by Matt Forbeck
Looking out the window, she saw yet another transport lifting off in the distance. She knew that she and Grace could have made it there, but they had no money to pay for tickets. Even in the best of times offworld travel was expensive, but on days like this tickets wouldn’t be available at any price.
She could have taken one of Nathan’s rifles from his locker under their bed. The top of the building would be the perfect vantage point to snipe at the oncoming hordes as they marched up the streets like a growing tide of dead flesh.
But she had Grace to think about.
Adelaide might—might—have been willing to subject herself to those terrors, to fight bravely against the mutants until they tore the last breath from her chest, probably along with her heart. But she couldn’t bear to think of Grace’s last moments being so filled with fright.
She put another pill into the cup and ground down on it with the spoon until it cracked and then was crushed. Then another and another and another, until the entire bottle was gone.
What would Nathan think of her? she wondered. If the Brotherhood was right, if there was an afterlife in which they might meet, would he accuse her of cowardice or applaud her bravery? This was the hardest thing she had ever done, and she kept having to wipe away her tears so she could see to do her awful work.
According to the Brotherhood, of course, suicides went to hell, and those who murdered their children deserved no less, even if they meant to save the innocent from a fate far worse than death. The Cardinal’s view of the world had no room for such shades of gray. There was good, and there was evil, and the line between them was razor thin.
Where would Nathan go upon his death? If he was dead, that was. Mitch’s words still echoed in her head, telling her to give up such silly notions. But the images from her dreams were too powerful, too real for her to ignore.
In them, she saw Nathan hovering near death’s door, bleeding from a dozen fatal wounds. Instead of crimson, though, he bled a tarry black. The mutants, which she could see too, tortured him with scalpels and syringes, cutting and poking him, violating him with their blades. He screamed and screamed, and when he finally stopped, he coughed up the same black stuff she saw flowing through his darkened veins.
Every time Adelaide closed her eyes, the dreams came back to her. She hadn’t slept for more than a few minutes at a time in the past three days. She’d started to hear Nathan’s screams while awake—or so it seemed. They echoed in her ears, and from them she could find no escape.
Having finished her work with the pills, Adelaide pulled a bottle of milk from the apartment’s small refrigerator and poured it into the cup. Her fingers shook as she did, and she had to hold the bottle with both hands to keep it steady. She filled the cup nearly to the top and then put the bottle aside on the counter, not bothering to recap it and put it away.
She used the spoon to stir the milk, mixing in the pills. Soon the mixture seemed ready, and she brought it to her nose to sniff it. It smelled bitter, so she added a spoonful of sugar to blunt that terrible edge.
Grace walked into the room then. Adelaide had told her they were about to leave on a trip to go see her daddy. The girl had squealed with excitement and gone to put on her best dress.
Seeing her daughter standing there—so sweet and beautiful and full of life as she twirled about in her pink dress, making the skirt flare—Adelaide nearly lost her nerve. She’d spent the girl’s entire life trying to protect her. How could she end it by her own hand?
You are protecting her, Adelaide told herself. She couldn’t let Nathan’s fate befall their little girl. She knew that Nathan would have done the same thing for her, and that thought offered her some cold comfort.
“Look at you,” Adelaide said. She wiped the last remnants of tears from her face and steeled herself for this. If she meant to make Grace’s last moments happy ones, it wouldn’t do for the girl to see her mother cry.
Adelaide stood before her daughter and brushed her beautiful hair from her face. In many ways the two were best friends. They spent most of their days in the apartment, sealed away from the troubles of the rest of the world, with only each other for company. That was the way they both liked it best.
Nathan had wanted it that way too. When they’d moved into the place, just after Grace had been born, it had been a place full of hope, somewhere they could store and build their dreams. Now it housed only her nightmares.
“It’s perfect,” Nathan had said on their first night in the place, as he held Adelaide in his arms.
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever known.”
“That’s why it’s perfect.”
Adelaide had been born on Luna—practically in the shadow of the Sacred Dome—the child of freelancers, people who lived outside the shelter of the megacorps and owed them no allegiance. She had met Nathan when he’d been stationed there.
She’d been working as a nurse in a private hospital. He’d carried Mitch into the ER. They’d been in a running fire-fight with a squad of Bauhaus Blitzers, and Mitch had taken a bullet in his shoulder.
“You should see the other guys,” Mitch had said, laughing right up until she’d started to pry out the bullet.
The man she’d seen today, who’d come to tell her of her husband’s death, seemed nothing like the Mitch she’d known back on Luna. In those days, he’d had, if not a purpose, a sparkle in his eyes, one that she’d once found irresistible. Then, of course, it had all gone sour, and she’d seen precious little of him since, so little that she’d fallen hard for his more stable friend and married him instead.
Despite their breakup, Mitch had always been there for Nathan, both on the battlefield and in the barroom. He’d been Nathan’s best man at their marriage, and he’d been happy for them both, or so it had seemed.
Adelaide had never been religious. Her parents had studiously avoided becoming enmeshed with the Brotherhood, a tricky feat on Luna, which the Cardinal practically owned. Looking at her daughter now, though, she couldn’t help but thank God for bringing Nathan to her and this darling girl to them both.
“You are such a pretty girl.” Adelaide knew she told her daughter this several times a day, but it grew truer with every hour. Just when she thought she couldn’t possibly love the girl any more than she already did, Grace would find a way into her heart again and make it stretch even farther.
Grace smiled at her mother, showing all her teeth. “Is it time yet?”
The girl was so eager that she could barely contain herself. Her legs and fingers fidgeted every second. She hadn’t been this excited since her last birthday.
“Almost,” Adelaide said. She stood up and looked at the cup sitting on the counter where she’d left it, then glanced at the clock.
Should she do this damned thing now, before the mutants got too close? Or should she try to treasure every precious moment with her little girl and risk having her plans for a peaceful end foiled? She looked at Grace again and didn’t know how much longer she could go without breaking down in front of her.
Better to do it soon. She reached over and picked up Grace’s hat and handed it to her. Then she went to take the flowered cups and the merciful murders they contained.
As Adelaide went to the counter, she heard someone walking up the outside hall. With most of the rest of the tenants having evacuated the place already, she wondered who it might be. She’d been dreading such a noise for days, ever since she’d last heard from Nathan. She’d had no idea that Capitol would send Mitch to bring her the bad news.
Was it more humane to hear about her husband’s death from a friend? Or would it have been better to have had some unknown officer bring her the details of Nathan’s doom?
She’d wanted to fall into Mitch’s arms, to let him hold her as the grief took her and wracked her with sobs, but she’d not let herself. Innocent as it would have been and as much as she needed it, it would have felt like cheating on Nathan, and that thought was more terrible to her than having to bear all the rest on he
r own.
The sound in the hall mystified her. For an instant she froze, thinking it had to be the mutants. But such creatures wouldn’t move so softly, would they?
As Adelaide was about to pick up the cups, she noticed a pill on the floor. It must have fallen from the table as she’d crushed the others. She knelt down and picked it up, deciding that she would swallow it with her drink to make sure the poison did its job.
Then a sound from the door made her head turn. She saw an envelope slip through the mail slot and flop down on the floor.
The postman had run off, and the mail hadn’t come for over a week. Suspicious of a trap, Adelaide crept over to the door and looked down at the envelope. It was long and white, and it had two words stamped on it in black block letters. They were the two most amazing words in Adelaide’s life since Nathan had said “I do.”
They read: EVACUATION PASS.
Adelaide snatched up the envelope and clutched it to her for a moment. Then she opened it and pulled out two tickets bearing the Imperial Skyways stamp. Across the top of each, she read the words ONE WAY.
Adelaide put her hand to her mouth and finally began to cry. All the grief and everything else she’d kept bottled inside for fear of crumbling in front of her daughter came streaming out, soaking her face in tears. She had no idea how long she was there before Grace came to check on her.
“Mommy?”
The little girl stood near the threshold, staring up at her mother with uncertain eyes. Clearly she needed to know what could be so wrong with the adult around whom her life revolved.
Adelaide turned around and scooped Grace up into a tight embrace. She held on to her so hard for a moment that she had to peel herself away to make sure the girl could breathe.
Grace brushed away Adelaide’s hair so she could look into her mother’s eyes. Adelaide forced a smile at her through the tears, then realized that the smile wasn’t fake at all.
“Guess what,” she said to her daughter. “We get to go on a rocket.”
21
It felt good to be back in the monastery, even if only for a while. Brother Samuel knew, though, that his stay there would be all too short. He’d finally gotten his team together, but they were a mess, a collection of individuals.
In fact, they were the farthest thing from a team in anything but name. Hailing from four different corporations, each of which had its own philosophy and fighting style, they were used to working against one another, trying to kill each other. Now he would have to meld them into a unit on the fly. Every moment they wasted meant more people dead, added to the Enemy’s forces. They had to move soon.
The soldiers sat in the pews of the abbey’s church before him, assembled like the professionals they were. They looked straight ahead, each of them having already sized up the room and the people in it.
They were still short one man, but the time had come to begin. Standing at the altar, Samuel spoke, assuming the role of teacher that fell so naturally to him. All eyes in the room moved toward him.
“The Chronicles foretell the release of the Enemy, the ruin of our world, and the final days of this age. But they also prophesy the survival of man—that Neachdainn the Deliverer shall walk reborn among us and redeem us from destruction.”
The door in the back of the chamber slammed open, and Mitch Hunter sauntered in, a duffel bag over his shoulder.
Samuel breathed a silent sigh of relief. He had grown tired of waiting for Hunter and had begun this briefing without him. He’d begun to wonder if the man would bother showing up at all, and he didn’t have the time or resources to spend chasing him to ground.
None of the others had absconded offworld with the tickets Samuel had given them. Captain MacGuire, in fact, had refused them entirely. It had been a matter of honor for him to not accept payment for saving humanity. We should be saving men like him, Samuel thought, not sending him to hell.
He’d known it had been a risk to offer such things to dangerous people with only their ethics to keep them from running off with their precious fees, but he’d chosen these people not just for their ability as warriors but also for their loyalty to humanity. He suspected that the trials they would face might require more than bullets to solve, and he wanted to make sure he had the right sort of people at his back when he needed them.
Despite being late, by showing up Hunter had proved himself to be just such a person.
Hunter surveyed the others as he walked in. Something passed between him and the oberleutnant from Bauhaus, Max Steiner. Samuel couldn’t identify it for sure, but these men knew each other, and not in a kind way.
Despite that, Hunter ignored the Cog and walked over to sit down next to his friend Barrera.
“How’s the leg?” Hunter asked his fellow Capitol soldier.
“It’s good.” Barrera almost seemed embarrassed at the question. To cover this, he took another chomp out of the apple he’d been eating.
Samuel cleared his throat and resumed, not bothering to start over for Hunter.
“It is in the service of this prophecy that we are now irrevocably bound. You are no longer fighting for profit. You are fighting for the survival of Man itself. Brother?”
Brother Fredrik, the head of the monastery’s Fourth Directorate—the Administration—stepped forward to speak. Although Fredrik was an intelligent soul, he was unused to having to speak with people and nervous about handling such an important briefing. He pushed his spectacles back on his nose before he spoke.
“Six weeks ago, in an artillery exchange between Capitol and Bauhaus, the Great Seal created after Neachdainn defeated the mutants the first time was broken open, and the Machine beneath it was activated once again.”
Barrera nudged Hunter and nodded at Steiner. “There’s your friend,” he said.
Samuel didn’t know just what kind of history might exist between Hunter and Steiner, but he hoped they would be able to put it behind them. Most of the soldiers in the room had fought against each other, if not personally, then at least on opposite sides of a battle. If humanity was to survive, they would have to look past such petty concerns to the danger that threatened to kill them all.
Fredrik continued, showing no sign he’d noticed the exchange. “In the ruins of the Imperial city of Canaan, catacombs lead to tunnels to the Machine. You will travel along these tunnels, find the Machine, and blow it up.”
The soldiers stared at Fredrik patiently. None of them wanted to be the first to speak to the monk, each of them hoping he would continue of his own accord. Samuel considered prodding the monk, but he wanted to see which of his soldiers would force the issue first.
Captain MacGuire spoke, asking the question in his understated Imperial manner and accent. “Is that all? We’ll just blow it up?”
Brother Fredrik nodded emphatically, then added something he’d forgotten to mention before. “We have a device.”
“Device,” said MacGuire. It was not a question but a prompt.
Fredrik meant the graven disk surrounded by swords, Samuel knew, the one that had sat beneath the Book of Law in the chamber high above the monastery’s chapel. Samuel had always regarded the device with a mixture of attraction and fear. The idea of using it to destroy the Enemy appealed to him, but he’d always hoped that such a duty would fall to another brother, not to him.
He had not been so fortunate. Still, this was a burden he was ready to bear.
“From the first Brotherhood battle,” Fredrik said about the device. “Ripped from the Machine.”
MacGuire pursed his lips. “So it’s a bomb.”
Fredrik did not flinch. His years in the monastery had robbed him of any sense of irony. “We don’t know, but we think it is.”
Steiner scoffed at this. “You think so?”
Fredrik hastened to explain his theory. He’d studied the contents of the vault ever since he’d arrived at the monastery a dozen years ago. No one knew it better than he, but his knowledge had huge gaps in it.
“The Ch
ronicles have a set of ancient schematics, not an instruction manual. The device is as ancient as Neachdainn himself.”
MacGuire ignored the implication that he could not understand the device and focused on the details. At forty-something years old, he was by far the most experienced of this group of veterans. You didn’t survive to such an age in this line of work without being both skilled and cautious, Samuel knew, and it made him value the man’s contributions that much more.
“How safe is it to transport?” MacGuire asked.
“Does that matter, MacGuire?” Steiner did not bother to keep the disdain from his voice.
MacGuire arched an imperious eyebrow at the oberleutnant. “You may call me ‘Captain,’ Steiner, and yes. Bombs don’t get stable when they get old. I want to know we can move it without blowing up.”
Brother Fredrik piped up with the answer before the bickering between the two men got worse. Samuel had expected some friction like this, but he appreciated the monk’s efforts.
“It’s a two-stage device,” Fredrik said. “You carry the trigger independently. Without it, the bomb’s just dead weight. You then turn it with a key, which we don’t have.”
Fredrik held up a page from the Chronicles. It showed a long rod with a half circle cut out of its tip. “It looks like this, and it should be in the Machine.”
“What if we can’t find it?” asked Duval.
Fredrik became even more serious. “Then the mission will fail, and every man, woman, and child on this planet will die.”
The soldiers all fell silent as they absorbed the gravity of the monk’s words. The big man from Capitol spoke up then.
“Why not just drop it down that big fucking hole?” Barrera said.
Steiner nodded, impressed with the directness of the question.
Brother Fredrik grimaced as he tried to explain. “The Machine is ten thousand years old. It’s survived earthquakes, wars, plate tectonics, and worse.”