by Paul Hughes
“Save these coordinates.”
“Done.”
“We’ll be back, Frost. As soon as we can. We’ll bring reinforcements.”
“But what if—”
“Just wait for
and all was static, shimmer, shift as the three soldiers of the Judith faded from the plain of snow and silver.
Frost, alone now, palmed her communications panel. “Get me Commander West.”
A formation of Judas Muj fighters screamed through the sky of perpetual winter.
“Great timing, Jud. What happened with our insertion?”
“Call it a short circuit. We don’t know yet.” An army of Judith technicians plugged, unplugged, analyzed, removed armor, placed nitrox masks over gasping mouths.
Paul felt the ache of reality begin to pound once again in the place behind his eyes. “There’s been a few developments. Do you have our output coordinates?”
“They’re locked. Rest for a while. I’ll debrief you after you’re reloaded.”
“Sounds like kink.”
“You wish.”
Paul smiled, sighed as he leaned back into the reload chamber. Technicians removed his armor. They slammed the chamber door shut above him. Through its clear metal cap, Paul observed Benton’s already-reloading figure in the oven next to his. Cutting lights moved in to flay her. His eyes crawled from peaceful, sleeping eyelids to gentle philtrum to supra-sternal notch, the placement of her nipples, the indentation of navel and the soft southern path to the pudendal cleft. Flesh flew away in the thinnest strips as the spinning whiteness recycled her body. Skin, fat, muscle, bone were removed and then rebuilt with untainted code from the Judith ocean. Hairless. It grew. Muscles toned. A wash of freckles, a mole, a scar. Breath of life and her eyes opened. She caught his gaze and threw it not ungently back.
He closed his eyes and felt his layers of offense and defense stripped from him by harsh, beautiful, sensual light.
“Feel better?”
“Like a summer’s eve.” He toweled tousled hair. “You’re looking better.”
Judith leaned against the chamber entrance, arms folded. She looked over the flesh constructs: the aged West, the hairy author, the ripe smoothness of Benton, brutal cardiac shield scar painfully visible above and between hanging breasts. She self-consciously suited up under the feminine gaze.
he has good taste
Paul reached out. so does she. now stop ogling her.
fair enough. “What’d you see?”
schlick of armor closing over his arms, legs, chest. Cardiac lock. “Your favorite one-hearted psycho is bleeding through into the Whenstream.”
“Fuck.” Judith slumped. “You’re the author. What’s this mean?”
“It means
two distinct universes colliding, splintering both along that fault to history-sized fragments: rupturing, rending, riving, splitting, cleaving. It meant that two distinct universes that I’d written into existence were merging into one.
dissolution
then strike in my name. Strike for all of those whose lives were shattered. For the trillions dead and broken. For those who still bear scars of flesh and thought. Strike because I don’t want my children to die for the Purpose. Strike because there is evil, and it is not me. Strike because history will remember the loss if you don’t.
fading
I’ve begun a war of desire. A war of technology.
All fears realized, all hopes questioned, all boundaries erased, all secrets of form and space brought forward into hesitant light.
None of us will survive this
intact, but it’s not a good chance. If she’s in the Stream already, chances are she’s started all over again.”
“And you’re convinced this Jag When is the crossover point?”
“It’s Delta. Silver is off the scale, and Enemy pattern exhibits a sharp decline. It’s where she broke through.”
“No good... No good.” Judith activated the display. A glowing representation of the Timestream flickered to life. “Okay, we can divert forces from—”
“It won’t be enough.”
“The Fleet’s—”
“She’ll equip the Enemy with silver. If she’s focusing on Delta Point, I wouldn’t be surprised if she has forces en route to the trees right now.”
“Shit, never thought it’d come to this.” West tapped nervous fingertips on the display surface. “Place any bets, Miss Maths?”
Benton thought for a moment. “Negative to at least five decimals.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Enough.” Paul’s fingers went to his temple: throbbing with the silver ache. “We gather forces, we travel back, we take out the Zero-Four probe before silver infestation.”
“Easier said.” Judith smirked. “But you can do it. Get out of here.”
“See you tomorrow, Jud.” Paul rose with West and Benton. “Whenever tomorrow might be.”
“Watch your ass.” As the chamber door sizzled shut, something crawled between her hearts, took residence there, and began to gnaw. She shuddered.
They left.
OF LOSS, OF RUIN
Four hearts: one, and frequent exhalation, shudder, the scrape of exquisitely-manicured nails over flesh, over metal, over flesh and:
She realized through closing her eyes, opening to watch the ceiling spin, the gritting of teeth, fingers through hair, that the absence of stubble was a refreshing and welcome change, and that she could feel the inverse imprint of dimples on her inner thighs as Maire smiled, looked up, went back to work, the drape of raven locks, curled with effort, hours, sweat, hiding most of their collective sin:
The inhuman tongue shaped, re-shaped, the central division splitting, flicking, rearranging and reconceptualizing the meaning of pleasure, of desire, as the interior vocal cords housed within resonated reflexively, whispering without thought through muscle, through the tips of the snake’s voice, one ruddy finger caressing, one circling, both speaking into wetness and soft, soft magenta: do we and with a frantic shifting of position to the other tongue, to other, darker recesses, bound not with teeth, but with lips, kissing, dragging, inhaling the essence of have an agreement?
Maire arose from thighs, wiped moisture from her mouth. She smiled over a tongue closing upon itself, sealing with mucus both her own and another’s. Shattered voices repaired as one: Do we, sweet-ness? The tugging of a voice formed beyond the vibration of flesh, somewhere within the electricity, the halo.
The response was slow, not as a result of thought or consideration or reticence, but simply because Kath couldn’t calm her hearts enough to form words. Hands now idled from intertwining with hair danced lost across her bare thighs, abdomen, breasts, settled over her cardiac plate. La-la-duh-dub. La-la-duh-dub. Slowing, the edge of orgasm, the recession of the interior oceans of loss, of desire for a moment, an hour, a day with this dark partner, replaced with the richness of pleasure.
“Of course... Of course.”
“Good.” Her smile seemed misplaced, given the decision, the alliance. “Blinds off.”
The panels walling the entire chamber shifted from murky gray to reveal a projection of the planet surface far above them. Realized in four dimensions, the outside was a disconcerting veil of sensuality: the bitter wind, the brittle scrape of the lumber schools drowsing through waves of chlorostatic mist far above the surface, the heady intrusion of pine pitch into membranes just now waking from aromas hidden in uncovering, in opening, in sex.
Maire rolled on to her back and snuggled against Kath’s side. It started from above: the singing of the trees, lilting, howling, branches miles long quivering through the mists, sparks floating down, a lazy display of fireworks that sputtered out long before planet impact. The song...
“This is where it begins.” Maire looked into her eyes, lids narrowing, lips bracing with resolve. “This is how we win the war.”
Kath looked into a night sky brazen with perpetual sunset from the system’s binary stars,
the great black forms of the sentient trees blocking out swathes of meager starpoints, their own shower of silver falling to ground, never reaching, never reaching:
Silver.
It was terror and it was beauty and it was all.
Michael made the final decision and launched the Zero-Four probe from a Gauss pipeline that stretched miles within the planet to the void between stars, between times: one hundred grams of alloys and plastics and the echoes of biology. The primary propulsion rockets separated and the solar sail deployed in a flash of gossamer golden filaments. The sail spread out to grasp the stars, and a fusion concussion fed the ever-increasing velocity of the precious spacecraft. At several million astronomical units and several hundred thousand years, the unit achieved nine-tenths light speed. The journey of infinity had begun.
Nanotechnological ramscoops collected the materials required to procreate, and in the night between the galaxies, the tiny vessel created an exact copy of itself. The two remnants of a civilization now eons dead separated, and for an instant, the first machine felt an emotion. It dismissed the feeling and began to replicate another child. The second vessel set off on an alternate trajectory, the translucent solar sail sweeping eerily before it, mute golden wings in the void of silence and nothing, forever departing from its immaculate and sole parent.
The process continued for billions of years. In time, out of time, the original machine died, but its infinite spawn carried the message forever onward. The universe became populated with the machines. The expansion of existence eventually forced the universal heat death. Organic life became an impossibility, and the technological lifeforms flourished. The machines continued onward, waiting for the time that their precious cargo could live again.
When the universe fell back together, having achieved maximum expansion, the machines fell silent. When they encountered a solar system, sometimes they could reconstitute organic life from the biological patterns recorded so long ago on a planet in a system long dust. All that they could do then was wait for that life to grow anew.
In those days between the death of everything and the rebirth of less than humanity, the Zero-Four probe hurtled into the dark and spawned. Its progeny spread outward and consumed everything in their path. Before Omega, it judged that all that it had created was good and redeemable, and it sent the newborns back into the blackness to save those unfortunate enough to have remained behind.
They would live forever in the ocean of silver fire. Omega would be the salvation and the nirvana and the extinction and the
wind bit at her still-flushed cheeks. She pulled her hood forward, forcing her hair into a flailing mane. She pulled errant wisps from her sticking lips. She’d left the scientist Kath drifting into sleep between silken sheets. A part of her still longed to be there.
Concussion from above of static thrust, cycling engines tracing the planet surface with gentle force, currents of dust and needles. The transport was magnificent, drawfed only by a migrating school above, the scavenging parasite herds trailing silently behind.
Clawed feet, jointed legs hinged from the transport’s belly. It more crawled to the surface than landed. As ramps descended, as sides split and smaller vessels thrust into the mist, as ground vehicles began rolling from the transport as a burst eggsac releases spiderlets, Maire was proud of the army she had gathered.
Her mind reaching, her tongue flicking behind parted teeth, no longer filed to barbarian standards, she tasted the communications blinking across the plain, the battle language, the grunts and hisses of action, of anger. Fear: hidden below bravado, hidden not deep enough.
A tracked vehicle approached the compound. Maire frowned, not at the approach, but at what she had begun to taste on the edge of the passenger’s thoughts, a strange, bitter, hazel confusion.
Treads came to a rest. The passenger jumped from the top hatch.
“Maire—”
“What’ve you found?”
“We don’t know. Just—”
A tugging and she saw, heard, smelled: a ridiculous beeping, two sets of tones with silence interrupting: blip blip blip, beep beep beep, blip blip blip, silence.
She frowned.
From dreams, the warmth of the bed, the coolness and fragility of panic, she thought of the freedom that Black Space promised. She thought of Berlin, now so far from her on the planet of machines and nears. She had been unfaithful. She struggled to find calm, but the potency of memory intruded with yesterdays of stubble, stretching, and good pain.
She sat up in bed, drew the sheets around her still-nude form. She wasn’t cold, but she was.
To be so far from One...
To what end had she agreed? How could she ever tell Berlin of the plan that had been set into motion? He was due to return on the next outward tide with the harvesting fleet for the chlorostatic flora.
Black was on fire, had been for decades. The animals, the machines... Maire had told her of a childhood, living but not truly living. Underground with the fires above (literal and figurative), the horrible memories of feasting on the rotten flesh of her fallen parents, of her friends. The time when the plains of wheat had died in the chemical scourge and white light had shot the emergency aid shipments from the sky.
There were legends that they’d once made the machines, but Kath didn’t believe them.
Berlin’s mutterings in his sleep... The final battles before the nears, before the artificial lifeforms had made it all the way to Planet One. Hers was a species enslaved by automaton baubles.
He’d whispered of a tower of black falling from the sky, crushing the planet surface, a line of white through the sky, and then words fell victim to slumber’s confusion and grief’s overflow. Tears choked him and he turned over, coughing, pulled the covers closer over his shoulders. She’d reached out to touch him but hadn’t.
Pieces of a grand puzzle slid into place with liquid and silver precision.
She wasn’t cold, but she was.
Closing her eyes as the waldoes gripped the treadcar, swung it up through the chaos of troops, fighters, other land vehicles, coming and going, loading and unloading, up through sparks and static and jets of super-heated gelatin, she thought back to the calm of war, that moment before impact and combat, that moment when all becomes honed senses: the waft of the protein sludge sloshing in the bio-bombs, the tickle of phased silica shielding, that scream the weapons arms of land vehicles made, lacking lubrication, as pallet after pallet of twelve or fifteen medium-range slash-and-blow missiles slam into place, the muffled tinkling of contents: enough compressed shrapnel slurried with acid to disperse five square miles of unshielded ground soldiers, the stink, the stink of decay and exhaust, blood, sticking to sand, sticking to bones burst through flesh.
She opened her eyes.
The car bounced to a landing platform, quick-sealing deck fudge locking it into place. Maire jumped down from the vehicle, her stomach lurching into place under the pressure of ship gravity. Her first few steps were impressing, sucking, as the fudge completed its curing process.
She stood in place as an internal transport tube lowered over her body and flew her to operations. Her hearts pounded through thousands of feet of lowlight tubing.
Gentle landing.
“Where is it?”
Maire stepped forward into the ship’s core. Helmeted technicians worked at a ring of consoles, their manacled limbs projecting and determining the courses of vessels in wait above the atmosphere, hordes of ground troops spreading across the surface, things as simple as the waste reclamation system and limiting the level of toxic oxygen in the living spaces on-vessel. Dozens of distinct projection bubbles clouded dozens of consoles.
One bubble unclouded.
“We found it in the Seychelles Drift.”
Nude limbs undraped from its squat, shaking interface gauntlets loose to the floor. It stood, stretched, skin pale gray, the juncture of legs revealing nothing other than the signature evacuation slot of the unsexed neuter. Maire’s thoug
hts drifted briefly to the disgust and anger that even three decades of star travel couldn’t erase entirely from her mind, made even more potent by her lust for Kath, the evidence of their union still on her lips.
“Maire?”
“Hmm?” but that voice, that voice. She hated the middle species.
“Seychelles Drift. Remind you of anything?”
A cave, and teeth, and eyes. And silver. And a voice: reaching, reaching.
“Just show it to me.”
The lock cycled open in the chamber forty levels above the operations deck, in a secluded area housed between drives and weapons, just under the coolant pond. She felt the heat of engines, of lights, of something else, something just besind the eyes, just besind now.
Hiss and release of atmosphere shielding. Rivulets of steam and sparks.
“That’s it?”
The neuter walked in before her, fingers tracing over wall-mounted displays. “I’ll boost the outer barrier and run the interior down to visual. You have to see this.”
In the center of the circular room, tracing lasers faded, swept, intensified. Waves of phase shielding rippled out, slowing as force gradation shifted within the containment perimeter. The item hanging at the room’s center flickered into Maire’s vision.
“Readings?”
“Nothing atypical. It’s absorbed a lot of radiation, but that’s to be expected if it’d been in the Drift for a while.”
“What’s it made of?”
“Mostly gold, titanium.. But there are some elements we haven’t yet identified.”
“Metals?”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“Trace biologics on the interior. We can’t sequence them.”
“How’s that possible?”
“Alien genetic patterns. Our printers haven’t been able to build from them yet.”
