by Jesse Jones
#
If poorly, at least they were rested now and Zhiang had gotten past the worst of his headache from over-stimming himself. He'd taken middle watch—as the leader, it was his responsibility—and that hadn't helped, but he felt more spry than he had since insertion two days ago now. Some dinner had helped as well, though Zhiang had been deadly-jealous of the Americans' meal. While he had to make do with the small plastic tube inside his combat helmet through which he could suck spirolina-enriched nutrient goo out of his food cartridges, the other two had pulled flavored bars of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats and broken off small chunks, passing them into receptacles mounted below their faceplates. The food had passed through a small vacuum decontamination chamber before popping out onto a tray where they could snap it up. Zhiang thought he would sell his grandparents just to chew something, instead of sucking on flavorless, textureless paste. He'd thought about shooting both men when he watched them devouring their chocolate bars for dessert; they'd offered him some and he was still trying to decide whether they had been teasing him or were genuinely unaware that his helmet did not have an oral intake.
Still, personal discomforts aside, they seemed to be better off than they had in a while. If only they had some sort of destination, instead of these endless, accursed halls.
"Brilliant strategy, though," McDougal had muttered at one point. "Just bore your enemies into leaving you alone. I mean come on, I know this thing is supposed to be the size of two thousand sky scrapers all gummed together around Central Park, but we have to have covered half of it by now! We've seen, what, three goddamn rooms?"
The grumbling had continued, but neither Zhiang nor Brick had joined in.
Indeed, the American soldier seemed just about ready to launch into a renewed tirade when they came across something new and outside of their experience within the Angel. A dead end.
"What the hell!" McDougal cried as they came up to the smooth, flat wall where they had expected miles more of straight, undecorated hallway. It didn't even have a closed archway.
"Now what?" Brick asked, he and the other American turning to stare at Zhiang. How was he supposed to know?
"We go back," Zhiang said. "If nothing new shows up, we'll have to get one of these archways open."
It wasn't much of a plan, but it was enough to give them something to do.
Hss-ss-ss.
It was a testament to the training and discipline every man enlisted into Fallen Angel possessed that the three—though schooled by different military branches of different countries—acted in perfect synchronicity. Zhiang leapt to the left, dropping onto his stomach with his rifle up, while Brick mirrored his motion to the right and McDougal dropped to one knee, rifle up and already flicking his settings to load explosive capsules into the breach. Only after they were in position did they stop to actually see what had made the strange sound.
They didn't have to wait for Zhiang's command to open fire.
What had previously been hallway stretching out behind them—hallway they had traversed only moments before!—had silently become a room not unlike the arcade Zhiang's squadron had run into the Marines in. Pillars filled the new chamber, however, standing in two rows across the room and dividing it along the long axis into three roughly equal rectangles. In the middle of the room and currently obscured by the flashes of tracer rounds and the detonations of McDougal's Beck shots was what Zhiang thought was a robot.
A low-slung body suspended on six sharp, over-long legs, it was like the spiders they had met before, but the size of a pickup truck with a thicker head dangling from the body and facing in their direction. Zhiang dearly hoped it was not one of the aliens in some sort of combat gear; he didn't want to dwell on the thought of Earth being conquered by these grotesque spider monsters.
"Get some cover!" Zhiang shouted, the three of them being crowded into a small nook made of the last few meters of hallway. They were exposed, if the giant spider decided to do anything.
"It can't fire back," McDougal argued, switching his rifle back to its regular bullets so he could spray fire at the creature. Nothing seemed to be affecting it either way.
"I said move!" Zhiang cried even as he rolled behind the nearest pillar, Brick sliding smoothly behind the one opposite him.
"We can't give it a chance to advance," McDougal protested, his training finally failing him in the face of an enemy to vent his anger on.
"We're not affecting it," Brick interjected, dropping out one of his ammunition cartridges from his rifle's underside and slamming in another he fished off his shoulder. "So get over here!"
"Dammit," McDougal cursed, leaping for the cover of Brick's pillar. He didn't make it.
The spider's square-sided head tracked along McDougal's path and, as he was making to leap for cover, something lanced free of what Zhiang at first thought was its mouth. He realized belatedly that was a gap opened specifically for a projectile; a gap that was growing, for the spider had launched something like a harpoon and it was unraveling the metal of the spider's own head for line.
"Look out!" Zhiang cried, but it was too late. Wickedly barbed and glinting mercurially in the soft light from the strips about the room, the launched projectile passed effortlessly through the abdominal plates of McDougal's combat armor. Without scar or sound, the American soldier simply went limp in midair, stopping as the others had when touched by the miniature spiders in the arcade. Before his body could strike the ground, the giant spider sucked back on the unwinding metal cord and jerked barb and soldier back as one.
McDougal struck the floor about half-way across the room and slid the rest of the distance until he was on the ground in front of the creature. Ideas blazed like suns in the back of Zhiang's head and he shouted into the local radio.
"Brick! What kind of mines do you use?"
"H9!" The Marine yelled back. "Want me to mine that bastard?"
"No," Zhiang called, snapping the lever on the side of his rifle to chamber a Beck. "I want you to duck!"
With that, he leapt out from behind the column and raised his rifle, snapping off a trio of shots. The spider's head swung up, tracking his motion across the hallway as it had done with McDougal, but this time it didn't get the chance to fire. The corpse, limp on the floor by one of the spider's metal legs, danced and jerked as its dark green ferramic combat suit blossomed explosions like flowers in a spring garden. Then, one hit home, and the mother of all roses sprang up from where he lay.
Zhiang was already falling, hitting the ground in a roll and sliding behind the column to run up hard against Brick, who had braced himself. The pressure wave rolled over the pair—a visceral sensation even through their suits—as the explosion's roar triggered static in their helmets to deal with the sonic overload on the receptors. It felt like the entire ship was shaking, the columned room sawing violently around them as they struggled to keep the column between their bodies and the blast.
After a few moments of thunder and lightning, everything died down and their crackling feeds relayed the ship's ambient silence to them. The air of the chamber was thick with a smoky haze while Zhiang's head had been cleared by a rush of adrenaline that was as pure as only mother nature could provide.
"You shot his mines?" Brick's voice came, as if from a great distance.
"It was the best way," Zhiang said, a little defensively.
"That was cold," The Marine said tonelessly. "Effective, but stone cold."
I notice you didn't say anything about someone dying until it was another American, Zhiang dearly wanted to retort—perhaps in part to distract himself from the bitter taste in his own mouth at what he'd just done—but for the sake of their two-man teamwork he held his tongue. Instead, he replied with a noncommittal grunt.
"At least we know for sure they can change their architecture however they want," Brick muttered, peering around the column. "I hope that's why it doesn't look like much of anything happened out there."
Zhiang leaned out and bit back a sigh. The ground and columns around where McDougal and the spider had been was blackened, but otherwise looked completely unaffected by the detonation of however many mines the soldier had been loaded down with. For the first time, the staggering impossibility of the task at hand really hit Zhiang and it was like a steel-toed boot to the testicles; he wanted to throw up.
"The floor isn't what we need to worry about being able to damage," He said instead, hoping the words did not ring as hollowly in Brick's ears as they did his.
"True enough," The Marine replied noncommittally.
"Considering that I could turn the thirteen kilometers currently separating you and the, for lack of a better word, 'engine' into a solid wall, I would imagine it to be of prime importance to you both."
Every reflex that had made both of them perfect for the mission had Zhiang and Brick pivoting, their assault rifles disgorging a steady stream of fire that filled the space between them and the voice with the flashes of Zhiang's Beck rounds and Brick's tracers.
Only when the ammunition feed monitor in his H.U.D. flashed red to indicate it was almost depleted did Zhiang release the trigger and cease his volley of miniature explosives. Brick had already stopped, the nose of his rifle dipping down as he stared in abject disbelief.
Before them, drifting as if floating in water, was a solid curtain of bullets and blast capsules suspended effortlessly in the air. Through the empty patches made as their ammunition bobbed and weaved languidly in the air, they could only just make out the madness lurking beyond it.
"Dear me, and here, I was hoping we could remain civil about this," The voice said; a deep baritone that spoke clear English with a slight drawl.
A pressure wave washed over the pair of soldiers as the explosive capsules Zhiang had added to the mix detonated, sending the bullets scattering in all directions, several pinging off Zhiang's armor and one left a streak of carbon scoring on the faceplate of Brick's helmet as he jerked back in surprise.
"Much better," The voice said happily, clearing smoke giving an unobstructed view.
It was a man. A human.
He was a dark-skinned man, tall and naked, with heavy features in the face and a head shaved bald except for a small patch of braided hair at either temple. There would be a matching tail of hair at the base of his skull, Zhiang knew; it was a style popular with far-system colonists. Where a human's eyes should have been, however, were rippling pools of quicksilver, as if the orbs had been gouged clean and the sockets filled with mercury that had yet to settle.
Startling beyond even that was the thing in which he rode, looking like a marriage of an emperor's throne and a pharaoh's war chariot. The front of it rose to obscure his impropriety from the waist down, though a few glistening tubes rose over the rim of it and appeared to enter into the man's hips and navel. Behind him was thick cushioning, like the acceleration chairs they used on transatmospheric luxury liners to make sure the passengers were always comfortable. As the man shifted to look from one soldier to the other, Zhiang spied not only the anticipated braided ponytail but more of the glistening tubes—smooth white tendrils as thick as a man's smallest finger—projecting from the back of the stranger's skull and shoulders.
The entire assemblage was shaped like an inverted teardrop of familiar white material, canted so that the point of it was slightly forward, reaching towards Brick and Zhiang, while the bulbous back sprouted a three-jointed boom arm that connected it to the chambered ceiling. More tubes of white, along with alabaster wires and ivory cords ran from the platform's back, along the arm, and up into the ceiling where they melded seamlessly with the white material there.
"What in God's name...?" Brick whispered so quietly that Zhiang barely heard him.
"Oh no," The figure responded, despite being all of a dozen meters away. "No, Lance Corporal Barkley, not God; just a man."
"How do you know my name?" Brick growled, raising his rifle again in a gesture that all there knew was futile.
"Hmm...because it is written on your suit?" The man suggested, gesturing to the left breast of Brick's battle suit, where his rank and surname were stenciled.
"Who are you?" Zhiang asked, in no mood for jokes at this point. He raised the snub nose of his own rifle, flicking the feed from explosives to regular ammunition though it didn't seem like it would make a difference.
"I?" He mused, slowly rubbing the tips of his first two fingers again his thumb. "I am the bad guy."
In Zhiang's peripheral vision, Brick stiffened like a statue. It took a moment for him to realize the American's motions were in response to hundreds of tiny, headless, metallic spiders—these no bigger than regular garden spiders—slowly crawling up his suit in an implacable tide. Zhiang didn't know if one of those could kill as easily as their larger cousins, but Brick was obviously not in the mood to find out.
"Stop it," Zhiang yelled, squeezing off an ineffectual burst. As expected, it struck that invisible wall between him and the stranger, the bullets stopping immediately before bobbing about slowly like corks on the surface of a vertical pool.
"Zhiang Zhisheng," The man said, voice darkening slightly. "First Lieutenant in the People's Liberation Army Air and Space Forces; thirty-two years of age, resident of Changsha, married for two years, three months, eleven days to Jingfei Zhisheng née Fài, and father of Jia Zhisheng. When you were sixteen, you were hospitalized for a month after breaking both your legs jumping out of the third storey window of an apartment complex while drunk; in your military training platoon, you won a commendation for marksmanship despite being ill with the flu at the time; your favorite color is orange."
With every word, Zhiang's eyes widened a little more, the barrel of his rifle drooping closer to the chamber's immaculate white floor. He muttered something rather brusque in Mandarin.
"Quite," The figure said with a wry smile. "I've had my eye on you for a while. Several of you, as a matter of fact, but it eventually came down to the two of you." He gestured idly towards Brick, as well. "I regret to inform you, Richard, that I have chosen Lt. Zhisheng."
As the dark man spoke, the blanket of spiders that had covered Brick sank into the man's reinforced suit. Though it was, by now, no surprise, it still hurt Zhiang when the other man simply stopped, his body crumpling into a pile as all life fled it.
"Such a waste," The man mumbled, then sighed and shrugged. "But such is the way of things."
"What are you?" Zhiang managed to choke out, though it was a struggle to part his gritted teeth enough to speak.
"I am human, Lt. Zhisheng, just as you are." He glanced at Brick and shrugged slightly. "Well, maybe not just as you are, but I'm sure you catch my drift."
"I see only a monster," Zhiang hissed, raising his rifle again before, with a choked cry of mingled rage and disgust, he tossed the useless weapon from him. "What do you want!?" He shouted. Long hours filled with little rest and the death of his comrades had frayed nerves that even the harshest training regimens and sternest self-discipline had not made invincible.
"I wish to save my people, Lieutenant," The man said as his suspended platform drifted noiselessly closer. "I wish to save the human race."
"Save? Save!?" Zhiang shouted again. "The only threat to humanity I see here is you! You and this monstrosity you use to destroy men!"
"This thing—what you have dubbed the Angel—is merely a tool and I am merely a man. Neither of us is the threat; you are."
"Me?"
"Oh, not you in particular, but mankind. It threatens itself with pettiness and hate, turning the gathered efforts of minds and bodies towards self-genocide." As the man spoke, his words grew more impassioned and, to Zhiang's mind, less sane. Had this stranger the eyes of a man, Zhiang imagined they would be alight with the fevered gleam of zealotry.
"Mankind has turned outward," Zhiang hissed, flexing his gloved hands as if he wished for nothing more than his fingers wrapped around this man's throat. "Those 'gathered
efforts' were put to building outposts and colonies for humanity's growth into the wider universe. It is you, not we, who destroyed those."
"You take man's prejudices and divisions out amongst the ether and call that progress!" The man cried back, raising a hand in front of him and curling it into a fist. "Will you not be satisfied until you have stained every star in the sky with the bitter blood of internecine strife? I will not allow it! You will stand united or you will stand not at all."
"So you are God, then?" Zhiang asked. "You are divinity, ruling from the paradise of your solitude and relying on the power of your angel to enforce your judgments?" He was shouting in Mandarin now, but the stranger did not seem to care.
"If you wish to stray into the realm of metaphor and analogy," The man said dismissively, his rancor cooling visibly, "Then that is as good as any other."
"Then tell me, God," Zhiang began acidly, before being cut off.
"You may call me Naeem," The man interrupted. "I am—or was—Dr. Naeem Highgate."
"Am I supposed to recognize the name?" Zhiang spat.
"Not at all," He said with a shrug. "I was until recently a man of little note and less ambition."
As Naeem spoke, he waved his hands and the room began to squirm, the white substance flowing away like a thin pudding. At some point, Zhiang's concentration on the doctor, Brick's body had disappeared and now the columned room seemed content to follow. What remained in its absence was a dome some twenty meters across, Naeem's throne suspended from the ceiling's apex on a much longer articulated arm. For the first time, the walls were something other than white; a dull greyish-black, they seemed smooth and reflective. Startling Zhiang, a rectangle of light sprang up, suspended in the air and wide across as his outstretched arms.
It showed a suburban lawn, replete with a low brick wall and short-mown grass. Beyond it was a clean, modest home that could have been pressed from construction composite and dropped down in a neighborhood in any of a dozen countries without occasioning comment. Zhiang lived in one vaguely similar back home, though red rather than this yellowish beige. The image drifted slightly and he realized that it had depth as well, a glowing shadowbox. Before he could open his mouth to speak, however, another box emerged showing a starfield. A third and a fourth with people's faces and then dozens more, until the room was so crowded with three-dimensional images that he had trouble tracking half of them.
"What...?" Zhiang began to ask, English abandoned entirely as confusion temporarily overawed his distaste of the other man.
"It's me," Naeem replied in perfect Mandarin. "Images, plucked from my memory and cleaned up. An easy enough task, once I understood the human brain sufficiently."
"But how-"
"I'm getting to that," The doctor cut him off. "Here we go."
It was only the hope that something in all of this might give Zhiang a chance to strike back—the realization of how impossible defeating this man would be in a head-on confrontation—that focused his attention on the scene in the drifting image. The innate need to know kept it there.
Everything was seen as if a man's eyes were cameras, focus shifting slightly and intermittent with dark flashes that Zhiang thought were blinks as the observer sat behind a desk of some sort. Occasional glances to either side showed that the observer was not alone in the image, but most of their attention was on the figure at the head of the room, pacing in front of a wide patch of gel screen. She was a middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair and nostrils she could lose her lunch in if her aim were poor, dressed in a uniform whose cut and color Zhiang would have recognized as American even without the shield-and-eagle insignia of a Colonel on her shoulders.
"Thank you, lieutenant," She said to someone out of view before turning and scanning the audience with a well-concealed look of distaste. "I apologize, but I'm not good at this sort of thing. I'll keep it short. Because of everyone gathered in this room, you all have no doubt concluded there has been a contact scenario." The image shivered slightly, the observer had stiffening in their seat. "On June fifteenth, one of our interstellar probes en route to Lalande 21185 began sending transmissions from within the Oort Cloud. Apparently, before even managing to completely leave our system, it passed within several hundred thousand kilometers of a massive energy source.
"Further investigation with long range telemetry and probes from our facilities in Jovian orbit have identified what we believe to be artifacts of an extra-terrestrial nature. You are the most accomplished specialists in your fields that the United States government trusts, so let me be the first to welcome you, ladies and gentlemen, to Project Deep Sky."
The audio on the image cut out as Zhiang whirled towards Naeem, only to find another boxed memory filling the air between them. As soon as his eyes fell on it, the scene animated and words filled the silence.
"I'm telling you, Highgate, this is the best thing that could have happened," a short, oval-faced man with walrus mustaches gushed. "We've still got the resources and the know-how to make the most of it, and everyone is so tangled up in the tensions between China and the Eur-U that no one has the time to spend on 'decrepit old America.' By the time anyone realizes the balance has shifted, we'll already be back on top."
"You seem confident that there's something to find out there," Came a deep bass voice that Zhiang realized was Naeem speaking. "I'm not so sure, though."
"Bah, you colonials," The man chuckled, puffing out his cheeks.
Stars wheeled slowly outside of long, thin strip-like windows set in the floors. Judging by the speed of the stellar background's turning, Zhiang thought it must be on a fairly small cylinder ship, the kind that simulated gravity by spiraling through space.
"Still," The mustachioed man continued after a minute's thought, "I suppose there's no use getting too excited, eh? It'll be Chavez's show and he's military through-and-through. If it doesn't blow up or shoot holes through things, he's not going to be interested. They probably only brought me along to be the solar system's most expensive physician, never mind the Nobel Prize." He shot a calculating glance at Naeem. "And what they expect an expert in ethnology to do for their military concerns is beyond me."
"My best friend on that long voyage," Came the deep voice again, and it took Zhiang a moment to realize it was the actual Naeem speaking from the far side of the image. "Dr. Vincent Sartène, one of the most accomplished neuroscientists alive. Well, alive at that point. I regretted that necessity the most."
"Why show me this?" Zhiang asked woodenly.
"Because you have to understand," Naeem replied heatedly. "Because there can be no more mistakes, no more half-measures. Not after everything that everyone has sacrificed...including myself."
"What you've sacrificed?" Zhiang scoffed.
"I've lost as much as anyone," The doctor said with a shrug. "More than most."
"Tell that to the dead!"
"Oh, I shall, very shortly. Trust me."
"What...?" Zhiang began, frowning. But before he could say anything more, the images began to crowd around him, their audio struggling to drown one another out.
An image of something vaguely like the Angel, surface frosted with interstellar ice, while a thickly accented voice slowly ground out meaningless measurements of mass and dimension.
Figures in hardened combat suits that might have been a dozen Bricks. They fanned out through darkness, the beams from their suit-mounted floodlights revealing familiar halls of white substance, footfalls silent in the stagnant atmosphere of the ship. Radio chatter called groups forward or sent them storming down side passages, a constant stream of communication that birthed the military organism.
Back on the American vessel, a score of men and women in civilian dress were seated around a conference table, arguing fervently, launching salvos of vocabulary that Zhiang doubted he could have grasped in Mandarin, let alone English. A glowering figure at the head of the table ran two tiny hands through his short-cropped hair b
efore finally slamming them down on the table hard enough to make people jump in their seats.
"So what you're telling me is, we know jack-all about the thing after two goddamn months!?"
Inside the Angel again, everyone gathered together in a vault-like room, turning in slow circles as they struggled to take in their surroundings. Massive pylons the entire group would have had to link hands to surround rose out of the floor and stretched into the darkness where the ceiling lurked. Occasionally, the dimmest pulse of pale blue would rise like a rocket in the center of one of the translucent towers, shooting up before being lost in the gloom.
A piercing scream that drove out all other thought, coming from an image so close to the floor that Naeem must have been on his knees, shaking badly from whatever nervous gyrations had accompanied the moment. Shifting in and out of focus, Naeem stared at his arm, the dark skin glistening red with blood, a thick white tube burrowing into the meat on the underside of it. His fingers twitched with independent vitality, jerking as spastically as a toad with electrodes in its brain. The focus ripped away from the arm, towards a pair of men in combat armor staring in what Zhiang knew was shock and horror, even with the mirrored faceplates masking them.
"Help...me," Naeem begged, reaching his good arm towards them. In response, they lifted their rifles, the black barrels staring out like the empty sockets in death's skull. Then both men stopped in a way terribly familiar to Zhiang, who was unsurprised to see the clinging metal spiders on their backs as the pair collapsed. Naeem's mounting scream cut out as all the audio in the room stopped. Darkness descended as the hanging images disappeared all at once, leaving Zhiang alone with the doctor in the dull grey room.
"What was that?" Zhiang rasped, turning to look at the dark man's calm face.
"My end. And the beginning of all this," With a perfunctory gesture around him. "Increasing recklessness brought about by our leaders' impatience and, I learned later, by mounting suspicions on the part of other governments about where the resources being funneled into Deep Sky were going. Even experts like me—wholly unfit to dig around for clues to whatever superweapons they thought they might find—were assigned technical tasks far beyond the scope of our training."
Soundlessly, the armature Naeem rested on swung him around, positioning him eye-level with Zhiang. Around them, the room shifted yet again; that had become so mundane to him. What was left in the wake of the changes was practically comfortable by comparison to what the ship usually provided. It had the dimensions and aesthetic he would have expected of a general's office back home, right down to the crown molding and some sort of carpet made of the white material. There was even a chair-shaped protrusion in the middle of the floor, which he pointedly ignored.
"What we didn't know was that while we were stumbling through it, the ship was carefully cataloguing everything about us," Naeem continued. "Ransacking our ship's systems, acquainting itself with our language and sensibilities and biology. Compartments began to adapt themselves to our living conditions, with breathable air and comfortable temperatures. Recognizable architecture started to appear. Even art showing up on the walls and music being played."
"So the ship," Zhiang asked slowly, "It's alive? It can think?"
"Nothing so dramatic," Naeem said with a dismissive wave. "Even now, after all this time, I don't know everything about it. What I do know is that this thing, this great and terrible weapon that has leveled our entire civilization, is like a game to whoever built it."
"What?" It seemed to Zhiang he'd been saying that a lot.
"All this power and potential is like a relaxing afternoon with a good book to us," Naeem said, the zealous indignation returning. "This magnificent craft isn't a weapon sent to watch humanity or some relic of an ancient conflict or even some lost attempt to communicate across the gulf of space. It is a discarded bit of trash not even worth recycling. I have humbled the nations of man with a piece of litter!" And he was shouting now. "And we deny ourselves similar greatness."
"What do you mean?" Zhiang asked, before he could stop himself.
"Our petty strifes and divisions," Naeem said with a sigh, his hand dropping down into his tube-filled lap. "Our nations gnaw at one another, burning away resources we cannot afford in the vain fires of war, sacrificing the education of our children because it makes them better soldiers and more willing subjects, forcing this all down our throats as patriotism or else as necessary in the name of some illusion of security.
"Well, I have put played to that! The barriers of nations mean nothing to this ship and all their security is wreckage around them! But still they persist, with their secrets and their lies."
"The secrets are long past," Zhiang said, slicing a hand through the air. "We abolished them, we...to fight..." Slowly his eyes widened.
"Yes," And Naeem's mouth curled in an utterly humorless grin. "You begin to see the shape of things, don't you? I did not come all this way, burn a path across the heavens, so that I could rule from this lonely throne. That would breed nothing but resentment and rebellion. No, all of this was to set the stage, to press our myriad civilizations, by violence and necessity, until they stood upon the brink of unity. But still, it is not enough."
"Not enough! You would demand more death?"
Naeem motioned limply to the space between he and Zhiang, which was suddenly filled with a translucent image of a globe, showing the Earth in glittering detail, as if it had been carved from emerald and sapphire. Slowly, blotches of ruby began to appear, a shimmering speckle of them across the American Midwest, more along the border between China and Russia. The coast off of Brazil blazed with red light.
"The preparations," Naeem said with a sigh.
"Preparations? For what?"
"For your victory. Their foes are weaker now than they will ever be again; as vulnerable as possible with their colonial holdings in ruins and their corporate masters crippled by financial loss. Right now, all there is...is Earth. So there are plans in every major country to try and assure that only one state will make it back into space. My home hopes their aging stockpiles of nuclear weaponry—yes, they've held back a great deal of nuclear resources, so stop your gawking—will work, despite the anti-missile systems in place. Brazil is relying on its navy, of course, while the conflict between China and the Eur-U is set to decide which of the two will claim Eurasia."
"Madness," Zhiang whispered, taking a step towards the globe.
"Yes," Naeem nodded. "I have brought them to the edge of annihilation and they have decided that is excuse enough to hurl themselves over. Men led by fear and ignorance, ruled by masters so disconnected from reality that they cannot even imagine that the world needs healing now, not war. I will not abide this."
Something in that voice snapped Zhiang's attention away from the globe to the dark man. His features were gaunt, drawn with pain, and the soldier realized, for the first time, that the man across from him was not someone to whom violence came easily. Everything before had been born from a deep, self-destructive belief in the necessity of his actions. It didn't excuse what he'd done, wouldn't bring the dead back, but in some indefinable way it reassured Zhiang to know that a core of morality lay at the center of everything.
"What do you mean?" Zhiang rasped, fearful of the answer because he also knew that such a man as this would not hesitate to do anything he thought for the best.
"What exists now has too much impetus, too great a weight behind it, to ever really change. Society will bend back into this twisted shape from any gentle attempt to straighten it. If I wish to create a world where you can do what is right, then I must shatter this old world with strength enough that no king can rebuild his court."
Zhiang's body acted on its own, reaching the decision before his mind. His hand at his waist whipped up, sending the small discus unpinned from his suit spinning towards Naeem who turned to face it with a mildly perplexed look on his face. The high-explosive mine, set to pro
ximity detonation by a few simple taps of Zhiang's thumb, roared like a lion before all his suit's sensors overloaded, feeding him only static and white noise as he braced for a killing impact that never arrived. Though smoke fountained through the chamber, neither heat nor pressure escaped.
He wasn't really surprised as the smoke cleared with mechanized rapidity, revealing Naeem with a slight frown on his face as he fixed his quicksilver eyes on Zhiang.
"I suppose you needed to try that," He said after a moment. "To preserve your moral sense, if nothing else. You would not have made it this far if you were not, at your heart, a moral man."
"I won't let you," Zhiang growled. "I know what you're going to do. You're going to attack Earth itself, aren't you?"
"Of course," and as Naeem responded, the room began another transformation around them. Everything fell away, the walls melting until only stars surrounded them, no illumination but the light of the distant sun and the reflected glow of the Earth hanging as big as only a world can in front of them. Naeem's pod seemed to drift and, though he could feel the floor beneath his feet, Zhiang had to wrestle with the feeling of floating.
"Don't do this," He begged, thinking of the eleven billion people huddling down there, unaware that their last hope was the mercy of this monster. Thinking of his family.
"This is all that remains," Naeem said softly, reaching out a hand as if he could cup humanity in his palm. "All the stations and the colonies, all the research outposts and manned craft outside of high-earth orbit have been eliminated. Yes," He added at a look of stricken horror that crossed Zhiang's face, "While you were playing around inside my ship, I burned the Lagrange stations, I cracked open the moon and dug out every last living thing ever settled there. The UN's forward base is so much dust and all that remains of Tycho City is an incandescent shaft sunk two kilometers into the lunar surface."
"Over twenty-thousand people lived in Tycho City," Zhiang mumbled, trying to picture the largest extra-terrestrial settlement in the solar system and the crown jewel of the Eur-U space program disappearing in a growing dome of light. He found his imagination insufficient to the task.
"Twenty-two thousand one hundred eighty three," Naeem responded immediately. "I could name every single one of them for you, if we had the time. All told, including your little military excursion, I have personally claimed seven million seven hundred thirty two thousand five hundred six individual lives. I see every one of them when I close my eyes. I am the most fantastically accomplished serial killer in human history. And now...it ends."
He waved his hand in the air as if the weight of ages lay upon it and the space around them filled with a blue glow like sunlight through glacier ice. Slowly at first, but with increasing haste, threads of light detached and streaked towards the drifting Earth. Wide as a man was tall, a contoured image appeared before the silent pair showing a flat map of the planet's surface. A tiny spot of light flashed on the distant Earth and a corresponding electric blue circle about the size of a fingertip appeared on the map.
"The Pentagon," Naeem whispered and then, at a second and third flash, "DC and NORAD. That takes care of everyone remaining who knew about Deep Sky." The strike on the DC metro area alone had just doubled the war's body count.
More and more flashes caused the Earth to glitter as if sequined and as he watched, bolts of blue energy began to curve around the globe. According to the map, they were impacting on the far side of planet.
"São Paulo," Naeem recited emotionlessly. "Berlin. New Dehli. Luxembourg. Moscow. Mumbai. Beijing." Zhiang had been bracing for it, known it was coming, but the blob of light consuming the seat of Chinese power still dropped him to his knees.
"The Brazilian fleet," Accompanied a pair of overlapping blue circles off that country's coast. A squirming line of seven more across central Asia elicited a toneless, "The People's Liberation Army and the European Security Directorate's Emergency Forces."
"Stop it," Zhiang gasped.
"The Centre Spatial Guyanais," As a chunk of South America went blue, "Where the Eur-U had almost completed a military space ship to rival the ill-fated Shepard. It would have given them uncontestable dominance in space after the war, you see."
"Stop it," and Zhiang's voice was louder now, desperate.
"New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Toronto, Madrid, Frankfurt, Sydney...all because of the stock exchanges. It won't be enough to kill big business, of course, but it will cripple them for a while, give you room to-"
"Stop it!" Zhiang screamed. He realized from the hot wetness in his helmet that he was actually crying now, tears streaming down his face where he could not reach to wipe them away. "How many have to die before you're satisfied?"
"Approximately one-third of the species," Naeem said calmly. "Including ninety percent of its military, all the current heads of state and at least the first three tiers of their replacements for every first-world country, as well as the executive boards of as many corporations as I can reach without unacceptable levels of casualty." As he spoke, Seoul and Seattle turned blue like a pair of eyes set on a face as wide as the Pacific.
"And then what?" Zhiang managed with a sob. "After you've gutted mankind, then what?"
"Then I send them everything they need to return to glory. I send them a messiah name Zhiang Zhisheng."
"Wha...?"
"Haven't you realized it yet, through all of this? It was for you, Zhisheng, and for humanity. They sent me thousands of their best and I picked a few hundred of the brightest stars to bring aboard. I whittled those down with my spiders and tested you to destruction. Your compassion and your focus, your ability to deal with stress and hopelessness and the unknown, the speed of your mind and the depths of your resourcefulness. After all of that, this is what I have left before me." He gestured at Zhiang. "Strong and noble, with the face of a hero and the heart of a lion. A man who will do what is right when given the choice and what he must when everything hangs in the balance. Someone who knows how to wield power but does not lust after it. You are not perfect, Zhisheng, but you are as close to my ideal as I am likely to find.
"So now, you will emerge victorious. Here at the hour of man's twilight, you will succeed in crushing Earth's alien foe where the huddled masses can see. Carrying the memories of every hero lost in this grim conflict, you will become the embodiment of human victory and of mankind itself. It will require all the guile and perseverance that you possess, but if you take the opportunity I am presenting you, if you grasp the reins of humanity, our species will have this one chance to become what it needs to be if we are to face a universe populated by wonders such as the Angel."
"What makes you think I'm going to do anything you want?" Zhiang ground out, hands curled into fists at his sides, glaring up at Naeem.
"Oh, there is always the possibility that you won't," He said with a shrug, "But if you are the man I believe you to be, you will not be able to resist the chance to do more good for the human race than anyone in history. Now, time is short, so let us begin."
"I-"
"You no longer have a say in the matter," Naeem interrupted as white tubes began to snake out of the invisible walls that bounded the starfield. "You will carry the collected knowledge of the universe back to Earth with you. It will be your greatest weapon in the coming hard times and I have so much to teach you."
The striking tubes passed through his armor as if it were not even there.
###
About the author:
A Texas native, Jesse was born in Corpus Christi and lived there until moving to Denton in 1999 to attend the University of North Texas. Thirteen years and four degrees later, he's still in Denton and writing science fiction and fantasy. Though a perennial bachelor, he lives with his five roommates: a programmer, a voice actress, an engineer, a costume designer, and a Japanese teacher. Needless to say, life is never dull.
If you've enjoyed this ebook, consider other works
by this author:
The Darkness Undivided (The Blessed Land, Book I)
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