by Chad Huskins
“Be what?” said Heeten.
“Lost.”
Heeten smiled at him. “Then I guess we both see eye to eye on that, we just cope with our dreary duty in different ways. You rue it, I laugh at it.” She slapped him on the back suddenly, and changed the subject just as quickly. “You seen the others yet?”
“Others?”
LYOKH HAD TO search far, far back in his memory to recall a time when he had felt this relaxed and happy. They gathered in The Place To Be, so called because of its status as the only place to be on Lord Ishimoto when one had a little time between shifts. It was located at the dead center of Deck 3, and was a converted storage room. It was big enough to fit only four tables, which were just flipped-over compristeel crates. It was believed that vorta kept the place clean, though they were rarely seen in here.
Meiks and Takirovanen were at a table, conspicuously alone, like they were waiting for him. Then Lyokh realized they were, and that this was the surprise Reyes had intended for him. A meeting with the people he had walked out of that god-forsaken hellhole with. People who had been there. People who understood.
They embraced Lyokh briefly, then invited him to join them for some manner of alcoholic swill, made in a still that some forger in the fab room had whipped up. It was strange, getting to know them now. He hadn’t gotten to know anyone on a personal level in those tunnels, for they had all just been stragglers, glued together for a temporary common purpose, dying all the time, hungry, screaming for the wall.
Meiks was a talker, it turned out, who liked to egg at Heeten, who rolled her eyes at his japes. He had a lackadaisical look to him when he wasn’t fighting, which was surprising, and it was in full show when he was slumped in his chair, hand down his pants and uniform in disarray.
When Meiks launched into a story about this one time on Ferris 1714d, Heeten said, “Here he goes, another one of his long and boring diatribes.”
“There are many things about me that are long,” Meiks said. “But none that are boring.”
They cracked up about that. Even Takirovanen.
Takirovanen…he didn’t talk much. He was a man who sat and watched others, with eyes that burned with embers of mistrust, and a face smoothed by aquiline intelligence. It was said that Red Wingers were like this, mostly stoic, speaking very little. Their commander (now dead) had been a real taskmaster, always giving his people onerous workloads, and brooking no room for jokes or horseplay from even the most senior soldiers. Takirovanen continued this tradition, alarmingly fey at times, talking little while quietly massaging his arm, which was filled with nanite-infused serums that would hopefully save his arm from amputation.
“So,” Meiks said at one point. “You heard about this mess with the Ascendancy?”
Lyokh nodded, took a sip of his swill, winced at the hideous taste, and took another sip. “Reyes filled me in.”
“I heard they’re already moving towards Widden. What’s your take on it?”
“I think we’ll go there and we’ll die.”
“Yeah, but how do you think we’ll do?” Meiks said sardonically.
They all laughed. Lyokh included.
“I’m not sure how much we can do to help them,” he said. “At this point, we’re all just circling the drain.”
Meiks chuckled. “Hey, that reminds me. An optimist walks up to a Harbinger, and he says, ‘Give me some wisdom, friend.’ The Harbinger says grimly, ‘Mankind only acts when it is too late.’ The optimist says, ‘Hey, we’re in luck, it’s already too late!’ ”
Heeten nearly snorted out her drink she laughed so hard. Lyokh chuckled. Takirovanen smiled fractionally.
They drank more swill. Heeten broke out a deck of cards and they played a few hands of porhl. They bet with paper dominions, but it didn’t matter how much they lost, the dom-currency was collapsing faster than Man. Everyone knew it. The saying went, As Man collapses, so too does his dominion. In fact, Meiks repeated this maxim each time he lost a hand and watched someone scoop up his money. It seemed to help salve his failure.
Lyokh was hopeless at porhl, Heeten and Meiks were about even, but Takirovanen demonstrated true skill at the game. His face, almost always unreadable, only moved when he spoke, and even then it was limited. When raised, he typically didn’t talk, just tossed in the appropriate amount of doms.
As they played, they chatted, and Lyokh felt some of his worries retreating to the back of his mind. Not disappearing entirely, just fading a little.
Meiks tossed in his bet. “You know, I played this game on Vanwi—must’ve been nine, ten years ago?—against these Marines. They were old as all hell. They had been on regens for something like three hundred years. Two of them said they were so old, they fought in the Ninth Unknowns War.”
“Horseshit,” Heeten said, meeting his bet. “That was, what, five or six hundred years ago?”
“Five hundred fifty-two years ago,” Takirovanen corrected. Another thing they had noticed about their Red Winger, he spoke up to correct people. He seemed to prefer exactitude, not relying on guesses. It gave him the bearing of an accountant, or a know-it-all. None of them seemed to mind. Lyokh certainly didn’t.
“Right,” Heeten said, tossing in her bet. “So those Marines would have been long dead by the time you met them. There’s no regen stock left that can keep someone alive that long.”
Meiks scratched at his stubble. “I thought the same thing, until they showed me their medals. One of them also had an old, scratchy vid, which they showed me on a holotab. The vid was of them receiving their medals from some bigshot general. Some Imperator was standing nearby, too.”
“Who was Imperator during the Ninth Unknowns War?” Heeten said. “Was it Kahmil? Mah-tehn?”
“Ezek-ti,” Takirovanen supplied, tossing in his own bet.
“Right. Did the guy in the vid look like Ezek-ti?” Heetan asked.
Meiks chuckled. “I don’t know. What the fuck does Ezek-ti look like?” He looked at Takirovanen’s bet, then sighed bitterly and folded. “Anyways, they told me what it was like back then. They talked about the order and the discipline of the Republican Navy, the Marine Corps, the Army. They talked about how at one time, mankind had a space fleet of almost a million starships, lots of them built in cooperation with the Faedyans and the Qui’marcs. And they could do that back then, because all the worlds were aligned. Or mostly aligned, anyway. They helped build up each other’s fleets, humans and xenos.”
Meiks shook his head in wonderment.
“Can you imagine? A million starships roaming the Milky Way, all unified worlds going after the Brood. There wouldn’t be anything that could stop us, if we would just work together.” He pointed at Lyokh. “It’s your bet, doyen.”
Lyokh considered his cards, sighed, and tossed in a couple doms.
“What do you think, handsome?” Heeten asked, turning those green eyes on him. “Think it was possible we were ever that strong, or were those Marines on Vanwi just taking advantage of poor Meiks’s tiny intellect?”
“Hey now,” Meiks said with a mock pained expression.
“Hard to say,” Lyokh said. “Everything is becoming lost. Who knows what came before? It could be that all of this has happened before, or that we’re all inside a giant computer simulation, or that we are the dreams of some god.”
The table went quiet for a moment.
“Looks like we’ve got two philosophers here,” Meiks said, gesturing at Lyokh and Takirovanen.
“Don’t go throwing that label at me,” said Lyokh, taking a sip of his swill. He was beginning to feel lightheaded. “I leave philosophy to the ones who can spell it.”
Heeten chuckled. “Don’t let that stop you. If we were all relegated to what we could spell, Meiks over here wouldn’t be a man.”
Meiks pointed at her warningly, and laughed as he took a sip of his swill.
“Doyen is right,” Takirovanen said. “I’m no philosopher, either. And I’ll thank you all not to confuse me with such circu
lar thinkers.”
“Well, if you’re not a philosopher, what are you?” said Meiks.
Takirovanen laid down his cards. A winning hand. “I am the one who collects.”
They half moaned, half chuckled as he raked in their doms.
They sat a while longer, Meiks telling his stories, Heeten debunking them, and Takirovanen offering the occasional correction. Lyokh watched them all as entertainment, and wondered at what had brought them together. He wondered where he would be now if Lucerne, Egleston, Ruvio and Davisjo had not all died. He wondered what conversations he would be having with them if they had survived. Then he put all of it out of his mind, and tried to focus on these three people in front of him.
Just enjoy them, he told himself. Enjoy this moment. You won’t get it back.
That was probably what Reyes had been trying to tell him when he sent him this “surprise.”
As the ship’s night cycle wore on, he felt the gloom seeping out of his pores, and the fog of death lifted. The screams, let them return tomorrow, for tonight was revelry and drinking.
At one point Heeten called for a toast. None of them even had to think about what it would be. As they raised their glasses, they spoke in one solemn, unified voice.
“The wall,” they said. And they drank.
Chang-xi 517b [Muqin]
When the Brood appeared in the sky, the entire planet was blanketed in darkness. Brood worldships were vast black ovoids, the size of small moons, with deep channels that were as wide as canyons on their surface, and openings at their front and rear that spilled half a hundred tentacles. Worldships moved by unknown propulsion systems, but moved efficiently and gracefully for objects so huge. Broodlings were one-twentieth their size, it took centuries for them to grow into worldships.
Muqin’s three moons were the first to go. Ten of the worldships completely enveloped them, their undulating tentacles spreading slowly across the rocky surfaces like sensual fingers teasing a lover’s curves, while the superstructures of their bodies heaved and jerked like an animal getting ready to vomit.
Li, the closest and largest moon, was coated in regolith—the loose, powdery soil plumed out into space as the worldships’ tentacles gave it a hug, completely surrounding Li in a foggy whiteness, obscuring almost entirely the supermassive creature that had embraced it. Large fissures spread across its center, spider-webbing in all directions as the creature gave it a few testing squeezes. Those fissures became canyons, became splits, and finally Li came apart in nine large pieces and a smattering of smaller pieces.
Nine thousand miles away, Xao Meimei, a moon barely thirteen miles across, was swallowed whole, without any fuss or mess. Simply gone. The Brood worldship descended on the final moon.
Twelve thousand miles beyond Xao Meimei’s former orbit, there was Dajie. Thirty-eight miles across, it did not make such an easy meal for the worldship. However, it was eventually broken into pieces, just like Li, and all but the cloud of regolith and random debris was devoured.
Evacuations began immediately, for what they were worth. On major worlds like Muqin, where there were stable and prosperous governments, evac considerations always went into all planning stages of construction, networking, and public works projects. The alarm sounded in every home across the planet, on every street, in every aircar and shuttle, and in every space station in orbit. Some buildings had been made to detach, and came free while repulsor engines hummed and rockets ignited, and military installations blasted off with impulse-magnetoplasma rockets to get them into orbit. Schools were the first to launch, however, and also the first to be devoured, or else shattered when a miles-long tentacle raked void where they flew.
Muqin’s military fired laser cannons, plasma rockets, particle-beam focus weapons, and nuclear weapons. Combined, they let out enough power to obliterate a world. The Brood neither stopped nor slowed. Indeed, they looked to not even have noticed, and suffered no visible damage.
The evacuation continued for the next two hours, until three full-grown worldships and six broodlings had fully extended their cephaloi majors towards the planet—those were their largest tentacles—and mounted the world like ticks.
The world was destroyed in silence. The atmosphere boiled away into space as the planet was squeezed. Its core ignited. Jets of superheated debris were flung into space. Several flash-fires rocketed across the surface, the seas boiled away, and the broodlings drew sustenance from all this destruction.
Mercifully, none of the worldships or broodlings gave chase to any of the last evacuees.
Upon retreat in the starship Veracity, a poet named Ram-Mexst Arpool transmitted this message, and it was played repeatedly on worlds where it was received: “This is our end. All life ends here. Chased like ants, unable to make sense of the giants that continually kick over our anthills.”
The Brood ripped Muqin apart until its core was fully exposed. They continued pulling it apart, not devouring any of it, just making sure the damage was irreparable. Plumes of molten lava gushed out into the void, burning white-hot, then orange, then red. It would be weeks before it was all fully frozen to blackness.
Hours before, Muqin’s diameter had been twelve thousand miles. Now no chunk existed longer than a few miles. The Brood used their cepahloi minors to continually pry and split the planet into smaller and smaller pieces. They also ensnared departing space yachts and frigates, in most cases just splitting the ships open or smashing them. A few unlucky souls were cast into space, still alive and screaming inside their e-suits, tumbling end over end through the colossal cosmic graveyard that had been their homeworld. Just more bits of debris in the ever-expanding field.
Of the five billion inhabitants on Muqin, and the few million souls that had inhabited its three moons, only sixty thousand made it free and clear. They were headed for Monarch.
: Asteroid Monarch
Nothing matters, the Harbingers were quick to remind anyone they passed, lest one forgot it. And beware that human flaw of hope, too, they added. Hope was an attractive thing, one that the Harbingers had so wisely learned to deprive themselves of. But it could always return, that feeling that there was salvation, or a chance at a better tomorrow, or the possibility of immortality. Hope, therefore, was dangerous. It was something to look out for, like sharp rusty objects or bacterial infections.
The Harbingers were on Kalder’s mind when he stepped out of the conference room. He did nothing to wipe the spittle off his face. He couldn’t allow himself to be too concerned with Senator Hossel’s extreme response; if he wished to run a full campaign of Republican Navy and Army personnel to explore the mysteries of the Strangers, Kalder knew there would be more expectorations directed at him before his journey’s end.
Kalder’s mind was working like a nest of maggots. The meeting had worked well enough, despite Hossel shooting to his feet and spitting a gob into Kalder’s face. True it was, that Kalder ought to have been subtler. More soothing. One of the drawbacks to being a Zeroist was that a practitioner was often blunt.
“You have an opportunity here,” Kalder had told them all, seated at the head of the table. He had arrived early to make sure it was so—more because he wanted them all to be able to see him, yet he was also aware that it made him appear to be taking a place of superiority. Inadvertently, he had already put them on guard.
“Yes, yes,” Hossel had said. “An opportunity to put you in a position of unrivaled power. How does that help us in any—”
“An opportunity to re-label yourselves,” Kalder went on, as if the senator had not spoken at all. “And also to re-label your enemies. You look more progressive than ever, while at the same time showing that you are willing to reach across the aisle, unlike the myopic Corporatists, whose only focus is their foundry worlds, or even certain Restorers I might name. You people in the Liberty Arm have a real opportunity here, to be seen as the uniters.”
“We’ve all heard these promises from Restorers before,” Hossel said. “These guarantees of cooper
ation. They invariably fall through—”
“You’ve never been given guarantees of such by me.”
“And what’s the difference?”
“Name one time that I lied.”
They couldn’t. It was his one weapon, and it was a powerful one.
The room fell silent, save for a few chairs creaking beneath the shifting weight of the assembled luminaries, all of them representatives of the Liberty Arm.
Kalder continued. “To be clear, I know what I’m asking of you. I’m asking you to support a Bill that will recall most of the Republican Forces back to the Sol System, to cut our losses, focus our resources, and help reforge a single-system government there. And I’m asking you to give me command of a fraction of those Forces, so that I may go beyond the borders the Brood have set, test them, study them, and potentially uncover a truth only the Strangers knew. A truth left hidden within the Scrolls.”
He gave a pregnant pause, allowing them all to absorb and follow his logic.
“That’s what I’m asking. What I’m offering in return is one chance—perhaps the last chance any of you will ever have—to make a difference in your respective districts. If you are not happy with the terms I’ve laid out, you may console yourselves with the knowledge that the Corporatists are also discontent. If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.”
There had come a chortle from a few of the Liberators. Kalder hadn’t meant the joke, but if it engendered even a modicum of trust from this group, he was willing to accept it.
“Progress,” Hossel said. Spoken as a curse. “There’s a fine name for it. Irony of ironies, it’s spoken from a Restorationist, a man who wants us to go backwards. Backwards towards progress? What sense does this make? And what is Kalder’s progress?” He looked at the others in the room. “Is it the aggregate of the Republican Army? Does he mean to gather forces bit by bit until he’s got the whole lot to himself? Does he?”
