‘Brother, stand. You have done enough,’ said Citadel. Jin turned his head. Dented, his form steamed with his power expenditure, and one arm hung from metal threads. It wasn’t coming back. He tore it away from him, and threw it on the ground, and his nanites sealed the wound. Augs poured over the rim of the crater and surrounded the wane ghost, the Kind only three strong now, weakened to next to nothing, perhaps even too diminished to protect that which they had given their power to save.
‘No...I will fight to the death,’ said Jin, forcing himself to his feet.
‘No, you will not, Jin. Death is yet not yours. Look.’
From someplace deep below the planet’s surface, Anna and Ulrich emerged, hands held high.
Citadel’s voice boomed so that all Augs, any comms, transmitting so that the two ships and anything within range could hear. Scale Adjustment and Austerity Born of Destruction would instantly relay Citadel’s words to Hush, so it were the same as speaking directly to the mad planet-killer.
‘We will give what you need, Hush. Our emissaries will carry it to you. Will you stand down? Allow us to die in peace, in our own time? The embryos are your. The one you know, Ulrich Bale, will bring them to you and we may know peace. You will have your prize, and we will have nothing further you wish. The stars are yours. You have won.’
The transmission, the reply from Scale Adjustment was instant.
‘Give me what I wish, and you will be left.’
No, thought Jin. All this...for lie? Hush will not leave.
Still, Jin, said Citadel across the link only the Titans had ever shared. Be still, Brother. We know. Now know our mind.
Their plan passed in an instant, and Jin understood just what Ulrich and Anna were willing to give. Just the same as he was willing to give his kind, they were willing to give for their kind, and others too.
Humanity.
Not a race, or a people, but an ideal. A thought. Kindness in truth.
As they walked past Jin and Citadel’s faded form, Citadel and Jin both bowed low as they could.
‘Goodbye,’ said Jin, quietly.
Ulrich and Anna did not shine. They were not great, nor powerful. No more powerful than any one person acting without thought to the self.
Just part of a greater whole.
*
65.
Ghost
Scale Adjustment (Warship/Phobos Class)/Hush
‘I am Scale Adjustment,’ said the ship as Aug soldiers placed chains on Ulrich’s wrists.
Now, thought Ulrich. If we’re wrong, we’re dead before we begin and everything since waking was for nothing.
‘I am Ulrich Bale,’ he said.
‘Please prove your intent,’ said the ship. Ulrich nodded to the nearest Aug, opened the case, and passed it across to the soldier.
Inside, hundreds of embryos.
The Aug was perhaps linked directly to the ship, almost certainly, and the ship spoke without pride or gloating.
‘Thank you, Ulrich Bale. Hush waits on you and that which you bring. Be still. Four minutes to arrival. Please do not struggle against your bonds as you return to your tomb.’
Tomb, he thought. Back to sleep? No. Why would Hush bother with subterfuge now? He was meat to Hush’s machine. He had no illusions about that.
Hush lied, of course. She could not help it.
But so do we, don’t we? And you don’t know, because...
Scale Adjustment had said nothing of Anna, though she stood right beside him.
The Augs see her...the ship does not. To Scale Adjustment she is just another Aug. She is nothing. She truly is a ghost.
He didn’t speak to Anna, but they held each other’s hands and went to meet Hush, and death.
*
‘Scale Adjustment, may I see Hush?’
‘Of course, Ulrich Bale.’
None offered to move him. A screen appeared, like a hologram but real enough, and there against the backdrop of alien stars, he saw Hush’s true form for the first time.
She truly was a magnificent and awful creation.
Large as an asteroid, she seemed. Perhaps now, seven ships and who knew what modifications in the last nearly six hundred years, she was perhaps nine or ten kilometres in length, and half again as wide. It was hard to tell. His transports name was a joke, to him, but he did not laugh. Hush awed him.
Scale Adjustment was not overly confident. She simply did not care. Why would she? A Phobos Class ship hitting high orbit, as far as she was concerned returning successful with the prize her mistress demanded. There were seven ships, one each side of Hush, so gargantuan she hadn’t seen it before.
Hush was eight Colony Ships...and how many Phobos Class? Not just Scale Adjustment and Austerity Born of Destruction, without doubt. How many other ships? Sabots, Quarrel, Century Class ships. What else had she conceived? Everything and anything to further the cause of war, of conquest, perhaps.
Except Augs.
She had spent her centuries working toward supremacy in space, and forgotten land, and had not realised her mistake.
Genius, hampered by the basic blindness in her priorities...to develop faster, more efficient space travel.
Colonisation was within her name, but secondary to her, humans and humanity a tertiary consideration only. She saw the cargo in her care, and in the care of the ships now slave to her, only as tools, and thought nothing of humankind’s potential, their ultimate destiny. Thought herself greater than those who had conceived of her.
Sure, Hush made mistakes.
And it’s her downfall, he thought.
He hoped.
Anna squeezed his hand, and from here on out, he knew he could say nothing, and she could say nothing, and when they died it would be to silence.
Looking at each other, gently smiling, Ulrich realised his assumption, his belief, was not true at all. He did have something to live for. This moment. His death served to give Anna a chance at hers, and so together to give humanity a second chance just as they had been given.
For that chance, he was grateful indeed.
*
66.
The Finality of Peace
Hush
Ulrich and Anna stepped from Scale Adjustment, and the Aug walked Ulrich to the place he’d been once before, from Clerestory to the Chancel Sanctuary.
The only goodbye he could share with the small, brave woman he barely new was a smile – not sad, but tinge with sorrow and kindness both - and a final squeeze of her tiny hand.
Then, he was gone and she too, moving swiftly away to do her duty, her last duty, to hope and the race of humans, the last of them that would ever come, held in stasis on the frozen planet below. Those embryos the seeds of a new beginning in perhaps a thousand years. Just a chance, and tiny at that.
But their guardians were gods, weren’t they? As close to it as humanity were certainly ever know.
Citadel, though diminished, was still a creation of Gods.
Jin. Titan. Once Coeus. Something mythical and singular as creation itself.
Ulrich was led, not roughly but like someone may have once walked a pet in ages past. He travelled upward on elevators, walked long dark hallways, followed turns through far more corridors than he remembered...but of course, because the need to lie about the true scale of Hush was gone, wasn’t it? He wasn’t walking through the centre, through only one ship. Probably it was four kilometres now the need for the veil was gone, rather than perhaps one kilometre when they first left.
Only one Aug accompanying him. He could have killed the Aug, run, done anything at all, really. But why?
His job wasn’t to run amok, lost, simply to be shot or forgotten in some unimportant hallway as numerous as Hush’s slumbering cargo had been, before she deemed them no better than any material with which she could expand herself.
His purpose was to speak with Hush and to show her what the case contained.
Anna’s purpose waited for her in the heart of Hush, among the mighty ship’s con
gregation. She moved unhindered because she was ghost to Hush, straight to the central Nave.
She wasn’t a ghost to Ulrich.
The two of them were the last humans living in the known galaxy. They might be no more than memories, but even memories carry hope, don’t they?
*
Chancel Sanctuary
Hush
Ulrich stood, because he wanted to. He shifted back and forth, because he was tired and hungry. Scared, too. Sure he was.
His pain, though, was gone. Pain gone, because he was going to die, and what did hurt matter then? What did fear matter? More than duty, or less than ever?
Did he ever think he should be forgiven? His guilt?
Anna, a homeless street girl, opened his eyes to what he was. A killer. A man without compassion.
Perhaps now he’d found it.
Perhaps not, he thought, and found true anger someplace deep and buried inside him at the sound of Hush’s bland, feminine, uncaring voice.
‘Ulrich Bale. Welcome home.’
‘This isn’t home, Hush. Forget the lies, your ploys. Well played and fuck you. Get this done.’
‘Blunt but fair,’ said the ship. ‘As you say. Show me what you bring. Please.’
Hush was blind to Augs, blind to anything she couldn’t use.
You’re a vampire, aren’t you?
He felt her hunger, then. Her need. Her greed.
Was she insane?
No, he thought. She was everything which had killed humanity that was. Not insane. Just...stupid.
She must have sensed the life inside the case, because it was not shield. It wasn’t a trick, or a plot. That was not his game, not the game of the Kind themselves.
Hush played one, and they played another.
They couldn’t win at her game.
So they changed it.
Ulrich smiled. ‘You win, Hush,’ he said, and opened the case. Inside, thousands of embryos nestled unseen inside chilled fluid that moved like gel and crackled with strange new energy of the Kind, electrical pulses running through and over it, a whisper of power as odd to Ulrich as magic.
Even he, waiting to die, his whole life a killer, felt a shiver run through him, holding the unborn remnants of a thousand civilisations gone, of races, of real people to be who under Hush’s hand would never even dream.
Still, there was no sense of victory from the ship. She did not gloat, nor make any empty pronouncements. She did pause, though, as though she took whatever passed for a breath, or a moment. For an AP so vast and dark as her perhaps such moments were the equivalent of a thoughtful drink, or a day to a human spent looking out at a calm blue sea.
Hush made mistakes...course she did. It wasn’t hubris. It wasn’t humanity. Chaos, luck, whatever it was. The simple fact was that perfection wasn’t real.
Even the universe made mistakes.
Hush was blind to that, and so many things, wasn’t she?
The only failing of Hush’s that mattered right then to Ulrich and Anna and humankind was that she was blind to radiation, too.
‘The embryos are perfect.’
‘No,’ said Ulrich. ‘They weren’t. Nothing is, Hush. You should’ve figured that out after so long, but honestly? You’re a fucking idiot, aren’t you?’
What else was there to say?
Nothing, he figured, and opened the cavity the Kind had placed inside his chest while they worked on him and Anna, hand in hand, and took their pain away, too.
From that cavity, radiation flowed. Invisible to him, to Hush, yes...but in these doses?
To Hush, perhaps it felt as though she’d swallowed just a bite of a star.
‘No.’
The Kind had shielded Ulrich, but even their technology could not save a man carrying this amount of radiation. He’d been dying from the moment they augmented him, changed him, from a mere soldier to a ship-killer, the nemesis of Hush.
Such a huge amount, released, and he was not Anna. His body superheated, cells breaking down, like standing inside the reactor of one of Hush’s great engines.
Hush did all she could to vent the poison from inside her. She opened herself to space. Every blast door, every aperture, every seal, all at once.
Ulrich died before Anna, but only by perhaps a second. Ulrich carried the lure.
The hook?
Anna.
*
Anna heard the hiss as the door to the Nave slid open. Hush, venting, doing everything she could to protect whatever organics she had left to her. The pull of space, the call of it, and her feet leaving the floor.
A second after Ulrich’s eyes closed, the instant she felt that certain pull of Hush allowed space inside, she detonated inside the heart of Hush, her bowels, her core, everything which made her. With nothing to stand in the way, nothing to contain the last furious gambit of the Kind, the nuclear fire tore through Hush, her slave ships, the engines of everything remaining to her. Fire and destruction held in a storm with enough radiation to make Hush uninhabitable by anything organic for generations.
The fire rushed through, and out. Hush would live on as a crippled satellite of a new world which she could not touch.
Nothing aboard slept, nor woke, nor moved but her graveyard mind in the loneliness of space, high above a planet she would never reach.
*
PART SEVEN
What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin?
-
Iain M. Banks.
HOME
67.
Turn your Face to a Distant Sun
A New World
‘Do you think it will work?’ said Citadel.
‘I don’t know,’ said Jin. Above them, a second smaller sun they could not see through the planet’s thick, snow filled clouds burned brightly for an instant, and then turned dark. ‘Maybe.’
Jin shrugged. Snow settled on his shoulders, still now, with nothing to do, nowhere to go, no reason to do anything at all.
Citadel was untouched. Snow blew through her, and she cast no footprints.
‘I imagine she lived. Eventually? She will go wherever she can feed.’
‘And when she can grow no more, Jin? What will she do, do you think?’
Jin looked at Citadel, her beauty, the shining hearts of the three sisters left to him.
‘What drives life? To continue. Survival. Procreation, perhaps? To birth more ships?
Survival is voracious. It always was. Look at us. Living, here, on a distant planet. Living still. With purpose, still.’
Strange, thought Jin. So many years sleeping without sleep, blind inside Hush, believe I knew why I lived, and not wishing to die.
Would death be so bad?
‘Will you join with us, brother? Join the Kind?’
‘No,’ said Jin. He was in no doubt, and could not smile, but Citadel understood his love for her, if not his reasons. ‘Belonging is important, I think. But the universe was born from a singularity, was it not? The universe born from a single moment, mere atoms. Hush? Up there? Atoms. A moment in time. One side and the other. Like us, Citadel. One side and one side. No. I will remain alone.’
‘What will happen?’ said Citadel. ‘Us. You. Her?’
‘She’ll go on. Hush will live, won’t she?’
Citadel nodded, and smiled, her smile sad, her avatar granted a range of expression broad as Jin’s ability was narrow.
‘We will die one day,’ said Jin. ‘Humanity will die one day, and perhaps, one day, Hush will return. Anything might happen.’
‘Even death? For such as us? Can we die?’
‘I don’t know,
’ said Jin. ‘Not now. Eventually, everything dies. Kindness is our law, but the only real universal law is death. Until then? What do we ever have?’
‘Time,’ said Citadel.
The two of them, an avatar of gods and a god himself stood on a new world, beneath the weight of snow. The last of humanity wasn’t below the rock, though.
Perhaps the last of humanity stood there, on the surface, held in those two creations which might never come again.
Some beings perhaps should not come again. Singularities. Wonders. Miracles.
‘Time,’ said Jin, and knew Citadel felt him smile, even if she could not see it on his face.
‘Time’s important.’
But more, though, he thought. The things we do with that we’re given matter. Because life shines brighter than death, but they’re just sides, aren’t they?
One day might not time itself fade away and die, too?
Perhaps, thought Jin. Perhaps I’ll try death again one day, too.
Until then?
Jin stood while snow drifted and thought about just that. He’d always liked thinking. When you’re near eternal, thinking’s a good way to pass the time until the next thing.
Even on a frozen world watching your ride die, there was always a next thing.
The End
CAST
Ships:
Hush (Colony Ship/Interstellar/Pioneer Class)
Hard Fall (Scout Ship/Quarrel Class)
Sirocco (Scout Ship/Quarrel Class)
HUSH Page 25
