The Next Thing I Knew (Heavenly)

by John Corwin

  "Harb, I can't do that. Please reconsider. I don't want any more deaths. What about the Rrilk? They'll suffer too. The ones on Earth will be killed as well."

  He shrugged. "They're just animals."

  "If I stay with you, will you let the others go and leave Earth alone?"

  "Are you crazy?" Chris said.

  "Hush," I hissed at him.

  "But--"

  "Shut up," I hissed again. I couldn't have him upsetting Harb and wrecking everything.

  Harb looked at Chris and a smug smile spread across his face. "You realize you would be my lover, right, Lucy?"

  I nodded. "Yes."

  "Get on your knees and beg me to be your lover and I promise I'll let the others go."

  My eyebrows shot up along with my rage. Somehow I stifled my heated response. I looked at Chris and the others. I thought about the Rrilk and the other humans. It would save them all, even Ms. Tate, The Flying Spaghetti Monster bless her evil twisted soul. And it wouldn't be such a horrible sacrifice. Harb would probably get tired of me after a while and move on. There was no shortage of hot Shaval women for sure.

  I stepped toward him, each step leaden and stilted. I hated him at that moment more than anyone. Even more than Billy Nichols, who, in the fifth grade had pulled down my pants in front of everyone at recess. My ego weighed every step down with hate. I stopped in front of him. Dropped to my knees.

  "Please be my lover," I said unable to keep the sob from my voice. I glared at him, jaw clenched.

  He took my hand, pulled me up. "Thank you. That's what I wanted to hear."

  "You'll let them go?"

  "I will. I'm a man of my word." An aircar docked at the terrace and a squad of armored Shaval disembarked and entered the house. "Unfortunately the Shaval have made no such promise."

  "What?"

  "It is out of my hands."

  Azriel followed the men into the house. I pursued them along with the rest of the group. I sent out an emergency broadcast to the rest of the squad. They flitted in immediately.

  Emergency takedown, I said.

  The second I gave the order I could see it wasn't going to work. There were almost thirty soldiers and only fourteen of us. The soldiers filed into a large room. Our gel caskets lined the back wall. Harb tapped into Azriel and he smiled. I glanced at the names on the caskets. Jane, Kyle, Chris, Mike, Missy; all the names of the people I loved and had trained with were there. Conspicuously absent were mine and Harb's.

  "No!" I screamed as the soldiers took aim.

  We merged with the soldiers. I sent out a burst of hatred so pure into the one I took that he passed out. The others dropped. I left mine and aimed for another. I hit him the same way. He went down. But my strength evaporated and I faltered. Chris and Mike took down another before they too fell. Jane struggled free of her first soldier and launched at another. Bethany was out cold after her second attack.

  Confusion and panic hit the ranks. The soldiers yelled in alarm as their comrades collapsed for no apparent reason. Only Azriel remained calm and none of us could touch him with Harb in the way. Azriel fired at a casket in the center. I saw the name on it: Chris. I dove at Azriel, willing myself to merge with him. Harb's presence acted like a shield and I bounced off.

  I screamed bloody murder as light enveloped the casket. I felt an arm on my shoulder. I looked into Chris's blue eyes. His lovely sad eyes.

  "I love you, Lucy. Always." And he was gone.

  Chapter 30

  I stared at the empty space where Chris had been, my mind in shock.

  Azriel took aim and blasted another casket. Missy went with it. Then Tatiana Ivanovna, then Liu Chan, Piotr Ivanovich, and Erika Jannsen. Azriel could see us with Harb inside him. He smiled. The bastard was enjoying this murder spree. Mike staggered to his feet and into the last remaining soldier standing. He took him down before slumping out of the Shaval's body and onto the floor. Mike's eyes were closed, his body translucent from weakness.

  All we could do was watch helplessly as Azriel had his way. We had nothing to fight him with.

  "A shame he won't be awake when he dies," Azriel said. He took aim at Mike's casket.

  White energy speared into Azriel. He and Harb screamed simultaneously as Azriel's body disintegrated from the center out. Harb ejected and fell to the ground, still screaming. His body morphed back into that of the young boy I'd first met.

  I launched myself at him though I felt so weak I could hardly move. I wrapped my hands around his scrawny neck and squeezed for all I was worth. Harb's face reddened. I willed for him to suffer. I wanted him to pay for the murders he'd committed. I wanted the floors red with his blood and hot with his agony.

  Chris is gone. Chris is gone forever.

  Someone grabbed me and pulled me back against their chest. I screamed and thrashed until the last ounce of strength evaporated from my body.

  "I've got you," Kyle said. Bob's unconscious form slumped nearby. I'd asked Kyle to bring him in case we found the caskets and needed to move them. He'd been the one to kill Azriel.

  "Everyone's dead, Kyle. They're all dead."

  "I know, sweetie. I know."

  I felt his tears drop into my hair. I turned and hugged him and we sobbed together.

  Jane brought us back to our senses. "We've got to go," she said. "Load the bodies now before those soldiers wake up." She formed a length of rope from nothing, tied Harb's unconscious form with them, and secured him in the ship. I knew from Ms. Tate's new order in Heavenly that Harb couldn't flit while tied up like that.

  Kyle nodded and merged with Bob. The gel caskets were easy for one Shaval to move. And now there weren't many left: only eight, although mine and Harb's were unaccounted for. We searched the apartment but couldn't find them. Harb had probably hidden them with care in case Azriel double-crossed him.

  The rest of us were exhausted, too weak to fly, so Kyle used Bob to fly us back to the ship in an aircar. As the minutes stretched, my rage gathered to a point where I could barely control the seething demon roaring to get out. I wanted payback for the crimes perpetrated against Earth. For the deaths of my dear friends and the one I loved.

  Bethany returned to consciousness on the way back. She hugged me and cried the rest of the trip. Chris had been her best friend like Kyle was mine. If I'd lost Kyle too, I would probably have gone catatonic. But now my sense of purpose was crystal clear. My intent had changed and I had gone cold.

  Mike awoke and lunged at Harb, murder in his eyes. It took several of us to restrain him although he walloped the kid a few times. I noticed that Harb still had purple bruises on his neck where I'd squeezed. Something was happening to our ghostly bodies. Either we'd changed them or we'd figured out how to truly injure others like us now. I didn't know. I didn't care. I was happy. It meant I could hurt Harb. It also meant he couldn't escape so long as he was bound.

  When we reached the ship, I took a head count. Only four hours remained until nightfall and our assigned duties. But now our link to the database administrator was gone with Chris. I was short two people, and Kyle was short by five. He could deal with fewer since they only needed the three battleship captains. The ships were so highly automated that the rest of the five-man crew was hardly necessary to pilot them to Earth.

  Since Jane and a few others could already control their hosts, I assigned a couple of them to control another committee member as well so we'd have the votes to change the database. I told Kyle I'd assimilate one of the battleship navigators since we'd need one of them to program in Earth's coordinates once we had control.

  Another plan formed in my head. I didn't dare tell anyone what it was but it was there and it probably needed doing.

  Harb drifted in and out of consciousness. The death blow to Azriel had messed him up good. I took the opportunity to merge with him during his discombobulation and discovered where he'd hidden my body and his. I took Fergie in her aircar to pick them up and delivered them to the ship without telling the others just in case
I decided to vaporize Harb's corpse. Or kick his body into the far reaches of space. Then I dropped her back at home and worked on my side plan.

  The day of the vote arrived. As committee head, I called the vote using Fergie, saying routine maintenance was required to update obsolete records. It was a standard vote according to Fergie's memories, and it also gave the database administrator wider latitude. With our control, the vote passed by a wide margin and I realized that it probably would have passed if only because Fergie called the vote and the other members respected her judgment when it came to routine matters like that. Still, it was better to be safe.

  Jane had taken double duty as the database administrator as well and downloaded the encryption key from the committee to the console that controlled the database. From there it was easy to run a search on all references to Earth by its Shaval designation. Rather than delete the entries which might stand out to an audit, we changed the records to show that our solar system had no useful resources or life in it. That would keep us off Shaval radar, maybe forever, or maybe just a few years depending on variables out of our control.

  She also altered the records of the Rrilk who were working on Earth to indicate their duties were finished and they were allowed to go to their home world. I wished I could do more to help the Rrilk overall, maybe free the entire from enslavement, but that required a lot more than just fiddling around with the database. One baby step at a time.

  Next up were the battleships.

  I updated Zhrrii and Ciirr with our current status. Both were more than ready to get the hell out of Dodge. I joined Kyle on his shiny new battleship. We'd decided to imprison the Shaval crew from the ships since each one performed a useful duty that we'd need to learn if we wanted to actually use the battleships to do anything besides look pretty. We did merge takedowns on all crewmembers but the captains since they were already under the control of Kyle and his gang. Over the past day, I'd taken time to assimilate the ship's navigator. Otherwise it would've taken forever to figure out how to get back to Earth. That was my excuse, anyway. I had other plans that I didn't want to share with the others.

  I stood on the bridge of Kyle's battleship in the Shaval navigator's lithe female body and gazed at the rotating blue planet below.

  "Beautiful," I said, though my heart felt cold with anguish.

  "Yeah," Kyle said, a tremble in his voice. The Shaval captain stood almost ten feet tall with broad shoulders and cropped gray hair. He looked too grim and noble to have such a sad little quirk in his voice.

  Kyle had locked the other Shaval crew members in the brig after we'd taken them down. Now all that was left was setting the coordinates for Earth and going home. I strode across the large bridge and to the navigation console.

  A blip appeared on the communications console. Zhrrii was signaling us from the smaller ship we'd hijacked to get here from Earth. I activated the battleship's hangar controls and Zhrrii ferried the smaller ship inside. I entered the coordinates for Earth and transmitted them to the other two battleships now under our control. The lumbering space cruisers weren't required to report their destinations to any central location unlike civilian ships. The Shaval military wouldn't have a clue where they'd gotten off to. How pissed would that make someone, I wondered. These behemoths had to be worth a gazillion dollars.

  The other battleships under our control acknowledged receipt of coordinates. We'd put the gel caskets with the corpses of the respective team members on board the other battleships since we had no clue what would happen if they were out of range of their old bodies and got yanked off the ship while in that other universe. The thought of it made me shudder.

  The other two ships rotated slowly away from Zalista and faced outward. They shifted and winked into another dimension.

  Kyle put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. "Let's go home."

  "Okay," I said, and activated a command on the console.

  Multiple white beams speared from the battleship. One lanced into the large grey space station that encircled Zalista and blew a chunk from it. Another vaporized the capital buildings in Chandara. The others beams destroyed nearby defense satellites. Kyle gasped as a cloud of steam, dust, and debris became visible on the planet surface, marring the otherwise crystal blue. Bethany cried out. I watched in numb fascination at the magnitude of destruction and murder I'd just committed. I watched as the massive space station cracked and tore itself apart under the strain. I imagined the bodies being blown into space at this moment, hurling briefly out into the expanse before caught in the gravitational pull and burned into dust in the atmosphere.

  But revenge didn't fill me with a sense of justice or make me happy. It made me feel emptier. I continued to watch the injured planet as our ship rotated toward home and shifted away.

  Chapter 31

  Nobody said a word about the atrocity I'd committed on the way back. We talked about plans to revive Earth, about how best to defend her, and all sort of other things except the elephant in the room. Actually, forget elephants, this was a one-ton monster. If God existed he was probably preparing a very special place in Hell for me right this very minute. A place right next door to the Shaval.

  I already felt like I was there. Grief swelled in me every time I thought of Chris. Every time I thought how I could have saved him. I couldn't have done anything though. I'd been useless without a host to stop Azriel.

  Harb was still tied up in the smaller ship in the cargo bay. I hadn't decided what to do with him. I'd planned to nuke his body while he watched but since the mass destruction of Chandara, I'd lost the will to do anything. There was no justice that would make me feel better. Only having Chris back would do that.

  * * * * *

  We arrived on Earth a few days later. Less than a hundred people gathered to express their thanks and welcome us home as heroes. The families of those who'd been lost mourned them. My parents, of course, were still absent, presumably in Ms. Tate's evil hands. I couldn't think about that right now. There was too much else to do. My emotional range seesawed from comfortable numbness, to leaden grief, to apoplectic rage. It made me question my sanity.

  Bethany saw Chris's parents and ran to them, crying the entire way. Their eyes lit with understanding the moment they saw her expression. They beckoned me over and brought me into the fold.

  "We're so proud of you," Chris's father, Mr. Rogers, said.

  "Your parents would be so proud of you too," Mrs. Rogers said. "There are plenty of us in Heavenly trying to make things right. Unfortunately Bertha has too many people under her control."

  "Bertha?" I asked.

  "Bertha Tate. Otherwise known as the God Hand."

  I tried to laugh but even that seemed unfunny. "I never knew Ms. Tate's first name. I'll be sure to use that next time I see her."

  "Things are bad."

  "We're going to make things right on Earth," I said. And then kick some ass in Heavenly. For the first time in days, a sense of purpose returned to me. We had a job to do. I had something that would take my mind off Chris, at least in short stretches.

  The battleships had miniature automatic factories in them used to fabricate all sorts of things the military might need in a campaign on another planet. Cloned body parts were among those items. It took a couple of months to figure out the proper tweaks, but using the combined knowledge of the captured Shaval, we were able to configure it to make human bodies using our DNA.

  We had DNA samples from all team members stored in the Rrilk cube. After several raging disagreements, we decided to use Chris's DNA for the first clone. I forced the issue until everyone was sick of arguing and told me to do whatever the hell I wanted. I had wild ideas about what might happen, pipe dreams and fantasies most likely.

  We placed Chris's DNA sample in a large clear tub of gel. The cloner analyzed the DNA sample and started weaving a body from the gel proteins. At first it was only a tiny button of flesh encased in a sea of gel. A knot of tension in my stomach tightened every day as I checked t
he progress. By the end of the first week, the bones were in place. By the second week some internal organs were identifiable.

  I held my undisclosed desires close to my heart. I hoped against hope that this clone would somehow revive Chris's soul and bring him back. That whatever magic existed in the universe would do the trick and give him new life.

  I think Kyle knew what I wanted, but he remained silent. He'd argued against using Chris's DNA for the first test, instead volunteering himself. Nobody knew what would happen. Maybe the body would come with a soul already inside, or it might come empty. Maybe we weren't really souls in the first place, just trans-dimensional beings created by a massive discharge of life when the Shaval had killed us and the real Lucy Morgan and friends were all truly dead. End of story.

  The questions gnawed at me deeper and deeper until I could barely stand the passage of time. I literally could not wait for the cloner to finish.

  By the third week, sinews, muscles and veins showed through the translucent skin. The body was young, perhaps the equivalent of Chris when he was fourteen. There were ways to set the age of the final clone but we'd left the parameters alone.

  One month, two days, and six hours after starting, the cloner declared the body complete. It sent a shock of electricity to the heart and a puff of oxygen into the lungs. The clone coughed and started breathing. The console displayed the vitals: healthy and functional. After verifying normal function for an hour, the cloner placed Chris's new body onto a bed where it lay staring at the ceiling, occasionally blinking.

  I merged with Diana's body and went to him. I took his hand and held it. "Chris, it's Lucy. Are you in there?"

  He looked at me with a placid expression. Then he looked back at the ceiling. I instructed the computer to scan his brain patterns. It showed normal base autonomic activity. Higher functions showed almost nil. Not much going on upstairs. I snapped my fingers in his face. He looked at me again with a blank expression. I took his hand and pulled. He lay there staring at me, not moving a muscle to help. I don't think he knew what I was doing. After all, his mind was a blank. Diana's body was plenty strong enough to carry him. Instead, I pulled him into a sitting position and swung his legs over the side of the table. He sat there, staring ahead at the wall.