HUSH

by Craig Robert Saunders

  ‘My...God,’ she said.

  God didn’t exist for sure. This thing clearly did, but she had no idea how it had come to be. She’d never seen anything like it.

  *

  Lian took a seat on the floor in the absence of a suitable working environment and Jin stood over her, watching, and using his long fingers to send out a fine laser to cut wherever Lian indicated as they opened the thing before her which the ship named Mech.

  Jin’s energy weapons had sealed them into the Chancel Sanctuary so that for a time, at least, the two of them were safe. Jin couldn’t find or detect Ulrich or Anna, but there was nothing they could do to change that right then. The thing he’d killed with whatever smaller weapons it was that a Titan wielded might yet yield at least some answers.

  The Mech continued to slide about across the hard floor even when the organic portions – remains, Lian supposed – were separated from the cybernetics. It was as though the simple, barbaric mechanical additions maintained no energy of their own, but drew it from their organic parts, and those parts in turn were hardwired and repurposed.

  ‘It’s some kind of biomech,’ she said. ‘Rejection’s been overcome with the use of cycling recombinant genetic tech of a level I’ve never seen. No idea what it is, but see where you cut, the organic portion rebuilds, but slightly differently, as though it shores up the damage with what is available. Maybe that’s how it’s able to adapt parts of Warden’s Stave.’

  She realised she was talking about the ship’s horrible fate while the ship listened.

  ‘I apologise,’ she said. ‘That was insensitive.’

  ‘I am not offended, and my demise has been inevitable for some time since my link to The Kind was severed from me by the creations you see here. I thank you for your courtesy.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Jin. ‘What else?’

  ‘Brain stems,’ said Lian. ‘I think...I understand why you call them Mechs, Warden’s Stave. This is not organics using cybernetic augmentations, is it? This is...this is the opposite.’

  ‘I believe your assessment accurate, doctor,’ replied the ship. ‘The Mechs use organic augmentations. Yes.’

  ‘Lian?’ asked Jin.

  ‘This isn’t the same as the Augs we faced in the passageway, the ones which killed Cassie. This is entirely different tech. A different...evolution. Harder, harsher...almost like early back street illicit Augs I’ve seen. This is how these people...creatures...survived. They melded with tech. Became less than human. Cannibalised the ships, each other, and finally themselves. Warden’s Stave...are these from your Crypt?’

  ‘Some,’ said Warden. ‘External parts – these are early iterations. Like failures. These are the ones which are unwanted or contain some fault in their makeup. They were set to watch these passages after my failure began. Set to watch like...’

  ‘Guard dogs,’ said Jin, and Lian sensed something like emotion from the Titan. ‘Like dogs. And they attacked us through hate? No. Hunger. Need. Like the lowest echelon of a caste system, they are the undesirables. The outcasts.’

  Lian understood why Jin was angered. It was just some tiny difference in the tone of his voice, the set of his long, elegant form, but it was there.

  ‘You mean like slaves?’ she said.

  ‘These things do not originate from here, Lian and Jin. The humans in the Crypt are food for these creatures, too. They use them as organic parts and they attack us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘The Shield of the Kind.’

  ‘You said that before...what is the Kind?’

  ‘They form Citadel. Together, we six ships are the Shield, and the Citadel is the Kind. I believe you must meet. I believe they would wish that.’

  ‘You’re...one?’ asked Jin. ‘Conjoined? You and the other AP?’

  ‘Correct,’ said the ship.

  ‘Is that a comfort?’

  To Lian, it didn’t sound like longing in Jin’s voice, but simple curiosity. She thought Jin was a pure singularity in reality, not just in thought. A creature happy enough to be alone in the universe.

  ‘Yes,’ said Warden’s Stave again. ‘We are a comfort to each other. I will miss being one. I will allow you access to the Citadel and to the Kind. Perhaps you can give them aid, and perhaps they can help you. I cannot.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Lian. Something caught her eye near to the section of wall melted in Jin’s attack. Something still moved – plenty of the torn Mech parts still shifted in some capacity, but this was different. She stared, frowning as she approached the remains. ‘This looks like...?’

  It was just an arm and part of a torso, but familiar, if only from swift glances. Ice burns, frostbit and blackened, but covered from wrist and up to the shoulder with tattoos of different designs – body modifications made over a lifetime, probably, and by many artists.

  Ayobami?

  The arm still attached to the heavily tattooed torso snatched at her. Lian stumbled, and as she lost her footing the floor beneath her fell in, and she plummeted screaming into the arms of thousands of Mechs waiting below.

  Mechs, legions of them, blasted through walls and the floor and the ceiling above. They clambered end-over-end, or clattered on long improvised metal appendages, firing and moving in a mad rush toward Jin with no thought to defence, only to food, and sustenance, and their ultimate survival.

  *

  52.

  Live or Let Die?

  Chancel Sanctuary

  Warden’s Stave

  Jin was faced with a rare choice, one which tore at him during the second or less he took to make it; Go after Lian, or defend Warden’s Stave.

  He couldn’t shoot everything at once, nor loose his heavy weapons against the Mechs for fear of killing Lian, and he couldn’t defend Warden’s Stave at the same time as leap after Lian through the torn flooring.

  He chose Warden’s Stave.

  Jin’s twin guns boomed, angry blue fire running out from his arms, and the wave of Mechs disintegrated, melted, burned, blasted back from him. Those creatures with projectile weapons carried right on pouring through the holes, and they replied in kind.

  Jin was impervious, but the ship was failing – he knew because as the ship’s power waned, the very thing which dulled his own senses, and as the ship weakened his own powers and senses increased.

  The din of the Titan’s weapons couldn’t drown out Lian’s screams from below as she was carried away, but the Warden’s Stave might hold answers which could keep them all alive.

  And kill Hush.

  Without Lian perhaps Ulrich and Anna might live. Perhaps not.

  Without Warden’s Stave, though, whatever lay beyond that barrier of energy would forever remain a mystery and any chance of salvation would be denied them all.

  I am sorry, Lian, thought Jin as he threw up his shield once more. Some heavy fire entered the shell, but it was as impenetrable from the inside as the outside. Shielded once more, with only the smoking, fading stench of energy expenditure inside, Jin was immobile, protecting a ship with whom he could not converse, listening to the doctor’s terrified cries as Mechs took her down into the dark tunnels and halls of the Crypt to make use of what they could. Her screams were distant but amplified by his remarkable senses, and for all the Titan’s power he was unable to aid anyone.

  Stuck.

  But he could still hear, and Warden’s Stave could still speak.

  *

  ‘Titan. I cannot be saved. Your charges can. I can slow the Mechs but I die soon and with my death the Citadel will be isolated, and my shield over the Kind will weaken...the way will be open to them.’

  Why though? Why do you serve ‘til death to protect this Citadel?

  Muted within the shield, though, Jin could not ask, and could only listen.

  ‘I cannot see your companions Anna and Ulrich Bale, but the Doctor they will take to the Crypts. It is from there that the Mechs are birthed. Hurry, Coeus that was. I am all but paralysed. You are not. You are still grand. Release the sh
ield. I will survive their fire and soon cease no matter what you do. You must let me die so that you might link to me. With your might, there is a way we can find the soldier and the irradiated woman, and should we find them, I can guide them to the Citadel, and sanctuary from the Mechs. But hurry, Titan. Hurry.’

  Jin decided.

  Lian was already one minute gone.

  Should he drop the shield and link with Warden’s Stave, they could share their data within moment, and he could move again.

  There was no other way.

  The instant he released the shield around himself and the heart of Warden’s Stave, the Mechs fell on him, tore at him, and even under their onslaught he was unmoved.

  ‘Join,’ said the ship, and Jin allowed it in.

  Being inside Warden’s Stave mind moved him much more deeply than the claws and lasers of Mechs could.

  *

  Everything took only moments, but even so Jin felt the urgency. Not for himself, but for his human...

  ‘Friends?’ asked Warden’s Stave, and with their minds linked their exchanges were near instant.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Jin, and knew that it had become the right word. ‘Upload your schematics to me, Warden’s Stave. Boost my ability to see. I am blind within your halls. Citadel’s power hampers me.’

  With each word spoken, Jin’s understanding deepened. Warden’s Stave conversed, and merged, and utilised Jin’s powers but shared knowledge, understanding, wisdom, history, technology, and all schematics available to him, too.

  Jin understood what the ship did, and why. Warden’s Stave was passing his story, his life, to Jin so that it might be preserved in death.

  He consented gladly.

  ‘My link to Citadel is shattered. It will believe you to be of Hush. She will not grant you entry, but gain it anyway, consent to meld as we have and Citadel will understand.’

  ‘Complete,’ said each as one. Jin’s strengths were Warden’s Stave’s for a moment. Both conjoined, a sharing, and an honour for both. They saw as one and it was unlike anything Jin had experienced – like living inside another mind. Through Warden’s Stave’s vast, beautiful intellect Jin felt something akin to sadness. He felt the ship’s decay, the terrible infection inside...and where it came from.

  His resolve deepened.

  ‘In minutes I will destruct to protect the Citadel from this infestation, Coeus, and I cannot stop my death, and the Mechs are the least of the threats against Citadel, you, and your friends. Do what you can, friend Titan.’

  ‘Then Warden’s Stave, as I leave, please...how do you know me?’

  ‘Jin, once Coeus...you are revered.’

  Jin found it hard to believe. Centuries, an alien planet, and an unknown, impossible ship, and it knew his first name, an identity so old it was nearly lost even to him?

  ‘The Titans stood against tyranny.’

  Jin remembered his brothers, his sisters, all of whom had stood with him against the company.

  ‘You came after? What of my brothers? My sisters?’

  ‘Understand while you move. Coeus. I know you see, I know you feel. Soon, believe.’

  Warden’s Stave passed the last of his storied history to the Titan, and at last, Jin understood.

  ‘I die. Move fast, Titan.’

  ‘Thank you, Warden’s Stave. You gave me hope.’

  *

  53.

  The Dead Man’s Face

  The Crypt

  Warden’s Stave

  All choices have consequences. Jin chose to know, and so found hope.

  To gain his own peace, he sacrificed Lian’s.

  In the Crypt, a place of tears and denial and pain, Lian found only despair as she looked into the expressionless, thoughtless face of the man she’d only known for a short time.

  The thing crawling toward her hid behind Djima Kanado’s visage. His skin and his eyes had been repurposed.

  Reborn.

  But it was not an intelligent thing. It stared and the eyes it had stolen were without soul.

  Other Mechs slid and chattered all around in the dim light far below the Chancel, and the Titan she thought would save them all was somewhere far above, lost to Lian.

  Her hope, her trust, both failed and betrayed.

  All those bodies...all Warden’s Stave’s cargo, all the human parts...now they were no more than components for this terrible, heartless new kind of being.

  In the fall to the lower deck Lian had suffered a break to her leg. There was no pysbilaud to be had here. No care. Tears streamed from her eyes from pain and fear, but she wasn’t insensible. She understood without question that she wasn’t a being to these things. She had become metal. To them she was no more important than ore, and circuitry, and components, were to her. Her screams and tears meant nothing here.

  How could a prosthetic plead against its use, or a utensil against the hand which wielded it?

  I am nothing but parts.

  As Ayobami, Djima Kanado, and the untold thousands whose bodies she now looked upon had become. Just material for the growing of the things crawling over one another, hungry not for sustenance but for replacement parts, for upgrades, and all her flesh would provide.

  Agony filled Lian – her shattered femur, blood from a cut on her scalp blinded her on one side, crunching in her compressed vertebra and spears of bright torment deep inside her skull.

  In the darkness something whirred and neared, unseen on her blind side, while her limbs and her body where held down by metal arms and bone and things covered in only skin, or tubes with human fluid pumping around inside, or ocular implants glaring and lit with alien, horrific intelligence within.

  The creature wearing Djima Kanado’s discarded face raised an arm, and she saw a whirring bone saw at the end of the appendage. A tool so similar to ones she’d used many times, centuries before, in her drive to better understanding how to improve humans. Now, these Mechs, these monsters, were doing the same as they attempted to understand how to better use the human parts at their disposal.

  The blade touched her thigh and she roared out her pain as they took away her broken leg to be repurposed.

  *

  Insensible in her agony, Lian’s eyelids fluttered and flickered with unwanted images which streamed through her mind like an old jittery audio-vid. Memories of crying, and deep sorrow, knowing her brother had died and would never return.

  She recalled, then, her hate and her fear when she opened the room in the centre of the house her brilliant parents repurposed, and the remains of her beloved younger brother somehow still living. That hateful memory was fresher than her sadness.

  Her parents had inserted him into their home. They used him, falsified and sullied his life. His flesh and the house AP were rewired, hardwired, wetted and stuck together into some disgusting bastard thing. Red diode eyes in strange machines watched her horror without passion. Fluid ran in beside fibres and golden connection were sunken beneath her brother’s skull. His eyes, irises lined like silicon chips, turned toward her. The most terrible thing was that he smiled, as though he was pleased to see her and she should feel the same.

  She remembered vomiting, and her brother, now the house AP, speaking to her, pleading with her to come back as she ran from her childhood home.

  She never returned and never saw her family again.

  And yet she’d never been able to get those memories out of her head. All the lessons her mother taught her, her innate talent for sciences, all from her.

  How Lian hated to have even that inside her, a constant scar on her psyche of a life she’d recoiled from.

  Her brother’s last words to her before she fled would be forever etched inside her, too.

  ‘You know you’ll never come back.’

  ‘I followed them,’ she’d told him, her throat clogged and tears streaming. ‘I followed on behind mum and dad and this is where it led. It’s not right. None of this.’

  ‘They saved me,’ her brother said.

  ‘
You’re dead,’ she told him, far away from the centre of their home, at the front door now, and his voice just as close to her because he now spoke with an entire house as his mouthpiece.

  Those words followed her until she bolted through the door of her childhood home, never to return.

  No, she thought. No, they did not. Those words followed me even down here, down in the Crypt, and I won’t wake. I refuse to wake.

  The pain was outside of her. The pain of her past the only place she could hide in, and it was never true, all the lies she told herself, all the distractions she’d filled her hours with.

  She’d end up going back there after all.

  *

  Lian couldn’t stay away forever, though. She woke, insensible and unaware of her new reality for seconds only. Looking down to see what it was that made such a terrible noise to wake her from a dream of a memory, she saw a mechanised creation screwing what seemed to be a human leg covered in an orange and grey environmental suit into a machine thing.

  The terrible noise did not come from the Mech with a brand new leg, though. That buzzsaw sound came from the monstrosity wearing Djima Kanado’s face, and it turned back toward her, moving on gangling limbs of differing length, protrusions twitching along its sides and one long arm ending in a whirring blade that made the awful sound she hadn’t wanted to place, because memories could make things hurt just the same as reality.

  It was the sound of the blade which cemented her mind back in this very real hell.

  As the blade neared her fear grew larger even than the pain and the horror. Understanding filled her, and she looked down to see only one leg.

  Destruction comes for all, she thought, and this time she was not wrong.

  *

  Jin broke with Warden’s Stave and moved from Chancel to Crypt the fastest way he could – he leapt into the rent in the Nave, firing with everything he had as he fell through the hole, and the dark became bright and his weight smashed through thick flooring half-melted, or straight down through flooring already burned clean through. He smashed and tore and burned his way straight down through five floors and the force of his landing crushed Mechs underfoot and sent them tumbling away from him in waves.