by Chad Huskins
They drifted among a field of superheated beams, bundles of fleshy wires, and shorn hull plating. They were just one more piece of debris, with small bits orbiting them, while they in turn orbited a huge chunk of some platform. Two noncombative drones moved about them, alighting on this piece of debris and that piece, attempting some kind of repair, as though completely unaware that the end had finally come for their precious ship.
Lyokh was spinning, which meant Takirovanen spun with him. Every few seconds, the planet came into view. Besides a few torrential-looking storm clouds, Deirdra appeared to be at peace, a perfect jewel of life and harmony. He wondered if he’d done enough to save it. He wondered how much damage the Brood and the battle had done to it.
It was worth it, he decided. All of it.
The realization surprised him, mostly because Lyokh had come to believe that all hope was lost. He’d fought through the Fall of Man out of hopelessness, out of hatred, out of a deathlust, because he’d come to believe that that was all there was left to fight for. But now, as he watched many pieces of debris falling below him, turning to ribbons of flame upon entering atmosphere, he felt content knowing that he would soon be one of those meteorites. He would incinerate, him and his STACsuit, both torn apart and becoming a part of this jewel of a world.
Takirovanen was trying to talk to him, but his voice wasn’t coming through clear. Lyokh’s helmet’s transmitter seemed to have suffered some terrible damage. Thin white gases were venting from the cracks in Lyokh’s suit. Not long now. Finally. Finally…
A white light washed over them from somewhere, then vanished. Lyokh looked around for the source. Didn’t see it. They orbited the huge chunk of debris, bumping up against a smashed tower of some kind, wires wriggling in the void like tentacles, reaching for them. On the chance it was alive, Lyokh pointed his feet at it and pushed away. He didn’t want to die by the Brood—if he was going to die, he wanted it to be from any other cause. He wasn’t going to lose to them now.
The light flashed across his visor again, but was lost as they continued to orbit the debris.
They moved amid the detritus like tiny flecks of dirt amid a shovelful of rock. As he faded in and out, Lyokh was aware, on some level, of the larger pieces being pulled away from the planet, towed by tractor beams from colossal alien ships.
The cleanup crew, he thought.
But they would only be concerned about the larger pieces, the chunks that could wipe out civilizations, world-enders, they wouldn’t be coming for him. From their distance, he must seem another speck, and even if they could make him and Takirovanen out, they probably figured the two soldiers for dead.
And so they tumbled through space.
Here came another sunrise. Lyokh stared into Veronica, and he wondered about her age, about all she had seen. Just like Blue Father and White Mother, between and around which the Planet of the Wyrms had sailed in figure-eight orbit, Veronica had seen the power of her light fuel countless generations of beings on a flimsy, delicately balanced world, where all civilization amounted to a thin film of life scattered across the surface.
I’m the traveler now.
Lyokh’s mind was bouncing around. He suddenly recalled the painting that Kalder had showed him of the lone starship adrift in space. Kalder had asked him to find meaning in the painting, and to discern the artist’s intent.
We’re all the traveler. All of us. The artist invited us into his painting, into his story, to rediscover this truth every time we looked. Large and small, planet and moon, star and galaxy, organic and inorganic. We are all travelers.
The light flashed again in his visor, this time much brighter. He looked around, and saw a shuttle hovering nearby. Not a Nova, and not a ’rake or a ’screamer. It was something else. A watchacallit…an exploratory vessel. No weapons. One of those Series Sevens. What was it doing out here?
The searchlight switched off and all that was left were the running lights. Lyokh looked through the plasteel window of the cockpit that hovered right in front of him. He saw a dog on the other side of it, propped up on a control panel, barking its head off. Looked like a Vac Hound. He was pretty sure he was dreaming.
LYOKH SAT ON the edge of the bed, naked accept for the body-glove. His STACsuit was peeled off and sat slumped desultorily in the corner. He breathed in the familiar ozone-redolent air of a ship, and sipped a nutrient soup, looking across at a woman and her two-year-old daughter. The woman had changed since he’d last seen her, her short red hair had become a long flowing river of flame. Crow’s feet around her eyes…Those weren’t there before, at least not as pronounced. Beside her, resting duetifully at her feet, was her Vac Hound.
Takirovanen moaned in his sleep. Lyokh looked over at him. His friend was lying down, dealing with a concussion, something had hit his head hard as they had been spinning around out there.
Lyokh took another sip of the soup, feeling his final suspicions about all this being a dream slipping away. He looked up at the woman, then down at the little girl. She had her mother’s red hair and green eyes, but her skin was darker, and her cheekbones rounder. Doubtless, her father’s genetic contribution. He smiled at the girl, and she responded by hiding behind her mother’s leg.
He took a final sip, and set the cup down next to him. “How long?”
“Two years, nine months,” Moira said. “By Earth Cradle reckoning.”
Lyokh nodded. He was used to feeling as though time flew by him, and used to the idea of losing days and weeks to the constant grind of war, but nothing like this.
He looked down at the dog. “How the hell did you find us?”
Moira said, “Vac Hounds were bred for search-and-rescue in space. Nobody knows how they do it, really, but they can distinguish humans—and only humans—from everything else in a field of debris.”
“Still Man’s best friend,” Lyokh said, with a halfhearted chuckle.
“They are.”
Lyokh rubbed his eyes. “So what’s going on? Who won? Who lost? Where do things sit?”
Moira looked down at the girl hiding behind her, bent down to whisper something in her ear, and then the girl left with the Vac Hound. Then Moira leaned against a bulkhead, crossed her arms, and sighed. “Where things sit depend greatly on who you ask. There’s…chaos. Celebrations, sure, because technically the Brood have been defeated for the first time ever, but still, everything’s kind of up in the air. The Faedyans are claiming first-salvage rights, the Isoshi are not too happy about that. Taka-Renault’s a human-run system, so they’re letting us call the shots. Mostly. Kalder has arranged for several of the Corporate Arm’s senior officials to oversee the Faedyan cleanup endeavor from the s’Dar Watchtower, which is quickly being mapped out and occupied—everyone wants to see if there’s some way humans can steer the Watchtower—but he’s trying to keep xeno interference at a minimum because…well, it’s Kalder.”
“Right. Xenophobe.”
“He’s getting married soon,” Moira said, smiling and shaking her head ruefully. When Lyokh looked at her quizzically, her smile turned into a laugh. “Yeah, that’s right. Some duchess from Deirdra. It’s all part of an agreement that happened early in the war. The woman’s father had a surplus of advanced weapons he’d kept secret for a long time, and their customs are very family-oriented, the ancient ways of doing business only with family. So, he had to marry his daughter to someone lofty…” She trailed off. “Anyways, it’s been really, really strange out here.”
“It was strange in there, too,” Lyokh said.
“I’m sure it was,” Moira replied. “If it comes as any consolation, all of the Novas you helped escape made it out, as did Prophet and Malphos. High Priestess Zane has recovered, and been named one of the delegates for the Homo Sapiens Eternaes.” Lyokh gave her another weird look. “Sorry, there’s been a reformation of government. The Republic is officially dissolved, a new constitution drawn up by Kalder takes effect in a month, to ‘restore’ more sacred values of old.”
; “How did Kalder manage that?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. His vision was a little fuzzy. “How did he get it past the Senate and the Two Consuls? And wouldn’t something like that have to be ratified by the Imperator? Did the Imperator return while we were—?”
“Kalder is Imperator.”
Lyokh looked up at her. “What?”
“The ceremony hasn’t happened yet, but it’s already been decided. His popularity after this victory…I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t know that I’ve ever even heard of humanity being this unified. Harbingers are getting the shit kicked out of them in the streets everywhere. Widden is starting to become a new seat of government—Zane has promised Kalder an entire palace out in the middle of one of the largest virgin stretches of wilderness, just beyond Vastill, where a new Senate will be built. Monarch is being abandoned as we speak. Admiral Desh is coordinating it all from here.”
“Admiral Desh?” Lyokh slid off the bed and onto his feet. “Desh is admiral now, and Kalder’s…he’s going to be Imperator?”
General Quoden’s words suddenly haunted him. Welcome to the Fall of Man, where everyone is unfairly promoted.
Moira nodded. “There had been talk about an election for a while, a rumor to finally replace our missing leader. The frontrunner was a man named Pennick, who Kalder lent support to.”
“What happened to him?”
“Fell down a set of stairs. Died. I think Kalder probably arranged it but I can’t prove it.” She said it so matter-of-factly that Lyokh could tell she had come to terms with it a long time ago. “This whole war was part of his plan. I don’t know how he saw all the pieces ahead of time, and knew where everything would fall—”
“He’s had a lot of years to refine his skills at deception,” Lyokh said, starting to pace, slowly, testing out reality all over again. He looked at his STACsuit, piled in the far corner, along with his field sword and the Scroll. “Should’ve seen it,” he said.
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I could. ORB. Objectives, resources, and behaviors. We knew his resources, we saw his behaviors, we should’ve seen his objective.”
Moira shook her head. “It really doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done. Who knows, maybe it’ll all be for the best.”
Doubtful, Lyokh thought, and fumed some more.
From down the hall, he heard a child’s laugh.
He looked at Moira. “I see you took my advice.”
Moira looked at the floor and smiled. “Didn’t have much choice. Kalder tried to have me killed. It happened minutes after our last conversation, where you told me to look into the Crab Nebula. Remember that?”
“Yeah, I remember. It was just twelve hours ago for me.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right.” She snorted. “Anyway, I barely got away from his Trix bot in time, pushed for Deirdra, landed in a country called Zimbalka. A poor country, but the med bot that was with me carried me to the nearest hospital. I spent a couple months recuperating, watching the war from the surface, watching the Watchtower grow, and the World Serpent do its thing.”
Lyokh’s brow wrinkled. “World Serpent? What’s that?”
Moira’s eyebrows lifted. “You didn’t see it? Not even after you were flung out into space?”
“Can’t say I remember much about any of that.”
“It’s the thing that bit the worldship in half, and ate most of it.”
“What do you mean bit, ate?”
Moira waved her hands, and a holoprojector from the far wall spat out a menu. She shuffled through vid albums, and brought up footage taken from Deirdra’s surface and looking up at the sky, at a large dark mass that took up half of it, blocking sunlight. There were clouds between the person doing the recording and the undulating mass itself, indicating a scale far beyond Lyokh’s capability to comprehend.
“What is that?” he whispered.
“We don’t really know,” Moira said. “Word trickled through from different sources calling it the World Serpent. It had guns, weapons on its surface, which it fired at the worldship. Once the worldship’s shields came down it…just…” The vid showed a massive head, difficult to see behind the clouds, opening its jaws wide and biting down on the worldship in slow-motion. “It vanished almost immediately after it destroyed the worldship.”
“Who took this vid?”
“I did,” Moira said. “From an island called Quantalopos. I met my husband there.”
Lyokh tore his gaze away from the vid. He smiled. All talk of a thing large enough to devour a worldship was temporarily forgotten. This was the first piece of news he’d heard in a long time that made him surprised in a good way. It made him happy. “You’re married?”
“Was,” she said.
Lyokh’s smile faded.
“He’s dead now. Lots of problems down below, Sir Captain. Lots of debris falling, cataclysms, the works. Fallout clouds, dust storms, starvation. Jerrod—that was his name—he died just six weeks after Judy was born. Radiation from a piece of a broodling’s reactor core that fell into the shoreline about fifty miles away from where we lived. The radiation poisoned everything. Air, water, plant life, everything. We got out of there, but not in time for him. Cancer riddled him pretty badly. Judy, too, but hers was manageable.”
“Jesus. I was only gone a few hours.”
“Those few hours changed a lot for us, Sir Captain,” Moira said. Her eyes glistened with barely contained tears.
On instinct, Lyokh walked over to her and hugged her. He hadn’t hugged anyone that wasn’t a battle-brother or -sister in a long time. It felt strange. It felt good. It felt right. This kind of human contact was sorely missed in the Fall of Man. “I’m sorry,” he said honestly.
She hugged him back. “Thank you.”
They remained that way for a minute.
Moira came away sniffling. “I checked into it, by the way. Like you asked.”
“Check into what?”
“The Crab Nebula.”
Lyokh recalled the entire conversation with Artemis, the discussion they’d had about all the places where the Faedyans and Isoshi had claimed to have encountered wyrms in the past, and his spur-of-the-moment to decision to ask Moira to look into it for him. That had been in the embarkation bay, just hours ago for him. Almost three years for her. She’d barely survived attempted murder, escaped Kalder, found a man she loved, had a daughter, and researched the Crab Nebula based on his request, all while he’d gone on a twelve-hour mission.
“You bothered yourself on my account?” asked Lyokh.
“I didn’t just do it for you,” she said, sniffling and wiping her nose. “I, uh…I had my reasons. Before you left I’d looked into some things going on around the Perseus Arm, around the Tapir and Xang Systems. I got a lead from a guy named Thulm back on Asteroid Monarch,” she said. “It had to do with the World Serpent, what he called Magonogon.” She looked at him. “And I found something.”
“What?”
Moira bit her lower lip. “I can only show you. I didn’t record it, because I didn’t want to risk Kalder finding my shuttle and digging out the coordinates, or finding vids of it.”
Lyokh noticed her body language, the strangeness of her eyes. It was the look he saw in people who’d seen their first dead body, or who, after living a life on a space station, finally stepped onto the surface of a planet and stared up at a ceiling-less sky in wonderment, even fear. “Miss Holdengard, what did you find?”
“I’ll show you,” she said. “But I imagine you’ll want to make contact with your people first, your fellow Knights, Kalder, and the rest of—”
“Fuck all that, I’m through with soldiering for now. They probably all think we’re dead, anyway. Unless you told them otherwise?”
Moira shook her head.
“Good. Then show me.”
“It’s a long journey, Sir Captain,” she said. “It’ll take us weeks.”
“Then we’d better get moving. I want to see it. And call me Aejon.”<
br />
She nodded. “All right. Then you can call me Moira.”
They smiled at each other.
“I’m still Takirovanen,” grumbled the half-conscious man from his bed. “In case anyone was wondering.”
: SDFA Voice of Reason
His hands moved more steadily than they had in a while. The meditations had helped, as had the physical therapy. Julian had encouraged him to use regens, saying that he knew of a good supplier, but Kalder had given him a scalding that ensured the subject would never be brought up again. His reasons for natural aging were twofold—first and foremost, he was an unwavering Zeroist, and second, he had to set an example. If ninety-eight percent of the citizens outside of the military had no access to regens, then neither would the soon-to-be new Imperator. His suffering would be theirs. Together, they would endure dukkha. He thought that would please the Buddha man, enough so that it almost brought a smile to his lips. Almost.
Now he looked over the slinkplast forms, signing his name, or in most cases placing his thumbprint on them, and letting his imtech lenses record it. When he was done, he pushed them across the desk towards where Julian stood, and said, “Get these out with the next batch.”
“Yes, sir,” the assistant said, scooping them up. “You’ve got Desh waiting on the line.”
Kalder sighed and waved at his holotab sitting on the desk. Desh’s face, now clean-shaven but still wreathed in his defiant, unsailorly hair, materialized in front of him. “Boss man,” he said. “Thought you should know, there’s Ascendancy traffic about thirty AU away. Picked it up on long-range scanners. Reported it to PI, they seem to think the Machinists just came to see the aftermath of the biggest war anyone’s ever seen.”
“Will it be a problem in mobilizing away from Trevor’s Cluster?”
“Not at all. But there’s also a nest of pirates waiting beyond them, we think. Maybe they’re just hoping for a fight between us and the Ascendancy, and want to swoop in to pick up the scraps if we do. Also, a group of broodlings have attacked a star system called Kortos. Total annihilation of the people there. May be retaliation for what we did here. Just thought you should know. Oh! Also, Zane has just returned to Widden. Soon as she got there, she heard about the Machinist Ascendancy showing up here, and she’s mobilizing a fleet to attack them on her own.”