A week later another dies, drowned in a hotel swimming pool. The next week another dies of poison, then another is killed in a vehicle accident.
I call Eryllin to meet at my station on the Pole. Everything here is windows and white, endless halls of petrified snow, glass of vapor, held in place by the same soft walls that hold the air in the Host's endopolis. We sit at a barren desk and share a glass of thickened water.
"Contingencies in the Cull allow for the early formation of a global force," I tell her. She watches me with heavy-lidded eyes; jet-lag from the sixteen hour flight. We are not yet running above sonic travel. "I want you to form a force of ten thousand, and ensure no more of us are killed. You have the run of the Cull in protecting our operations."
"Run of the Cull?" she asks, briefly forgetting herself and staring into my eyes. "Would that not disrupt the plan?"
"There will be nothing to disrupt if we are all dead," I tell her.
She nods sharply.
"Yes, Cullsman."
We work the next two days detailing our plans, then she leaves to put them into practice.
* * *
Holograms from the Host arrive that night, sent in the year after we left and only catching up to us now. I distribute them to my remaining forty-five, then retire to my ice-white room. I watch as my daughters laugh and dance in front of the camera. Glaya holds King Trunk up close to the screen and calls out, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy," again and again. Foral holds her hand when she begins to cry.
Sylabry must be behind the camera. There is no footage of her. I scour the recording for any hint of her, her voice, her fingers reaching across the lens, but there is none. She stood and filmed my daughters without giving any sign of herself at all.
I fall asleep with the holograms of my daughters dancing in the cold white room around me, on endless repeat.
* * *
Eryllin forms our army within a month, from the ranks of private security firms and retired soldiers. She outfits them with the best technology the Host can offer, and trains them in its use. They partition and divide to protect the other forty-four. After that no more die.
Instead, my factories begin to explode.
The first is in a vast landmass called China. Few workers die, but an entire leg of the production flow for ten-story-high rebar rods is taken offline; rods that will, once latticed, make up the core of the Hook. At the same time a sizable section of recently laid high-speed rail that was to transport the rods is sabotaged.
It is a setback, but there are contingencies in place. I bring back-up plants online -- operations that have been lying fallow in the southern hemisphere -- and scramble repair crews to the rail line to patch up the holes in my infrastructure.
The world media calls it a violent uprising in pursuit of democracy. I do not believe it for a moment. That factory was protected by our best technology; there was no feasible way farmers and sheepherders could have destroyed it.
While I am moving resources and measuring my response, two more factories and a corporate headquarters are destroyed. It is now clear we are under attack. Someone knows we are here, and has decided we should not be.
I call the forty-five and apprise them. Eryllin nods as I extend her remit to guarding every inch of our gathering empire. They all accept the weight of increased precautions and security. Everything will be slowed. The enormous cost of it will strain the likelihood of our Cull succeeding within twenty years, but I cannot stop to consider failure. I cannot fail, so there is no choice.
* * *
On a private link sequestered from the rest, Eryllin speaks directly. "And do we strike?"
"Where could we strike?" I ask. "We have no targets."
"What does that matter? There are whole countries we could dispense with. Surely that would give whoever is behind these attacks pause."
"Why should it? If they know of the Cull, then they are already facing the apocalypse. There can be no greater threat than that."
She mulls that for a moment. "Yet we have to do something. Every preservative effort we've taken to date has been overcome, and our operations disrupted. Too many more disruptions and the Host will simply pass us by as another failed Cull."
She shudders at the thought. I have considered it too. Of the nine Cullsmen the Host sends out, one must succeed. If none of us do then the Host, and my family, will all slowly die.
"Then we need targets," I say.
* * *
I bring the other forty-four back into the link, and order the whole of the Cull to be paused. Instead we are to allocate every resource into hunting down any intelligence on the forces arrayed against us.
In the space of six months our army swells to the largest in the world, our spies infiltrate every bunker and back-alley, our surveillance satellites are launched to circle the planet, and our pattern analysts comb the web of data flowing through the airwaves and undersea cables, hunting for any sign of dissent against us.
They find nothing. There are no more attacks, but also no progress on the Cull. There is no sign of any organization leveling against us, nothing with the power to bring large swathes of our infrastructure down. We learn nothing of value.
Six months in we finally discover what our enemy has been doing all this time: watching us, and recording everything we have done.
* * *
In a vast dump of information, the Cull is brought to light in the media of this world. News channels run it endlessly for days, sirens blaring of an imminent interstellar attack. They have more details of the Cull than seems possible; a catalogue of all our actions thus far, those projected to come, along with our names and faces, our every company and patent and product, our infrastructure and our ultimate goal for this planet to become our Second.
The details are hammered out and laid bare in newspapers, television shows, all over the primitive internet. Our plan is explained and dissected by pundits and experts, the story of the Host and its coming approach are known far and wide, and behind every bit of it is evidence; our burgeoning infrastructure and expansive security forces tracked through satellite surveillance, our transnational business empire and vast wealth of intellectual property mapped out by financial espionage, even stellar cartographs of the distant Host itself moving through the universe under its own guided propulsion. They know everything.
Whoever we have faced knows us as well as we know ourselves. He knows the Cull, knows what will come, and knows how to inflame this world against us.
Now I know who he is.
* * *
I go to the Host descent ship, now lodged in the icy foundations of the Pole base, and search through the reams of discarded electronic records. I find logs of the fifty, including the one that died in transit; Laret Ark, my fiftieth. He must have somehow overridden the system, faking a mid-haul evacuation, then dropping into the ocean just after landing. It is the only possible explanation.
Now he has destroyed us. He has scuttled his own Cull and destroyed the Host's chance at survival. I cannot understand it.
Eryllin comes on the link, but there is nothing to say. She does not yet realize that it is over.
"Our own forces are seceding," she tells me urgently through the link. "They'll not follow commands. Banks are freezing our accounts. Governments are lobbying for the outright seizure of all our properties. The United Nations is considering military action against the Pole base."
I shake my head. I wonder if I will die soon.
"Are any of our forces still loyal?"
"Nearly half have deserted," she says. "The other half are surely on the edge. They cannot want their world destroyed."
I nod. What man or woman of this planet would stand by while we brought their destruction? What man or woman would aid us?
The Cull is doomed.
"Cullsman?" presses Eryllin.
"Kill them," I tell her, looking out at the white. The ice beyond the soft walls has frozen in curious patterns. I had hoped so much to see my girls again.
There is so much water here, frozen. I imagine my daughters playing in it, rolling giant balls of snow, King Trunk dancing in Glaya's hands. It will not happen, now. I will not see it.
"All of them," I answer. "He must be amongst them somewhere."
For a long time Eryllin glares at me.
"There must still be a way," she says at last. "Something in the Cull. Has this never occurred before?"
"Never," I answer.
"We have fifteen years yet. We cannot give up so soon."
"We have been beaten, Eryllin," I tell her. "There is nothing to do but bring the traitor down with us."
She pushes away from the link. From the corner of my eye I see her snap a smart salute.
"As you command it, Cullsman."
* * *
In her absence I strip off my tie, cuff links, shirt and shoes. I don't need to wear these things anymore. I dismiss my guards -- men who have no knowledge of what is happening in their world beyond. Perhaps they would kill me with their bare hands, if they knew. I go to my room, sit down on the bed, feeling defeat like the look on Sylabry's cold hard face. I will not Cull this world, and if none of the others succeed, then my failure has doomed us all.
I switch on the videograms of my daughters and watch them walking around this cold white space; singing, dancing, playing on swings around their Prime adjunct. Five years of memories I have missed, and none of my wife.
I spend the night with them dancing around me. At some point they phase to nightmare, and I see the Host engulfing my body, wrapping me in metal tines as though I am the Second, hooking me as though I am the one to be fed from.
Laret Ark turns the blade in my ribs. He is grinning. He has won.
* * *
I wake to a new world. Eryllin is by my side, surrounded by men with their weapons drawn. I look blearily from her to them, realizing my daughters are still moving through the room amongst them.
"I will not let my family down," she says, and draws her weapon, holds it to my head.
A hundred thoughts rush through my mind, but most of all there is this: I do not want to die yet.
I look up the barrel, into her eyes. She does not turn away.
"I am your Cullsman," I hiss.
"Then act like it," she answers.
A long moment passes, and she does not shoot. I push myself to my feet. I stand taller than her, but she keeps the weapon trained on my head. There is nothing I can say now, I know that. Now I must act.
I lead them to the link. Eryllin follows, her weapon always at my temple, her men following close behind. I do not know yet what I will do.
"What are you planning?" she asks, as I sit down at the screen.
"The next phase of the Cull," I tell her.
She does nothing while I cycle through screens of increasingly high clearance. The metal of her weapon is cool and steady at my skin. She does not know about everything.
The missile is launched before she can realize what I am doing, from a contingency submarine in the deep ocean. I turn to her, see puzzlement on her face. She is beginning to understand.
"You would kill us all?" she asks.
I stand. Should she wish to kill me now, there is nothing I could do. I am as good as dead, anyway.
At a deck-panel I raise the soft walls to their highest power. Perhaps they will withstand the blast. After that, we can only wait. Though they ask questions, I say nothing. I am Cullsman, still. I will not be bullied at gunpoint.
It is fifteen minutes, then the burst of violet light. The Pole base rocks under the impact. There is time enough to see a mushroom cloud rising into the sky, then the wave of snow and ice covers everything.
Dark, but for the flicker of emergency lights. They are all standing around in disbelief, as I settle at the hard-line link and send my orders out to the world. The blast will be claimed by our leaders in a fringe extremist nation. Reporters will well up and out to inspect the crater, and find it empty. They will find no trace of the Pole base, buried as it is beneath a thousand feet of hard-pack ice.
Our CEOs will all come out, individually and of their own accord, to discredit the theory of an alien world coming to kill the planet. Our politicians will publicly realize, through back-channels so opaque they could not possibly know that I am pulling the strings, that they have been hoaxed. Our pattern analysts will prove the stellar cartographs have been faked. Our lawyers will prove the financial records tying our empire together are nothing more than the over-reaching fantasies of fringe conspiracy theorists gone wild with exposure. Our experts will decry the fringe nation as the source of the lies, a unilateral actor that endangered the entire planet on a false whim. The nations under our loose control will rally unknowing to our defense, and the Cull will move on, silently.
Hours pass as I play my hand, adjusting pieces here and there as the wave of disbelief carries out across the world. A nuclear weapon was fired at nothing but ice. The news media all rush to carry the press conferences condemning the fringe nation. They tear it down in our place, stripping it of its powers, hamstringing it with trade embargoes and resolutions, while we go on undetected.
When I lift my head from the link, I see the armed men are gone, and Eryllin is watching me with a cup of hot tea in her hand.
"You are the Cullsman," she says.
I reach to her waist, pull out her weapon, and point it to her head. She does not move, except to give a small smile. She meets my eyes and does not turn away. A long moment passes, then I lay the gun on the desk, and gesture for her to sit. She does.
"Now Laret Ark."
* * *
Five months, and we find him.
In the wake of the nuclear blast, the Cull is easier than ever. There is no more need to skulk and hide in endless shell corporations. Our existence has been disproved at the highest levels. We could announce outright that we were the Cull come to take this world for ourselves, and the people would laugh. There are endless jokes about nuclear weapons fired at black cats, reflections, ghosts.
It is a perfect cover for what we must do.
We had not seen Laret's infrastructure because he hid it within our own. He knew the Cull, knew the stages, and managed to hide his own patent applications within the bulk of our own; growing from them just as we did, expanding, caching supplies and setting initiatives in place.
We cut his infrastructure away from him like weeds in the shadow of an oak. We hunt him through his contacts, from safe house to safe house around this world, burning each as we find it, leaving no path back. We circulate all that we know of his morphology, genetic make-up, brain-wave and memetic idents to every police force, army and intelligence service across the world, as the architect of the hoax that shook the world. At our hands he becomes this planet's greatest enemy, the man who brought it to the brink of nuclear devastation.
His friends dwindle away. His resources fade. His closest accomplices give him up. At last we find him in a walled compound in a northern tundra town, huddled under a blanket, watching old news footage of the day he almost broke the Cull.
I am there, with Eryllin by my side. He stares up at us with cold hatred, and I know if it weren't for the soft walls restraining him, he would try to kill us with his bare hands.
I sit down in front of him, and peer into his empty eyes.
"Why?" I ask.
He only gazes back at me.
"Why would you betray your own world?"
He spits within the soft wall field. A moment later he dies; a suicide switch built into his brain. They tell me it was implanted long before the Cull even began, using technology from a past Second. Perhaps he was a survivor. It doesn't matter anymore.
We burn the compound with him in it. An unfortunate gas rupture. The Cull continues.
* * *
Fourteen years pass.
I wake from a dream of my daughters. They are still four and seven. Glaya is clowning with King Trunk, as always. I have almost forgotten my wif
e's face.
I throw the covers from my body and watch the dawn through the Pole base's thirtieth-floor windows. Molten fire creeps over the ice, and there, straddling the horizon at the point of zero spin, is a huge bulk of twisted metal, the first link in the chain.
I follow it up, suspended under its own massive weight, a column big enough to black out half of the sky; one hundred kilometers in diameter, a million billion ten-story-high spun rebar threads, twisted to maximum strength, plunging one thousand kilometers into the planet's crust, cinched to five hundred tines buried through the meat of this world, bored down along the line of thirty degrees, looming up through the atmosphere, up into the black null of space, culminating with the giant hook that will leash this world as the Host's new Second.
Yesterday came the first communication from the Host in fifteen years. We've been selected. Our Cull was completed on schedule. The other nine Cullsmen failed, for one reason or another. Deaths, rebellions, desertions. It happens every time, that's why they send nine.
They're coming in three months. My tugs are to be ready in space, to help align the Hook. The gravimetric, orbital, radioactive and magnetic conditions will be at their peak. Just a gentle tugging, as the jaws of the Host open, and this world will inch free of its track, its orbit lengthening, ellipsing, breaking, and it will leave its home forever. Its sun will recede, its moon will sail off, freed of orbit, and in its place will be the desiccated carcass of last Cull's Second, some other planet from some other galaxy, left behind.
The tugs will accelerate, one thousand engines heaving, and we will accelerate with them, following the charted courses, bringing us in line with the next target, the next cluster of nine, and their waiting Cullsmen. In six months we'll be at constant acceleration with nothing to slow us down but the curve of our course.
Work will begin on the new Second. Billions of people will die, as the core of their planet is pumped out like blood transfused to the Host, as their world's gravity slackens, as their liquids and gases evacuate the surface and transpire through the gulf of space to the inner endopolis of the Host.
The soft walls will peel back, and the Great Rains will begin. The adjuncts will re-open, one by one, and our people will spread throughout them. Our children will know prosperity. The Cull will be forgotten for a time, except for the Second's shining core-moon in the sky, surrounded by the glimmering stars of its last cities.
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