by Nick Webb
“And what was that?”
“Us.”
They walked down the corridor, peering into the different rooms as they passed them. All full of various amounts of strange equipment, monitors, strange instruments poking out of the walls at various points. One of the room was humming, perhaps with the thrum of some machine deep inside the walls. “Well,” said Proctor, “we are pretty badass.”
“I’m serious, Shelby. They conquered billions of species. Billions. And we were the first that handed their asses to them.”
“Barely. All it took was flinging you into a black hole. And besides, in case you haven’t seen, they’re back.”
They’d reached the end of the hallway. So far there had only been one way to go. Forward. But now the corridor split. “To the right,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said, indicating the way to Case and Davenport. They shrugged, and began down the new hallway. At some point she suspected they’d reach the core of the ship and, finally, find him. Granger. Was he mobile? Could he walk? she wondered. Would Case and Davenport have to carry him? He mentioned he was missing a few parts. She supposed it was too much to ask for knees to last seventy years much less thirteen billion.
“So,” he continued, “there I was, in the Swarm’s own universe, with half a dozen Valarisi ships. But here’s the thing. The Valarisi were free. As susceptible as they are to the meta-space influence of the Swarm, without the Skiohra’s Ligature, the Valarisi had a brief space of time where they were completely free of the Swarm’s control. And in that time, clever buggers as they are, built up some defenses. More than that. They weren’t just clever. They were devious. They built up defenses such that when the Swarm reasserted their influence, the Valarisi would maintain control, without the Swarm realizing it. And not just maintain control, but able to follow the lines of control back to their source.”
Proctor paused in the corridor. Her marines stopped as well and watched her. “Are you saying, the Valarisi turned the tables on the Swarm and infiltrated them?”
“In a sense, yes. They couldn’t control the Swarm, by any stretch of the imagination. But they could spy, essentially. They Swarm would be acting through them, just as they did here, but the whole while the Valarisi were there, in the background, learning, growing in understanding of how the Swarm operated, how their technology worked, and how they could ultimately either destroy them or escape.”
“I take it the Valarisi never figured out how to destroy them?”
A pause. “No. They didn’t. Our only option was to escape.”
She resumed their trek down the corridor, which ended in more stairs heading down. These weren’t stairs carved out of asteroid, however, but looked like they may have been original steel steps from the Victory. “You’ve skipped something. You escaped, yes. But what happened from the time you entered their universe to the time you escaped? Did the Swarm catch you? You were on the Victory. What happened to the rest of it?”
“It was absorbed into one of the Valarisi’s vessels.”
She hesitated to ask. “And you?”
Form his voice, it sounded like he didn’t want to answer her. “I … I as absorbed as well. It was the only way.”
Oh my god. “What do you mean … absorbed?”
“Remember when the Russians first encountered the Swarm-controlled Valarisi? Right before the Khorsky incident? Malakov was there, and at his direction, in order to get what he wanted from the Swarm, several of his men were … consumed by the Valarisi. Their essence absorbed into theirs.”
“Shit, Tim. They … liquified you? And you … stayed conscious?”
“They didn’t so much liquify me as … disguise me. I basically spent a whole bunch of time in a vat of Valarisi matter. But it was … transformative. Their essence was inside of me. Part of me. I could hear them all in my head. I was part of them. They’re a collective, Shelby. It was glorious. And then … the Swarm reestablished their link and their essence entered into us too. And it was also … transformative.”
Proctor didn’t know what to say. And in fact, felt rather sick. “In … what way?”
“It changed me. And Shelby … it took a long time to get myself back.”
“Longer than thirteen billion years?”
“Shelby, our isotopes don’t decay at the same rate in their universe as they do ours. The physical constants are different. The fine structure constant is different. The gravitational constant is different. Everything is different.”
She gulped. “How long?”
“I was in the Swarm’s universe, from my perspective, many times longer than I’ve been back in ours.”
“And you’ve been back here for thirteen billion years?”
“Around twelve, actually.”
She didn’t know what to say. It was Tim, but at the same time, given what he’d been through, it wasn’t Tim. Not at all.
The stairwell ended in another corridor, and they followed it to the end where it forked again. She recognized this intersection. To the left was what would have been the entrance to the galley. To the right would be the way to engineering. That was where he must be. Except now … what would she find? His shriveled body? Was it the same body? Replaced many times over the years? Though she supposed, when she thought about it, all bodies are slowly replaced many times over a lifetime.
“So … what you’re saying is … you’re a really, really old man, Tim.”
“And cranky.”
A question had been weighing on her mind since they’d first had an inkling the mystery ship—what they’d called the Golgothic ship which had turned out to be a heavily retrofitted ISS Victory—was in some way related to Granger. “Tim. The Chesapeake. The Dolmasi ships. Their homeworld. New Dublin. All these places where you left death and destruction in your wake. Why?”
“Shelby. I—” it seemed he was at a loss for words. “I told you. I was … changed. The Swarm changed me. My greatest fear was realized. They didn’t control me, but their essence was creeping into me, through their incorporation into the Valarisi. It was a devil’s bargain. On one hand, it changed me. Made me … less human. On the other hand, I gained knowledge surpassing my wildest imagination.”
“So it was you. You killed Captain Diaz on the Chesapeake. My old ship, Tim. My friends. Your friends. How could you do that? What end justified that?”
“There is no justification, Shelby. I’m telling you, they changed me. When I finally came into contact with humans again, after so many eons, it was like meeting aliens. All the customs, all the social norms, everything was out the window. All I saw was a threat, it fired on me, and I neutralized it. It wasn’t until later that it started dawning on me what I was doing. I accessed the memories, long buried, and started to remember. I … remembered how to be human again.”
“Took you long enough.” They were almost there. Just a few more corridors and corners, and they’d arrive at engineering. Given what Tim had just told her, she caught Case’s eye and indicated with a hand gesture towards his rifle. Her meaning was clear. Be ready for anything.
“I’m truly sorry, Shelby. I wish I could go back and change how things happened. But we’re here. And after twelve billion years of laying the groundwork for the Swarm’s final destruction, of meticulously laid plans, we’ve arrived at the moment. Finally.”
The were at the doors to Engineering.
“Ok Tim, what is it? What’s the plan? What do you need me to do?”
A long pause. The longest yet.
“Tim?”
“Shelby. I need you to kill me.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Fighter cockpit
Near planet Shao-587
Once again, Zivic found himself on escort duty. Except this time the circumstances were far more strange. They’d decided it made more sense to interrogate—nicely—Polrum Krull on her own ship. Since their marines were far outnumbered by the remains of Krull’s people they had to rely on the captive king principle. With a gun held to
the head of their leader, the people were powerless, and if they brought Krull aboard the Independence, in a way they’d lose that leverage, since now their leader would be simply absent with only the abstract threat of violence instead of seeing the gun held to her head with their own eyes.
“Lieutenant Zivic, prepare for launch of the VIP shuttle,” came the voice of the bridge comms officer on duty.
“Acknowledged.” He flew in a broad arc around the Independence, positioning his fighter to fall into company with the shuttle now leaving the flight deck.
“No antics, Batship. Just a boring flight, if you don’t mind,” said his father, his voice sounding far more tense than it usually was. And the reference was unmistakable. Oppenheimer had opened old wounds on the bridge, and now, apparently, to help himself forget his own poor choices in life he had taken it upon himself to remind his son of his.
His mother. Her husband, Julio Zivic. Both dead in a shuttle accident over France because of his antics. At least, that’s what he told himself over the years, assuming one hundred percent of the blame. Objectively, it wasn’t even half his fault, but it hurt far, far more to say that than just hog all the blame for himself.
“Loud and clear, captain,” he said, struggling to keep the bitterness out of his voice. They had a mission, and he’d be damned if he was going to let a casual slip of his father’s tongue get him riled up. The old man probably hadn’t even meant it. Probably didn’t even realize what he’d said, Zivic told himself.
The flight over to the Benevolence only took a few minutes. The unnamed planet, far below, still loomed large behind the Skiohra ship, dwarfing it, showing to everyone present that no matter how ingenious humans and other sentient life could be, they were no match for nature itself in building spaceships. That’s what planets were, after all. Giant spaceships careening through space. No airlocks or pressure seals to keep the air in, but gravity itself. Oxygen molecules would collide on the surface and bounce upward, careening hundreds of miles into space before gravity arrested their ascent and pulled them inevitably back down to the surface. No fusion plants to keep things running, but a planetary core with so many leftover radioisotopes that everything below the crust would stay liquified and hot for billions of years, allowing the continents to drift and generating the magnetic field surrounding the planet, enabling it to ward off deadly ionizing radiations and solar storms. Something a simple lead layer of shielding could accomplish on a standard human spaceship, but instead nature doing the same thing so outrageously circuitously and with such complication and vast scale that it was saying, puny humans, take a seat and watch a pro.
He shook his head back to attention. He’d been gazing absentmindedly at the thin layer of light blue atmosphere on the horizon, but now they were pulling up to the Benevolence.
“Preparing to dock,” came his father’s voice, more casual this time, but still with an edge to it. Zivic remembered his speech about crew morale to his father, and now wondered if it was his father that needed morale himself.
“You got this dad. Just … do it like Proctor.” The encouragement sounded fake and thin in his ears after he said it.
But his father chuckled. “No one does it like Proctor. Her style is singular.” But he sounded a little less on edge.
Zivic landed his fighter next to the shuttle—his father had requested his presence during the negotiations. Soon the whole team was assembled near the door on the Skiohra flight deck that led into the rest of the ship. His father, Lieutenant Qwerty—who Ballsy was hoping could provide any necessary translation if it came to that—and himself, with only a few marines as escort. As small a party as possible.
The door opened and a Skiohra matriarch appeared, escorted by one of the marines Oppenheimer had brought with him. She looked incensed that she even had to be there. A prisoner, a puppet, on her own ship. “This way,” she said, and was silent the rest of the way to the command center.
The way there was a journey Zivic would never forget. Blood streaked the walls at certain intervals, and, occasionally, it became clear just how recent the violence was as they passed a body still sprawled out on the floor. Sometimes two or three together. “Looks like we missed the fun,” said Zivic.
The matriarch glared at him for a moment, and then didn’t look his way again for the remainder of the trek. “Have a little respect, idiot,” his father hissed at him. He immediately regretted saying anything at all.
They gathered in transportation pod which took them up, then switched directions to travel laterally, and then up again. There must be an entire pod transportation network throughout the ship, he supposed. Would make it possible for a crew of a few hundred thousand to staff a ship that was a hundred kilometers long.
Polrum Krull was waiting for them in the command center. He’d seen her twice before already, but this time she looked … unsettled, to say the least.
“Friend of the Motherkiller. Welcome.” In spite of the situation, Krull was graceful as always in her alien not-quite-human way. She bowed slightly. Ballsy mirrored the motion.
“Polrum Krull. I’m deeply sorry we are meeting in these circumstances. I want you to know that this aggressive action was not my idea, nor was it my opinion that it should ever have happened.”
She paused to consider his words, and perhaps his truthfulness. “I understand, Friend of the Motherkiller. These are dark times. Almost all of us have earned the same title as your friend. We have all killed this day. It is a day of shame for us all. A day of infamy. It will forever be remembered among my people as our lowest moment. Our darkest time.”
“Again, I’m sorry our actions here today—”
She held up a long-fingered hand. “No. Your actions here are but the smallest part of what has gone on. It is almost inconsequential in comparison. I’m referring to the tragedy that has occurred here before your arrival. Sister raising arms against sister. Incomprehensible violence. The deaths of millions. And even now, I don’t understand any of it.”
Ballsy looked surprised. “You don’t … know why you were fighting?”
She took a long pause from speaking, as if searching for words. During the limited amount of time that he’d ever seen her speak, she was always confident, purposeful, and, well, wise. This alien standing here was stooped, confused, unsure of herself, and was clearly somewhat scared.
“We were fighting for madness, that’s what we were fighting for. Madness.”
Ballsy cocked his head. “I’m not sure the Skiohra on the other side would agree.”
“They would. In fact, there are brothers and sisters on the other side, as you put it, in my very being. Inside of me. Almost half of my Interior children are against me. Half. Can you imagine, Friend of the Motherkiller? Having half your brood rise up against you in rebellion?”
Ballsy risked a side glance at his son, and Zivic could see the temptation on his father’s face to risk a snide comment about his own brood, but he turned back to Krull and nodded. “I can only imagine the scale of the horror you’ve been through. You have my sympathy.”
She almost sneered. “We don’t want your sympathy. We want order. We want peace. We want things to be the way they were.”
His father shrugged. “I’m afraid things never quite go back to the way they were. That’s life, I’m afraid.”
“For tens of thousands of years, there was order among my people. Even through the dark times of slavery to the Swarm, we had order and harmony. We were all of like mind. We could disagree, we could discuss, we could even vigorously debate. But never, ever, did it lead to violence. Ever. And now? Over the most simple of things, we’ve lost very souls. We’ve lost our minds. We’ve lost … everything.” She swept her hand around the command center as if to indicate the carnage. “Everything.”
“I know things seem bleak. But … you’re alive. And many here still live. Surely you can reconcile your differences and move on?”
She shook her head, deliberately, as if remembering her catalogue of
human gestures. “No. All Exterior children that still live here are of the old ways. We’ve killed the rebellious. And those we didn’t kill fled to the Magnanimity. And our battle with Magnanimity was … terrible. We sustained damage worse than we ever did during the war with the Swarm. Worse even than when the Constitution breached our side.”
“Why, Matriarch? Why did this happen?”
She looked down for a long time, as if studying her feet. “A change. A change occurred. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand it. But everything is different.”
“What is different, Matriarch?”
“Several weeks ago, during the uprising of the Dolmasi, we severed the Ligature. It was our link to each other. The way into each other’s thoughts. But not just thoughts. Feelings. Opinions. And not just objective matters, but … our sense of … family. It was severed too. When we lost our link into each other’s minds, we lost our sense of each other. We all became … other, to each other, whereas before we were united.”
“Ok,” he said, slowly, “how about reestablishing the Ligature?”
“We can’t. It’s gone. Permanently. It took generations to establish, tens of thousands of years ago. And it will require that much time and more to remake it.”
“Ok,” Ballsy repeated. “But … I still don’t understand what you’re fighting over. Family’s squabble all the time. What made you pull guns on each other?”
