Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “I’m fine. Just have a headache.”

  “You need sleep.” Benton touched his hand.

  “I’ll be fine.” His words were cold and final. He pulled his hand from beneath Hope’s.

  She’d noticed the shaking.

  “Seems empty here tonight.”

  “Lots of ships are out. Myers meeting up with John Wayne, Spear and Riley for a Fuck-Run-and-Go.”

  Benton shook her head. “You boys and your cute little names.”

  “Behind your back,” Paul took a sip of coppered coffee, “we call you ‘Sugartush.’”

  “Now I know you’re sleep-deprived.”

  Paul and West looked at each other and grinned.

  “Hi!” Honeybear jumped onto the table.

  West flinched. “God, I hate this bear. Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. West! How are you today?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Okay!” The bear sat down between Benton and West, glassy-eyed smile directed at Paul.

  “I guess we have to take him out on a run sometime?”

  “Yeah…Should be able to get a pretty good lock on Windham with him.”

  “Great.”

  “Oh, he’s not so bad.” Benton patted the bear’s scruffy head.

  West grumbled.

  “Big run tomorrow. You two should get some sleep.” Paul picked up his cup to take another sip of coffee, but Benton took the cup from him. It snapped from the construct.

  “You, too. No more coffee.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “We close enough yet?” fleet on scope.

  “Bring Mindel up on gel.”

  calling.

  Alina slumped against her interfaces and leaned into the warm slurp of the neuroflux gelatin. She blew a few bubbles from her mouth, which danced outward to her command chamber’s metallish crust.

  Eddies wrapped, swirled into a form a little taller, a little more angular than Al’s. Static snap and the form sculpted a translucent smile, swam forward to embrace her. Sam adjusted the gelatin consistency accordingly to make the contact convincing enough.

  “Frosty!” The two young women, one molded in flesh, one carved in jello, giggled and covered each other’s cheeks in slimy kisses. “It’s been forevers.”

  “Too long, babe. How’s it hanging?”

  “Oh, you know. Mediocre, but it gets the job done.”

  “Ready for a little midnight special?”

  “Fuck and run, you know it. How’s your fleet holding up?”

  “Just fine until they pulled us out of the Jag. Sent us to patch up hotzones closer to A-Point. Lost our fort sometime last—Well… A while ago.”

  “Time flies in the mind of—”

  “Minolta. Oh! You’re going to hate me for not telling you sooner, but I met him.”

  “Met who?”

  The gelatin form’s eyes pinched to mischief. “The Author.”

  The bridge slime Alina inhaled took on a bitter cool. “Really?”

  “Jud’s little retrieval team misfired into our Jag When. Kate and I got to personally deliver him to the suspected Delta bleed at Lascaux.”

  “You bitch!” Her stage frown became a smirk. “What’s he like? I mean, in real life?”

  “Didn’t say a lot. Didn’t smile, either. His hands—”

  sorry to interrupt, darlings, but we’re closing on-target.

  “Okay, Sam. Meet me after the dance in the construct?”

  “Sure thing, Al. Let’s lube up.”

  “Bang their bottoms out, hon.” Wink.

  “Later!” Mindel Frost’s gelatin form drizzled back into the bridge tide.

  Alina sighed and sank back into her gauntlets. “You get that?”

  it’s all recorded. Judith ME confirms Delta bleed on Fort John Wayne patterns.

  “Bring them to visual.”

  All around her, the dusk of Sam’s bridge faded to the intense white of the Timestream. A scattering of Judith vessels flocked according to home forts.

  “Secondary confirmation?”

  neurological extrapolation confirms Delta bleed. tainted code. she’s silver.

  “Sweep for crawlies?”

  negative on enemy pattern.

  “Okay, open channel to my kids.”

  done.

  “Judith Ft. Myers fleet,” her fingertips raced over the projected timescape, “close on these targets and engage on my mark.”

  Her finger hesitated over Mindel Frost’s vessel, Judith Kate.

  “Open fire.”

  tracing these constellations of flesh, greater silences than stars provide

  “You, too. No more coffee.” Benton pushed back from the table. She was about to stand up when she saw Samayel and his captain approaching.

  “Yes, dear.” Paul’s eyes were locked on hers. He hadn’t seen Sam & Co. yet.

  “Al, don’t—”

  The young woman walked right up to Paul’s side and struck him across the face before Sam could grasp her flailing arms, hands pulled to fists. West jumped up and took one of the fists harmlessly to his barrel chest. He growled as her forced her arms behind her back, slammed her to the tabletop.

  “Shit. Fuck. I’m sorry, Paul. She’s—”

  “The fuck’s your problem?” West bore down on her, incapacitating her against the metallish table.

  Paul said nothing. He wiped a line of blood from his crumpled nose, upper lip split by that inherited chisel of teeth. With a thought, it was gone. Silver burned behind muddied eyes.

  “I don’t care who you are.” Alina struggled beneath West’s heft. “If you send me on another mission like that, I’ll fucking kill you.” Her bared teeth looked entirely too sharp.

  “Wanna help me out here?” Paul searched Hope’s eyes.

  She activated her glass, waited. “They went on a bleed containment run today. Took out the Fort John Wayne fleet remnants.”

  Paul sighed.

  “She was my best friend!” Alina blinked back tears.

  “Captain Mindel Frost.” Benton snapped the glass shut. “Delta-infected, 99% certainty.”

  “We met her…When this all—”

  “Get off me.” Alina shrugged from underneath West. He lifted her with one hand to her feet.

  “You gonna control yourself?”

  She didn’t answer as she fixed the tie in her hair.

  “Have a seat. You three let me handle this.” Sam, West and Benton faded from the construct, now empty except for Alina and Paul.

  She sat. Two distinct lines of tear wet her too-big cheeks. She wiped them away.

  “I’m sorry. Really.” He reached out to take her hand, reconsidered and withdrew. “I know it wasn’t easy.”

  She scoffed. “It was easy. All I had to do was reach out and think.”

  “I know the feeling.” He thought a scotch into his hand, drank most in one draw.

  “Listen—” She studied the tabletop where she’d been splayed and writhing a minute before. “I shouldn’t have hit you.”

  “It’s okay. I can’t feel anything anymore.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “I do.” He placed his now-empty glass on the table and extended his hand. “Let’s try again. I’m Paul.”

  “Alina.”

  “Sam’s told me all about you.”

  “Ditto.”

  Awkward silence.

  Paul’s glass filled itself again. Sip, swallow, clink.

  “I’m sorry about Frost.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know you didn’t really kill her.”

  “I know she’s out there somewhere, outside of this.”

  “A ghost.”

  “Shaking chains in the attic, droning amps in the basement.”

  Something twinged behind Paul’s eyes.

  “It’s all going to be okay. Trust me.”

  “I can’t.” She took his glass and drained it. “I don’t know you.”

  “Then
know me.”

  Flush of red. “I’d better go get sliced. More fun tomorrow.” She stood.

  “Keep up the good work.”

  “I’ll try.”

  i want to know your midnights to bear witness to your yawns, twists and turns your valleys and your breath, neither better nor worse than mine. i want to be your stars and sunrises, first kisses of ever and of morning. i want to see your first smile and hear sleeping mumbles and sighs. i want to see your waking face in the stillness of our quiet dawn. i want to be your

  Cowboy lately?” He shrugged off the drape of sleep as he got out of the slicing chamber, the blades retracting, still wet with the flesh fragments of his previous day’s body.

  Benton not-shyly toweled pattern scum from her pubis. “Haven’t heard anything from Jud. Adam?”

  “Nah. Last I knew, they were heading outer. Trying to draw a bead on young Windham.”

  Paul blew pattern from his nose, wiped it from his ears. He felt the final touches solidify: scars, wrinkles, hair. He caught Benton’s stare.

  “What?”

  “New scar.” She approached, touched the right side of his face. “Blade impact.”

  “Yeah, well—” He wiped his face dry. “Your tits are bigger today.”

  She scowled. “Glad you noticed.”

  “It’s true.” West chuckled. “What have you been dreaming?”

  She ignored him, snapped her glass open. Figures illuminated face and chest. “We’ll be out on runs for a few days. Recharge in the forts. A few little hotspots to seal up before we hit half-and-half.”

  West shielded with a ssschiick and sheen. He flexed the blades of his right arm and slammed a needle cartridge into his right shiver pistol, repeated the process with his left, flipped both back into their forearm holsters. “Let’s fucking do it right this time. I’m getting old, kids.”

  Benton shielded and locked her glass into place on her chestplate. “We’ll be good to go. Coordinates are golden.”

  “Silver.” Paul pulled his faceplate down, locked it into place. His cardiac shield hissed and frosted blue as it blinked an affirmative. “Coordinates are silver.”

  They went

  back into the wind and it amazed me, all of it, the incomprehensible enormity of the system within which I now operated, the Judith Mind Essence. They’d taken some of the best parts of each book and combined them into the hive mind generated by the countless Judiths held in metastasis in the construct.

  A twinge: too much. Right eye watered, from pain or from the sunlight reflected from white stretching away in every direction.

  “That ridge. We’ll find the cave there.”

  The hulk of Task’s vessel still smoldered on the ice plain of Lascaux. I smelled, tasted his blood in ice crystals, in the bite of the wind, the singe of melting metallish.

  We trudged, West and I crunching down through the surface skin of melted and re-frozen snow, Benton walking along beside us, sweeping the field with her instruments and colorless eyes.

  “I got a reading. Faint.”

  “Human?”

  She shook her head. “Two hearts. Berlin or Task?”

  “Don’t know.” And I didn’t.

  “We takin’ ‘em, or bleed?” West unslung his shivers.

  “This one’s pure Judith patty. We’ll take him.”

  They walked from wind into the dark of the cave, flooded it with schools of halo dust, lighting their way over ridge and around protrusion and under overhang.

  “Reading’s close.” Hope’s voice was barely a whisper.

  She need not have consulted her glass to conclude the proximity of their target; the two lines of tacking blood in the snow draped on the cave floor were barely freezing, two imperfect plow rows through drifts, the scrape of shattered femurs across ice.

  It was an ugly place to die.

  The tunnel widened, bubbled, tapered off into a series of smaller shafts into the rock. Laying propped against the ledge, the dying man who was Task gasped his agony through bloodied mouth. His glass eyes swung to view his three visitors in a way that suggested he was already dead.

  In the plastic interface glove of his left hand, he still held a twitching, sparking something. It appeared to be the index or ring finger of his dead lover, the near Elle.

  His right hand was crushed into a smear of bone and strips of flesh.

  His legs were held on by what muscles hadn’t torn completely through in the crash of his vessel.

  As Benton crouched beside him, surveying his damage, another twinge needled through and besind and before Paul’s eyes.

  “Who..? Who—”

  “Don’t try to talk.” Benton injected him with numby mist from the kit at her side.

  West remembered a young doctor from Michigan who’d designed something like that once. Sweeping, flailing, tides of memory and something else, deeper and darker and alien.

  “Task,” Paul took a knee. “Where are they?”

  Blinking confusion and fear. Red teeth, crusting and browning.

  “Berlin and Maire. Where are they?”

  Task clutched the finger tighter. “Elle..?”

  “It’s dead. You know that. You saw it die. We need to know where the others are. What happened after the crash?”

  Eyebrows furrow, a gasp, exhalation and drift into meds-induced coma.

  “He’s out.”

  “Dead?” Paul reached to check Task’s pulse.

  “Metastasis for now. He’ll die if we stay here much longer. He’ll cross over with us, minimal damage.”

  “Looks like we’re heading home early.”

  Paul stood. “You prep him for exit. West, let’s check out the rest of the cave for signs of

  silver erupted everywhere, that piercing brand of light that exists beyond our concept of vision.

  The force of the blast was enough to knock Hope from her feet. She not-gently hit the stone and snow floor, her head snapping back in a sickly and palpable crack of shielding.

  I saw Task’s limbs flutter in ways that human arms and legs shouldn’t. Now passed out, he couldn’t have realized that what had remained of his left leg had just sheared off.

  The blast knocked me back against the cave wall, but I kept my footing. I immediately thought my shielding to its highest phase.

  The mountain that was West bore the explosion the best of us all. He had his weapons drawn and was returning fire before I even realized what was happening.

  Blocking the light with an outstretched hand, I looked into the white that the tunnel entrance had become to finally see somethings that had crawled behind my eyes for centuries.

  I hadn’t imagined them that way.

  Beyond simple words or concepts, the Enemy spidered along the cave walls, tens, dozens, fifteens of them, a flickering, sub-screaming mass of writhing silverblack silverthought.

  Each of West’s shiver blasts, accompanied along its trajectory with a stream of profanity that only he could seem to muster with such aplomb during combat situations, struck home on its intended Enemy target. The intruding Judas timeline patterns shattered and were re-absorbed into the Enemy mind-essence.

  More came.

  Bent physics fucked my mind for an instant before realization, but I tore myself from the big picture and focused on smelling the roses instead: I lifted Hope from her crumple on the ground and snapped the emergency exit pin on my chestplate. I did the same to Hope’s. I reached down to grab hold of Task’s arm.

  “West! We’re out!”

  A few more kills, a dozen more new arrivals, the cave ceiling cracking and collapsing into dust and chunks. He walked backward, dodging silver tendrils, almost to us—

  He tripped.

  The uneven ground met his bottom and back with a rough slap, but still he fired, the shiver blasts echoing and rupturing rogue code from the ME. He slid back, kicking with his feet, trying to get as close to us as he could before the jog jerked us back into nowhere.

  He’d almost reached us wh
en a shot went wide, an Enemy got too close, a silver tendril snaked and severed his right arm from the elbow down.

  The shiver fired once upon impact with the ground, taking out the Enemy’s legs. It snapped to grid.

  West dropped his other shiver and tore the emergency exit release from his chest. When he was within reach, I helped him into what was supposed to be our exit bubble.

  It wasn’t there.

  I knew something was wrong. There was no tickle, no copper anticipation of jog or exit, no visible shimmer.

  I was covered in other people’s blood.

  The Enemy patterns stopped their advance. Silver snakes paused.

  A fuzz of static, a shared mind, orders from beyond. I could seetastehear them speak as one: that horrible One, the Enemy mind-essence, that which had kept me awake for years as I’d attempted to unravel its intricacies, its secrets and horrors.

  It spoke.

  The voice was ancient. The magenta bib overalls looked brand-new.

  Click.

  She walked lazily around the still Enemy patterns, each leg she passed a veritable tree trunk in comparison to her five-year-old form. As she passed each pattern, the silverblack rippled, reached, retreated from her purity.

  Maire wasn’t smiling.

  “Ah, Author. You think too much.” She sat on the floor before the four where their exit bubble should have been. Her raven curls bounced and settled. “Let’s talk.”

  The Enemy didn’t move.

  Paul ignored the child for a moment, checked Benton’s vitals from her plate. She was stable. West held his cauterized stump with his good arm. “I’m fine,” to the silent question in Paul’s gaze.

  “I’ve been watching you, Paulywog.” Her voice was playful, singsong. “Nice job with the bear. I never would have guessed that he was under the couch.”

  “Thanks. It was a shining moment in literature.”

  “So what should we do now? I could have my shiny dead soldiers back there kill all of you right now. That’d be the easiest solution.”

  “I die, you die.”

  “Unfortunate, that. You shouldn’t have written me so well.”

  “You weren’t meant to be a main character.”

  “Good thing I was, though. Brought credibility to an otherwise-sappy space soap.”

  “I should’ve deleted you.”