by Paul Hughes
“Nan?”
“Are you in pain?”
Lily frowned. She didn’t think she hurt, but she wasn’t sure. She knew she was afraid, but she didn’t know exactly what hurt.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re bruised. We’ll take them away.”
“Okay.”
The angel lifted the child from the seat.
“Nan?” but she knew it wasn’t. This angel was different. Lily couldn’t feel the
“No. You may call me System. Or Arch.”
“Ark? Like Noah and the animals?”
The machine frowned. “What?”
“You look like Nan.”
“Call me Arch. Like Noah and the animals.”
The child smiled. “It’s cold here.”
“It will get warmer.”
“Are we home again?”
The angel carried Lily across the walkway toward the chamber entrance. “No.”
“Where are we?”
“This is your new home. We’re between the stars now.”
“Can I play with the boys now?”
“Maybe for a little while.”
“Arch?”
“Yes?” The chamber door cycled open.
“Can I have some chocolate milk?”
He fell from his vacuum chair into a withdrawing puddle of flux, splashing the lazy fluid up with a meaty slap. He heard similar splashes all around him, but his eyes didn’t work. He couldn’t see.
The little boy pushed himself to all fours, sat back and wiped gelatin-slick hair from his face, scrunched his fingers into his eyes in an attempt to clear his vision. He couldn’t stop coughing. Vomiting. He’d had the flu once. This is how it had felt.
Blink, blink. He heard crying.
Metal crash and warm wind filled the room. The floor was drying.
Click and the room was red. His eyesight hadn’t disappeared; the lights had just been off. Now, he saw everything as it must have looked in Hell. Mommy had whispered to him about the places they’d go after this world: one was happiness and clouds and angels, and one was fire and red and screaming. From the screaming and crying and red, Hunter wondered if he had died. He wondered if he’d done something wrong and ended up where the bad people went when they died.
The lights grew brighter.
A giant snap like the firecrackers that his father had brought him, set off down in the sand by the water. Hunter jumped. The room shimmered as phase shielding dissembled.
There was a smaller boy sitting on the floor beside Hunter. He was sobbing. Hunter helped him to his feet.
“I’m Hunter.”
Through sniffles: “I’m Br-Brendan.”
“Are you okay?”
“Where’s Mommy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know.”
Brendan covered his face and cried some more. Hunter didn’t know what to do.
The chamber door slid open with the slosh of phase. Hunter and Brendan looked on with fear and confusion. Other boys stood in silence.
A procession of angels entered the room, surrounding a middle-aged man in a charcoal gray suit. He looked over the boys with a gaze like fire; Hunter felt he was human. He felt the angels weren’t exactly angels. There was none of that tugging he’d become used to from the projections. Eight, ten, twelve: the angels walked amongst the boys, helped some to their feet, gently held the weeping, surveyed the little soldiers for damage.
The man cleared his throat.
“My name is Captain Pierce. You may call me ‘Uncle.’ Welcome to your new home. His name is Archimedes.”
An angel bent to Hunter’s level, turned his face from side to side, looked him over. “Do you hurt?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“My Mommy’s dead.”
For an instant, the angel froze, head cocked, as if listening to a voice from within. “Your mother is safe now. You will be reunited with her soon.”
“You’re lying.”
Motionless non-human: the pause was longer this time. “Are you hungry?”
“No.”
The angel didn’t respond, but moved on to Brendan.
Uncle walked around the room, patted the heads of his new soldiers. “We’ve come a very long way, boys. We have a lot to do. We have a lot to learn. But first, we’ll have something to eat. Who’s hungry?”
There were a few noncommittal affirmatives.
“Good. You have to eat and become strong like your fathers!”
Hunter wondered if Uncle’s father had been killed somewhere between the stars, too. Somewhere deep and black, a place with two stars, where the squeal of shattering glass had been the last sound before—
“Let’s have some supper, boys!”
“Three days.” Hunter sighed.
Lilith cradled his face in her hands. She knew he was thinking... too much.
“We’ll find a way.” Her eyes to his eyes, her soul to his
“Arch?”
yes?
“Have you met the Rebecca before?”
outsystem offensive action, fourth extinction air support group.
“Why don’t I remember that?”
Lilith held his hands. “We’ve been through so many—”
“Arch?”
yes?
“Where’s she from?”
rebecca crew ascended upon initial Earth siege.
“Soldats perdus. City?”
canberra compound.
“Fuck.”
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Arch, set course and engage.”
specify destination.
“Deep Outer, full speed.”
specify destination.
“Just fucking fly.” Hunter stood from the vacuum chair, fingers groping through unruly hair. He paced the bridge. “Up bubble three, four, five. Full speed.”
“Hunter?”
crew secure for Light X. Sirens roared to life.
“What?”
“Who are they?”
He slammed his fist to a dead control panel. “They’re a rogue…”
Pacing. His hand moved to his right temple, rubbed. Reflex.
“Hunter?”
There was a building pain underneath his fingertips. Lilith looked from his closed, frowning eyes to his temple, fingers massaging in a circle: forth, back, forth, around.
“Hunter?”
He opened his eyes, grabbed a dead angel from one of the command chairs, threw it across the room with a growl of fury. Mechanical guts spilled across the bridge floor. His hand went back to his temple and forehead.
“Hunter?”
“WHAT?”
“Your hand.” His heart broke a little more when he saw her eyes, her gaze. The way her hands were clustered before her mouth.
He looked, horrified before he even saw, because he knew, and he knew, and he knew.
Faint lattice of silver, just below the skin. It crawled from fingertips to palm to wrist. He spun an overhead monitor into the light, saw even in the reflection of the dead display that the silver was working its way underneath the skin above his skull.
Lilith sobbed as she activated the shield mechanism on her cardiac plate. The phase gelatin engulfed her form as she stood from the vacuum chair. “Hunter, I—”
“No, it’s not—”
“I’m so—”
“It’s not your fault!” He cried out as the silver gave one last twinge in his head that brought him to his knees. “It’s not your fault.” The pain subsided as Lilith’s shielding provided a buffer between his flesh and her affliction.
She knelt at his side, dragging the slosh of phase behind and around her.
“It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”
Hunter nodded, although he knew that their love would kill him.
Pierce took off his jacket and slumped into a bridge chair. “When did you find it?”
“About ten
minutes ago. Faint at first, then a signal spike. It’s definitely for us.”
“Stop Arch and snag it.”
“Yes, Uncle.”
He hated the machines, hated the way they spoke to him, hated the way they looked just enough like real humans to disturb, to place that sliver of doubt in his mind. He hated the machines, hated Mother (Maire) for this prison without end, hated this war and this purpose. He hated being the caretaker of several hundred boys trapped within a box of metal flying faster than light toward a galaxy that they would kill. He might have hated the girl most of all, the brat who had once stolen a doll from his grasp with a mine.
“Temporal brace in position.”
“Display.”
The bridge bubble shielding retracted, allowing Pierce to see the quantum physics of their communication: all of space bent toward a single point, starlight forsaking points for curves, time bending to the will of an ancient species.
“Let’s see if it works.”
“Wire mechanics aligned.”
“Open tight beam.”
He squinted at the array and saw the particles erupt, faint patterns of phased communications bullets shot into the quantum singularity. He thought of rainfall.
“Carrier beam aligned.”
“Lock and load.”
The bridge lights dimmed, leaving an illuminated platform at the chamber’s center. Light bent toward the platform and Maire was there, image at first filled with static, half-translucent, but the wire mechanics adjusted to secure the signal from thousands of years across space/time.
“Mr. Pierce.” It was a voice of echoes.
“Maire.”
“What’s the situation?”
“Cargo intact.”
“I trust they’ve all been fed and tucked into bed by now?”
“Of course. Training starts tomorrow.”
“No time to waste.”
“Has the enemy fleet—”
“Orbital defenses held them off long enough for most of the childships to escape the system.”
“But not all?”
“Forty percent losses.”
Pierce’s heart leapt at Maire’s interpretation of the word “most.”
“And we’re on target?”
“Courses projected and fleet on targets. You’ll rendezvous in-system with several others eventually.”
“Will you tell me the specifics of this mission?”
“Just keep the girl safe. The angels will handle the rest.”
“Yes, Maire.”
“I’ll check in monthly.”
“Yours or ours?”
“Your months. My millennia.”
“Understood. Maire?”
“What?”
“Is there anything left?”
“Complete surface destruction. Total atmosphere loss.”
“But you—”
“Don’t worry, Pierce. I’ve saved some specimens.”
“And the enemy?”
“The worldships left orbit after a few months. They sent a few expeditionary forces to the surface and obviously didn’t like what they found.”
“Are you sure?”
“We’ve been tracking them for years now.”
“And where are they?”
“Since they didn’t find anything down here, they’re on their way after you.”
“Great.”
Maire grinned. Pierce noticed for the first time that the lines around her eyes were no longer there. She looked younger. “You’ll be fine. They’ll never find you.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Even if they do, you’ll have a vessel full of the strongest warriors to meet them.”
“I’d better get to work.”
“That’s the
spirit to the eternal void of night. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, silver to silver.” Tallis nodded and Pierce’s coffin was ejected from the hangar. The soldiers saluted in unison, stood at attention. Tallis walked down the line, scrutinizing his troops.
“Uncle is gone. I’m your Commander now.” He paused in front of Hunter. “I choose Windham as my second.” He continued down the line. “We all knew the day would come that the last vestiges of home would fade away. From now on, we’re on our own. We’ll continue on target and fulfill our mission objectives. We owe it to Uncle to succeed. We owe it to Mother to succeed.
“Let’s get to work. We need to fix this boat and get back on the road as soon as possible. They found us, they killed our Uncle. Let’s find their home.”
He nodded toward Windham. Hunter cleared his throat.
“Okay. Damage control teams sweep the decks. We took a lot of phase flak below. We have slithers to repair, hull damage, a
breach in the primary phase flux generator. Decks one through ten are flooding.”
“Shit.” Another volley rocked the Archimedes. Pierce held tightly to the arms of his chair as internal gravity compensated. “Lock decks and attempt to drain.”
“Arch is hemorrhaging from below. We won’t be able to reach Light X until—”
“Launch slithers and lancets.”
“Done.”
“Do they have fighters?”
“Not many.” The angel looked over tactical monitors, holograph displays. “Earth orbital defenses must have taken out most of them.”
then why didn’t they make more?
“Three worldships on scope?”
“Three, yes. Pipeline has closed. Our boys are closing in.”
“Good... Good.” Pierce spun his chair to the comm panel, waved his hand before the display. Hundreds of slithers in fireworks formations dove at the enemy spheres, engaging the enemy fighters in orbit. Brilliant arcs of phase fire erupted from both sides. “Command to Tallis: We need attachment of catalyst tethers on those globes ASAP.”
The display split in half, revealing Tallis in the cockpit of his slither and giving Pierce a Tallis-eye-view of the action. “Understood. Attack One moving in for the kill.”
Pierce watched as ten of his slithers detached from the main firework and dove at the center enemy sphere. A swarm of enemy fighters immediately broke from combat to engage the Tallis squad.
“Watch it, boys. They’re on to you.”
“We see them.” Tallis threw his slither into a spiraling descent, phase licking out in all directions, tearing enemy fighters into light and boiling phase sludge. His squad followed suit, their vessels spinning off into an intricate, disorienting dance, weapons fire intersecting and diverging with startling precision, vessels flying through a grid of light that shredded the enemy fighters. Almost fifteen years of training had honed Pierce’s children into a brutal weapon of war.
“We’re clear. Moving in for tether placement.” His fighters moved in tight and close, swimming as a single organism to avoid fire from the worldship surface. One of Tallis’s men was clipped by phase fire, flew out of alignment, colliding with another friendly vessel. The squad moved quickly to compensate, reform. The surface fire intensified. Two more friendlies flared from existence.
“Windham to Tallis: Do you want Attack Two to cover you?”
Tallis raged in his cockpit. “We can do it ourselves, thanks.” More fire from below. Tallis flipped the tether control cover open to reveal the command pad encoded to his genetic signature. “Almost there.”
Pierce watched with dismay as the enemy fighters broke off their combat and converged on the central worldship. Attack One would never withstand the assault.
“Pierce to Attack One: You okay down there, son?”
“It’s getting a little hot.”
Hot was an understatement. Tallis was losing his men too quickly for the descent.
“Attacks Two and Three move to cover. We need that tether in place. Solid.”
“Copy.” Hunter’s squad dove through enemy fire, tearing them apart with light and silence. He could see Tallis and three others below, so close to the surface that their afterburners were leaving contrails in the residual at
mosphere of the metal planet. He spun to look at the other, smaller worldships. They appeared dead in the aether. Waiting?
“Let’s make a hole.” Brendan’s voice was cocky over the comm channel. “Launching atomic.”
“Too close—You’re too close! Launch the tether and get out of there!”
“I know what I’m fucking doing!” but Hunter knew that Brendan did not. He was showing off for his troops. His troops were dying behind him, however.
Hunter watched Tallis swoop in toward the surface, dropping the atomic. The weapon itself was invisible, but the damage it did was not. The worldship surface rippled out as black became white, metal became plasma. Tallis’s slither began to spin, but this time out of control. Two more of his squad were consumed. Enemy fighters regrouped.
“Fucking hell.” Hunter was furious at the showboating. “Are you okay?”
Tallis was silent on the comm, but Hunter could see that his vessel was intact, just spinning out of orbit.
“Pierce to Tallis: What’s your situation?”
Static and silence. Pierce could see the vessel, but wondered if Tallis himself was intact in the cockpit.
“Tallis please respond.” Nothing. He turned to an angel. “Lifesigns?”
“He’s alive. Unconscious. Must have gotten banged around in the shockwaves.”
Five enemy fighters were closing on Tallis’s position.
“Eject him.”
“Yes, sir.” The angel’s too-white hand waved over the display and Pierce saw Brendan’s cockpit pod rocket away from his vessel, which was quickly consumed in enemy fire.
“Pierce to Windham: Take your squad in for tether attachment. Use the hole Tallis made.”
“Copy.”
So the pretentious bastard had been useful after all. Hunter signaled to his squad and dove for the atomic scar rent into the worldship mantle. He flipped the tether control panel open, firmly shoved his hand against the pad. The genetic sampling was painless. The pad withdrew to reveal a handle. Hunter grabbed it, let the onboard systems plot the target from his visuals.
He gunned the engine and flew into the atomic impact crater. The worldship was a monster, the edges of the crater dozens of fortified decks. Hunter noticed with a morbid fascination the tiny figures even now being sucked into the vacuum of space by the dozens. Hundreds. Thousands? The crater’s periphery was a ring of fire as the vessel’s atmosphere was vented. It was a green fire.
