“What do you mean?”
Richter outstretched his hand. “I could destroy them.”
“No. You don’t know where you’d end up. You don’t know what would happen—”
“For ten years, each day of my life since I was pulled out of there, I’ve wanted to return. You have no idea…I know where to go. I know how to stop this. Don’t you see that one of us has to go? One of us has to end this.”
The shaking was becoming unbearable. So close…
West rushed at Richter. “I don’t—How? You could be killed. Don’t—”
Richter laughed, smiled a smile that in no way looked like a smile. “One of us has to begin this so that we can end their plan. If you only knew… You’re safer here, for now, but in time, you’ll come, too.”
“Come where? You can’t just go back in, Richter. You don’t know what’ll happen.”
“I do know. We’re all dead already. This isn’t living. I know what I have to do. I’ve known for years. They told me what I have to do.”
“Richter, don’t—”
Richter’s form suddenly illuminated the room with a silvery brilliance, and fire tore from his eyes into the orb. In a flash, he was gone, and the orb faded considerably, blackened.
A beam of nothingness, a pillar of phase energy tore from the orb, a vertical hole forming in the threads of existence, up, up through the chamber’s ceiling, up through the solid rock, through the atmosphere, through the void between the stars.
The four people remaining in the chamber put their hands to their heads, screaming in the waves of non-existence.
((michael, i detect a shadow drive on the planet surface.))
“What the—? That’s—Simon, take us down.”
A SHADOW ON THE PLANET SURFACE((?))
THE JUDAS—
REROUTE RESOURCES FROM NEXTWHEN TRANSIT, DOWNLOAD FORCES FOR JUDAS ENGAGEMENT…
SURFACE FORCES CONVERGING ON SHADOW POINT. REINFORCEMENTS DOWNLOADED, GENERATED.
THE HERETICS WILL SUFFER. THE VIRUS WILL BE ELIMINATED.
From above, a meager light shined down the circular hole cut through the rock, the metal. Richter was gone, and the orb was nearly black. Faint pulses of light from within were the only indication that it still lived.
West stood, unsure of his footing. “We have to get out of here, now!”
They bolted through the ship, hearing girders squeal, rocks grind. Thankfully, the elevator still worked.
Something had been triggered.
The earth threatened to tear itself apart.
“What’s this all about?”
“Well, David, we detected a Shadow drive emanation.”
“A Shadow drive?”
“A suppressed black hole. The power source of all Judas vessels.”
“Where?”
“In the mountains in the middle of your country.”
“A black hole?”
“Yes. A black hole.”
“In the mountains?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus—it’s Diablo.”
From the top of Diablo Peak, the four unknowing soldiers of the Judas watched the alien creatures converge upon them. From the east. And the west. And the north. And the south. The air was charged as the Enemy were generated in flashes of silver and white.
They were surrounded.
“This is it. No sequel. They win.” Hayes whispered as he watched the hordes of aliens rush toward the mountain. He put his arm around Flynn, and she pulled him close. She buried her face in the hollow of his neck, and he bent, his face pressed into her hair. He whispered something into her ear, and she looked up into his silver eyes.
“I love you too, Simon.” There were tears in her eyes to match his own.
They all drew closer together.
On the eastern horizon the dead sun gave its last light and faded to black. The Earth hurtled through space into the black hole. The moon, calmly traversing the night sky, was suddenly and viciously compressed into a long, thin strand of rock as it was pulled violently into the collapsed star. They flew through the night into the void of the unknown.
They stood in silence in the darkness.
Light from above, sudden, furious in its intensity, flashes of hellfire, startling, pierced the blackness that had settled over Diablo. The surface illuminated for scant seconds at a time, they saw the Enemy hordes in their mindless approach and the warped surface of the earth as the planet’s crust was pulled apart, great chunks of rock lifting from the planet and ripping themselves free from her hold forever.
Simon.
The longboat plummeted from the heavens with phase guns ablaze, tearing apart the lines of Enemy converging on the Shadow site. Each blast of phase energy was enough to disrupt the patterns of the Enemy it struck and erase them from their precious Pattern.
“Sweet Richter, there’s people down there!” Zero-Four ran to the airlock on the underside of the vessel. Jennings followed him.
Zero-Four opened the lock. The longboat descended slowly, weapons blazing, sending the Black to their hells with an almost casual ferocity.
((fifty feet.))
“It’s a spaceship!” West shouted over the din of the battle and the roar of the disintegrating planet. They all now stood shifted, ready to destroy the approaching alien hordes. The aliens flew at them. Each monster that drew near was burned alive and torn from this existence by light from above. But still they ran closer. More were generated by the mind-essence in flashes of heat and silver. Fifty feet. Forty feet. Thirty—
((twenty-five feet.))
“Get ready to help them aboard!”
Twenty feet. Fifteen. Hayes could see the featureless black faceplates of the aliens, the black armor—
And he was pulled up into the longboat.
((hovering at ten feet. surface is extremely unstable.))
Simon’s fury blazed at the endless onslaught of Enemy.
Jennings reached down, grabbed the shoulder of the young woman below him, and saw—
—PRESIDENT JENNINGS, SIR, BECAUSE OF THE EVIDENCE, THE BLOODY CLOTHING, NO RANSOM NOTE, WE MUST ASSUME THE WORST. OUR DEEP COVER AGENTS ARE QUESTIONING OUR INFORMANTS. BUT SHE’S BEEN GONE A MONTH, SIR. SHE’S GONE. WE SHOULD ASSUME THAT THE QUEBS GOT HER. SHE’S DEAD, SIR. PATRA’S DEAD. WE CAN’T KEEP SEARCHING FOR—
—“PATRA!?”
She had grabbed his arm and was pulling herself up when she heard her name. The voice was familiar. It was the voice of her
“DADDY!?”
she shouted and then she was in the ship and holding onto her father with all of her might. She sobbed with happiness, as did he.
Zero-Four wrestled West aboard the longboat as Hayes leaned out, took Flynn’s hand, pulled her upward.
The Enemy onslaught heightened. With an ear-splitting crack, a great rent formed in the Peak as the earth shook apart. The ground below them was a storm of light as the mind-essence generated countless Enemy. Simon was forced to shift the longboat to one side. As the vessel tilted, Flynn began to slip, and Hayes fell forward. Zero-Four leapt to grab his free hand.
The Enemy were on Flynn, struggling to climb up her into the longboat. Hayes groaned with exertion and his eyes locked with Flynn’s.
The longboat lifted fifty feet higher from the surface. Flynn, Hayes, and an Enemy warrior hung perilously from the vessel’s underside.
The alien reached back, preparing to silence Flynn’s screams forever. It painfully clung to her left leg. Where it made contact with her body, a silver web emerged, started to encompass her flesh.
Hayes was torn. With one hand he held on to Flynn; the other was clasped by the stranger from the vessel. He could do nothing to help her.
Flynn, screaming with agony, shifted her forearm and swept it downward, shattering the helmet and faceplate of the Enemy. Only her fingers touched the alien; its head was not taken off. Shards of armor erupted outwards in an explosion of black and silver slivers, shredding her lower back. She screamed, b
ore the pain and prepared to shift again.
She looked down.
Hayes was transfixed on the Enemy, eyes wide, filled with terror and fascination.
West gazed from above.
The cracked faceplate and helmet had fallen off, revealing the face of the alien.
A man stared up at them. A human.
Blonde. Silver eyes. An unsettling look of mindless determination and rapt hatred was innate on his face.
A human.
The soldiers of the Judas looked down upon a human.
The Enemy was humanity.
His face was illuminated with an unholy light as silver mesh of the web began to re-encompass it, covering the human visage with blackened alien metal.
Zero-Four extended his free hand and the Enemy’s human face became a mass of blood, teeth, and bone. The corpse released its grip on Flynn and fell to the ground into the midst of countless other Enemy. The silver tendrils weakened their grip on her lower body and fell lifelessly to earth.
Another fissure opened in the Peak. A great mass of rock rose into the air; a huge chunk that had comprised most of the Peak almost slammed into the underside of the longboat as it passed by, filling the air with dust and grit. Hayes looked down, blinked in disbelief as he saw the vessel that had been buried in the earth now partially exposed to the air. As the longboat struggled to maintain its position, he could see the now-dull black surface of the orb in the vessel beneath them.
Bathed in the Enemy’s blood and her own, mortally wounded, Flynn’s grip began to slip on Hayes’ hand. She exclaimed weakly, “Simon,” and Hayes struggled to tighten his grip.
Zero-Four’s heart stopped. He inhaled sharply.
Simon.
She was slipping.
“MAGGIE!” Simon Hayes shouted as her bloodied hand slipped free of his.
Heartbeat, and the screaming sound of a dying planet.
Inhalation.
Her eyes locked with his for an eternity, and he felt her touch in the space between heartbeats. She hung in the air, silver eyes searching his for help, mind reaching out and touching his with a calm and soothing reassurance. She hung in the air, and Simon could see how the furious wind blew her hair about her face, how that one unruly curl that he had had to brush out of her face so many times so that he could kiss her and kiss her waved in the wind as she slipped from his fingers into the space between life and death and heaven and hell. He felt the touch of her mind and it said the things he could not accept. Let me fall. Everything will be all right. Leave this place and live.
Heartbeat.
((maggie don’t leave me. i can’t do this without you.))
Living between heaven and hell, watching her fall.
Heartbeat.
Go, Simon.
Only ever really one story: a boy, a girl, and the end of the world.
Heartbeat, exhalation, silver eyes blink back tears of rage and terror.
She fell.
Hayes desperately looked at Zero-Four, who was still recovering from some unknown shock. Their hands were locked.
Hayes looked gravely and directly into Zero-Four’s gray eyes, so empty. Simon released his grip on Zero-Four’s hand. Zero-Four nodded.
Zero-Four let go.
Simon Hayes and Ember Magdalene Flynn fell into the scar in the earth, fell into destiny. The tumultuous surface of the planet closed upon them, and they were no more.
Zero-Four snapped himself from his reverie, stood emotionlessly. West reached over, grabbed his arm as Zero-Four walked by. Zero-Four tore from West’s grip, looked coldly and emptily into his eyes before continuing on. “Simon! Get us out of here!” A motion from Zero-Four’s hand and the bottom hatch closed. The longboat careened into the heavens to rendezvous with its fathership.
“You can’t just—” West’s eyes searched Zero-Four for some kind of encouragement.
“They’re dead. We have to leave.”
“But I saw you—”
Zero-Four slammed into West’s mind with his own. West was knocked to the matte metal floor, his face a canvas painted with terror. Zero-Four’s eyes blazed with metallic fury, and his eyebrows drew to an angry scowl. “What the fuck are you doing in this When? Are you part of Hannah’s little game?”
“I don’t know what—”
“What Program are you from? You aren’t from Seven. I’d recognize your pattern.”
“Listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re just—”
Zero-Four reached out with his mind and touched West’s. His frown abated and he looked over to Jennings, who was holding on to a creature that was not entirely human.
“He’s a Styx. He’s not a Judas. We made him. He’s one of my soldiers.”
Zero-Four looked confusedly from Jennings to West, and his gaze finally rested on the silver creature looking warily out from Jennings’ protective embrace. “And what is that?”
“That—She is my daughter.”
Zero-Four saw then the web within which he had been entangled, and as the futures now long dead began to merge together before him, he felt overcome with despair, dizzy with the timeshift that for a moment infiltrated his pattern. Jennings was dismayed when for an instant the image of Zero-Four was clouded with static. Zero-Four returned to normal before Jennings could react. The image was as crisp and clear as ever.
The longboat slammed into the docking fields and Simon enveloped the smaller vessel. Zero-Four shook his head, turned silently and went to the control chamber.
The earth tore itself apart.
Shiva rejoined Simon in space.
The Jennings family sat quietly together.
West was troubled, lost in his thoughts.
((my sensors indicated four humans on the surface. where are the other two?))
“They were—I don’t know, Simon. I don’t know.”
((i’d hoped that the shadow signature was maggie’s.))
“Me too, Simon.”
((is everything all right, michael?))
Zero-Four looked up, into the eyes of the nearly transparent, silver image that floated in the spherical expanse before him. A momentary flicker of interference clouded the image, which then returned to its former clarity. Standing like a phantom in the black of the control chamber, a perfect, somehow metallic image of the man he had just let fall into the crevasse in the dying earth was projected before him. Simon Hayes.
“No, Simon. It’s—I don’t know what’s going on.”
It’s falling apart. Our worlds are colliding. The Program is collapsing.
The vessel shook gently.
((the planet, michael. do you want to witness totality?))
“Not this time, old friend. Not this time.”
He retreated into his thoughts.
They watched from the viewscreens as the planet was torn apart in the fury of the black hole. Implosion and cessation, the process was complete. The Enemy had won another When. They turned from the image with tears wetting their faces. Everything they had known, everything they had loved, was gone.
Brave new world.
The planet fell upon itself, died.
Earth, planet of humanity. Planet of mankind.
Planet of the dead.
[course of action?]
((send a beacon to command. call for all available judas to converge upon next harvest when, coordinates to follow. the enemy’s been routed, and in this moment of their weakness, we have to strike. from all whens, from all alternities, from all of eternity, the judas must converge.))
[precise nextwhen coordinates have been calculated from extrapolation of enemy purpose contrail transit data.]
((good. transmit the coordinates to the fleet, and we’ll go join malachi.))
[affirmative.]
((preparing to disembark on nextwhen transit.))
“Understood, Simon. Another When, another war.” Zero-Four locked the hatch on the stasis chamber, felt the shift and the wash of phase space. He hoped in the instant before his
pattern was uploaded into the Whenstream that this time he would not dream.
A pause, a silence. A quiet but troubled sleep of aeons.
The warriors of the Judas faded from existence once more upon paths into damnation.
time of the damned
once upon a time
la la la!
within the black
the man who was Judas
screamed
and held on to
the last strands of
sanity
the vessel that was
Judas Simon
struggled to force
the memories of
her
from his soul
the Enemy sought their Purpose
the deception was
complete
and the
end times
began.
a white place, out of time.
“Incoming beacon.”
“Read it.”
“It’s encrypted for Commander Kilbourne.”
“Who sent it?”
“Mujahadin Malachi.”
“Patch it through to her immediately.”
It began.
Applause over the helmet speakers.
“I dub thee Anubis.”
From her position on the open docking ring of the Judas Lazarus II, Judas Commander Hannah Kilbourne tossed the bottle of champagne at the gunship below her.
End over end over end. Impact.
More applause.
“And with that, comrades, the newest class of Judas is ready for operation.”
Kilbourne looked around at the spectators. Hundreds? Thousands? The number changed daily. Hourly. Especially within this last engagement. So many had perished at the hands of the damned. So many sacrifices…
“Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Mujahadin.”
Roars of applause. Cheering.
Mujahadin. Soldiers of god.
The final hope.
It slept but did not sleep.
It was aware of the incoming projectile. It judged that it was harmless and let the champagne bottle shatter against the top surface of its port weapons nacelle.
So now it was a Judas.
With all of its mechanical intellect it sensed the urgency of the mission, the vast importance of success.
It did not fear.
It was not programmed to fear.
As only a machine can, it smiled inwardly.
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