An End tst-2

by Paul Evan Hughes

  The transports landed just outside of one of the cities.

  There was little resistance.

  Tallis’s Attack One cut through the city without mercy, slithers strafing from above, ground troops storming the streets. Hunter’s own Attack Two and Arik’s Attack Three were just as brutal, although Hunter himself never fired a shot in offense. He felt sick to his stomach at the slaughter enacted upon the “harboring” world.

  Outside of the city, a city collapsing and a city on fire, the centerpiece the worldship hemisphere rising above it all, now cracked and falling. Tallis called all of his forces to the outskirts of the city for tether placement.

  “Isn’t it great?” His smile disgusted Hunter, refracted behind the shield, twisted into a leer.

  “We have to talk.”

  “Leave it for the ship.”

  “No. We have to talk now.” Hunter’s weapon swung ominously close to Tallis.

  “Tether in place.”

  “Incoming!”

  A fresh sea of combatants stormed from the city, had to be combatants, couldn’t be unarmed people, unarmed men. Couldn’t be. Running, hands outstretched, shouting—

  “Light ’em up.”

  “What are they saying? What the fuck are they saying?”

  “Who cares? Light ’em up. Trigger it. We’ll iron out the paperwork later.”

  Hunter shook his head. “This isn’t right. Something isn’t right.”

  Tallis glared through him, flipped his visor down. “Call in the fucking strike, Windham.”

  “Sir, I can’t just—”

  Tallis tore the comm from Hunter’s grasp, shoved him aside. He locked the device into the hardlink on his throat shield. “Tallis wing to orbital firing group. Bring the weapon online.”

  copy, wing one.

  “Sir, listen to them. They aren’t—”

  “Hunter, don’t—”

  “They aren’t humans.”

  “The fuck are you—”

  “Listen to them!”

  “It’s an off-chart language. So what? We have orders.”

  “Tallis,” Hunter pulled off his helmet. “Listen to them.”

  An instant of light, a forever of end.

  Hunter shouted in frustration and disgust. Tallis looked pleased.

  It struck from above: the beam was peaceful, gentle, a faded light draping across the city, barely casting shadows, barely touching anything at all. From within the static shielding, Hunter and the dozens of other droptroops braced themselves.

  The natives fell silent. Hunter realized with a morbid fascination that they had never actually spoken at all. The guttural tones that came from underdeveloped mouths had been the only thing Tallis had heard. He had failed to listen to the voice of the

  i have come again to

  mind, the Voice of the people who were now an instant from the eternal cease.

  Hunter heard. He heard them all.

  berlin hannon judithgod

  maire

  “You knew!” Hunter knocked Tallis to the ground with a swift, unexpected blow. Both of their shields rippled from the impact. “You fucking knew!”

  Tallis stood, shield purging dust and dirt from a hundred invasion points. He wiped the mud from his chest.

  “Back to the ship. We’re done here.”

  “This isn’t over. You knew they weren’t aliens. They’re people.”

  “Back to the ship.” His growl chilled the windless plain. The city outskirts were silent, the inhabitants frozen in place, replaced with something from between the stars and times.

  Slithers docked.

  Hunter leapt from his cockpit, released seals on gloves and helmet, let them drop to the floor. Other pilots climbed from their vessels in silence. They had seen; they knew what would happen.

  Mandela jogged to Hunter’s side. “Don’t, man. Maybe we can—”

  “Stay away from me.” He deflected Arik’s grip from his arm.

  Tallis walked from his slither, cracked his neck seal. “Do you have a problem with me, Windham?”

  He walked up close, too close. Breathing heavily, fraught with bitter emotion. “How long have you known?”

  “Known what?”

  Hunter swung, but Tallis blocked. He’d always been the swifter of the two. He held Hunter’s forearm and grinned.

  “I repeat: Known what?”

  “That

  there are worlds out there, boys, so many worlds we could never hope to count them all, and on some of them are monsters.”

  Hunter turned to Brendan, whose face stared at Uncle in rapt fascination. The boys sat in the schoolroom, Uncle at its center beneath a slowly-spinning holograph of the galaxy. Hunter frowned. It was the only sign of his fear.

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Good question!” Uncle smiled, patted the inquisitive boy’s head. “Very good question.” He zoomed the display out, their galaxy shrinking to a point amidst thousands, thousands shrinking to a point amidst eternity.

  Hunter didn’t understand. He leaned forward, cradled his chin on his palms.

  “There’s a place out there somewhere, a galaxy much like ours. It’s a bad place, very far away, and that’s where the monsters come from.”

  “And they killed Earth?”

  Uncle smiled sadly, nodded at another boy. “Yes, son. They sent the worldships to kill Earth.”

  “Why?”

  Hunter remembered the pause, the tilt of Pierce’s head, the bobbing swallow of his Adam’s apple.

  “Who gave us the ability to fly, boys?”

  “Mother!” Unison. Disconcerting unison. Hunter realized that he had replied in reflex.

  “And who took away war and disease, gave us all a new purpose? Who cured the world of affliction?”

  “Mother!”

  “Yes.” The affirmative was a hiss, slow and calculated. “Mother.” He circled the room, sweeping his gaze across the pre-pubescent soldiers of the night. “The aliens hate Mother. The monsters want to kill Mother. They killed Earth to try to kill her, and now we’re going to make them pay for it.”

  Hunter saw that Brendan was smiling widely.

  “We’re the last hope, boys. We’re here to kill them all. We’re here to cleanse the universe of this disease. We can’t let the aliens win.”

  “Never.” Brendan whispered to himself.

  “We have to be the best soldiers we can be, boys. We have to learn to fight, to fly, to kill. We have to save Mother from the monsters.”

  “Uncle?”

  Pierce scanned the crowd, turned to Hunter. “Yes, son?”

  “Did the monsters kill all the girls?”

  Pierce nodded gravely. “Yes, they did. They poisoned our world before the attack and made sure that all the girls would die.”

  “But what about Lily?”

  Another pause to consider. “Lily is special, son. She’s the last little girl ever. She’ll help us hurt them.”

  “Uncle?”

  Pierce turned to Brendan. “Yes?”

  “When do we learn to fly?”

  Pierce chuckled. “Soon enough, son. Soon

  enough of this shit!” Mandela wrestled Tallis away from Hunter.

  “Stay out of this, Arik.”

  “No. We need answers. How long have you known that we’ve been killing people?”

  The pilots were gathering around the combatants, uneasy, confused. They’d seen the target population as well, but they’d carried out Tallis’s orders to the end.

  “They aren’t people. They’re monsters.”

  “Who’s to say Mother isn’t the monster? Who says she’s not the one who started killing the women with silver? Just think about it.”

  “Arik, what the hell would you—”

  “We saw them on the worldship. Near-humans. All men. So they came to Earth to kill Mother, right? There wasn’t a female on the whole ship. They were cloning boys in a chamber. They had angels that look just fucking like ours.”


  “You don’t—”

  “I saw them too.”

  “So they aren’t monsters. So they look like us. They still tried to kill Mother. They—”

  “Did you ever stop to consider that maybe we aren’t the good guys? That maybe we’ve been killing the wrong people for years?”

  Tallis snapped.

  He struck out at Mandela first, fist colliding with throat, leg sweeping out behind his knee, cutting the man down with a sickening thump. He fell to the ground, gasping, clawing at his neck.

  Hunter and Tallis collided in a fury of swinging limbs. Tallis easily threw Hunter to the floor, leapt upon him. The pilots clambered to separate their commanders. Tallis lashed out at them.

  Hunter used the moment to throw the distracted Tallis away with his still-suited legs. A flash in time and Tallis was back on his feet, hand reaching down to retract his blade from his leg sheath. Hunter rushed to his feet and slammed into Tallis before he could pull the knife. They both staggered backward from the collision into the docking cradle of a slither.

  The vessel rocked. The phase molding drained to the reservoir, it was nothing more than a thin metallish framework sitting atop the cradle supports. Hunter held Tallis’s left hand to his side, disabling his blade arm, struck out to slam his head against the slither leg. Tallis clawed for Hunter’s eyes with his free hand, fingertips digging for connection with soft, supple flesh. Hunter bit him.

  The dance of war, the combat between men without rifle, without push-button bombs, without silver or the fluid mechanics of space/time: they grappled. They fought without romance, grunting and shouting nonsense syllables at each other and the silent audience, sweating and gnashing teeth, tasting that lust, pure lust for survival, pure lust for a victory decided by the death of the opponent.

  Drops of blood traced lazy paths down Hunter’s cheek where Tallis’s fingernails had carved away skin.

  Hunter let go of Tallis’s blade arm long enough to allow it to snap up for purchase on his neck. Hunter’s hand moved down, grabbed his commander’s knife, and brought it to target between his ribs.

  Tallis inhaled. Jaw dropped, eyebrows furrowed, eyes darted forth, back, forth in realization.

  Hunter slammed Tallis once more against the slither support, wrenched his body from his own. He held Tallis between the twin hydraulic lifts of the cradle, stabbed the blade between metal and rubber, twisted it, releasing a stream of gelatin and the seal broke and the slither began to descend from raised position.

  Tallis’s hands reached out again for Hunter, his body jerked, but tons of metallish slither fell on his head between the cradle lifts.

  The body fell motionless, geyser of black erupting from crushed skull.

  How the body is weak, how fragile biology bursts upon cool metal, how the final crack of the spine signals an end.

  “Hunter?”

  “WHAT?”

  “Your hand.” His heart broke a little more when he saw her eyes, her gaze. The way her hands were clustered before her mouth.

  He looked, horrified before he even saw, because he knew, and he knew, and he knew.

  Faint lattice of silver, just below the skin. It crawled from fingertips to palm to wrist. He spun an overhead monitor into the light, saw even in the reflection of the dead display that the silver was working its way underneath the skin above his skull.

  Lilith sobbed as she activated the shield mechanism on her cardiac plate. The phase gelatin engulfed her form as she stood from the vacuum chair. “Hunter, I—”

  “No, it’s not—”

  “I’m so—”

  “It’s not your fault!” He cried out as the silver gave one last twinge in his head that brought him to his knees. “It’s not your fault.” The pain subsided as Lilith’s shielding provided a buffer between his flesh and her affliction.

  She knelt at his side, dragging the slosh of phase behind and around her.

  “It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”

  Hunter nodded, although he knew that their love would kill him.

  “We’ll meet up with a galleon. We’ll find a way to hide you. We’ll split up. I can take the Fleet back to Earth and—”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “You have to. When she finds out that we’re off-target—”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “Lilith.”

  “Hunter.”

  The phase shield was an echoing frustration. He longed to hold her, reassure her. The silver wouldn’t allow any contact at all very soon.

  “Our first concern right now is to outrun the Rebecca.”

  “We can’t outrun them. We’ll have to fight.”

  “Are you willing to kill a destroyer of humans?”

  She tripped over words. Heart pounded beneath cardiac plate. “It would appear I have been all along.”

  “Lily—” He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll find a way to end this.”

  “We will.”

  “Us.”

  “Just us.”

  They flew into the void, machinery of night and war, wounded soldiers without certainty, grasping what hope they could from the dream of ending the jihad of silver.

  “What’s that?”

  He placed the Bic micro metal black ink pen on the countertop, reached for his cup. Slow sip, clink, napkin to lips.

  “Just something.”

  She smiled, releasing solitary dimple, hiding her eyes. “It’s a new book.”

  “Nope.”

  “Yes it is! What’s it about?”

  “It’s not a new book.”

  “A short story?”

  He tapped the pen against the counter. “I don’t know.”

  “You have to know what it is.”

  “It’s something.”

  “A journal?”

  “Do you remember when you first came here?”

  The shop was empty, past closing time. He wrote while she made order of cups and saucers, filled sugar dispensers. He’d helped her put the chairs on the tabletops earlier. She walked around to his side of the counter, took the stool next to him. Her eyes studied the floor, the pen, his hands. Not his eyes, old eyes now gray, old eyes now buried in furrows of wrinkle and thought.

  “Yes.”

  He reached, took her hands in his. Gently, so gently raised them to lips, traced knuckle and fingertip, slid over ring and ring. He tilted her face up with fingertips layered in callus, guitar callus of decades and night. Her bottom lip trembled, mouth opened to say something, anything. He kissed her cheek.

  “I knew it would happen…I wrote about it months before it happened. Something inside me knew.”

  “Paul, I’m—”

  “No.” They embraced. He spoke into hair and ear. “Sweet girl.”

  “Please know.”

  “I know. And I knew. And I knew that we’d be together again, someday, somehow.” He pulled back, tip of nose meeting tip of nose. “And now I know something else.”

  “The journal?”

  “Something’s been speaking to me for years. Long before they found her, long before the wars and the troubles. I hear it in the night, in the loss, in the stillness, in the—”

  “Silver.”

  He nodded. “It’s gotten worse since it’s begun. Since she’s begun.”

  Susan thought of the intersections of that day: the young engaged couple: soldier and silver ring, the author and his girlfriend: Deus Ex and Demian, the man with a white curl.

  “‘And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”

  “Hmm?”

  “Gatsby.” He found double-meaning in her response.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t dance with you.”

  “Stop it.” She grinned.

  “This is where the fish lives.”

  “I have come again—”

  “To wound the autumnal city.” Her smile was wide, forgiving, forever.
“Delany’s going to sue you someday.”

  They laughed, and it was good.

  She pulled back from their embrace, tangle of arms, warmth of bodies, scent of coffee, sound of raindrops. Eyes tear-wet, blinking. Blinking.

  “Please know, Paul.”

  “I know.” He closed the blank book, left in mid-sentence. “I’ll finish this journal another day.”

  They walked into the unsteady night, clouds lifting to reveal a sky of stars and starships, the men of war within the machinery that would take them beyond heaven, beyond time and tomorrow. They walked into the night, knowing that it was time, almost time, almost time. Their hands clasped tightly under stars, under stars.

  “Susan?”

  “Yes?” Blue-green eyes in the light of the moon. Dimple.

  “I love You.”

  my lips remember the echoes of that night LES SOLDATS PERDUS: A PLAGUE JOURNAL

  And in these final moments, in this final terror, I find stillness.

  I remember her eyes.

  They give me silence, the pause to reflect, the stillness that exists between two old souls brought together through tragic circumstance. As I hold this weapon, as I prepare to end this war, I remember and it gives me strength.

  This is the moment of ultimate truth; I inhale and know all. I know what I have to do to end this. Even as the child stands before me, even as I hold this weapon to target on her heart, I know what I have to do.

  It is a flood of thought and emotion; this is the moment before an end, those instants when the world pauses, those instants when everything is revealed and I am held motionless in a hesitant peace.

  Inhale.

  She begs me to end it. I will, but not before telling you the story of how it all came to be. Seconds stretch to hours, years, decades, forevers. I will take my time.

  They’re all dead now on this dusty plain, this barren world where it began and where I will enact an ending. Only now do I realize the depth of my loss; I’ve killed the woman I love by killing the doppelganger sent to replace me. The shot went right through him and hit her as well. What have I done?

  Exhale.

  She’s in my arms right now, lifeless body. I hope her soul is elsewhere.

  So much to say. So little time. The child yearns for this weapon, yearns for cessation and stillness.