An End tst-2

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “Okay. Damage control teams sweep the decks. We took a lot of phase flak below. We have slithers to repair, hull damage, and that breach in the primary flux generator has to be contained before we can move. Decks one through ten are flooded. Let’s get to work.”

  Officers barked orders. Hunter took one last look out the hangar entrance: Uncle’s coffin was invisible against the fabric of night, just another dot against black. What cairn in this sky, what memorial to the lost soldiers in the midst of the night?

  He caught Lilith’s gaze as he walked by her. Mind to mind, touch to touch. Her lips attempted a quiet smile that he could not return.

  “Arik.” He grasped the man’s shoulder as he went by. “You have a working slith?”

  “Yes, sir.” Arik Mandela snapped to attention. “Attack Three is at ninety percent.”

  “At ease.” Hunter already didn’t like the new hierarchy, the new formality. Uncle had been a good commander, a human commander. There was something about Tallis that tickled the base of Hunter’s skull. “When can you be ready to fly?”

  “Now, sir.”

  “Good.” Hunter looked across the hangar at Tallis, in animated conversation with members of Attack One. “We’ll take a ride over to the worldship wreck.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Arik?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Call me Hunter. Stop with that ‘Sir’ shit.”

  Mandela smiled. “Alright.”

  Hunter patted his shoulder and went to suit up.

  Door alarm. She activated and swam. Tallis.

  “We need to talk.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ve spoken to Windham recently.”

  “Before the ceremony.”

  “Do you know why he slithered up?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything.”

  Tallis slumped into a vacuum chair opposite Lilith. “You can tell me.”

  “He was upset. He didn’t say anything about taking a ship.”

  Tallis nodded. “Why weren’t you shielded when you two were alone together?”

  “I—” She stumbled over her words. “I was. Of course I was shielded.”

  “No. I inherited access to the phase logs. We were running a diagnostic on the cistern and I saw that you’d recently shielded up again. Logs indicate there were two people in your chamber at the time.”

  “There must be a mistake. I wouldn’t—”

  “You were unshielded in the presence of my top officer. Why and how?”

  “I’m telling you, it has to be a mistake.”

  “Arch doesn’t make mistakes like that. Each and every time you’d been unshielded in the last twenty years has been recorded without error.”

  “The attack must have damaged the ship’s systems. There could have been a—”

  Tallis surged from his seat in one swift motion, hand impossibly reaching through three feet of phase gelatin. Lilith gasped in horror at the look in his eyes, that burning from within. He palmed the release mechanism on her cardiac shield and her phase splashed to the floor in a wave. Her hands reached up to grab his forearm, to wrench it away from her body. He pulled her from the vacuum chair with one hand, crushing her neck as he lifted her from the ground.

  “Don’t fucking lie to me.” He growled through clenched teeth. There was no sign of the infection, no silver runnels underneath his skin. He threw her to the floor.

  “I don’t—”

  “He’s immune to the silver. How?”

  She sobbed from the cold of the floor, rubbing her bruising neck. She palmed the cardiac mech, but it didn’t respond.

  “Don’t bother.”

  “You’re not—”

  “So now you know. It’d been Mother’s plan all along. Pierce taught us to be good little soldiers, but his death means that I’m the leader now, and it’s time to start the real work. We can’t have a flesh construct commanding a war against flesh.”

  Lilith crawled back, away from this machine. She had to tell Hunter, had to let the others know.

  Tallis bent, grabbed the front of her jumpsuit, slammed her up against the chamber wall.

  “This will be our little secret. If you tell anyone, I’ll see to it that we space your little Windham at Light X.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I can.” His eyes were mercury fire. “You won’t tell anyone. You’ll do the job. You’ll sit in the firing chamber like a good little girl and we will destroy them.”

  Lilith nodded, shaking with her tears, breath heaving in and out in great gasps of fear.

  Tallis let go of her uniform, his face inches from hers. She could smell the stink of his non-adrenaline, could feel the warmth of his non-body. Swimming behind those eyes, the tug of an eon of Maire’s plan for vengeance, the flicker and

  “What are you?”

  Tallis grinned.

  silver

  was everywhere on the charred remains of the worldship husk, writhing in the valleys, reaching out from spinnerets in a last attempt to snare human biology.

  Hunter and Mandela palmed their shields.

  The slither hovered above the atomic crater, descended into the vessel interior slowly. There was no fire, no movement. The silver cooled, slowed, died, dissolved.

  “Any lifesigns from the interior?”

  Mandela checked his instruments. “None on scope. There’s movement, but no biology. Sections are still collapsing. It’s a dead ship.”

  “Take us down.”

  Mandela searched for a secure area on which to attach the fighter. One edge of the crater had fused together, providing a firm enough strip of slag for a landing zone.

  “Does Tallis know about this little trip?”

  “Fuck him.” Hunter frowned, looked out at the derelict world. “He doesn’t need to know.”

  Mandela nodded. “Glad to see someone else shares the sentiment.”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “But he made you second.”

  “I still don’t trust him.”

  “No one trusts him, Hunter.”

  The vessel’s landing gear reached out and grabbed a segment of blackened deck.

  “Keep that in mind. Let’s go find some answers.”

  Windham didn’t expect to find any of the enemy quickly or easily. The atomic blast had gouged a vast hole into the vessel, instantly exposing dozens, perhaps hundreds of mantle decks to space. Slither systems revealed that there were still pressurized interior areas, but the atmosphere was alien, almost pure nitrogen. The silver from the attack was still present, but not a threat from within their phase shields. He walked with Mandela through decks now open to the void. The worldship’s gravity was light, but it was enough to hold them down.

  “We have a bulkhead.” Mandela’s gunbeam revealed a sealed door, now half-melted into the wall around it.

  “Take it down.”

  “I don’t know how much atmosphere is behind this…Let’s secure a bubble.”

  “Right.”

  Mandela unsnapped a phase generator from his pack and locked it to the wall. He activated the bubble and a half-sphere of gelatin enveloped the bulkhead. He affixed a charge to the entryway. They ran clear of the particle blast. It cut a hole into the solid steel((?)) of the door. Atmosphere poured out, stretching the bubble as pressure equalized within and without. The edges of the hole cooled to black.

  They flanked the hole. Mandela nodded to Windham, who thrust his weapon into the new entrance and swept the interior with light slugs. Nothing. The gunbeam revealed a dead chamber.

  Windham grabbed the upper lip of the bulkhead and swung himself into the next room, legs first. His feet made jarring contact with the floor and he helped Mandela through.

  The floor, the walls, everything was covered with the invasive silver dust. Three feet of solid metal shielding had not been enough to protect the enemy from the weapon. They were in a hallway, doors on each side, stretching away farther from the crater area.
r />   “Critical systems will be at the center. I doubt that transport mechs will be operable.”

  “We don’t need to get to the bridge. We just need to find a body.”

  Mandela paused. Windham kept walking, stopped, turned around. “Why a body?”

  “I want to see what the aliens look like.”

  “Why?”

  “Ever seen an alien up close?”

  “Well—”

  “Ever engaged one in hand-to-hand combat? Ever had to fight one to the death?”

  “No.”

  “That’s right. We’ve always fought them from above, targeted them from space. We’ve relied on the sensors to see them. And what do they look like?”

  Mandela shrugged his shoulders. “Humanoid.”

  “Bipedal humanoid. Sometimes armored. I want to see what’s behind the mirror.”

  “Are you sure we should be doing this?”

  “We’ve never seen them. Not really. We’ve killed them, but we haven’t looked at them. I want to know what we’re up against. I need to know who killed our home, our parents. I need to see who we’re going to end.”

  “Then let’s find them.”

  Down hallways, down stairs, across levels, nothing. The same silver dust, the same brittle quality of the walls, the floor. It hung in the air, swirled around their phase shields, sending currents of shimmer, contrails of glitter behind them, walking through a suffocation, choking through a world of glass and sparks.

  Mandela studied his projector display. “Faint biologics ahead.”

  “Movement?”

  “None. Stationary targets. Signal is fading fast.”

  “Where?”

  Mandela drew a bead with his gunbeam on one of the many doorways in the corridor. There were markings, but he couldn’t read them. “This one.”

  There were levers on each side of the doorway. Windham and Mandela both grabbed one, and Windham signaled a three count. Levers pulled down, door groaned three-quarters of the way open. Mandela swept the inside with light as a wall of warmth met them.

  Hunter’s heart dropped.

  They walked amidst silver, between the bodies and the angels and the tubes. They walked without words; there were no words for what they saw and what they felt: two decades of subterfuge unraveled in a simple room by simple evidence, machinery and bodies and angels.

  Hunter was reminded of a day that started with

  “Mommy?”

  “Have to go outside, baby. Have to get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “The gun, baby.”

  his mother, quiet beauty Helen Windham, married to a commander of the Extinction Fleet, young bride, shaking hands, hands covered with the silver affliction of Maire’s initial ascent from the Paris Gate and hands covered with black leather gloves, hands that lifted him from bed, carried him outside, where she fell to the gravel parking lot, hands that grasped those stone shards and yearned for something, anything, as they watched the orbital defense system fire balls of white into the morning sky. The day started with his mother waking him, and she died less than an hour later, a hole through her chest, and Honeybear was at her side, on fire because of the flak from above, fighters in the sky, men dying to save him, to save the others. An angel lifted him from his dead mother, carried him to the escape vessel, and he knew. He knew that things would never be safe again, would never be right or the same. Things would be wrong until he found the enemy homeworld and killed them all. It was his life, their life on the Arch, those consoling words whispered to him from Uncle or the nicer angels. It was his life to kill those who had killed his world, those alien beings cloaked in black and haze, hiding on periphery worlds, rising up against Mother and the Extinction Fleet. It was his life to kill those strangers below, those monsters without faces. Twenty years of conditioning, twenty years and one goal. He found love in that metal box between the stars, and in her heart was the weapon that would kill those who had killed. He had found love, and together they would create an end. These bodies, these consumed bodies, these were the enemy. These twisted forms, faces masks of horror against the silver, hands frozen in time and space as useless shields against Lilith’s weapon, they were the enemy.

  “They’re human.”

  Hunter’s heart beat in his throat. His eyes filled with tears that he could never hope to control. Twenty years of lie.

  “Human.”

  Mandela’s mouth opened on words that he couldn’t speak, jaw hung open, grasping for meaning, sense, truth.

  The room was nearly featureless save the rows of vertical glass cylinders, within which dozens, hundreds of boys now hung lifeless, each in varying stages of development. Babies and toddlers in suspension, now crumpled to the tube bottoms from the loss of ship’s power. In the paths between rows, near-biologic angels lay near weapons, medical instruments, each featureless artificial face attempting to convey the fear and confusion of that final moment of silver. There were a few fully-developed males between those rows, supervisors or doctors, all adult men.

  “No women.”

  Something tugged behind Hunter’s eyes.

  “Scan one of them. See if you can isolate the code and match to Earth bloodlines.”

  Mandela swept his instrument over the nearest corpse. “Not enough biologic left in this one.” He walked to another victim. Frowned as his panel chimed.

  “Got a match?”

  “No match. But there’s something else…”

  “What?”

  “He has two hearts. Had two hearts.”

  Hunter spun around, pacing, shield sloshing lazily behind and around. Hands clenched, unclenched.

  “No women.”

  He remembered a hospital room, his mother smiling down at him from the bed. He was holding his father’s hand, remembered faint gray light from the window, overhead fluorescent lighting glinting from the button on his father’s dress uniform. Large hands slipped under his arms, lifted him up, held him close, for a moment inadvertently pressed his face against metal nametag pinned to crisp olive drab: Windham, and there were epaulets and a jaunty beret that his father hated. He sat snugly in his father’s arms and looked down at smiling mother, sad smile, smiling mother? and

  The baby was more red than pink, more pink than gray, but they knew, and they knew. It was why they’d brought their son to see her so soon, to see that miracle of life, the miracle now denied a species by the lady from the middle of the planet. His father had sat with him at the kitchen table and tried to explain, but Hunter held Honeybear close and barely listened, preferring instead to eat his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and scribble spaceships and robots with crayons on his new construction paper. His father had done his best to explain the inexplicable.

  The baby made noises.

  Hunter remembered being afraid of her. He’d seen another baby up-close, the neighbor’s baby son who was too small to play with and kept them awake every night with crying. Hunter couldn’t tell why this baby was different, what made it a her and not a him, what would soon end the young life in suffocating silver.

  His mother had smiled, but her eyes had been wet. She comforted the baby girl, held her tightly in black-clad hands, concealing her own affliction. It was a miracle that the baby had even been carried to term; the headlines in those first few years had reported the miscarriage rates almost as often as the construction projects, the conquest of the solar system, the impending jihad.

  Hunter had taken refuge from the baby girl against his father’s neck.

  Mommy came home a few days later without the baby.

  “Lies. All lies.”

  Mandela studied the floor. “They’re cloning boys.”

  “The silver would have killed off all the women. Not all at once, but over time. Just like home. They aren’t human, but close enough.”

  “But the Catalyst—”

  “Isn’t the same silver. The Catalyst comes from Lilith. It doesn’t discriminate against biologic. The silver comes from…”
Headache forming behind eyes, reflex to rub, glass shield prevents.

  “Mother.”

  “That’s when it all started.”

  “The worlds we’ve hit already? Rogue planets, harboring the enemy?”

  “They weren’t harboring anyone. They were the enemy.”

  “And now we’re taking the Catalyst home. To her home.”

  “She wants to finish what she started.”

  They didn’t speak on the return to Archimedes. Hunter had made it clear that this information must remain their secret until he could find a way to approach Tallis. He didn’t think it would be easy to persuade the blood-thirsty new commander to re-evaluate their objective.

  Tallis waited for them in the hangar.

  “What the fuck have you been doing?”

  “Recon.”

  “Do you know how dangerous it was to—”

  “I was aware of the dangers. It was a dead ship.”

  “And you just—”

  “We didn’t find anything, Brendan. It was slag.”

  Tallis sneered. “Get out of the suits and into the bubbles. We’re ready to fly.”

  “You’ve tracked them?”

  “We know exactly where they are.”

  “How far?”

  “Days.”

  “Will Lilith have enough time to regain her—”

  “She’ll be ready.”

  “Good.” Hunter feigned eagerness. “Let’s go.”

  Ten thousand midnights, the blink of an eye in Light X, a slumber barely refreshing, fraught with uncertainty and echoes of a planet now dead, the woman hidden at its center, a vessel preparing for war, his love hanging at its center.

  “Crew prep for aerial bombardment.”

  “No.” Tallis strode across the bridge. “We’re going down.”

  “There’s no need to risk—”

  “They killed Uncle. We’re going down. Crew to transports.”

  “We can hit them from above, just—”

  “I want blood. We’ll take the tether down ourselves. Get to your transport.”

  Hunter’s eyes locked on Arik’s as Tallis stormed from the bridge.

  The target worldships had landed long ago on the central continent. The phase technology of the enemy apparently provided a faster ride; cities had grown around the sunken spheres. Hunter swallowed hard as he watched the descent from his monitor. He couldn’t let this happen.