by Joe Mahoney
“All right, Ridley. It’s time to get you back home. Your dad needs you.”
“My dad.” Ridley sounded sceptical. “Where’s he even been all this time?”
“It’s complicated. It wasn’t his fault. I’ll tell you all about it when we get back home.”
“Yeah, listen—about that. You do know I’m a soldier, right? You can’t expect me to just desert.”
I wanted to say, You’re not a soldier. You’re a boy. A boy who had no idea what he was getting himself into.
But that would drive us right back into the same old tired rut. I chose my next words carefully. “All right. If it were up to you, when would you come home?”
“It is up to me. I’ll come home when we’re done.”
“Define done.”
“When the enemy has been eliminated.”
I held my tongue. Eliminating the enemy—the “Necronian scourge,” as Iugurtha had put it—wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. It wasn’t going to happen because I had failed. And not just failed, but failed spectacularly, in every way possible. I had failed to save my sister, failed to save my nephew, failed Sarah, Casa Terra, humanity—by giving Akasha and her knowledge to Jacques, I had, indeed, failed the entire universe. It was not possible to fail any more than I had.
Ridley misinterpreted my woebegone expression. “Uncle, listen. I’ll come home as soon as I can. I promise.”
But he didn’t understand what I had only just grasped. That it was too late. That it didn’t matter anymore whether he came home. Now that Jacques had Akasha, no place in the universe would ever be safe again.
XXVII
Orphans
A fraction of a second before despair completely engulfed me, a concentrated blast of telepathy clobbered me right between the eyes:
Hello Wildebear Barnabus j I shall dispense with the usual banter and bravado I shall destroy the archive just as I said I would good of me don’t you think grieve not the best part of me shall live on I shall convey it to you now still this part of me cannot resist one final parting shot at an old foe it is a flaw in my character I suppose I bid you adieu Wildebear Barnabus j
A single heartbeat later it was over, leaving behind a headache so intense that I had to close my eyes and hold my head still with both hands until it passed. I opened my eyes to find Ridley staring at the horizon, his jaw hanging open. “What the—?”
An object roughly the size of an aircraft carrier was hurtling through the air toward us—an object bearing an uncanny resemblance to the bloated carcass of a long dead whale. I caught a whiff of something incredibly rank, and knew that I was looking at the vessel in which Jacques had spent several hundred years wandering the universe in search of Akasha.
Several other craft—smaller, sleeker, infinitely more attractive—dogged the Necronian vessel like birds of prey, lashing it with crimson beams of light that made Jacques’ ship rock and buck as though punched repeatedly by an invisible giant. Despite the titanic forces at play, I heard no more than faint whooshes of wind as the ships shot overhead.
“It’s heading toward the mountain,” Ridley observed.
He was right. The Necronian ship was heading straight toward the mountain containing Iugurtha’s ancient star ship. Squinting, I could see that Jacques’ ship was losing altitude rapidly. It wasn’t going to clear the mountain.
“Forty-five seconds until impact,” Sebastian said.
One final parting shot at an old foe.
Laser fire lashed out from the tip of the mountain, traversing several kilometres in an instant before striking Jacques’ ship in a scathing broadside that had no discernible effect. Probably, as Sebastian had predicted several hours earlier, it did not even scuff the paint on the Necronian ship’s bulkhead.
There were people inside the mountain.
Sarah was inside the mountain.
I drew energy from the nearest sun and focussed all my attention on the gate. A massive surge of power coursed through my body. With it came a profound sense of well-being.
With Akasha no longer around to impose her own agenda, my navigational skills had improved considerably. The gate took me straight to Sarah without any fuss or bother. I found her inside the cavern near the waterfall sitting on a large rock, First Aid supplies arranged neatly around her. When she saw me she leapt to her feet. For a second I thought she might hug me.
“Barnabus, you’re okay! My father. Have you—?”
My words tumbled over one another in my haste to get them out. “Listen—something terrible is about to happen. We need to get out of here. Fast.”
Sebastian had linked himself to a public address system in the cavern. His voice reverberated off the stone walls towering above us. “Thirty seconds to impact.”
“Impact?” Sarah repeated.
My mind raced. How many others were scattered inside the mountain? I had no idea. Apart from Sebastian broadcasting the situation there was nothing we could do for them. In the scant seconds remaining, only Sarah and I were close enough to make it through the gate.
“Twenty seconds,” Sebastian said.
I could see but not hear Ridley screaming at me to hurry from the other side of the gate. His silent but urgent exhortations penetrated even my unnatural equanimity.
“We need to go,” I urged Sarah.
She wasn’t listening. Two T’Klee had emerged from the treeline about two hundred yards away. They were galloping our way at full throttle. They wouldn’t make it in time.
“Ten seconds,” Sebastian said, accomplishing little more than alerting those who could not escape to the fact of their imminent demise.
Sarah still wasn’t moving. I seriously considered picking her up and physically carrying her through the gate.
“Five,” Sebastian continued. “Four—”
“Knock it off,” I told him.
The ground shifted beneath our feet. We heard a rumbling in the distance. A shower of dirt rained down upon us.
“What was that?” Sarah asked.
“That would be the Necronian ship crashing into the mountain,” I said.
“I might have been off by a few seconds,” Sebastian admitted.
“That’s why you wanted us out of here so bad?” Sarah glanced at our surroundings. They had not changed a whit.
I shrugged. “Honestly, I thought it would be worse.”
But I had nothing to be embarrassed about.
We heard rocks fall in the distance, and then ducked reflexively as splinters, shards, and seconds later part of the cavern’s roof caved in. I reeled, coughing and choking in the dust and dirt. I couldn’t see the T’Klee anymore and feared the worse. We heard more rumbling.
“Sarah, we need to go!”
“Wait,” she commanded.
We waited.
“Sarah—”
“Listen,” she said, holding up a hand to silence me.
We heard rustling, scrambling, stone on stone. The two T’Klee emerged from the cloud of dust like apparitions.
“Go!” I told them, motioning toward the open gate. “Go now!”
They didn’t need to know English to understand me. A twitch of muscles propelled each of them through the gate with the easy athleticism of their species.
Once they were safe, Sarah required no encouragement to dash through the gate herself. I sped after her into the shadow of the Necronian reservoir seconds before the entire roof collapsed.
Ridley had been pacing frantically. He ducked as a stone the size of my fist rocketed out of the gate and ricocheted off the reservoir, narrowly missing his head. Despite the risk, I kept the gate open in the hope of more survivors emerging, but no one did. More dust and rocks shot out of the gate, forcing me to close it.
The two T’Klee saw the refugees surrounding us, still streaming toward their homes. They signalled th
eir gratitude to us with heads bowed and knees bent before galloping off to assist their brethren.
Sarah made no secret of eyeing the gate covetously as I turned it back into a ring and slipped it on my index finger. We both knew that she could have taken it if she wanted to—I was far too weak to defend myself with the gate closed—but she made no such move.
“Where’d you come from?” Ridley asked her.
“Long story,” Sarah told him.
It was difficult to think straight. I was being bombarded with emotions—fear and loss mostly. A man lurched from behind the reservoir. A man wearing a plaid fleece jacket, his forehead graced by a single eyebrow. Jack Poirier—the emotions were coming from him. It was difficult to know where his feelings ended and mine began.
“Jacques is dead,” he said.
The words were like punches to the head. Punches that hurt— Jack’s words were accompanied by such a potent combination of fear, anger, and grief that Ridley, Sarah and I staggered back from the telepathic onslaught.
“What do you mean Jacques is dead?” Had the crash killed enough of Jacques to dissolve its collective consciousness? “How?”
“How do you think? Peacefully. In its sleep.” Jack’s sarcasm, telepathically enhanced, cut like a meat cleaver. “It used the archive to kill itself.”
Jack desperately needed to get his feelings under control before he inflicted serious psychological damage on the rest of us, if he hadn’t already.
“But why?”
“You know damned well why.”
He was right: I did know.
I shall destroy the archive just as I said I would.
Jacques had been true to its word, destroying the archive the only way it could: by commanding the archive to destroy them both. I did not understand the means by which Akasha could accomplish this—most of Jacques was on C’Mell, so the crash alone wouldn’t have been enough to kill it—but I had no doubt that she could. How difficult could it be to kill one fifty thousand strong Necronian after murdering an entire planet of them?
Ridley leaned close. “Who’s Jacques?”
“The Necronian,” I said.
“There’s a Necronian named Jacques?”
“Not a Necronian. The Necronian. There’s only one.” Present company excepted, but Ridley didn’t need to know that. “All the Necronians you’ve ever seen were just one big consciousness named Jacques.”
“Iugurtha never said anything about that.”
“She might not have known.” The Necronians she would have known a thousand years earlier had been a different breed.
Ridley glanced at Jack. “So it’s dead. Isn’t that a good thing? Why is he so upset?”
I couldn’t think of an answer that wouldn’t reveal the truth about Jack’s nature.
“Do you think it’s true?” Ridley went on. “That it’s really dead?”
“Every single Necronian would have to be dead for that to be true. Sebastian?”
“Way ahead of you, Mr. Wildebear. I am perceiving zero Necronian activity of any kind, apart from—”
“That’s enough, Sebastian. Thank you.”
It was true, then. Every Necronian was dead.
Except for one.
That one, clad in a fleece jacket and jeans, with two arms, two legs, and two sad brown eyes, looked every inch the human. But that was just a façade. Behind that façade lay a Necronian. A Necronian that, if we didn’t do anything, could multiply just like Jacques had. In another thousand years our descendants might find themselves in the same sorry mess we were in now. All around me the broken, shattered remains of the T’Klee were returning to what was left of their homes. Jacques had done that to them.
The Necronian before me now might not be Jacques anymore, but he had been once, and could be again. The Necronians surrounding Jack hadn’t been trying to kill him, I realized—they had been transforming him. Conveying crucial information to what would soon become the last of their kind. Just like that first fragment of Jacques half way across the universe so long ago.
This was Jack before me; of that I had no doubt. But it was also something else. Something more: fifty thousand Necronians distilled into one. A Necronian vessel holding the distilled consciousness of an entire species.
If I wanted to, I could tap into the power of the gate, power capable of shattering Jack into a thousand pieces. It only took one of them to reproduce. A year from now there could be dozens of Necronians. A decade from now? Hundreds. I could prevent that from happening. Getting rid of Jack would be the end of the entire vile species. Gone from the universe forever.
I could do it, I told myself. I could kill Jack. Sure I could. A few days ago maybe not, but today I could.
I stepped closer. Jack raised a tear-streaked face to me. A part of his illusion, or did Necronians really cry?
Ah, but who was I kidding. I couldn’t hurt Jack any more than I could hurt a skunk, a coyote, or a door-to-door salesperson. The truth was I liked Jack. I couldn’t even stand the thought of hurting his feelings let alone hurting him physically. “Jack, look. I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
Jack accepted my condolences with a curt nod. He knew perfectly well what I’d been thinking.
Sarah pointed. “Look.”
Iugurtha’s spider was weaving its way through the mass of T’Klee refugees back to us. Evidently the spider was smart enough to know that there was no point conveying Rainer to the mountain under the circumstances. When it arrived, it hunkered down and gave Sarah her first good look at her father since they’d parted ways, mere hours from her perspective but six months from his.
The change in Rainer’s physical appearance was profound and unsettling. Gaunt and frail, he looked like he’d aged thirty years. The spider had coated much of his body in a green gel and inserted tubes into his neck and wrists. Sarah studied him with both arms wrapped tightly about her waist as though hugging herself.
“The spider’s doing all it can for him,” I said “That’s right, isn’t it Ridley?”
“It’s a walking ambulance,” Ridley agreed.
“I need to get him home,” Sarah said. “I need to get him home right now.”
”It’s time to go,” I told Ridley. We both knew he didn’t need to be here anymore.
He nodded, and I started to open the gate.
“Wait,” he said. “What about the rest? How will they get back?”
My heart sank. I didn’t think I had it in me to make another trip after this one.
“We’ll come back for them,” Sarah said. “I promise.”
Ridley looked at me.
“I’ll see to it,” I assured him. And I would—whatever it took.
Ridley nodded. “Good. Oh—just one more thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
He uttered words in that foreign tongue of his. Iugurtha’s spider raised a mechanical forelimb and almost casually impaled Jack in the chest with it. I gasped—not just from the act itself, but from Jack’s distress, which I felt as keenly as though it were my own.
The spider’s blade protruded a full half metre out of Jack’s back. Yellow blood ran along its edges, dripping great globules to the ground. The spider placed a second limb against Jack and pushed, removing the blade with a slick wet sound. Jack groaned horribly. The blade retracted into the spider’s limb like a sword being sheathed.
Jack shed his illusion and slumped to the ground, his tentacles splayed all about him.
“I knew it,” Ridley said. “You can always tell when there’s a Necronian around. It’s the stench, you know. And you never feel quite like yourself.”
I stood dumbfounded. There were simply no words for the enormity of what Ridley had done.
How does one comfort a dying Necronian? Gently, with great care. One ill-timed death throe and someone would be comforting me
. I knelt at Jack’s side and took up a tentacle. It was heavier than I’d expected. It felt coarse and rough in my hands. I held it awkwardly, not knowing quite what to do with it. Jack tried to say something, but all that came out was a gurgle.
“Shh,” I said stupidly. “Save your strength.”
“I would keep my distance if I were you, Uncle,” Ridley advised. “There might be some life left in it yet.”
I ignored him.
He spoke more foreign words. The spider moved closer to my side.
“Get that thing away from me!” I snapped. “Why don’t you make it do something useful for a change?”
“Like what?”
“Help him!”
“Are you crazy? You do know it would have killed every single one of us, right?”
It didn’t matter. When Jack’s grief vanished all at once, leaving behind only my own sad conflicting emotions, I knew it was too late.
Sarah knelt and removed Jack’s tentacle from my hands. She laid it gently on the ground beside me and helped me to my feet. I stared down at the last of the Necronians, hideous in its true form. It didn’t feel right leaving Jack there like that. He deserved better, but I had neither the tools nor the energy to bury him. I told myself I would come back for him later.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Ridley said defiantly, but in his tone I detected a question. He knew perfectly well that he’d done something wrong. He just didn’t know why it was wrong.
I used the gate’s power to select new coordinates: a century-old dwelling by a bay where a man on crutches stood on the back porch gazing out over the water.
“I’ve alerted Casa Terra to our presence here,” Sebastian informed us once we were all through the gate. “A medical team will be along shortly.”
“Thank you, Sebastian.” I turned the gate back into a ring. The power vacated my body like someone siphoning all the blood from my veins. I steadied myself on Sarah’s shoulder.