Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3

by Paul Evan Hughes

  Tears verged. Kath’s breath came in halts and stops, the choke of sob, the confusion of the not-knowing. “Whatever happened, let me help you.”

  “I have to go away. Now. I don’t know for how long.”

  “Will I—”

  “You’ll see me again when it’s time.”

  “Time for what?”

  The illusions our eyes play in night, without light or reason: an instant of static, a halo of silver, and Maire’s form returned to normal. Don’t touch me

  “When it’s time to strike.”

  She turned and walked out the door, leaving Kath to an empty room, echo, and fear.

  “You’re quiet.”

  The observation platform hovered miles above the surface, the “grass” of thousand-foot trees, the embryonic stage of the lumbers. Kath had once seen a hatchery where a surrogate mother had nudged those infant flora into the sky with great cracks of vestigial root structures and the dusting of centuries-old branches to the forest floor. Those first hesitant leaps into the sky, that keening song, the wind made by the mature herd swimming above them…It had been beauty, steeped in the scent of pine pitch.

  “Hmm?” Her gaze met his.

  Berlin grinned. “Exactly.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her fingers threaded through his, now wrapped tightly around the safety ring of the platform. She’d forgotten how disconcerting an observation flight was for those usually confined to galactic or surface travel. It was a different kind of falling. “Just thinking too much.”

  “About what?” His fingers squeezed. That scar, those infinitesimal hairs, the ridge of callus denoting the bellies of knuckles.

  Her answer hid in the tilting down of her eyes, the thin exhalation of carbon triox evidenced in the cool of the upper lower atmosphere. He smiled at the redness of her ears and the flush of her cheeks.

  “What? ((Cat)) got your tongue?”

  She frowned, awash in a memory not hers and a word not possible. Maire and smoke and bitter, bitter

  “What did you say?”

  “Kath, what’s wrong? You’ve barely spoken to me since I arrived in-system.”

  “It’s just…” The thought was lost somewhere between wind and the long fall down.

  “If it’s about the lumbers, I’ve told you. They won’t feel any pain. We need to do this. It’ll all be over in—”

  “It’s not that. It’s not just that. I mean…”

  She unlocked fingers and wrapped her arms around him. He pulled, squeezed, noting her height, the tickle of her hair in the scattering wind, and the scent of

  In the distance, he saw the first harvest vessels begin to chase a small school of the enormous trees. Flash and snare, the screaming of wood, the foul defensive odor of burning and something intensely sweeter than sugar could ever be. She jumped in his grasp at the screams, and he pulled her closer.

  The harvest continued.

  Just a taste at first, a few hundred lumbers. They took the screaming specimens into orbit, held them in dissection freighters, took them apart and looked inside for that shimmer, that echo.

  They found it in the tricarboxylic acid cycle, mitochondria resonating with an energy, a metal, a something they couldn’t explain. They took more samples.

  The machines were confused. Concerned.

  A breakthrough: isolation of a limited flux passage, buried deep within the pattern, teased forward and brought to the rippling surface. Vacuole inversion. They could ride on poisons. Liquid space travel became not a dream but a soon-to-be-realization.

  Planet One sent orders.

  Weeks, months and

  the air burned with cold above the lumber plains on the night that she’d been so convincing. Winter had arrived in the hemisphere. The embryo forests stood snow covered in their first hibernation, sleeping through the frigid night until a spring that wouldn’t arrive. The platform didn’t offer much protection against the wind.

  It wasn’t dancing, and it wasn’t singing, but the flora hovered in formation below them, basking in the phosphorescent hydrostatic mist of the mid-atmosphere. The canyons echoed with their midnight song.

  Berlin wrapped his arms around Kath, hands clasped in front in a bundle of their intertwined fingers. Squeeze. Sniffle and one hand went to her face as demure form shook with sob and fear. In moonslight, twin tracks on windburned cheeks: just two tears, but they were two too many.

  “They’ll all be harvested.”

  “Analysis was conclusive. We can isolate the flux ability.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because they can. And they don’t want anyone else to figure it out.”

  “So that’s it? They take a few lumbers for sampling, isolate the tech, and kill the rest?”

  “That’s the way we work.”

  “No.” She turned around in his arms. Gray eyes swallowed by black pupils. “That’s the way they work.”

  “I can’t—”

  “You can’t. But we can.”

  She slipped from his grasp, walked to the other side of the floater, leaned precariously over the edge. The vehicle swayed in the wake of a forest passing above them. Berlin walked to join her.

  “We?”

  Kath hesitated, cleared her throat. “You don’t have to know about this.”

  “Do you think I’d—”

  “No.” She squeezed his hand, let go. “But they’d kill you if they knew about it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve met someone.”

  Berlin stood in a silence only that phrase can assemble.

  Kath remembered her indiscretion, stumbled through clarification. “There’s a woman who can help.”

  “Help what?”

  “She comes from the outer. Came in months ago on a transport. Just something about her…”

  “Who?”

  “She knows what to do. To make it right.”

  “Kath—”

  “She’s not like us.”

  “If you’re talking about—”

  “She wants to help. Not just this planet. She can make it right again.”

  “Make what right?”

  Kath’s hands balled to fists at her side. “The last war.. Nothing’s been the same since. Planets in slavery, One ruled by machines and nears. Gods dropped into the slumber. Nothing’s right anymore.”

  “We had to fight that war.”

  “But we didn’t have to become this.” Her fingertips traced the insignia on her chest, moved to her temple, where the metallish uplink writhed under her skin. “We didn’t have to give up our—

  “It was for the best.”

  “Whose best?”

  “Our best. It had to be done.”

  “We’re killing the system! The stars can’t support us anymore. The energy load alone between the two—”

  “That’s why we need the lumbers. Deep galactic survey missions, colonization hives—”

  “We have all that we need right here. We’ve just forgotten how to live within our means.”

  “We can’t turn back now. We’re pushing the saturation mark as—”

  “We don’t have to be pushing the saturation mark.”

  Berlin felt the throb of the comm uplink, but kept it static. “You can’t be talking about—”

  “Planet One alone uses eighty percent of the system resources.”

  He said nothing.

  “A lot of bad people on Planet One.”

  “Not all.”

  “They started the war.”

  “The war’s over.”

  “It’s not over. Not yet.”

  He’d never heard her talk like this: such determination. Passion. He never suspected that she felt so strongly about the civil war that had split the binary system a decade before.

  “If we take out One, we solve everything. Decentralize the machines’ power. Make room for real people again.”

  She reached out. His response was uncertain, but he did hold her hand.

  “And you know some
one who can do this?”

  “A woman from the outer, where the planets still burn. She says she can kill the machines.”

  “And her name?”

  “Maire

  shook from the release of the shiver, stilled. The headless form in front of her fell to the floor in a splash of destabilized proteins.

  The gun an extension of her arm, she turned, slowly enough to stir a ripple of widening eyes and furrowing brows in the circle of people before her weapon.

  “I’ll ask again. Who can give me a ride into the Drift?”

  A jagged chuckle from behind was the only response to her inquiry. Its distance from perceived origin to her ears spoke of safety, but the whisper behind her eyes still warned her to be wary of a drawn weapon. Weapon and head first, body trailing not far behind, she met the source of laughter with a sharp inhalation and her firing finger poised on her shiver gun’s trigger.

  “You’re already in the Drift, woman. Come on, sit down.” His hands waved off the concern of onlookers. Business returned to that particular brand of normal that only the edge of Black thrived upon.

  He wasn’t short, but short enough, and he wasn’t fat, but fat enough. He leaned forward in his chair and poured another steaming cup of fermented protein gruel for himself. Tilting it toward Maire, he wordlessly offered and she wordlessly refused with the wrinkling of her nose bridge and the downturn of her lips.

  “You’re looking for something, this far out. What is it?”

  His enormous brow sloped down into a hooked nose. Underneath, two black eyes blinked away drunkenness and crawled over her body, darting imagined tonguetips over erectile tissues. A badly repaired cleft palette barely drew attention away from the ledge of his underbite. His voice reflected more than simple physical impairments.

  “Speak to me, woman. I’ve saved your life by inviting you to my table. You stink of sex, of women. Blood and fear, rage. You’re desperate for something out here, looking for something, and I’m the man who can lead you home.”

  There were no machines on this vessel, at least none of the thinking machines from the last war that now held the inner planets of the system in a death grip. Her thoughts flashed to Kath and the trees, Michael and the

  “You’re a mercenary?”

  “A trivial term at best.” He sipped from his meaty cup. “An appropriate term at worst.”

  “I need a ship, and a team of—”

  “Slow down, woman.” Black beads surveyed the mess interior. “You can’t just come to my home, kill a member of my crew and expect service immediately. First I have to get to know you.”

  Her gaze was the empty that encompasses all of fury.

  “I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions, and I want them answered immediately.”

  “And if I—”

  “If you refuse, I’ll have my troops space you into Seychelles. Not a nice way to die.”

  Eyes dimmed.

  “What’s your name?”

  She placed her shiver on the tabletop and thumbed the echo chamber release.

  “Maire.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Seychelles Edge, two-seventy under.”

  “A local girl!” He grinned through teeth that were somewhat there, mostly broken. “But you’ve been gone a while, haven’t you?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Fantastic.” Another sip, his eyes still gouging into hers, and now a playful flash. “So that’s where your taste for flesh came from. Your entire family? Friends? Did you have to eat your children, or did you escape before—”

  Her bared teeth and a barely-audible hiss cut him off.

  “Poor girl. You stink of inner worlds. Why’d you come back?”

  “Business.”

  “Yes, business. You need a ship, and troops. And you’re heading deep into the Drift, looking for something. Sounds like standard fees are in order.” He pulled a data panel from a pocket at his side, placed it on the table. His fingertip traced over schematics. “We can work together.”

  “This isn’t your usual fuck-and-run. I’ll need the best vessel you have, your strongest troops, your—”

  “Tall order from a stranger.”

  Her eyes scanned the ceiling, fell back to meet his. “I can see you fought in the wars.” She tapped her temple, indicating the regiment brand not gracefully gracing his own. “And this vessel,” she waved around them, more indicating the raucous crowd drinking goofy gravy, smoking the copper from old wires, and savagely fucking in the darkened corners of the mess than the superstructure of the gutted ship itself, “is an Inner Worlds destroyer from the machine conflicts.”

  “Your point?”

  “You hate the machines. I’ve not seen a single thinker since I arrived, save that glorified abacus with which you’re about to take my order.”

  His frown, a constant until now, explored deeper definitions of itself.

  “There’s something out there in the Drift right now. I need to go get it.”

  “And why’s this ‘something’ so important to you?”

  “It’ll be important to you, too.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because when I have it, we’ll use it to kill all the machines forever.”

  He smiled.

  Back arched, she swung down through the cockpit tube, her grasp on the ladder releasing when she felt the not-unpleasant suck of the vacuum chair on her buttocks and thighs. She adjusted her robe to allow a better grip.

  “You don’t have to wear that here, you know.”

  Cork had paused long enough from his startup routine of toggling switches and locking interface ports to his wrists and eyes to crawl his vision over her drab-draped form. His tongues absently explored the corners of his mouth.

  “I get cold.”

  “Right.”

  She wondered how the mercenary had managed to squeeze through the access tube into his nest. Rolls of hairy flesh poured over his pilot chair, pulsating to the suction. His breasts dwarfed her own. Above, his cardiac shield heaved for breath. She checked and double-checked the enclosure on her garment.

  “Comfy?”

  “I guess.”

  “Okay. I’ll lock you into waste systems—”

  “No.” She couldn’t take the risk of slaving into the ship if the urethral, vaginal, and anal links were fully aware biosensors. Cork would find out in an instant that she wasn’t exactly normal anymore. “I can hold it.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Suit yourself.” His hand waved over the dashpanel. He grunted as his body loosed to the ship’s probing and gave a satisfied exhalation. “You can clean up the mess yourself if we hit rough water. And shitting on my boat costs double.”

  The bulbous drives forward and above the cockpit began the resonance cycle. Maire felt the vessel shudder and jerk against the docking grips.

  Tickle.

  She studied the panel, the levels, the systems. “What’s your mix?”

  “Dark, seventy over.”

  “How’s she run?”

  “She gets by.” Cork patted the viewshield affectionately.

  “Try boosting the dark level to seventy-two five. It’ll compensate for outside interference from resident dark streaks as we get farther out.”

  Frown. “Ever sailed the Seychelles, woman?”

  “Just trust me.”

  “Fine.” He bumped up the level of dark matter in the shred drive to 72.5%. The vessel immediately calmed, the drives above them shivering steadily instead of randomly. “Well, shit. You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

  “I try.”

  The shred peeled away from the belly of Cork’s destroyer and fell into the black endless of Seychelles, the jungles of empty, the machinery of night. Maire felt the ratcheting of the mercenary sleepers as the pods fell into place in the chain of the vehicle. Snaking through the debris of ancient and [recent] wars, the shred spermed around the hulks of abandoned warships, metal worlds whose interiors had been torn into the
suck and cold. Occasional freeze-dried soldiers sparked and ceased before the forward energy sweeper.

  “How long’ve they been asleep?”

  Cork’s fingers traced over the biologics readings. “Brand new batch. Twenty, thirty years.”

  “Good.”

  “What’s it matter?”

  She shrugged. “I prefer fresh meat.”

  His eyes performed unmentionables. “I bet you do.”

  The passage through the vessel graveyard was uneventful. Maire froze images as Cork’s ship increased speed: the shell of a destroyer, a planetship scuttled and taken apart for spares, smaller shreds transporting reclamation teams through the complex of spinning metal and hollowed asteroids.

  Cork yawned.

  He caught Maire’s glimpse and tossed it back.

  “You’re different.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Exactly.” He wagged his tongue from his mouth, the tips circling and rubbing together. “Your voice is different. Flat.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s alright. I’m different, too.” He wiped saliva from the badly repaired cleft on his lip. “But you…There’s something wrong with you.”

  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.”