by Stephen Moss
She began receiving a list of proposed items under the heading of ‘unnecessary extremities’ and began ticking them off. Minor items like her limbs, reproductive organs, eyes and ears, all were vestigial now, and so she put them on the list for ligation, and eventual avulsion. She looked over the list once more, noted that her backside was on it, and then kissed her ass good-bye.
That was that then, she thought, leaving her autonomic AI to get on with it. No more itches for her to scratch, and no more fingers to scratch them with, either.
“Let’s get going then,” she said with lips she would not have much longer, and she started clambering away from the hull of the transport ship she had supposedly been trying to fix.
The chunky repair bot, fat and ungainly among its peers, but just a dot in the huge Armada’s midst, began clambering along the thick spar linking this one ship to its neighbor, and from there, onward, from ship to spar to pivot, crawling like an insect through the colossal fleet’s superstructure to get to its shining vanguard.
Interval End: Dropping an Ocean
The fleet was dropping at Earth. Having catapulted itself through planets and stars, accelerating all the while, it had stolen momentum from the cosmos, and now that momentum was its power and its curse.
It was coming. Only the great engines of the carrier ships dotted throughout the Armada could stop it, and the loss of some of those great pilots had cost them greatly. Nowhere had the effects of the attack been felt more than in the Yallan sector, now just a scar slowly healing, the sides of the great slice that had been cut out coming together as the battle group reconfigured itself to face its foe.
As the fleet hurtled toward its destination, its many components braced for what was clearly going to be a very real fight. After days of analysis, modeling and remodeling, the many military AMs and PMs had submitted themselves to the Arbite and a picture of the coming war had started to take shape. Humanity had, in some part, shown its hand. It had landed the first real blow in the war, and it had struck home, cutting the Mobiliei far more deeply than they had thought was possible.
But in the transient moment of the attack, the humans had also left many clues, markers that gave the great minds of the various contingents an insight into what their enemy was capable of. It was much more than any among the Mobiliei had expected, but it was not insurmountable. They had not been struck with some great godlike blow, and in the scars of the attack were the signs of a civilization working at the limit of its capabilities, flaws and tremors in the subspace fingerprints that showed humanity was stretching itself to the limit, driven, no doubt, by war’s uniquely primal drive, a civilization-wide survival instinct.
But, the fleet-minds saw, if this was the best mankind could do, then the Mobiliei still held the higher ground. We are not fools, said the great minds. We are not going to brake neatly into your waiting arms. We are not going to trip lightly across whatever wires you are setting for us. We have an asset you cannot match, speed. Where you are anchored, trying to erect a barrier around your fragile world, we are mobile, imbued with kinetic supremacy.
Now you will see the truth of surprise, the stark reality of our superiority.
From under the falling fleet, the plume faltered for the third time in less than a week. This time, like the second, it was deliberate. After they had excised the injured Yallans from their midst, they had worked to prepare for the greater separation.
The white-hot fires slowed and realigned again now, steadying for the coming change in pressures. Freshly cored engines from a subdivision of the fighting fleet were locked in place and firing as subsidiaries of the carrier ships. The departing Skalm force was ready, all that was left now was the displacement.
The engines vacillated, a tremor whose seeming insignificance did not beget the scale of the coming schism. And then the carriers were changing their form once more, awakening their captured singularities and warping them outward, not to encompass the whole Armada, as they had when they had stepped into the beyond after the attack, but to suck the Armada proper out of reality, and leave a swathe of the vanguard behind.
To see it was to see a sun blink out, and the effect of the departure was immediate. In an instant after the ensuing blindness, the Skalm attack force that had been left behind in reality began to free-fall, its sleek blackness dropping away into the greater dark between solar systems, the interstellar void.
The effect was like a formation of parachutists parting, the bulk pulling their cords as the carriers’ fusion brakes dug in once more, while the few, the unleashed, plummeted onward with abandon, toward Earth, toward war, closing the gap now without restraint.
In a few hours, when the Skalms were but a distant horde of bombs dropped into the night, the fleet would reappear, its lights shining forward once more, illuminating their path with nuclear flame. They would not talk to their kin again, not until the fight had engaged. The massive flotilla of Skalms would be silent now, as they closed on their unsuspecting prey.
Endgame:
Chapter 49: Under the Radar
On the outskirts of our solar system there is a ring of broken lumps of rock and ice. They form a roughly spherical border marking the outer reaches of the sun’s influence, a loosely strung fence around our stellar home. Against this backdrop, a meteor ten times the size of Central Park flies past.
Not that its size is particularly unusual.
Size, like speed and distance, can only be judged as usual or unusual when taken in context. So as we consider this particular meteor, even though it is ten times the size of Central Park, or about half the size of Hekaton, it is dwarfed by the multitude of extrastellar debris relegated by chance to the cold, distant reaches of our sun’s gravitational well, which, in turn, are made minuscule, negligible even, by the unfathomable expanse of the void beyond.
All that said, no human eye could compare them in order to judge the disparity, as none had yet come this way, and may never, given what is going to happen in a month’s time when this object reaches its destination if it is still travelling at the blurringly astonishing rate of four thousand kilometers per second.
Of course, this meteor’s seemingly incredible speed is also not that exceptional for an interstellar body, which, though rare, are not unheard of.
No, the only truly exceptional thing about this meteor is that it comes from the very same place as another that came this way ten years ago. But where that dark object had, spread out behind it by a complex invisible web of magnetic forces, a vast, atom-thin solar parachute that was slowing it, this one is coming on far faster, with no brake or hindrance.
And this one is alive. Not with eight Agents and their four orbital minders, but with nearly a hundred thousand survivors of the missile-mine attack, hurtling out-of-control at their destination.
- - -
Two weeks after passing the proxy border to the solar system, the raft of interconnected ships passes Jupiter. As it does so, it is already starting to glow under the ranging spotlight of active deep space detection systems coming from Earth. It does not wish to be seen, but nor can it do anything to stop it. Its superconductive shielding will make detection difficult, but by scatter scanning alone, its size will make it visible soon.
It will not actually hit Earth, but that is not much of a consolation. Its fate lies either in flying past the planet at this same unbridled speed and being ripped to shreds by Earth’s magnetic and gravitational fields even as it reeks terrible havoc on that planet’s tides and orbital bodies, or being destroyed by the people it had once sought to conquer when they see how close it has been aimed to them, and what its approach and passing will do.
Its inhabitants wait, and they watch. Many submit to the balm of mental hibernation, some commit suicide, some argue futile strategies. And some think of asking for help from either their enemy or their executioners, though not with much hope of an answer.
Chapter 50: Dying Another Day
The long days were, in some ways, worse than
the long nights, thought the prisoner. During summer, the time passed interminably and was filled only with the blustery wind and long walks through the penguin and seal colonies.
In winter, at least, the nights were punctuated by a brief twilight each day around noon, which, as it faded, revealed once more the great diorama above, vivid and beautiful. Neal stared up at it now, pulling back his visor for as long as he could stand, to take it in, unabashed, pure in all its infinite magnificence.
Then, as his eyes began to water and that tiny amount of moisture threatened to freeze on his lashes, he resealed his faceplate, blinking hard to clear his vision as the warmth enveloped his face once more.
He shook his head, closing his eyes within his suit’s helmet and checking his systems. His view, a view that had once encompassed a world, was reduced now to the base bodily functions his limited monitor allowed him access to. His suit, warm though it was, gave only enough augmentation to discount its own weight as he walked the width and breadth of the island each day.
It was, itself, part of his sentence. He could not take it off outside the confines of the prison block he now called home. Doing so would only bring hypothermia and quick death anyway, but that was the point. He was not allowed even that escape.
This was his punishment. This was his purgatory. Confined forever to a jail of his own construction down under the cold, dark underbelly of the world, far away from the sun’s life-giving gaze.
He decided he would not walk along the south coast today, the cliffs and buttes there held the great, howling seal colonies, predictably hostile as they barked at his lumbering form.
They had fascinated him for a while, during the first months of his incarceration, but now their willful coming and going and vibrant life only served to mock his own incapacitation. His pen, though wide and beautiful, was very clearly demarked. And it was, he knew, to be his prison for the rest of his life.
So he started the long walk back to the low, grey block where he ate, slept, and had what limited conversation was now available to him.
His only company now came from one of two people. One insane and the other, he had to admit, profoundly evil, a sociopath he had, in his hubris, given license to. He hoped, no, he expected to see one of those two people on his walk home, as he passed the Dome, or the nearest point he and his fellow inmates could get to it, anyway.
Sure enough, there she was, crouching across a low plateau as Neal cleared the western ridge and started down the slope. He breathed heavily into his suit, the hot air thick on his face. Its systems worked diligently to cleanse it of vapor and carbon dioxide, but made no attempt to aid his struggle, as it so easily could.
He trundled onward. Yes, he thought, there she was, as she so often was, constant even now, in this, perhaps the final stanza of her difficult life. She just sat there, staring at the lights and activity around the great Dome, as the latest in earth’s growing fleet of Skalms was wheeled from the golden egg that had birthed it into the cold night.
It was a night that the Skalm would soon light up and depart, soaring into the sky with a haste and speed that would rattle the entire island, lifting free a layer of regolith and desert snow from its mountains as its departing roar echoed out across the grey ocean that surrounded this lonely place. The dust would settle in places and be whipped up in others into eddies that would be matched by the distant cheers from an elated Dome crew celebrating yet another successful launch.
For the Skalm did not belong here. Almost the moment they came to life they had no further need for this drab and lifeless place. They could not be contained here, and nor should the woman Neal now stumbled toward, he knew that. Not that she hadn’t earned her place here, he had no doubt about that. At their trial, the litany of crimes she had committed, both in his name and of her own volition, had shocked him to his core.
But still, she was not meant for this. She had survived too much, accomplished too much, to be penned up here. She had been driven to fury by her grief, and now she had been driven to madness by this place, by her punishment, and by her lack of even the freedom to end it. She clearly longed to. That had been made all too plain by her many creative and often gruesome attempts at suicide. But, in the end, they had been futile, and now he came up on her as she sat on her haunches, leaning slightly into the stiff gale blowing across the island.
Her suit was black, like the rock of the plateau. Inside her helmet he could not tell if she was looking at the Dome or elsewhere. He assumed that she was probably mumbling gently, like she did in the night sometimes. She had been the toughest person he had ever met, and he knew it was not this island that had really broken her. It was the loss of Barrett, and her failure to fulfill the mission he had died fighting for.
And he knew it was also the shame, the shame at what that man would have thought of their actions if he had seen them brought to light. Neal had been thankful, at least, that Jennifer had not been at their trial to hear it. He was happy that he would be left with a memory of her still loving him, and still respecting him. He was sure neither was true anymore.
As he stepped up behind his old ally, one of his first friends in this long, lonely war, he placed a mechanical hand on her shoulder. Without the suit to protect him, he would not dare touch her. She had nearly killed him and their other companion at least twice, stopped only by a numbing pulse from her spinal interface, attached there now with a length of nanotube wire around their necks that served both as anchor and choking reminder.
But she did not react to his machine touch. She did not turn or speak to him through their suit comms. She hadn’t said a word to him in months now, well, not a pleasant one, anyway. He missed her, in truth. She had done horrendous things, he did not doubt that, but this … this was … well, he supposed, if he was honest with himself, this was all too appropriate, lex talionis.
He left her, sparing only a passing glance at the still Skalm across the bay, silent now for the last time in its spectacular life as it awaited ignition. How many was that now? Two a month for … two years? Longer? He called up the date. Thirty-two months. Jesus. Thirty-two months in this awful place.
Only sixteen months left till d-day. A day when he would watch, from here, as the world fought without him. Maybe even died without him. If they lost, at least he would be spared this interminable boredom. He banished that thought. He was angry, but not angry enough to wish for that end. Well, not today, anyway.
As he left the unresponsive Ayala, he marched onward, back to the cellblock, and thought of his last weeks in civilization. The hearing had been held in secret, and open to representatives and senior officials only, for obvious reasons. Afterward, after they had found him, Ayala, Saul, and seventy-three others guilty of war crimes, he had agreed to make a lengthy and public statement of resignation to allay public questions about his whereabouts in return for some measure of leniency.
Not for leniency for himself, and certainly not for Ayala, not after what the prosecution had brought to light, but for some of their subordinates who had been less culpable. As he stomped through the snow to the airlock, the thick metal door clunking open automatically as he approached, a part of him now regretted getting so many of them sentenced internment closer to family and friends, if only because of who that had left him with here at Deception Island.
There was the ever-friendly Ayala, homicidal and suicidal, and then there was Doctor-fucking-Moreau, thought Neal bitterly as he stepped through the inner-door to the small bunker’s lobby, and saw the doctor sitting there. The man smiled, and in that smile Neal saw the worst part of himself. For while the doctor was disturbingly without remorse when it came to the vivisection of hundreds of orphaned North Korean children, Neal knew it was he who had given the man the scalpel, he who had shipped the poor children to this dreadful place.
“Good evening, Neal,” said the doctor, smiling incongruously.
Neal paused, wanting to hit the man like he often dreamed of, but knowing he could not even do that, not her
e. Instead he replied, inanely, “Is it even evening, Doctor? I cannot tell anymore.”
They laughed without mirth as Neal stepped to a wall and let the suit unwrap itself from around his frail, pasty form. He did not say anything further to Dr. Ramamorthy as he stepped out of it, but simply turned and walked away to his cell.
As he closed the heavy door behind him, he felt a tiny ping within himself. It was a familiar sensation, yet one he had almost forgotten.
A message. He waited a moment, confused. He quite literally never received messages. It was part of his punishment. No communication from the outside. In truth, there were those that were allowed to contact him, including many of his old inner-circle, but those that were important enough to have the ability accordingly lacked the desire.
Now, though, in the grey coldness of his sparse cell, he sat back, and with a curiosity he had not felt in years, he opened the message.
The message contained only a set of images. The same thing captured at intervals over a period of weeks, no, months. Why had they sent him this? Who had sent him this?
He knew what it was immediately, that was painfully clear. He had stared at it a thousand times, watched it for ten years, first through the Hubble’s wide lens and then ever more acutely through others as it grew nearer.
Even now, he would often pick it out in his own sky, visible as it was now with the naked eye, brightening to rival the full moon. But here were more vivid images, close enough to almost discern detail in the cluster.
He stared at them, plastered across his inner-mind, filling his view, and took them in. Instantly he was back there, in his office in the heart of Milton SpacePort, watching and planning. These images were powerful, but they were still vague, still blinded by their own subject, whited out at the center by the power of the Armada’s engines.
But it was not so vague that Neal didn’t see something strange in the changes between them, an irregularity. He flicked back and forth, back and forth through the series. What was that? He started making notes and pulling up what limited resources he had been allowed to bring with him as his mind started to churn once more.