by Stephen Moss
The code was as natural to them as breathing, even if the non-native speaker on the other end often stumbled. It was binary, and they brought its meaning down into their minds like hope showering from above, focusing their might on calculating and recalculating any possible interpretation of the string.
In the end, the meaning was as obvious as it was poetic, and in the instant they both saw it, every capable air and ground unit in a two-hundred-mile radius of a specific point in southwestern Germany was mobilized. Whatever task they had been working on, whatever precedence their cargo might have thought they were owed, all was superseded by the chance that Birgit might once again be able to defy the odds stacked against her.
StratoJets lifted from the ground in clouds of dust or banked hard, setting aside old courses as they ramped up their engines now in concert and closed on the spot for whatever final attempt Birgit had planned. Minnie could not be sure what Birgit intended, and she could be even less sure that the woman could do it even if she tried, but if there was a chance that her mother was going to jump, Minnie would be there to catch her.
As hundreds of aircraft and ground units, both old and new, closed on the point in the Schwarzwald, eyes turned to the sky above the observatory-capped peak of the Feldberg and everyone waited.
- - -
Rob felt as cold now as the body he still held close. She had not moved in over an hour, silent like the connection to Earth, last heard reporting its impending doom.
He had stopped crying now. Now he just waited. So much effort for nothing. That they were going to die had always seemed likely. That they had survived so long was a miracle, really. But that they had failed just made the truth of this slow death unbearable.
What comfort he might have taken in being close to the woman he had come to love was diminished by her self-enforced silence. If he could only see her face once more, kiss her once more. He tightened his grip around her cold body and closed his eyes.
The pull of her hand was so gentle at first, so soft as to be almost imperceptible. But he felt it anyway, he felt it and his heart leapt at the sign that she was still alive, somewhere in there. He started to fight again, his strength flooding back to him as hope for one last moment with her was revived within him. But as he fought to pull her free once more, her finger, weak and feeble, shook slowly back and forth.
Stop, she was telling him. Stop. And now, as he stared at the ghostly hand, it came toward his mask, and began pulling him gently down, toward her, closer.
“Birgit!” he called. “Can you hear me?”
She could not, but still her hand pulled his head down, and he struggled to reorient himself in the cramped space, so he could be close to her once more in the final moments.
Her hand, her arm, were distant things. After the loud and brash vigor of her subspace battle with the Mobiliei fleet, this simple act was so hard. It was so close, and yet so tiny and vague, she could almost not imagine it had ever been natural to her.
But on some level she felt, like an echo of a distant bell, as her hand slowly brought him down, closer, to her chest, to her heart.
But this was no sentimental act. She might have been privy to such flights of fancy if she didn’t think she had a hope. But she did have hope still, in a corner of her self, and if she could bring his head closer, nearer, not to her, but to the singularity itself, then when she finally released it from its enslavement she might be able to pull off one last trick.
As he came close, confused, perhaps, but without other option or want in the darkness, she reached out, not with her arms now, but with the singularity’s broad, thin fingers, across space, broaching the wide gap between them and their home.
She saw it now as a great gravitic orb, the huge tug of the Earth visible for eons across this inverted place. It was vast and heavy, holding so many souls in its embrace, but she could see none of them now, none of its cities or towns, none of its mountains or oceans. She saw only signatures, fusion footprints large and small dotted around the borders of the great orb, like shining lights of pressure and attraction, their pull visible under the skin of the universe.
She span around the globe at the speed of thought, seeking a pattern, a unique point, and here, at the rough distance from the globe’s pole that she expected to see it, a converging surge of forces, a riot of energy closing in, as Minnie and Mynd mobilized their forces.
It looked, to Birgit, like a flower budding in reverse, a folding inward of light at whose epicenter, Birgit knew, was a mountain that she had once been able to see from her childhood home. They had heard her, Birgit thought, sobbing at her center, they had heard, and they were waiting.
With the last ounces of herself she fixated on that beacon in the night, bringing the IST’s massive power round in a great, fixing beam that pulled at the strings of this different place, this warped universe, and linked it to that closing blossom on Earth.
Now, with the two places joined, holding on as best she could, she released her grip on another part of IST, allowing the singularity to burst outward, letting go of its reins and smashing the chains that had held it prisoner. Without sentiment or backward glance, the singularity bloomed outward, briefly enveloping the few cramped meters around itself in the center of the IST, and then sucking the center of itself away, into the dark mist.
- - -
The translation came, not with a bang, but with a whisper, and a white flash that fled quickly away, leaving only a black dot at its center. Minnie, Mynd, Guowei, and every mind that had been able to inhabit a craft rushed up to it or ran under it, as eyes probed the slowly falling sphere.
A lazy ribbon of blood was forming as the irregular black orb started to fall, already starting to come apart when the faster of the minds watching and rushing to it made out what they were seeing. It was the core of the IST, transposed here by long patterned equation, an ideal dreamt by the very brain now bleeding out in its center.
In slow motion, two automatons, an eight and a fourteen, leapt from approaching StratoJets onto the falling block with apparently suicidal abandon. They grabbed and pulled at the device, suddenly bereft of the massive gravity that had so recently been holding it together, but now responding to Earth’s greater gravity as it started to fall faster and faster.
The two automatons worked with fierce effort, tearing metal and gouging into the machine to get at the severed bodies within. The dot was coming apart now, ripped at by powerful muscles as the whole fell fast toward the mountaintop below.
The singularity at the IST’s center, once opened, had only spread wide enough to encompass Birgit’s torso, and even less of Rob had been pulled over, pulled back, as she sent what she could of them flying through space, sent them home, at last. Her gloved hand was still resting on the side of his helmet when the Phases broke through to them.
The automatons, working feverishly, grasped one each, Birgit’s legless form, Rob’s disembodied bust, and leapt free once more in the last moments before the widening cloud of debris started to rain down on the green earth.
- - -
As the story was etched into history, as the tale of the battle was recorded, many names would be carved in many monuments around the world. The shockwave of the conflict carried a lot of them away still, as high on the list of heroes were the lost orphans, the best of humanity, our salvation even after we had forsaken them.
As recovery work was prioritized and begun, first among many imperatives for a rebuilding TASC was the launching of probes, out along potential pathways modeled after the battle, looking for remnants, for explanation, and maybe even for survivors floating in ejected capsules in the coldness of ever-deeper space.
While plans for those probes were finalized and inputted into the two Resonance Domes still standing, the rest of the world turned its eyes to the rain. It was a meteor rain, part of a storm that encompassed the entire equator and much of the tropics, and that was predicted to last for the next decade or more as the remnants of Hekaton and the other sa
tellite hubs fell slowly to Earth.
Much would stay aloft, however, and now the minds that had planned this terrible party gazed on the damage wrought and looked to the stellar brooms they would need to clear it, before our highways to the stars could be rebuilt.
It was a pity, some might say, that they would be forced to clear the glimmering ring that was now forming around the waist of the planet, a tribute to Saturn’s glory, but if this first brush with the wider world of the cosmos had taught them anything, it was that the universe was no more forgiving than our own world had once been, and if humanity did not want to suffer the fate of the Incas and Aztecs, then they must look to the horizon and prepare.
And to that end, they also turned their focus to the last of their enemy. They sent signal to the colony ship’s of the Armada, telling them of their cousins’ fate, and quickly worked to construct a copy of the now lobotomized IST on the very axis of the world, drilling into the South Pole to anchor it to the plate it would now defend.
The massive Subspace Core was no communication device, though. It could be, but that was not its prime directive. This was a weapon, one of a new era, and maybe it could even be a transport, if the recovering Birgit could figure out a way to reproduce that trick without destroying the core itself at the same time.
- - -
“We see you, you slippery little …” said Birgit, standing at a console in her new laboratory on Jeju Island.
“Now, now, darling,” said Rob, stepping up to her side.
She smiled, “But they are right there, see?”
And he could see what she was pointing to, he was happy to say. She did as little as possible in the ether now, preferring to spend as much time as she could in the real world, in all its warm, wet, weighed-down-and-dirty glory. And to spend time with Rob, as well, what was left of him.
They might not be able to romp in zero gravity anymore, or anywhere else, for that matter, with her lower extremities gone, and his body now more machine than man. But what was left was more than enough for her, she thought, as he wrapped his strong, lifelike arms around her and they looked at the big screen in front of them.
She pointed at a moving dot, laden with data and meaning, and he saw the dot closing on another. The dot represented a ship not unlike New Moon One, but with a very different target. It was closing on a dark mass. Almost lifeless, but still flying blind in a long pass through Venus’s orbit and then outward, forever.
But before that ship was lost to the void, another was closing on it, an intrastellar mailman going to deliver an important package, a package that included something close to a stamped-addressed-envelope, for those that remembered such things.
- - -
The year following the final battle went by surprisingly quickly. The colony ships, surrendered after Birgit had fired a few shots across their bows, were arriving into orbital impound while humanity decided what to do with them. Their orbit would not be around Earth, though, as that space was still a debris field, and would be for many more years. And so they targeted the moon, and for the most part were happy even for its cold embrace given the fate of their fighting fleet.
Birgit had not managed to find a way to refine her trick with the IST, but she had found a way to repeat it. After long and unpleasant negotiation with the vanishing carrier flagship, or rather what was left of it, two capsules had been given over in return for a simple concession of the rest of its inhabitants being allowed to live out their lives in space-bound exile.
The two cryo-units in question, one having been removed forcibly from frozen, crusted excrement before being handed over, were taken into the heart of a purpose-built IST, and placed next to it. With To-Henton and DefaLuta watching in icy silence, and the Hemmbar gazing on in fascination, Sar Lamati screamed and screamed into the cosmos as the traitors departed the ship, and then the universe.
- - -
In a wide room, a small group gathers and waits.
On two cots lie Quavoce Mantil, the man who had pretended to be Shahim Al Khazar; and Shtat Palpatum, the man who had pretended to John Hunt, a pretense so profound that he had even fooled himself. They awake slowly in a customized medical recovery chamber unlike any ever conceived on Earth.
These are chambers designed for alien anatomies, the first extra-terrestrials to ever truly touch upon our planet’s surface. In this room, sterilized by technologies that combine the wisdom of both races, the two men open their real eyes for the first time in decades, stretch long dormant limbs, and groan as the last of the days-long reanimation process brings them back to consciousness.
As they both focus, they look at each other, and then at the small group of aliens waiting to meet them. They see their human selves and smile into these mirrors, the faces familiar from a decade of shared experience.
And next to their simulacrums they see Madeline and Jack. They know them both from now rejoined experience. They know them, but they have never truly met them until now. They warily nod, not a natural movement for Mobiliei necks but they attempt it anyway, knowing their faces must appear strange to these people who had come to be family.
But they all smile with very real affection, instantly seeing past their differences, knowing these men for who they really are: the people ultimately responsible for every saved life, for giving humanity back the future it now looks forward to.
These men are the ones that truly saved them, they know that, and Madeline steps forward with a tear in her eye. She steps up to the one she knows to be Shtat Palpatum, both of them remembering their first tentative meeting in a hotel room eleven years before, and slowly, but without fear, they extend their alien hands toward each other and touch for the first time.
For more information on books by Stephen Moss, and to hear about future releases,
you can find the author on Facebook, or email him directly at [email protected]
Look for new titles from Stephen Moss in 2015,
including The Similar Infinites, a new series that explores the extent of our infinite universe,
and the many differences and similarities we can expect to find
if we ever discover a way to explore it.
Also look for The Orphans’ End, the story of the fates of
Banu and the orphan pilots, to be released as a short story in my newsletter
and on Facebook in the new year.
For now, though, this story is at an end.
But the greater questions it begets are just beginning.
Thank you for reading,
-Stephen
