Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “Paul, you need to—”

  “Adam?”

  West turned. “Hmm?”

  “Can we have a moment?” Paul nodded toward Benton.

  Eyes slit. “Sure.” West walked down the corridor. “But make it fast.”

  Benton sagged against the wall. “What is it?”

  “We’re at ninety-eight over. Sixty/forty lock. You know you don’t have to come in with us.”

  Starlight in eyelight. “Are you saying you don’t need me?”

  “It’s just—”

  “Afraid of what you’ll find in there?”

  “No.” He sighed. “But if we—”

  “Paul.” Hand to shoulder. “I’ve seen it all before. You don’t scare me.”

  “You should be scared.”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  “You will be.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Fighting with you is useless.”

  “You wrote me.” Lips upturned.

  “And you,” lips to cheek, “have no idea.”

  Screaming.

  Agony of broken bone within the face. He snuffled back blood, choked on copper, spat. Eyes slicked shut with

  He ground earth from his vision, blinked. Sitting up from the mud and shit and snow, he pried his arms from the impact mark, rolled to free his legs. His helmet was gone. He heard the stutter and stammer of his cardiac shield attempting to lock on to

  West at his side, face gouged by

  “This isn’t good.”

  “Hope?”

  She crawled through the trench towards her partners. “Lock’s splintered.”

  “Yeah.”

  Stutter.

  “Shit. Let me see that.”

  Chest heaving, breath a whisper, the author rolled to his back. Benton checked the readings on his shield. “Okay, it’s stabilizing.”

  “Where are we?” West held his riflescope to a silver eye.

  “Over/under target, that’s for sure.”

  “Okay.” He patted Paul’s cheek. “Can you move?”

  “Yeah. Just a little headache.”

  “Nose’s broken. Maybe your cheekbone. You’ll be fine.”

  “I’m placing a beacon in the Stream. Should be able to lock in a few.”

  “Good. Let’s head toward the ridge.”

  Lights flickered in the valley around the lake.

  Their landing in this time had been particularly rough. West now saw the probable cause of the temporal disruptions in the worldline.

  There were scores of black vessels surrounding the lake. One had crashed into an island at its center. From the sky, the stiletto shapes of Judas warships strafed the ground with lances of white laser. Smoke and fire, screams and static snaps. A shattered upload generator struggled to connect to the Enemy mind-essence under a barrage of weapons fire. Judas and Enemy fought hand-to-hand by the thousands. Humans fading into the shift, humans downloading from the mind-essence, a sweep of snow and cutting wind. The lake was frozen. Ice splintered with shadow.

  A squadron of Judas Mujahadin passed over the huddled Judith, dropping dozens of pattern-charges into the midst of the Enemy horde. One vessel slowed, a fan of zeros and ones sprinkling West, Benton, Paul. Landing struts descended, and retro-forces kicked up spatters of mud.

  It landed.

  I remember the throb of nose and right cheek, splintering into eye socket above and rattling teeth below. I don’t remember writing Judas or Enemy into anything else. It concerned me. More blood. I spit again. Breathing was getting easier, marginally, as my blood slowed and thickened. The cardiac shield was quiet.

  I guess I’d never really seen a spaceship. I knew it wasn’t just that, but the tickle behind my eyes grew into suspicion and fear. A lucky shot from the valley below slammed into the starboard nacelle of the Muj and dissipated harmlessly into phase shielding. Returning fire from the craft ignited two of the disabled Enemy ships. Shards from the blast tore into and through the field of combatants.

  I’d seen it all before…but I’d never seen it before.

  A hull ramp descended from the Muj’s belly. Armed Judas soldiers ran down the plank, surrounded us. At least the weapons were pointing out, not in. That was a good sign. And one Judas—

  “Commander West?”

  The frown and flicker of confusion was unmistakable, but he proceeded to hide it well beneath his mask of coagulating blood and diced cheekbones.

  “Yeah, I’m West.”

  Silver eyes swept forth, back under furrowed brows, sculpted with laser precision, fixed on Adam’s again. “Sir?”

  “Listen…” The firefight below and above intensified. “I’m not your West. Where are we?”

  Realization. “Shit, sorry. Let’s get back to the ship.”

  They ran.

  That disconcerting joggle in the stomach as inertial dampening systems compensate in an alien atmosphere, butterflies: monarchs? and he felt the suck of the vacuum chair as they rose into a sky shot through with beams of light and plumes of black.

  Beside him, Benton wiped beads of nervous sweat from her upper lip. One eye was developing an unpleasant bruise from their rough entry into the wrong When. She caught him looking and smiled quietly, looked toward the front of the cabin where the battle chamber elevator was falling to the floor. The Muj captain got off.

  “Okay, let’s figure this out. I just checked with our batteries; nav’s taken us to strato, so we’re out of the battle for the moment.” She palmed the release mechanism on her armor, and silver blades retracted across torso, limbs, settled in seams. “You’re not Commander West.”

  He pried himself from his seat, reached to shake her hand. “Not yours. We seem to’ve landed wrong.”

  She shook. “It happens. Captain Mindel Frost, Judas Mujahadin Kate, out of Fort John Wayne.”

  His eyes lit up. “Mindel Frost? You know Breine Frost?”

  “My father.”

  “He served with me in the first Jaguar war.”

  “I know.” She shrugged. “Same here, too.”

  “Is he—”

  “Pattern erased two years ago standard.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “So what’s your business in this When?”

  “Well…” West looked over at Paul. “It’s complicated.”

  Frost turned to the author. “You are..?”

  “Paul.”

  “Right.”

  “We’re here to fix some things, but it might not be exactly here. Can we take a little trip north?”

  “Where to?”

  “Search Judith ME for coordinates for Lascaux.”

  “Judith Em Ee?”

  Fuck. Paul gave himself a mental slap to the forehead. “Can you find where France will be?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  the most painful of our memories jarred loose from the recesses and wrinkles of gray-pink flesh by that most poignant of our senses: scent, and I knew watching her wasn’t good for me. Smelling her was worse.

  Scent and taste intrinsically linked: mouth-melting mints, fireplace logs, the claw-footed table, the brown ceramic cup into which he’d spit chewing tobacco juice and saliva, the taste of tongues and lips, teeth closed to bar entrance into mouths, adolescent, yearning, to be rid of the heat and roofing nails, the tear of white t-shirt and back, scars now, wounds then (and this is how we heal by primary) intentions uncertain: cigarette smoke and vodka? The pressure of three on a green flannel comforter, giggles, sisters, shaking hands move to breasts, necks, cheeks, and taste and scent collide in their spectrum, lost in themselves, the self a wondering observer from the periphery of my own world, taste and scent collide in the thrash of limbs, descent of clothing to tiled floor, callused fingers within softest folds, the shudder and gasp, the disconcerting slap of flat sweetness, sweat, the tang of exertion and desire, and desire across all senses, all pasts brought forward into tomorrows constructed solely of impossible memory and the loss of
r />   “What’s in Lascaux?”

  My attention snapped from Frost, now poised over viewscreens of the battle at Jaguar. Hope Benton beside me: her scent accompanied an entirely different spectrum flood of memory into the conscious. She was adjusting her armored left arm; a snap of her wrist and silver plates schhhicked forward.

  “Snow. Wind.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I knew what she meant. The Judas weren’t supposed to be here, weren’t supposed to be anywhere. Now we were aboard Judas Kate watching Mindel Frost assess the progress of her fleet’s attack against an Enemy insurgence force. Judas? Judith? Where could I have gone wrong? We’d been within two percentage points of A/O stability.

  “Maire’s here.”

  I saw her eyes flick to Frost and West at the screen. The Muj hit some slight turbulence. The scene required thunder. She leaned in. Whisper.

  “That’d explain a lot.”

  It didn’t require a response.

  “Should we tell them?”

  And a commotion from the screen: Frost’s hands moved over controls. “You should see this!”

  Walls faded from non-reflective alloy to the snowflake-stippled battlefield around Jaguar. The vacuum chairs upon which Hope and I sat seemed intensely out-of-place from our vantage point in the sky above the battle, a parasite image drawn from the eyes of another Judas.

  Frost’s hands clasped, unclasped. Eyes were drawn, slight smile. “Wait for it.”

  Hundreds, thousands of Judas soldiers fled from the valley; Enemy stood motionless, flickering. Flocks of Judas focused fire on the upload generator sunk into the lake. Great black shards splashed to the surface, ice cracking from a glacier into frigid Arctic waters. Three focused phase bursts at the spire’s base and it shattered, a wave of purple and silver leveling the Enemy vessels and downloads across the valley floor. The Judas flocks arced to the sky to escape that explosion of stolen souls.

  To be above it, to be within that wave of chaos and screams, was the closest I’d found to stillness.

  Frost waved a hand and the image merged back to black walls, cold walls.

  “We win.”

  within

  and within

  shattered images: a star, an inhalation, silver and blood

  the poetry of us loss is ruse, a delta converge, assess, act alpha. omega. hidden from and Delta purpose will be forgiveness; please forgive a gnashing of teeth, a rending of flesh stutter c:c It begins.

  “You’ve won the battle, but not the war.”

  “Nice. Cliché.”

  “Thanks. I’m an author.”

  Faint look of disdain from Frost. “We’re approaching Lascaux. Want to tell me why we’re here?”

  Paul walked to the screen, still guttering with images from Jaguar: smoke, flame, stars. “Show me the Stream.”

  Frost paused, looking skeptically into eyes torn between green and mud. Fingers slid over depressions and the image changed: the linear temporal path from Alpha to Omega, branches of charted Whens and alternities spidering out in the pipecleaner cartography of the collected knowledge of eons.

  “Illuminate known Enemy progress in this fragment.”

  Fingers: a pale blue-green field washed a majority of the time/space in the direction of Alpha from Omega. With few exceptions, blank areas on the Stream’s spine, the Enemy had already uploaded a majority of this universe.

  “See those?”

  “What?”

  He pointed. “Magnify this.”

  The area he indicated filled the screen; there was a noticeable fluctuation in upload success during that time.

  “Bring it to two-dimensional.” The image flattened. It could have been a depiction of a recorded waveform. Just below his finger, there was a severe decrease in uploaded pattern. “There it is.”

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Delta Point.”

  maybe it was the interlocking of those life strands that made the loss of both so poignant, so unbelievably painful.

  I’d considered writing it into Enemy, but it was one of those ideas that just wakes me from hesitant sleep, accompanies me through a cigarette, two, three, and the hours of trying to return to dreams, only to have left in the morning (afternoon) light. Judith had told me of the next book I’d supposedly written; there was no mention of it there, either.

  i met her again after two years at the first performance of his i’d seen in two years. the last time i saw him was with her. a month separated their physical and metaphorical deaths.

  Writing histories into existence, writing men and women into life…

  the most difficult part has been convincing myself that i’m not the focal point of these destinies, that i have no right to ascribe my ownership of these histories. i’ve been selfish and vain to assume that i linked anything together.

  Alpha and Omega.. and Delta. How could I have forgotten that strand?

  i’m not the focal point of history, but a simple man swept along within it. i don’t deserve to be the intersection of life paths; i’m just paul. just paul.

  Maire. The name tasted like blood.

  i am ugly in every way. i am bitter and selfish. i could take pills, but they’ll never help. i am incapable of love. i’m sorry. i’m so sorry.

  “Don’t—Just stay back.”

  West grabbed Benton’s elbow to stop her forward motion. She looked into his old gray eyes with cold precision.

  She activated the panel above her right forearm. Blade shielding retracted from her hand and she—

  “Stay shielded!” Paul shouted back from the impact crater. “I don’t know if it’s still active.”

  Blades slid back into place.

  Frost surveyed the frozen plane. “What are we dealing with here?”

  “Silver.” West’s grumbled answer.

  contained multitudes.

  and I felt like weeping, knew that I couldn’t, forgot about it for a while.

  what have i done?

  Knowing that each time I put pen to paper, each time callused fingertips traced lightly over plastic lettered keys, a world began, a world died, knowing that each time I thought too much, that each time I woke from a nightmare, a daymare, knowing, just knowing that it was real, it was blood and bone, the gasp of terror or lust, the cry of pain or release of

  I knelt next to the mark her body had made in the earth. In the Earth.

  Imagine a bipedal alien, cold eyes and flowing hair, jettisoned from a galaxy whose death she’d guaranteed, thrust into the veil of black between galaxies, caught in the wake of a vessel: a glorified photographer, an artificial lover, a traitor with two broken hearts. Imagine the impact of a body, a body and the snow, ice, the wind between then and now, and silver.

  I knelt by the human-shaped crater, dragged armored claws over the compressed snow. Ice. I carved faint paths across its surface.

  I could see the silver crawling. Merging, diverging, coalescing. Still very much alive, still very much a threat. She’d been here recently.

  The husk of Task’s vessel had stopped smoking. A path of footprints and blood stretched to it, around, to the caves beyond.

  I stood. Melting silver dripped from my claws, puddled and danced across

  “Frost?” Paul returned from the crater, holding his right hand before him. “You shielded?”

  “Shielded? I—”

  “Have phase armor on?”

  “No, but—”

  “Shift up. Just a little. Have something to show you.”

  She flickered into the shift. Lazy light spilled over Benton and West.

  “What is that?” She reached out to touch Paul’s silvered hand.

  “Don’t.” The light from the shift bent toward his hand, shivered.

  “But what—”

  “Silver.”

  Paul reached to finger the release mechanism at his neck.

  “Don’t—!”

  The helmet hissed and released, retracted into his clavicle armor. The s
ilver leapt. He exhaled, closed his eyes.

  Benton gasped as the silver blackened, fell to the packed snow in lazy swirls of ash.

  Paul cleared his throat. “Adam, what’s your wife’s name?”

  West blinked. “What?”

  “What’s her name?”

  Eyes narrowed and jaw clenched. “Abigail.”

  “Right. Frost, what’s your West’s wife’s name?”

  She looked from West to Paul, confused. “Patra.”

  “Any children?”

  “Two daughters. Twins.”

  “West?”

  “One son.”

  “And therein lies the problem.” Pasts and futures intertwined in the knot of an impossible present. “How’d Abby die?”

  West blinked. “In childbirth.”

  “Right.” Paul flicked the last of the silver from his claws. “Judith and Judas, Patra and Abigail, West and West. Frost, have you ever met her before?” His outstretched hand indicated Benton.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You wouldn’t have. She doesn’t exist here. West does, though…”

  “What’s this mean?”

  “Maire’s breaking through. She’s achieving Delta point completion.”

  Paul’s cardiac shield began to beep. Benton rushed to his side, looked over the monitor. “They’re locking on to our signal.”

  “Save these coordinates.”

  “Done.”

  “We’ll be back, Frost. As soon as we can. We’ll bring reinforcements.”

  “But what if—”

  “Just wait for

  and all was static, shimmer, shift as the three soldiers of the Judith faded from the plain of snow and silver.

  Frost, alone now, palmed her communications panel. “Get me Commander West.”

  A formation of Judas Muj fighters screamed through the sky of perpetual winter.

  “Great timing, Jud. What happened with our insertion?”

  “Call it a short circuit. We don’t know yet.” An army of Judith technicians plugged, unplugged, analyzed, removed armor, placed nitrox masks over gasping mouths.

  Paul felt the ache of reality begin to pound once again in the place behind his eyes. “There’s been a few developments. Do you have our output coordinates?”