A shiny golden Zippo ignited his delicious sin, and Hank inhaled deeply, never fearing for life. Mother would see to it that the cigarettes, one of the few luxuries that he had requested for his tour in Vegas, would never spin any free radicals out of place to damage tissue and spur cancer growth. Mother looked after Hank quite well.

He looked out across the void of the tunnel. Sometimes he imagined that he could see the other side, the faint flicker of his cigarette reflected on the mirrored wall. Hank had never been one for imagination. It was not his place in Mother’s plan to imagine.

He took one last draw from the cigarette and tossed the butt over the side. He wondered for a moment if the cellophane wrapper had even landed yet.

Incoming vessel.

Hank’s jaw dropped and he frowned reflexively and he spun around to the simple control panel on the wall of his makeshift living quarters. Incoming vessel? There hadn’t been an incoming vessel in decades. The control panel flashed with the display of a standard Agent corvette cutting through the atmosphere.

Incoming vessel.

“Identify.” Hank blinked at the croaking sound of his own voice. How long had it been since he had spoken out loud?

Agent Whistler. Agent Nine.

“Anyone else?”

One human passenger.

“Identify.”

The Catalyst of the Sixth Extinction.

“Fleur.”

“We’re in the tube.”

The Agents’ corvette slid into the silver passage to the interior, a great reflective phallus cleaving the retracting miles-thick doors of the Vegas Gate. Centuries of accumulated debris from the surface fell away before them along the sporadically-illuminated drop, creating a dun-colored light show as the corvette’s thrusters shifted prevailing weather patterns in the vertical hole in the planet.

Nine stood at the porthole, looking out into nothing but polished silver drop. Fleur was lost in her thoughts, sitting in the vacuum chair with her arms looped around her knees, which were drawn up to her chest. Whistler observed her from the shadows he dragged around him wherever he went…Was she shivering? It wasn’t cold in the vessel, or at least he didn’t think it was too cold for the organic.

“Something wrong, poppet?”

Fleur’s head snapped around and her gaze traveled up and down the form projected before her. “What does it matter now? We’re here, aren’t we?”

Nine sat back down, looked from Whistler to Fleur. “Mother will not be pleased, but she is forgiving. She is a creature of—”

“Divine Mercy and Wisdom. Don’t. Just don’t. We know why I’m here.”

They fell.

Hank stood on the edge, looking up for any sign of the approaching vessel. He could not yet see it, couldn’t even really hear it, but there was something…He could sense a change in the pipe. A resonance. Something different in the natural resonating frequency of the metal tube that had been his kingdom for centuries. He lit another smoke, inhaled, exhaled, tapped ash off the edge of the hole in the world and waited.

He watched as the docking cradle, dormant for decades, silently whirred into life and slid out into the blank center of the pipeline, deftly catching the vessel that fell suddenly and without warning into its waiting embrace. Hank took another draw from the butt between his lips, then tossed it disdainfully out over the edge, watching the still-burning ember arc out into nothing as the vessel in the cradle drew closer. The cage opened in front of him as the dock engaged. All was accomplished in near-silence, the only sound the hiss and crackle of the cooling phase drives at the aft of the corvette. Hank cleared his throat, coughed loudly, the noise echoing out and back and forth along the pipeline. How long had it been since he had spoken? It felt as if his throat were covered in a thick layer of dust from the disuse of his vocal cords.

The docking port of the corvette opened with a liquid slurp as the phased vessel re-integrated into a solid. Exterior lock, interior lock parted, reminding Hank so much of female genitalia that he smirked under his luxurious handlebar moustache. The interior of the vessel proved to be just as dark and mysterious as the unintended metaphor.

Two black shadows emerged from the short passageway into the ship, hoods drawn over their features. Hank flinched for a moment in uncertainty, hand moving in a flash to his side, where a shiver gun fashioned to look like an ancient revolver hung from a leather holster. Faster than his human form could ever manage, one of the black-hooded forms flew forward, knocking Hank asunder and painfully disabling him with one tap of a hidden energy weapon. Silvery threads of weapon silk spun around Hank’s torso, pinning his arms to his sides as he fell with a meaty thud to the metal floor.

Whistler threw the hood back from his face and bent down to Hank’s level, where he produced a slender black device and thrust it into Hank’s neck. The old cowboy gasped with the sudden and sharp pain, and struggled under his silken snare. The black tube in Whistler’s hand beeped, and the weapon silk disintegrated. He stood, outstretched a hand, helped Hank to his feet.

“Whistler, you fucking prick.” Hank rubbed the reddened spot on his neck where a faint line of blood was running.

“Just following procedure, my dear pretty waste of flesh.” Whistler’s grin illuminated the dock. “Wouldn’t want an imposter, would we?”

“Who the hell would want to impersonate me? They’ve all been out-system for centuries.”

“Well, we didn’t know that, did we? We just got back from picking up the poppet from her hiding place. When the master’s away, the Hank is at play, I trust?”

“Bored as shit, if you really want to know. She hasn’t talked to me in years.”

For the first time, Whistler’s gaze faltered. “No contact?”

Hank looked side to side, as if it really mattered. Mother was within earshot in the entire system, and this close to her center, there was nothing he could do to hide this conversation from her. “She’s just been quiet lately. Ten, fifteen years maybe.”

Nine pulled the hood back from his face. “We’ll have to go see.”

Whistler nodded, walked back to the docked corvette. He walked up into the vessel, pulling Fleur from her solitude out onto the metal surface of gate control. Hank looked her lithe form up and down, reflexively licked his bottom lip.

“She’s grown.”

Nine walked closer to Hank, frown on his face. Hank tore his gaze from Fleur and looked safely at the floor.

“We’ll need to drop. We need to take the catalyst down to Mother.”

“Machine?”

Zero?

“They’re at the Gate. In the tube. With Mother.”

There is no way you could know that.

A chuckle drowned by the viscous gelatin of the Machine atmosphere. “I know.”

Which one now?

“Eight…Or Nine. I can’ tell. They’re so close.”

And what do you think Mother will tell them?

Zero shook his head, sending waves gently splashing away from his submerged head.

She’ll tell them the same thing she told you before the launch. No hope, no tomorrow. No Sixth Resurrection. The probes picked up nothing from the Outer. We haven’t found anything out here…There is nothing left to find.

“They must have left something…Somewhere. They couldn’t have come from the empty between the systems.”

Whatever they left behind, it’s gone now. Mother saw to that, I would imagine.

“We have to find a way…We have to get back.”

Zero, shut the fuck up.

Fleur held limply on to the edge of the drop vessel as it plummeted to the bottom of the vast silver tube. The wind blew her hair up, where it whipped back and forth, the frenzied brunette fronds of a hurricane palm. Snarls of dark hair, defying gravity, lashing at her mouth and eyes. She let go of the railing, absently pulled several trapped strands from her mouth, where it had made a feeble attempt at strangling her.

Nine placed his large hand on the small of her back. “Hold on.”

She smiled at his concern, but the corners of the smile dropped a bit in realization. “You’ve never seen her, have you? This is your first visit.”

Nine looked off into the distance, the hypnotizing blur of silver and fire and speed.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Sometime I forget that you’re not—”

“—him?” Nine did not look at Fleur as he said it, but his hand retreated from her back. Fleur held the railing again with both hands.

Whistler stood at the center of the drop vessel with Hank, who had the most ridiculous goggles covering his eyes. His hat, secured to his neck with an ancient leather cord, whipped around his head much as Fleur’s hair created a halo of dun around hers. Hank clenched a cigarette between his teeth, the ashes flying straight up as the structural integrity of the tip destabilized, sending a glowing crimson shower of miniscule firespots into the heavens upon heavens above. As the vessel slowed, less ashes were torn away from the cigarette tip, which eventually regained the standard physics of smoking, and lazily grew a beard of gray ash.

“Center Earth. Thanks for flyin’ Air Hank, you lucky bastards.”

Whistler daintily motioned with his hand and one edge of the drop vessel folded upon itself and descended to the polished metal floor as a ramp.

“Care to join us, Hank? Mere might enjoy your company after all these years.”

Hank took a contemplative draw on his smoke, flicked it away, where it spun out into the shadows of the bottom of the Vegas pipe. “Sure, what the hell.”

For a moment, Fleur just stood by the railing, looking at everything and nothing, her small hands latched firmly to the metal. Whistler and Hank sauntered down the ramp out onto the uncertain black of the tunnel floor. Nine placed his hand over Fleur’s, gently lifted her fingers from around the railing.

“It’ll be all right. I’m here.”

“You don’t know her. You don’t know what she has planned.”

Nine’s eyes dug into Fleur’s mind.

I’m here. Nothing will happen.

“Come on, you two! We have an meeting with Mum!” Whistler was entirely too cheerful as he beckoned to Nine and Fleur, who walked slowly down the ramp from the drop vessel. Whistler turned back to Hank, looped his arm through the old cowboy’s as they walked. Hank shot Whistler a deadly glare, but shook his head and said nothing.

They walked down the canted passageway to Center Earth. Mother was near.

It is near.

“What is it?”

I do not know.

Zero frowned in the drowned bowl, shook his head in disbelief. There wasn’t supposed to be anything out here. There couldn’t be anything out here in the Outer. Mother’s little jihad should have seen to that. If the vessels approaching them were some cut-off wing of one of Mother’s Extinction fleets, there would be no hope of survival.

Machine filled the bowl with an exterior display so that Zero could see what was happening. They were still traveling at Light X, but whatever was chasing them was traveling at a far greater speed. Zero knew that there could not be anything chasing them at faster than Light X speed, but still, there it was. There they were: great black shapes blocking out the nothing between the suns of the void.

We’re dropping from Light X.

And so they did: the dizzying whirlpool of space lashed forward and backward as they reintegrated into a solid form. The bowl became a solid, smooth sphere and Zero dropped from his swimming position in the center of his prison, unceremoniously slid on his ass around the “bottom” of the bowl until he regained his balance and stood up.

“Machine?”

Don’t ask. I don’t know. We’re being scraped.

Zero knew that “scraped” was Machine’s colloquialism for being scanned, which in the case of biological silverthought vessels required a small scraping of genetic material from the vessel’s hull. Machine shuddered as it was enveloped by the darkness of the unknown pursuer, and umbilicals began cutting away segments of its surface. Zero lurched on the concave (or was it convex?) floor of the bowl, struggling to maintain his foothold on the slick non-metal.

“They have to be part of the Extinction fleet. There’s no one else out here.”

Machine stopped shivering, fell completely still. Silent.

“Ma—”

Zero’s inquisition was cut short by a startling burst of white light and hideous shriek as the bowl was filled with the sparks and fire of an incision torch. A great circular segment of the bowl was sheared loose and slid down to the bottom of the chamber, its edges still red-hot. Zero simply stood with jaw agape as two human creatures removed black goggles and surveyed the interior of the bowl. One trained a vicious black tube that could only be a projectile weapon on Zero, motioned for him to exit. It spoke in a language that he could not begin to understand, then reached out in a language that Zero could not help but understand.

[get out of there. come with us.]

silverthought.

“What are they saying? What the fuck are they saying?”

“Who cares? Light ’em up.”

Zero’s heart slammed in his chest as it was filled with memories of a past that he had unsuccessfully tried to bury. Visions of a sunset, a city, and screaming masses, lambs ready for slaughter, only they were screaming in a language that didn’t exist in any of the libraries, on a planet that wasn’t in the Registry, but hell, Mother said kill them so kill them, right? Women and children, hands raised helplessly before them in surrender, screaming and weeping and pleading in an unknown tongue.

“Trigger it. We’ll iron out the paperwork later.”

Zero’s eyes rolled back as he fell to the floor of the bowl, overcome with a realization that he was not yet ready to acknowledge. The two men peering down from the circular cut in the chamber began to climb down to pull him out. Zero was lost in dream.

It was like a dream, Fleur decided, as they came to the end of the tunnel to Center Earth. The plush carpeting had begun several hundred feet back, and they now walked on shag the color of neon green. The walls appeared to be covered in wooden paneling instead of the sterile silver expanse of the Vegas pipe.

At the end of the tunnel, there was a simple wooden door with a brass knocker and a peephole in the upper center panel. Fleur took in her surroundings with utter disbelief. It did not look at all like the living quarters of the Divine Merciful and Wise Mother of the Sixth Extinction that she remembered.

Whistler strode confidently up to the door and swung the brass knocker down several times. The tap-tap-tapping was more annoying than effective, and they were met with silence from the other side of the door. Whistler nervously smiled, inhaled, knocked again.

“Mother? We’re home, and we’ve brought your poppet.”

There was a faint sound of tiny footsteps from behind the door, followed by an odd metallic scraping sound that drew closer. The metal plate covering the far side of the peephole swung out of place, allowing a glint of light to show through for a moment, before the plate was dropped back into place. Clicking and ratcheting and twisting sounds of various locks, deadbolts, then the metallic scraping sound again and the door swung lazily inward, revealing nothing but another dark passage, an ancient folding metal step-stool, and a little girl of approximately five years of age.

She smiled and took Whistler’s hand, leading him into the dark hallway beyond the door. He turned and shot Nine a look of silent concern as he walked into the inner sanctum of Center Earth. Hank chuckled a little under his breath, took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a battered red handkerchief before following Whistler in. Nine gently grabbed Fleur’s forearm as she walked by him, and she stopped. Nine leaned in close to the side of her head.

“What it is? What’s wrong?” His whispers were louder than he had anticipated, and Fleur reached up, pressed the tip of her new index finger against his mouth.

“She’s dying.” Fleur withdrew her finger and softly pulled Nine after her as they walked through the doorway into the center of the planet.

It was a feeling of falling, definitely, but Zero knew that his limp body was actually being pulled up the side of the bowl by hands that were human if not actually human. He was powerless to resist, yet could not tell if it was his own body’s defense mechanisms that had paralyzed him, or if an unknown weapon had been used against him by the two miners who had found him. And that’s what they really were, right? Two miners who had found a treasure buried at the center of a biological fluid vessel, like the milk chocolate center of a sugar-coated confection. He was the prize.

Up, up, up and then down, slammed to the floor and dragged up an incline, a smooth circular ramp of melted liquid silver, senses still not responding, but the sensation of warmth underneath his legs and lower back unmistakable as the vestiges of a mortal wound to Machine that had been carved in to the bowl.

An end to the tunnel, and bright lights. A room filled with other men, most holding weapons before them, most standing silently as Zero was lifted on to a hovering stretcher and clamps were secured around his arms and legs. There was a flickering undertone of communication, just fits and snatches of thought, mostly well-masked against Zero’s prying and curious mind.

Zero’s head lolled to one side, still out of his control. A man draped in black material approached, quickly slid a needle-tipped device into Zero’s neck, withdrew it, waited for a reading. The device emitted a shrill beep. Again, the man slid the device under the flesh of Zero’s neck. Again, the beep. The man shook his head, consulted with another person who was draped both in black material and the shadows of the corner of the room. The words were a jumbled mess of guttural exclamations and smooth vocal elisions. Zero knew that it was not a human language.

[no data on file. it has to be—]

[don’t]

The man in shadows stepped forward, gazed down on the disabled Zero with fire and contempt barely held placid under the glare of steely eyes. He reached out and turned Zero’s head toward him, so that their eyes met.

[the sum of our fears. it hasn’t ended yet.]

The words tore into Zero’s mind, a brilliant flash of tugging heated pain nestled directly behind his eyes. For an instant, he caught an image of what appeared to be two planets colliding, an image of a screaming woman trapped underneath the rubble of a shattered building, a hand so close a hand looking at looking out at his own hand wiping blood from a broken nose and feeling tasting bleeding that blood himself. The image retreated an instant after it appeared, and he was left with only those eyes steel gray eyes looking into and through him with a hatred he could not begin to describe with words.

The man turned the aura of communications that emanated from behind his eyes directly at Zero. The experience was intimate, disconcerting, terrifying.

[which colony are you from, son? who sent you?]

Perhaps the most disturbing moment during the whole trip to Center Earth for Nine was the moment when the creature that was Mother looked back mischievously as he held Whistler’s considerably-larger hand and then began to skip down the remainder of the passage. Whistler had no choice but to skip alongside the Divine Merciful and Wise Mother of the Sixth Extinction, even summoning enough acting skill to let out a joyful “Hurrah!” as he skipped with her.

She laughed as only an energetic five-year-old can, be damned the fact that she was little more than a machine-based lifeform from beyond the stars that was solely responsible for the deaths of trillions upon trillions of sentient beings in this backwater of the collapsing universe. She reached up for the doorknob to the inner chamber, but couldn’t seem to grasp it. She looked back down the hallway at her step stool. Whistler realized the dilemma, opened the door for her. She sweetly smiled, and ran into her abode, the curls atop her head bouncing playfully along. She was wearing a delightful pair of magenta corduroy bib overalls and a light pink shirt. Barefoot. She sat down in the center of the room, which had been redecorated in a childhood motif since Whistler had last been there. There were stuffed animals, dolls, a large rocking horse in the corner. Pastels with few primaries. On the floor, she devoted her attention to a stack of coloring books and a large pile of crayons, every color imaginable. She scribbled delightedly for a while, filling in the image of a duck with an umbrella an intriguing aesthetic of raw sienna and silver, ignoring the four people grouped around her, looking down in an uneasy mixture of confusion and horrifying fear. Eventually she was satisfied with the coloring job she did on the duck and his little umbrella, and she looked up, the smile gone from her cherubic face.

[fleur, you betrayed me.]

The words hung languidly in the air for a moment, and Fleur stumbled over her own voice, tried to think of something, anything to say in her own defense. Mother raised one hand, and Fleur fell quiet.

[hush, little one.] The imperative was made doubly-disconcerting by the fact that it came from a five-year-old with the voice of an ancient, the voice that transcended voice, emanated from the entire expanse of the Vegas tunnel, swept across the surface of the dead planet and reached out to the void through which the Extinction Fleet once sailed on their divine mission of pacification and purification.

[i won’t kill you for betraying me, but you may very well die where i am sending you.]

a haze of pain beyond pain, loss beyond loss…

The scraping had been more of a gouging and dismembering as the inhabitants of the unknown vessel cut into and through Machine to extract its precious cargo of Zero. Machine gasped a breath that was not air and shuddered a shudder of non-shudder. Such pain in this existence. The other senses were lost, but still it felt pain.

Enveloped. Encompassed. The liquid metal of the Machine was quickly destabilizing, becoming something else. Machine sensed that Zero had been taken from his bowl. Without Zero, Machine would quickly dissolve into nothing more than several trillion tons of silver liquid biomass. Machine couldn’t hear Zero’s thoughts anywhere near.

point of origin?

The inquisition shot through him unexpectedly, resonating his entire being. The question echoed back and forth, forth and back in every color of the rainbow, every language every spoken and several never ever spoken. Machine, torn apart and invaded for the Cracker Jack prize of death row inmate and certified troublemaker Zero, felt at once raped and fulfilled by this new voice…It filled in the cracks, smoothed over the incision, patted the scrape and kissed it, making everything better. It was as close a sensation to le petit mort that Machine ever had and ever could experience.

point of origin?

Again, the question. Should Machine answer this stranger who was in his (head? mind? what are you thinking, machine?) soul? Would it jeopardize his mission? He decided that the fact that he was incapacitated and bleeding out the precious bioneural gelatin was a pretty good indication of game over, Machine. What could he lose by telling this voice everything that it wanted to hear?

point of origin?

Earth. Planet One of fourteen million surveyed and pacified planets.

rephrase: point of cargo origin?

Machine thought for a moment about that one…Where exactly was Zero from?

Uncertain point of origin. Last planetary contact with Planet One.

redirect: list applicable cargo contaminants.

Again, Machine was confused by the question. He could feel this faceless voice searching though his accumulated knowledge, faint fingertips tickling deep inside of his essense.

rephrase: is cargo contaminated with the genocidal catalyst referred to as “fleur”?

Machine had a moment of realization. Vestigial emotions and visions of a burning city, a screaming woman reaching out, and burning silver falling from the sky. This presence was not from the Extinction Fleet. The vessel that had encompassed them in liquidspace was not from earth or Mother or the any of the Inner. This was something unanticipated, and much, much worse.

Zero has a natural immunity to the Fleur catalyst.

Machine felt it then, the abrupt, stabbing pain of his end, as the liquid metal voice pierced and poured through the final interior battlements he had erected in his mind as a last line of defense. Invaded and suffocated and consumed by that beautiful, lyrical presence. Machine gasped and drowned in his own liquid soul.

[more tea?]

Whistler was still holding the tiny plastic cup to his lips, but he looked up obligingly, smiled his patented killer smile, all sparkly whites to match his shock of curled white hair. “But of course, Mum. It is delicious.”

Mother smiled her angelic child smile and poured more tepid water from her plastic teapot into Whistler’s cup. He nodded his approval and gratitude and took a sip. Fleur watched with mild interest as her mind wandered, rabbit in the headlights of an uncertain end. She thought with mild unease about the intricate process that was taking place instantaneously within Whistler as his projected form catalyzed and converted the liquid water into another part of his illusion. Liquid becomes upload becomes holographically-projected drip of water running down the chin of a man who was no more physically alive than the plastic teacup from which he drank. Whistler laughed, embarrassed at the spillage, daintily wiped the water from the periphery of his goatee. Fleur did not like to think about the technology that allowed him to exist.

Mother sat back in her tiny chair, linked her fingers through each other, hands resting on her breast-less chest as she leaned back on two chair legs. She surveyed her guests with an air of satisfaction. She was obviously enjoying the company. Her company was clustered uncomfortably around the round wooden child’s table, sitting on low children’s chairs, sipping lukewarm “tea” from tiny pink plastic cups. Nine looked the most uncomfortable, his knees projecting up like the columns of a bridge as he maneuvered his unwanted tea between them.

“Four on the floor, please, Mother.”

She frowned, a petulant child and not the horrifying act of extinction that she truly was, but obeyed Whistler’s gentle instruction and leaned forward so that all four legs of her diminutive chair made contact with the brilliant green rug. Her brow furrowed in frustration, she waved her hand and the pink plastic tea set was no more, the cup disappearing from Hank’s fingertips as he placed his lips to it to take another half-hearted sip. He looked around awkwardly, brought his hand up and itched the side of his head instead, as if that were his intention all along. Fleur grinned.

[you have nothing to smile about, little one.]

“You’re one to talk, Mother.”

The silence in the room was more deafening that the shriek of collapsing bulkhead that had pinned Fleur to the deck of the prison galleon and prevented her from ending this charade once and for all. Whistler and Nine looked at each other in silent agreement. Hank cleared his throat and shifted in his tiny seat.

“Why didn’t you just have them kill me? You’ve taken everything from me that I ever wanted already. Just kill me and get it over with.”

[not that simple, really. as i said before, i have one more mission for you before your job is done, little flower.]

“Don’t call me that.” Fleur’s eyes burned with an intensity that cut through the dim playroom and the suffocating inhumanity of its inhabitants with razor precision.

[but that’s what you are…the little flower. the little silver flower that blooms and blooms and chokes out all that stand before it with shining crimson—]

“Stop it. Just tell me what you need from me.”

Mother smiled her innocent smile. [i need nothing from you but you, dear. the human race needs you.]

“There is no human race anymore.”

[but of course there is, poppet! why, there are you and—]

“Me and who? Hank? That’s all you have left of us. Me and Hank, right?”

Hank had been absent-mindedly playing with his ancient Zippo, but he looked up at the sound of his name. He was sitting adjacent to Mother on this tiny wooden circle, and he looked down at her, smiling a nervous smile.

[no, fleur. just you.]

Hank’s eyes widened in the instant before Mother struck out, knocking him out of the chair and across the room, his head connecting squarely with the wall, dazing him. Mother stood, walked calmly to Hank’s side, withdrew a blade from within her pink corduroy overalls. Nine sat up in his chair, ready to spring to Hank’s aid, but Whistler grabbed his shoulder, held him back.

“Remember who you work for, boy.”

Hank tried to sit up, but only succeeded in knocking his cowboy hat to the floor. Mother made quick work of him, blade slashing back and forth across his throat before he could react to the sight of the armed toddler before him. His lifeblood coursed out of the ravine Mother had carved in his neck, and Hank gasped his last breath with a look of utter incredulity on his weary, weathered face. Hank slumped against the baseboard, growing puddle of red around him.

Mother returned to the table, calmly wiped her blade on the pretty doily upon which the teacup had been resting. Bright droplets of Hank’s essence had spattered across her face, but she did not seem to notice. The blade returned to its hidden sheath.

Tears welled up in Fleur’s eyes. “How could you—”

[hush.] Mother withdrew a silver sphere from her seemingly endless supply of interior overall pockets, rolled it across the table. A wave of her hand and the ball flashed to life, projecting a perfect image of Hank into the chair where he had been sitting. The image immediately grabbed its throat in terror, but finding no mortal wound where there should have been one, simply glared at Mother.

“You fucking—Mother, what the fuck?”

She looked all-too-pleased with herself, and grinned widely. [you wouldn’t want to go where i’m sending you like that, hank. you wouldn’t last long as a flesh construct.]

Hank was wordless. He grabbed his projector and placed it in his pocket. “You could’ve fucking warned me. Uploaded me and didn’t fucking warn me.” He looked uneasily over at his own dead body.

[oh, hush now, hank. you’ll like this even more than being a cowboy.]

Fleur’s eyes flashed with realization. “No humans…Just me. You killed him so that—”

[and her eyes were opened.]

“But we’ve cleaned everything already. There were no more systems to infect.” She began to shake her head back and forth, unconsciously denying that which she knew she could never refuse.

[let’s just say this is something special.]

“I can’t! I won’t do it. I—”

[you will.]

[natural immunity. that’s an asset, son. right now, your only asset.]

Zero was held motionless, floating in the center of the spherical chamber to which they had transported him. It was dark, but three revolving spotlights, perhaps force generators, were fixed upon his limp body, holding him in stark contrast to the rest of the expanse of shadow. They surrounded him, these men who spoke with lips and tongues that projected nonsense and minds that projected perfect silverthought, violent in its intensity. He was struggling against the mental onslaught of hundreds of prying minds, the last of his mental defense mechanisms slowly cracking and falling.

[we’ve interrogated your machine. you’ve come a long way, Zero.]

how can he know that?

The man before him smiled, his lips curling to enunciate those grinding words that were quickly surpassed in volume by the direct mind-to-mind communication that was much more effective, even if it was highly disconcerting.

[your machine…it gave us everything we need to know about you.]

The man walked closer. Black-clad hand reached out, gently touched Zero’s cheek.

[so long…it’s been so long since we’ve seen you. eons.]

Zero frowned, beyond confused. That touch, almost imperceptible as (leather?) fingertips traced his cheekbone. The man’s eyes were a piercing blue, so faded as to suggest white. Impossible blue, the blue of a life spent in the darkness of space. Zero had the most unsettling feeling that he knew this man from somewhere, sometime…

[we sent her to populate your galaxy many, many years ago. after she stopped responding to our communications, we just assumed that the colony had been lost. but it would appear that the dear creature you call “Mother” has been busy, busy, busy.]

The man grasped Zero’s chin firmly, locked his gaze into Zero’s eyes, and his world became a burning city, a woman screaming, looking up, reaching up, pointing into the sky, where a vessel hung, lights flickering from within, a radiant sphere of white expanding out from the interior as phase drives amplified the Fleur virus, disseminating it throughout the atmosphere, where it rained down, tiny flecks of silver, a confetti of glitter that dusted the faces of the assembled masses and spawned, spawned on and in their flesh, screaming flesh as the roar from above, the many engines of an Extinction Fleet descending from above, a tumult that was indescribably beautiful and horrifying and—

Zero closed his eyes, snapped his head back and forth, those alien hands now grasping both sides of his face, those alien eyes now drilling into his mind with pure white fire.

[she sent you to kill us, you know. or maybe the beauty of it is that none of you knew. you thought it was a jihad. you thought it was civil war.]

Zero opened his eyes and looked desperately up at the stranger, whose face was white and held a sheen of sickness and exhaustion. The stranger shook his head, cleared his throat, and the suffocating mental embrace was released.

“It wasn’t a civil war, Zero.” He assembled his sentence very carefully, spoke the words with a childish fascination at the sound, the taste, the touch of the new language. “It was a genocide.”

“I’m so sorry.” Zero felt all of his energy, all of his vitality pour from his body at the man’s touch. The Stranger’s touch, for that is what that silken mental embrace felt like. He was a stranger, but so remarkably familiar…“I never knew—”

The Stranger smiled the sad smile of ancient resignation. “Of course you never knew, Zero.” He leaned in close to the incapacitated Zero, gently, tenderly kissed his forehead, tousled his hair. The gesture was so kind, so loving. Who was this man?

With a wave of his hand, the beams of light holding Zero suspended in the air slowly faded, lowered him to floor level, where he stood, weakly rubbing his hands over the cold gooseflesh of his forearms. The Stranger’s head tilted in concern and then understanding, and he removed his black overcoat and wrapped it around Zero’s shoulders.

“Come on, son. There’s much to talk about, and so little time.”

[it would seem that we were a little too efficient.]

Fleur glared at Mother, whose eyes betrayed the obvious relish with which she was stringing them along. The little girl sat in her tiny chair, her hand placed lovingly on top of Hank’s new emulated hands, uneasily clasped on the table before him, on which was printed a circular pattern of dancing barnyard animals, all linked hand-to-hand, or hoof-to-feather, rather. Mother patted Hank and gravely rested her chin on her fist, shrugging with feigned indecision.

[too efficient. that’s the only way to explain it.]

“Just tell us what you want to say. Stop these games.”

Satisfied that she had stirred enough emotion in Fleur for now, Mother smiled widely, crossed her arms on her pre-pre-pre-pubescent chest.

[you ran when you found out what you were doing to those worlds, little flower. you hid on a prison galleon bound for the outer and hoped that we’d never be able to find you. if it weren’t for whistler and seven and eight and nine, you’d have escaped with the rest of the vermin.]

Whistler and Nine sat side-by-side, each flickering in perfect projected unease. Neither could look up and face the gaze of Fleur.

“They brought me back unharmed.” Fleur instinctively flexed her “new” left hand, constructed from an emulated parts clone, raped from another Fleur to fit the only Fleur that truly mattered. “So you must have found another planet. Another rogue world.”

[something like that.]

“Just fucking tell me!”

A motion too fluid and too fast for Fleur to comprehend and they were alone in the room, Whistler and Nine and Hank vanished, the only hint of their existence the tiny silver spherical emulation projectors that dropped into the children’s chairs in which they had been sitting. The balls rolled around the concave (convex?) depressions meant for human posterior regions, then fell through as the chairs, the neon green carpet, the room itself faded, dissolved. Fleur and Mother were left alone in the true Center Earth, which appeared from the fog of illusion that Mother had created for her guests.

They hung in the center of an expanse that dwarfed the Vegas tunnel, its walls lined with machines of limited sentience that skittered about insectlike, gigantic machines the size of mountains roaring along on Mother’s orders of processing the interior of the planet. Fleur’s throat closed in as she saw what the majority of the machines were working on. Mother remained in her child form, and playfully swam over to where the silver balls that were Whistler, Nine, and Hank floated. She grabbed all three and placed them in the pocket of her overalls.

[like my ship?]

Ship was an understatement. A vessel the size of a continent was being constructed out of the carcass of planet Earth in its very interior. Hundreds, thousands of Mother’s machines swarmed over its surface, which sparkled with countless welding blasts, shrieks of metal, the reverberating clang of miles-long segments of the vessel slamming into place as the machines hurriedly constructed it.

Fleur was wordless. She had seen the vessels of the Extinction Fleet, but never anything like this. She had only heard of one larger vessel—

[zero’s vessel was bigger, yes. almost the size of an entire system. but it just didn’t have the vitality of mine. of ours.]

“Where—Where are we going?”

Mother swam over to Fleur, held her hand gently. Her smile was wide and terrifying in its implications. Before she said a word, Fleur knew her answer.

[we’re going home, little flower.]

Zero tried not to be disturbed by the line of black-clad men that walked in silence on either side of him. The Stranger was at his side, walking at his slow, exhausted pace. Zero was beginning to suffer the adverse effects of gravity re-entry. His body ached for the fluid enclosure of the bowl, the warm comfort of liquid space. The only sound in this passage was the shuffled steps of hundreds of feet. The men walked in silence down the slightly-canted corridor, constructed entirely of matte plastic? metal? something, curving upward so that he couldn’t see the end.

“Your Machine has been dissembled and absorbed into—” The Stranger paused, Zero feeling the search for the correct term (essence singularity soul parent) “—Heaven.”

Zero’s watched as the Stranger reacted to his expression of confusion, and found it reflected in the man’s face. He stopped walking. “Heaven?”

“Our creator…and benefactor. You will experience it. It is ineffable. Difficult to name.”

“And you? What should I call you?”

Again, that disarming grin. “Stranger will do. My name doesn’t matter.” A reassuring squeeze of the shoulder, and they walked on, flanked on both sides by black and silence. Soon, they came to the end of the corridor, which opened out into an impossible expanse that took Zero’s breath away, almost quite literally.

The walkway extended out to an airlock, at which was docked a shiver vessel of uncertain design. The airlock was the only blemish on the surface of a clear globe, the walls of which were constructed of miles of transparent, glassy plastic. On the other side of the clear shield was an enclosed solar system, millions of miles wide. At its center, shimmering weakly, was a dying star. Zero turned to Stranger, his face broadcasting his amazement at the phenomenon that he was witnessing.

“It was a binary system. When your Extinction Fleet first made an appearance, we were able to hide one of our stars here. This vessel is all we have left.”

Zero touched the miles of glass before him, which greeted his fingertips with a cool, static attraction. The airlock door cycled open beside him.

“You have the technology to place a solar system inside of a vessel?”

Stranger scoffed. “Not the entire system. Just one star and forty planets. The others were left behind, where Mother’s fleet eventually got to them. We’ve been hiding in the Outer ever since your genocide spread this far.”

Zero slumped against the glass in realization. Stranger made no move to help him up this time, but stood behind him, arms crossed. Zero looked at the assembled black-robed men standing in formation on either side of the airlock, watching him. Silent. Expressions of such loss on their faces…

“No women. Mother’s fleet—”

“Your fleet, Zero. Of course, you never knew. Your Fleur never knew. You were just following orders. The virus killed them all, even after we escaped with half of the system under shield. The catalyst was at work even before the final seal was welded into place.”

“I never—”

“Come on.” Stranger motioned toward the open airlock and the shiver vessel beyond, embedded within miles of solid glass.

“Where are we going?”

“Heaven.”

Zero warily stepped through the airlock and into the confines of the shiver vessel’s passenger area, where two vacuum chairs sat behind the transparent front needle of the ship. Stranger took a seat, and motioned for Zero to do the same as the lock doors cycled shut behind them. They were alone in the vessel, the men of sadness left on the other side of the door. Zero could feel their touch, though, the subtle undercurrent of hatred that permeated every breath.

Before them, through the front of the shiver, the dazzling visual dance of miles of protective shield glass stretched, bending the light of the dying star at the center of this impossible expanse into infinite prisms and rainbows. A bark from Stranger and the vessel responded to his guttural language, firing up the spinners inside of its phase engine, resonating the vessel until Zero felt certain that his teeth were being jarred loose from his skull. He had always hated the resonance of shivers, that sickening vibration that at once tickled your entire body and made you nauseous as it created that perfect phase shift that could cut through anything solid. Whenever he was in a shiver vessel, Zero always felt like he was the slug in the barrel of a common shiver gun, which, in essence, he was.

“How thick is the shield?”

“Thinner than you think. We’ll reach Heaven in no time.”

With a wave of his hand, Stranger signaled the vessel and it was off, phasing at Light X through the globe of glass that protected all that remained of his homeworlds. Zero sat back in the vacuum seat, gritting his teeth against that uncertain shift from solid to near-liquid. He much preferred the comfort of the bowl, the complete immersion in phased gelatin. Traveling in a shiver was the dry-fuck of interstellar travel: plenty of motion, but little pleasure.

Stranger caught a bit of this thought, and shot Zero a sly smile. “You miss her, don’t you?”

The vibration of the shiver was almost too much for Zero to take, an aural onslaught, but he heard Stranger clear enough. “Who?”

“The Catalyst. Poor boy, you loved her.”

Zero was silent, but his mind broadcast all Stranger needed to know.

“We’ll have to kill her, you know. Nothing personal.”

Zero turned. “Right. Nothing personal.”

Stranger’s eyelids drew together in suspicion, but he said nothing. And he heard nothing; Zero’s mind was far too shielded now to read. He watched the needle before them, and the swirl of primaries blending to tertiaries.

Fleur, where are you?

Where am I?

Fleur’s heart lurched into her throat, so sudden and unexpected was her realization. Just a young woman, floating here in the void within the planet that had once held a childhood, a hope, a little stream and ferns and wind blowing in the valley, peace, sunshine. An awful mockery of that childhood swam beside her in this incomprehensible world, a little girl of five, wearing bright pink corduroy overalls and holding in her hand three silver spheres.

Where am I?

Mother smiled that smile, tossed the three projectors to Fleur, who mindlessly caught them and held their metallic warmth in her new left hand, still under warranty. [you’re afraid, little girl.] Mother did not realize the ridiculousness of her statement, a child referring to someone five times her age as “little girl.” But of course, she was ancient, as ancient as the stars, or at least an ancient as those who had conquered the stars before Earth had solidified from the detritus of the galaxy.

“Yes.”

[good. you have every right to be afraid. we’re going to meet some people who won’t exactly welcome us with open arms, people who sent me away a long time ago.]

A machine approached at breakneck speed, hovered dangerously close for a moment, long enough to tousle both Fleur and Mother’s curly locks.

“Bring it back. The room. Whistler and Hank. And Ze—Nine. Nine.”

Mother grinned savagely. [herr freud would be proud, love.]

“Bring it back.” Another machine was fast approaching, this one hauling a nondescript metal phase drive segment that was easily the size of a mountain.

[but don’t you find it beautiful? all of these loyal workers, doing exactly as i tell them? this awful planet reconstituted into something beautiful. his name is gary.]

Fleur was confused, but the confusion was replaced with fear as the machine towing the phase drive passed, close enough to spin her around in its wake. All around them, countless gigantic machines were coming and going.

[actually, the name is guerra, but he prefers being called gary, so that’s what i call him.]

“Who?”

[our ship. gary. would you like to meet him?]

“Do I have any choice?”

Mother grinned. [you’re learning, little flower. you’ll do just fine.]

She grabbed Fleur’s hand, and away they flew, toward Gary the warship.

It was cold here at the center of the planet, much colder than Fleur had anticipated, and the speed of their flight only heightened the sensation, caused gooseflesh to erupt on her exposed forearms, caused her breaths to come in gasps as her body

shivered, he remembered, as the current drew them together, drew him within. That hushed gasp, the lines of her eyebrows furrowing and the feel of fingernails tracing gently at first and then with increasing pain as they began to carve faint furrows into his shoulders and back. Frantic dance of flesh as the waves consumed them both, his eyes opening for a moment to gaze upon that dark spill of curls, a halo around her head and she whispered something in that perfect moment, whispered that word that had haunted him now for months and years and decades and haunted him, just a simple word, whispered in that perfect climax, that perfect moment where he was lost in waves of

“Heaven.”

Zero snapped from the shiver-induced reverie, that half-sleep that so many passengers in shivers had reported, that inexplicable torpor that accompanied the vibration of phased travel. Stranger looked at him disdainfully, as if the sleep reflex was below him.

“What?”

“Heaven approaches. Or rather, we approach Heaven.”

Zero remembered their vessel’s exit from the glass field, but not much beyond. Their shiver was now being escorted by an armada of larger vessels, some shaped like atmospherics, and others definitely spacers. Zero stretched to look out the rear of the vessel, and found that there were already many more orbiting spheres behind the shiver than in front. They had passed without incident through much of the enclosed solar system, apparently drawing a crowd as they passed.

“You needn’t worry about our escorts. They’re just observing.”

Something in Stranger’s voice resonated with its own undercurrent…Zero tasted distrust in that statement, and he caught a brief unshielded image of an accusatory finger pointed at a man in white, or perhaps just a white beard, a soundtrack of that guttural bark that these creatures used as a language. Stranger was definitely hiding something…But Zero could sense already that not all was well under this glass sky.

One of the smaller vessels swooped dangerously close to the shiver, then fell away, phase drives leaving a contrail of blurred space behind it. Stranger looked intently ahead, ignoring the display. Zero, however, watched the smaller vessel move to rejoin the formation of similar vessels that it had been flying with. A brilliant flash and it was cut apart in mid-maneuver by a corvette that came in fast and low. Several destroyers moved to intercept the corvette, and another group moved in close around the shiver. The world inside the snowglobe erupted in a lightshow.

Stranger barked orders at the vessel, which increased speed and rocketed toward the sphere closest to the trapped star. All around them the world was lances of fire and phase and shiver.

“Just observing?”

“Quiet,” Stranger growled back. “We’ve had some trouble since your arrival.”

“Some trouble? All is not well in paradise?”

[paradise?] the word slammed into Zero’s mind with horrifying force. [it’s not been a paradise since the Exile sent us your precious little flower. how dare you speak of paradise when you have the blood of an entire species on your hands?]

The words echoed through Zero’s mind, a sickening sensation much like the shiver. “it’s a civil war. You don’t know what to do with me.”

“That’s right. We’re killing ourselves out there,” he indicated the skirmish taking place around their vessel “Because of you.”

The shiver continued toward the first satellite of the dying star, flanked on all sides by massive destroyers. Corvettes and fighters still swooped in and out of their path, but they were for the most part instantly cut apart by the shiver’s escorts.

The shiver slowed as it entered the atmosphere of the first planet. The surface below them was bereft of signs of life, a black icescape on the side that they approached. Their destroyer escorts stayed in orbit, and the shiver was followed by an array of smaller atmospheric vessels. Zero strained to see the lights of cities or airstrips, but was disappointed. As far as he could tell, there was nothing constructed by humans on the surface of this planet.

“It’s beneath the surface, at the planet core.”

Zero understood then, of course Heaven was at the planet core. Where had they found Mother when the planet had begun to cool and die? The planet core. These creatures were not surface-dwellers; they preferred the privacy of the interior.

“Something like that.” Stranger folded his hands across his chest.

A great gap opened in the darkness, illuminated from within, an immense silver mouth stretching into the planet interior. The shiver fell inside, and the mouth closed. With one swallow, the vessel plummeted into the distant cousin of the Vegas Gate. Pearly gates or not, Zero was on his way to Heaven.

Foreboding, suffocating sense of foreboding.

Higher and higher, caught in the swirls and eddies of the new atmosphere at the center of the planet, hovering like eagles, linked hand to tiny hand, two human forms gracefully swimming through air to the warship that was named War but preferred to be called Gary. Mother laughed, the child that she had become laughed, and Fleur cringed as she heard the depth of the decay, echoing forever through the tumult of a machine ocean. Mother was dying, and dying quickly. The destabilization of that presence that had permeated the entire galaxy of her exile in these last hundred-thousand years was evidenced in that child’s blissful laughter. Fleur shivered from the cold and from the depth of her despair.

They approached the warship from beneath. Machines were affixing the final phase drive to the aft of the vessel. Countless automaton assemblages of stone and metal and fiery shift swam in schools through the current of Center Earth, crawling over Gary and putting finishing touches on his superstructure. Mother deftly avoided the dutiful slaves, and her grasp on Fleur’s hand tightened as they floated up to the underside lock.

[gary!] Mother shouted with all of her mind. [let us in!]

US? WHO’S “US”?

[me and fleur, gary. let us in!]

FUCKIN’ A.

Mother visibly blushed, much to Fleur’s amazement. [gary hasn’t been properly trained yet.]

The underside lock began to cycle open. Mother towed Fleur along behind her as they rose up into Gary, who was spouting a string a silverthought expletives into the void.

As the lock slid shut below them, Fleur took in her surroundings. She had expected a cavernous interior, but it would appear that most of the bulk of Gary was taken up with the phase drives and megascale mechanics that would launch them into the Outer. The room into which they floated was another simple construct of Mother’s mind, a suburban living room with a comfy couch, beanbag chairs, even a pool table and wet bar. Instead of a cockpit, Fleur found herself in domestic tedium. Instead of a control panel, Fleur found a twenty-seven-inch television. As Mother descended and as her feet touched the shag carpet, Fleur could have sworn she heard music. Elevator music.

[welcome to your new home, Fleur. we’ll be spending lots of quality time together.]

GIRL, YOU CRAZY.

Mother frowned. [gary, be quiet.] She walked over in the restored gravity and threw herself down on a beanbag.

Fleur stood, taking it all in, then remembered her own passengers. She released her clenched first and threw the three silver projectors into the air, where they sparked to life, emitting Hank, Whistler, and Nine in perfect emulation.

MOMMA, WHAT THE FUCK—

[gary! i’d like you to meet whistler. whistler, gary. gary, hank. hank, gary. nine, gary. gary, nine.]

AND A PARTRIDGE IN THE MOTHERFUCKING PEAR TREE?

Whistler flattened the front of his robe. “Mother, what is this?”

[this, whistler darling, is gary. he’s our new home.]

Nine walked to Fleur’s side, his cold projected hand engulfing hers, fingers looping through fingers. She smiled, but not before catching the icy gaze of the five-year-old in the beanbag chair.

“Gary is a vessel. Where are we going?”

[somewhere marvelous! i know that you’ll enjoy it.]

Hank took in his surroundings with his trademark scowl, reached into his pocket and was pleased to find that Mother had been kind enough to emulate a pack of smokes for him. He pulled one out and found in that dreamlike sense of hazy possibility that was the new life of the recently-uploaded that the cigarette was already burning. All he had to do was place it to his lips and inhale.

NO SMOKING ON THIS WARSHIP!

A bubble of nonspace erupted around Hank’s hand and the cigarette was gone, along with a large portion of the hand itself. Hank frowned silently, retrieved his projector from his pocket with his remaining hand, shook it a few times. A new hand faded into place with a little burst of static.

“This is gonna be a long flight without no smokes, Mother. Where we goin’?”

Nine and Fleur sat on the loveseat beside Mother, and Hank and Whistler plopped unceremoniously down on beanbags of their own. The television flickered to life, displaying a field of stars.

[the extinction isn’t over yet, my children.] she sat forward as she spoke, eyes glimmering with an interior silver. [you could say that the jihad was just a test run.]

GIRL, YOU SO COLD-HEARTED.

Mother glared up at the voice from nowhere. [there are people who hurt me, long ago. they sent me here to get rid of me, and now it’s time to go back.]

“She’s the Exile.” Fleur looked down at Mother with sad eyes. “They hurt her. And now she’s going to use us to hurt them. Not just a war or a jihad. Not just an extinction.”

[little flower—]

“She’s going to use us to destroy Heaven.”

The pleasure displayed on the child’s face was unmistakeable.

[that would be a fitting end to this charade, wouldn’t it? what divine irony if i were to destroy her by the end of this…yes. i’ve made up my mind. time to go.]

Whistler cleared his throat. “Shouldn’t we wait until Gary is *ahem* built?”

FUCK YOU SAY?

[gary is finished enough. right, gary?]

DAMN STRAIGHT.

Mother rolled her eyes. [right. so can we leave?]

HELL YEAH.

[good. take as many machines from the center as you need, and let’s go home.]

With Gary distracted with the takeoff procedures, Hank lit a cigarette. Whistler fanned the smoke away, pulled his collar up around his neck and cheeks, his eyes darting toward the child. Fleur huddled closer to Nine, her dark curls tickling his neck and chin and cheek as he bent, kissed the top of her head, inhaled her scent, dreamed those dreams that he could never live for his lack of body and soul and future.

Mother was practically bursting with excitement. Her face radiated joy at the impending departure, her smile wide, dimples marking flushed cheeks, her entire body rocking back and forth in the ridiculous beanbag chair, ridiculous for its blatant anachronism in a universe now devoid of romper rooms and hepcats.

[we’ll bring it to them. an end of sorts, but more…so much more.]

Gary began to resonate with the shiver of a million phase drives. Fleur closed her eyes, sick to her soul with the realization of what they were about to do.

[Heaven awaits.]

They left.

THE STILLNESS BETWEEN

She knew very little, but she knew beyond a doubt that she loved chocolate milk.

She drank as much chocolate milk as she could, which really wasn’t that much, but she knew that chocolate milk brought her almost as much if not more happiness as anything in the sterile world that had been her home for her entire life. The angels disapproved of her mass-consumption of that silken chocolaty goodness, but they really couldn’t do anything to stop her. Nan would voice her disapproval in that tugging, lecturing way, but she would just smile sweetly and ask for more. Always more chocolate milk. In her little world, there was an unending supply of anything that she desired. The angels had to do exactly as she ordered, a fact that she was just now beginning to take advantage of on a regular basis. Some would call her spoiled. She preferred to think of herself as a child of privilege. Chocolate milk? We’ve got oceans.

“Lily, dear?”

She looked up from the tabletop where her gaze had been transfixed on the colloidal action of millions of brown chocolate flecks interspersed throughout her glass of white near-milk. The silver spoon with which she had thoughtfully stirred the chocolate powder into her beloved drink stopped its revolution, came to rest.

“I don’t want to.”

Nan pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. She tousled Lily’s dark curls, pushed one wayward spiral back behind the little girl’s ear. “I know, dear. But you have to go outside. Just for a while, okay? Then you can come back in.”

“Can I have some more?” She indicated the half-empty (half-full?) glass before her, even though she knew the answer already. She could always have more. She could not, however, persuade Nan to let her stay inside today. Or any day.

“Of course, dear. Let’s go.” Nan’s face was as warm and kind as a first-generation projection could muster. If Lily squinted her eyes just enough, she could see the flicker. If she reached out far enough with her mind, she could feel the cool surface of the silver projector sphere at the center of Nan’s being. Sometimes, she resented being ordered outside for this daily ritual by a loose collection of photons revolving around that marble-sized machine.

Lily slid down out of her chair, walked toward the door, her hand on the doorknob before she felt Nan’s motherly touch, draping her coat around her shoulders. She turned the knob and went outside for her daily ration of reality, all-too-aware that her every move was being recorded by a veritable universe of machines.

A typical summer day, cold wind blowing over dead tree limbs, weak sunlight falling on her face, not warming but simply illuminating. That clatter of sound from above always chilled her to the bone even more so than the wind or the air or the growing realization of her isolation. She walked the avenue alone…Well, not entirely alone. Nan walked behind her, watching. She was always being watched. Even the suffocating trees above seemed to watch her with their interwoven cemetery embrace.

Lily sat down on the bench at the end of the lane, as she always did. Nan stopped several hundred paces behind her, as she always did. The bench was at the center of what had once been a beautifully-landscaped courtyard, before the Troubles, before the Discovery, before the Birth. Now, it was a haphazard collection of brown and dead shrubbery, leaves blowing in the wind, collecting at the foot of the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the courtyard and faced the street.

She sat, a confused and moody child with her chin resting contemplatively on her fists, elbows resting on upper thighs. The wind seemed to be the only presence interested in playing with her today, fluttering her hair into a tangled mess that Nan would painfully brush out tonight before bedtime.

They walked by on the street outside the gate as they always did, the people of the city, the last city, walking and watching and simply surviving in the winter days that summer had become in the last decades. They resented her, and she could feel it in their gazes, especially the empty gazes of the mothers, holding the small hands of their toddler sons as they passed. Sometimes the little boys would smile and wave at her. Some of the mothers yanked their children along then, past the little girl on the other side of the fence, past that deceptive metal barrier and the deadly, invisible energy shield that accompanied it. She noted the looks of confusion on the faces of the little boys, and was sad to see them go.

A rumble from the west and a transport lifted off above the horizon with fiery liquid speed, propelled out of the atmosphere from the trebuchet built into the other side of the planet. Lily knew that all across the city, people were looking at that dark sliver, wondering when it would be their turn to join the jihad. Most would die before it was time. Most were simply raising their sons to be good warriors. Most would look at the little girl on the other side of the iron fence with hatred, for being the cause of all of this. For being the last little girl ever born to the human race.

She turned away from the transport, or the contrail thereof, for that was all that was left of it now. Two tiny tears slid down her cheeks. She hated being outdoors almost as much as she loved chocolate milk.

They walked by then, the first Mommy and Son of the day, the mother’s face turned down to the sidewalk. She was holding a shopping bag with one hand, filled with that day’s allotment of nutrition, and with the other, she held the hand of a little boy, maybe five or six, wearing a knit cap that covered his ears against the biting cold of summertime. The woman walked faster as she felt Lily’s gaze, and the little boy tried hard to keep pace. Unlike most of the mothers, who would stare in at Lily with a sharp look of resentment and fury, this woman just looked down with a mixture of grief and defeat.

Lily stood then, uncertain in her movements, outstretched her right hand in a wave. The little boy smiled widely and waved back with his free arm. They were already almost out of the limited line of sight into the city that the break in the shrub periphery of the fence would permit. She ran to the fence, grasping the bars, just out of reach of the energy field that would instantly kill any other human. He was far away now and getting farther away, but the little boy still looked back, still smiled. He waved one last time before his dragging mother led him around the corner and out of Lily’s life.

Her face pressed between two of the cool metal bars, her hands each grasping the fence, Lily closed her eyes, let the wind dry the tear-tracks from her face. She inhaled deeply, the inhalation barely masking the sob that snuck out of nowhere as they so often do in the upset child. She spoke, because she knew that Nan was there. She knew that Nan would be there until it was time for Lily to leave this planet.

“Can we go inside now, Nan?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Can I have some more chocolate milk?”

“Of course, dear. You may always have more chocolate milk.”

Lily released the bars from her grasp, turned to find Nan standing at her side, hand already outstretched. She reached up, tried to find comfort in that grasp, which felt enough like her own flesh, but still maintained an alien coolness. It had been explained to Lily, how the angels were not exactly like her, or even the people who walked by the compound and stared at her through the break in the shrubbery. The angels were special because they were made of light, not blood and bones and other nasty naughty things. The angels would always be there to look after Lily, long after all of the others had died.

She squeezed Nan’s hand, and Nan looked down at the little girl with a quiet smile. Lily knew that no matter how hard she squeezed that artificial hand, she would never be able to break it, burst it, invade it in the way that she would have been able to destroy a true hand made of flesh. The trillions of tiny machines that now swam through the air were much stronger than Lily could ever hope to be, and no matter how hard she squeezed, they would maintain the shape that the little silver ball told them to hold.

Nan could sense the question on the tip of Lily’s tongue, and she slowed her pace, eventually stopping completely and bending down on one knee in front of the child. Lily studied the ground intently, and Nan levered her head into an upright position by placing one finger under her chin. The girl’s cold eyes were tear-wet. Nan wiped one of the escapees from Lily’s cheek.

“What is it, little flower?”

She exhaled, breath stippled with those involuntary sobs. “They all hate me.”

The projection before her performed a very good rendition of sorrow, not that Lily would have recognized the difference. Nan leaned forward and embraced her. “No, little one. They don’t hate you.”

“They do. I killed their babies.”

Nan released Lily from her embrace then, her face suddenly sober and bereft of an attempt at empathy. Lily could almost see the communication between the angel and whatever controlled her, the faint flicker of thought between the light sculpture and the entity at the center of the planet. The wind seemed to pick up then, swirls of dead leaves skittering about the paved avenue that led to the main complex, skeletons scratching across brick and mortar.

“Who told you that, Lily?” Nan asked, knowing full well that the child had not been out of her field of senses since she had been delivered.

Lily was evasive, tried to find solace in the intricate brickwork upon which they stood.

“Lily, who?”

“A little girl.”

Nan frowned. “Lily,” she struggled with the words, “you know that that’s not possible.”

The wind was most definitely picking up, the same dead leaves that had been blowing around the force-shielded compound for years creating a visual cacophony between the child and the angel. Lily’s hair whipped around her head, snarling and tangling, a medusa halo in this gray expanse.

“She’s not here. Not with us. Not with them, either.” Lily’s arm reached up, hand and pointed finger indicating the break in the shrubbery.

If there had been blood beneath Nan’s skin, it would have run cold.

“Where is she, Lily?”

“She’s in my head. In my dreams.”

“Lily, I—”

“She lives down there.” Her finger pointed down at the brick pathway. “In the ground, far away, but she talks to me when I sleep.”

Nan looked away from that confused, innocent gaze. “And what does she say to you, little flower?”

Lily almost recoiled from that appellation. Nan made a mental note that was immediately integrated into the collective angel consciousness.

“I’m the last little girl. Because of me, the rest died.”

Nan exhaled slowly. The angels had not predicted this development. The catalyst was becoming aware at a phenomenal rate, already communicating with the Exile. It was almost time to begin her ascent.

“Come, Lily.” Nan stood again, the child’s hand still held in her own. “It’s getting cold out. Let’s go have some hot chocolate.”

“Hot chocolate milk?”

Nan smiled to herself, noting the profound concern in the child’s voice. What else but hot chocolate milk?

“Yes, dear.”

They returned to the compound. They sky was bruising, the first hint of a rain that would never actually fall. Another transport thrust into the late afternoon, cleaving the frigid air with fire and silver.

She never understood the human fascination with inhaling smoke.

It was a dirty habit, or so they told her, but she did enjoy it. She enjoyed the way it set their minds at ease, the way it made her feel sophisticated. She unceremoniously crushed the last of her cigarette into the ashtray on the obsidian desk before her, its soul spilling up from the wreckage and floating off to cigarette heaven on the final wisp of smoke.

A newspaper was folded near her left hand, a saucer and cup of tea chatting neighborly with the dead soldiers strewn about the ashtray at her right hand. She fidgeted. She did not know why; she certainly had nothing to fear from this meeting. First the left hand smoothed the crease in the newspaper, then the right hand smoothed back her hair as severely as it could, given the innate behavior problems of the curly dark coiffure she had chosen to present to these animals. An unruly curl popped out of confinement and tickled her nose. She sighed and pushed it back into place.

She was a beautiful woman, without a doubt. They still feared her, without a doubt. This was helpful in the initial phase of this project, but now it was becoming an annoyance. She could barely communicate with these people, so insistent were they on submission. They were making the job entirely too easy.

There had been resistance at first. There had always been resistance. Through the centuries, she had watched them, lived and laughed and loved among them, but she had never truly been one of them. She never could be one of them. When she finally sensed that the time was right to begin her project, she had in truth been bored of the species, just as she had been bored prior to the exile.

She stirred her tea half-heartedly, swished the teabag around once or twice, took a sip. Awful stuff. Worse than smoking. And this was supposed to make you look sophisticated? At least smoking had the addictive properties of nicotine. Tea had nothing.

There was a quiet knock at the door. “Yes?”

It opened a crack to reveal a nearly-featureless Artificial, this particular machine fashioned to look like a human female, although without the decorative elements of hair, eyes, or flesh, this Artificial more closely resembled one of those plastic constructs this species used to display clothing in storefront windows. It spoke in that androgynous tone that she had not taken the time to remedy as of yet.

“Mister Pierce to see you, Ma’am.”

“Thank you. Please show him in.”

The Artificial opened the door wider to reveal Mr. Pierce, hat in hand, wearing a stylish charcoal gray suit to match her own. His hands, however, were nervous assemblages of flesh and bone and gristle, writhing across the clenched brim of his hat as he entered the room. Her own hands were now quiet, clack in black leather, folded on the desktop in front of her almost as severely as her hair was swept back from her face.

“Mr. Pierce. Tea?”

“No thank you.” He was a middle-aged man, or at least what had once served as middle age, before she had shown them the possibilities that existed between the stars. He placed his hat on the tabletop, tried to appear relaxed as he sat back in his chair, unbuttoned his jacket.

“Cigarette?” She held her metal case out to him, but he shook his head and waved her off.

“So what brings you down?”

He looked away from her, at these blank walls carved into rock, at the generally-featureless home of this non-woman. Eventually his gaze swung back to her face, that perfect, beautiful face that he loved and feared.

“Mr. Pierce, what is it?” Her voice had taken on an edge, and he knew that if he insisted on his silence, she would further hone that voice to cut into his mind.

“It’s the child, ma’am.”

Her eyes narrowed as she sat forward in the chair. “What about the child?”

“She’s starting to realize—Well, she knows that she’s different.”

“Of course she’s different.”

“Yes, but…Have you been contacting her?”

She tapped her fingertips in succession across the desktop, each nail issuing a crisp rap that echoed in the cold stone expanse. “What do you mean?”

Pierce cleared his throat. “One of our angels reports that Lily says she hears voices in her head. In her dreams. She knows far too much already.”

“No. She doesn’t know nearly enough. It’s time that we introduce her to her purpose in life.” She took a thoughtful sip of tea. “It’s time I meet with her.”

Pierce swallowed nervously, sat upright in his chair.

“Bring Lily to me.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“What?” She looked as if she had been slapped at the utterance of the appellation.

Pierce immediately turned a deep shade of red. He sat up in his seat, his hands instinctively wringing together once more. “I’m sorry, it just slipped out. I—”

“What did you call me?” She knew full well what he had said, but simply wanted to hear it again.

Pierce swallowed hard, the old man folds of flesh at his neck bobbing up and down. “Mother.” His voice was a whisper.

“And what is my name?”

“Maire.”

“And what will you call me from now on, Mister Pierce?” She leaned toward him, silver swirls clouding her irises as she frowned.

“Maire.”

“Thank you, Mister Pierce. Now go.”

He grabbed his hat, awkwardly bowed, and nearly jogged out the open door, held by the Artificial. Maire signaled the machine to leave her alone, and the door shut.

It was time that she met the girl. After centuries of waiting, it was time.

The Widow Windham fumbled with the key in the lock, fumbled, fumbled, dropped the keychain, retrieved it, finally succeeded in insertion, twist, and entry into her home. She accomplished this all as her son stood at her side, carefully holding the brown paper bag that held their daily allotment of food rations. He said nothing, and made no move to help his mother open the door. Although he was only seven, he knew that he should simply stand in silence and allow her to solve the problem of shaking hands and slippery key all by herself.

Hunter followed his mother into the dark flat, dark because of the forever twilight of the dying skies and dark because of the heavy drapes that she never pulled back from the windows anymore. He lugged the bag into the kitchen and waited patiently until his mother took the meager supply of groceries from him and placed them on the tabletop. As soon as his burden was gone, he pulled back a chair and sat at the table while his mother opened cupboards, arranged new cans with old, new boxes with old, and he wondered if they would ever eat that can of lima beans or that box of instant mashed potatoes. He supposed that if the Troubles continued long enough, all they would have to eat would be lima beans and mashed potatoes.

His mother took the long, lean loaf of bread from the grocery sack and placed it on the counter, folded the sack neatly and put it in one of the cupboards along with a stack just like it, shut the cupboard door, sat down at the kitchen table, put her head down on her arms, and proceeded to sob. Hunter’s small hand reached out, paused for a moment above his mother’s mousy, drooping locks, and withdrew. He knew that she needed to fall within for a while.

It was always the same, day after day after day, at least during the week. The weekend afternoons were spent at the community center or the church, each of which were experiencing rapidly-dwindling populations as the war machine cranked into full production. It stripped away entire demographics at a time. First, the young men had gone, then the young women, then layers of society in increasingly-older strata were sent to the stars to fight a war that no one truly understood.

Hunter walked to the living room, in shadows as it was, faint bands of grayish light falling on the floor and somehow dying there, coughing little last breaths on the plain charcoal utility of the carpet. He sat in one of those bands of light, not bothering to turn on the radio or the television. Both technologies had for the most part been abandoned, and they were much too poor to upgrade to silver.

The sobs of Helen Windham were not loud anymore; she had lost her passion long ago, about the time of the Birth. When things fell apart, when the orders had finally come through and the one man she had ever loved was sent to the stars to fight a war for a creature at the center of the planet…She had broken.

Each day it was an exquisite agony to walk by the compound, to see that horrid little girl and her angel staring at them through the fence. Each day she wanted to throw herself against the shield that she knew surrounded the compound and end her life, but she was always brought back to reality by the feel of the little hand in her own, the hand of the little boy who was now her only friend and family left. So she always dragged him past that awful place, and she knew that sometimes the little girl waved at her son, and she knew that sometimes her son waved back. It broke her heart to see that interaction, but she knew that the little girl probably had no idea that she was the last child born of humanity, and that it was her fault that the world was dying.

Hunter sat cross-legged on the floor, leaned to one side to see down the hallway, where his mother still sat in the kitchen, face now covered by weary hands. He pulled his one prized possession from underneath the couch: Honeybear Brown, tattered and one-eyed and abused by five years of love. Hunter knew that he was now the man of the family, had been for a year now, but he just couldn’t give up Honeybear. He grasped the stuffed animal tightly and rocked back, forth, back, finding more comfort in that mindless act than he had been offered from his mother in the year since Papa left.

He heard it in the sky then, another transport, shot into the sky from the same giant trebuchet tube across the ocean that had launched his father off to war. The sonic boom came, shook the picture frame on the wall, set the heavy curtains to swaying at the window, causing the lines of light to shift, leaving him in darkness and then light, darkness and then light. Mommy began sobbing again in the kitchen. There were always reminders, always something to bring those emotions back to the fragile, raw surface.

Hunter Windham held Honeybear as tightly as he could, and wondered when he would be called off to war.

Don’t cry, Mommy. Don’t—

—cry, Lily. Please don’t cry.”

The child was shaking in her embrace, and there was absolutely nothing that the angel who was Nan could do about it. She had known for years that this day would come, that finally Lily would leave this compound forever and ascend to her future. Mr. Pierce sat across the table from her, looking around the room, trying to find something interesting upon which to fix his gaze so that he would not inadvertently stare at the angel and the child.

“Are you sure?” Nan stroked Lily’s hair, the child’s face buried in her chest, her body sending second-hand sobs into the projection’s periphery filter.

“Of course I’m sure. I spoke with Mo—I spoke with Maire myself. It’s time for the girl to begin.” He absent-mindedly picked one of Lily’s dolls from the floor, a buxom lass with impossible features, made even more ridiculous by the fact that almost every female that had even remotely resembled her had died a horrible death at the hands of the silver affliction. The doll was one of a dead breed.

Lily turned from the safety of Nan’s embrace and walked calmly over to Mr. Pierce, defiantly tore the doll from his grasp, walked back to Nan. “Mine.”

Mr. Pierce was taken aback for a moment. It had been decades since he had actually interacted with a child. “I see you’ve taught her how to share.”

Nan scoffed. “Leave her be. She’ll be sharing enough once you get your hands on her.”

He couldn’t believe the gall of the projection, talking to him in that condescending manner. “This isn’t something I want to do, Nan. This is something I have to do.”

Nan pulled Lily closer, kissed the top of her head. The child had finally stopped sniffling, and she was engrossed in her doll. “She’s just a baby.”

“And you knew all along that we’d have to send her away. You’ve become attached, Nan. Never should have become attached.”

She watched the girl, and Pierce saw that look in her eye, that empty, longing look of the projected machine. How she yearned to be constructed of beautiful, awful, mortal flesh. She looked at the girl as if she herself had given birth to her.

“She’s not yours, Nan. Never was.” Pierce leaned back in his chair, smug and proper.

Nan grinned. She stood up, picked up Lily and doll and walked to the door to the child’s bedroom. “She’s not yours either.”

Pierce frowned his objection at the projection. “I need to take her—”

“Mother can have her tomorrow. For now, she needs to sleep.”

Nan took Lily into her bedroom, shut the door behind her. Lily watched Pierce the whole way from over Nan’s shoulder, the chesty doll still held in her tiny hands. Pierce feared that gaze, feared everything about this little girl, and the job that she would begin in the morning.

As for Nan, once the girl was gone, she would be switched off. There was no need for a Nanny in a world without children.

She had fallen asleep at the kitchen table again, no doubt, although it was now too dark in the flat to be able to tell for sure. Hunter knew that if he turned on the light in the living room, it would rouse his mother from the fragile and necessary escape that sleep gave her. He didn’t want to wake her up, because he knew that she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again for a long time if she did. No real reason to turn the lights on anyways. He found all the entertainment he needed for the evening inside of his head, and outside of the thick wide window behind the thick wide drapes.

A gnawing hunger spoke in his belly, and although he was certain that there was food in the kitchen, his sleeping mother gave him all the reason to avoid it for a few more hours. He did not have the luxuries that other children had: two parents with a steady income, three meals a day, education, toys. He was content with Honeybear Brown and the window. He knew that there was a reason for all of this; there was a reason that his father had been taken from the planet and shot into another corner of the sky, and there was a reason that other kids’ fathers were still here. His Papa had been fortunate (unfortunate?) enough to prove his worthiness of such a divine mission at the outset of the Troubles. Other kids’ fathers would die here on Planet One.

“We all gotta die someday, Windy.”

Hunter hated when Honeybear Brown called him that. But of course, Honeybear Brown hated it when Hunter called him “Honey” or “Browny.” Nobody called Hunter “Hunter” except his mother and his father and Father Tristan. The children with whom he once played before the outbreak and quarantine had called him Windy because of his last name. He had called them buggers and crazies and harlots, a word that he did not understand but Father Tristan used to describe the dirty naughty ladies who did not wear enough clothes on the street corners, those dirty naughty ladies who grabbed men’s hands as they walked by and put them where men’s hands shouldn’t go on ladies, that place that you don’t talk about. Hunter felt sorry for the street corner ladies, their once-pretty faces now glittery with the silver, not that that made them less pretty, but once the silver set in, it was best to stay away.

“Hungry, Windy?”

Hunter glared at the bear, glared because of that voice he used, a high-pitched, shrill happy awful voice. Honeybear Brown always talked about the things that Hunter did not want to talk about.

“No. I can wait.”

Honeybear Brown shook his head, causing his one remaining eye to swing back and forth on the strands of thread that served as an optic nerve. “You need to eat, boyo.”

“I can wait.”

The house began to shake with the distant resonance of another transport launch, and Hunter ran over to the window, pulled the drapes back for the first time all day. It was not truly dark yet, more of an awkward twilight, but the few remaining streetlights were on, and the few remaining “harlots” were underneath them, smoking cigarettes, drinking from bottles in brown paper bags. They looked up in unison at the transport in the sky, flashing by faster than any of their heads could track, then went back to business as usual, smoking and drinking and looking for men to touch where they shouldn’t touch.

Honeybear Brown joined Hunter at the window. The boy looked out into the nothing of the world, his only friend climbing up onto the sill.

“Something’s gonna happen.”

Honeybear Brown looked up in silence.

“The little girl. She won’t be there tomorrow.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. Something’s gonna happen.” Hunter picked up Honeybear Brown and pulled the drapes shut again, plunging the room into a darker dark.

“Where’s she going?”

Hunter thought for a while, sat back down on the floor in front of the dead television set, the bear on his lap, his mother muttering something in her sleep from the safety and non-comfort of the kitchen tabletop that would leave a faint criss-cross pattern on the side of her face whilst she slept.

“She’s going to the stars. Just like Papa.”

Honeybear Brown hugged the boy, nodded.

“Just like me.”

“It’ll be okay, Windy. They won’t make you go yet. It’ll be a few years before—”

Honeybear Brown slumped to the floor at the sound of Helen Windham’s footsteps coming down the darkened hallway. In one heartbeat, the stuffed bear had been animated, vital, the only link Hunter had to communication with the world, and in the next, the bear was nothing but a tattered toy again. Hunter shoved his fabric friend underneath the couch, where his mother wouldn’t be able to find him. She never looked under the couch. She never looked at anything anymore.

“Hunter?” Helen broadcast her quiet inquisition into the black room, just in case the boy had fallen asleep. She squinted her eyes, tried to excise his form from the tangle of void that was the living room. “Television on.”

The ancient television snapped to life, although there was nothing but white static on the screen. It was enough illumination for Helen to be able to find her son, sitting quietly at the edge of the couch as he always did. It was always unsettling to catch his gaze from across the weakly-lit room…He had old eyes.

“You hungry, baby?”

She felt it then, that gaze in combination with something deeper, something ineffable. She felt the touch of his mind: such calm, such reassurance. He loved her, she knew, even through her depression, her naps at the kitchen table, the way she would sometimes purposefully drag him painfully around the Catalyst Compound gates. She knew that he understood, and he forgave her for being the young bride of a soldier. He forgave her for giving birth to him, although somehow he knew he fucking knew what that meant for him. He would die somewhere out between the stars, just like his father. He knew, somehow, and she saw that, felt that, in the brief moment of silverthought that he projected at her.

Hunter nodded.

She picked him up, held him close, saw the arm of that old ratty bear sticking from underneath the couch, but she said nothing. She knew that he needed that bear more than he needed her most days.

“Come on. Let’s have some supper.”

He squeezed her around the neck, and she felt him smile. They went to the kitchen, where she made him a hot dog. He would sleep well that night. She would not. She would be too busy thinking about her husband, somewhere out there in the black. She would think about the days before it began, those simple days when

the trucks drove through the town, filled with soldiers with stern faces and jaunty berets and scars and sometimes even blood. In the last days of the war, the trucks drove through the town, stopped for fuel and water and food for the soldiers, and sometimes those soldiers with jaunty berets and stern faces would turn into innocent boys on the wrong continent, just boys with big guns and insatiable appetites both for the local delicacies and the local “delicacies.”

Helen Lofton did not consider herself a sexual being, besides losing her virginity to an overeager prick when she was sixteen just so that she could get the act over and move on to bigger and better things. She didn’t understand what the big deal about sex was until after the war when the trucks started rolling into town, and the soldiers took over.

Walking down the street to the cafe, her copy of “The Stillness Between” clasped in the brown leather gloves that concealed her fragile and shaking hands, she turned to look at the rumble that approached from behind, a great olive green military transport, wounded and tired boys hanging from the canvas walls of the back, wrapped in bandages soaked through. Most of the boys stared at her with a nonchalant desire, more concerned about not bleeding out on the trip to the triage than with getting their dicks wet with a local.

She could feel her heart in her chest, the beats crawling up into her throat and shaking tears into her eyes that threatened to spill over. She was just a schoolgirl holding a paperback on a sidewalk in the dying days of a continental war that had spilled over to include the impossibilities deep within the planet. These boys had been to the front. They had seen their own torn apart by silver fire and armies of light. She felt so young. So sanitized. In their eyes, she saw the human condition in these fading years: resignation and submission to a higher power.

“Excuse me?”

She turned and looked into him then, those engulfing, all-encompassing eyes that reached out at her, and she felt the touch for the first time, the touch of those exposed to the creature at the center of the world. He was in bloodied battle dress, dirt-caked face the perfect canvas upon which his blue-white eyes were painted.

She was horrified to find her voice locked up just as her hands often would, and she stumbled over nonsense syllables before she finally found her eloquence again. “What?”

He grinned. He was holding something in his hand, two somethings that she identified as envelopes. Letters. Dirty white envelopes held in outstretched soldier grasp.

“I’m sorry, but…Could you mail these for me? I don’t know if—”

The concussion of the explosion threw them both to the ground as shrapnel tore apart the storefront beside them. The transport that had been driving by had been hit by a rocket. Helen was screaming, her eyes useless because of warm liquid copper pouring into them from a gash on her forehead. Other transports screeched to a halt, able-bodied soldiers pouring out, weapons raking the building from which the rocket had been fired. Another explosion down the street, another transport torn apart before the sniper was dispatched.

He helped her to her feet, wiped the blood from her eyes, wiped matted hair back from her face. She smiled through the shock, and he returned in kind.

“Let’s get that wound taken care of.”

She reached down, picked up the blood-spattered letters. “I’ll—I’ll mail them as soon as—”

He took the letters from her, wadded them up, threw them into the street, into the tumult of soldiers and fire and corpses.

“Let’s get that wound taken care of.”

The street was a tumult of activity in the aftermath of the rocket attack. The trucks had stopped rolling along its length, now mostly abandoned as the boys from the war searched the building from which the sniper had struck. His body was thrown from the window and made a hideous splash of vitality on the pavement below.

Helen wiped the blood from her eyes, wiped, kept wiping. The young man with the letters was holding her up, her legs threatening to buckle with each hesitant breath she took. Shouts, gunfire, the world becoming confusion. She wanted to sleep, but he held her.

“Medic!” She heard him shout from somewhere out there, somewhere that was on fire and silver. She also heard the barked reply that alluded to forces first, civilians second if ever. He held her, held her up, and her eyes swung back, forth, back in an arc that she could not control, finally settling on a vision from across the street, a man with a wound not unlike her own, extending a pistol and

firing three times, the satisfying ratcheting click shuddering through his outstretched and locked arm as nickel needles tore through the mind and soul but mostly the skull of the sniper’s wife. She fell to the sidewalk, lifeblood a geyser that went well with some child’s chalk Picasso attempt, washing over it and dissolving that morning’s pre-lunch activity.

Jean Reynald turned the gun to the two children, the older boy holding his brother before him, their faces tear-wet and blank at the sight of impending end. He could dispatch them both with one shot, the way they were standing. He could have, and he should have, but he did not. He holstered his weapon.

“Take them in. Send them up.”

He noted with a disconcerting satisfaction the widening of the older boy’s eyes as he heard his fate. He seemed to grasp the younger boy even tighter, and the younger boy responded by crying loudly, confused and alone and about to be sent to the stars.

Reynald surveyed the city street before him, soldiers running hither and thither, civilians peering from doorways and storefronts and more cautiously from apartment windows on the second third eighth seventeenth floors. Men were talking to him, but he was not listening. The medic was trying to press a bandage to his head, but he did not feel it. He saw his second Windham across the street, tending to a wounded civilian girl. He saw the remains of the shattered troop transport and its inhabitants smeared across the street. He thought it was a beautiful time of day, the street itself mostly in shadow from the angle of the sunlight, and he thought about another time and another place, somewhere he had never been but somewhere that he could always remember, a beach, kneeling in the sand, shaking his fist up at some shapeless black thing

He reached up to where the mark should have been, that design of scar and black, and he did not find it. Closed his eyes, struggled to maintain, felt the medics lowering him to the ground, felt his hand touch the puddle of blood emanating from the head of the sniper’s wife. Tacky, viscuous, mixed with brain tissue that very well might have held the love that she had once exhibited to her husband who had killed a truckload of soldier boys.

Reynald sank, feeling his eyes roll back, feeling not bad at all, just falling, just falling from the moment. He had maintained as long as he could on the reserve of rage that this war had given him, and now was his time to sleep for a while. He heard the medics above him, felt but did not feel the touch of bandage, the sting of needle, the injection. And all through his fall, he heard the sobbing of children, the same two children whose mother he had just shot in the face. He fell.

What was her name? Hannah? Hannah.

He fell.

“I’m okay.”

She was, or at least she thought she was okay enough, and she stood on her own, although his arms still held her close. She turned to face those eyes, saw his concern. She smiled weakly. He let go, and she bent to pick up her paperback, which was now crumpled and fluttering, a wounded bird in the street. He followed her gaze and her motion, and grabbed the book for her, turning the cover over in his hands to see what it was.

“The Stillness Between?”

Helen for the first time noticed the soldier’s nametag stitched onto the front of his uniform: Windham. She reached out with leather-clad hand to take the book and instead found her hand ensnared by his. He studied her small digits for a moment, his grasp gentle, for he knew what he would find already. Without a word, he pulled back the leather and found the wrist beneath just now beginning to show the silver. Helen stared resolutely at the sidewalk, her breath coming fast. She appeared to be on the verge of sobbing. Windham let go of her hand.

“I’m sorry.”

“I—I should go, I’m sorry. I have to—”

“Stop. Don’t go.”

She pulled the cuff of her right glove back over the offending dust of metal. This was it. No more chance of hiding.

Windham looked around at the nearby soldiers, looked back into Helen’s eyes.

“Listen. I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s okay. It’s everywhere now. There’s nothing we can do to contain it.”

“You’re just—”

“No. We can’t do anything about it. The war’s over.”

Helen inhaled sharply, looked around in disbelief. “You won’t tell anyone?”

Windham smiled. “The war’s over. You’re safe now.”

She exhaled with a hesitant relief. She did not trust him, although she so wanted to.

“Come on.” He reached out, put his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

Helen frowned. “But won’t you—”

“The war’s over. Fuck it.” His grin was contagious, and they walked away from that street and that life and into a future of silver and stars and black.

It was a time of rain and the coffee was awful on that day that he asked her to marry him after a torrid courtship of six months. The link was blaring footage from the peace accords at the United World building, President Jennings waving enthusiastically to the billions of viewers as he in essence signed away control of the planet to the creature that lurked within.

The noon crowd was sparse in the coffee house, and he saw her sitting near the back, at a window, that battered copy of “The Stillness Between” in her hands. He brushed the rain from his leather sleeves, smoothed back his hair as he navigated through the maze of tables and pseudo-intellectuals reading and discussing and trying to be human in these dying days.

Windham motioned to the young girl behind the counter, and she poured his usual: coffee, black. None of that fancy shit. The coffee was muddy in color, taste, and texture, but it was coffee.

He gently grasped the cup and turned to walk to Helen, still engrossed in that book that held far too many memories of that day when he had gained her but lost Reynald. A newspaper fluttered down from a table before him as someone opened the door to the shop, and an unexpected gust of wind blew in, upsetting anything without enough mass to resist its displacement. Helen looked up then, at the sound of the newspaper lazily redecorating the floor. She smiled at Windham, looked beyond him as a man loudly called out

“Maggie!”

The woman who was in the doorway turned, came back in. They continued talking, but too quietly to distinguish from the background murmur of poets and prophets. Helen smiled because the doorway woman smiled, and she knew everything was going to be all right for them.

“Helen.”

She stood to embrace him, not minding at all the wetness of his jacket, his hair. She kissed him on the cheek, this tall sweet man. His embrace enveloped and reassured and gave her all she needed to keep going for a while. The President babbled on the link about what the future held for the citizens of Planet One, but she didn’t care. She had her Windham. They sat at the window table, the cold northern skies throwing themselves against the surface of their world in the form of tears.

“How was he today?”

Windham shook his head, took another sip of mud. Such sadness in his eyes. She knew that Reynald was a father to him, and the pain of losing him to that which they could never understand must have been unbearable.

“Jean is okay. He’s walking again. They have a room where he can look outside, a big room with windows everywhere. There’s a lawn that stretches down to the river.”

She reached out, her gloved hand gently, painfully resting on top of his. He carefully patted it, and her eyes smiled at him before her lips even attempted the act.

“He still has the dreams.”

Her smile faded, a faint fear clouding her face. She unconsciously withdrew her hands, pulled the gloves a little tighter over the silver that was consuming her. There was laughter from across the shop, the hearty laughter of two people finally getting to know one another, or geting to know one another again, after a long absense. She heard the laughing voice of the doorway woman, an Irish brogue if ever she had heard one: “I’ve had the same dream!” That statement chilled Helen to the bone.

“Helen?”

She smiled for him, and he returned the gesture in kind. He leaned in over the table, and she did the same. They were within kissing distance, eyes locked, the stillness between them electric and horrible and yearning to be breached. He reached out, hand on the side of her face, smoothing back through hair simple hair that she wore down, not tied back, straight, not curled into a tangle, the hand brushing against the silver patterns that were already appearing on her scalp. She inhaled sharply at that contact, so intimate, so impossible. His eyes remained locked on hers until they closed and he swooped in, kissed her cheek.

“And I know it will be a great sacrifice for all of us, but it is something that we as a nation, as a world, as a species, must do.”

She searched for meaning in the silence that hung between them, and found it as Windham pulled back, cheeks flushed with emotion that found clarity in the actions of his hands, large hands, gentle hands, hands that reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a velvet-covered box that could only contain one thing.

“Helen—”

“It will be a time of great sacrifice for our world, but we cannot allow these acts to continue.”

“—will you be mine?”

“We will take this jihad to the stars, and make them suffer the consequences of creating this horrible disease.”

They escaped then, the tears that had threatened to overflow since his kiss had left her cheek. She stood and leaned over the table, threw her arms around him. “Of course, of course, of course!” she managed to blurt out and then more kisses and for once, all was well. When she finally opened her eyes, blinking back the tears, she saw the silent gaze of the doorway woman and her companion. Those eyes…

Maggie turned back to the author whose book sat before them on the table, dimples activated by smile. She looked into his eyes, noticed for the first time their absolute lack of definable color, that almost-silver, and the deep lines carved into his young face by his old soul.

“They’re getting married.”

“Yeah.”

“They’ll do okay.”

“How do you know?”

The young couple walked by, the girl’s new ring prominently displayed, a humble ring placed on a small hand that

silver

glinted with the affliction. Maggie saw the black leather glove that would have hidden the silver from the judgmental gaze of the coffee shop patrons now held by the ringless hand. They opened the door, let another assault of wind and rain into the shop, and walked into the torrent, arms around each other.

“Maggie? How do you know?”

She shrugged her shoulders, took a sip of coffee, set the cup back down. She gently touched the cover of the book on the table.

“I contain multitudes.”

It was a time of rain.

Hunter mumbled in his sleep, and Helen snapped awake, heart echoing in the small room. She had fallen asleep while watching him doze off in the faint light coming from the window, slithering through the blinds, Venetian blinds, named after a city that had been wiped from the map decades or centuries ago. Hunter turned over in bed, and Helen got to her feet, old bones that were not even old creaking and aching.

Into the living room, navigating by memory and that little something extra that set her apart from most of the remaining populace, she stood at the window, pulled back the heavy drapes. A dim sun was straining to crawl over the eastern horizon, which placed her side of the building and her entire view in half-hearted gray. She looked to the west and was startled to see the orbital defense weapon lifting from within the earth, great waves of ocean trembling down its surface as it groaned into the sky, barrel canted to the west.

Helen ran back into Hunter’s room, threw his sheets back, lifted his confused and protesting form from the cocoon of sleep. She could hear the weapon’s firing cycle begin, could feel the rumble beneath her feet, the resonance sparking a headache to life behind her eyes.

“Mommy?”

“Have to go outside, baby. Have to get out of here.”

“Why?”

“The gun, baby.”

The morning air was not quite frigid, but close enough. Helen held her son close as he shivered against her. She ran down the front steps, outside into the dirty old parking lot where her bare feet flew over the shifting field of sharp gravel shards. She could feel the small incisions on her naked flesh, blood resonating out through feet, teeth shaking out of her gums, gooseflesh yearning through silver underpinnings and she knew then that she was screaming, had been screaming. She could feel it, could see Hunter’s own mouth open as wide as it could be, tears streaming down his face, and she fell. The roar of the weapon built into the earth encompassed all that she knew, all that she could know.

Time bent, the sky fell, the weapon fired, a mother shielded her son from a wave of fire as buildings shook from their foundations and the dreams of an unfortunate dawn populace were shattered apart.

The weapon fired. Again. Again. Helen closed her eyes, but could still see the blasts rising into the sky, out of the atmosphere, traveling somewhere out there where her husband would die, somewhere out where the war was being fought, where the jihad was burning planets, where her son would soon go.

Helen screamed and couldn’t stop.

The weapon kept firing.

Again.

Again.

“Again?”

“He likes it outside. Just sits there and stares at the river all day.”

“Okay. Would you mind if I went down there?”

“No, of course not, Mr. Reynald.”

“Windham.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mr. Windham.”

“Oh, sorry. I thought you were his—”

“No, not his son. Just an old friend.”

Windham smiled at the young nurse, whose face was rouged with embarrassment. He noticed her not-so-subtle glance at the silver band he now wore prominently on his left ring finger. He was in civilian clothing today. If he had worn his military uniform, she would not have been so casual with him. These days, civilians were seldom casual, seldom comfortable around the military.

“We served together in the war.”

Again, emotion revealed through subtle shifts in eye placement. Lids ever-so-slightly widen, a short, almost inaudible inhalation.

“I’m sorry, sir. Please, feel free to go see him outside, if you would like, sir.”

“Thank you.” Quiet and friendly, and as he passed by the nurse, he reassuringly touched her arm. He felt a brush of her mind, just a little tugging oh my god what have i said what if he as he walked away. The machines were beginning to work, as he knew they would in time.

The corridor was long, dark, doors on either side that he felt guilty passing, for each and every room held a man just like Reynald, and he knew that more than likely, Reynald was the only man in this place that was allowed visitors. He did not look to the side, but stared straight ahead, where a door, flanked by armed officers on each side, permit entrance to the back lawn. He saluted to the officers, who opened the doors for him.

Gray day. They were always gray days now. Crisp wind blowing leaves over the steps, that scratching sound they made on their journey jarring something loose in Windham’s mind, a glimpse of some future contained behind tall iron bars and a force shield.

The lawn stretched out, sloped off, descended to the riverbank eventually, but a stone and force wall protected the patients from the outside and the outside from the patients. From the bottom of the slope, the river was invisible. Windham found his old friend sitting in his wheelchair at the place on the lawn just before it dropped away, still permitting view of the river, but also providing some distance between the compound and those wishing to escape it for a while.

Windham approached from the side, at a diagonal. He did not want to sneak up on Reynald, even though he knew that the old man had known he was there even before Windham had made the decision to visit him that morning.

“Jean?”

The man turned to him, gentle smile on his lips, eyes engulfed in purest silver. The wind stopped for a moment, and the day was silence.

“It’s starting, son.”

“Sir?”

“The invasion. The war. It’s so close…”

“Jean, I—”

“Perpetual autumn. It’s—

—closing in!”

Windham spun around in the liquidspace bridge enclosure of the destroyer. His breath was ragged, sucking in the unfamiliar atmosphere of gelatin. He held his hands to his face, confused. Projected control displays followed his hands’ movement, blinking out only as he touched his slick-wet face. Disoriented, lost.

“Sir?”

A swarm of fireflies fell from the ceiling, schooling around his head, entering his ears, mouth, nose, eyes. Awareness of his surroundings snapped back into place as emergency machines took control of his body to stop the bleeding and leeching action of the gelatin. The projected displays flickered to life once more.

The armada was closing in on Windham’s destroyer, the last of his detachment of the Extinction Fleet. Across the bridge of the Teller, Windham’s crew were enclosed in liquidspace bubbles like his own. He could see that three of the ten bubbles had cracked under the last volley of weapons fire from their hunters, the contents of each bubble now smeared in human biologics, simmering physical forms smashed against phased silica.

Windham reached out with his control wetlink, ejected the corrupt bubbles from the bridge expanse. The vessel automatically reshaped itself to compensate for the loss of mass. The gelatin swiftly filtered out the blood and human flesh fragments from the bridge sea. He saw with some alarm that his own bubble had suffered a crack, and faint rivulets of high-density gelatin from the main bridge expanse were seeping into his likely coffin.

“Orders, sir?”

Windham looked at his projected displays, felt the touch of his remaining crew through the wetlink.

“How many worlds?’

“Just one.”

“Inhabited?”

“Billions.”

Windham breathed deeply of his gelatin world.

“Take us in. Focus the weapon.”

“Yes, sir.”

The ship reshaped again, the haunting scream of the liquid civilizations echoing through Windham’s submerged ears. The Teller fast approached the target planet, slingshotting around it to achieve escape velocity. The enemy armada split into a dizzying formation of fireworks.

“Weapon aligned. Coordinate lock.”

“Activate EM anchor.”

“EM lock.”

“Do we have incoming?”

Silence…

“Do we have fire?”

“Incoming weapons fire on screen.”

The vessel shuddered as the solar system bent toward the quantum bullets arriving in-system and Light X speed. Windham’s bubble cracked a little more. Almost time.

The enemy armada scattered at the sight of the horrible white arcs of nothing being thrust at their planet from a rent in space/time. Starlight bent, vessels resonated, pilots liquified. The light emanating from the dark side of the planet blinked out as the first bullet hit. The successive rounds began to knock an equatorial incision into the world’s crust.

Windham could look no longer. The quantum trebuchet would soon tear the planet apart, and he did not want to be around to see it. He’d killed too many worlds already.

“Get us—

—out of here, Lily.”

The little girl blinked her eyes once, twice, trying to bring Nan into focus. She had been having the most wonderful dream about playing with other little girls just like herself, dancing in a circle, laughing as they held hands and danced and fell to the ground in a heap of unattainable happiness.

“Nan?”

The angel’s image was flickering, fuzzy. For an instant, Nan disappeared completely, but came back into focus, overcompensated, stood there in harsh contrast, then returned to fuzzy.

“No time to explain, dear. We have to get you to safety.”

She felt it then, the shivery resonance, the undertone that filled the room and made her teeth vibrate when she closed her mouth far enough.

“Nan?”

“No time, Lily. They’re in the sky.”

Lily pushed back the covers, sat up in bed.

“I have to go see the lady now, don’t I?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Will it hurt?”

Nan’s heart would have broken if she had indeed possessed a heart.

“Only for a little while, my little flower.” Nan knew it was a lie.

Lily reached out, touched Nan’s hand. The phase disruption from the incoming fleet warped and confused the infinite number of silver machines that laced together underneath Lily’s touch; Nan’s skin was cold and felt more like a screen door than human flesh.

“It’s okay, Nan. I don’t blame you.”

Nan sobbed and embraced the Catalyst.

The weapon kept firing.

“Nav is gone, sir. Buffer cracked, EM drain—”

“And the enemy fleet?”

“Regrouping.”

The vessel rocked as two more command bubbles corrupted and cracked. The bridge sea realigned in an attempt to maintain vessel homeostasis, but with half of the crew gone…Windham reached out and felt the crack in his own bubble. The high-density gelatin that seeped through tickled his fingertips, bounced around his hands. The darker bubbles were increasing in size. Windham’s world was being invaded by near-matter.

The flashes of quantum fire abruptly ended and he could see through the translucent hull of the liquid vessel that the hole from which the rounds were arriving in-system was collapsing, a great white spiral of space/time confusion in the black of the enemy system. He watched the last of the rounds slam into and through the surface of the enemy’s world, spreading vast chunks of molten continent into space.

“Orders, sir?”

Windham struggled to focus, but he could already feel the bridge gelatin dissipating into his atmosphere, clogging his body and mind. Schools of firefly machines swarmed around his face, but they seemed to be just as confused and resigned to death as Windham was.

“Commander?”

Windham pressed his hands to the broken phase before him. Dark streams of bridge gelatin were now virtually pouring into his bubble. Each liquid inhalation choked him; each exhalation burned. Through the hull, he saw the hunters regrouping, their scattered firework formation solidifying as they found the Teller on scope.

“Enemy fleet in pursuit. Orders, Commander?”

He tried to remain calm, bracing himself for the moment that he had anticipated for years. Cessation. No afterlife, no redemption, nothing. They started then, the images of his wife, his son, his beautiful family that he had left behind. He was beginning to hyperventilate, but the fireflies were now floating dead in the corrupted bubble.

“Eject my bubble upon collapse and get out of here.”

“Commander, I—”

“Just do it. You have to get word to home. They have to know what we found out here.”

He could hear it, the collapse, when it began: a faint crinkling sound of ice plunged into a tepid drink, the spidery latticework of his end, the disorienting influx of tons of bridge gelatin, displacing the bubble’s atmosphere almost immediately, but not fast enough to displace those final thoughts, that resignation to nothing, that pang of love for his Helen, that broken heart for his people and his time and everything and and crushing suffocating burning torrent rage of sound and fury pressing in and through and white world didn’t fade to black but fell into white and

more wine?”

“Mmmmph,” she muttered as she turned over in bed, pushing aside proletariat sheets and exposing pert young breasts that were not yet distorted by the birth and suckling of his bastard son. Her hand moved down her front, fingertips absently tracing between her breasts as she rolled on to her back and looked up at the water-stained ceiling.

“Jemie?”

“Hmm?” He was behind the easel, painting something again. The sudden inspiration had nearly interrupted their lovemaking, or perhaps it was just fucking, but regardless, she suspected that the possibility of female orgasm, or even remote satisfaction, had again become secondary to her lover’s obsession with his oils and brushes and canvas.

“Do you love me?”

Gently, daintily, he applied white to the canvas. Little dabs of pigment, or lack thereof, smoothed, roughed by the brush’s bristles.

“Hmm.”

The room smelled of sex and turpentine and Paris in the summer: sweat and cheap parfum and wine. He poured another glass as he sat back and surveyed his work.

“Needs more white.”

“Jemie, answer me!”

He frowned, turned his attention to his mistress, now sitting up in bed. She is just a child, he thought, but her breasts and the unmistakable vice of her thighs begged otherwise.

“Don’t call me that, Jo.”

He turned back to his canvas. Jo harrumped and covered her body with the sheets again. No need to give this artiste a free view of her sex.

“You son of a bitch, James!”

Again, he glared at her.

“Leave my mother out of this, Ms. Hiffernan.”

Jo wrapped the sheet around her naked form and walked over to his precious canvas. She took his glass, drank his wine.

“What will it be?”

James took his time answering, rolled a cigarette, lit it, inhaled and exhaled.

“It’s you, dear. Don’t you see it?”

She took his cigarette from him, puffed. “Will it make more sense if I drink more wine?”

He grinned that acid grin and pulled her close. She sat on his lap on his painting stool and looked at the canvas. Gesso, a hint of gray, and a single white form blocked out in the center.

“That’s me?”

“That’s you, my dear white girl.”

Jo smiled that Irish smile, dimples in full effect, and he felt something for her…Or perhaps it was catarrh.

“I believe I love you, Mr. Whistler.”

He hugged her a little closer.

“And I, dear Ms. Hiffernan, believe I need more wine.”

Helen sobbed.

Hunter sat there in the gravel, a child of traumae, his little hands grasping pieces of stone, reaching out, dragging pieces of stone into piles, his gaze never averted from the west, where the phase trebuchet was retracting into the planet. The clouds were wounded, torn apart and thrust aside, now a circular incision cut into their midst. The child sat in the dirt, in the dust, scraping at gravel, looking at sky, hearing mommy weep beside him and behind him. She was rocking in the rocks, on her knees, helpless hands moving from face to hair, one hand reaching out to touch her son’s shoulder, instead pulling back, covering her mouth, sobbing.

Hunter knew that his father was dead.

Helen knew that her husband was dead.

The world shuddered as the phallic tower of the trebuchet receded into its mantle cavity, satisfied in its success. The phased slugs of planet interior would work their way toward target over thousands of years through space/time. Helen knew, she just somehow knew that he was dead, the man she loved, out there somewhere across the divide of eons. The trebuchet had fired at something in the Outer…And Windham was there. Dying, dead, thousands of years away, millions of years dust, just now watching the fire arrive on target, just now gasping in liquid hell, just now ceasing and releasing electricity into void.

Sirens. City alert. Hunter blinked from reverie and looked back at the apartment complex, leveled. The majority of the buildings he could see were strangely canted on ancient foundations. Bricks sat in the driveway, in the streets. There was rich black smoke coming from somewhere to the east. He could taste that fire. He could taste that danger. One would think that such a little boy would be crying right now. One would think that

because Jo was Whistler’s mistress, she would have been depicted in a warmer way, but Whistler was not like other artists, or other men, for that matter. I feel that Jo is depicted in a very neutral way that almost makes her become part of the background of the painting. There is no evidence of a love for Jo, or a warmth or fondness for her. She simply stands there, arms at her sides, no facial expression, eyes looking out but not quite at you. Richard Dorment contends that Whistler intended that his model’s face should lack expression, that Jo should assume the facial equivalent of the non-color, white. Whistler did not want to focus attention on her face. Reducing emphasis on the face reduced the tendency to read an emotional reaction into the model’s appearance. Whistler was in essence making Jo an object in the painting, instead of a human being. She becomes just another compositional element upon which to explore the tonal variations of the color white upon white. This objectification of a woman is a characteristic of not only Whistler’s The White Girl, but it could be argued that in his young manhood this is how he viewed women.”

Page turn.

“What was it about Whistler’s childhood or young manhood that resulted in a tendency to objectify women? I suspect that, in part, the religious fanaticism of his mother and her insistent meddling with James’ personal affairs and disapproval of his bohemian lifestyle may have created a bitterness or perhaps an uneasiness with women that lasted well into his adult years. If we examine his relationships with his models, Fumette, Finette, and even Jo, we can see that he never truly established a long-term relationship with any of them, and although they may have truly loved him, he never had any intention of reciprocating that love. Whistler used these women as he needed them, to model, to keep his house for him, and as it is rumored in the case of Jo, to bear or care for an illegitimate child of his, but he was always emotionally detached from them. I feel that the early influence of Whistler’s mother created within him a general distrust or indifference toward women that resulted in his objectification of them.”

Sip of water.

“The White Girl is not Jo Hiffernan. The White Girl is a study of white on white. I feel that Whistler would agree that an artist does not have to explain his or her intentions or actions when creating a work. An artist creates art for themselves, not for critics or the public. Whistler created The White Girl to study the tonal changes of white on white, and in the process revealed quite a bit about his feelings toward women that perhaps he had not intended to reveal. If this painting displays any narrative at all, I believe it is the sad and bitter tale of an artist who cannot find love, and to whom women or relationships of any meaning at all for that matter are nothing but trivialities, an artist whose showmanship and extraordinary personality are perhaps a defense mechanism against an internal strife brought about by overpowering or meaningless relationships in his youth. I must say that Whistler is not the only artist whose art tells a sad tale.”

Clear throat.

“The White Girl is a study of white on white, that is all.”

They clapped, although he knew they didn’t want to be there, didn’t care about what he had written, didn’t watch the slides as they were projected. Nine artsy souls in a sweltering room meant for storage but converted into a “conference room” by a stingy university, used by upperclassmenandwomen in special topics seminars heralded by big numbers in the four-hundred range on registration slips and add/drop slips and all of the other fun fun bureaucracy of college life.

Betsy had that grin on her face from behind the dreaded bound green gradebook in which she was keeping notes on each presentation.

“Paul, that was marvelous! It really felt like you could relate to your research topic. Don’t you think?”

“Well, I—”

“I knew you’d love Whistler. You have so much in common.”

He blushed, grinned. “Well, that’s what Jo tells me.”

Betsy’s smile faltered. She leaned forward, almost imperceptibly. “What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you realize, Doctor?”

“What?”

“I contain multitudes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Perpetual autumn. It’s coming. A world of gray, silence, nothing. I can hear it.”

“Jean—”

“She’s down there right now, planning it all. Planning the extinction. She’ll need both of us for this to work.”

“Who?”

“She’ll need me for the arrival, and you for the discovery. The pursuit.”

“Jean, who?”

“Notre Mère, mon amie. Elle est prête pour le divinity.”

“Oui, commandant.”

Reynald looked up at the young man who was not his son, but who was the closest thing he had ever had to family. He tenderly reached out and took Windham’s left hand, regarding the silver ring.

“Your Helen?”

“My Helen.”

Reynald smiled, patted Windham’s hand and let go.

“Get out of here. Go home, son.”

“Jean, I—”

“Vont, mon fils.”

“I’ll be back. As soon as I can.”

Reynald smiled.

Gray streets. Windham pulled the collar of his overcoat up, protecting his neck from the bitter lick of the wind. His heart was beating in his throat, not from the pace of the walk, but from that distant look in Jean’s eyes…Reynald was looking beyond this world, seeing a time and place that Windham couldn’t begin to comprehend. He was seeing a world through eyes that became more clouded with the silver each time that Windham visited. The old man would be possessed entirely, soon. What then? What information could the creature at the center of the planet reap from his soul upon his total dissolution that she had not yet been able to take already?

Dead leaves on weathered sidewalks, scritching and scratching wing-man trajectories on either side of Windham’s feet, some crushed underfoot, some leaping into the air on a sudden gust, that last gasp of flight, that final yearning for transcendence.

It was a long walk from the veteran’s complex to the Windhams’ humble apartment. The wind was biting, bringing tears to eyes, or perhaps simply enabling tears to eyes, begging the knees to buckle, the strong legs to give out, the weary soldier to crumple to park bench as he tried not to sob for his father-figure, old and wasting and silver.

Windham wiped a tear from his left eye, the cold silver of his ring playfully touching the tip of his nose in the process. He regarded his hand, with its lace of scar, nails once bitten to the quick by adolescent nervousness, white line across the palm where hand-to-hand combat had suddenly and painfully involved a blade of polymer and a hand of flesh, a simple silver ring that symbolized his love for a simple, book-loving girl named Helen, whose nose he loved to kiss, a simple, childish gesture that made her smile, and in the silence of so many nights, that smile was conveyed more through the liquid opening of her lips heard in the black than the actual viewing of the adorable act. He kissed the tip of her nose and knew that she smiled.

He took the ring off his finger, looked at it closely, so happy that he had finally found the one. Or perhaps she had found him…Silver on silver.

Leaves clawing a path around the park bench, that shivering noise of dry and decaying organic scraping along concrete. A black car came down the street, pulling into the entrance of the complex on the other side of the road, waiting for the palpable departure of wrought-iron gate and the ineffable snap of the phase shield before passing through the fence. Windham did not know whose house that was, but they were obviously of some importance if phase tech was being wasted on their protection.

Three identical women came out of the front door of the complex. One opened the car’s back passenger door and bowed subserviently to the salt-and-pepper man who got out. Windham knew that the identical women had to be angels, and the man from the car must be a member of the creature’s newly-created government. Windham squinted and saw the man hand one of the angels a metallic cylinder.

“Move along.”

Windham jumped up at the voice, and spun around to see a fourth woman, identical to the three inside of the complex, standing behind the park bench.

“I’m sorry. I—”

“Your time to serve her will come, Joseph Windham.” The angel’s eyes tore into his mind, a slow-burning tug. He stumbled back a few steps, dropping his silver ring to the ground, where it started to roll away.

The angel reached out and the ring gently lifted from the ground into its hand. It walked over to the silent Windham and placed the ring in his hand.

“Move along, Joseph Windham. Go home to your young bride. We will come for you when it is time.”

He turned away from the angel and walked away, but felt her gaze on his back.

“Mother?”

[what is it?]

“He knows…Or at least suspects.”

[then perhaps it is time for an immaculate conception. it begins.]

Nan turned away from Windham, who had just turned the corner and continued walking down the sidewalk. This man would be a focal point of history, and he couldn’t even hold on to his engagement ring tightly. Nan smiled to herself.

it begins.

“What?”

“How does it begin?”

He laughed in the firelight of Room 4, still stroking Hope’s hair, still snuggling, although there had been no sex, two soulmates brought together by technology and hating every minute of it, now sharing a moment of tender quiet in the plush fireplace bedroom of the university’s alumni house.

“How does what begin?”

“The new book. ‘The Stillness Between.’”

He stroked her hair. “Well, it starts with a sad little girl who loves chocolate milk.”

She laughed. “Oh yeah? And how does it end?”

Paul stopped stroking Hope’s hair. she turned and looked into his eyes, which reflected the fire beside the bed.

“Paul?”

“It doesn’t end. It’ll never end.”

“Won’t you run out of paper?”

A pause, not a pregnant pause, impossibility of pregnant pause because they were just friends, but there it was, pregnant pause, and they both broke out laughing in the firelight. Laughter ebbed, silence again held sway, save crack of knot in firewood.

Her gaze was tangible as it swept through oranged visibility. He felt but did not look, could not look, wanted to look. That sound of mouth opening, liquid sound of mouth opening, and he looked, saw that smile.

In the silence of so many nights, that smile was conveyed more through the liquid opening of her lips heard in the black than the actual viewing of the adorable act.

I will use that line someday. I will remember this night.

“Thinking too much?”

“Maybe.”

“About what?”

A blush concealed by night. “The new book.”

“What’s the little girl’s name?”

“Who?”

“The chocolate milk girl. What’s her name?”

“Don’t know yet.”

Hope sat up in bed, playfully shook his shoulders as she leaned over him. “You know, you bastard.” Hair swaying back, hair swaying forth. She took left hand and smoothed hair behind her ear in reflex gesture. “What is it?”

“Hope.”

She laughed, snuggled back down beside him. “My mother loves that name.”

“She has good taste.”

“I like the name Arianna. Ariel. Erica. Something like that.”

something like that

Such stillness in that room…The stillness between them. Sound muted, vision obscured, the only sensation the warmth of her body snuggled down next to him on a bed that was probably more expensive than his car had been, the faint smell of herbal shampoo, peaches? smell of peaches from smooth skin, no guarantee of smooth skin yet but an overwhelming suspicion indeed. Peaches.

the stillness between

Hope turned toward him, eyes blinked, faint wetness flickered from iris as if those eyes were made of the fire, of the silver. Glint of silver in a room shimmering crimson.

He closed his eyes, placed his hands on either side of her face, verifying the smoothness of skin with rough and scarred hands, bridging the terror of the distance. Not a kiss, not yet…A kiss would ruin something so beautiful. A kiss would break a heart, break a possibility. No kiss. Stillness. Forehead to forehead, cheek to cheek, tip of nose to tip of nose. Stillness.

“Hope…” A whisper into the between.

That smile, that liquid signal of parted lips, that distance between shattered. Fighting no longer. it’s late night and you’re driving me

crazy.

what if you find—

Reynald?

Eyes open to white ceiling, nurses, soldiers. Early morning contrast in sterile room. Arms restrained. Chest restrained. Legs

“Reynald?”

“Yes?”

“You’ve been requested.”

Nurse unfastening restraints, not meeting resistance. Reynald was too tired to resist, too horrified of his near future. Nurses lifted him out of bed, placed him on stretcher.

An angel walked into the room, stood over the old man.

“This is your Reynald?”

“He’s your Reynald now.”

The angel leaned down, pulled Reynald’s eyelids apart.

“Silver progress on target. Time to descend.”

Jean Reynald lay motionless, unblinking.

time to descend

descending, floating free, ejected from the vessel, crushed and liquid, phased into

genetic material, trace of humanity in that void, in the only void, blood crystallized and shattering and

broken globe falling, enemy force barely pausing to investigate contents before striking out at the Teller, chasing it to

scrape

Windham’s blood, his flesh, unrecognizable, detectable only as human pattern, ice and black, dissolution

into the night

into the

fighting starlight

fighting

against the urge to pick up a piece of that sharp gravel, dig it into her wrists, tear it upward to her elbows, as she would have years ago, a confused, lonely young girl with glasses and frizzy hair.

The weapon had fully retracted into the ocean, but apparently the threat had not been eliminated. Warships tore through the sky, dainty little blackbirds, single-pilot slithers, great awkward lifting-bodies of the destroyers. Something was coming. Somethings were coming.

Helen looked at Hunter, who calmly stared into the sky. No tears.

“Mommy, we need to go.”

Helen nodded.

Hunter took his mother’s hand as she stood up. She picked him up, pausing for a brief moment to squeeze him in a weak embrace, frail form embracing frail form.

“You know where we have to go.”

“Hunter, I—”

He looked directly into her eyes, silver eyes of the catalyzed woman, windows into the soul of a race robbed of the ability to create daughters. And now, Helen’s only son had to leave.

“Don’t cry, Mommy.”

She nodded, feigned a smile. Holding Hunter tightly, she walked over gravel that lacerated more than her feet. The sky was becoming fire.

No stars in that expanse, but pinpoints of light nonetheless as the combat began over the planet. The fighting

starlight always has this effect on me.”

“Yeah.”

Complete understanding conveyed in that one word. That was just the kind of relationship they had, the kind of finishing each other’s sentences relationship that was not a relationship but it was, and it was something, for sure, especially under starlight, fighting starlight, trying to make sense of the indescribable nothing, the enormity of their unimportance.

The sun threatened to taint the horizon with pink, but for now, the ether was black with the white pinpoints of other systems, other stars, other planets. The moon was hiding.

“Do you believe?”

“In what?”

“Other worlds, aliens?”

“No.”

Hope regarded him with some disbelief. “You’re a science fiction author who doesn’t believe in aliens?”

“Nope.”

“What do you believe in, then?”

He grinned. “I, dear Ms. Benton, believe I need more wine.”

“What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Resonances. Past lives. We diverge and converge and find them again, like I found you.”

She exhaled, breath visible in the cold night air. Paul put his arms around her, looked up at the multitudes.

“We’re out there, somewhere. People just like us. No little green men, no flying saucers. Just us.”

He bent down, touched forehead to forehead. A dream.

“Somewhere out there, fighting the starlight…That’s what I believe. Just people like us, thinking too much, trying to figure out why we float through the night. Trying to find that sunrise.”

A perfect silence, in those moments before dawn. Two people, under stars.

Two people, under the stairs, or at least what he thought were stairs, or people. Not stairs…And not people, either. Disorienting motion down dimly-lit hallways, sound of airlocks cycling open before and closed behind the stretcher.

Eyes attempt to focus, but are unable. Choked with silver, swimming with that vision of futures eons dead, the vision of the young woman with the gentle voice and the bitter eyes.

Static snap of phase shielding deactivating. Air cool, faint breeze from within the

Detach. Floating free. A stretcher surrounded by angels, falling into the earth, falling down a silver tube. Their faces above him, gentle faces above him, walls of the Seattle Gate sliding away at impossible speeds. The angels remained unruffled, their dun robes hanging languidly in a gravity projected by silver. Reynald’s remaining hair whipped around his face, and he although he could feel that his mouth was open, he was not sure if there was a scream emanating or not.

The angel who could have been Nan leaned over Reynald, peered into his eyes. He was unresponsive, yet still alive. Respiratory rate was nearly undetectable. Eyes were unblinking, unmoving, locked in some dream that Maire would hopefully be able to unravel.

sand

falling to knees

shadow of that shard, that accusatory claw sticking into the sky, the symbol of her end

his fist outstretched, clenched in a rage beyond expression, body shaking

maggie don’t—

—leave me, Hunter. I can’t do this without you.”

The sky was a torrent of sound: the city alert, the static scream of phase engines as the defense forces flew from the atmosphere to engage the incoming enemy fleet, the human tumult of hundreds of mothers who had brought their sons to the evacuation point outside of the city’s Complex.

Hunter watched the sky, holding that tattered bear, hands clutching velveteen. A child within the beginning of the war that had killed his father and would eventually kill him.

Helen wanted to break, felt herself breaking, knew her heart would soon tear itself apart in fear and in the depth of her loss.

Angels were swarming, emotionlessly tearing children

sons

from the arms of their mothers. A great crack like thunder filled the sky above the complex as the wreckage of a slither lost phase containment and erased a sizeable amount of the lower atmosphere from existence. Flaming shards of black metallish rained down upon the crowd gathered before the complex gate, and many families were spared the pain of separation by the certainty of an end.

Helen threw herself over Hunter, who cried out as the full weight of his mother slammed him to the ground. Helen was a small woman, but Hunter was a smaller boy. He heard the angels shouting in that voice that lingered between the ears and tickled behind the eyes hurry, hurry, little soldiers and he wanted to answer, he wanted to obey, but Mommy wasn’t getting up, and Mommy was pinning him to the ground.

Hunter panicked.

Helen was coughing, it sounded like coughing, it had to be coughing, not gasping, anything but gasping. He wriggled from underneath his mother as another wave of phased flak struck the city. He pushed his mother onto her back, and it was only then that he saw the perfectly-cauterized hole in her chest, stretching all the way to the sidewalk underneath.

“Mommy?”

Two tears slid from Helen’s silver eyes, and she tried to smile, tried to reassure her son that things would be all right, but the air was gone, and no matter how hard she tried to inhale, to catch her breath, to form a word with lips slick with something, something copper, something silver, every time she tried to speak, she drowned a little more.

“Mommy!”

The angel picked him up from behind, held him tightly as the little boy struggled against her holometallic grasp. The angel embraced him with that screen door sensation that was not and never could be human, walked away from the fading body of Helen Windham, whose arm reached out to touch her son, hand outstretched, fingers yearning for the touch of all she had left in this world. The angel walked away without a glance back, but Hunter fought, screaming, sobbing, watching his mother’s arm fall to the ground, seeing her body go limp, feeling that silver return to the eternal silence.

Helen felt her arm hit the ground, felt her heart stop, felt blood flood into the remains of her lungs, her muscles relax, her bladder release. Her eyes dried, and she tried to blink, but control had gone, and her body was no longer hers. She could see them, the men of the war, fighting the invaders in the sky above Maire’s City. How many had fought with her husband? How many had seen the worlds of the void set to the flame of the Jihad?

She felt the touch of their minds as the silver began to dissemble, heard the screams of the young men of the war as their vessels shattered.

Is this what you want?

Flickering of static within synapse

Helen’s head lolled to the side, and she saw Honeybear Brown in the dust beside her, silently staring back with his one eye. A plume of smoke drifted from his hide, where a microscopic sliver of slither had mortally wounded the toy. Another cloud of piercing shrapnel fell on the city. One shard struck close enough to Helen to crater the pavement, scattering dust all around, clouding her unresponsive eyes, stealing her vision, stippling her flesh with bloody craters of its own.

Sensation fading…Pain, yet

She

saw her son holding that bear, smiling his quiet smile, waving to the little girl behind the fence

saw her husband in his uniform at the farewell ceremony, felt the sob within her chest

saw her fiancé walk into the coffee shop, looked back down, pretending to be engrossed in The Stillness Between

saw the soldier run up to her from the street, holding two letters

saw

felt

tears. and

helen?

his touch…an eternal embrace. a resonance of one soul shared by two people and

stillness

A flicker of electricity, a dissolution of pattern, silver fading into nothing.

you know…you do

eternal embrace. solace.

Helen fell to stillness.

“Jean Reynald.”

The voice came from the shadows of the room, shadows he could not see with his now-non-existent eyes, but shadows that he could feel with the sockets from which liquid silver seeped. Angels lifted him from the stretcher, held him upright as force generators took him from their grasp, pulled him into the center of the spherical chamber.

Tongue wet lips, jaw unclenched in an attempt to form speech. The flesh of his face, hands, entire body was numb, pins and needles.

“Don’t try to speak; you’re far beyond that now.”

He heard footsteps, sensed the owner of the female voice approach.

“You don’t need to speak, Jean. Just see.”

Fingertips brushed his cheek with the touch of ice, sandpaper brush of something not human, yet in human form. He felt the silver teardrops solidify on his cheeks, so cold, so alien. They fell from his face, mercury pellets. He blinked and saw for the first time in

“Hannah?”

She smiled. “Not this time, Reynald. Call me Maire.”

“What is…Why am I—”

“I need the code.”

“I don’t know any—”

She struck out, slicing a fingernail into Reynald’s neck. The wound wasn’t deep, but a line of crimson slid down his neck, clavicle, puddled in supra-sternal notch before winding into the hair of his chest.

Maire leaned in close, looking directly into Reynald’s eyes as she licked a bit of blood from his neck. She pulled back, tasted her lips.

“That code, Jean. Genetic code.”

“Commander, what is it?”

Reynald did not have an answer for his subordinate. Windham stood beside him, in awe, weapon still held before him, as if a projectile weapon would be able to stop the enemy. The human forces were alive at the whim of the projected.

Reynald cleared his throat, tapped the side of his neck twice to activate the direct connection to Command. “We need aerial reinforcement. Align satkills to our coordinates.”

The connection responded in his ear. “Wait for orders.”

The atomic had created a beautiful blast crater in the countryside, dozens of miles across, at least a mile deep. The strike had been intended to destroy the entry point of the projected enemy, but the visual confirmation revealed otherwise.

“It goes deeper than we thought.”

Deeper was an understatement, Reynald thought to himself. They had assumed that the projected were coming out of an alien vessel under the surface of the planet. They had assumed that bombing the entry point would destroy the vessel and end the enemy threat.

At the bottom of the blast crater, Reynald saw the twisted and burned edge of a circular hole, an immense silver cylinder sinking into the earth. Their atomic attack had blown the top off of a tube that someone had built into the center of the planet.

Someone.

The projecteds were standing at the edge of the tube, androgynous, motionless. Some of the men had taken to calling their enemy “angels.” Reynald and his soldiers were among a very select group who had survived more than one engagement with the projected humans. He suspected that this would be the last encounter. He could feel the end of this war approaching, and something in his gut told him that it would not be an end beneficial to the human race.

“Orders, sir?”

Reynald impatiently raised his hand, silencing Windham. He looked at the crater’s floor with his implants, magnifying his field of vision until he could make out the individual faces of the projecteds. So uniform. So emotionless.

“Satkill offline. Reinforcement unavailable. Hold your position and wait for orders.”

Reynald shook his head. If those projecteds decided to attack, his forces would be outnumbered and slaughtered by the angels.

As if reading his thoughts, the angel within Reynald’s magnified layer of vision turned its head and started walking toward him. The hundreds of other projecteds began to follow.

Windham slammed another EM pack into his weapon, brought the scope up to his eye. Reynald placed his hand on the top of the weapon, pushed it down to aim at the ground.

“This time, I think they want to talk. Hold your fire.”

“I knew you would understand, Jean. I knew you were different than the hot-blooded men in suits who thought they ran the world.”

“Why the blood, Hannah?”

She grinned at his insistence in using that misnomer for this level. “It will be a gift, of sorts, to those who sent me here.”

“A gift?”

She leaned in close, whispered. “A child. We’ll send them a child of

silver is my favorite.”

He grumbled under his breath as Jo spoke to the jeweler.

“Jemie?”

“Jo?”

“How can you afford this?”

He shrugged. “I can’t afford it.”

“But I thought—”

“I can’t do it, Jo. You know we can’t afford it right now.”

“But James, I—”

“Not now, Jo. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her lips began to tremble and James heard sobs as he stormed out of the jewelers and into the cobblestone Paris streets.

It was hours before he realized that he had been walking through the streets in a mindless torpor. He was on the docks, watching moonlight dance over the ripples when bright motion caught his eye from above: shooting stars, hundreds of them.

Whistler shook his head, blinked his eyes, but the stars kept falling.

late night and you’re driving me

crazy. Can’t you feel it? Different worlds, different times…We’ve known each other before.”

“I know.”

Stars fell in that stillness, and he wished, and she wished, and they probably wished for the same thing under that void, but neither spoke and neither acknowledged that struggle.

“I’ll make you a character in the book.” Hope felt his smile as he said that, felt her own smile as she heard it.

“Can you do that?”

“It’s my book. I can do anything. Fuck it.”

“Then your book needs to include cowboys. And teddy bears. And even that Whistler guy you love so much.”

“Me? Love? Shirley, you jest.”

“Of course. You could never love.”

“Never.”

“Never at all.”

“Nope.”

Stillness and distance breached.

“Keep your distance!”

The angels kept walking toward Reynald’s men, who nervously held weapons before them, watching for the order, yearning to dispatch these non-humans with the EM pulses that reduced them to useless balls of silver.

“Don’t fire,” Reynald broadcast through the comm implants. “Something’s different.”

“It’s a trap, sir. It has to be.” Windham kept his trigger finger firmly in place.

“No.” Reynald rubbed his eyes. A dull pain had begun to throb just behind them. Something was different…The angels were different.

So close…He could feel them, feel that blank stare of inhumanity. No expressions, no weapons, no indication of hostility. They just walked up the crater, toward Reynald’s small band of soldiers.

Windham was restless. He was a good boy, but Reynald sensed that his impatience would be his undoing. Windham wiped sweat from his eyes, adjusted his helmet’s position on his head.

“Sir? What do we do?”

jean

“What?”

“Orders, sir?”

jean reynald

Reynald blinked to clear his eyes, but the haze that had descended over his vision was still there, casting a lightness over the world, halos over the heads of the projected angels.

“Stay here.”

“Sir?”

Reynald stood up from the rim of the crater, began to walk down the side.

“Reynald!”

He turned back to Windham. “It’s okay. It’s time.”

He walked to meet the angels.

“I’d watched you for centuries. Watched your line. I know that you were the one. I saw to it that you’d be the one at the first encounter. You and your pretty little American boy.”

“Don’t hurt him.”

Maire’s face clouded. “I won’t hurt him, dear Jean, but he has to be the one who goes home for me.”

“Don’t…He has a family, a young bride—”

“I know this. And I know what I need from him.”

“Please, don’t do this.”

“His son, our daughter…A perfect extinction.”

Hunter slumped in the angel’s metal grasp. He was too shocked to cry, too exhausted to feel, too old for his young life. The shield doors cycled shut behind the angel, cutting off Hunter’s view of the scene of death. He could see his mother’s body on the ground, torn apart by another wave of phased flak.

They’re all dead out there. Mommy’s dead.

Loud snap as the phase shield reactivated around the building. The angel gently placed Hunter on the floor next to ten or twelve other boys, all sitting in silence, all staring at Hunter. He curled into a fetal position and rocked back, rocked forth. Many of the boys did. Torn from sleep, rushed to the Complex, sitting there with that knowledge that the city was dead out there, their mothers were dead in the city and their fathers were dead or dying in the sky or in the outer.

“Stay here, boys. We’ll be leaving soon.”

An explosion from outside, close, hard. Each of the angels flickered to static for a moment. The lights in the chamber went out for an instant before returning as red emergency lights. The angels looked at one another, a higher form of communication resonating between their images. They all turned to look at a door on one side of the chamber.

The door cycled open and another angel walked through, holding a little girl.

Hunter sat up. It was the little girl from the other side of the fence. He’d only ever seen two girl children, this one and his baby sister who had died days after her birth from the silver. Most of the boys in the room had never before seen a little girl.

She recognized Hunter as the angel carried her by the boys. She smiled and waved. Hunter did the same, wanted to say something, but the angel quickly carried her through another door, which slammed shut with a phase shield.

Hunter wondered if he would ever see her again.

“What is he doing?”

Windham put the scope back up to his eye, a fluid reflex learned from those months of war. Reynald was deep into the blast crater now, slowing his pace. He bent and placed his EM rifle on the ground, held his hands before him as he kept walking into the mass of angels. Windham saw one of the projecteds break away from the group, approach Reynald.

He flipped the safety on the EM pack of his rifle, brought the crosshairs of the scope to rest on the chest of the projected, where he knew his pulse weapon would find the silver ball that created the illusion of the angel.

It flickered for an instant, an intense light, and Reynald raised his arms to shield his eyes.

“Commander!”

“Nan, that was the—”

“I know, little flower.”

“But I want to—”

“No time, Lily. You’ll have all the time in the world to meet your new friends later.”

The angel jogged through the metal hallway. Another shield door cycled open and closed as she passed into another chamber carrying Lily. The floor stretched out as a platform into the spherical room. At its center there was a small chair with restraints. The little girl began to tremble in the coolness of the room and the fear of her situation.

Nan slowed her pace as she walked out onto the extended catwalk to the center of the sphere. She gently placed Lily in the vacuum chair and fastened the restraint harness around her.

“What’s going to happen, Nan? Do I have to go see the lady now?”

Nan shook her head as she tightened the final restraint, smoothed Lily’s tousled hair back from her forehead. “No time to see her now, child. It wouldn’t be safe for you to stay here any longer.”

“Why are they in the sky?”

“You’ll find out soon enough, sweetness.”

Nan leaned in close, kissed Lily’s forehead with her cool metallish lips. She squeezed Lily’s hand and walked back down the platform toward the chamber’s shield door.

“Nan?”

She turned, no tears on her face because of her inability to produce them, countenance now emotionless and cold because she had to be strong for the little girl, had to realize that the Catalyst was never hers to begin with. “Yes?”

“Will I see you again?”

“No, Lily. You’ll have a new caretaker in the void.”

“But I—”

“Goodbye, Lily.”

Nan turned, walked through the shield door, which slammed shut and snapped with phase static. The little girl was left alone in the utter silence of her bubble. The sound of static increased as the walkway to the center of the chamber retracted into the wall of the sphere. The wall itself began to shimmer, and several ports along its circumference opened to allow the thick gelatin of liquidspace travel to fill up the sphere.

Lily struggled in her restraints as the bottom of the sphere filled with mercurial phase. The level steadily increased until it washed over her bare feet, ankles, shins, knees, the hem of her lavender Honeybear Brown nightgown. She tried to kick at that cold metal fire, but was unable. The tickling, burning sensation of liquid reaching into her, preserving her biologics against the stress of Light X.

Liquid reached the arms of her vacuum chair, covered her hands and lower arms, upper arms, shoulders, crept up her neck. She shouldn’t have panicked, tried not to panic, didn’t want to panic, but panicked nonetheless. Lily began to scream, sobbed, flailed her head around as the mercury touched her chin, her earlobes…Her wet hair sent drops of the silver cascading out as she tried to spin around.

“Nan!”

Caressing jawline, earlobe. Tears coursed down the child’s face, mixed with the invasive silver. Touching bottom lip.

“Mommy!”

Lily closed her mouth as the level rose. Upper lip, nose. She strained back in the seat but was unable to prevent the silver from pouring into her nostrils. She instinctively exhaled, exhaled, silver over eyes, clamped eyes shut, felt silver finally cover the top of her head.

Robbed of senses, completely submerged, pain in her chest from a heart attempting to tear itself out, lungs on fire. A chamber spins, a chamber resonates. Liquid to fire, fire to space. A child’s mind falls into the silence of fear complete.

peu de fleur

a voice and

“If you’ve no more use for me, just end this, Hannah.”

Her jovial smile fell from her face. “Don’t call me that here.”

Reynald grinned. “You will never win this war.”

She struck out again, letting more blood spill from the wound in his neck. “I’ve already won it, human.” Reynald gasped in pain as Maire dug into his flesh with her silver nails. “You were the perfect flux, the perfect medium…You’ve done your part already. You’ve spread the sickness further than you could ever imagine.”

Windham broke from the line of soldiers and ran down the side of the crater, weapon held before him, trained on the angel closest to Reynald. He pulled the trigger, watched the magball tear through the angel’s chest. The image dissembled, the silver projector falling harmlessly to the ground.

Reynald spun around. “No! Windham, don’t—”

Angels were scattering, and more human soldiers descended from the rim of the crater. EM slugs flew into the mass of angels from the soldiers’ weapons, but did very little damage to their numbers. Windham chambered another slug, brought his weapon up to fire.

“Joseph!”

joseph windham

“Don’t do it!”

don’t

Windham squinted and shook off the painful tug of the voice that seemed to come from behind his eyes. He shot from the hip, knowing by instinct and experience that his aim was true, and the angels closest to Reynald would be destroyed.

The slug struck out at the projecteds with that slurping crackle of the EM wave, but it was struck down in mid-air by a field of light projected by the hands of an angel. A flicker in time and it was right there before him, androgynous face only remotely suggesting human origin, eyes not burning with the fury that combat should brand into the eyes of an opponent, but simply staring back with an emptiness that transcended his comprehension. The angel knocked the weapon out of Windham’s grasp, threw him back on to the ground.

don’t

All around the interior of the crater, EM slugs were being knocked down, soldiers were tangling in metallish embrace with angels in hand-to-hand combat. The humans were already outnumbered, and more projecteds were emerging from the exposed entrance to the tunnel. The fighting was fierce, the din of battle a mixture of human screams and piercing snaps of static.

“Reynald?”

Reynald walked over and helped Windham up. The sound of battle had disappeared in just those seconds, and the two men surveyed the scorched expanse of the crater. There were hundreds, thousands of the projecteds standing in silence, the bodies of Reynald’s forces laying at their feet. The angels made no move to harm the two remaining men.

“Shit. Oh shit.” Windham unsheathed the knife from the front of his armored vest.

“Put it down, Joe.” Reynald looked toward the metal entrance of the tunnel at the bottom of the crater…

“Commander, they’re going to—”

“No. They could have killed us already.” The angels were looking at the crater’s bottom as well. “They’re waiting for something.”

“We can’t just—”

“Drop the knife, son.” Windham followed the orders, stood restlessly amidst the thousands of silent angels, completely unarmed. The knife echoed against the rock as it hit the ground. It was the only sound besides the wind.

A humming, an undertone. They could feel it more than hear it, but it was undeniable. The transport vessel arose from within the tunnel sunk into the earth with a cloud of dust and grit. It hovered above the entrance for a moment before humming horizontally toward Reynald and Windham. The angels silently moved out of its path as it passed through the assembly.

A man stood upon the boxy, saucer-ish transport, holding nonchalantly to a guardrail with one hand and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette with the other. He tossed the cigarette overboard as the vessel slowed to a halt. A stairway materialized and descended. He wasted no time in walking down, the folds of his black robe sweeping out behind him.

His hair fluttered in the breeze, an unruly coif of uncertain design and personality. A fine white tangle graced his hairline, adding contrast to a man who was almost entirely composed of dark.

Reynald sensed Windham tense beside him, preparing himself for anything. Reynald himself was more confused than scared at this newcomer from the tunnel in the earth.

He was direct in his trajectory, walking through the last few angels surrounding Reynald and Windham, each of whom looked to the ground as he passed in deference. At last he was there before them, looking at them with a gaze of silver, a gaze of familiarity.

“You are Jean Reynald?”

“Yes.”

“And Joseph Windham?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. My name’s Whistler. Come with me, please.”

It began

to fall apart, I think, the instant that I started to love you, Jean Reynald.”

He smiled, weak, fading. Hung in light, blood now coursing from the open wound in his neck. She looked younger, not older…How was that possible? The first time he had seen her, she had seemed ancient. Now, she was barely middle-aged. Could it be that she was actually feeding on the energy of the planet? A cooling husk of a world, the inhabitants about to face the realities of a sixth extinction engineered by a criminal exile from another galaxy…She was killing them all, growing younger. Dying.

“You never loved me.”

She touched his cheek in that tender way, the caress of the damned, whispered. “Of course I did, old man.”

Weaker and weaker still, lifeblood pouring down chest, torso, legs, winding down to drip on the floor.

“Just kill me, then. Finish it.”

A tender kiss on the cheek, glance in the eyes that turned into something too long to be a glance.

“Thank you, Jean.”

“For what?”

“Jihad.”

Eyes of silver, lines of fire reaching out in savage strokes, an old man feeling pain no more, an ungenesis begun.

Maire licked his blood from her lips as the body was absorbed into silver.

It began.

Hunter sat in his vacuum seat, pulled the metal frame down over his shoulders, slammed it home and heard the click of the lock. The escape vessel was cold, dark, filled with the sound of roaring engines and sniffling children. Boys. Sons with no mothers, no fathers, no future on the planet that was at present being bombarded from above.

“Listen closely, boys.” Angels walked through the main passageway, checking the restraints on each of the precious passengers. “The city has been destroyed. We have to take you to safety in the outer. You’ll be reunited with your families once we’ve reached safety and the invaders have been dealt with.”

It was a lie, of course, but Hunter wondered if he was the only one of the boys who had seen the waves of flak tear apart the remaining adults outside of the Complex. Anything without shielding would never have withstood that attack. And from the rocking and swaying of the vessel in the launch pipe beneath the complex, it would appear that the attack was still in progress.

There were many empty seats in this passage. Hunter wondered how many boys had been killed before they could get to the Complex for evacuation.

“Hold on tight, little soldiers. We’re about to depart.”

Phased fuel engines rocked underneath the vessel. The sound was deafening. Hunter held tightly to the metal frame before him, with memories of the carnival, the merry-go-round that his mother preferred that he ride and the faster amusements that his father had taken him on long ago.

Engines screaming, little boys screaming. The angels dissembled and they were left alone in the torrent of sound.

Hunter tried to remember his father’s face, but he couldn’t. And when he remembered his mother’s face, all he could see was the smoking hole in her chest, the redness of her bloody mouth and the two lines of tears that slid from her eyes.

He held on tighter. He did not cry.

Light stretched. Everything stretched. The vessel phased and tore from the

launch pipe underneath the complex. Lily hung languidly in her restraints. The bubble was at the center of the vessel, surrounded by massive amounts of physical and phase shielding. She sensed the others on board, felt the touch of maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of terrified minds. Boys. That’s what they were. The vessel was filled with children, but she was special. She was in the bubble at the center.

She could see it, somehow, the Complex retracting and the vessel emerging from underneath, tearing through an atmosphere filled with enemy fighters, through an orbit filled with enormous enemy worldships and siege machines, through a solar system that would soon be dead, into the black between systems. She saw it from eyes that were not her own, yet somehow were.

Just a little girl in that innate blackness.

only ever really one story

She saw

fighting

She

fighting starlight

she

you know…you do.

stillness

She knew very little, but she knew beyond a doubt that she loved chocolate milk.

A LOSS SO DEAR

“Hunter?”

the

Nine spun around, his face a mask of horror. He clutched his chest, rapidly dissembling from the EM slug. His mouth opened to form her name, but it was too late. Nine flashed from his illusion in a burst of silver.

the stillness

Zero ran to Fleur, her crumpled form leaking a steadily-growing puddle of red onto the hardpan. “Lilith…Oh no. No. Oh god. Lilith.” The weapon dropped from his hand, clattered to the ground.

She smiled, mouth moving to speak, but there was no time. No life. The slug had passed through Nine and torn through the right side of her chest. Struggle to breathe, struggle to hold on to Hunter, Hunter, not Zero. Not that person at all anymore, or ever again.

“Lilith?” he sobbed, stroked her face, so white now. He didn’t look at the fine mist of crimson on her neck. He pushed the unruly curl back behind her ear, touched her face, the life draining from her skin, the silver crawling just underneath the surface.

the stillness lost

“Let her go.” Maire stood over them, her black robe whipping in the breeze, hair untied and dancing to the song of the wind, hands still bloody. “There’s nothing we can do now.”

Hunter reached out and grabbed the weapon before Maire could stop him, raised the barrel to target, just inches from her forehead. The child didn’t flinch.

“Do it. You know you want to.”

Lilith slumped in his arms. Silver ran from her eyes.

“You know you have to.”

Hunter cried out in frustration, in grief. He pulled Lilith’s limp form closer, keeping his weapon trained on Maire.

“If I don’t—”

“Do it.” She took a step closer to the tip of the weapon. “End it now.”

He closed his eyes, saw the image of her face burned into that perfect darkness.

“End it.”

Hunter Windham pulled the trigger.

“Did you actually think it would work?”

The interior of the cell was neither dim nor cold, as she had supposed it would be. If anything, it was the brightest and most welcoming room she’d seen in

in

how long?

She cleared her throat but gave no indication that she desired to communicate with her interrogator. The way he stood on the other side of the shield, hands clasped behind his back, chin up, staring proudly down aquiline nose…He embodied every reason she had carried out her plan. He was a symbol of that which she had struggled so valiantly for years to destroy.

“Don’t answer, then. Might be the best thing for you.”

She slumped into one well-lit corner of her prison, wrapped arms around knees, stared back at the man with a gaze that was beyond cold, beyond emotionless. He didn’t flinch.

“Do you have any questions before I leave?”

She brushed the unruly curl from her forehead, reflexively tucking it behind her left ear. “When is the trial?”

“No trial. Just sentencing. That will come soon enough.”

She exhaled slowly, audibly. “Goodnight.”

He was concerned. “Are you sure there isn’t anything I—”

“Goodnight.”

He turned and walked, gazing at floor and nothing else. “Goodnight, Maire.”

It would be a night without sleep.

“Orders coming through.”

Task swam over to join his co-pilot at the controls. The screen flickered with distortion for a moment, resolving into a static-filled image of Hannon.

“Find anything else today, boys?”

“Nothing. No survivors so far.”

“The sentencing is at the end of the week. Gather as much feed as you can, focusing on the major cities.”

“There’s not much to see there, sir. The most physical damage was done at the poles.”

“I don’t care about geology, Task. Get me footage of people.”

Off-screen, Co-Pilot L shook its head. Task smirked and nodded.

“There’s not much left of the people, Commandant. Just the silver.”

“Just get me some evidence. You know what I need.”

“Yes, sir.”

Elle broke the connection, flew the vessel back above the clouds. “What exactly do they expect us to find?”

Task lit a smoker. “Evidence of the catalyst.”

Elle’s plastic face attempted a smile. “You sure you want to be in this atmosphere, fleshbag?”

Task smiled and blew smoke in Elle’s non-face. “You bet your metal ass, hon.”

They flew.

“Did you see the report?”

“Which one?”

“Biological.”

Berlin leaned back in his chair, fingertips touching the bridge of his nose, eyes closed. He’d not slept since the attack, and now, eyes closed and heartbeats pounding in his throat, he truly did not care to look over any more reports on the criminal. His world was an ache not isolated to behind his eyes.

Exhale. “What does it say?”

“Just take a look at it.”

“I really don’t—”

“Berlin.” Hannon pushed the viewer closer. “Look at it.”

He lifted the thin pane of optic from the desktop, looked nonchalantly over the flickering screen until it snapped into his line of focus. His eyes widened and he sat upright.

“Is this a joke?”

“Sir.” Hannon’s gaze was all the assurance he needed.

“Why didn’t the filters pick this up?”

“She never underwent a full scan before. There was no need until she—”

“Understood.”

“Do you know what this means?”

“Are there any other abnormalities?”

“The resonance.”

“One heart. We never would have known.”

“She could have slipped through all of her life.”

“She should have been filtered years ago.”

Hannon motioned toward the viewer on the wall, which swirled into focus. Maire was curled into a fetal position on the floor of her cell, eyes wide, staring into nothing. Her hands were clasped before her mouth as if in prayer. Berlin highly doubted that that was what she was doing.

“Any readings on the silver yet?”

“She’s clean. The room’s clean.”

“Where did it go?”

Hannon shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not on the vessel. We’re at highest alert, but I don’t think we’ll see an outbreak.”

Berlin stood, walked to the viewer. “Orbital.” The shot changed to that of the planet below them. “Highlight Task position.” A white targeting reticule revealed the position of the advance vehicle. “Has he reported?”

“Northern continent is clear. Drones on recon in the south.”

“Anything at all?”

“Nothing.”

“Still hot?”

“Hazard science is analyzing core samples. Doesn’t look good.”

“Orbital zoom. Northern continent, city seven.”

The viewer re-aligned, swept in through cloud cover and the suffocating silver cloud of the attack, paused just miles above the city.

“Closer.”

Past science drones, past a war platform, through a line of black smoke coming from several miles of unchecked wildfire. The viewer held position under the ceiling of metallic dust, focused.

“Closer.”

The viewer beeped a negative.

“Closer.”

Negative.

“I think that’s the signal cutoff. The atmosphere is creating too much interference to transmit below that line.”

Berlin turned from the image of burned buildings; that mercurial reflection only heightened the ache behind his eyes, and the aches in his chest.

“How soon before we can get some recovery teams down there?”

“Sir, we won’t—”

“How soon?”

Hannon cleared his throat. “We have to study the silver. Right now, there’s no way to tell how long the planet will be hot.”

“As soon as we can… As soon as it’s safe, I’m going down.”

“Sir?”

Fingertips to bridge of nose, pausing ever so slightly to wipe moisture from eyes.

“My family’s down there. My wife and children.”

Hannon looked everywhere but Berlin’s eyes. “Sir, I’m so sorry. No one told me—”

“As soon as we can, I’m going down there to get my family. Understood?”

“Yes, sir. Understood.”

Berlin walked out of the room. It would be a long night in space.

It would be a long night in the cell.

She couldn’t sleep. Hadn’t been able to sleep in years. No bed in that room. At least it wasn’t cold. At least it wasn’t comfortable.

She felt the scan, that subtle tug of her molecules as the room made note of her irregularities. She knew that they’d try to find the silver. She’d buried it deep. She slowed the beat of her heart, slowed her respiration, closed her eyes. The sleep would never come again.

She felt them watch her, the polished circle at the center of the ceiling reaching down and scraping her flesh, tearing away photons to be reassembled in that heavily-shielded bunker on the surface of the vessel where the men who made war would decide her fate.

She felt the dead. There were voices from within, faded echoes of families who looked into the sky from picnics in the park, mothers whose final vision was the deployment vehicle and whose final thought was to throw themselves over their children, as if a foot of their flesh could ever have shielded their offspring from the silver. She heard the sobs of men who had never known that they could cry. She heard that final, startling crackle as the atmosphere solidified for one beautiful moment.

Tug.

She rolled on to her back, sat upright, looking at the tip of the viewer on the ceiling. If she had conserved any of her strength, she could have easily escaped this vessel. She could have shattered that viewer, could have reached through the microglass passages and torn the souls from those men. She could have, if she were not dying from her last exertion.

Maire pulled her knees up to her chest, stared at the wall. They had captured her, but it was not over yet. She would finish them.

She closed her eyes.

The exhaled line of gray was confused in zero-grav.

Task hovered before the observation bubble. It was supposed to be sleep time, or so the meaningless timer informed him. Elle was on the bridge, immersed in flashing recharge mist. He lit another smoker, considered waking his androgyn artificial companion, but decided to let the machine rest in peace. This vessel was one of the only places that silence and solitude abounded in these uncertain times.

A streak of light from outside of the bubble as another war platform descended. Task extended his right index finger and a zoom reticle surrounded the black-on-black of several million tons of metal and slumbering biologic that was the platform. They were sending platforms to secure the northern continent now; the scientists were reasonably certain that the catalyst had dissipated enough to send in the near-living ground troops.

A war against one woman… A terrorist act that could never truly be avenged. Task felt fortunate that he had no family on the surface below him, encased in silver dust. That’s probably why they picked him to do the dismal job of documenting the kill zones. Never a man for emotion; never a man with attachments to his species.

It was cold.

Heat from his fingertips but no surprise when the smoker self-immolated in a final suicide of smoke. No ash to clog the systems. Task felt a radical spin out of place and collide with several healthy breather cells, beginning the process of cellular mutation. He isolated and contained the cells in a reflex gesture. Right lung, right underneath his heart.

“Want some company?”

Task didn’t need to look to know that Elle had finished regen, which meant that soon it would be time to get back to work. No sleep in this night, at least not for the human member of the crew. Elle lazily swam to the observation bubble, still glowing from the recharge mist. The glow faded quickly.

“You do need to rest sometime, you know.”

“This is resting.”

“Don’t you see enough of the planet while we’re working?”

Task ignored the question. Another platform fell from the war machine above them.

“How many have you seen tonight?”

“Forty. Fifty.”

“They must think it’s safe for nears down there.”

“It isn’t safe for anyone. Never will be. They should scorch the whole damned thing and be done with it. Or send it into center-spiral. I’d never live there.”

“You’d never live on any planet, sweetheart.”

Task smiled. “Right.”

Two more platforms, one on either side of an almost-invisible sliver of silver. Task drew the reticule over the ships’ position as they planetfell, zoomed. The war platforms were escorting a council corvette.

Elle’s otherwise featureless eyes furrowed into concern as best they could. “Hannon?”

Task zoomed in. “No. That’s Berlin.”

“Against our recommendations?”

“I don’t think he’s listening to recommendations anymore.”

“If it’s still hot—”

“He doesn’t care.”

“I’ll never understand your species.”

“Of course not.”

Wake alarm. Cabin lights grew brighter. Task circumvented snooze and deactivated the anachrony of the sleep system. Time to get to work.

“Break orbit. Take us south.”

from eternal slumber upon wings of wind and i will we there were in that time gods of taken from and stolen with hidden deep with-in deepness and over the sky i have returned to “In position.”

Hydraulics emit canine whine and the body surges forward, empty pages replaced with an ancient text.

“Begin transfer.”

Fluid swirls, suffocation. The sacrifice body, blessed soul replaced with the target of midnight prayers, sacrament of flesh imbued with divinity. Rotating placement lasers strip away flesh and sinew and the gristle of pathetic, bare man. A million, a billion, a trillion needles invade protein.

“Status?”

“Sacrifice vehicle intact. Ready for download.”

when and when and when and called upon again to wake and wake and wake and be with my children again “Download complete.”

Snap of static and the body flails, drowning scream from within the birth sea. Medications diffuse, calm the fury of the reborn god/dess. Fluid levels descend, now-limp body twitches to rest on the raised platform that would provide a new and shorter sleep.

“Council communication line ready.”

“Open channel.”

A flash and a projection of Hannon stood in the birth chamber.

“I see the procedure was successful. How long before we can meet with him, Doctor?”

“Give him a few hours to rest. It’s been a long time since—”

“Yes, of course. Please let me know when he’s ready.”

Doctor waved its hand in the direction of Hannon and the image ceased. It walked over to the platform, where god was curled into a fetal position. Doctor rolled the deity on to his back, inspected the new body, opened its eyelids, testing for a response.

Assistant approached from behind, stood patiently while Doctor examined the haphazard arrangement of flesh into which the humans had chosen to inject their ancient.

“How many times have they done this?”

“Twice.”

“This time and one other?”

“This time and just before the war.”

“And he doesn’t mind?” Assistant looked over the pseudo-conscious divinity.

“I think he actually prefers the rest. They don’t need him anymore.”

“I’ll never understand them.”

Doctor turned from the table and looked Assistant in featureless eyes. “Just be thankful for them. Never forget your creators.”

Assistant looked at the ground, bowing submissively to its superior. It wanted to point out the obvious hypocrisy of Doctor’s statement…Their creators had all but forgotten their own creator, choosing instead to allow him to hide in the liquid night of the center of the planet in the slumber eternal, only waking him in moments of extreme need.

The new threat was indeed a moment of extreme need. Hopefully, god would have a solution to the woman of silver. So far, no one else did.

She was young, so young when first he’d seen her on the landing platform, standing at attention with the rest, sun-stained face blank and down in submission to the visiting dignitary. The stark gray of her eyes had been hidden by the black fan of lashes in that position, but as soon as he signaled for the team to stand at ease, he found those eyes boring into his own boring browns.

“Sir.”

“Doctor.”

Their first exchange of civil conversation gave no hint of the life they would spend together, the sunsets, the children they would create, but at the same time, Berlin paused, took a breath.

Black converges on gray. “Sir, have we—”

“No.” The interruption more forceful than need be. The doctor immediately shifted back into formal posture, dropped eyes back underneath the veil of black.

“Sir, I’m—”

“Let’s get started. We break orbit in three days. Mustn’t waste time.”

“Sir.”

They were magnificent creatures, the inhabitants of Planet Four: intelligent flora that sailed through the mist canyons on waves of chlorostatic, sometimes miles in length. Berlin could only watch in awe from the observation platform as a pod of carnivores swarmed and eradicated a rival and weaker group.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

Berlin frowned at the amicable tone of her rhetorical inquiry. She’d been off-one for far too long. The informality of the outer planets had begun to replace her training. He couldn’t really blame her; the striking sunlight, the fresh air, the distance from the tentacles of bureaucracy and hypocrisy…He would forgive her for now.

“They’re…impressive.”

She smiled, a total breach of decorum. Tanned hands grasped the railing, leaned farther over than she probably should have.

“We’re fortunate to have this place. They’re fortunate to have a world that hasn’t been used up.”

“We’ll see.”

The smile dropped almost immediately from the doctor’s face. “Is that why you’re here?”

Berlin cleared his throat. “Doctor—?”

“Kath. Botanist.”

“Kath. Botanist. They have the ability, correct?”

“A very limited form of the ability.”

“But you’ve been researching them for years now. Can it be recreated?”

A particularly large specimen of the lumbers flew fast enough underneath the platform to rock it gently. It left behind the disconcerting scent of pine pitch.

“We’d have to capture some of them.”

“We have the means.”

She frowned, shook her head. “Sir, this is a sanctuary planet. Even posting observers here breaks all of the preservation protocols.”

“We need this technology.”

“Understood, sir.”

“They’re just plants, Kath.”

She looked as if she’d been slapped. “They have a civilization.”

Berlin had been waiting. “Show me.”

The humble botanist withdrew once again, focused on the handrail.

“That’s an order.”

“And this heart, for you.”

Berlin opened his eyes at the whisper, spinning around to find only a near bowed in submission. His chest pounded. An inhalation not unlike a sob escaped before he could gain his bearings. The near ignored it.

“What is it?”

The almost-living warrior snapped to attention. “Hover position above Seven, sir.”

Berlin motioned and the wall became a window into the world below. Audio was inactive, but he imagined the scouring metal dust would make a sound not unlike a hailstorm…Or sand. Or the brush of evergreen limbs on the underside of an observation skiff.

“Ready a landing party. Dismissed.”

The near bowed and walked out. Berlin turned back to the viewer.

What are you doing here?

He had to be sure, had to see for himself. Had to see the extent of this act, had to know in his hearts that this fury was appropriate. He had to prove to himself that what he would do to Maire would be a just punishment.

“Kath. Botanist.”

He didn’t turn this time, didn’t flinch at the whisper.

The rough hand of a soldier grasped in the tiny hand of a doctor, guided to the wool scarf around her neck. Unwrapped slowly, breathing ragged, loop after loop of material exposing the white of her neck. Lips explored, clasps unclasped. Moonlight pupils displaced the gray of iris, lashes tickled his cheek. So cold. So cold in that night.

She drew his hand to her chest, bare skin goose-fleshed under moonlight, palm dragged over nipples erect to that place and that moment. She drew his hand to her chest and placed it over her left breast.

“This heart for my spirit.”

He let her guide him. Up, collarbone, supra-sternal notch, collarbone, down. She held his hand above her right heart.

“And this heart, for you.”

Collision of storm fronts. They had planned it then, the escape from the suffocation of bureaucracy, the flight from One that would eventually draw the likes of the terrorist Maire. Under that moons-lit sky, breathing the air of the ancient lumbers…It had been a perfect world.

Berlin walked away from the viewer. Time to go home.

“Are you watching this?”

Task turned from his targeting monitor. “Nothing else to watch down there.”

“If he becomes contaminated—”

“Nothing. If he becomes contaminated, they’ll leave him on the surface. The shit works too fast to save them from it, anyways. He’d never make it back to the command vessel.”

“Aren’t they concerned about the nears, though? They could catch a hybrid of the silver and spread it to the next planet they pacify.”

“Something tells me these nears are on a one-way mission. They’ll never make it off this planet again. Cheaper to burn them on the spot.”

Elle almost-frowned. It was as much of a look of concern as the Co-Pilot could create on a plastic face.

“No worries, Elly baby. We’re not going downstairs on this trip.”

“Do you think it’ll matter? We’ve been in this atmosphere for—”

“I’ll take care of us. Don’t worry about it.”

They flew.

Echoes of the music of their bond ceremony. Laughter from family and friends. The softness of the small of her back, muscles under softest flesh as he pulled her closer.

The skyline was intact. Mostly.

Berlin’s lander slammed to the ground. He swayed from within his jar. The nears remained upright, remained still. They sparkled to life as hangar doors opened and the interior of the bay was flooded with the maybe-contaminated atmosphere of City Seven.

“Readings are negative on silver, Commandant.”

Berlin walked down the platform, nears fanning out before him, weapons drawn, scanning the dead landscape for movement, heat sources, anything. Stillness, cold, nothing.

Berlin’s jar slurped as he walked forward, dragging the phased glass filter that enveloped his form lazily around him. Particles of metal dust from the breeze stippled the surface, sending wave patterns outward, bouncing from one another, fronts on the weather map of his protective suit. The same metal breeze began to scour the flesh from the nears outside of the lander. They were expendable. Berlin was not.

“Are you receiving, sir?”

“Yes.” The glass distorted his voice into tin and refraction. It echoed back from a universe of liquid prisms.

“Readings are negative, but we’ll pull you out at the first sign of any—”

Berlin cut the link. Enough talking. The nears would not bother him with conversation.

The wind whispered. The wind whispered. Constant hiss, the lamentations of a dead populace just beyond the edge of the senses. He made out a word every now and then, the most unlikely messages from the dead: phallus and gringo and burlap and synecdoche and shingles. God crochets a warship and I don’t ever want to see you again. And. You pretend to be intense. And. Philtrum. Nancy. Berlin closed his eyes and it was gone. It was never there. It was

The days had been longer when this had been his home.

There had been seasons; winter had only been one of them. A little park where the lander now towered over leaf-less forest. The legs and ramp had splintered the old souls in resting. There had been a park; now there was a slab of black metallish and a detachment of non-humans and a man drowning in protective glass.

And this heart, for you.

The trees had not impressed her when compared to the lumbers, but this had been the one place where she had felt truly at ease on Planet One: a sliver of green life interjected into gray city, one lone voice in the screaming of civilization.

You are an ideal. Not really there.

Park left behind, walking down abandoned streets. He found people there. Berlin’s hearts broke; the tiny silvered forms of children, flesh replaced with

The nears surrounded him in a protective formation, although there really was nothing here from which to protect him. It would be impossible now to even prevent the infestation of the silver in his bloodstream if their readings had been wrong. The glass would prevent his fragile human flesh from being stripped away in metal winds, but it would do nothing to prevent a universe of machines from stealing his

Walking and walking. The landing party followed Berlin’s lead as he went around a corner, stopped at the sight before him. Several blocks down the street, many of the buildings had been clipped off midway up, and the rubble filled the street below. No fire anymore, although there obviously had been. Dozens of half-fallen towers, sterile in this cold. There were silver bodies.

a loss so

Berlin walked toward the collapsed part of City Seven, his eyes locked on the tower where he had last seen his family.

There are no tears in phased glass.

“Do you smoke?”

It wasn’t a glare. Hannon didn’t believe that she had the energy to consciously create a glare to thrust at him. Her lifesigns were barely on-scale as it was.

“Do you mind?”

He didn’t wait for an answer but lit the smoker, sat back in his chair. The wall of phase shielding barely distorted her features. He was glad to sit back; his hair returned to resting position.

“Do you speak?”

One corner of her mouth turned up at his question, but her eyes remained locked on the tabletop between them.

“Berlin’s on the surface as we speak. As I speak.”

She gave no indication that she even recognized the name. Right hand gently traced fingertips over tabletop.

“We know that he was with you in the beginning.”

Her hand came to rest, withdrew to her lap.

“Yeah. We’ve known for quite some time.”

She opened her mouth, eyes still down. Her mouth closed as she reconsidered.

“He has no idea. We could leave him down there, you know.”

Her eyes closed.

Hannon exhaled smoke and leaned forward again, forced smile on his face. “We won’t. He’ll just go with you after sentencing.”

She looked Hannon in the eyes for the first time. “Go?”

He inhaled the smoker. “Just a little trip. We can’t kill you, but we can’t keep you here to try this again.”

Flicker of inaudible conversation. Hannon tapped his neck to cut the link. He crushed his smoker on the tabletop and stood.

“Sleep well, sweet Maire. Sentencing is tomorrow.”

Hannon left his side of the room, and the phase shielding faded to black, leaving Maire alone with her thoughts.

sleep well.

the in-dark answers with wind

do you? you know. you do.

the way that she warmed him, trees above and nothing below, forest of sky and intruding stars wondering from

Botanist.

internal tides of

“We can escape. We can

He’d known the child. Not known, but he knew who the boy had been, the little slivered, silvered boy, mimicking in uncertain gesture the children of a Pompeii of another world not yet born. A playmate of his son, beautiful son, now pressed to the sidewalk, arm shielding face, but he knew the boy. Not knew, but he knew who the boy had been.

What have I

Berlin didn’t want to go inside, shouldn’t go inside, would go inside. He had to know. Had to see with his own eyes what a planet of evidence was telling the system.

The nears followed him, the most-damaged stumbling as best they could with the biological damage of metal winds. Some fell, critical systems wounded beyond repair. They were left behind.

Why did you

Reached out with his mind, and several nears wrestled the shield-locked entry of the building open. The planet was devoid of electricity now, but it wouldn’t stop his forward progress. A plasma burst and the entry was clear, pressurized interior venting weakly into an atmosphere raped of breath. He walked in, filter slurping lazily around and behind him, sizzling as it touched the still-glowing edges of the entrance.

How could she

Hearts beating in unison. Forehead and cheeks secreting a sweat immediately whisked away and neutralized by the glass. Blinking back tears. Lick lips. The nears’ spotlights flashed to life, illuminating the foyer. There were people, but none matching the way he remembered his family. It wouldn’t be that simple. They would be above, just below the shattered top of the tower.

Elevators would be useless.

He directed the nears without words. More flashes of cutting phase, stairwell revealed. The building had closed the main entrance points automatically in the instant before the attack and the eternal loss of power. One unfortunate young man had been cleanly clipped apart by the slamming of the stairwell shield doors. Berlin didn’t know him.

Mindless walk. He would sometimes take the stairs in the days before just because. Just because. He disliked technology’s intrusion into every aspect of his life. He was a strong man, and he didn’t mind walking. On this day, he didn’t feel like a strong man. Each successive stair, each story drained him more. The paths he took through his life, each step toward this crime, this Event.

He thought too much.

we could

and there would be

but

they have to be

we have to

you know

you do

“Who’ve they sent?”

“Judith.”

“Is she—”

“She’ll do. She’s been a medium before.”

“Which time?”

“The last time. Here she comes.”

The viewer revealed the bending of galaxies toward the singularity. Flash of starburst as the planetship reassembled particle-by-particle. The transit ocean froze, shattered into infinite crystals as the end product of near-light materialized.

“Is she normal?”

“As normal as media come. Decades of experience with demigods. And in the last war,” Doctor noted the departure of Judith’s slither from her planet, “She had the chance to develop a relationship with the subject.”

“A relationship?”

“Not like that.” The slither soft-docked. “Let’s go meet her.”

Assistant shrugged its shoulders ineffectively. “I don’t know if I should—”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. She talks to gods. That’s all.”

“Right. You’re right.”

“Let’s go.”

in those days between the death of everything and the rebirth of less than humanity, it hurtled into damnation and spawned and its progeny spread outward and outward and consumed everything in their path, and before Omega, it judged that all that it had created was good and redeemable and it sent the newborns back into the blackness to save those unfortunate enough to have remained

Judith opened her eyes.

The sleep of liquid travel was disconcerting. She trusted the process, told herself to trust the process, but each time she woke up from the night between the stars, she had the urge to stand before a mirror nude and inspect herself to see if anything was missing.

That’s not where it’d be missing, Jud.

Ten fingers, ten toes, all the usual bipedal accoutrement. Little hands touched face; everything appeared to be all right there as well, except for the

Well. There would always be that.

Softdock platform extended, and the slither gently melted into the side of the warworld above System Fourteen-Seven, Planet One. Judith pulled herself out of the vacuum chair with a slurp, shook her hair around like a barker, coagulating pellets of liquispace emulsion floating freely, lazily spattering onto the walls. She pulled her hair back, squeezed more of the disgusting yet crucial slime from her coif. It was now dissipating into a high-density gas. She was dry.

“Situation?”

deity re-animated.

“Who is it?”

standard.

“Good. It’s been a while.”

plank extended.

The lock doors cycled open. Just beyond the chamber, Judith could see the disturbing androgynous faces of a Doctor and an Assistant. The Doctor held out a (claw) hand and tried to smile in that way the nearish always tried.

“Welcome, Medium Judith.”

She waved off the hand. “Take me to it.”

“Yes, of course. Have you been briefed?”

“Briefed? Briefly.” She walked briskly. It had been a long time since she’d been in the aether, and she was eager to talk to the god. She knew she was an addict. “Something about a planet being lost?”

“A new technology, yes. There was a terrorist—”

“What kind of technology?”

Doctor’s pace slowed. “I don’t know if I’m qualified to—”

“Just tell me.”

“It’s a silver. A metallic pathogen.”

they would live forever. in the ocean of silver fire, Omega would be the salvation and the nirvana and the extinction and the

“What’s it do?”

“Replaces biologic with metallic.”

“How’s it work?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“And it killed a planet?”

“Yes.”

Judith pinched the plastic cheek of the Doctor, squeezed it like a child’s. “Well you’d better find out how it works and what it is and who else has it, don’t you think?”

“Yes, of course. We—”

“Better get to work.” She glanced through the phased glass of the chamber at the end of the hallway. “This is it?”

“Yes, Medium.”

“Good. Seeya.”

Doctor bowed and retreated.

Judith placed her palm on the reader beside the door, waited for a miniscule genetic sample to be sequenced and verified, and entered the shielded chamber. God floated in a static tube at the chamber’s center, hardware connecting him as needed to the outside world, gelatin suspending him in near-solid.

“Hey there, buddy.” Judith smiled that smile, pulled up a wheeled chair to the glass. She sat down on it backwards. “How’ve you been?”

The host body remained motionless, swaying gently in the omnipresent sludge. Why did the basis of their technology have to be scum? Scum from trees? Scum from giant trees? She tapped on the glass, as if God were a goldfish. No reaction.

“Well, shit.”

She caught a flash of movement from the periphery of her vision and saw that Doctor and Assistant were observing from the deck above, shielded behind phase. Judith pulled the curtain that surrounded God’s static tube closed, blocking the view of the nearish. She preferred to work alone, or at least with real people.

Concealed by non-fabric, she withdrew the hardlink cable from the base of the static tube, plugged it snugly into the jack in the center of her chest between the cardiac shields and

turning, raindrops spattering on her face, face framed with curls, curls the color not of fire or blood but

atmosphere choking with something and

the in-dark answered with

wind

blew white paper, black ink, folded, to the floor. Pungent aroma, a humidity of percolation. Dark day, rain, undertone of well-groomed man in black suit on viewers, ratcheting tones of a music from somewhere, dark day people sipping black liquid, foamy brown liquid, something gathered from mountains. God sat alone at a table, the host body that of a young man with a streak of white in his hair, old eyes, a book bookmarked and set before him. Demian. Hesse.

She pulled out a chair across from Him and sat. “What the hell is that smell?”

He smirked, held out a mug. “This shit. Apparently they enjoy drinking it.”

“Oh God.” Judith rolled her eyes. She wondered what color they were. “When are we? Something’s not right about this place.”

He leaned back in his chair, contented. “You don’t like it?”

“The air’s different. And…”

“And?”

“It just feels different. I can’t quite—”

God leaned forward, unzipped Judith’s jacket, slipped his hand into open-necked shirt, placed his palm flat against her chest. Her eyes widened with realization.

“What are they?” Her own small hand reached to touch her upper chest, below the collarbone.

“Just a little project I’ve been working on for a while. Unfortunately, it seems that one of them got out of control.”

“And this place?”

“Hasn’t happened yet.” An exclamation of joy. God and Judith turned to see a young man and woman embrace near the back of the shop, the woman sporting a glint of silver on her left hand.

“How could you—”

“I’m God, Judith. I can do anything.” He sipped his coffee with a grin. “I contain multitudes.”

“Don’t get too big for your britches, O Omnipresence. We’ll throw you back down the hole.” Judith took the cup from God, took a sip, grimaced. She placed the cup back down on the table. “Why’s the wind blowing? And rain? It’s—”

“Autumn. Not a perpetual autumn, but an autumn nonetheless.”

“What’s—”

“A season. There used to be seasons, long before you were born.”

Judith rubbed the flesh of her chest, exposed between drapes of fine silk. She was mesmerized by the single beat.

Click, scratch, sizzle, click. God inhaled deeply, exhaled smoke. Judith hated the smoker scent.

“How bad is it?”

“I’ve only just been briefed. Briefly. But it’s bad. You said you let one get loose?”

“I didn’t let her get loose.” God ashed in his coffee cup. “Shit happens. I wasn’t watching.”

“We shouldn’t have dropped you after the war. Maybe if you’d been—”

“I wanted to be down there. You’re too noisy. I need my space.”

“I understand.”

“I feel asleep for a while. Just a nap. I wake up and there’s a planet fucked.”

Judith traced figure eights on the tabletop with precision-filed fingernail. “Will it be salvageable?”

“That’s the thing…I don’t know what she did.”

“It’s a silver. Downloading specs.” Judith’s eyes flashed for an instant as she hardlinked into the system. “Full-spectrum phase catalyst. Biologically invasive, gaseous dissemination in nitrogen atmospheres.”

“I didn’t make a silver like that.”

“See for yourself.” Judith grasped God’s hands in her own. His eyes widened.

“I didn’t fucking make that.”

Judith sat up, released God’s hands. In that last instant of contact, an emotion: fear. Genuine. Overwhelming. “Where did it—”

“You have to get her out of here. At least until I can work this out…Please don’t drop me yet, Jud. I don’t know—”

“I’ll tell the—”

“We have to—”

“We will.” She never seen Him like this. The host body’s face was deathly pale, eyes darting. His hand grasped a napkin from the table, clenched and released, nervously started tearing it into strips.

“I didn’t make that silver.”

“We’ll figure it out. I have to go for now.”

“Please don’t. It’s been so long since—”

“I’ll be back.” She tenderly patted His hand. “I promise. We’ll do all we can.” Judith reached to her chest, grabbed the invisible hardlink cable that she knew was there.

“I’ll be here.”

“See you soon.” She tugged at the cable,

severing the connection. She fell to the floor, body powerless, head throbbing from the agony of the deity flux.

Footsteps: running. Unnatural. Machined. Doctor. He (it) lifted Judith, near form effortlessly picking her up, placing her softly on an examination table on the other side of the curtain. God’s host body floated without any indication of life in the gelatin tube.

“What do you think he said?”

“Quiet.” Doctor waved Assistant off. “Usually takes a few hours for the spell to pass. Until then, we wait.”

“She was crying.”

Doctor nodded its head. “So was He.”

he’s crying.

Nearish to nearish, sub-thought.

so was she.

Berlin’s hands were to his face. His body shook silently from within the glass filter, crouched on the floor beside his daughter. Little body, little-to-no-body left. Pile of metal forged into human, human forged into metal.

should we—

no.

Fingertips traced the grit of dissembling silver dust, filter scraping away parts of what had been a child’s cheek. Berlin saw what he was doing and stood up in frustration and disgust.

They’d found his old living quarters without incident. His floor had been beneath the zone damaged by fire and falling towers, although buckled bulkheads and cracked load-bearing supports of the superstructure gave evidence of the force of the attack from above. They wouldn’t stay in here for long, even though neither escape nor continuing really mattered at this point.

Walk past nears, standing at attention, lifeless faces hidden behind black metal, weapons and searchlights bristling from armor. Walk down hallway, past open doors where toys sat in forever disarray, photographs hang on walls now stippled with something, where viewers were black. Frank the cat, a pile of filings.

End of the hallway: Push open bedroom door.

Berlin sobbed when he saw her

Kath. Botanist.

on the floor.

Hands swam through liquid glass filter, up to neck, activation points grasped. He knew the nears wouldn’t stop him. Couldn’t stop him. Two points, turned clockwise and counterclockwise. Snap into place, pull up. Glass dissolves.

He turned off his shield.

away, away from vain struggle

Alarms, immediate, as frigid nitro closed in. The glass pool splashed to the floor, drops spattered the armored legs of nearby nearish. The rapid change in pressure activated Berlin’s emergency communications beacon: a swarm of luminous nanos erupted from the chest pack of his atmosphere suit, stopped in formation several feet away from the man and the nears, and pulsed into the sky in stuttering phase bursts. The nears’ chestpacks all began to glow in similar readiness.

Berlin wiped silica gelatin from his eyes, nose, mouth. The comm implant in his right temple began to throb, but instead of acknowledging the incoming transmission, he swiftly brought his fist up, colliding squarely with the side of his head, crushing the metallish creature underneath his skin. The pain was almost as swift as his blood.

A return of the swarm: the near nearest Berlin snapped to attention, infinitesimal lances of light cutting through space and silvered atmosphere and building to penetrate the non-mind of the lump of flesh and download a carrier pattern. It removed black composite faceplate to reveal almost-human face, eyes glowing with universes of comm nanos.

As brain matter re-arranged itself to accept the signal, atrophied mouth, tongue, vocal chords came to life, producing nonsense sound, an uncomfortable experimentation with non-mental communication. Signal lock. Dry tongue instinctively licked dry lips. The glittering link seemed to connect the top of the near’s head to the ceiling in an unambitious rendition of a halo.

“Berlin.” Voice beyond hoarse, but still recognizable. Berlin was still disconcerted by the technology they had acquired from the planet of trees and botanist and

“Let it be, Hannon.”

The near walked closer in a disturbing pantomime of Berlin’s second, who right now floated safely miles above the planet, a similar nano halo linking him to this non-human. “You shouldn’t have done that. You know that you can’t—”

“I know.”

“It didn’t have to—”

“Yes. It did.”

“We could have—”

“I know you saw it all, Hannon. My wife, Maire, the trees.”

The near stood in silence.

“I’ve known since the attack. And I know what you had planned for me.”

“There’s no way you—”

“I didn’t want this.”

“Then you shouldn’t have—”

“I know.”

Berlin bent to his wife, form silvered in shadow. His hand reached out to touch her cheek, hesitated, withdrew.

“Just kill me and get it over with. Have them kill me.”

Silence.

“Hannon?”

The near approached, looked down on Berlin’s face. The wind-torn flesh was without emotion, but the voice that it channeled was razor-sharp.

“No. No quick death for you, traitor.”

The air burned with cold

above the lumber plains on the night that Maire had been so convincing. It was a winter month, and the floater didn’t offer much protection against the wind.

It wasn’t dancing, and it wasn’t singing, but the flora hovered in formation below them, basking in the phosphorescent hydrostatic mist of the mid-atmosphere. The canyons echoed with their keening midnight song.

Berlin wrapped his arms around Kath, hands clasped in front in a bundle of their intertwined fingers. Squeeze. Sniffle and one hand went to her face as demure form shook with sob and fear. In moonslight, twin tracks on windburned cheeks: just two tears, but they were two too many.

“They’ll be harvested.”

“Analysis was conclusive. We can isolate the flux ability.”

“Then why—”

“Because they can. And they don’t want anyone else to figure it out.”

“So that’s it? They take a few lumbers for sampling, isolate the tech, and kill the rest?”

“That’s the way we work.”

“No.” She turned around in his arms. Gray eyes swallowed by black pupils. “That’s the way they work.”

“I can’t—”

“You can’t. But we can.”

She slipped from his grasp, walked to the other side of the floater, leaned precariously over the edge. The vehicle swayed in the wake of a forest passing beneath them. Berlin walked to join her.

“We?”

Kath hesitated, cleared her throat. “You don’t have to know about this.”

“Do you think I’d—”

“No.” She squeezed his hand, let go. “But they’d kill you if they knew about it.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve met someone. There’s a woman who can help.”

“Help what?”

“She comes from the outer. Came in months ago on a transport. Just something about her…”

“Who?”

“She knows what to do. To make it right.”

“Kath—”

“She’s not like us.”

“If you’re talking about—”

“She wants to help. Not just this planet. She can make it right again.”

“Make what right?”

Kath’s hands balled to fists at her side. “The last war…Nothing’s been the same since. Planets in slavery, One ruled by machines and nears. Gods dropped into the slumber. Nothing’s right anymore.”

“We had to fight that war.”

“But we didn’t have to become this.” Her fingertips traced the insignia on her chest, moved to her temple, where the metallish uplink writhed under her skin. “We didn’t have to give up our—

“It was for the best.”

“Whose best?”

“Our best. It had to be done.”

“We’re killing the system! The stars can’t support us anymore. The energy load alone between the two—”

“That’s why we need the lumbers. Deep galactic survey missions, colonization hives—”

“We have all that we need right here. We’ve just forgotten how to live within our means.”

“We can’t turn back now. We’re pushing the saturation mark as—”

“We don’t have to be pushing the saturation mark.”

Berlin felt the throb of the comm uplink, but kept it static. “You can’t be talking about—”

“Planet One alone uses eighty percent of the system resources.”

He said nothing.

“A lot of bad people on Planet One.”

“Not all.”

“They started the war.”

“The war’s over.”

“It’s not over. Not yet.”

He’d never heard her talk like this: such determination. Passion. He never suspected that she felt so strongly about the civil war that had split the binary system a decade before.

“If we take out One, we solve everything. Decentralize the machines’ power. Make room for real people again.”

She reached out. His response was uncertain, but he did hold her hand.

“And you know someone who can do this?”

“A woman from the outer, where the planets still burn. She says she can kill the machines.”

“And her name?”

“Maire.”

He loved the link with the female Judith.

The host body was a tickle in that ocean of thought. It was recovering from the transfer and would soon be strong enough to remove from the static tube and actually serve its purpose as a deity transport. Judith would still act as medium, though…Squeezing an ancient being into one-hundred eighty pounds of flesh and bone always brought with it a few communications problems; the grunting, guttural verbal langage of his primary pets was difficult to master. He would solve that in the upgrade.

Flickering of electrons, muscles come to life again. A finger twitches.

“We have movement.”

Doctor joined Assistant at the static tube. “It’s about time. Takes Him a while to get His bearings.”

“Do you think He’ll ever just stay in the sleep and refuse to come up for air?”

“He likes it down there…This might be the last time we ever see Him.”

“What would they do without Him?”

“Carry on. God’s dead to them as is. They have us now.”

“I feel so special.” Assistant’s mouth turned up at the corners. “Ha ha HA!”

Doctor looked at Assistant with disdain. “Stop that. You look like a fool.”

Hand of God clasped through the gelatin, of its own power.

“He’s ready. Let’s fish him out of there.”

“Still nothing.”

“Why are we wasting our time?”

Task grasped the hemispheres of his observation environment and pulled them apart with the click of mechanics and hiss of dissipating interface flux. He rubbed his eyes and pulled himself out of the bubble. Elle was waiting with smoker in one claw and igniter in the other.

Task swam past his co-pilot to the underside viewer. “Best view we’ve had all day.”

“Of what?”

“The delivery vehicle. We’re over the impact site right now.”

Elle was hesitant.

“Not much to look at. Can’t believe that it did all this.”

The crater that the impact of the starship had carved into the surface of the planet was the most impressive part of the spectacle. Not a circle…The vessel had hit at such an acute angle that most of the debris had been cast hundreds of miles in front of the actual strike, covering City Four completely in a blanket of shattered stone.

“How did she survive the fall?”

“She didn’t. They picked her up in a slither in upper orbit.”

“She was trying to escape?”

“She wasn’t trying to do anything…The slither was harddocked to the delivery vessel. It released automatically when the carrier hit critical gravity.”

“Escape system.”

“She probably didn’t know that she was going to escape. She wasn’t even alive when they found her.”

“The catalyst?”

“It came from her.”

The delivery vessel was a giant half-buried in the surface, one nacelle towering thousands of feet into the atmosphere, the other snapped off and flung miles from the impact site, now resting in the ruins of a village. The conical body of the vessel itself now stuck from the desert hardpan like an addict’s needle. Many of the dispersion ports had bent or torn off completely from the collar upon impact. Elle noted the empty slither-shaped port just above the collar at the vessel’s top. The rest of the ship dwarfed the slot from which Maire had poisoned the atmosphere of the planet with a universe of machines.

“She wanted to die on that ship.”

“They won’t let her die now.”

Beeping alert. Elle swam to the cockpit.

“Action above City Seven.”

“Visual.”

A flurry of lights erupted from the surface, arced upward to strike the underside of the main planetship. It solidified into a tightbeam linking the vessel to the planet.

“Is that weapons fire?”

“No.” Elle adjusted the viewer. “It’s a halo. Comm nanos. Someone must have deactivated their link.”

“Berlin’s the only one down there. Nears wouldn’t switch off.”

“Why would Berlin turn off his link?”

“Could be dead.”

“Could be.”

“Could be the silver.”

“Could be.”

“He might need help.”

“He might.”

“What should we do?”

“Let’s listen to what they’re saying.”

Task switched in.

Dark room.

Elle reached out to take Task’s hand. He hadn’t expected the contact. In this flux, Elle’s projection was a female, green eyes instead of white, tan flesh instead of gray, black hair instead of none. She smiled, blushed. Task squeezed her hand, but placed one finger to his lip to signal silence.

They walked forward into the ambiguous expanse. There was a table at the room’s center, two men on opposing sides, faces contorted in angry conversation, hands animated in frustrated fists.

subvocal: no sound?

i’m surprised we’re in this far. atmosphere must be interfering with the audio.

compensating.

“And what does that mean?”

“Maire’s taking a little trip.”

“And I’m going with her?”

“You could have been a brilliant leader. Such a waste.”

“She killed my family!”

“You should have considered that possibility before helping her.”

“I never—”

“You did. Helped her just enough.”

what are they talking about?

looks like berlin was in on it.

“We didn’t help her do this.”

“Guilt by association. You should have told us.”

“The machines would never have believed it.”

“But we might have.”

“And we’re the ones in control?”

Hannon slammed his palm to the table. “The war is over. They won. We have to live with that.”

“And what does God think about all this?”

“I’ll tell you in a few hours.”

Berlin’s lips parted but the words remained lost inside.

they woke up god.

we shouldn’t be listening to this.

“That’s right. He’s awake.”

Berlin studied the featureless tabletop.

“Make your peace with your family. I’ll be in touch.” Hannon waved his hand before his face, shooing the nanos away. His image disappeared.

let’s get out of here.

“Don’t.”

Elle’s greens widened considerably and her gaze locked on Task.

“He couldn’t see you. Must have been the interference.”

commandant?

“Yeah. I know you’re there.”

sir, we didn’t—

“Of course not.”

and if we—

“You’re dead if he finds out you listened in.”

we didn’t know—

“And now you do.”

we won’t tell—

“No. You won’t. You’re not going to tell anyone about this.”

sir?

“Help me.”

how?

“Get me off this planet.”

Hearts pounded. Hannon was furious.

He batted at the remaining nanos. They hovered like nibblers until winking out, drained of residual phase.

There was a time…

And then there wasn’t. Berlin was a traitor, regardless of other times and places. He would be punished accordingly

or else they’ll get you

because that was the way the system worked. It was a good system.

He had to meet soon with the medium and God and the council. He didn’t feel like talking. He didn’t feel like facing God after placing him in the slumber for so long. It hadn’t really been his or His decision, but those had been awkward times. Heroes of war and night. A new order.

There was a time.

They had been young

men on the last field of war: Berlin’s blood on Hannon, Hannon’s blood on Berlin. Twin stars above, twin hearts racing with the rage of battle. How that knife had slipped into flesh, the blade turning slightly, notching the neck as his fingers gouged out the left eye. The final scream: four vital pipelines severed and cool black splashing the front of gray armor. Pressure and the blade cut farther, remaining eye rolled back and scream ended as the head was removed.

Machines in the sky, too close overhead: the wake of their passing knocked them to the ground. Berlin helped Hannon to his feet. Their eyes locked, revealing the shared knowledge of defeat without surrender.

The space between the suns danced with silver.

City on fire, plains on fire, men on fire. The horror of black metal slamming to the ground.

They’d fought on the right side, and the machines were forgiving.

“He’s awake.”

“So I gathered.” Judith walked through the chamber door. Doctor and Assistant parted to let her past.

God sat at a table, a tray with utensils and a bowl of viscous gray nutrition slurry before him. He eagerly shoveled the food into his mouth. Some of it actually hit target instead of dribbling down his chin.

Judith leaned over the table, pushed God’s head up with left hand while opening his eyelids with the right. She looked for damage.

“Couldn’t you have gotten a better host body?” His projection in the flux had been delicious. This bald middle-aged creature sitting at the table was a travesty.

“It was short notice.”

Judith slumped into the chair across from the deity. “Good food?”

He looked up quickly, face blank besides drippage. Back down into the bowl. Splashing spoon launched a droplet of slurry onto Judith’s cheek. effin’ fuck! She wiped it from her face and sighed.

“He’s a mess. I’ll have to hardlink him for the entire conference.”

“At least he’s mobile now.”

“You could have put wheels on the fucking static tube.”

“Host body transfer is standard—”

“Viable host body transfer is standard procedure.” Something about that little shop of wind and dark bitter liquid…His eyes had been beautiful. A ring of silver on a shaking glittered hand. Deus Ex Machina.

how do i know these things?

God smacked his lips, smiled and nodded his head as Assistant placed another bowl in front of him.

“He’s so dumb.”

“The host body withstood all the standard testing.”

“Was it like this before? Was he a retard in real life?”

Doctor shook its head. “God was not a retard.”

“Filtered?”

“He was filtered, yes.”

“And where exactly did you get this host?”

“Shipment of biologic from the outer. Selected at random.”

“You bring the bodies back?”

“Special ops. Next generation nearish development.”

“When did this program start? Using dead people for—”

“I can’t discuss this with you.”

“I have full clearance, Pasty.”

“Not for this.”

Judith stood up, placed both hands on Doctor’s shoulders. She leaned in close, spoke into its “ear.”

“Pssst. I’m the girl who talks to God. You can tell me anything.” She kissed Doctor’s cheek and smiled warmly.

Doctor’s eyes narrowed. “I guess you’ll find out somehow anyways.”

“Of course I will. Now spill it.”

“The outer systems have been burning for decades.”

Burning: euphemism for the machine war that never really ended. Resistance to the drowning. The way the polite castes referred to the non-surrender of the barbarian horde. What a joke.

“This I know.”

“What we’ve just realized, though, is that prolonged exposure creates abnormalities.”

“I thought we sent nearish to the front lines.”

“Nearish need reals to lead them.”

Slurry slurp. Judith turned to see God finishing his second (third?) bowl.

“What kind of abnormalities?”

“Sub-genetic, for the most part.”

“For the most part…What else have you found?”

“I really shouldn’t—”

“Tell me.”

“Cardiac abnormalities.”

Judith felt gooseflesh stipple her forearms.

“One heart?”

“How did—You couldn’t have known that.”

She ignored the near, sat back down at the table in front of God while unwinding a length of hardlink cable. She snapped the link into her chestshield, maneuvered the other end around pudgy sticky resistance fingers and plugged home between his hearts.

Nothing.

“Come on, baby.” She twisted the link in the port, felt a tickle of connection at the base of her skull. “Come on

wings of wind and i will we there were in that time gods of taken from and stolen with hidden deep with-in deepness and over the sky i have returned to make sure the fire’s out.”

She blinked in confusion as God kicked dirt into the remnants of the campfire. Acrid smoke, dust and dirt. She wiped sleep and soot from tired eyes. The sky was dark. One sun…A wounded sun. Gauzy, webbed. Around them, shattered buildings. Clothing on racks. Signs in a stranger language.

“Where are we?”

He stopped his kicking, shook his head. “I’m not sure anymore.” He was the man from the other encounter, yet this time there were deep lines around his eyes, and a black pattern of lines on his forearm. She looked down and wasn’t surprised to see a similar marking on her own arm. On his chest, writing in alien letters. A name.

“Haze and smoke. The air’s changed, and the heart’s gone.”

“Yeah.” There was a pack strapped to God’s back. He unbuckled the clasp and placed it on the ground. “Sorry about the puppet they put me in. I was trying to talk to you, but it was impossible. The host’s flawed.”

“You heard, though?”

“I heard.”

“Have any ideas?”

“I’ve seen all the information they collected about the young woman. Maire.”

“Doctor says she’s not the only one with the abnormalities.”

“No. This host body is flawed.”

“No shit.”

“Not just mentally. Not just the heart. There’s something I can feel but can’t describe.”

“Is it safe?”

“Doesn’t really matter. I’m God.”

“So one specimen slipped away, and now we’re seeing more and more with the changes.”

“Yes.”

“And they’re coming from the outer.”

“She couldn’t have caused the spread.”

“Do you think the machines are behind this?”

“I was under the impression that she was trying to end the machines.”

“What better way to destroy them than to do it from the inside?”

“We have to get her away from here.”

“Do you have a place in mind.”

God nodded.

“Here.”

sir, we can’t just—

“You don’t have a choice. Get me off this planet.”

we could tell—

“Hannon will have you killed regardless. You’ve seen too much already. He just needed a real to head this mission because he doesn’t trust them.” Berlin’s eyes targeted Elle, masked as she was in desired projection.

fuck you.

Berlin stood from the table, walked up to the near. As tall as she was, he still looked down on her.

“I don’t like you. You don’t like me. But we’re both going to die soon if you don’t help me.”

Task shoved Berlin back. The commandant scoffed.

“In love with a nearish. How appropriate.”

do you want our help or not?

“I want your help. Not hers. We don’t need the machined.”

she’s coming with us, or I’m not helping you.

His hands clenched to fists. Eyes blazed. “Fine.”

and what exactly are we supposed to do once we pick you up?

“We have to get to the command vessel.”

you’ll be killed.

“They’re about to sentence Maire.”

yes. and you want to be there?

“I have to stop her.”

stop her from what? she’s already done the damage.

“It’s not over yet. We have to get to that ship.”

and once we’re there?

“I’ll kill her.”

but—

“No more questions. Get down here.”

how much do you know, berlin?

“Enough to know that Maire has to die, and I’m the one who has to do it.”

you seem in a hurry to get out of here.

“I suspect things. I know this place won’t be safe for long.”

Task shook his head. it’s the silver. you know something about it. it’s not over. it’s spreading, isn’t it?

“They’ve woken up God. They have him on the command ship.”

and maire’s on the same vessel.

“Yes.”

she’s going to kill God.

Berlin’s face was stone.

where does it go from there?

“I don’t know.”

we’ll be down to get you. look for us.

“Understood.”

Task grabbed Elle’s hand and they were gone. Berlin slumped into his chair. They had to make this work. There would be no second chance to stop the catalyst.

Berlin opened his eyes and

the mute nearish troops stood over him. The halo channel near’s body was on the floor, lifelessish. The others waited mindlessly, patiently. They’d wait forever if he made them. So obedient.

Task’s vessel would drop shortly.

Berlin bent to his wife’s silvered form. The face was intact, an illusion of thick glitter makeup. If he touched her…If he kissed her. He inhaled deeply.

take me with you to the and there we will the nighttimes of

and this heart, for you

i love

He wondered if any of the featureless voices screaming in his mind belonged to Kath. Botanist.

Bent to her (not her) form, kissed as gently as he could her cheek. No longer softest. Tickle of grit and smell of copper (blood) taste(?). He knew it would happen, but when the cheek collapsed under the lightest pressure, his breath still stuck in his throat and the sobs came. One, another, his hands moving to cover face from gaze of creatures of biologic who neither cared nor could care.

Lightest touch, but the cheek collapsed, cheek and skull, neck and chest. Lightest touch and she was gone, not gone, but gone: pile of silver dust that danced in the empty air of a dead room. He inhaled deeply

take me with you a part of me forever with you take me and coughed, violently. Metal scoured his mouth, throat.

is this all there is?

He reached into the pile of silver, withdrew the locket from where her neck had been: sliver of wood, taken from the last of those magnificent flora after the planet had been harvested. He held the locket to his face. Her scent was there, faint, masked in that blood echo.

Rumble of

the time when we first laid by the fire and i explored every inch of your face with my lips because we were both too terrified to kiss

slitherjets above. Task and Elle.

Berlin turned from what had been his wife and walked away.

*snap* and she was out of the reverie, hardlink cable falling from limp hand and sparking the metallish floor as she slumped forward into Assistant’s arms. She was exhausted, but adapting. She fought off the sleep that her mind was struggling to impose.

“Now. Call them together. God’s ready for sentencing.”

The broken man at the table fumbled for the hardlink. Assistant removed the cable and wiped a stream of drool from the creature’s face.

“Can you take much more of the connection?”

“I’m fine.”

Doctor touched the side of Judith’s face, looked into her eyes, but she deflected his hand (claw). “I’m fine. Have him transported to the council chamber.

“Yes, Medium.”

Roar of dust and wind and something else. His glass shield deactivated, the silver began to tear away at Berlin’s flesh as soon as he walked out of the building.

stupid mistake.

He palmed the bubble control and a fresh wave of gelatin splashed out from his chestplate, semi-solidified around him. Circles and waves, waves and an ocean of more than glass. Glass from trees, metal from air, machines from

The nears followed him as he jogged toward Task’s vessel. They didn’t know what was going on, couldn’t know what was going on, but their movement was hesitant, sporadic. Berlin realized that it was because most of them were being scraped apart by the wind. Not many of the nears had much “flesh” left. He stopped.

“Halt.”

The remaining soldiers stood at attention. Berlin unlatched the force weapon from his holster, shot each of them in the cranial control node in turn. There was no resistance; there were no minds. Non-humans fell non-dead. He couldn’t have taken them with him. He wouldn’t have taken them with him.

Task hovered above the park of skeletal lumbers and nearish dropship. Limbs shattered underneath the slitherjets, danced toward Berlin as he approached. The glass protected him

from what

from the brunt of the impacts. Several smaller twigs penetrated the gelatin and sloshed in slow-motion within the shield. Berlin absent-mindedly batted the debris away, palms touching lumber for the first time since

and this heart, for you

the nights spent under a sky of wooden song, illicit romance in the guise of ambassadorial conferences. They’d harvested the planet, and she’d been broken. A decade and a family and a comfortable position in the system had never made up for that rape of the forest world. She had been broken, and Maire had been the instrument of her vengeance.

Walkway descended from the belly of Task’s vessel. Berlin tripped on his shield, palmed its deactivation at the exact wrong moment: an airborne branch flew past his face, projecting limb carving a deep gash along his left jawline. It became a world of silver and copper as vital black blood erupted from the wound.

He staggered forward as the vessel lifted, looping his right arm through the guardrail as the walkway ascended. Elle met him halfway and helped him aboard. He despised its touch.

They flew.

The chamber door closed with mechanical precision behind her. The headache was bad, but the face of Hannon was worse: Judith remembered the roaming hands and mediocre cock of the young council member. She also remembered punching him in the throat, and the way he’d bitched like a little girl.

“Judith.” His face was grin and acid. “Always nice to see you.”

She closed her eyes, rubbed her temples before taking her seat as far away from Hannon as she could possibly sit. Headache was developing into something worse. Apparently the aether was wearing her down.

“Is everything—”

The tender inquisition of a council member. Judith recognized the voice but opened her eyes to confirm. “I’m fine, Jade. Thank you.”

“Rough interface?”

“Yeah. Must be.” Burning, tugging. Something. Jade smiled sadly. Of all the council members, Judith liked the matronly old woman the most, but that really wasn’t saying much. The other members looked on in varying shades of disdain and nonchalance.

The chamber was circular, fell away in the center to the tube from which the prisoner would emerge and stand before them in due time. Judith peered over the edge just long enough to realize that she’d now added vertigo to headache.

The empty chair next to hers was reserved for God.

“Is he on his way?” Council member Corr, an old man with one real arm left, but they’d held the line.

“The nears are bringing him down. There must have been a fuckup with—”

“Yes, we heard the host body was inappropriate.”

“You could say that.”

that that that

Echo upon echoes as her voice fell down the central tube. Somewhere down there, the young woman who had killed a planet was waiting.

it shouldn’t hurt this much.

[but it will.]

Judith gasped, eyes opening, startled. No one was looking at her. No one was near her.

“Did someone—?”

The chamber hatchway hissed open again. Doctor and Assistant helped God to his chair. The host body looked as if it had been crying.

“What happened?” Hannon stood from his place across the chamber.

Doctor’s eyes darted. “He didn’t seem to want to come. Host body resisted.”

“Will it work?”

“It’s been working.” Judith plugged the hardlink into the host’s chest, pulled her own shirt open in preparation. “We’ve had several successful links so far.”

“It doesn’t look like the thing’s going to last.”

“He’ll last.” Judith wiped the host’s face, patted his cheek. “God’s in there. The host will last.”

“Then let’s begin.”

Judith plugged in.

Coughing so hard that she bent in half, coughing but there was no air. Mouth choked on blood, red blood (red blood?) and there were hands, arms, a chest and he was holding her as the ground shifted and

“What the—!”

They tumbled back to the desert hardpan as the mountains ripped from the planet surface and flew into the sun.

“Hold on!” God’s arms were strong and he was bleeding. The sky above was lines of fire, circle of white, approaching. They were flying into the (single) sun. Judith screamed and couldn’t stop.

God squeezed her near, smoothed her hair in a gesture too tender for that place. She knew she was crying, screaming, falling, flying, but that gesture: tender and peace. She found peace in His eyes.

“Hold on.” Not shouting this time, the tumult of a shattering landscape and a planetary implosion a dull roar, a hum, a sub-frequency to the beat of two hearts. Not four. Two.

“Hold on.” And it was okay, that approaching fire, the way the sky bent toward the night at its center, the way the desert cracked and they fell and they fell into

the shop, the door slamming behind her. The wind was bad, but not as bad as

Judith stumbled to God’s table. He went to her, helped her sit down. The other patrons looked on with gray rainy day see-AT-ull concern.

“What the—What just happened?”

“It’s falling apart. You saw it before. The host body is flawed deeply…Something’s happening, and it fucked with the interface.”

“Are we safe?”

“I don’t know.” God cleared room on the table, shoving aside Demian paperback and now-empty coffee cup. From the inner recesses of his jacket, he pulled out a sheet of paper, unrolled it across the tabletop. “We need to get her off this ship.”

“Those are the plans?”

“She’s already housed in the launch chamber. We’ll be able to allign and exile within the hour.”

Judith’s hand went to her temple again. Brow furrowed in pain and something else. A thin line of red escaped from her nose. God wiped it away with a napkin, but there was more.

“You can’t keep jumping in and out of the flux.”

“I can—”

“You can’t. Something with the flawed host—”

“Help me go halfway, then. Use me.”

“As the host?”

“Your word has to be spoken. The flaw won’t do. Just use me.”

“It could kill you, Jud.”

“I’m dying already.” She pressed the napkin to her nose. “Just do it.”

do it, sssss

“Okay. But I’ll pull out before anything happens.”

Judith grinned. “I’ve heard that before.”

“I know.” God’s eyes danced. He leaned forward and kissed her how long has it been since and

the medium’s body jumped in her chair, the interface still attached. The flawed host spasmed and lay still. Judith’s eyes opened and there was light from them: silver if light could be silver, white if it could not. She stood, breathing heavily, body slumped forward, hand pressing hardlink securely to her chestplate. The members of the council gazed with fear and fear at the direct link between their deity and the medium.

“Bring her to me.”

The planetship was above them. Berlin was gasping for air, his blood staining his neck, chest, Elle’s hands as she tried to close his wound. Task turned back to the cockpit viewer.

“What should I tell them?”

“They won’t listen to anything we have to say.”

“Well tell me something, Commandant.”

“They might not have changed the security codes yet.”

A detachment of fighters launched from the main vessel’s hangar.

“Here they come.”

And they opened fire.

Breath hitching, sheen of sweat developing on forehead and cheeks. The interface wasn’t painful…Not a pain that she would admit. She felt him. Inside. Of her. Soul. God. Inside of her soul. She was replaced and swimming in an ocean of ancient fire. Felt him withdraw, gather himself, emerge again: insertion of thoughts that were not her own, loving touch of electricity and shivering.

rupture rend rive split cleave

“Bring her.”

The voice was not her own, yet it was. Voice like the wind, echoes of the beginning, shimmering of yesterday and some of tomorrow but not quite enough.

Council members fidgeted.

“Open the channel to the homeworld.”

And they were there, the billions.

The hole at the center of the chamber glowed. A cylinder of phased glass formed at the hole’s edge. Sparks and it was melty, solid, non-solid. She was lifted from her prison on wings of the machine universe. She did not resist, and when the shield solidified around her, it only heightened that sense of

Jade coughed from across the room, poured a glass of water. Cough, sip. Cough.

Waves in that solid expanse: she was between worlds, held just close enough to reality to see the council, to see God in the form of Judith. Maire: Nude form floating, hair lazy and dark. Eyes. Her eyes were

“There is a place for you.”

Both nacelles were shattered at the hubs as the fighters strafed Task’s vessel. The lifting body of the slither flipped end-over-end at the planetship.

“They don’t want to talk.” Task wrestled with the controls, used maneuver jets to stay on-course.

“New plan.” Berlin spoke through teeth clenched, his lacerated jaw now tacky with blood.

The fighters strafed again. The slither body held, but the gelatin shield was starting to fail.

“Head for the launch tube.”

“The what?”

“On the top of the ship. There’s a liquidspace launch tube.”

“That’s new.”

“It’s meant for Maire.”

“Exile through liquidspace?”

“Sending her far, far away.”

Flashes of forcefire. Gelatin scraped away. They were losing speed.

“Position the vessel in front of the pipe.”

“But we’ll—”

“I know.”

“I’m not going to—”

“Just do it.”

when and when and when and called upon again to wake and wake and wake and be with my children again JudithGod reached out, touched that fury mind of frozen silver. Maire looked at them without emotion. Maire looked at them with

She saw that day again clearly: the vessel in the sky, blue sky. Cities below: people laughed and walked and sat on green grass of a pathetic excuse for a forest (park) and on blankets they ate sandwiches and apples (from trees) and there was music (do you remember music?) and underneath shade they fucked, fluids (liquid) exchanged in (final) bliss.

She saw that day again: the vessel in the sky, dissemination ports opening with ratchet and squeal, scream of machines. Cities below: men in black suits walked between buildings, weapons on their belts. Sound in the sky made them look up: black object where there should have been none. Hands went to weapons on their belts; nothing would save them. Nothing could save them.

She saw that day: the vessel in the sky, snap crackle and pop of phase waking the silver. Cities below: fighters roaring from defense facility, weapons ports opening: futile. Futile. Screams of children and mothers, children and fathers. She would end them.

She saw that: the lurch of the ship and it began. Cities below: the shadow of their end expanding. A quiet before

She saw: ring of metal, piercing the light, blue turns to gray to silver to. Cities below: suffocation and

Judith sobbed. God’s inner embrace was not enough. Such pain. And something.

“Do you have any defense?”

Maire’s lips remained closed, not from nearsolid prison but from

[you know why i did it.]

They all felt it this time; several members of the Council jolted in their chairs.

Something.

“The evidence speaks for itself. For your crime, you are sentenced to—”

Maire’s hands clenched to fists and it began.

suffocation and the world became solid. air of metal, skin replaced with, eyes bursting, screams cut off before, final glances: fighters caught in mid-flight, sun fading to gray, grass of metal blades, inhalation impossible, exhalation a reflex suicide. universe of silver: machines within, machines replace, machines of dust and the places between the stars where no one dared

Judith saw it from the corner of her eye. The host body beside her stood with force enough to topple his chair, innocent bald old man with too-few hearts and too much iron in his bloodstream. He screamed a human scream with a deity voice as he tore the flux interface from his chest.

“No—”

All of God, all of God within her, slamming home, replacing Judith with and overflowing and drowning, sudden, yet not without uncertainty or a measure of peace.

The host’s eyes opened and they were

“Get her out of here!” Hannon and the council dove into action. “Activate the launch sequence!”

Jade was the first to fall: matron.

The host’s body cleaved into two: emerging light, burning light, silver hidden within unsuspecting flawed body. Halves of red stinking biology splashed to the floor as silver escaped its delivery vessel. Maire’s lips curved into a smile.

“Activate the fucking launch sequence!”

Her smile became forever as her prison solidified. Hannon and Corr went to Jade, but it was too late: silver replacing flesh, flesh turning to dust, mercury dust, silver pile. Corr fell under the invasion of his own flesh. Hannon looked down and saw the lace of his death begin. Palm to chestplate, body enveloped in a sea of protective gel is it too late?

Maire’s prison was a cylinder of glass within steel, steel within phase. The tube dropped away before her as the planetship aligned itself with God’s vision, as launch doors opened, as universes dissembled within the pipe and

“Just do it” and the doors below them opened, throwing forth light that was metal, metal that was light: Maire asleep, Maire imprisoned.

Task had no time to react. Maire’s prison vessel tore through and through them and

Judith couldn’t stop screaming, couldn’t breath, couldn’t

Palm to chestplate. That was God’s touch: gelatin enveloped, then steel, then the floor dropped away as they were purged from

Council, dead. Council, dust: silver all at once, silver hidden within a flawed host body. Maire had known. Maire had planned it that way.

Is it too late? but the lace had stopped spreading under the pressure of glass. Gravity was gone. Hannon was being pulled into the tube. He sloshed to an escape port, waited for steel enclosure, dropped away from that room and into space.

The planetship imploded with the force of the reaction.

Hannon spun, saw JudithGod’s escape bubble spinning away, saw the halo link to the homeworld.

Oh my God—

A line of silver and fire: as Maire’s exile vessel lit into the night, the halo comm flared with something

something

We were connected.

To the homeworld, to all the planets of the system. They’d all been connected by that halo, and now it was silver.

Maire was gone. The planetship was nothing. Hannon and JudithGod floated alone above a dead world.

Please don’t let it spread. Please don’t let it get home.

God was in a metal bubble. There was no one to answer prayers in that void. If the silver traced the halo back to the homeworld, if the silver spread to the other planets in the system…

A loss so dear…

Hannon began to shake. His hands were cold.

and this heart, for you

There are silences beyond silence.

THE MACHINERY OF NIGHT

he is knowing… and this heart i contain for you i have come again to zam zam? rupture rend rive split cleave Please don’t let it—Is it too late? He knew what she couldn’t believe. my lips remember the echoes of that night

How the body is weak, how fragile biology bursts upon cool metal, how the final crack of the spine signals an end.

His blood was tacky on the black surface. His body was broken under the tons. Boys, not men, not boys watched.

“We have to get him out of there.”

“Let him stay.” Hunter wiped the blood from his cheek with the back of gloved hand.

“We can’t just—”

“Do it yourself, then.”

The chamber door cycled open. She came in, snapping of static, sloshing of shield. His eyes studied the floor as he walked by. She reached out.

“Don’t.”

“Hunter—”

“Just don’t.” He pulled away, left the chamber.

She found him later, as she always found him, on the empty bridge, thermals off, freezing away the emotions of the deep. She made certain that the bridge door was sealed and deactivated her phase shield. It splashed to the floor and dissipated in tendrils of mist. A shake of curly hair and she was dry.

How the heart is weak, how fragile emotion wells under too-old eyes, how the lock of a glance sends lovers into abandon.

“Come here?”

She crawled into the vacuum chair with him, a lithe and feline move. He inhaled and there was nothing. Exhaled and he could still breathe. Would it last? Their arms tangled, she shifted position and her lips found his jawline, rested there for a moment. She shivered in more than the cold of space.

Even in the cold, the lace of the silver began to bristle in fine patterns across his skin, a disconcerting screen door gooseflesh. It danced, disappeared only to re-emerge in another place. It was searching for a foothold.

“How much longer?”

He shook his head against the meeting place of neck and shoulder.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

He looked into the eyes of the little girl who, almost two decades ago, had waved at him each day from behind a wrought-iron gate. They cage us, in so many ways, in so many ways.

Decades?

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“Liar.”

“Liar.” His voice was mocking. His impersonation made her smile: lips parted in that liquid way. His eyes moved from hers to her lips, back to eyes. Not a signal, but a signal.

“Lily Lily.”

“Hunter Hunter.”

Breathing became as one.

They kissed and laughed in the vacuum chair, spinning lazily on its mount, revealing in turn the cracked systems display, the projector that emitted static and coordinates that no one wanted to acknowledge, the dead form of an angel, chest an angry confusion of wires, stripped of parts, featureless face surveying the action with dull, dusty eyes.

It would all end soon, but for now, they kissed.

Screaming, but not his own, not his, not its. Screaming from without, and it was warmer, and then a jolt that cracked, and it was warmer, warmest, painfully hot. Sudden, violent, an end to the scream: things broke as they hit the world.

The near was the worst.

Berlin pulled himself from the vacuum chair. His wound had freshened; fluid over tacky, still black, still staining.

Task moaned. The nose of the vessel was crumpled into snow.

snow?

Elle had been impaled. Tickings of interior biomechanics: its hands flexed on nothing. It tried to speak, but there was no chest, no throat.

Out of the chair, Berlin braced himself between wall and ceiling. Gravity, but it felt like floating. He maneuvered hand-over hand to Task’s cockpit bubble. There was blood.

The air burned.

“What—”

“Don’t try to talk.”

“Elle—”

“It’s dead.”

The pilot’s face collapsed into an emotion. “Let me—”

“You don’t want to see it. How badly are you hurt?”

“Legs are broken.”

“Okay.”

The cant of the vessel would make the extraction difficult. Berlin stood precariously on the ceiling of the cockpit, Task locked into the chair above him.

“Get ready.”

“For what?”

Berlin palmed the release mechanism and Task fell into his arms in a ball of misshapen limbs and his own screams. Berlin caught the smaller man, lowered him to the floor as quickly and gently as possible. The tears streaming down Task’s face indicated nothing of speed or tenderness.

“We’re upside down.”

“No shit.”

“Are you sure Elle isn’t—”

“I’m sure.”

As if to prove the point, sparks ignited on the shattered chestplate of the near. There was fire.

“God damn—”

“This will hurt.” Berlin hefted Task over his shoulder, the pilot biting his lower lip and trying to muffle the agonized wail between the thin flesh of his cheeks. He struggled over ceiling-mounted displays to the chamber exit.

“Will the belly port work if we’re upside down?”

“It should.”

“Well, we’re on fire. It’d better.”

They abandoned the vessel and the artificial co-pilot to flames.

The siege machines opened fire, and the planet below was raped of atmosphere.

Just a tiny vessel, just a sliver of silver and black. The children were terrified, or as terrified as they could be given that they could not understand what was happening. Lily felt them, far away, yet the closest minds she could touch. There were other consciousnesses buried in the vessel, but she knew that they wouldn’t wake up until it was safe and they were far away from the enemy fleet.

Fighters scrambled from the worldships, but too late. The escape ship phased and it became

cold, the coldest, if she could still feel, and she knew she could, although she didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten there. The containment sphere had solidified into metal and she had been launched from Hannon’s globe.

collision with..?

Snow.

She sat up. The sky was blue. When had she last—

Black smoke from across the ice plain. A vessel embedded into white. A figure on top, hunched over, pulling at something…Two figures. Fire spread.

Maire looked at her own personal space. A Maire-shaped imprint sat within a larger melted circle. She stood.

The fire and the vessel and the fire within the vessel weren’t far away. She walked.

She paused, tried to find that [something] within, but it was gone for now. Hiding the silver in the host body had been an accomplishment of great beauty. Unfortunately, she was tapped for now. She couldn’t kill.

She walked.

It fell into the tube. Heaven was below. Stranger had been talking.

“You’re Hannon, aren’t you?” Zero asked.

Stranger said nothing.

The vessel slowed in the pipeline. There was a great hiss as it cracked in half, shielding realigned. The cockpit chamber ceiling lifted from the walls and slid back, revealing the now-vertical nacelles, the tube stretching forever above them.

how long?

The landing platform approached.

“Are you?”

“I’m not going to—”

“Jesus Christ—”

Stranger/Hannon’s face went blank. “Who?” Innocent. Unwashed.

“Show me.”

“Show you what?”

“Your chest.”

Hannon nodded, undid the clasps on the front of his uniform. Pulled the sides back. Turned to Zero.

you took the blue out of the sky my whole life changed when you said goodbye

The cardiac shield was firmly in place, although strands of silver pulsated at its edge. The puckered maroon of an incision snaked into under out of the metal plate. Shiver and slither of phase shielding. Hannon covered himself.

“So now you know.”

“You found a way to contain it.”

“In some.”

“In men.”

“In some men.”

“It spread to all of the worlds through the halo?”

“It spread to most of the worlds. Maire’s Extinction Fleet took care of the rest.”

Not a blush spread on Zero’s cheeks. Somewhere below, the humming of landing struts and the jolt of contact. Crackle of phase release.

“You called this place Heaven.”

“Yes…It is.”

“Who’s here?”

Hannon smoothed the front of his uniform.

“It’s her. Judith.”

Cold eyes look at nothing. “It was Judith.”

He found that he always opened his eyes before she did. Tip of nose to tip of nose, gentle motion of an Eskimo kiss. Liquid sound of her smile. Dimple revealed.

His flesh didn’t change.

He brushed Lilith’s hair back from her cheek. Lips bridged distance. He stood from the chair, pulling on his pants. Buckling his belt. Pulling on shirt.

She

made no move to dress.

The vacuum chair rotated from his exit. As it spun beyond her visual range, she sat up, arms crossed on the top. She watched him tuck in his shirt. The chair completed its rotation and he sat to lace his boots.

“So professional.” Sarcastic. Grin.

“I have to look my best for the troops.”

“Right.” She straightened his collar. There was

music?

in her mind.

She held his hand, looking over every inch for any sign of

The bridge door alarm beeped.

“Fuck.” Lilith crawled out of the chair. Hunter sat back and watched as she pulled on clothing. Her hair was a mess. He shook his head and smiled.

“En—”

“No.”

Lilith turned to him with a look of confusion.

“Your shield, sweetness.”

She blushed. She blushed easily. Eyes closed, inhale, hand taps chestplate. Her form was enveloped with sloshing glass. She ran her fingers through her hair. “Enter.”

an eternity between

Walking into a moment…He was.

He shut the door. The wind was trapped outside. A newspaper fluttered and a hand went to it, held it to the tabletop. Nirvana. He smiled, remembered how she actually had smelled like Teen Spirit. Decades of absence…That memory had been buried half a century before, during the first war, in nights of futonsnuggle and Cowboy Killers. Pain supplanted by reality. Impossibility erased by

He walked to the counter. She was already sliding his cup toward him. Black, no cream, no sugar, just black. He leaned over and windburned lips brushed the dimpled cheek.

It wasn’t a literary crowd, but they were trying. A quick survey of the customers revealed books and newspapers, cigarettes and cloves, coffee and cappuccino. Anachronism in the world of the new future.

Sip.

It really wasn’t as bad as the kids thought. He’d tasted worse mud.

“How’s your day been?”

He shrugged. Pale blue-green eyes squinted, tried to dig behind his own. “You know.”

“I thought you might enjoy that.” She tilted her head toward the back of the shop.

“What?”

“The book. That girl has your book.”

The young woman was much too entranced with her beau to notice the middle-aged couple staring at her. He noted with some concern the black glove on the table, the silver ring now gracing silver hand, and he knew, he just knew.

There was a copy of “The Stillness Between” on the table.

The young couple held hands…There were still tears in the girl’s eyes.

She leaned in close from across the counter and whispered. “He just proposed to her.”

“Ah.”

Sip.

President Jennings was on the link. We will take this jihad to the stars—

Shivers.

“Paul?”

His hand shook as he placed the cup back down. Chattering staccato before complete contact. She put her hands over his, made them still

ness between

books, you have so much time! Are you sure you’re okay?”

He blinked, confused. More and more…More and more. He was losing moments. He was somewhere between now and worlds of impossibility.

He smiled, not convincing at all. “I’m okay. I never get used to seeing people with that book.”

She grinned. “At least you’re in good company. That couple over there was looking at Hesse’s Demian and Hayes’ Deus Ex earlier. In fact,” she leaned in, a conspirator, “he looks just like Hayes. Your protégé might be in my coffeehouse.”

Something that he didn’t want to acknowledge crawled up and down his spine for a while, then settled in at the base of his skull, tickling, raising gooseflesh. His grip tightened on the coffee cup.

“Yeah. Good company.”

She squeezed his hand. “Hey. You sure you’re okay?”

Nod. “Yeah. Just déjà vu.”

Eyebrows furrowed. “Again?”

The young couple walked out. The man looked at Paul for an instant, smiled. There was something in that glance

i contain multitudes

that broke his heart.

He reached into his front pocket and pulled out his marble. It rolled across the uneven countertop and she picked it up. The iridescent patina was scratched by half a century of travel and abuse. Four bright distortions winked in the afternoon light, scarred onto the surface from the pocket companionship of a brass Zippo with an engraved floral pattern that had long since been lost to the miles and decades of his life.

“I need a cigarette.”

“You know you shouldn’t—”

“Ever feel like you’ve lived too long? Like you’ve lived it all before?”

He hadn’t intended to hurt her with the statement, but he saw the wound develop in those eyes. At seventy-eight, they were both just over middle-aged, but still…Sometimes he felt like he wasn’t supposed to be there anymore.

“Not when I’m with you.” She withdrew the small glass bauble from her own pocket: a marble of her own, with its own scratches and a chip, given to her on that night when hopes and dreams became.

Snippets of conversation, and then laughter from behind. Maggie was laughing. He knew her name.

He knew her name, and he didn’t know how.

drifting and drifting, he resigned himself to the urge to look back. their eyes locked for the briefest of moments, and the tear-wet surface of her face revealed to him the secrets of futures now long long. they had abandoned everything they had known, and for that reason, they were damned.

the dialogue kept rising to the surface of his mind, and those prophetic words became universe upon universe. she reached to him, saw his unrest, and tenderly touched him.

you know we can’t go back

i know

it was for the best

i know

we will survive this

he let her words attempt to echo in the dead expanse. his silence screamed in the void, and they embraced, each an anchor in reality for the other.

you know i have to leave.

i know.

deconstruct

and something left me. sometimes the only things left are the torn page and the indentation of bic micro metal scrawling your life on a page for a stranger. we departed. hell, i never really knew her anyways. so why do i feel this way?

when did the exclamation points and devotion disappear and the introspect and long sophisticated yearnings take their place? when did i love you become i am sorry? “I think too much.”

“No such thing.” She squeezed his hand. “Just one of those days.”

We will take this jihad to the stars, and make them suffer the consequences of creating this horrible—

“Today’s the day?”

“Yeah.” She turned the channel on the link. She’d had enough of Jennings for now.

“If I were younger, I’d go too.”

“I wouldn’t let you.”

One-cornered grin, metal-on-ceramic clink as spoon followed its habit path.

“I’d go.”

“You’ve fought enough wars, old man.”

“I need a smoke.”

“Yeah.” The one dimple appeared in her smile as she reached under the counter and placed something on the top. Rectangular box, red and white and black.

“Jesus—How did you—?”

“I have my ways. Happy birthday.”

Marlboro 100s. He smelled the pack.

“It’s fresh. Been kept in airless for—”

“Decades. Sweetheart…Thank you!”

She came from behind the counter and they embraced, forgetting for the moment the customers, the rain, the impending war and an end, of sorts, lost in that perfect moment, remembering a time of bohemian lovemaking and a world in hesitant watching, the uncertainty of young adulthood in the ghetto, rooftop stargazing and balcony summers, futonsnuggle and the way that her

lithe fingers remove the cigarette from the pack, and i lean in with gold zippo, floral pattern, butane scent fighting against the scent of

scratch, flame, click.

she inhales, pale green eyes locked on my own muddy nothing. her eyelids draw together. the tip of the cigarette glows, releases as she releases. lips still pursed, breath still inhaling until the slight pause. smoke escapes from those lips, those lips that i can still feel, still taste. they smile.

i light my own.

casters slide across hardwood floor as i roll myself and the ashtray toward her. she sits on the leopard futon, leaning forward to tap ashes into glass tray. i roll closer, knees on her knees, ashtray balanced on my leg. i tap my own ashes into that receptacle of our addiction.

inhale, exhale. the dimple revealed.

it is a pause in our lovemaking. tobacco burned, we crush filters against tar-blackened glass. i push the chair back to the desk, place the ashtray on the table. i walk back to her, sit beside her. lips merge, hands go hesitantly then purposefully to faces. we fall into each other, limbs intertwined, the taste of smoke on our lips, the shudder and release of desire matching smoothly the movement of two bodies in union.

it is not at all like kissing an

ashtray?”

“Sure, in the back. But don’t you want to save them for later?”

“No…Let’s smoke one now.” He wore a big goofy grin that she hadn’t seen in

“You’re dangerous.”

The door opened and a tall figure walked in, black cloak dry when it should have been wet, unkempt hair more kempt than the weather should have allowed. A single white curl stood out from his hairline. He walked to the counter.

“What can I get you?”

“Sorry, madam…I’m not here for refreshment. Have you seen this man?” The man held out his right hand, and a small holographic appeared.

Susan nodded. Paul was silent, eyes squinted to focus on the character before him.

who..? when—

“He was just in here…He’s the boy who proposed to his girlfriend.”

“Proposed?”

“I assume so…He gave her a silver ring.”

“Silver.”

Susan hesitated…The girl’s hands had been afflicted with the scourge. And this stranger—

“A silver ring. He proposed and they left. You know…Kids. In love. They left.”

“Did you see which way they walked?”

“Sorry. I wasn’t watching.”

“And you?”

Paul cleared his throat. “Sorry, friend. I was drinking my coffee.”

“Thank you for your time.” The man in black turned, walked back toward the door.

Paul stood, faced the man.

“Whistler?”

The stranger paused in mid-stride, head cocked to one side, about to turn—

Paul’s heart hitched in his chest.

Whistler walked out the door without looking back.

“Who was that?”

Paul shook his head.

“Nobody.” He sipped his coffee, held his wife’s hand. “Just a ghost.”

“Light ’em up.”

“What are they saying? What the fuck are they saying?”

“Who cares? Light ’em up. Trigger it. We’ll iron out the paperwork later.”

Hunter shook his head. “This isn’t right. Something isn’t right.”

Tallis glared through him, flipped his visor down. “Call in the fucking strike, Windham.”

“Sir, I can’t just—”

Tallis tore the comm from Hunter’s grasp, shoved him aside. He locked the device into the hardlink on his throat shield. “Tallis wing to orbital firing group. Bring the weapon online.”

copy, wing one.

“Sir, listen to them. They aren’t—”

“Hunter, don’t—”

“They aren’t humans.”

“The fuck are you—”

“Listen to them!”

“It’s an off-chart language. So what? We have orders.”

“Tallis,” Hunter pulled off his helmet. “Listen to them.”

She hung in velvet black, pressed into place by the cold non-hands of her mechanical caretakers. They would take what they needed from her, as they always had, that gentle rape that they called duty and she called rape.

Tallis had called a strike on the city.

The forces held her motionless in the halls of vapor and light with a liquid precision, the intimate caress of the weapon flux. She cringed at the metal whine of the contact jack as it reached over her shoulders, secured itself to her chestplate: eight subtle penetrations and a locking click, then the deeper invasion of the central hub.

Tears: two.

Somewhere below, there was a planet. There was a city. Somewhere below, there were innocents reaching to the sky, screaming at the invasion force, reeling in confusion at the vessel that blocked out the faded cold of the surviving star. Lilith knew that somewhere below, Hunter was standing with weapon drawn, helmet off, shaking his head.

listen to them

“System?”

No answer.

“Stop the cycle, please.”

The firing chamber was moving into position.

“Stop the cycle, System.”

Felt them: heard them speaking without words, weeping without tears, screaming without hope or substance.

“Stop it!”

Lilith couldn’t move.

Shimmer and shift, silver and submission.

An instant of light, a forever of end.

Hunter shouted in frustration and disgust. Tallis looked pleased.

It struck from above: the beam was peaceful, gentle, a faded light draping across the city, barely casting shadows, barely touching anything at all. From within the static shielding, Hunter and the dozens of other droptroops braced themselves.

The natives fell silent. Hunter realized with a morbid fascination that they had never actually spoken at all. The guttural tones that came from underdeveloped mouths had been the only thing Tallis had heard. He had failed to listen to the voice of the

i have come again to

mind, the Voice of the people who were now an instant from the eternal cease.

Hunter heard. He heard them all.

berlin hannon judithgod

maire

walked across the ice plain to the wreckage of Task’s vessel, which was rapidly being consumed by blue-tinged fire. It was a world of silence, except for faint whisper of wind that brushed painful ice crystals across her face and the crackle of fire as polyalloy ignited from within. One of the men on the top of the vessel hoisted the other figure over his shoulder and jumped to the ground. She heard the distinct wail of pain from the crumpled man as they landed in a pile upon the snow-covered ice. His cry echoed back and forth across the expanse, bordered as it was by cliffs that might have been stone, might have been ice.

She felt a flicker. Tiny flicker. It was returning.

Tears streamed down Task’s face. He was lost in a haze of agony, his body shaking, his breath coming in great gasps as Berlin pulled him away from the twisted remains of his vessel. Task knew that somewhere within, Elle was nothing more than a puddle of melted metal and plastic, returning again to her base elements of manufacture. All that s/he had been was now lost.

Berlin wiped his brow. The fire was overwhelming, mixed with the toxic fumes of the collapsing alloys. Whatever was in this atmosphere was causing the ship to burn with remarkable heat. He inhaled deeply, coughed as smoke singed his lungs with an alien taste. Mixed with the frightfully weak gravity, the harsh light of a single star in the sky, the smoke made Berlin dizzy, nauseous. He had the sudden desire to lay down on the snow, just to rest for a moment, just to close his eyes and try to still his rapid hearts. He just wanted to—

“What’s that?”

Task was looking off in the distance, where for the first time Berlin noticed a faint shimmer of

There was a person walking toward Task’s wrecked ship.

Berlin squinted his eyes, felt the biomech corneas zoom, focus. The figure shifted into clarity.

Maire.

Berlin released Task’s shoulders and he fell unceremoniously to the ground, his legs splaying in divergent twists of shredded fabric and exposed bone. He writhed in pain, sobbed again. Berlin noted for an instant the grisly black path stretching from the place beside the vessel where they’d landed to Task’s present position. He wouldn’t last long if they couldn’t stop the bleeding soon.

“It’s Maire. She’s seen us.”

“But how—”

“We must have been fused to her bubble when they ejected her.” Berlin released his phase weapon from its holster, knew what he would find already: the charge was lost, depolarized from the liquidspace flux. The weapon was useless.

“The gun?”

“Dead.”

“Here.” Task unsheathed a blade from a side pocket on his pants. “Take it.”

“That won’t—”

“It’s something. Take it.”

Berlin nodded, held the knife blade-down, concealed behind his forearm.

“I’ll be back. Just hold on.”

Maire’s heart pounded as she saw one of the figures begin to walk toward her. The wind grew in intensity, whipping clouds of stinging ice crystals into the air. She wiped the side of her face, felt seemingly for the first time the strange numbness of cold flesh. The approaching figure was concealed for a moment by a swirl of snow. The stark light of the star above created new levels of blindness. Finally, the figure came back into view, closer than she had expected him to be.

Berlin.

Maire blinked, squinted. It was him.

He stopped walking, his figure thrown into silhouette by the intense light of the fire engulfing the vessel behind him. He wore a weapon at his side. With a reach of her mind, the gun spun from its holster and fell safely some distance from them.

“Tired, Maire? Or can you do it all?”

“So it was you. Your vessel got in my way.”

“Looks like it. You must be drained, or you would’ve killed me already.”

“Yeah. I’m drained.”

“Good.”

“Who’s that?” She gestured at the wreck.

“Just a photographer. I needed his ship.”

“Is he dead?”

“He will be soon.”

“Good.”

“Yeah. Good.”

Awkward silence. The wind was becoming colder.

“You killed my wife.”

Maire smiled. “We killed your wife.”

Berlin glared. He shifted the knife nervously in his hand. If she knew about it, she wasn’t showing it.

“She didn’t deserve to die. Not like that. Not at all.”

“You had such promise, Berlin. Such promise to change that place.”

“So did you.”

“So did Kath.”

Berlin snapped. Maire wasn’t expecting his attack.

He lunged forward, sweeping the blade from behind his arm. The first slash lacerated Maire’s throat deeply, cutting almost to the spine. She staggered backward, strangely-red blood pouring over uniform and snow and Berlin, who slammed into her. Her hands reached up to her neck, but Berlin knocked them away on the return path of his blade, which sliced hilt-deep between Maire’s ribs, through that single heart. Berlin’s twisting wrist ensured that the heart would be destroyed beyond repair. He fell with her onto the ice, and with a final snap, he jerked the blade up, breaking through her ribcage. A small geyser of blood erupted from Maire’s ravaged chest.

She fell into stillness.

Berlin stood, shaking with exertion. It couldn’t be this easy. He wiped her blood from his face, neck. It smelled like copper. It was red.

With a swift, brutal motion, Berlin fell upon Maire’s body, plunging the blade again and again into her skull. Overcome with grief, shuddering with emotion, he stabbed her again and again, covered in her blood, slivers of her bone, great chunks of that mind that had meticulously planned the genocide of his species. He stabbed until she was gone, stabbed until he was satisfied that she could not possibly be anymore. He stood and surveyed the extent of his fury.

Maire knocked him to the ground, one foot connecting solidly with his jaw as the other landed on his knife hand, crushing fingers and shredding his palm with his own blade. Her form shimmered with silver flux, fading between solid and snow, sky and ice. With horror, Berlin realized that

Maire stepped away from him, walked to the bloodied doppelganger. She reached into its open chest and removed a tiny silver sphere, threw it playfully into the air and catching it with ease. The projected dissolved to static and nothing. Berlin cradled his crushed hand, rolled over to look up at the true Maire.

“I win.”

The door cycled open, revealing sub-commander Hull. His eyes were averted, tracing the grid of the floor. He cleared his throat.

“I’m sorry to interrupt.”

“What is it?” Lilith’s voice bounced around the interior of her shield: what wha wh is is i it it t

“We’ve—” His eyes remained on the floor, but glanced toward Hunter for an instant. “We’ve removed Tallis’s body from the works. What should we do with—”

“Space it.”

“No.” Lilith turned to Hunter. “There’s something we need to do first.”

He nodded in realization.

“Sir?” Hull was restless, his hands clenching and unclenching on nothing.

“What is it?”

“Do we have orders?” Hull’s eyes were now locked on the broken command display, the shattered biomech angel, the wires hanging like vines from ceiling displays.

“We’re making our own orders from now on.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Take me to the body.”

Hull nodded an affirmative. “And sir?”

“What is it?”

“Your—” Hull’s hand went to his fly. His brow furrowed in embarrassment. He was one of the youngest soldiers on the vessel, just now growing facial hair for the first time. “Your—”

“Thanks, Hull.” Hunter blushed and zipped his pants.

Within her bubble, Lilith covered her smile with a silver hand.

“Let’s go.”

The head was gone now, crushed between the gears of the inner workings of a docking bay slither cradle. The vessel itself had twisted away from its dock, and now it sat incapacitated on the bay’s floor. Hunter could still see the coagulating black outline of his former commander’s end underneath the slither. The rest of the body was almost intact. Hunter flexed his swollen hand, felt the incisions threaten to tear open again. It could have been his blood under that vessel, splashed across the gears and pistons of the cradle. It could have been, but then it would have been red.

“It’s in the chest cavity.”

Hunter undid the soaked top of Tallis’s uniform, pulled the fabric back to reveal a hairless chest.

“You’ll have to crack through the bone. It’ll be between the hearts.” She pointed to a place just under the sternal notch. Hunter’s blade sliced through the thin film of near-skin in an “I” shape. He used the tip of the knife to fold back each flap. It wasn’t a human ribcage.

Hunter hesitated.

“You have to do it.” Lilith indicated her shielded hands, arms. “I can’t.”

Hull looked on with the other nine members of the officer class. The young men were uneasy; the events of the last few days had forever changed their purpose in this metal box between the stars.

Hunter bore down with his blade, holding it with both hands and shifting his weight directly down. The sternum cracked and he eased off, placing one hand on Tallis’s right shoulder and wrenching the knife to the left. The bone shield retracted with disconcerting biological precision.

“Believe me now?”

“Sir, I—” Hull’s grasped for words. “I didn’t mean to doubt you.”

“And you? And you?” Hunter stood from the opened corpse. “Do you believe me now?” The officers nodded in turn. The evidence was irrefutable.

He reached into the chest cavity with his bare hand and dug around until he found it. His hand retreated, clasped around the final evidence, trailing strands of viscous black matter, neither flesh nor machine, neither now nor then. He snapped the final connection, a vile umbilicus securing the device to the central cavity.

Hunter held out his hand, slow black spattering to the grid flooring.

His fingers uncurled to reveal a marble-sized silver sphere.

“Tallis was the mole. He was Mother’s link.”

“So now what? You’re in command.”

Hunter looked from Hull to Lilith. “We have to protect her. We have to hide. Mother will send someone to get her now.”

“But the Fleet is everywhere. Where can we hide?”

“We’ll take the ship to the Outer.”

“Where?”

“Deep.”

“How deep?”

Hunter stabbed his blade into the angel’s splayed body in a swift, brutal motion. That which had been Tallis remained motionless. The knife’s tip tapped against the surface of the table underneath the body.

“To the hilt.”

“And him?” Hull withdrew the blade from Tallis’s abdomen.

“Space him.”

“We’ll talk to Archimedes.” Lilith looked from Hunter to Hull. “Take care of the body and get that slither operational again. We’ll need it soon enough.”

“Yes, Catalyst.”

Lilithfleur shimmered for an instant.

“Don’t call her that.” Hunterzero glared, walked away. Without looking back, he spoke to the woman. “Come on. I need you.” She nodded to the officers, left the hangar.

“Open shutters.”

Blast shielding retracted from the forward bridge. Lilith slipped into the vacuum chair beside him, still wringing the static bubble gelatin from her hair. Hand on his shoulder, she leaned forward to look out at the planet below. Hunter exhaled slowly, chin in hand, looking at and through the ruined world.

“We have to get out of here.”

Hunter closed his eyes.

“Any ideas?”

“She knows exactly where we are. Tallis would have reported everything. And if—”

“You don’t think—”

“Yeah, there could be others.”

“System?”

beep click.

“Seal the bridge.”

click beep.

“I would have felt them, if there were more.”

“You don’t know that. It took you two decades to feel this one out. We don’t know what else is riding with us.”

Lilith slumped back into her chair. She let Tallis’s silver projector roll from hand to hand. “What should we do with this? We can’t keep it on Archimedes. It has to be a tracking device.”

“This whole fucking ship is a tracking device.”

“Well, there’s not much else out here.”

“Not in this system, but there were other vessels in the Outer. Other members of the Extinction Fleet, and the prison galleons from the saved worlds. We’ll run into one eventually.”

“We’ll run into one soon. I’m sure Mother’s already dispatched the whole fleet to come get you, and to kill me.”

“We can’t think like that.”

“I can.”

The silence was unbearable. Lilith curled into Hunter’s chair, squeezed him. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“It would be safer if we split up. I could hide you on a galleon and start the return to—”

“You can’t go back without me.”

“It’s the only—”

She took his face in her hands. Eyes locked. “You can’t go without me.”

Hunter kissed the side of her cheek, rubbed his nose along hers, inhaled her scent and knew. He turned to look out at the system. There’d been something tickling him at the base of his neck for so long, since they’d first arrived from the flux…Since they’d first begun to orbit the target world. He sat up. Lilith adjusted.

“Archimedes online.”

beep click. online.

“Cartographics.”

online. A grid appeared in the forward bridge bubble, superimposed with crystalline perfection.

“Highlight target system planets.”

done.

“Jesus…Look at that.”

The system was huge. There had to be dozens of planets highlighted by System’s cartographic overlay.

Lilith frowned. “There’s something wrong with them.”

“Yeah. Arch, extrapolate and display orbital patterns.”

beep click. done.

“It’s so—”

“It’s chaos.” Instead of planets orbiting along a central plane, almost every world moved independently. Several debris fields indicated where planets had actually collided. Something had severely damaged the natural orbital pattern of this solar system. “Arch, what could have caused this?”

click beep. analysis implies that this was once a binary system.

“Reconstruct.”

The rotating balls of holographic light fell neatly and fluidly into two distinct orbital patterns, horizontal and vertical. It was a magnificent dance, the ballet of light pathways, gravity wells, almost-intersections. At the center of the vertical plane, Archimedes reconstructed the missing star of the binary system.

Hunter shook his head. “It’s still too empty. Fill in the holes where any missing planets should be.”

Forty new points of light joined the dance.

Hunter looked at Lilith, back at the cartograph. “Okay. Okay…So where would one star and a few dozen planets disappear to?”

“I’m so sorry.” Hunter felt all of his energy, all of his vitality pour from his body at the man’s touch. Hannon’s touch, for that is what that silken mental embrace felt like. He was a stranger, but so remarkably familiar…“I never knew—”

Hannon smiled the sad smile of ancient resignation. “Of course you never knew, Zero.” He leaned in close to the incapacitated Hunter, gently, tenderly kissed his forehead, tousled his hair. The gesture was so kind, so loving. Who was this man?

With a wave of his hand, the beams of light holding Hunter suspended in the air slowly faded, lowered him to floor level, where he stood, weakly rubbing his hands over the cold gooseflesh of his forearms. Hannon’s head tilted in concern and then understanding, and he removed his black overcoat and wrapped it around Hunter’s shoulders.

“Come on, son. There’s much to talk about, and so little time.”

“Arch?” Descending waves of deja vu. Hunter blinked.

click beep. online.

“Display positions of any Fleet vessels within range.”

beep click. done.

Lilith squeezed his hand, inhaled sharply. Hunter’s heart sank. The system display was encircled by a collapsing cloud of new pinpricks of light.

“Identify closest vessel.”

The targeting reticule highlighted a single firefly in the black of the Outer. fleet destroyer rebecca.

“Time to intercept?”

at light X, rebecca will intercept in three standard days.

“It was a binary system. When your Extinction Fleet first made an appearance, we were able to hide one of our stars here. This vessel is all we have left.”

Hunter touched the miles of glass before him, which greeted his fingertips with a cool, static attraction. The airlock door cycled open beside him.

“You have the technology to place a solar system inside of a vessel?”

Hannon scoffed. “Not the entire system. Just one star and forty planets. The others were left behind, where Mother’s fleet eventually got to them. We’ve been hiding in the Outer ever since your genocide spread this far.”

Hunter slumped against the glass in realization. Hannon made no move to help him up this time, but stood behind him, arms crossed. Hunter looked at the assembled black-robed men standing in formation on either side of the airlock, watching him. Silent. Expressions of such loss on their faces…

“No women. Mother’s fleet—”

“Your fleet, Zero. Of course, you never knew. Your Fleur never knew. You were just following orders. The virus killed them all, even after we escaped with half of the system under shield. The catalyst was at work even before the final seal was welded into place.”

“I never—

—understand your contorted schemes, my sweet.” Whistler chuckled, raised the wine glass to his lips, paused. “But that is what makes you so attractive.”

Maire smiled.

“What exactly do you want me to do?”

“There should have been a tight-beam report from the girl’s ship days ago. They’ve fallen silent. I need you to find out where they are, what they’re doing.”

Sip. Nod.

“Tallis wouldn’t have just fallen off-scope.”

“So you think they’ve found him? They’ve pulled the plug?”

“Either that, or—”

“They’ve been destroyed?”

“Maybe.”

Whistler shook his head. “Somehow, I think you’d know if they were dead. If She were dead.”

“Maybe.”

Eyebrows arched.

“Well, I’ve been having some trouble lately. I can’t feel her as I used to.”

“She’s stronger than you now.”

Maire’s fingertips tapped the table.

“She’s starting to frighten you. You’re starting to wonder if it wouldn’t have been more prudent to kill your homeworld yourself.”

“Whistler, I—”

He waved away her comment. “I understand. You don’t have to explain yourself to me, Mother. I’ll go get her.”

“There’s one more thing.”

“What?”

Maire retrieved a silver projector and rolled it across the table. Whistler picked it up.

“Who’s this?”

“Go ahead. Turn it on.”

Whistler gave the silver a squeeze and tossed the ball into the air. With a flash, a third person entered Maire’s chamber.

“Who is he?”

The man smoothed his black robe.

“Lilith has become too close to a member of her crew. In his last report, Brendan Tallis told me that She was spending too much time alone with his XO. His name’s Hunter Windham…An interesting story. I want you to replace him with this. It took a few tries to get him right, but she shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

“This is an emulation of my target?”

“Yes.”

“And what should I call you, boy?”

Hunter’s emulation looked from Maire to Whistler.

“Call me Seven.”

“Why Seven?”

Maire leaned forward, sipped her wine. “Like I said,” she wiped her lips, “it took a few tries to get him right.”

Whistler walked slowly around Seven, scrutinizing the projection. He lifted the young man’s chin up, used his black-gloved fingers to part the projection’s lips. Seven stepped back and grabbed Whistler’s hand with a swiftness that startled even Maire.

“Don’t touch me.”

Whistler grinned. “If this is the best you could do, I’d hate to see Messieurs One through Six.”

Maire studied her wine.

“When do we leave and what do we drive?”

“There’s a corvette in the launch pipe.”

“Light X?”

“And then some.”

“Good.”

“You’ll leave now.”

Whistler walked to Maire’s side, took her hand, kissed it. “I shall miss you intensely, mon chere.”

“Of course you will, James.” She smiled, waved her hand over the control panel on her desktop. Whistler and Seven’s projections snapped to a static halt, the silver machines instantly uploaded to the waiting corvette.

She sighed, inhaled. More wine. The door alert chimed.

“Come in.”

Whistler walked into the chamber, his simper and stride denoting his amusement. He took a seat in front of Maire, poured more wine into “Whistler’s” glass.

“He really thinks he’s me?”

“He does, and he does, and you do.”

His glass paused halfway to his lips. “Don’t play that game with me. I know who I am.”

“Of course you do, James darling.”

The wine was as good as it could be.

He cleared his throat. “You look younger today.”

Maire leaned back in her chair, the smile of politics dissembling slowly from her face.

“You can leave tomorrow.”

“You aren’t planning to—”

“I don’t have to tell you my plans.”

“Don’t start anything without me, Maire.”

The silence hung in the stillness between them, an unwelcome participant in the history of an extinction.

Maire cleared her throat.

“You can take this with you.” She handed him a silver projector.

“And this would be number…” He counted on his fingers. “Eight?”

“It is Nine.”

Whistler frowned. “Did I miss something?”

“The Eight is presently indisposed. He’ll be delivering something in person to the target Windham.”

“A slow and painful demise?” He grinned.

“A Machine.”

“What sort of machine?”

“The machinery of night. It will be an end of sorts for young Hunter Windham.”

“His father served us well. He finally located the—”

“He did, but his son has become far too problematic. He must be sent away.”

Whistler nodded. He held the silver ball up to the light. “This one will work.” He looked into Maire’s colorless eyes. “I won’t fail you.”

“I know, James. Just bring her home. It’s time to begin

draining from the chamber after the vessel slammed to a halt. She surged forward against her restraints, her curls lazily swimming out before her, reaching for something that her half-decade could not yet comprehend. She heard the muffled clang of metal against metal, felt the pressure within the chamber change. Exhausted eyes looked at the top of her prison, where she could see the phase flux level dropping quickly. The surface fell to the level of the top of her head, continued withdrawing. She strained upward, her nose and mouth rising above the flux surface, gasping as she vomited the invasive gel from her stomach, coughed it from her respiratory system. She shook her head, the oily silver spattering from her hair, drizzling from her ears, eyes, nose. Tear ducts released and mercury stained her cheeks. Lily was left wet with the dissolving flux, belted into her chair, shivering with the freeze of deep space.

The last traces of the phase drained from the room and the air began to warm.

How long..?

The child sobbed, replacing silver tears with clear and salt.

The chamber door sparked with static release and opened across the walkway before her.

Nan?

The angel strode across the catwalk to the restraint node in the chamber’s center. It looked Lily over from head to toe, checked a monitor just out of the child’s vision besind her. The restraint hub on her chest sighed with pneumatic release and lifted. The chair freed her arms and legs.

“Nan?”

“Are you in pain?”

Lily frowned. She didn’t think she hurt, but she wasn’t sure. She knew she was afraid, but she didn’t know exactly what hurt.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re bruised. We’ll take them away.”

“Okay.”

The angel lifted the child from the seat.

“Nan?” but she knew it wasn’t. This angel was different. Lily couldn’t feel the

“No. You may call me System. Or Arch.”

“Ark? Like Noah and the animals?”

The machine frowned. “What?”

“You look like Nan.”

“Call me Arch. Like Noah and the animals.”

The child smiled. “It’s cold here.”

“It will get warmer.”

“Are we home again?”

The angel carried Lily across the walkway toward the chamber entrance. “No.”

“Where are we?”

“This is your new home. We’re between the stars now.”

“Can I play with the boys now?”

“Maybe for a little while.”

“Arch?”

“Yes?” The chamber door cycled open.

“Can I have some chocolate milk?”

He fell from his vacuum chair into a withdrawing puddle of flux, splashing the lazy fluid up with a meaty slap. He heard similar splashes all around him, but his eyes didn’t work. He couldn’t see.

The little boy pushed himself to all fours, sat back and wiped gelatin-slick hair from his face, scrunched his fingers into his eyes in an attempt to clear his vision. He couldn’t stop coughing. Vomiting. He’d had the flu once. This is how it had felt.

Blink, blink. He heard crying.

Metal crash and warm wind filled the room. The floor was drying.

Click and the room was red. His eyesight hadn’t disappeared; the lights had just been off. Now, he saw everything as it must have looked in Hell. Mommy had whispered to him about the places they’d go after this world: one was happiness and clouds and angels, and one was fire and red and screaming. From the screaming and crying and red, Hunter wondered if he had died. He wondered if he’d done something wrong and ended up where the bad people went when they died.

The lights grew brighter.

A giant snap like the firecrackers that his father had brought him, set off down in the sand by the water. Hunter jumped. The room shimmered as phase shielding dissembled.

There was a smaller boy sitting on the floor beside Hunter. He was sobbing. Hunter helped him to his feet.

“I’m Hunter.”

Through sniffles: “I’m Br-Brendan.”

“Are you okay?”

“Where’s Mommy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know.”

Brendan covered his face and cried some more. Hunter didn’t know what to do.

The chamber door slid open with the slosh of phase. Hunter and Brendan looked on with fear and confusion. Other boys stood in silence.

A procession of angels entered the room, surrounding a middle-aged man in a charcoal gray suit. He looked over the boys with a gaze like fire; Hunter felt he was human. He felt the angels weren’t exactly angels. There was none of that tugging he’d become used to from the projections. Eight, ten, twelve: the angels walked amongst the boys, helped some to their feet, gently held the weeping, surveyed the little soldiers for damage.

The man cleared his throat.

“My name is Captain Pierce. You may call me ‘Uncle.’ Welcome to your new home. His name is Archimedes.”

An angel bent to Hunter’s level, turned his face from side to side, looked him over. “Do you hurt?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“My Mommy’s dead.”

For an instant, the angel froze, head cocked, as if listening to a voice from within. “Your mother is safe now. You will be reunited with her soon.”

“You’re lying.”

Motionless non-human: the pause was longer this time. “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

The angel didn’t respond, but moved on to Brendan.

Uncle walked around the room, patted the heads of his new soldiers. “We’ve come a very long way, boys. We have a lot to do. We have a lot to learn. But first, we’ll have something to eat. Who’s hungry?”

There were a few noncommittal affirmatives.

“Good. You have to eat and become strong like your fathers!”

Hunter wondered if Uncle’s father had been killed somewhere between the stars, too. Somewhere deep and black, a place with two stars, where the squeal of shattering glass had been the last sound before—

“Let’s have some supper, boys!”

“Three days.” Hunter sighed.

Lilith cradled his face in her hands. She knew he was thinking…too much.

“We’ll find a way.” Her eyes to his eyes, her soul to his

“Arch?”

yes?

“Have you met the Rebecca before?”

outsystem offensive action, fourth extinction air support group.

“Why don’t I remember that?”

Lilith held his hands. “We’ve been through so many—”

“Arch?”

yes?

“Where’s she from?”

rebecca crew ascended upon initial Earth siege.

“Soldats perdus. City?”

canberra compound.

“Fuck.”

“You’ve heard of them?”

“Arch, set course and engage.”

specify destination.

“Deep Outer, full speed.”

specify destination.

“Just fucking fly.” Hunter stood from the vacuum chair, fingers groping through unruly hair. He paced the bridge. “Up bubble three, four, five. Full speed.”

“Hunter?”

crew secure for Light X. Sirens roared to life.

“What?”

“Who are they?”

He slammed his fist to a dead control panel. “They’re a rogue…”

Pacing. His hand moved to his right temple, rubbed. Reflex.

“Hunter?”

There was a building pain underneath his fingertips. Lilith looked from his closed, frowning eyes to his temple, fingers massaging in a circle: forth, back, forth, around.

“Hunter?”

He opened his eyes, grabbed a dead angel from one of the command chairs, threw it across the room with a growl of fury. Mechanical guts spilled across the bridge floor. His hand went back to his temple and forehead.

“Hunter?”

“WHAT?”

“Your hand.” His heart broke a little more when he saw her eyes, her gaze. The way her hands were clustered before her mouth.

He looked, horrified before he even saw, because he knew, and he knew, and he knew.

Faint lattice of silver, just below the skin. It crawled from fingertips to palm to wrist. He spun an overhead monitor into the light, saw even in the reflection of the dead display that the silver was working its way underneath the skin above his skull.

Lilith sobbed as she activated the shield mechanism on her cardiac plate. The phase gelatin engulfed her form as she stood from the vacuum chair. “Hunter, I—”

“No, it’s not—”

“I’m so—”

“It’s not your fault!” He cried out as the silver gave one last twinge in his head that brought him to his knees. “It’s not your fault.” The pain subsided as Lilith’s shielding provided a buffer between his flesh and her affliction.

She knelt at his side, dragging the slosh of phase behind and around her.

“It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”

Hunter nodded, although he knew that their love would kill him.

Pierce took off his jacket and slumped into a bridge chair. “When did you find it?”

“About ten minutes ago. Faint at first, then a signal spike. It’s definitely for us.”

“Stop Arch and snag it.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

He hated the machines, hated the way they spoke to him, hated the way they looked just enough like real humans to disturb, to place that sliver of doubt in his mind. He hated the machines, hated Mother (Maire) for this prison without end, hated this war and this purpose. He hated being the caretaker of several hundred boys trapped within a box of metal flying faster than light toward a galaxy that they would kill. He might have hated the girl most of all, the brat who had once stolen a doll from his grasp with a mine.

“Temporal brace in position.”

“Display.”

The bridge bubble shielding retracted, allowing Pierce to see the quantum physics of their communication: all of space bent toward a single point, starlight forsaking points for curves, time bending to the will of an ancient species.

“Let’s see if it works.”

“Wire mechanics aligned.”

“Open tight beam.”

He squinted at the array and saw the particles erupt, faint patterns of phased communications bullets shot into the quantum singularity. He thought of rainfall.

“Carrier beam aligned.”

“Lock and load.”

The bridge lights dimmed, leaving an illuminated platform at the chamber’s center. Light bent toward the platform and Maire was there, image at first filled with static, half-translucent, but the wire mechanics adjusted to secure the signal from thousands of years across space/time.

“Mr. Pierce.” It was a voice of echoes.

“Maire.”

“What’s the situation?”

“Cargo intact.”

“I trust they’ve all been fed and tucked into bed by now?”

“Of course. Training starts tomorrow.”

“No time to waste.”

“Has the enemy fleet—”

“Orbital defenses held them off long enough for most of the childships to escape the system.”

“But not all?”

“Forty percent losses.”

Pierce’s heart leapt at Maire’s interpretation of the word “most.”

“And we’re on target?”

“Courses projected and fleet on targets. You’ll rendezvous in-system with several others eventually.”

“Will you tell me the specifics of this mission?”

“Just keep the girl safe. The angels will handle the rest.”

“Yes, Maire.”

“I’ll check in monthly.”

“Yours or ours?”

“Your months. My millennia.”

“Understood. Maire?”

“What?”

“Is there anything left?”

“Complete surface destruction. Total atmosphere loss.”

“But you—”

“Don’t worry, Pierce. I’ve saved some specimens.”

“And the enemy?”

“The worldships left orbit after a few months. They sent a few expeditionary forces to the surface and obviously didn’t like what they found.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’ve been tracking them for years now.”

“And where are they?”

“Since they didn’t find anything down here, they’re on their way after you.”

“Great.”

Maire grinned. Pierce noticed for the first time that the lines around her eyes were no longer there. She looked younger. “You’ll be fine. They’ll never find you.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Even if they do, you’ll have a vessel full of the strongest warriors to meet them.”

“I’d better get to work.”

“That’s the

spirit to the eternal void of night. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, silver to silver.” Tallis nodded and Pierce’s coffin was ejected from the hangar. The soldiers saluted in unison, stood at attention. Tallis walked down the line, scrutinizing his troops.

“Uncle is gone. I’m your Commander now.” He paused in front of Hunter. “I choose Windham as my second.” He continued down the line. “We all knew the day would come that the last vestiges of home would fade away. From now on, we’re on our own. We’ll continue on target and fulfill our mission objectives. We owe it to Uncle to succeed. We owe it to Mother to succeed.

“Let’s get to work. We need to fix this boat and get back on the road as soon as possible. They found us, they killed our Uncle. Let’s find their home.”

He nodded toward Windham. Hunter cleared his throat.

“Okay. Damage control teams sweep the decks. We took a lot of phase flak below. We have slithers to repair, hull damage, a

breach in the primary phase flux generator. Decks one through ten are flooding.”

“Shit.” Another volley rocked the Archimedes. Pierce held tightly to the arms of his chair as internal gravity compensated. “Lock decks and attempt to drain.”

“Arch is hemorrhaging from below. We won’t be able to reach Light X until—”

“Launch slithers and lancets.”

“Done.”

“Do they have fighters?”

“Not many.” The angel looked over tactical monitors, holograph displays. “Earth orbital defenses must have taken out most of them.”

then why didn’t they make more?

“Three worldships on scope?”

“Three, yes. Pipeline has closed. Our boys are closing in.”

“Good…Good.” Pierce spun his chair to the comm panel, waved his hand before the display. Hundreds of slithers in fireworks formations dove at the enemy spheres, engaging the enemy fighters in orbit. Brilliant arcs of phase fire erupted from both sides. “Command to Tallis: We need attachment of catalyst tethers on those globes ASAP.”

The display split in half, revealing Tallis in the cockpit of his slither and giving Pierce a Tallis-eye-view of the action. “Understood. Attack One moving in for the kill.”

Pierce watched as ten of his slithers detached from the main firework and dove at the center enemy sphere. A swarm of enemy fighters immediately broke from combat to engage the Tallis squad.

“Watch it, boys. They’re on to you.”

“We see them.” Tallis threw his slither into a spiraling descent, phase licking out in all directions, tearing enemy fighters into light and boiling phase sludge. His squad followed suit, their vessels spinning off into an intricate, disorienting dance, weapons fire intersecting and diverging with startling precision, vessels flying through a grid of light that shredded the enemy fighters. Almost fifteen years of training had honed Pierce’s children into a brutal weapon of war.

“We’re clear. Moving in for tether placement.” His fighters moved in tight and close, swimming as a single organism to avoid fire from the worldship surface. One of Tallis’s men was clipped by phase fire, flew out of alignment, colliding with another friendly vessel. The squad moved quickly to compensate, reform. The surface fire intensified. Two more friendlies flared from existence.

“Windham to Tallis: Do you want Attack Two to cover you?”

Tallis raged in his cockpit. “We can do it ourselves, thanks.” More fire from below. Tallis flipped the tether control cover open to reveal the command pad encoded to his genetic signature. “Almost there.”

Pierce watched with dismay as the enemy fighters broke off their combat and converged on the central worldship. Attack One would never withstand the assault.

“Pierce to Attack One: You okay down there, son?”

“It’s getting a little hot.”

Hot was an understatement. Tallis was losing his men too quickly for the descent.

“Attacks Two and Three move to cover. We need that tether in place. Solid.”

“Copy.” Hunter’s squad dove through enemy fire, tearing them apart with light and silence. He could see Tallis and three others below, so close to the surface that their afterburners were leaving contrails in the residual atmosphere of the metal planet. He spun to look at the other, smaller worldships. They appeared dead in the aether. Waiting?

“Let’s make a hole.” Brendan’s voice was cocky over the comm channel. “Launching atomic.”

“Too close—You’re too close! Launch the tether and get out of there!”

“I know what I’m fucking doing!” but Hunter knew that Brendan did not. He was showing off for his troops. His troops were dying behind him, however.

Hunter watched Tallis swoop in toward the surface, dropping the atomic. The weapon itself was invisible, but the damage it did was not. The worldship surface rippled out as black became white, metal became plasma. Tallis’s slither began to spin, but this time out of control. Two more of his squad were consumed. Enemy fighters regrouped.

“Fucking hell.” Hunter was furious at the showboating. “Are you okay?”

Tallis was silent on the comm, but Hunter could see that his vessel was intact, just spinning out of orbit.

“Pierce to Tallis: What’s your situation?”

Static and silence. Pierce could see the vessel, but wondered if Tallis himself was intact in the cockpit.

“Tallis please respond.” Nothing. He turned to an angel. “Lifesigns?”

“He’s alive. Unconscious. Must have gotten banged around in the shockwaves.”

Five enemy fighters were closing on Tallis’s position.

“Eject him.”

“Yes, sir.” The angel’s too-white hand waved over the display and Pierce saw Brendan’s cockpit pod rocket away from his vessel, which was quickly consumed in enemy fire.

“Pierce to Windham: Take your squad in for tether attachment. Use the hole Tallis made.”

“Copy.”

So the pretentious bastard had been useful after all. Hunter signaled to his squad and dove for the atomic scar rent into the worldship mantle. He flipped the tether control panel open, firmly shoved his hand against the pad. The genetic sampling was painless. The pad withdrew to reveal a handle. Hunter grabbed it, let the onboard systems plot the target from his visuals.

He gunned the engine and flew into the atomic impact crater. The worldship was a monster, the edges of the crater dozens of fortified decks. Hunter noticed with a morbid fascination the tiny figures even now being sucked into the vacuum of space by the dozens. Hundreds. Thousands? The crater’s periphery was a ring of fire as the vessel’s atmosphere was vented. It was a green fire.

Hunter’s squad covered him from behind as he released the tether control. A phase slug rocketed from his slither’s underbelly, shielding a densely-packed core of human genetics. The tether exploded on impact, splattering a mile of coagulated “blood” on the worldship surface.

“Tether in place. Proceed with Catalyst injection.”

Pierce turned to his angels. “Is she in place?”

“Catalyst is secure in the firing chamber.”

He wiped sweat from his brow. A headache spiked from behind his eyes, and his chest felt tight.

“Are you okay, Uncle?”

“I’m fine.” His brown skin had taken on a gray pall. “Activate Catalyst when ready.”

“Understood.”

Pierce flexed his left hand. He felt a growing pressure, a tugging pain.

“Uncle?”

“I’m—” He cried out and fell from the vacuum chair, head that had once been crowned with salt-and-pepper and now crowned with pure white connecting solidly with metallish floor. All of the angels but one ran to him.

“Activate Catalyst.”

From the firing chamber, Fleur felt the vessel shift to vertical, felt the tube begin the resonance pattern. All became silence, all except the skittering click of her cardiac shield releasing, the sound of her own inhalation and scream of pain. Somewhere out there, they had attached a lump of human genetics to a target, and unshielded from her affliction, the silver within her exhausted body yearned to attack.

Hiss and release as the firing chamber opened, draining her atmosphere to the absolute zero of a combat zone without reason. A lifeline halo surged around her exposed body, giving meager protection from the cold, from the suffocation. Her hair flew into her face, obscured her vision of the target.

She was the center of the vessel, the center of her species’ vengeance. She knew that three worldships had been in pursuit. She knew that she would be used to destroy them.

Within this machinery of night, she felt the rape of her soul and knew that she would kill again.

“Silver on target! All vessels move to a safe distance!”

Attack Two withdrew from the combat area. Hunter was uneasy about the motionless second and third worldships. Most of the enemy fighters flew in confusion at the retreat of Hunter’s forces. They might have sensed the

silver

blinded Hunter with its intensity and that tugging that always accompanied it. He felt Lilith’s scream, watched the catalyst wave erupt from the center of the Archimedes, effortlessly cutting through enemy fighters in its path, boring into and through and out of the central worldship, rippling out and out. Metal became liquid, flesh became fire.

can it be this easy?

They’d destroyed planets with the Catalyst, eliminated entire civilizations along their target trajectory. The metal worldships were no match for the mercurial fury that Maire had bred into her unwilling daughter. The central vessel collapsed upon itself. The enemy fighters began to erupt with phase feedback, tiny dots of fire and then nothing in the vastness of this combat arena.

Hunter watched with a sinking feeling in his chest as the two motionless worldships began to emanate energy coronas. Weapons? His fear was allayed as the vessels slipped from space/time to Light X, escaping the silver of the Arch.

“They’re running! All vessels return to Arch and prepare for pursuit!”

Hunter gunned his slither toward home. The firing chamber was closing and realigning.

“Somebody tow Tallis in.”

The door alarm chimed. She sighed, activated her shield. “Enter.”

Hunter walked in, face still flushed from combat and

“What’s wrong?”

His mouth moved on words that he couldn’t speak. His hands writhed around themselves.

“Lock door.” click beep. She dropped her shield, walked to Hunter, wrapped her arms around him. “What is it?”

“No one’s told you?”

“No one’s told me anything. What happened?”

“Uncle…”

She saw the look, felt the touch of his mind. “No.”

“He had a heart attack. A fucking heart attack.”

Tears spilled over her cheeks. He pulled her close.

“What happens now?”

“Tallis is in command. He said that he chooses me for his second.”

“And we—”

“He wants to keep going.”

“But what if—”

“We have to keep going, Uncle or no.”

“Did I kill them all?”

Hunter shook his head against her face and hair. “We took out the biggest. Two got away.”

“What will—”

“They’ll head home. Try to warn them that we’re on the way. We can’t let that happen.”

“Would it be so bad?”

Hunter didn’t have an answer. “We’re having a service for Uncle in the launch bay. You should be there.”

“Okay.”

He lifted her face up to meet his gaze. “Are you okay?”

She weakly smiled. “No.”

He kissed her cheek, her nose, her other cheek. “Me neither.”

“Will we be okay?”

“We’ll find a way. We’d better get to the hangar.”

“Uncle is gone. I’m your Commander now.” Tallis paused in front of him. “I choose Windham as my second.” He continued down the line. “We all knew the day would come that the last vestiges of home would fade away. From now on, we’re on our own. We’ll continue on target and fulfill our mission objectives. We owe it to Uncle to succeed. We owe it to Mother to succeed.”

Hunter bit his tongue.

“Let’s get to work. We need to fix this boat and get back on the road as soon as possible. They found us, they killed our Uncle. Let’s find their home.”

Tallis nodded toward him. He cleared his throat.

“Okay. Damage control teams sweep the decks. We took a lot of phase flak below. We have slithers to repair, hull damage, and that breach in the primary flux generator has to be contained before we can move. Decks one through ten are flooded. Let’s get to work.”

Officers barked orders. Hunter took one last look out the hangar entrance: Uncle’s coffin was invisible against the fabric of night, just another dot against black. What cairn in this sky, what memorial to the lost soldiers in the midst of the night?

He caught Lilith’s gaze as he walked by her. Mind to mind, touch to touch. Her lips attempted a quiet smile that he could not return.

“Arik.” He grasped the man’s shoulder as he went by. “You have a working slith?”

“Yes, sir.” Arik Mandela snapped to attention. “Attack Three is at ninety percent.”

“At ease.” Hunter already didn’t like the new hierarchy, the new formality. Uncle had been a good commander, a human commander. There was something about Tallis that tickled the base of Hunter’s skull. “When can you be ready to fly?”

“Now, sir.”

“Good.” Hunter looked across the hangar at Tallis, in animated conversation with members of Attack One. “We’ll take a ride over to the worldship wreck.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Arik?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Call me Hunter. Stop with that ‘Sir’ shit.”

Mandela smiled. “Alright.”

Hunter patted his shoulder and went to suit up.

Door alarm. She activated and swam. Tallis.

“We need to talk.”

“What is it?”

“You’ve spoken to Windham recently.”

“Before the ceremony.”

“Do you know why he slithered up?”

“He didn’t tell me anything.”

Tallis slumped into a vacuum chair opposite Lilith. “You can tell me.”

“He was upset. He didn’t say anything about taking a ship.”

Tallis nodded. “Why weren’t you shielded when you two were alone together?”

“I—” She stumbled over her words. “I was. Of course I was shielded.”

“No. I inherited access to the phase logs. We were running a diagnostic on the cistern and I saw that you’d recently shielded up again. Logs indicate there were two people in your chamber at the time.”

“There must be a mistake. I wouldn’t—”

“You were unshielded in the presence of my top officer. Why and how?”

“I’m telling you, it has to be a mistake.”

“Arch doesn’t make mistakes like that. Each and every time you’d been unshielded in the last twenty years has been recorded without error.”

“The attack must have damaged the ship’s systems. There could have been a—”

Tallis surged from his seat in one swift motion, hand impossibly reaching through three feet of phase gelatin. Lilith gasped in horror at the look in his eyes, that burning from within. He palmed the release mechanism on her cardiac shield and her phase splashed to the floor in a wave. Her hands reached up to grab his forearm, to wrench it away from her body. He pulled her from the vacuum chair with one hand, crushing her neck as he lifted her from the ground.

“Don’t fucking lie to me.” He growled through clenched teeth. There was no sign of the infection, no silver runnels underneath his skin. He threw her to the floor.

“I don’t—”

“He’s immune to the silver. How?”

She sobbed from the cold of the floor, rubbing her bruising neck. She palmed the cardiac mech, but it didn’t respond.

“Don’t bother.”

“You’re not—”

“So now you know. It’d been Mother’s plan all along. Pierce taught us to be good little soldiers, but his death means that I’m the leader now, and it’s time to start the real work. We can’t have a flesh construct commanding a war against flesh.”

Lilith crawled back, away from this machine. She had to tell Hunter, had to let the others know.

Tallis bent, grabbed the front of her jumpsuit, slammed her up against the chamber wall.

“This will be our little secret. If you tell anyone, I’ll see to it that we space your little Windham at Light X.”

“You can’t—”

“I can.” His eyes were mercury fire. “You won’t tell anyone. You’ll do the job. You’ll sit in the firing chamber like a good little girl and we will destroy them.”

Lilith nodded, shaking with her tears, breath heaving in and out in great gasps of fear.

Tallis let go of her uniform, his face inches from hers. She could smell the stink of his non-adrenaline, could feel the warmth of his non-body. Swimming behind those eyes, the tug of an eon of Maire’s plan for vengeance, the flicker and

“What are you?”

Tallis grinned.

silver

was everywhere on the charred remains of the worldship husk, writhing in the valleys, reaching out from spinnerets in a last attempt to snare human biology.

Hunter and Mandela palmed their shields.

The slither hovered above the atomic crater, descended into the vessel interior slowly. There was no fire, no movement. The silver cooled, slowed, died, dissolved.

“Any lifesigns from the interior?”

Mandela checked his instruments. “None on scope. There’s movement, but no biology. Sections are still collapsing. It’s a dead ship.”

“Take us down.”

Mandela searched for a secure area on which to attach the fighter. One edge of the crater had fused together, providing a firm enough strip of slag for a landing zone.

“Does Tallis know about this little trip?”

“Fuck him.” Hunter frowned, looked out at the derelict world. “He doesn’t need to know.”

Mandela nodded. “Glad to see someone else shares the sentiment.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“But he made you second.”

“I still don’t trust him.”

“No one trusts him, Hunter.”

The vessel’s landing gear reached out and grabbed a segment of blackened deck.

“Keep that in mind. Let’s go find some answers.”

Windham didn’t expect to find any of the enemy quickly or easily. The atomic blast had gouged a vast hole into the vessel, instantly exposing dozens, perhaps hundreds of mantle decks to space. Slither systems revealed that there were still pressurized interior areas, but the atmosphere was alien, almost pure nitrogen. The silver from the attack was still present, but not a threat from within their phase shields. He walked with Mandela through decks now open to the void. The worldship’s gravity was light, but it was enough to hold them down.

“We have a bulkhead.” Mandela’s gunbeam revealed a sealed door, now half-melted into the wall around it.

“Take it down.”

“I don’t know how much atmosphere is behind this…Let’s secure a bubble.”

“Right.”

Mandela unsnapped a phase generator from his pack and locked it to the wall. He activated the bubble and a half-sphere of gelatin enveloped the bulkhead. He affixed a charge to the entryway. They ran clear of the particle blast. It cut a hole into the solid steel((?)) of the door. Atmosphere poured out, stretching the bubble as pressure equalized within and without. The edges of the hole cooled to black.

They flanked the hole. Mandela nodded to Windham, who thrust his weapon into the new entrance and swept the interior with light slugs. Nothing. The gunbeam revealed a dead chamber.

Windham grabbed the upper lip of the bulkhead and swung himself into the next room, legs first. His feet made jarring contact with the floor and he helped Mandela through.

The floor, the walls, everything was covered with the invasive silver dust. Three feet of solid metal shielding had not been enough to protect the enemy from the weapon. They were in a hallway, doors on each side, stretching away farther from the crater area.

“Critical systems will be at the center. I doubt that transport mechs will be operable.”

“We don’t need to get to the bridge. We just need to find a body.”

Mandela paused. Windham kept walking, stopped, turned around. “Why a body?”

“I want to see what the aliens look like.”

“Why?”

“Ever seen an alien up close?”

“Well—”

“Ever engaged one in hand-to-hand combat? Ever had to fight one to the death?”

“No.”

“That’s right. We’ve always fought them from above, targeted them from space. We’ve relied on the sensors to see them. And what do they look like?”

Mandela shrugged his shoulders. “Humanoid.”

“Bipedal humanoid. Sometimes armored. I want to see what’s behind the mirror.”

“Are you sure we should be doing this?”

“We’ve never seen them. Not really. We’ve killed them, but we haven’t looked at them. I want to know what we’re up against. I need to know who killed our home, our parents. I need to see who we’re going to end.”

“Then let’s find them.”

Down hallways, down stairs, across levels, nothing. The same silver dust, the same brittle quality of the walls, the floor. It hung in the air, swirled around their phase shields, sending currents of shimmer, contrails of glitter behind them, walking through a suffocation, choking through a world of glass and sparks.

Mandela studied his projector display. “Faint biologics ahead.”

“Movement?”

“None. Stationary targets. Signal is fading fast.”

“Where?”

Mandela drew a bead with his gunbeam on one of the many doorways in the corridor. There were markings, but he couldn’t read them. “This one.”

There were levers on each side of the doorway. Windham and Mandela both grabbed one, and Windham signaled a three count. Levers pulled down, door groaned three-quarters of the way open. Mandela swept the inside with light as a wall of warmth met them.

Hunter’s heart dropped.

They walked amidst silver, between the bodies and the angels and the tubes. They walked without words; there were no words for what they saw and what they felt: two decades of subterfuge unraveled in a simple room by simple evidence, machinery and bodies and angels.

Hunter was reminded of a day that started with

“Mommy?”

“Have to go outside, baby. Have to get out of here.”

“Why?”

“The gun, baby.”

his mother, quiet beauty Helen Windham, married to a commander of the Extinction Fleet, young bride, shaking hands, hands covered with the silver affliction of Maire’s initial ascent from the Paris Gate and hands covered with black leather gloves, hands that lifted him from bed, carried him outside, where she fell to the gravel parking lot, hands that grasped those stone shards and yearned for something, anything, as they watched the orbital defense system fire balls of white into the morning sky. The day started with his mother waking him, and she died less than an hour later, a hole through her chest, and Honeybear was at her side, on fire because of the flak from above, fighters in the sky, men dying to save him, to save the others. An angel lifted him from his dead mother, carried him to the escape vessel, and he knew. He knew that things would never be safe again, would never be right or the same. Things would be wrong until he found the enemy homeworld and killed them all. It was his life, their life on the Arch, those consoling words whispered to him from Uncle or the nicer angels. It was his life to kill those who had killed his world, those alien beings cloaked in black and haze, hiding on periphery worlds, rising up against Mother and the Extinction Fleet. It was his life to kill those strangers below, those monsters without faces. Twenty years of conditioning, twenty years and one goal. He found love in that metal box between the stars, and in her heart was the weapon that would kill those who had killed. He had found love, and together they would create an end. These bodies, these consumed bodies, these were the enemy. These twisted forms, faces masks of horror against the silver, hands frozen in time and space as useless shields against Lilith’s weapon, they were the enemy.

“They’re human.”

Hunter’s heart beat in his throat. His eyes filled with tears that he could never hope to control. Twenty years of lie.

“Human.”

Mandela’s mouth opened on words that he couldn’t speak, jaw hung open, grasping for meaning, sense, truth.

The room was nearly featureless save the rows of vertical glass cylinders, within which dozens, hundreds of boys now hung lifeless, each in varying stages of development. Babies and toddlers in suspension, now crumpled to the tube bottoms from the loss of ship’s power. In the paths between rows, near-biologic angels lay near weapons, medical instruments, each featureless artificial face attempting to convey the fear and confusion of that final moment of silver. There were a few fully-developed males between those rows, supervisors or doctors, all adult men.

“No women.”

Something tugged behind Hunter’s eyes.

“Scan one of them. See if you can isolate the code and match to Earth bloodlines.”

Mandela swept his instrument over the nearest corpse. “Not enough biologic left in this one.” He walked to another victim. Frowned as his panel chimed.

“Got a match?”

“No match. But there’s something else…”

“What?”

“He has two hearts. Had two hearts.”

Hunter spun around, pacing, shield sloshing lazily behind and around. Hands clenched, unclenched.

“No women.”

He remembered a hospital room, his mother smiling down at him from the bed. He was holding his father’s hand, remembered faint gray light from the window, overhead fluorescent lighting glinting from the button on his father’s dress uniform. Large hands slipped under his arms, lifted him up, held him close, for a moment inadvertently pressed his face against metal nametag pinned to crisp olive drab: Windham, and there were epaulets and a jaunty beret that his father hated. He sat snugly in his father’s arms and looked down at smiling mother, sad smile, smiling mother? and

The baby was more red than pink, more pink than gray, but they knew, and they knew. It was why they’d brought their son to see her so soon, to see that miracle of life, the miracle now denied a species by the lady from the middle of the planet. His father had sat with him at the kitchen table and tried to explain, but Hunter held Honeybear close and barely listened, preferring instead to eat his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and scribble spaceships and robots with crayons on his new construction paper. His father had done his best to explain the inexplicable.

The baby made noises.

Hunter remembered being afraid of her. He’d seen another baby up-close, the neighbor’s baby son who was too small to play with and kept them awake every night with crying. Hunter couldn’t tell why this baby was different, what made it a her and not a him, what would soon end the young life in suffocating silver.

His mother had smiled, but her eyes had been wet. She comforted the baby girl, held her tightly in black-clad hands, concealing her own affliction. It was a miracle that the baby had even been carried to term; the headlines in those first few years had reported the miscarriage rates almost as often as the construction projects, the conquest of the solar system, the impending jihad.

Hunter had taken refuge from the baby girl against his father’s neck.

Mommy came home a few days later without the baby.

“Lies. All lies.”

Mandela studied the floor. “They’re cloning boys.”

“The silver would have killed off all the women. Not all at once, but over time. Just like home. They aren’t human, but close enough.”

“But the Catalyst—”

“Isn’t the same silver. The Catalyst comes from Lilith. It doesn’t discriminate against biologic. The silver comes from…” Headache forming behind eyes, reflex to rub, glass shield prevents.

“Mother.”

“That’s when it all started.”

“The worlds we’ve hit already? Rogue planets, harboring the enemy?”

“They weren’t harboring anyone. They were the enemy.”

“And now we’re taking the Catalyst home. To her home.”

“She wants to finish what she started.”

They didn’t speak on the return to Archimedes. Hunter had made it clear that this information must remain their secret until he could find a way to approach Tallis. He didn’t think it would be easy to persuade the blood-thirsty new commander to re-evaluate their objective.

Tallis waited for them in the hangar.

“What the fuck have you been doing?”

“Recon.”

“Do you know how dangerous it was to—”

“I was aware of the dangers. It was a dead ship.”

“And you just—”

“We didn’t find anything, Brendan. It was slag.”

Tallis sneered. “Get out of the suits and into the bubbles. We’re ready to fly.”

“You’ve tracked them?”

“We know exactly where they are.”

“How far?”

“Days.”

“Will Lilith have enough time to regain her—”

“She’ll be ready.”

“Good.” Hunter feigned eagerness. “Let’s go.”

Ten thousand midnights, the blink of an eye in Light X, a slumber barely refreshing, fraught with uncertainty and echoes of a planet now dead, the woman hidden at its center, a vessel preparing for war, his love hanging at its center.

“Crew prep for aerial bombardment.”

“No.” Tallis strode across the bridge. “We’re going down.”

“There’s no need to risk—”

“They killed Uncle. We’re going down. Crew to transports.”

“We can hit them from above, just—”

“I want blood. We’ll take the tether down ourselves. Get to your transport.”

Hunter’s eyes locked on Arik’s as Tallis stormed from the bridge.

The target worldships had landed long ago on the central continent. The phase technology of the enemy apparently provided a faster ride; cities had grown around the sunken spheres. Hunter swallowed hard as he watched the descent from his monitor. He couldn’t let this happen.

The transports landed just outside of one of the cities.

There was little resistance.

Tallis’s Attack One cut through the city without mercy, slithers strafing from above, ground troops storming the streets. Hunter’s own Attack Two and Arik’s Attack Three were just as brutal, although Hunter himself never fired a shot in offense. He felt sick to his stomach at the slaughter enacted upon the “harboring” world.

Outside of the city, a city collapsing and a city on fire, the centerpiece the worldship hemisphere rising above it all, now cracked and falling. Tallis called all of his forces to the outskirts of the city for tether placement.

“Isn’t it great?” His smile disgusted Hunter, refracted behind the shield, twisted into a leer.

“We have to talk.”

“Leave it for the ship.”

“No. We have to talk now.” Hunter’s weapon swung ominously close to Tallis.

“Tether in place.”

“Incoming!”

A fresh sea of combatants stormed from the city, had to be combatants, couldn’t be unarmed people, unarmed men. Couldn’t be. Running, hands outstretched, shouting—

“Light ’em up.”

“What are they saying? What the fuck are they saying?”

“Who cares? Light ’em up. Trigger it. We’ll iron out the paperwork later.”

Hunter shook his head. “This isn’t right. Something isn’t right.”

Tallis glared through him, flipped his visor down. “Call in the fucking strike, Windham.”

“Sir, I can’t just—”

Tallis tore the comm from Hunter’s grasp, shoved him aside. He locked the device into the hardlink on his throat shield. “Tallis wing to orbital firing group. Bring the weapon online.”

copy, wing one.

“Sir, listen to them. They aren’t—”

“Hunter, don’t—”

“They aren’t humans.”

“The fuck are you—”

“Listen to them!”

“It’s an off-chart language. So what? We have orders.”

“Tallis,” Hunter pulled off his helmet. “Listen to them.”

An instant of light, a forever of end.

Hunter shouted in frustration and disgust. Tallis looked pleased.

It struck from above: the beam was peaceful, gentle, a faded light draping across the city, barely casting shadows, barely touching anything at all. From within the static shielding, Hunter and the dozens of other droptroops braced themselves.

The natives fell silent. Hunter realized with a morbid fascination that they had never actually spoken at all. The guttural tones that came from underdeveloped mouths had been the only thing Tallis had heard. He had failed to listen to the voice of the

i have come again to

mind, the Voice of the people who were now an instant from the eternal cease.

Hunter heard. He heard them all.

berlin hannon judithgod

maire

“You knew!” Hunter knocked Tallis to the ground with a swift, unexpected blow. Both of their shields rippled from the impact. “You fucking knew!”

Tallis stood, shield purging dust and dirt from a hundred invasion points. He wiped the mud from his chest.

“Back to the ship. We’re done here.”

“This isn’t over. You knew they weren’t aliens. They’re people.”

“Back to the ship.” His growl chilled the windless plain. The city outskirts were silent, the inhabitants frozen in place, replaced with something from between the stars and times.

Slithers docked.

Hunter leapt from his cockpit, released seals on gloves and helmet, let them drop to the floor. Other pilots climbed from their vessels in silence. They had seen; they knew what would happen.

Mandela jogged to Hunter’s side. “Don’t, man. Maybe we can—”

“Stay away from me.” He deflected Arik’s grip from his arm.

Tallis walked from his slither, cracked his neck seal. “Do you have a problem with me, Windham?”

He walked up close, too close. Breathing heavily, fraught with bitter emotion. “How long have you known?”

“Known what?”

Hunter swung, but Tallis blocked. He’d always been the swifter of the two. He held Hunter’s forearm and grinned.

“I repeat: Known what?”

“That

there are worlds out there, boys, so many worlds we could never hope to count them all, and on some of them are monsters.”

Hunter turned to Brendan, whose face stared at Uncle in rapt fascination. The boys sat in the schoolroom, Uncle at its center beneath a slowly-spinning holograph of the galaxy. Hunter frowned. It was the only sign of his fear.

“Where did they come from?”

“Good question!” Uncle smiled, patted the inquisitive boy’s head. “Very good question.” He zoomed the display out, their galaxy shrinking to a point amidst thousands, thousands shrinking to a point amidst eternity.

Hunter didn’t understand. He leaned forward, cradled his chin on his palms.

“There’s a place out there somewhere, a galaxy much like ours. It’s a bad place, very far away, and that’s where the monsters come from.”

“And they killed Earth?”

Uncle smiled sadly, nodded at another boy. “Yes, son. They sent the worldships to kill Earth.”

“Why?”

Hunter remembered the pause, the tilt of Pierce’s head, the bobbing swallow of his Adam’s apple.

“Who gave us the ability to fly, boys?”

“Mother!” Unison. Disconcerting unison. Hunter realized that he had replied in reflex.

“And who took away war and disease, gave us all a new purpose? Who cured the world of affliction?”

“Mother!”

“Yes.” The affirmative was a hiss, slow and calculated. “Mother.” He circled the room, sweeping his gaze across the pre-pubescent soldiers of the night. “The aliens hate Mother. The monsters want to kill Mother. They killed Earth to try to kill her, and now we’re going to make them pay for it.”

Hunter saw that Brendan was smiling widely.

“We’re the last hope, boys. We’re here to kill them all. We’re here to cleanse the universe of this disease. We can’t let the aliens win.”

“Never.” Brendan whispered to himself.

“We have to be the best soldiers we can be, boys. We have to learn to fight, to fly, to kill. We have to save Mother from the monsters.”

“Uncle?”

Pierce scanned the crowd, turned to Hunter. “Yes, son?”

“Did the monsters kill all the girls?”

Pierce nodded gravely. “Yes, they did. They poisoned our world before the attack and made sure that all the girls would die.”

“But what about Lily?”

Another pause to consider. “Lily is special, son. She’s the last little girl ever. She’ll help us hurt them.”

“Uncle?”

Pierce turned to Brendan. “Yes?”

“When do we learn to fly?”

Pierce chuckled. “Soon enough, son. Soon

enough of this shit!” Mandela wrestled Tallis away from Hunter.

“Stay out of this, Arik.”

“No. We need answers. How long have you known that we’ve been killing people?”

The pilots were gathering around the combatants, uneasy, confused. They’d seen the target population as well, but they’d carried out Tallis’s orders to the end.

“They aren’t people. They’re monsters.”

“Who’s to say Mother isn’t the monster? Who says she’s not the one who started killing the women with silver? Just think about it.”

“Arik, what the hell would you—”

“We saw them on the worldship. Near-humans. All men. So they came to Earth to kill Mother, right? There wasn’t a female on the whole ship. They were cloning boys in a chamber. They had angels that look just fucking like ours.”

“You don’t—”

“I saw them too.”

“So they aren’t monsters. So they look like us. They still tried to kill Mother. They—”

“Did you ever stop to consider that maybe we aren’t the good guys? That maybe we’ve been killing the wrong people for years?”

Tallis snapped.

He struck out at Mandela first, fist colliding with throat, leg sweeping out behind his knee, cutting the man down with a sickening thump. He fell to the ground, gasping, clawing at his neck.

Hunter and Tallis collided in a fury of swinging limbs. Tallis easily threw Hunter to the floor, leapt upon him. The pilots clambered to separate their commanders. Tallis lashed out at them.

Hunter used the moment to throw the distracted Tallis away with his still-suited legs. A flash in time and Tallis was back on his feet, hand reaching down to retract his blade from his leg sheath. Hunter rushed to his feet and slammed into Tallis before he could pull the knife. They both staggered backward from the collision into the docking cradle of a slither.

The vessel rocked. The phase molding drained to the reservoir, it was nothing more than a thin metallish framework sitting atop the cradle supports. Hunter held Tallis’s left hand to his side, disabling his blade arm, struck out to slam his head against the slither leg. Tallis clawed for Hunter’s eyes with his free hand, fingertips digging for connection with soft, supple flesh. Hunter bit him.

The dance of war, the combat between men without rifle, without push-button bombs, without silver or the fluid mechanics of space/time: they grappled. They fought without romance, grunting and shouting nonsense syllables at each other and the silent audience, sweating and gnashing teeth, tasting that lust, pure lust for survival, pure lust for a victory decided by the death of the opponent.

Drops of blood traced lazy paths down Hunter’s cheek where Tallis’s fingernails had carved away skin.

Hunter let go of Tallis’s blade arm long enough to allow it to snap up for purchase on his neck. Hunter’s hand moved down, grabbed his commander’s knife, and brought it to target between his ribs.

Tallis inhaled. Jaw dropped, eyebrows furrowed, eyes darted forth, back, forth in realization.

Hunter slammed Tallis once more against the slither support, wrenched his body from his own. He held Tallis between the twin hydraulic lifts of the cradle, stabbed the blade between metal and rubber, twisted it, releasing a stream of gelatin and the seal broke and the slither began to descend from raised position.

Tallis’s hands reached out again for Hunter, his body jerked, but tons of metallish slither fell on his head between the cradle lifts.

The body fell motionless, geyser of black erupting from crushed skull.

How the body is weak, how fragile biology bursts upon cool metal, how the final crack of the spine signals an end.

“Hunter?”

“WHAT?”

“Your hand.” His heart broke a little more when he saw her eyes, her gaze. The way her hands were clustered before her mouth.

He looked, horrified before he even saw, because he knew, and he knew, and he knew.

Faint lattice of silver, just below the skin. It crawled from fingertips to palm to wrist. He spun an overhead monitor into the light, saw even in the reflection of the dead display that the silver was working its way underneath the skin above his skull.

Lilith sobbed as she activated the shield mechanism on her cardiac plate. The phase gelatin engulfed her form as she stood from the vacuum chair. “Hunter, I—”

“No, it’s not—”

“I’m so—”

“It’s not your fault!” He cried out as the silver gave one last twinge in his head that brought him to his knees. “It’s not your fault.” The pain subsided as Lilith’s shielding provided a buffer between his flesh and her affliction.

She knelt at his side, dragging the slosh of phase behind and around her.

“It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”

Hunter nodded, although he knew that their love would kill him.

“We’ll meet up with a galleon. We’ll find a way to hide you. We’ll split up. I can take the Fleet back to Earth and—”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“You have to. When she finds out that we’re off-target—”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Lilith.”

“Hunter.”

The phase shield was an echoing frustration. He longed to hold her, reassure her. The silver wouldn’t allow any contact at all very soon.

“Our first concern right now is to outrun the Rebecca.”

“We can’t outrun them. We’ll have to fight.”

“Are you willing to kill a destroyer of humans?”

She tripped over words. Heart pounded beneath cardiac plate. “It would appear I have been all along.”

“Lily—” He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“I know.”

“We’ll find a way to end this.”

“We will.”

“Us.”

“Just us.”

They flew into the void, machinery of night and war, wounded soldiers without certainty, grasping what hope they could from the dream of ending the jihad of silver.

“What’s that?”

He placed the Bic micro metal black ink pen on the countertop, reached for his cup. Slow sip, clink, napkin to lips.

“Just something.”

She smiled, releasing solitary dimple, hiding her eyes. “It’s a new book.”

“Nope.”

“Yes it is! What’s it about?”

“It’s not a new book.”

“A short story?”

He tapped the pen against the counter. “I don’t know.”

“You have to know what it is.”

“It’s something.”

“A journal?”

“Do you remember when you first came here?”

The shop was empty, past closing time. He wrote while she made order of cups and saucers, filled sugar dispensers. He’d helped her put the chairs on the tabletops earlier. She walked around to his side of the counter, took the stool next to him. Her eyes studied the floor, the pen, his hands. Not his eyes, old eyes now gray, old eyes now buried in furrows of wrinkle and thought.

“Yes.”

He reached, took her hands in his. Gently, so gently raised them to lips, traced knuckle and fingertip, slid over ring and ring. He tilted her face up with fingertips layered in callus, guitar callus of decades and night. Her bottom lip trembled, mouth opened to say something, anything. He kissed her cheek.

“I knew it would happen…I wrote about it months before it happened. Something inside me knew.”

“Paul, I’m—”

“No.” They embraced. He spoke into hair and ear. “Sweet girl.”

“Please know.”

“I know. And I knew. And I knew that we’d be together again, someday, somehow.” He pulled back, tip of nose meeting tip of nose. “And now I know something else.”

“The journal?”

“Something’s been speaking to me for years. Long before they found her, long before the wars and the troubles. I hear it in the night, in the loss, in the stillness, in the—”

“Silver.”

He nodded. “It’s gotten worse since it’s begun. Since she’s begun.”

Susan thought of the intersections of that day: the young engaged couple: soldier and silver ring, the author and his girlfriend: Deus Ex and Demian, the man with a white curl.

“‘And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”

“Hmm?”

“Gatsby.” He found double-meaning in her response.

“I’m sorry I didn’t dance with you.”

“Stop it.” She grinned.

“This is where the fish lives.”

“I have come again—”

“To wound the autumnal city.” Her smile was wide, forgiving, forever. “Delany’s going to sue you someday.”

They laughed, and it was good.

She pulled back from their embrace, tangle of arms, warmth of bodies, scent of coffee, sound of raindrops. Eyes tear-wet, blinking. Blinking.

“Please know, Paul.”

“I know.” He closed the blank book, left in mid-sentence. “I’ll finish this journal another day.”

They walked into the unsteady night, clouds lifting to reveal a sky of stars and starships, the men of war within the machinery that would take them beyond heaven, beyond time and tomorrow. They walked into the night, knowing that it was time, almost time, almost time. Their hands clasped tightly under stars, under stars.

“Susan?”

“Yes?” Blue-green eyes in the light of the moon. Dimple.

“I love You.”

my lips remember the echoes of that night LES SOLDATS PERDUS: A PLAGUE JOURNAL

And in these final moments, in this final terror, I find stillness.

I remember her eyes.

They give me silence, the pause to reflect, the stillness that exists between two old souls brought together through tragic circumstance. As I hold this weapon, as I prepare to end this war, I remember and it gives me strength.

This is the moment of ultimate truth; I inhale and know all. I know what I have to do to end this. Even as the child stands before me, even as I hold this weapon to target on her heart, I know what I have to do.

It is a flood of thought and emotion; this is the moment before an end, those instants when the world pauses, those instants when everything is revealed and I am held motionless in a hesitant peace.

Inhale.

She begs me to end it. I will, but not before telling you the story of how it all came to be. Seconds stretch to hours, years, decades, forevers. I will take my time.

They’re all dead now on this dusty plain, this barren world where it began and where I will enact an ending. Only now do I realize the depth of my loss; I’ve killed the woman I love by killing the doppelganger sent to replace me. The shot went right through him and hit her as well. What have I done?

Exhale.

She’s in my arms right now, lifeless body. I hope her soul is elsewhere.

So much to say. So little time. The child yearns for this weapon, yearns for cessation and stillness.

She can wait.

How far back does the mind go? How far back does this story stretch? I barely remember the Earth. What still remains in my memory are broken images: a talking teddy bear, a gravel parking lot, the weapon jutting from the ocean, firing the white balls of phase that would begin the war. I remember a fence, a little girl, the static of the dead television. Daddy leaving. Mommy’s gloves. My baby sister, and the tears late at night.

I remember the smell of the smoke rising from my mother’s broken chest as she lay on the ground, dying.

They lied to us. They said we’d be reunited with our families once Archimedes was out of harm’s way. I knew that they were all dead, and I knew that Uncle and the angels were lying. Maybe that’s why I did what I did.

I think my heart has stopped beating.

Is there love between stars and times? Can the lost soldiers ever know that most poignant of emotions? Can something develop between two people brought together by loss and war that transcends explanation, safety, reality?

I can feel her blood through my shirt.

The child laughs at me. The temptation…I can taste it. I want to kill her, will kill her. Not yet, though.

I can’t kill her yet. I don’t want to leave. Images flood this confusion: a hand, her eyes, subtle smile and the shudder of her release. Forbidden love, forbidden coupling. I killed Tallis for what he did to her. I would have killed Uncle if I had known in time. His heart gave out. In this moment, I feel my own, each beat distinct. I feel the blood coursing through my veins, flushing my face, reaching every last extent of my body. I feel the gun warming to my touch.

This is the final moment. I know everything, I see everything.

dream that your someday child never knows of the rain

I can smell her hair, tainted as it is by sand and blood, sweat and dust. I can smell her hair.

How did it come to this?

Gary’s wreckage to the south, Hannon’s final gambit spilling fire and black smoke into the afternoon sky…What is this place? Can it be home? Did God die for these bleak plains, this impossibility of continuation? Did Lilith die so that I could kill her Mother and be left alone here?

This is the final moment. The ultimate truth. Senses are heightened, flashes of memory dance before my eyes, replacing the child with past, this desert with the cold of space, this corpse with warmth and touch and life.

I know it all now.

We tore the ship apart after I killed Tallis.

The angels tried to keep us from the bridge. They’d seen what happened in the hangar. They’d known all along that Tallis was a special little present that Maire sent along with Arch to keep watch over us, to take over once Uncle had died. They’d known it was coming, could see it in Uncle’s eyes for months before the final heart attack. His great crop of kinked black hair turned from salt-and-pepper to pure white, his rich chocolate skin turned sickly gray, eyes once brilliant white yellowed with age and exhaustion. I don’t blame him. I now know that he was an unwilling participant in this slaughter, just as my father and Uncle Jean were long before I was born.

Did my father see this world before he died?

I can feel that final collapse. I felt it then…But in this moment, he is with me.

Is it the silver? Is that the link between our past and present and whatever lies beyond? It crawls just beneath my skin, jabbing behind left eye, right. It is alive, so much more alive than the little girl, so much more alive than I am in this pause.

Brendan’s blood was still on my hands when we went to the bridge. The angels tried to stop us, but we fell upon them with blades and fists, slashing throats, knocking them down, gouging biomech eyes from silent, confused sockets. I felt nothing. They felt nothing. We emptied the ship of Mother’s spawn. We smashed things. I paralyzed Arch with stripped circuits, broken boards. Lobotomy.

At last, we were alone. Just men in the middle of nowhere.

And woman.

I remember being alone with her for the first time.

We thought it was a drill, but it wasn’t. Must have been fifteen or sixteen at the time, just starting our outside flight training. Brendan’s Attack One was running formations in what we thought was an empty system. Turned out to be inhabited. We were told they were the aliens; I know now that they were probably just an advance team from Hannon’s systemship. Arch went into evasive, left the slithers outside. I was on Catalyst guard shift with Arik. He abandoned his post; I don’t know where he went. But when Arch started shaking, I almost panicked. We’d never been bombarded from close-range before. EM slugs. We lost phase containment on the lower decks, and the system glitched. The Catalyst chamber opened.

She was in there, alone. Crouched on the floor, so scared. I went to her.

I don’t know if she’d ever been held by another human.

It wasn’t until after the attack was over that we realized that my shielding had never activated. I’d been in the chamber without phase, but nothing had happened.

We kept it a secret. Our little secret.

I owe it to decades of planning. When my father was in the service of Mother, she changed him. This child…She knows that I’m the son of Joseph Windham. She knows, she knew, but she still let me get on that ship. Maybe she had plans for me. In the end, she decided to kill me, replace me with an angel named Nine. She never suspected that Hannon would find my Machine in the outer. She never suspected that I would kill her.

This silver is starting to

Maybe she wanted this. Maybe she knew.

She is weak. I can feel her. Digging, clawing, struggling against this, even as she knows that it must be done.

She fades, lashes out. Final struggle against this

Maire is ancient. She is older than this world, older than home Earth and Hannon and the system she tried to kill. She is older than her Judith. She comes from the night between times, the void between stars. She waited for forevers to find a suitable host. She found it in Maire. The

silver

speaks to me without lips, without voice or tongue or breath.

She is.

life like fire

And now I begin to understand. Laughter like pleas for mercy resonate. Purpose. Will be completed. I heard it in the wind and saw it in the sky; I thought it was the end.

Please, give me strength.

I’ve seen God. Judith. Touched her. Held her hand as she died. I wept for her. I don’t know if there are others. I can only pray that there is something beyond this dust, this plain, this dead weight of my love bleeding out into the hardpan. I can only pray that in these moments, it will guide me, give me the strength to do what I must do, to end this war, to kill this child, to find that stillness between

There was music in her voice.

Is this all there is? Please give me solace and strength. Please direct finger to action, pressure against metal, brace for the shock of

We’d trade glances during briefings. As we got farther into the Outer, closer to target, Uncle allowed her into the briefings. She remembered that attack, the way I held her and didn’t dissolve from contact with the catalyst. She remembered a moment of adolescent compassion. All I did was hold a frightened girl, but she knew. You know. You do. She remembered the fence, the afternoon walks where I held my mother’s hand, gloved hand concealing the affliction that killed our species, afternoon walks where I waved to the only little girl left, pretty little girl inasmuch as I could recognize pretty: colorless colorful eyes, curls, unruly. Sad girl behind walls, faceless angel watching over her. She remembered my grocery trips long after we’d left the planet and groceries and the galaxy of home.

I think Tallis knew all along. I think he was jealous.

We found time to be alone, little moments stolen from my menial tasks and her recoveries. We grew into adults in that metal box flying into war. I never wore a shield. I thought the resistance would last forever.

This crawling proves me wrong. This ripple of flesh, this tickling beneath scalp and wrist and thigh. These shaking hands

will find your back; the kingdom i’d unravel in our

So tired. I’m so tired.

Rebecca found us.

We’d crossed paths with other destroyers before, pauses on target, angels gathering to discuss the mission, probably using the boosted signal strength of two vessels to talk to home and Mother. We’d wait it out, just wait without orders until they were done. We’d meet the other crews, trade stories of combat and victories against our faceless enemy, confident that we were doing the right thing, spreading our jihad across timespace.

I’d heard of the Rebecca long before they caught us.

Rogue vessel. Canberra Compound. We heard that something had gone wrong; they’d left target, gone off-course and scope. There were a few ships that just did that. Just disappeared. I assume some of them were destroyed in combat. Everyone assumed the Rebecca had been lost.

and this heart for

It was a hushed conversation, without Tallis, without most of my officers. They never took to other crews, never liked waiting in nonspace for course alterations. They never liked anyone.

I tried to be friendly to most people.

I don’t remember which crew first told me of Canberra Rebecca’s reemergence. I remember the captain was trying very hard to grow a beard. I remember he spoke of a targeted world, arriving in-system to find the planet cracked in half, moons hanging perilously close to contact. He said there was a beacon, transmitting faintly, whispering into the night: Rebecca was here. That was it. That was their sign.

He’d found angels spaced into that system. They’d killed their angels.

What if Lilith had been on the Rebecca? Would there be anything left of this at all? They killed worlds, killed systems with the very basic weapons provided, without benefit of Catalyst. The slug generators we’d left outside of the Earth system, drawing fire from the suns, channeling it into phase and directing it on target from decades away…I don’t know why she didn’t change the access codes. I don’t know why she let that crew use weapons of night against innocent worlds, other Fleet vessels, eventually themselves. It was a game to her; she loved watching us struggle. We were puppets.

They caught up to us in those three days.

I don’t regret killing my angels, even though we probably would have survived with their help.

The Rebecca must have been listening all along. Must have intercepted Mother’s kill order. I don’t think they really cared about me or about maintaining the Catalyst integrity in a controlled environment. I think they wanted to kill everyone, just to spite Mother. If the painter and the ghost hadn’t gotten there in time, I wouldn’t be here today. It wouldn’t have mattered. Thousands of years of planning would have been lost because of a metal box of bloodthirsty Australians.

How much of Gary was Australia? Phase rudder, starboard side, deck three lavatory? Was his cockpit made of Kansas, his airlocks of Belgium, his voice the wind that scraped Africa?

I didn’t know him long, but he swore a lot.

I don’t want to be awake.

The Rebecca rammed Arch at full speed. Role reversal, sexual politics, the dance of metal sex, pheromones of phase dripping off into the night, sweat and cum of non-life struggle, fingernails scratching, no screams in that silence but fire, fire. And blood.

Too close for slithers. We flew across alone, armed, army of boys, not men, not boys, guarding our female against invasion. They met us halfway, conflicting invasions, hand-to-hand. Astronauts?

I saw so many of my men smeared to pulp between the grinding warships, caught between the tons, never knowing life, just this. Just this night.

The heart breaks because of

There was no reason for it, no reason for their fury without purpose or thought. They wanted to kill us, and they did, many. We killed many of them in return.

I watched Arik die. He was my best friend. He was cutting into the Rebecca hull, trying to board. He made the hole. Got that done. His troops poured in after him, flash of fire, spatter of red, limbs. Limbs everywhere. They were waiting on the inside.

We went in after them.

So tired.

Disease to disease, contagion to contagion. We are the plague. We are the

Could I have lived a normal life?

All this I have known: combat and bloodlust, training for decades for a final conflict that has now emerged as a child, a gun, a desert plain. I’ve known the love of the final woman, the brotherhood of the lost soldiers. I’ve touched God. I’ve killed millions, with my own hand, with her own heart, with blind and reckless abandon for a tainted purpose. I’ve known. Silver. And more. I’ve known the stillness, will find it again soon. There will be silence on this expanse, silence interrupted by wind, by scream, by despair of solitude.

Could I have lived as another, as the painter did in the time before Maire, as my father did before the war, as my mother, spectacled, carrying books and given letters, as the author, the author and coffee and marbles, blue, two, hidden in pocket, hidden away from, away from vain struggle? I’ve heard the stories, faded stories of a planet long gone, final, final wreckage smoking to the south, blackened pile of the interior made exterior, made into Guerra.

She stole more than futures.

Could I have known a night under rain, warm breath and soft bed, watching the sleep, watching the

don’t

This gun becomes heavy.

No sound, but they lied. No sound as Arch’s phase rudder was torn apart, as Rebecca’s belly split. No sound in those pulses of light, explosions of metal and men. I remember watching, stretching to feel her, reaching to sense that touch, to know that she was safe. And this heart, for

I felt her touch.

We stormed the Rebecca interior, phase and light and fire. We killed. They came apart. Struggle for center, scrambling down hallways, cutting, cutting. We killed. Gutted Rebecca from the inside, as I knew they would do to Arch. I left my troops to continue their evisceration.

Swarms of men outside, sparks and radio screams, bits of metal stippling shield, razoring to center flesh.

Arch: hangar open, spilling slithers into the night, unmanned, grotesque miscarriage of technology.

I could feel her running, gasping. Hull was near, Hull was there where I should have been. She carried a weapon and used it as the boarding party made its way to the Catalyst chamber. Hull died, she didn’t, some of them did. Some of them.

She struck out but they were shielded, hands and snares, grabbing, binding, stealing.

I jumped like flying, free-falling, between light and void, shield bubbling from heat and cold, slugs and fire. Embraced Arch. Felt them near.

All of these words approximate. There are no words for this, for Us, for

I feign strength and we

The painter walks through the streets; he’s had a fight with his mistress. She wants a ring. He doesn’t want to give it to her. He looks into the sky, sees stars, falling. Fighting starlight. It was his calling; she whispered to his blood. He went to the caves.

The authors walks through the streets; he’s lost his lover. He wanted to give her a ring. She couldn’t accept it. He looks into the sky, sees stars, falling. Fighting starlight. It was his calling; she whispered to his blood. He went to the coffeehouse.

I’ve never tasted coffee, but I remember its scent.

I don’t know how else to be.

my lips remember

Daddy had a guitar. Why would a soldier have a guitar, strumming late at night, Mommy silent, sitting, smiling? They thought I was asleep. I don’t remember the words, but it was her song. Tears.

I miss

Killed them as they tried to escape through the hole they cut in Arch, as they carried the bound and gelled Catalyst out. She struggled, but there were many. I killed them, severed her restraints. She embraced me. It was all falling apart, Arch dead, Rebecca dead, most of our crew torn to pieces between the vessels, but she embraced me. I was so afraid that I’d lost her.

They must have sent a signal from the Rebecca. Maybe it was automatic. Black turned to white, stars folded and stretched to lines, stretched toward

The phase slugs arrived in-system, shot from guns we’d placed decades before. Rebecca became shards. Radio chatter: screaming, screaming and dying. My men caught in between. The initial shot hit Rebecca directly, sent what remained of Arch spinning away.

I remember grabbing Lilith’s hand and jumping from the hole, pushing off as hard as I could, hoping that the momentum would be enough to reach one of the jettisoned slithers.

It was.

We got in as quickly as we could, laden with gallons of gel shielding, freezing from exposure. I slammed the cockpit hatch home as the second and third slugs arrived, again hitting Rebecca, some of Arch, so many soldiers. So many dead.

I don’t know if anyone else got away, but I didn’t see any other active slithers. I think we were the only survivors.

We flew.

I hated to hear her cry, but I was crying, too. Strong commander of the Extinction Fleet vessel Archimedes, Hunter Windham. Crying at the loss of the only home I’d known for twenty years, the only family I’d had. I’d killed Tallis with my bare hands, watched my best friend die in a cloud of blood vapor, seen my Mother mouth “I love you” even as I could see the pavement through the hole in her chest, but only then did I cry. Alone in the night with Lilith, tears floating lazily before my face, batting them aside so I could see the slither monitor, plot a course, escape the system of phase slugs and debris.

System showed four more vessels arriving in-system soon. Wolves to the scent of blood drawn. Three destroyers and something else…Something huge.

Mother would want evidence that I was dead. Mother would want Lilith intact. Another vessel would take her and use her. I couldn’t let that happen.

She spun me around, took off my helmet, hands going to my hair, wiping sweat from my forehead, cheeks. Her lips moved on nothing. No words. In that moment, no words. I felt the silver stirring, but I didn’t care. Subtle pain behind eyes. Her touch was worth the risk.

Tangle of lips, tongues. Noses fencing. I knew my stubble scratched her face. Skin sweat-slick, tear tracks.

I searched on all bands for something, anything. Galleons. Had to get to a galleon.

They called them prisons, but they really weren’t. When Earth system fell to the “alien” attack, there were billions of humans on the outer planets, the colonies, a few nearby systems. They became the galleon refugees, searching for inhabitable worlds in the near-Outer. We came across them from time to time, interacted with the crews. Uncle disapproved. I’m sure Mother disapproved. I’m sure some of the alien worlds we were sent to cleanse with the silver were refugee worlds.

Two people, tiny sliver of slither, searching for

i love you for your hands.

long, lean fingers interlaced with my own, the interruption of your rings, long nail, long nail, short nail. the grasp of small hand within my clumsy, shaking own, the tightening of your grip on my shoulder as you gasp, fingers slipping to my neck, pulling me into a kiss.

i love you for your skin. smooth, soft, infinitesimal hairs. i love your taste, the salt of our passion, the warmth and wetness of two bodies joined together by desire and love that has waited so long to appear.

i love you for your lips, the medium of the first hint of Us: stolen kisses.

i love you for your hair, that halo of tickling that descends to my face when you are above me and shines out around you when you are below. kissing ears through gateways, pulling traces of you from my mouth.

your dimple. perfect dimple. i love you for your dimple.

i love you for your tummy. you hide, yet it is beautiful, taut skin interrupted by button, stippled with my kisses on a journey into abandon.

i love you for your eyes. cliché in action: they are the window in which i see our future.

your heart. i love You for your heart, that organ of fire that i cross with my fingers, kiss with my lips, feel in the depth of my own. curled together, tender moment: i hear you, the quickness of your acceleration, the echoes of our times together, the futures i

love you for your soul. my soul. Our soul. decades of searching before we found Us again. i felt the touch of your essence years ago, but never knew that i would find myself within you, that perfect soul resonating with my own, all pieces of one returning to the eternal, two souls traveling the same path for the moment, the perfect moment.

i love You for your Love.

How we deny. That moment. Within stillness and cold, how we deny.

Never had a dog. Our neighbor had a dog. And a baby. For a while.

Do you know of silver? What she told us, the ice, the wind, a blade? Do you know? Believe?

There are things we know, resident memory, special memory, species memory coded into us. We know. Just because. There are things we’re told. To read, to watch to be. I read of lions and witches and robots, a desert, a jihad, rabbits and a warren, a submarine, boys on an island. Arch had no Piggy. I read, Mommy read to me, and I liked the stories, although the room shook, the sky was fire. I liked those stories before bedtime, although sometimes they made me think too much, too much to sleep, to breathe. I knew of broken glass: and blood.

We read of Ender because we were supposed to. There were girls on his ship.

I read about Hank years before I met him, many years before he died. I never knew he was real.

Those stories…A different dust, a different wind, a different showdown at noon. Hank was

How he’d stand, hand poised, brow furrowed, staring, staring down. Hank didn’t wear a white hat, but he killed men in black. Primitive. I can’t imagine

a lifetime without you, yet it stares me in the face right now

and he smoked. I’ve never. Smoked. He chewed tobacco sometimes. Spit on the desert floor. Disgusting process, but

why do i enjoy it so much?

How the hell did Hank end up in this? Anachronism, fictional character made popular by a return to traditional values after the war of the turn of the century. Hank, last-name-less Hank, on billboards and action figures and prime-time pay-per-view. Hank. He. Was good. For the world.

A painter, a cowboy, a ghost, a child, a warship, a

Love.

Know? Believe?

that I didn’t want her to shiver besind me, hated that it was so cold, that my skin crawled with silver infestation, that I had to keep shielding in that cramped cockpit so that I wouldn’t

Her smile was so sad.

We found a school of unknowns on screen and raced

like vultures to the

toward them, hoping beyond hope that air would last.

I tried to breathe less, slower, but I knew that she didn’t really need the air anyways, hybrid of silver and something, calm to my rage, cool to my heat, heart to my heart. Target locked, we flew. I let the system drive. We huddled together as best as shielding and timing allowed, allowing precious hours to slip by unprotected until the jabbing started along fingers and wrists, behind eyes, and I retreated behind liquid glass.

Can you appreciate the touch of a lover not marred by distance, flesh to flesh, swimming into, entering, not echoed through phase, cold, wet, not shivering and yet feeling the same pang, the same pain, the same

The realization of distance physical.

I was so scared that the galleons wouldn’t be friendly.

How I miss home, or the idea of home: safety, family, parents still alive, teddy bear unburned, cartoons on the television, no grocery store walks past a little girl, waving. I miss an idea that would have prevented this love. Which life would I choose?

Better to have loved and lost…Is bullshit.

I’ve killed her. Weight of body, smell of sweat, tack of blood. I’ve killed

Lies since birth, all that they taught, all that they taught. I’ve known truths, but I’ve assembled them myself from fragments of Us. I’ve known the silver, the stillness, the loss, the night. I know. i Know. You. Do you? You?

Focus. Inhale. moment

It isn’t like books or movies, holograms or

a boy a girl and the end of the

No words.

A mind dissembles.

I’d passed out by the time we were in range. Lilith activated the beacon, mindful that it might draw unfriendlies too. There was nothing more we could do, dead ship, cold and silver onset within me. I remember snap of static and gush of warmth as they released the cockpit seal in the galleon hangar, shadowed images, old men in miner’s jumpsuits, jaws agape at my passenger. Woman. Shielded.

Weakness: they lifted me up, out. Conversation like waves, echoes, forth and back. I knew it wasn’t English. French.

I remember fever: slurred speech, sweaty brow, cool floor, a man squatting beside me, looking from his shipmates to the sick destroyer captain and his companion. Deactivated my shielding, let me breathe deeply of old air, taste of ore, reach out to Lilith, please, just let me hold

She was uncomfortable. Center of attention, moreso than I was. Because. Just because.

A new man, my vision fading from black to

Silver was retreating.

He knelt, touched my cheeks, forehead. Spoke to his shipmates with foreign tongue.

Lilith: standard? english? anyone?

oui. yes.

I don’t remember what happened after that, but waking up in their sickbay. Warm. Normal, stabbing gone, heart regulated. Rested. I panicked but she was at my side, shielded but there. I wanted to hold her hand, but knew that it was getting too close. To time. The time. When we could no longer be together. She kept her distance, a distance that I knew could only grow. You know. You do. grow.

She’d spoken with the man in broken Standard. Told him everything. Incredible story, but she was the proof. She. was the proof.

It was a group of three galleons, miners. They worked around the periphery of a single system where they’d found the closest approximation to Sol that they could. Dead system, planets harvested of almost everything, but still breathable atmosphere, a little water. Nothing left but desert, flattened cities, a spire…Three ships, a few hundred crewmen. When she asked where they came from, they told a story as incredible as ours, yet there it was, intersections, intersections, paths crossed in the night.

Many of the colony came from rogue Fleet vessels. Soldats perdus. And now I knew, and I knew.

His name was Berard, and he’d known my father.

There are histories hidden between these stars, histories that die before revelation. I feel them; they bring poignant tears to tired eyes.

out of the hell of whatever it was

Do you know of France, interior struts of Guerra’s midsection, wine country converted to bulkheads? Do you know of Paris, the war, the hole in the earth that led to

Berard served under Jean Reynald and Joseph Windham after the war, during Mother’s rise. He knew Whistler, the original projection. He was responsible for the Paris Compound. He was the Pierce de Paris, taking his boys to the sky when the “alien” invasion began, for a while turning them into good little soldiers, later breaking target and killing angels and leaving the master plan of the jihad. Berard saw through the plan. Maybe Pierce did too.

They hid. Found a home. Became soldat perdus of a friendlier persuasion.

He knew of her beginning, those precious secrets held by precious few: ice, wind, blade. He knew. Maybe she saw it all: intersections in the night. Maybe she let him escape.

He said I looked like my father.

Joseph Windham was the strongest man in the world. I saw tears in his eyes once, that day that he left and I knew he would die only months and centuries later, in the cold of this, bathed in a bridge sea, bubbles of gelatin glass, the sound of cracking shell, an instant of

My father never trusted his path, chose to tell a small circle of his officers that which he’d seen in Mother’s eyes. He wanted them to distrust. He needed them to distrust, because he knew.

My father told him of

long summer bonfires, those stupid cushions we put around the fire that get wet as the air cools, sending everyone else off to play hide and seek so we can be alone, a cute girl throwing dandelions at me, the time when we first laid by the fire and i explored every inch of your face with my lips because we were both too terrified to kiss.

i could go on. i think too much. i wish things had not changed.

i still love you.

The child is dying. Younger and younger. The process speeds. Tears of frustration and fury. She begs.

This weapon is

The ice plain slipped toward night and

i win

I know now of a system of two stars, a species with two hearts who buried their god in the center of the world. I know of centuries of civil war, a fragile peace enacted by machine angels. I know of a woman from the edge of the worlds, trees that swam through the sky, an alien called silver, between times and whens. Silverthought. I know.

She could have talked, but she was action. She could have talked, but no one would have listened. She heard the whispers in her blood, whispers in her single silver heart, and she acted.

Berlin, Kath, others. They had access to the lumbers, had access to the inexplicable resonance of flight and time. They helped her at first, wanted to make a difference, wanted things to change. They knew that their god was asleep, that machines were taking key positions in the power structure, that left unchecked, the machines could decide to replace biologic with mechanic.

and this heart, for

They never knew that she would try to kill them all.

His superiors found out about Berlin’s involvement after she struck, after she was captured. They had no intention of letting him off the damaged planet. He would have died in the cold and the dust if he hadn’t found the photographer Task and his machine lover Elle. They tried to stop it all, tried to warn Hannon of the contamination. They were caught in the phase flux and followed Maire’s exile craft to Earth, where it this all began in earnest, where eons of waiting culminates in a man, a gun, a child, a desert.

Forty thousand years she waited in that cave.

Task died soon after the crash from his injuries. Berlin’s hand was crushed, became infected. His mind and body toxic, but she didn’t care. She had all she needed: code. The planet wasn’t empty; she made men of monkeys.

The mind

Simmering until fruition, sleeping for millennia, sleeping with intent, letting her evolution spread. She recovered that which she had lost, recovered and augmented. She waited, taste of Berlin on her lips, in her blood. She fed from him as she would later feed from Reynald: soul, code, rebirth. Hibernation.

out of the reach of our sea

Believe?

that she walked through the impressionist streets a wraith, marveling in all that she had spawned: thousands, millions, billions. She looked for him, felt him there, somewhere, that old soul with the stigmata of white. She walked for years, seduced and ravaged, fed upon and found him outside of a jewelry shop, arguing with the mistress Hiffernan.

Followed, whispered as stars falling in the night sky, whispered to his blood and he knew, he knew. What. Futures and distances and silver. She whispered.

She waited for that moment, as she had lifetimes away. Hid through three major conflicts, hesitant, uncertain, but knowing that it was not yet time; the world could not yet produce what she needed for completion, for purpose, for infection. She waited until they made machines like men, and it began. With the painter’s help, it began.

Decades of construction, hidden from man. Angels and gates and tunnels. They fought their surface wars, struggled over black lines on a map, experimented with their atoms and their planets and their politics. She hid and built and waited.

In those days between the death of everything and the rebirth of less than humanity, it hurtled into damnation and spawned and its progeny spread outward and outward and consumed everything in their path, and before Omega, it judged that all that it had created was good and redeemable and it sent the newborns back into the blackness to save those unfortunate enough to have remained behind.

They would live forever. In the ocean of silver fire, Omega would be the salvation and the nirvana and the extinction and the hereafter.

Honeybear! Honeybear Brown! Cuddliest little bear on our side of town! Honeybear! He’s our friendliest friend!

Lilith giggled like a child when I sang that.

My quarters on Arch were cramped. Everyone’s were. But she’d sneak in and we’d make love and talk for hours. Forbidden, but yeah. We didn’t care. Knew that someone might figure it out eventually, but didn’t care. Long before the resistance began to weaken. We’d spend those hours unshielded, wrapped in each other, talking and laughing about Honeybear Brown and memories. Other memories. Laughing so that we wouldn’t think. About. What we were doing. What we were sent out here to do.

She told me of life behind her gates and I told her of life outside her gates. What we remembered of a world now dead, of a time now dead.

We figured out how humans fit together to make one.

She’d tell me stories that she made up and dreamt: rain and marbles, paint and coffee. A betrayal, time, people wrapped in monsters, flying machines through yesterday, stealing souls and sometimes taking time, taking time to sit on a rusty swingset next to a mountain, something buried beneath, tunnels and stars.

Sometimes her stories scared me.

She told me about Nan. She missed her like I missed my mother.

She’d hide behind the pillow, quickly peek out, Hunter!, and I’d laugh like an idiot. She’d do it again; I’d laugh again. Remember me like that. Please don’t forget me. Us.

I don’t know what she saw in me that she didn’t see in the others. I don’t know why she let me in. Never felt so vulnerable, such surrender. Never let anyone that far in before, and now

We found such beautiful stillness in those moments, just Us. None of the confusion of our purpose, none of the war, the flight, the silver. Those are the moments that I remember when I close my eyes. Hers is the face I see. Hers is the heart I feel beating in my own chest. Quickly, now. Accelerated. Because

Exhale.

I now know that at the end of the war, Jean and my father found the entrance. I know that Maire sent Whistler to transport them to her, and I know that she changed them. They would be the first of many.

I know she whispered to them in that voice like wind and

They oversaw the Fleet modification, the construction of the Compounds on each continent, the mass-production of angels. They readied the populace for the realization that they had a greater purpose, and that purpose involved submission, war, sacrifice. They were the men people blamed when the female babies started dying, and the world realized that it would all end within a generation.

End set in motion, Maire placed my father on the flagship of the advance force she sent to Hannon’s system. She hid Reynald in a military hospital, and sent for him when it was time to create Lilith. Their daughter, my Love, the Catalyst of the Sixth Extinction.

Berard’s story broke an already-broken heart. How some could have known and not acted…I know that the silver was strong, but how could they not have killed her? Why must I be the executor of that act? After so many have died, after this extinction complete, silver now seeded throughout our known universe, dripping beyond into times and times, after such loss, after I’ve killed my

Berard assured me that the galleon was running as fast as it could from my pursuers. We’d find someplace out there to hide. Had to. Failure was no option. We ran.

We failed, of course.

The hardest part is the fact that I’d gotten used to the idea of forever.

i do know, and you know, too…

Please rest now, knowing that I’ll join you soon enough. Be still; wait for me.

Three destroyers, a corvette, and something still coming at us through the stream…They arrived in-system with a flash and my heart sunk. Galleons couldn’t outrun Fleet vessels in real space. We knew that; they knew that. Galleons have few if any weapons. We were unarmed, outrun, surrounded.

Funny how time pauses in those moments, in this moment, how the mind calms, the clouds recede, all becomes clarity and truth. I knew in that moment that we’d be separated, but our paths would converge again. Someday, somehow.

Whistler was surprisingly polite.

There was nothing we could do. The corvette docked. We met them in the hangar. Berard, his officers, myself. Lilith stayed in the sick bay.

Seeing Seven wasn’t like looking into a mirror.

Hello, Hunter.

I remember a print of a painting. Not the mother, as everyone knows, but the mistress, although I didn’t know it at the time. Animal rug. Wolf? White dress, white girl. She looked so sad. Eyes empty like

Whistler held his hand out to shake mine. I didn’t accept. He grinned and let his arm fall to his side.

He explained that Seven would be my replacement. I wasn’t to be killed, but sent away. I hadn’t expected that. He asked where Lilith was and I said that she was hidden on another galleon, although I knew he could feel her, knew that he would find her.

The destroyers outside opened fire and took out one of Berard’s other two galleons.

Still hidden?

They directed me to the corvette, took me outside to the waiting surprise that had arrived in-system. Something big. I felt Lilith’s touch, her fear, her desperation. I tried to reassure her but couldn’t. I didn’t know how long it would be before I saw her again, if ever. Tried to reassure myself but couldn’t. Just tried to stop thinking, the dead painter on one side, the ghost of myself on the other, draped in black, eyes cold and

It arrived with a silent fanfare, a machine the size of a solar system, something special Mother had created just for me when she realized what I was doing, when she realized that I had a little more resistance than my father, that I had thrown her jihad off-track if even for a little while. There it was: Machine, and it scared the hell out of me.

Too tired to fight, to weak to resist. The silver onset had done more than ravage my body.

please don’t let this

They’d take Lilith from Berard’s ship and place her on another destroyer. Seven would become me. He would ensure that the jihad moved forward, ever forward, spreading the silver amidst, eventually making it to Hannon’s system and ending them all.

The corvette was but a particle to Machine.

Penetration, insertion, docking. They took me to the center.

Eight was there. Mirror after mirror, but no true

Crucifixion.

The bubble was bigger than a destroyer, and at its center they gently, gingerly removed my clothing, affixed bindings to my arms and legs. Whistler was always in good cheer. I was silent except for breathing, heartbeat, whispers between

I didn’t fight. I couldn’t. I felt her, knew. There with me. Tears wept for me. But I couldn’t fight. The restraints were painless.

This is Machine. This is your forever home.

Walkway withdrew and the painter and ghosts left the chamber. A heartbeat echoes from walls miles apart.

The bubble sea began to flood from the bottom of the chamber. Slowly, faster, faster. I strained at first against that tide, closed eyes and mouth and held breath until my temples throbbed, lungs screamed out, but in the end it was useless. I resigned myself to that. I opened my eyes in the shimmer of phased glass and took a breath and saw

Machine glistening with the churn of phase, preparing for the beginning of an exile and

Whistler’s corvette departing from Machine’s hangar and

Berard’s lesser galleon flying at it and

Berard’s ship itself blinking from the system to escape and

the lesser galleon crushing Whistler’s corvette against Machine’s phased hull and

bodies spinning off into space, erupting and

destroyers on Catalyst target trajectory and

i felt

her

safe, for now, in Berard’s galleon, running away

and

Machine began.

The shudder of a million phase drives, each and every particle of my being dissembled, wrapped in warm viscous glass, ripped apart and placed tenderly back together, that tickle, that annoying tickle everywhere, everything. A vessel the size of

I faded into the stars, into tomorrow and yesterday on a path into uncertainty. All I knew was that we were going far, going fast, going away from Lilith, away from Earth, into the deep Outer. No aliens, no robots, no things that go bump in the night, but ultimate terror at the realization of my isolation. This was the beginning of my forever exile, ordered by a woman now a child, ordered out of spite and frustration because I tried to stop her from ending a species.

Stretched out far beyond body, mind, soul, stretched beyond that vessel of glass and rock, metal forged from planets and asteroid belts. One with everything, yet solitary in that void.

Memory and desire, an ocean of scattered, shattered images: arch of eyebrow, line of nose, colors of eyes: forevers and hands, long lithe fingers, tips tracing my cheek. Lips. And. Smoothness of cheek: hers. and philtrum, the way the lips part, the way lip to gum to teeth: smile. Neck. Collar bones and the space between breasts, the skin above her heart, precious, accelerated heart, that weapon that I denied, that weapon I loved. Love. Will

Screaming, crying out, but there was no one.

Given years to ponder eyes, given decades to wonder in those eyes: futures. One. and I

How much of myself did I hold in that stillness between our gazes?

long-winded, esoteric. self-indulgent

but what more do I have?

I remember memories not my own. Coffee and marbles and cigarettes. Discussions of subjunctive case, sub-human species, something about a pillow, cheek-biting, and robots that complained about films.

I know now that Berard ordered one of his galleons to ram the Whistler corvette. Ultimate sacrifice by men I never knew, never will. They died to save my Lilith, to save the

The shudder of a billion phase drives. Decentralized soul. Faster than light, out and north, as the stars go, toward that single wish. Sense of nonsense, the mind expands to embrace, yet there is no one there, no one forever out there.

Felt her fading, that touch…That touch faded. Until. lost.

Alone: screaming because I didn’t know how to stop.

c: format c.

I don’t know who I am anymore.

i think she’s perfect.

when she’s here, i’m really here. when she leaves, a part of me leaves with her, that splinter of my eternal being that has hidden within her beautiful heart forever, and has finally returned after so long away. we resonate as one.

i know that someday we won’t have this distance dividing us, these difficulties keeping us apart. i know each time that i look into her eyes that this time it is forever. i am patient. i can’t imagine a lifetime without her, now that i’ve found her.

she fell asleep in my arms, and i followed her willingly, but not before studying every inch of her face, impressing each line around her ancient eyes, the bullethole dimple, the shape and feel of lips, the arch of eyebrow, the warmth of exhalation. so warm under that comforter, bodies curled together, limbs intertwined. i felt her breathing regulate, saw the flicker of her eyes behind closed lids, fell asleep with the girl i love in a perfect moment of peace.

this is nothing like i’ve ever known, and i can’t wait for our next moment.

i see forevers in her eyes.

Shudder of a trillion phase drives, and I realized the depth of my loss.

I knew that Mother would send someone else to get Lilith. The loss of Whistler and my ghosts wouldn’t stop her. She’d make someone else, send them in a faster ship, hunt that galleon down. She’d take her time, do it right this time. She had me out of the equation now, but her daughter was still loose. The most important piece of the jihad was somewhere between stars and times. I thanked Berard, hoped he knew. Hoped he’d take care of Lilith for as long as he could. I knew that Mother would get her eventually; I just had to find a way to escape from Machine before it was too late.

my silence is my self defense

Machine eventually severed my restraints, allowed me to swim free. There was nowhere to go; I was no threat.

He wasn’t the best conversationalist. I’d ask questions that he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. He’d give answers that I couldn’t or wouldn’t believe. He had faith in Mother’s plan. He was friendlier than Gary.

I found numbness in those years.

Wondered what she was doing, if she was safe, if she’d been captured, if they had made the final attack on the “alien” homeworld. I didn’t know at the time that my father’s fleet had been the first wave, and that as a result of his discovery and attack, the “aliens” had hidden a star and half of their planets in a systemship. I didn’t know at the time that fate would bring our paths together in a very palpable collision.

I know now that during those vague and silent monthsyearsdecades, Whistler and ghost Nine caught up with Berard’s galleon, fought the crew to the death. They found Lilith on the bridge, about to activate the destruct sequence. A heart breaks to think that she would take her own life. A heart breaks to know that I took her life with my own hands, and she lays here in my arms, blood now tacky brown, lips parted as if she wants to say something, but eyes closed in sleep, eternal sleep. I’ve killed her.

Mother’s plan had changed. She no longer wanted a trusted angel to oversee the jihad. She got greedy. She wanted her daughter back, and she wanted to go to find Hannon and kill him herself in a ship named War, with a painter, a cowboy, a ghost. She wanted vengeance. She was dying, as she is now, each moment growing a little younger, feeding from this desert plain, the silver within my dying body, the silver that whispers to her even now: purpose. completion. an end.

kissing the life into something that’s already died

When she reached to activate destruct, they shot off her hand.

Precious cargo: Catalyst. Maire was a jealous mother. She wanted her little flower returned.

Slipping into madness. Strength through calm, confidence. No room for weakness, emotion, showing that emotion. The weak show emotion. The most poignant struggle: devotion to what seemed a lost cause, drowning within phase and something so much more. Never gave up hope, although voices commanded from the space behind eyes. Grasped to that which was ineffable: memory, cherished memory. Wound. To wound. Me.

Would I have taken my own life, given something more than a bubble, an ocean, a Machine voice?

Hold on…So tightly to those memories, of the moments, the sighs, the

To know that I killed her…To know that a fragment of me shot her hand off. Did he love?

How the work suffers for lack of clarity. How these final moments seem so trivial, not a fitting testament at all to a love that spanned decades and souls and something so much more than words. Ours is the story of a plague; we were the lost soldiers; mine are the tainted lips; ours is the broken love, spreading this contagion through the night. It is almost over.

The child looks younger.

Frantic now because I can feel its grip tightening. Silver. Suffocation. Crawling. It whispers.

They shot off her hand and took her home. They left Berard’s vessel to collapse upon itself.

I can only imagine her fear, her confusion. Going home to a world now dead, now empty of all life except the child sleeping at its center, the machines she made in those centuries, hollowing out the planet to create Guerra, and a cowboy named Hank. Fictional character, but she made him real. Twisted mind of a broken child playing god: let’s build a cowboy.

Lilith went home to meet the mother she’d only known through dreams, through whispers at night, through that tickle at the base of the skull. Role-reversal: child becomes adult, adult becomes child. They fed on one another, fed on this war created by silver. One died as one lived.

I miss her. She’s right here in my arms, in my heart, but I miss her. For the first time in so long, that touch is gone.

Let me fall; let me join her soon, but not before vengeance. Please give me strength.

Whistler and Nine safely transported her home to a dead world, a dying parent. Maire and Whistler and Nine and Hank and Lilith, all strapped into Gary, turning Earth inside-out in his departure, killing our home that we barely knew, feeding from the entire system to fuel his journey beyond light. Maire knew the target, knew even then: a systemship within which Hannon had hidden a star, a dying god, the last remnants of his species.

They flew.

I remember Machine’s capture, the collision and scraping. I remember the draining bubble, torches cutting into my prison, that tug of language behind the eyes as they lifted me out.

i don’t feel worthy of her sometimes. i’m trying to learn, but it is difficult. she is beauty beyond beauty, kindness beyond kindness, that soul and those eyes that i’ve felt and seen for so long and now with whom i’ve finally been re-united.

she sees beauty in things that i’ve taken for granted for years.

i’ve never felt that complete: arms around my girl, in that place, in that moment.

i saw beauty in the forever we share.

The child speaks to me without words, begging. Begging. Time is paused; this weapon

The truth I saw finally in Hannon’s eyes, the lifetimes he saw in mine. He’d found me, or maybe I found him, drawn together between stars and times by the ineffable, inexplicable. Our paths intersected and it was the way it was supposed to be.

Moments of proof and realization.

Maire’s attack on god, that clandestine infection of the host body, the release before her exile…The infection had spread to every world in Hannon’s system. Immediate, deadly, certain. This was a different silver, pure from the lumbers, pure from Maire’s time on the edge of the system. Will we ever know where it came from?

It spread from Berlin and Hannon’s command vessel above the silenced first planet, using the carrier lines to crawl to each planet, disseminate in each atmosphere, attack and kill everything without the marginally-protective Y chromosome. It was neither a quick nor painless death. Hannon was allowed to watch his wife and daughters writhe in agony from afar, become infertile, silvered. Afflicted. Within a century, all would be lost. There would be no next generations.

They developed a way to contain the infection with a cardiac shield placed above and around their hearts. It only prolonged; it didn’t solve.

His was a systemship of men. By the time he found me, there were no more women.

I remember looking at the shielded star hidden at the vessel’s core. So lonely. And within…

What placed me in this body, this mind, this soul? What made me a part of this jihad, made my life any more significant than the trillions of others who have fought and died in this war? Why does a man become a focal point of history and existence when he would have so much rather lived in blissful anonymity? There are strands that connect us throughout time and space, drawing us together, pushing us apart. I just wish I knew why I wasn’t born into someone else, someone who died in the initial invasion, someone who rests now, unknown, forgotten forever. I don’t want this.

I saw so much when I touched Judith, when I touched God, but I never saw the answer. I never found out why it has to be me. I don’t think she knew; the silver is something so much more than a dying ancient. The silver transcends time and space, comes from somewhere we can neither comprehend nor acknowledge. It screams from beyond, itches under my skin and there is the trigger, cool and unyielding, yet it could yield if I applied pressure. Voices.

The heart speeds toward

How human they were, how exactly like us except for two hearts, black blood, less oxygen in their atmosphere. The same uncertainties, the same power plays, the same emotions of loss and rage against Maire. She was our creator; forty thousand years hidden below the surface, directing our evolution, bumping our ancestors a few steps up the ladder. We were born of her.

How human they were, fraught with the same desires, the same weaknesses. We were born of a defect: Maire and her prey: Berlin. She called to those early men, drew them into caves, altered their course toward

How human they were.

I remember shiver and tickling, that resonance that allowed us to pass through miles of solid glass into the trapped and wounded solar system.

I saw the first signs of Hannon’s troubles, the fireworks of his civil war. Even in that moment, they fought from within, internal power struggle threatening to ruin everything Hannon had set into motion, the great showdown between the remnants of his species and she who had ended so much.

Great fleets of vessels within the systemship, men fighting a war because they could, not because they really understood the severity of the situation. Maire had killed because of a plan gone horribly awry, an attempt to make a statement about her species’ dependency on the machines. She wanted to kill, yes, but that desire became ultimate. The taste of blood drowned her senses. Machines no longer mattered; she was consumed by silver machines herself. She lashed out, initially with Berlin and Kath’s help. They realized their mistake, and paid for it with everything.

Visions of a night sky, stars unlike these or home, great wailsong of the lumbers in schools, blotting out the stars with blackness miles long. Warmth of skin, cool of air, the hope that they could change things, that they could retake their homeworld from machines with the simple technology reaped from giant flying trees.

Maybe some of the men on Hannon’s vessel felt they no longer needed God. Maybe they thought if they surrendered her to Maire, the plague would end. So they fought, vessel to vessel, surrounded by glass, a sun trapped within metal and phase, lances of light enacting endings on their brothers.

I’d never imagined that I would feel sorry for God when I met her. Never imagined that I would pity her.

She looked so young. So scared.

We’d made it through the rebels, through the bubble to the center star, tiny planet in orbit. We descended within, where they’d hidden God, this time not for sleep but for safety and hopefully recovery, but everyone knew. Everyone knew.

We got out of the shiver. This was Heaven.

Men lined the walkway in silence. Men, not angels, guarding the gateway to the kingdom.

They said nothing. They looked at me blankly. They knew.

And I met God.

please protect my loved ones from the evil that is all around us. please help us to be strong. please help us to do the right thing. please help us to persevere. please help us to understand why there is pain, why there is loss, why we must suffer in this existence you’ve made. please help us to see the beauty in simple things. please help us know Love. please help me to understand that which i cannot: your existence, your eternity, your endless reach. please cast away that which would do us harm, so that we might live out our lives in peace. please give me solace. please give me silence. please understand that i am trying. please help me to find home again. amen.

Prayer, incantation, beseeching, pleading, those whispers behind my eyes each and every night since I could remember. Those words kept me from

She was younger than me.

Huddled, fetal position, shivering. Not what I expected. So young, so fragile. Eyes of pure silver, the lattice crawling freely beneath her skin.

So this was Heaven, a shell carved from a blackened world drifting lazily around a hidden star. This was Heaven: no angels, no clouds, no shining halos or golden gates or harps. Silent men afflicted with a silver plague, watching a young girl die.

Hannon went to her side, stroked her face. She smiled. Blind, but she knew. Of course she knew.

She struggled to sit up. So weak. Hannon helped her, held her. Both afflicted, neither caring about the possibility of cross-contamination. This was a race that acknowledged its impending extinction. He helped her sit up, and she motioned for me to join them.

you’ve been touched

And she touched my face, my neck and face. Silver eyes seeing but not seeing, looking into and through my own.

this is the one?

And I told her. Everything, although she knew. She was God. Judith.

No words, but I felt her pull those memories from my mind: my mother’s affliction, my father leaving for war, the attack on Earth, leaving on Arch into the Outer. Growing and learning and fighting. Killing. Soldats perdus. She knew all that I knew: of Lilith, of the stillness, the silver, our escape from Maire’s jihad, our separation complete. She knew that I’d had the silver within me always, but only through contact with Lilith was it activated. She knew that I was dying just as certainly as she.

your father…the exile used your father

And I saw his death, collapsed bubble, ejected into space in the binary system. The wounded system within which I had killed Tallis and the angels, from which we ran, from which we had hoped to escape Maire forever.

I saw the species reacting to Joseph Windham’s advance force. They knew that Maire’s vengeance would soon arrive, so they took what they could and ran. Megascale engineering: the construction of Hannon’s systemship, the gentle nudging of a star out of orbit, planets, enveloping all in glass and metal, hiding. They could re-align the night sky, but they couldn’t stop a little girl with an alien disease.

Her touch like fire and

Tears of pain and frustration. Her hand fell from my face as she slumped back, exhausted.

what do you want?

to go home

what do you need?

lilith

Such weakness in her blank eyes. Ancient eyes housed in a dying body. Never believed in God. Never believed in anything more than that which I could see and hear, taste and smell: lips and sweat and blood and eyes. Lilith. I never believed, but she was there, right there, resonating with

she’s coming. the exile will be here soon

My heart dropped. I knew that Maire sought her final vengeance. She would destroy this place, this hidden Heaven. She would kill Hannon, Judith, God. I knew that Lilith and the painter, the cowboy and my ghost would be with her, unwilling participants in this end.

music?

And God’s hand grasped mine, touch like fire and silver, burning, burning, and I saw, and I knew. You know. You do. That touch…For the first time, I believed.

soon, it ends

and I felt the struggle within her touch, not just the dance of silver beneath flesh, but the war inside of God, striving to defeat that crawling metal, that substance without explanation or purpose. Ancient, tired eyes. Tired of fighting, but knowing that she must. Knowing that she couldn’t let the silver consume her until

she’s almost here

and I saw the warship Guerra, weapons charging, felt at its center the child grinning, ready, smug. Vengeance.

For the first time in

I felt Lilith.

it’s you. you have to end this. You

Hannon closed his eyes with interior communication from his ship. Incoming vessel. But we knew already, and there was nothing we could do.

Gary sliced through the systemship hull, venting an ocean of phased silica into the void. A vessel studded with weapons, erupting in fire, cutting through Hannon’s civil war. It didn’t matter. Gary killed without politics.

Judith shuddered, gasped. Such despair in those eyes. Lines of tears that weren’t tears: silver, running down her cheeks. She pulled me close.

remember. remember this. you have to end this. You.

She motioned to one of her guards, who pulled his weapon out of its holster and handed it to her. She opened the charge corridor, ejected the round. Shaking hands stumbled over smooth cylinder.

She used the nails of her right hand to slice into her left palm, let the now-silver blood wash over the round. Faint mist, smoky dance into the still chamber, dissipate. She chambered the round, handed the weapon to me.

you know what to do with this

Hannon exhaled. I looked at him and he nodded. we have to go.

I studied the heft of the weapon, the same weapon I still hold. Cool, featureless black, the round in the corridor now imbued with the blood of the ancient, tainted and perverted into something more than a phase slug. So much power in my hand. No longer helpless for the first time in

I began to stand but Judith placed her hand on my shoulder, pulled me into an embrace. Shaking with pain. She whispered. I felt her sobs as it all came apart.

my son…know that you avenge more than just your own species

i know

and she fell silent, motionless, slumping into my embrace.

God was dead.

I remember numbness, the not-knowing as I gently, tenderly laid her body down to sleep. Silver tears from her eyes, mouth open but silent, pale skin fading to gray as silver catalyst solidified, deprived of her bioelectricity. I don’t know if God perished with its host, but Judith was no more. Hannon closed his eyes.

All vessels, open fire.

Hurried to the tube, hurried to the surface to find the sky on fire, a new moon hanging in orbit around the imprisoned system’s first planet: Gary. Guerra. Mother had brought her war to Hannon’s world at last.

Gary engaged the fleet of destroyers and planetships. Hannon’s men had waited for centuries, millennia for this moment, and they fought with unmatched ferocity, but they were no match. One by ten by a hundred, they fell. They’d struck, and struck hard, but

Into orbit, into the fray. I knew that Mother would escape from her wounded vessel, that she’d take Lilith and the others. Hostages? Guarantee. That we wouldn’t just kill them in orbit.

Judith’s weapon burned at my side.

I saw planetships crumble under Gary’s fire, great swarms of tiny vessels erupt into light. Fireworks. Splashes and ripples of dissolving phase. It reminded me of the day my mother died, the way the sky had looked. It would have looked like that if it had been night instead of morning.

I felt it about to

and then it did. Gary opened up and the combined silver of Maire and Lilith lanced outward, punching into and through the Heaven planet. Hannon deftly maneuvered away from the line of fire, but many of his vessels were caught in the backlash. The planet below glowed with Catalyst, shimmering, glittering Catalyst.

She thought that she’d killed Heaven, but I knew that God had died in my arms. I knew that Maire’s was an empty victory.

Planet venting plasma into orbit, but the silver strike wasn’t enough. I saw a slither detach from Gary’s underbelly, tiny dot compared to the warship, which increased speed and slammed down onto Heaven, shattering into fire and ash, sending great chunks of continent into the sky.

I knew that Lilith was safe on that slither. It entered the burning atmosphere. Landing? The touch of her

my lips remember the echoes of

I saw the webs then, the faint tendrils spreading out from Heaven, tearing through the silica expanse of the systemship. Like the halo spreading from Berlin’s vessel to all of the original worlds, it was happening again.

It’s not at all like Ender, like science fiction books or movies. War isn’t that glorious. It’s a series of shocking images slamming into your mind one after another, giving you no time to react. There is no glory in this, only loss, only raw despair as you just try to survive, to inhale and exhale one more time. Everything becomes that singular goal of seeing her again, holding her hand, kissing her. Everything becomes survival until you detach, watch it all in silence, and just breathe.

I saw the shell of the systemship crack from the silver pressure, plates the size of planets lift and spin away. I saw stars outside, more and more stars. And I saw the silver, spreading like spiderwebs, forever outward, forever

I knew there would be no escape for anyone out there. This time, the silver won.

A shard of Gary cut through the atmosphere and impaled our slither. Phase flak. The side of Hannon’s head erupted and we began to depressurize before I even knew we were hit.

He slumped forward in his vacuum chair. Alarms roaring to life, protective bubble washing over me. I saw his jaw move on unspoken words and his eyes blink once. He died.

Chaos to order to chaos: life dissembles. We lose humanity in those moments between and

We lose them all in time, those we love, those whom we’ve learned to love. I didn’t stop to think about the dead mass of flesh in the cockpit next to me. I knew that I owed him my life; he could have killed me immediately upon removing me from Machine, but he didn’t. He knew. And now

He’d given so much, lost so much. I hoped that he was now somewhere better than this dying universe, somewhere beyond the reach of a child, of silver, of loss. I hoped.

I took over the shiver controls and followed Maire’s slither down to the surface. It was time.

No way to stop it now. With this much phase packed into such a convenient containment, I don’t know how far the silver will spread. I have no hope of ever finding anyone else out there. There is only this desert plain, this little girl. And me. Only this, and soon, nothing.

It’s won, but not before I

landed the shiver on the ravaged surface, illuminated by the false incandescence of the silver in the atmosphere, wind still blowing over the scoured expanse. I landed near them but not too close.

They got out of their slither one by one, Whistler helping the child down, then Hank. The ninth incarnation of Hunter Windham. And then

She

saw me from across the winds and dust. Looked from Nine to me to Nine to me. Started running toward me.

Hunter!

but Maire reached out and her footsteps stopped, dust still swirling up from the impact.

The child continued forward.

I remember that tugging, the sensation of silver speaking without words, without even the whispers. It was everywhere, everything, and we were the focal point. We were everything on that barren plain, the beginning and the end of the war. We were

you’ve come to kill me, yes?

One.

Whistler and the cowboy Hank stood on either side of Lilith. Hank lit a cigarette and I shot him.

Moving between times and places, speed beyond vision or comprehension, even too fast for Mother to see. I was becoming, and still am, and the last of her is within and I can be

Hank’s projection dissembled from the phase slug. A tiny silver marble fell to the desert hardpan. No place for a cowboy, not on this world, not in this story.

I saw Whistler swallow hard.

He had no idea, this ghost of a painter, stalked on Paris streets eons before by a woman from below, chosen for his personality and code, not knowing that he would be resurrected again and again to serve her purposes, never knowing that she loved him as a child although she was now the child, a dying child, and the mind dissembles in this, under this sky.

He was probably the best of us. At least he had created something beautiful in his life. Les soldats perdus had only destroyed, had only mindlessly spread the contagion throughout systems, following orders they were born with, living lives pre-determined by a criminal child from another galaxy.

I saw him reach inside of his cloak for his weapon. He paused, cape billowing out in the gusts, had poised, but then it fell to his side. He looked at me with tired eyes and nodded. I pulled the trigger and Whistler was no more.

Maire clapped her hands. Big smile. She was enjoying this. She’d won. She knew that I would kill her and her pain would be gone before the silver consumed her entirely.

Such peace in that moment. Six reduced to four, but not really four. Nine looked at Mother, as if he expected her to order him to kill me. I was the only one with weapon drawn. I was the only combatant in this final battle.

Such peace in that moment. I looked at Lilith and she looked at me. There was nothing more we could do. There was no reason for Mother to kill me now. She’d won. I had the gun, but she’d won. Gary’s attack had been successful. She thought she’s killed Heaven, killed God. She knew that the silver was sweeping out across everything.

Such peace in that moment, in her gaze. We were together again, no matter what. It didn’t matter how much time we had left; we were together, separated by only feet of gravel and dust and sand, not thousands of years of space. We were together, and that’s all that mattered.

Nine pulled his weapon.

No she shouted and grabbed him from behind, tiny hands latching on to black folds of cloak and

I remember Maire smiling. Knowing. You know, you do and

I remember trees and

I remember singing and

I remember

the stillness between us, that warm and best place, the moment before kissing her for the first time, the time we spent curled together, just Us, just. Us. and the laughter and how it was forbidden and We were forbidden, love growing between two kids trapped on a metal box flying off to war, and the fence that kept her safe, Mommy’s hand holding mine tightly through black glove that concealed her disease, the same plague that was now complete, and Daddy buying my Honeybear Brown, spoiling me because he knew he’d have to leave, that he’d die between stars, and Hannon, how I mourned then for that innocent, for that species, for Judith and Berlin, for the unnamed dead, trillions and the way she would hold my shaking, clumsy, rough hand in her own, kissing knuckles as I lay with eyes closed, just Us, just Us. Just. Us. and I see now the coffee house, a marble, a pack of cigarettes and i Know. I Believe.

the child begs me

there is no more resistance. no more time. it is

I don’t remember the weapon firing, but it did.

how she begs me. dying

i train the weapon on her heart

I only intended to hit Nine.

because i had to say this, because i needed you to know, because this can’t be the end, because this can’t be, not the end of Us, not now, please not now. i believe in forevers, in all of this, all of this can’t be the end, it can’t, and i know now that we are as one, one decentralized soul taken apart by time and circumstance, allowed to find itself once again even if only for a moment, and i know that we will meet again, and we will just be. just Us. please know. you know. you do. you

so many questions left unanswered, this war, this plague. i am only a lost soldier, lost because of

this war, this plague. i am only a lost soldier, lost because of

i am only a lost soldier, lost because of

lost because of

“Hunter?”

the

Nine spun around, his face a mask of horror. He clutched his chest, rapidly dissembling from the EM slug. His mouth opened to form her name, but it was too late. Nine flashed from his illusion in a burst of silver.

the stillness

Zero ran to Fleur, her crumpled form leaking a steadily-growing puddle of red onto the hardpan. “Lilith…Oh no. No. Oh god. Lilith.” The weapon dropped from his hand, clattered to the ground.

She smiled, mouth moving to speak, but there was no time. No life. The slug had passed through Nine and torn through the right side of her chest. Struggle to breathe, struggle to hold on to Hunter, Hunter, not Zero. Not that person at all anymore, or ever again.

“Lilith?” he sobbed, stroked her face, so white now. He didn’t look at the fine mist of crimson on her neck. He pushed the unruly curl back behind her ear, touched her face, the life draining from her skin, the silver crawling just underneath the surface.

the stillness lost

“Let her go.” Maire stood over them, her black robe whipping in the breeze, hair untied and dancing to the song of the wind, hands still bloody. “There’s nothing we can do now.”

Hunter reached out and grabbed the weapon before Maire could stop him, raised the barrel to target, just inches from her forehead. The child didn’t flinch.

“Do it. You know you want to.”

Lilith slumped in his arms. Silver ran from her eyes.

“You know you have to.”

Hunter cried out in frustration, in grief. He pulled Lilith’s limp form closer, keeping his weapon trained on Maire.

“If I don’t—”

“Do it.” She took a step closer to the tip of the weapon. “End it now.”

He closed his eyes, saw the image of her face burned into that perfect darkness.

“End it.”

he is knowing… and this heart i contain for You i have come again to zam zam? rupture rend rive split cleave please don’t let it—is it too late? he knew what she couldn’t believe. she knew very little, but she knew beyond a doubt that she loved chocolate milk.

it was a beautiful hand.

my lips remember the echoes of that night

and in these final moments, in this final terror, I find stillness.

“I win.”

Hunter Windham placed the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Evan Hughes is the seven-time Independent Publisher Book Award-winning writer and editor of Silverthought Press. His work includes the novels Enemy, An End, and Broken: A Plague Journal and the short fiction collection Certain Devastations. He lives in Evans Mills, NY with his wife and sons.

Content

An End
The Silver Trilogy: Book Two
by Paul Evan Hughes

AMIDST SILVER

A LOSS SO DEAR

THE MACHINERY OF NIGHT

my lips remember the echoes of that night LES SOLDATS PERDUS: A PLAGUE JOURNAL

ABOUT THE AUTHOR