by Paul Hughes
Maire smiled. He disgusted her.
around and never through those nonspace tendrils, the black matter that stippled, and swung, and reached
All time went flat.
She’d gasped for a while as the cockpit bubble flooded with nitrox gelatin. Cork’s breathing was steady; he’d been sucking the shielding for decades, and inhaling that bittersweet fluidish was a comforting return to the non-womb of space.
“Let me know where to point this thing.” The voice was choked, slurred. His tonguetips flicked over slicked lips, teeth. Sludgy echoes. Flat time.
“Give me flight control.”
“Listen, no one flies this shred but me, and I’m—”
“Give me flight control.”
Eyes narrow, relent. Cork thumbed the panel release and slid the sticks across to Maire’s side of the bubble, where they locked into place. Her considerably smaller hands gripped the shafts.
“You know how to run one of these?”
“Should’ve asked that before you slid these over.” Smirk.
He watched as she expertly adjusted the shred axes. She boosted the dark mix to 75%. “You’d better know what you’re doing with that mix.”
She gunned the engines. “I was a pilot. Don’t worry.”
They flew.
She locked coordinates and eventually lilted off to sleep in the sway and slosh of the mineral slime’s warm caress. Cork took the opportunity to extrapolate the path she’d set into the vessel’s slave. She was taking him deep into the Drift’s crotch, that hook of realspace bordered with dark matter so thick that entry was a suicide and exit was just as deadly.
He scratched an itch buried beneath suck.
Maire shifted in her seat. Her face rolled toward Cork, her mouth open, struggling to inhale the bubble sludge.
Gotcha.
He leaned closer. There was something different with her; her tongue was deformed. He absently fingered the scar of his cleft palette. He’d seen other deformities who’d been born in the wake of the trinary collapse, but never anything like that...
Her robe had come unsecured in the bubble’s tide.
He considered.
He acted.
Reaching out, his hand navigated around her shoulder, below and through the loosed interfaces above her eyes. He tugged on the front slit, gently enough to mimic the natural pull of the sludge. The robe flapped open.
Her chest was smooth, marked only by the small canyon of her cleavage between two breasts and a scattering of moles. No cardiac shield. No—
Her eyes opened.
She struck out at him, a savage blow to the throat with a backswing that shattered the bridge of his nose. The bubble blackened with the blown ballast of his blood.
For an instant, just an instant, Cork could have sworn that Maire’s eyes were silver.
She pulled her robe shut. “How dare—?”
Klaxons roared to life.
Maire spun to the flight control sticks. In her sleep and Cork’s distraction, the shred had pirouetted dangerously close to a tendril of dark matter. She flailed the sticks and the vessel spun away from the reaching black, over a ridge in the texture of space, down through a valley and
the ships, if they were ships, lay in wait.
Maire gasped.
They scattered, converged, enveloped. Michael had told her what to expect, but what she saw was beyond expectation or reasonable comprehension.
A wave of light swept the bubble. The vessel shuddered.
All around them, the ships swam through space, the tendrils of dark matter licking and following. It was a dance of horror and beauty, the magnificent school of black spiders thrusting through light and something deeper, something ancient and
a tug and
Maire sat alone on the floor, vomiting shield gel into and out of the spot of light in which she wretched. Cork was gone; the shred was gone. Beyond the circle of light, all was the absence of light, but she sensed something there, someone there, someones there. Another fit of coughing wracked her as bubbles of gelatin worked their way out of her lungs.
It was cold.
a heap of shattered images and
zero
flicker
zero one
flicker
one zero one
resolution
you are
fear and
you are ((?))
Maire stood, covered her now-nude breasts with goose-pimpled forearms.
you are ((?))
“I—I’ve been sent.” She struggled to remember what Michael had told her. “I’ve been sent by your creator.”
silence and
you are of loss, of ruin
“I am.”
purpose. completion. forevers.
One heart: one, and frequent exhalation, shudder, the scrape of exquisitely-manicured nails over flesh, over metal, over flesh and
“I am Omega.”
SYSTEMS OF DESIRE
“Do you believe in werewolves?”
Samayel shrugged as best he could beneath her, his nacelles rising and falling in lubricated silence.
“I do.”
She clambered to the edge of his central hub, looked down upon the captured star. The heat was a pleasant slap compared to the months of timestream cold in which they’d been. She rolled to her back and let her nest of hair dangle over the side.
Looking up, away from the stark light of the sun below, she saw a scatter of wounded forms returning home, Judith vessels with phase scoring, here and there a vessel being dragged along by one nacelle. They couldn’t afford to leave the wrecks behind anymore. She glanced the tickle of tight-beam signals Sam sent to his returning soldiers.
It made her sad, so she turned over and looked down again.
“Fort Myers, good ol’ Fort Myers. I’m gonna miss this place.”
The orbital ring had been split into halves, into quarters, into countless fragments of metallish, but remarkably, the containment layer that held the miles of breathable atmosphere in place above the star was still in place. Alina loved the smell of air, the heat of sun, the exposed warmth of Sam’s hull beneath her. How many Judith captains could say that they’d ridden their mounts on the outside?
A flock of three Judiths passed close enough to generate wind. Alina giggled as they tipped their nacelles in salute.
“What’s gonna happen to the Fort, Sam?”
retrieval crews will salvage what they can from the shell. they’ll collapse the star and conceal the evidence.
“It’s a shame. I really liked it here.”
The atmosphere parted as a Judith destroyer entered the shell, towed by at least a dozen smaller fighters. Alina stood, shielding the light from below with her still-gauntleted hands as she tried to get a better look. “Who’s that?”
i’m not getting any signal from it... but the markings say it’s from Fort Johns.
“Flagship Jasper. He’s—Uhh.. It’s coming in a little fast, isn’t it?”
The destroyer picked up speed as it plummeted into the atmosphere. The Judith tows fell behind as its billions of tons of metallish fell faster and faster toward the sun below. Caught by a flailing particle cable, one Judith rolled dangerously close to the destroyer’s hull, slammed against its side and erupted with fire and splinters of black. Other Judith began to disengage their cables as the destroyer fell out of control.
Alina smelled the smoke as it surged past Sam: something between plastic and flesh, something between bitter and sweet. The sound it made: screaming.
The helpless destroyer erupted miles below against the containment layer, great arms of black and fire blotting out the brightness of the star.
“There goes another one.”
yeah.
Alina felt dizzy, not from the disconcerting vertigo of standing on a vessel without protection miles above the shield layer, but a deeper sickness wrought from two-point-five decades of servitude and horror.
“I think I’ll come b
ack inside now, Sam.”
She loved Samayel, but she hated her command. She hated the war. She hated that even in a world of war, even when those last scattered remnants of her species were trying to make a stand, people could still be cruel. Boys could still be cruel. They could still work up the balls to call her “Banana Tits.” She hated those boys. She hated her breasts. She wanted them to be fuller. She hated her face: how it drooped, how her eyes looked perpetually sad and her high, high cheekbones, that in another time and place would be deliciously inviting for biting and nibbling, just made her feel so intensely ugly. Round face. Banana tits. No ass. She had a funny nose, and her body, even in stripped-down emulation, was still stippled with patterns of freckles and moles. She thought maybe if she improved her posture, just stood a little straighter, smiled a little more, maybe then she’d be beautiful.
She hated that space and time had made her sterile, removing the monthly threat of droplets of blood gumming up the systems of the ship, but hair still grew in the places where she wished it wouldn’t. Not that it really mattered. Everyone caught in this war seemed too tired to fuck. She wanted love. She wanted to make love. She wanted someone to love her. She wanted someone to remember her or care if she didn’t come back from a combat run or think of her as he drifted off to sleep, or at least what true sleep this war would allow between the killing frenzies and the running.
Sam loved her. She knew that because she knew everything he knew, but it just wasn’t the same being loved in that way. Besides, Samayel was a machine forged from metal and plastic and stars, and his soul, older than hers by at least four decades (he refused to tell her his real age), was forever and hopelessly queer.
She sighed a lot.
To one, it was a Paris cafe, filled with American expatriates of the fin de siecle. To one, it was a Laredo saloon, the rough-and-tumble crowd clustered around an overworked barhand. To one, it was an East Village dive where Bob Dylan had once been slated to perform as the opening act for a science fiction author. To Alina, it wasn’t much of anything. A few tables, a few smokers, a few glasses. She caught Sam’s beckoning smile and sat down beside him.
“Have a drink, little lady.” Hank tipped his glass to her. A smoldering Marlboro hung from his lips, the ashes considering the jump to the table. “It’ll help.”
“Not tonight, sugar.”
“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” Sam’s deep eyes swept the non-space construct, “but we lost Fort Myers today. Cleanup and collapse crews are en route.”
“Tragic.” Whistler hissed through his teeth. “Tragic, tragic. Sorry, my dears. It seems each day the Delta’s redrawn.” In his version of the projected construct, an attentive garcon placed another bottle of absinthe on the table. Whistler poured green over the sugar cube. “And each day, we lose more ground.”
“Shit, Jim. You know that ain’t true. Why, just last week we—”
“Which week?”
“Last week.”
“Which last week?”
Hank reddened. “You know what I mean. They’re doing their best to fix it all.”
“Bullshit.” Alina bummed a smoke from Sam’s pack, used Hank’s scarred Zippo to light it. “That kid doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”
Sam pushed his ashtray closer to his captain. “Sure that’s not the jealousy talking, Al?”
She blew smoke into and through his chocolate face, frosted with bushy vanilla beard. “You of all people should know there’s nothing to be jealous about.”
“And you, of all people,” he stole the cigarette back, inhaled, “should know there is.” He tousled her hair, which was already and perpetually tousled. “Benton needs some competition. It’s good for her. Keeps her maths pure.”
“It’s not her.” Alina blushed, a furious bloom of red across nibbleable cheeks and nose, neck and down through the periphery of her banana zone.
“Somebody’s got a crush!” Hank swigged back the last of his beer. “Ain’t it wonderful, Jimmy?”
Whistler’s eyes rolled under the swirl of his mane. “Charming. You dirty old men should leave the poor child alone. Intellectual badgering and Old West hullabaloo. You’re an episteme all your own, Messieurs.”
“Ally needs some competition. It’s good for her. Keeps her strats pure.” Hank grinned.
“Oh, fuck off. I’m out.” Alina snapped from the construct, leaving the three Judith emulations at the table.
“Aww. Something I said?”
Sam patted Hank on the back. “Not our fault. Just young love.”
“Has she ever even met the author?” Whistler dipped his sugar cube.
“Not really. A few words in passing here and here. But there isn’t a young woman this side of Omega who doesn’t have a hard-on for him.” Sam’s eyes indicated a group that had just arrived within the construct. “And not an inconsiderable percentage of the young men, too. Oh, to be young and foolish again. To feel—anything.”
At the entrance point along one of the far walls, three figures faded in. They shrugged off their blade armor and found an empty table. Metal retracted to reveal the old soldier, the author, the maths egg.
“To the young and foolish,” Sam raised his glass. “May they contain multitudes.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“What?”
“This.” She indicated the room. To Benton, the walls and tables were bare metal. Before her on the table, a simple flask of nutrient slurry steamed.
“Use your imagination. It’s a nice way to spend our recharge time. People need people. As long as we have the resources, we’ll keep this place running.” There was a Killian’s Red and a charred steak in front of Paul.
“I don’t need people.” Benton plugged the slurry flask into her arm. “It’s a waste of bandwidth.”
“Spoken like a true child of the Judith.” West took a fishstick from his plate, bit into it, wondered why he’d chosen fishsticks of all things; Judith knew there wasn’t a squirt of tartar sauce available for centuries around them. “If you’d known a world, a real world, you’d appreciate this place.”
“I appreciate it. There’s nothing trying to kill us here.” She adjusted the pack on her arm. “Most days, at least.”
Paul caught Sam’s wave from across the room. “I’ll be back.” As he stood, his hand traced across Benton’s shoulder.
West waited for a safe distance before he asked. “So?”
Benton leaned in. “A/O reports sixty-five/thirty-five. We’ve lost ground, and—”
“No, no.” West cleared his throat; his eyes locked hers. “What’s going on? With you two?”
Benton sat back in her chair. “How many times do I have to tell you? There is no ‘you two.’”
“Not the word on the street, kiddo.”
“What’s the word on the street, then?”
West shrugged. “Apparently Judith brought the author in from his When to fix all this shit, and now she sends him out on missions with that old man West and the delicious young Hope Benton. Word is that I’m a mere chaperone.”
“Bullshit, and you know it.” Benton scoffed. “One more reason for me to hate this construct. Gossip.”
West bit into a fishstick. Flecks of what could have been fish glinted in his grin.
“Good run today?” Sam offered a smoke. I accepted and sat down with the characters at a table that looked suspiciously like it had come from the old U Inn. I blinked and noticed the booths in the back, the chubby drunk sorority girls. Music from a wedding reception seeped through from the back room. Heard myself on the jukebox. Smoke, shadow, echoes: illusions, all.
“It was okay. How’re you guys doing?”
Sam did his best Burl Ives impression, but his grin faltered. “Lost Fort Myers. Al’s pretty upset.”
“Fuck.” I’m better with words in my head. “How about you two?”
“Still lookin’, son.” Hank scooped a slug of Red Man into his mouth. “Ain’t much out there, but we’re still loo
kin’.”
“What my dear cattleman is trying to say,” Whistler smoothed his lapels, “is that we’ve run out of promising leads, and we’ve not yet found anyone of significant tactical value.”
“There have to be more characters out there somewhere. You were.”
“So we were, but we’re not, shall I say, entirely truthful?”
I knew where Whistler was pushing the conversation. “Sometimes it’s hard to be truthful about people you never really met.”
“Perhaps you should have focused on biographical research. I would never have worn this ridiculous cape.”
Hank guffawed. “Sure makes you pretty, though, Jim.”
Whistler hissed at the cowboy.
Sam just shook his head. “Any leads on Delta yet? Anything new you can tell us?”
“It’s there.” And it was, a great stabbing tickle behind my eyes, a tugging toward and a pushing from and the words escape: it was. “Just haven’t excised it yet.”
“Word is we’ve slipped to Alpha seventy-over.”
“Sixty-five.” I hated how fast the Judith mind essence relayed everything to everyone, and how fast that relay distorted truth. “That’s the word. Watch my mouth and call me the horse.”
“Rough insertion today?”
Dirty old man. I drank, swirled the beer around my mouth, over bruised gums and a loose molar. “Could say that.”
“Meet anyone interesting?” He considered. “Again? Any words of wisdom from the Great Within?”
Thinking back to the shattered images I’d catalogued that “day”: “People shit when they die.”
Sam chuckled.
I pulled on the cigarette, exhaled through my nose. I vaguely remembered when that had used to hurt. “Just another day. Erased a few more post-silver characters.”
Hank spit tobacco juice into his empty bottle. “Seem to be getting better at that, buckaroo.”
It didn’t matter that he sounded artificial. He was artificial. His television show had never really existed. The dialogue did concern me, though. I knew I could do better.