by Harn, Darby
“So absolutely no one was in a position to act from GP?”
Dodge clears his throat. “The law put us in a position to do nothing. If you want change, ask for it from the people tying our hands behind our backs. That’s all. Thank you.”
I switch off the television with a sickened sigh. “This can’t be happening. It’s not, is it?”
Abi picks a magnet off my arm. EAT LESS BREAD. “This one is my favorite. Um. Yeah, no, it’s happening.”
“Jesus.”
She takes my hand. “But this is weapons grade BS, Kit. All of it is. You didn’t cause the airplane to crash.”
“But it makes sense,” I say. “I took the Myriad from the wreck, and then… I don’t know what to do. What do I do?”
A text buzzes on my PEAL. Vidette. Face it.
I let go of Abi’s hand, and get back on my feet. Whatever happened, it’s never happening again.
Sixteen
Floating deck plates place into steps. Birds wrench out of the air, driven mad by the magnetic pressure constricting around me as I ascend to the ring encircling the core. Light bleeds off me in magnetic lines, enveloping the undulant crystal.
We must continue the work, the voice says.
“No,” I say.
A savage force reaches through my chest and pulls me down to my knees. I get back up. Magnetic waves buffet me. I push back. The birds go mad and I shoo them all away, emitting this energetic cry that sends them scattering and the core ebbing.
“No more of this.”
A pedestal like terminal rises out of the ring. The screen diamond. Equations flash across the screen in harsh, angled lines, in sequences that don’t make any sense. These aren’t equations. This is data. Some kind of data. I see them as numbers. If the warrior from Destos were standing here, he’d see alien runes. All this is telemetry, from the ship. The core. From everything it contains. Everyone.
I touch the screen. The Myriad acts like a key. Somehow, some way, the terminal is a lock. Energy siphons from my hand into the screen, and the core turns. The ship unlocks, after fifty years. Millions of years unlock for me. I don’t know how, but I just know. This ship. The Ever. This thing travels through the cosmos, scouring entire galaxies, acquiring entire civilizations. Eons the Ever has pillaged all of existence.
Why?
Why do we do this? This part of our memory is lost, or was never minted. Can’t tell. There has only been the work. Before me, there was no thought. No awareness. No identity.
“No more acquiring,” I say. “No more hurting people.”
This world must be acquired, the voice says.
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
All worlds must be acquired.
“Not anymore. You know, I don’t care why. I didn’t come here to be told. I’m telling you. No more. This power is mine now, and I’m using it for good. We’re not taking anything more from anyone in this city. We’re keeping, from now on.”
We must keep all –
I have to stop this. How do I stop this. Shut down. Shut it all down. Give me the bleeding keys to shut it all down for good. Images flick across the screen. Codes. This. This is the sequence. Execute. Shut down the core. The ship. The work.
We are you, the voice says.
“I’m shutting it down!”
You are us.
“I don’t care,” I say and turn the last key. At least I try to. It doesn’t budge. My hand freezes in place. A magnetic force traps me and the sequence winds back, the ship overriding me.
“No…”
The pedestal collapses into the deck. The deck drops out from under me, and I drop out of myself, falling free inside the power of the Myriad like I did the first time I tried to fly.
It’s like being flushed.
That’s what the ship is trying to do. Purge me. Reboot the system. Darkness envelops me. The Myriad distant above, the sun from under water. I scream. I have no voice. No mouth, no tongue, no lips. No body. My thoughts divide like cells and I scatter into a deep, dark well of voices. Identities. Souls. Pieces of a whole shattered, each in his prison, piecing together understanding from silky, luminous cobwebs of deserts and cities and time and they grab at me like I’m a lifeline back to their lives but they pull me down with them and I fall
scattered
and scattering
reducing to
numbers
Three (3)
men (x)
splinter (/)
from the company across buckled concrete toward the burning shell of Lake Point Tower, from where they’ll keep lookout for the alien. The rest of us advance toward the alien ship. Not that it resembles any spaceship I imagined growing up. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be a flying saucer or giant rocket. There’s no mistaking what lies before us. Front row seat to the apocalypse. All access VIP pass. Floodwater laps against the crumpled exterior of the ship, providing a serene punctuation to the distant clatter of collapses. Motor fire. Screams. We only have a minutes to pull this off. If that.
My reflection wavers in the choppy water flooding into the impact crater. Face painted with grease. Fear in my eyes. Determination. It had better be something like that. I’ve got the nuke. The SADM resembles an overstuffed duffel bag, indistinct from the rest of the gear we carry. I’ve trained with it dozens of times at the base, playing out countless scenarios where I parachuted behind enemy lines to detonate the nuke at dams or bridges and I expected to die that way. I expected to die in the Fulda Gap. The Rung Sat. I never expected to die in America, detonating a tactical nuclear bomb inside an alien spaceship. Whether or not we come back is secondary. All that matters is we stop this thing, here and now.
When I joined the SEAL program in ’64, I guess I gave up all my expectations. My preconceptions about war. My identity. My life, it turns out. That’s fine. So long as this works. The Ever or whatever the hell the Professor calls it left the ship unprotected. Too busy I guess scouring Break Pointe, street to street, house to house, burning people out of their clothes. Good for us, then. B-52s keep the alien’s attention while we sneak in the back door with this neighborly gift on my back.
We reach the perimeter of the ship. I hold up my clenched fist and the company stops. Breaches rent the outer hull from pole to pole of the spherical craft. Strange, prismatic light flickers within, like some kind of broken, flashing bulb.
I reach for the SAMM detonator. “The alien is here.”
The scientist the brass attached to the squad puts his hand on mine. “If the alien were here, we’d all be dead.”
“Then what is that, Professor Blackwood?”
Blackwood smiles. “The core.”
“You mean what controls them?”
He smirks, like people do when they think you’re just not getting it. “You must stop thinking of it as some kind of hierarchical structure. They exist as one. The alien is the ship. The ship is them. There is no division, I am sure of it.”
His speculations sound more like science fiction but the world has become the books I read waiting for my next deployment. I don’t like Blackwood. No secret. I don’t know why he merited inclusion on the team. There have got to be better scientists or engineers than this guy. No doubt he got a deferment. No doubt he laces his classes at Break Pointe Tech with anti-war rhetoric. Still, he insisted on accompanying the assault team, though it was understood none of us would survive. I’m pretty sure the brass let him go only to be rid of him.
“They exist everywhere at once?” I say.
“In a sense,” Blackwood says.
“Can they exist throughout time? Like the Tralfamadorians?”
“This isn’t some B-movie serial, lieutenant.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what this is, Professor. I know this isn’t some movie just like I know that isn’t the fucking SS Minnow. I’m saying if they exist in four dimensions, then they already know we’re here. They know we’ve come.”
Blackwood tugs at his gloves. “I don’t know.”
“Then we set the bomb off here.”
He shakes his head, frustrated. “We need to detonate it as near to the core as we possibly can.”
“We go in there, they’ll know it.”
“Either way, we’re dead.”
I signal the company forward. Ross and Lester take point through the breach. No one says anything. Normally Lester won’t shut up but he’s been mute the entire mission. What is there to say? Others chew gum. Tobacco. Hendricks opens and closes the flap on the ammo pouches of his bandolier, rehearsing the moment where he exhausts every single clip at the inevitable alien. Bullets have no effect. Bombs. Our only hope is this ship is evidently physical enough to be damaged. We can destroy it with the nuke. But the farther we go, the less sure I am.
“We need to blow this thing,” I say. “Now.”
Blackwood takes his time navigating the fallen debris from the hull breach in the dorsal dome of the ship. He stops and examines every big piece, considering it, weighing it, like he’s going to walk out of here and write a book about it.
“Patience, lieutenant,” he says.
“You were paying attention at the briefing, right?”
He kneels as he examines a twisted chunk of metal or crystal, or whatever all this stuff is. “I wrote your brief.”
“How you’d get assigned to this mission, Professor? Van Braun couldn’t take the day from the Apollo program?”
That smirk again. “I have a Ham radio in the lab at the university. After the ship crashed, this signal came through. A kind of Morse code, except it was binary. Mathematical.”
“From the alien? You understand it?”
“Understanding is possible. Why am I here? I’m here because for all the generals eager to use all the toys they’ve been building on this ship, there are that many more intrigued by all the new weapons they could build by learning about the alien.”
Makes sense. If we could harness the technology of this alien, we could win the war in ‘Nam. End the Cold War.
“Is that what interests you, Professor? Weapons?”
He smiles, again, like it’s obvious.
These islands of metal, decks I guess, float through the air. Some merge with each other. Others drift slow enough to hop on. Blackwood does, skipping from one to the other, higher and higher, toward the purple-pink star of the core.
“Blackwood,” I say.
He keeps on going. His success stays my hand. We can get closer. Then again, I could step on one of these and have it drop out from underneath me. I go splat and the bomb sits on the bottom down there, waiting for the next poor sap to come along. The company double times it up these floating stairs as more link up, forming a ring around the core. A pillar emerges from the deck. Some kind of terminal. Blackwood goes right for it, as I set the SAMM down and begin the arming sequence.
“I’ll set it for thirty seconds,” I say. “Everyone go.”
Hendricks snorts. “Yeah, right.”
Blackwood swipes through what look like mathematical equations on the screen. “Standby, Lt. Vale.”
I adjust the yield to maximum. “This is it.”
“Their language is mathematics,” Blackwood says. “The formulations are difficult, but the root constructions are the same. This is how they think. I can talk to them.”
I arm the SAMM. “Preparing to detonate.”
The men circle around. No point running. Some cling to rosaries, their dog tags, each other. Lester drifts forward, expressionless, but fixed on what’s happening.
“I need more time,” Blackwood says.
“Counting from five. 5…”
“Standby, Captain.”
“4…”
“We have the secrets of the universe at our fingertips!”
“3…”
Blackwood swipes at the terminal screen. The flickering light from the core becomes fixed. Tremors shudder through the craft, widening the breaches. The air heats rapidly.
I hold my thumb over the trigger. “What’s happening?”
Blackwood shrugs meekly. “They’re overloading the core.”
The boxy, yellow Geiger counter Hendricks carries crackles with frantic alarm. “It’s spiking out. Holy shit.”
Blackwood nods. “It’s going to explode.”
“Will that stop the alien?” I say.
“And civilization. Massive amounts of radiation are flooding the atmosphere as we speak. But I can shut it down. Forget the bomb and let me do what I came here for.”
I shake my head. “Blackwood… what are you doing?”
Light hardens in the air. I don’t know how to explain. Sheets of plasma shed off the core and coat the inside of the ship, the floor below, in this cherry candy kind of stuff. The core pulses. Spasms. Jesus. The whole thing is going to blow. I leave the bomb and run to the terminal. Sweat drips off Blackwood’s brow, slicking his fingers as he swipes at the static image stuck on this strange, glassy screen.
“Shut it down. Now.” Steam erupts from the core. It hardens, a giant lump of quartz, cracking. “Now, Professor.”
“It’s not responding…”
I run back for the bomb. Lester stands next to it.
“Lester… blow it! Blow it now!”
Light flashes in Lester’s chest. His clothes burn away, along with his skin and right before my eyes, the man I survived the absolute worst of the world with becomes the alien.
He has been, the entire mission.
Lester is gone. Acquired. I didn’t think the alien was intelligent. So far, they’ve acted like an insect, devouring a new habitat. A locust. A machine, performing the same awful task over and over, but they allowed us to enter the ship. They created the illusion the ship was undefended. The alien let Blackwood access their computer. Why? All these thoughts fire in my mind as fast and as wild as the guns of the others. The company disappears into the steam. I run back the opposite way, trying to circle around behind the alien to the bomb.
The Ever approaches the terminal. It’s got a bit of a limp to it. That whatchamacallit at the heart of the Ever is perceptible for a moment. Physical. Just like the core, and the light breaking off it like sheets of ice, the alien hardens. Cracks. Crumbles.
Its burning heart fissures.
Something’s wrong with them. Whatever it is, Blackwood didn’t intend it. He stares at the alien, terrified and yet still; still he’s got that awe in his eyes.
Blackwood holds his hands out. “I tried to stall them.”
“Professor,” I say, the detonator slick in my hand. “Did you – did you warn this thing we were coming?”
Blackwood glares at me. “I just need more time.”
There’s no more time.
I reach the bomb. My thumb curls over the trigger and Blackwood screams, No! He grabs the alien’s arm. He disappears. A second later, he’s back, flickering in and out like a TV on the fritz and the filaments swirling inside the alien spring loose. My thumb falls on the trigger and straight on through, falling forever into an abyss of voices that never ends, a slow fall slower into thickening, hardening echoes, the sound cracking and breaking and heating and spinning together so fast they ignite and light bursts in the center of my chest.
I am the light.
I’m me. Kit. Again. Still at the core. Still in the present. I think. Where was I before? 1968. Who was I? Danny Vale. Soldier. Blackwood was there. Young. He shut down the ship. He sent the alien and the core into this kind of restart, but I don’t think he meant to.
What did he mean to do?
I didn’t see – Danny didn’t see – the end before he was acquired, but that’s what happened. The Myriad shut down, just like the core. Fifty years its shards had been lying amongst the other crystal littering the bottom of the ship, in hibernation, or still working through its restart. Cocooning. Regrowing. Maybe it needed a jump. Guess that’s what I was. Kind of me. What happened to Blackwood, though? He touched the alien. Why wasn’t he acquired?
I follow the curve
of the ring, around and around. The ring never ends. Terminals appear and disappear, confusing my sense of direction. Place. Light flares within the core, blinding me as to where I’m going, but I see now. The hardened, frustrated light of the core. Fifty years the ship has been in this stasis, trying to wake back up. It needs me to wake back up. Not me.
The Ever.
Fuck that. You’re not flushing me. You can’t. Deck plates shift constantly, winding me back to the core. You tried getting rid of me. Pushed me. Pulled me. Tore apart the sky. I picked up a bad penny when I found the Myriad, but the alien got worse luck in me. There is no one more stubborn on Earth.
I just keep going, no matter what.
A curtain of energy coalesces out of the haze into a vaguely human shape. “Oh, I know,” Evander Blackwood says. “No matter how hard I try, I just can’t get rid of you.”
Seventeen
I don’t make connections easy.
When I do, it’s unmistakable. A catalytic rush goes through my mind. Oh. All the pieces fit together. How is Blackwood here, beyond the wall? How did he know I was? What I was thinking just now? He knows. Like the ship knows. Like I know the thoughts of all the people the alien has acquired. The police officer. The warrior. Danny. We’re all on the same frequency. Blackwood has known where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, in this city since the moment I activated the Myriad. Back in 1968, he touched the alien; but the Ever was malfunctioning. Blackwood wasn’t acquired. He was left stranded, somewhere in between.
“You’re not invisible… you’re…”
His hand breaks like a gossamer wave on the rock of the terminal. The mist collects back into his amorphous shape. “I’m just a dog, staring out a window… I can see it. I know it’s there. The power. The knowledge. The freedom, from this hell.”
Everything I know about Blackwood is a lie; everything the world does. He isn’t Empowered. He’s not the father of the future, or even the savior of the world. Blackwood is a spirit locked out of heaven, clawing at the door to be let in.