I THINK THAT IF I REMOVED YOU, THEN I WOULD BE ABLE TO SUCCESSFULLY DECAPITATE THIS LITTLE PROBLEM. YOU HAVE ONLY THREE MINUTES TO LIVE
Sarah, who had begun to float away from the side of the wall, felt the wall again. Had she been drifting? No. Her ears perked and in the increasingly stale air of the room, through the vacuum outside, she could hear a slow, grinding creak . Suddenly, her mind filled with an image of the room tightening on her and Spez like a fist. The room had chucked them out into an erratic orbit, and she was certain that it had done so in a way that had caused as much debris, as much confusion, as possible. In the aftermath, she had no idea if the rest of the Commanders would know which chunk to chase.
She reached out with her free arm and her tendrils slammed into the wall. But it was like connecting with a stone – no, worse. A stone wouldn’t have throbbed with such intense hate. She felt her tendrils quivering, and biomorphic commands and impulses began to trickle from the wall to her arm. She jerked her wrist back before the symptoms got too bad – but her heart still felt as if it was beating a mile a minute. She gasped for air that she didn’t need and said: “You absolute bastard. Why are you even doing this? Did he tell you, Spez?”
“Nopesauce,” Spez hissed. “We’re going to fucking die, though.”
I DO NOT NEED TO EXPLAIN MYSELF TO FEEDSTOCK.
“Except you fucking do!” Sarah snapped. “Because I’m the last person who knows where the surviving Pro-Tas are.”
The silence that filled the room was palpable. But the walls had stopped contracting – she could hear their stillness.
HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT NAME?
“You’re not used to hearing about species you’ve exterminated coming back. Well, you missed a few. There are hundreds of them – and they’re our allies. And with their help, we’re going to do more than just kick your ass around Earth. We’re going to absolutely demolish your entire galactic terraforming project. We’re going to-”
TERRAFORMING? IS THAT WHAT YOU THINK THIS IS ABOUT?
Sarah pursed her lips. Was that effrontery she heard in its voice?
It was. It was . She grinned, slightly.
“And what else could you be doing by making all those Dyson Spheres? You don’t need to live on them - it’s almost like you’re building something for someone else-”
I SERVE NO ONE ELSE
The irritation in his tone was crystal clear. “You almost sound human, Eye…” Sarah said.
I HAVE BEEN ASSIMILATING INFORMATION FROM YOU. BY THE END OF THE CONSUMPTION OF THE PRO-TAS, I COULD HAVE DEBATED WITH THE BEST OF THEM AS WELL. YOU ARE NO MORE COMPLEX. NO MORE SUPERIOR. NO MORE UNIQUE .
Sarah shook her head. “Fine, then. Debate me. Tell me why I should lay down and let you mulch me. Do it. Come on. Convince me! I’m a fucking scientist and I’m halfway to being a communist – it’s not like I’m in a particularly philanthropic! I’m like, two good sentences away from writing humanity off as a bad idea and a dead end and fucking off with Aiden to the Magellanic Clouds to see if we can build something better. So tell me what it is you fucking want and maybe I’ll switch sides! You don’t know! ”
The sound the Eye made was not quite a laugh, not quite a chuckle, not quite a sigh. It was a boulder-like chimera of all three human noises, made by a throat that had never known flesh, transmitted through a medium unlike air. The juxtaposition of the noise and the source almost made Sarah giggle with hysteria. But then the Eye began to speak – and as it spoke, the center of the room glowed with a light so sudden that it was shocking. Spez and Sarah, floating near what had once been a ceiling, watched as the glow flared outwards, coalescing into an image of an galaxy that seemed at once familiar and strange. As the galaxy began to bead with tiny gemstones of light and symbols that turned into legible words to the two Commanders, the Eye began to tell them about the War.
***
The War had not started in the Milky Way. It had started in the chaos and the wild flurries of a different, more energetic galaxy – one that was the Milky Way’s younger sibling. The Andromeda Galaxy had birthed just as many early civilizations as the Milky Way. It simply did so far earlier. The fact was that while the Milky Way was stable and sedate, the Andromeda Galaxy was a positively rowdy hothouse. More massive, with more stars, the Andromeda Galaxy had seen the stellar cycles of birth, growth, and death flash by at a lighting pace.
The simple fact was that intelligent, tool using, space exploring life could not exist without metals and chemical components that were formed in the hearts of dying stars. These stellar furnaces baked the elements out of hydrogen and helium and scattered them to the cosmic winds with their death blossoms – the supernovae that made a star shine brighter than their entire galaxy. In Andromeda, such processes led to the blooming of life far sooner than in the Milky Way. These lifeforms had made contact with one another and penetrated the laws of physics that cloaked faster than light travel under a caul of seeming impossibility. With contact had come peace and understanding. Multi-species confederations. Alliances of friendship, even love.
It had also brought war.
A lot of war.
The very same solar furnaces that made the Andromeda galaxy so prone to life also made it terribly hostile, in both the long and short term. Intense radiation busts, gamma ray sweeps, crushing black holes, and worse scoured through the narrow habitable ring that surrounded the edges of the galaxy. As worlds were sterilized, and new habitable worlds were found, the rush to claim land was intense. Confederations and alliances fell upon one another like a pack of wolves. What had begun and dozens of separate conflicts had transcended, in the blink of an eye, into a singular, galaxy spanning war, fought by two distinct sides, composed of hundreds of species each.
The final political and moral breakdown had shook out with remarkable regularity.
On one side, there had been the species that valued life, artistry, compassion, kindness, genteelness, co-existence.
On the other?
...not so much.
Maybe at the beginning, there had been some measure of moral equivalency. After all, no species evolved to be evil. It was counterproductive in the long term, in the singular planet, singular sentient species environment that most sentient life evolved in. But in the new environment of the War, with the new evolutionary pressures of galactic Armageddon and battlefields that could consume entire solar systems in orgies of violence, new trends came forth. The first faction, whose name could only be translated into English as ‘The Forces of Good’, found themselves evolving to be more cooperative, more empathetic, more understanding. The evolution was primarily artificial, driven by engineering programs and social systems. Meanwhile, the second faction, whose name translates roughly to ‘The Forces of Evil’, had a similar recursive spiral. To counter the understanding and cooperation of their enemies, they became more brutal. More vicious. More evil.
Locked into this spiral, the Andromeda Galaxy reached its terminal phase with the deployment of weapons that didn’t just wipe out planets. They didn’t just wipe out stars. The D-Iron Bombs wiped out galactic sectors – by shunting pseudo-iron from several dozen nearby universes via the manipulation of high level quantum mechanics, the DIBs could cause a normal sun to go supernova with an incredible intensity. Spraying deadly radiation across the light-years, DIBs sterilized vast swaths of the Good half of the galaxy. In response, the Forces of Good used gravitic accelerators to ram neutron stars into one another and set off even more powerful busts of gamma rays, some of which even reached the Milky Way – unnoticed by the relatively scarce, relatively primitive species there.
In the end, the Andromedians were left with a smoldering cinder – a minuscule chunk of galactic civilizations left, standing among the corpses of trillions of sentient creatures. A sliver of the Forces of Good approached the Forces of Evil and peace talks began. They were delicate and they were slow, but they, at last, came to an agreement.
The Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil would split.
Observations were taken of deep space, and the Forces of Good spotted a galaxy that was in the midst of being sterilized by the X-ray laser of a perpendicular neighboring galaxy – the supermassive black hole at the core of the neighboring galaxy literally sweeping each star clean of life. It was a natural tragedy on an immense scale, happening many millions of years in the past due to the vast distances between that pair of galaxies and the Andromedians. But the end result would be a galaxy that had no sentient life to displace. The Forces of Good could rebuild it, and maybe see if they could find any survivors who had escaped the natural purge.
The Forces of Evil, meanwhile, found a galaxy that was smaller and denser than either Andromeda or the Milky Way – one that would have never evolved life, not with the amount of radiation bathing the scant millions of stars that ringed the distant core. They would settle in this desolate, blasted wasteland, and they would build themselves a new empire, far from the Forces of Good.
The agreement was set.
The Forces of Good entered into vast portals, constructed out of the corpses of dismantled gas giants and powdered by the explosions of small stars, and vanished.
The Forces of Evil…
Smirked.
And said: “What a bunch of fucking morons.”
And immediately set course for the Milky Way.
***
Sarah blinked, slowly. “So, you’re...a vanguard?”
NO, SARAH.
Sarah gulped. “You’re...”
EVOLUTION HONED ME – HONED US . LIKE A KNIFE PARING AWAY THE DROSS AND THE WEAKNESS AND THE PETTY CONCERNS. WE TOOK HOLD OF THAT NATURAL IMPULSE AND DROVE IT, FASTER AND FASTER, AS YOUR SPECIES DID. WE CUT OURSELVES AND WE BLED OUT ALL THE SIMPERING, ALL THE FOOLISHNESS. ONCE WE WERE DONE, WE WERE LEFT WITH A UNITY OF VISION. A UNITY OF PURPOSE. A UNITY OF THOUGHT. THERE WAS NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN K’LUL AND VOSS, BETWEEN ZI’RAN AND KYOSS. NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN I AND WE.
Sarah felt her entire body going chill. The walls began to tighten, then. They clenched, slowly. Terribly slowly – like the paw of a cat, batting a mouse back and forth, back and forth, claws playing along fur, teasing muscle and skin. Sarah and Spez clung to one another as the room – the hand of the Eye - tightened more and more around them.
I AM EVIL, SARAH. PURE. AND. SIMPLE.
Sarah clenched her jaw. She wanted to scream as the wall-flesh pressed against her back and the wall-flesh pressed against her face. Her nose flared, uselessly. She didn’t need to breathe. She wouldn’t be suffocated by the flesh tightening around her. She would be crushed. Her bones would be turned to powder, her muscles turned to a red ruin. Her friends, if they ever found her, would have to separate her from Spez with a soup strainer, and identify them with a genetic screen.
But Sarah still found something inside her.
It was a part of her...that was comforting.
She grinned, slowly, her teeth pressing against the gummy tightness of the wall. Slime dripped against her body and her hand released itself from Spez’s hip as she put her palm against the skin of the wall.
“Hey...Evil...” She whispered, her voice muffled in the cloying deepness.
There was no response – but the wall did pause.
“You’ve been in our heads for months now, and you think you understand us. But you still haven’t fucking grasped one. Simple. Thing.” She wished she could lick her lips. As it was, it felt like she was talking into a pillow – but her words were more thoughts than actual vocalizations. “Humans have been waiting for you for our entire fucking evolutionary history.” She grinned. “We know what to do when it comes to evil.”
Her fingers tightened against the wall. Her claws popped free.
“Rip and tear.”
For the entire time the Eye – that Evil – had been speaking, Sarah had been subtly altering her body. Laying muscle on top of muscle on top of muscles, in disastrously short term structures. The biologist in her cringed at the design. But unlike a natural creature, her muscle in her arm and her shoulder, the bones underneath both, didn’t have to survive year in and year out.
They just needed one push.
She shoved.
Her hand punched through the tissue of the clenching room, which suddenly went slack as her claws razored through tendons and veins. Her hand punched into the blinding clarity of space and then wind roared around her. She and Spez pushed through a tight, dragging mass of gore, and then tumbled away from the compacted lump of flesh that hung above the surface of Haven. They clung to one another as they flipped away, blood-crystals glittering around them.
In the howling silence of vacuum, Spez was the first to speak.
“Well. He’s going on the R slash ShittyBosses.”
Chapter Seven: Sarah Saves the Earth
“I...really was not expecting the answer to be so...blunt,” Zeradar said, glancing over at the rest of the Haveners, who were all lounging in the cafeteria – the only room on the shipyard that had enough room for everyone to visit. “They really provided no amelioration? No excuses? They Eye is really just...self identified as being evil?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said, nodding. “And he’s entombing every sun in the Milky Way galaxy in the flesh of the dead to create a...a...” She shook her head. “A necro-galaxy, illuminated by the infrared heat of Dyson spheres, every droplet of energy collected and used by a singular begin to do anything it fucking wants, surrounded by its slaves and the icy cores of dead worlds. And you know what? I don’t think it’s going to wait for the Forces of Good to come investigating to start conquering every other galaxy it wants to, until the whole universe is one big throbbing pustule of pure darkness, from here until the Big Crunch. Assuming it lets that happen.”
The Haveners exchanged glances with one another. L'Laya crossed her arms over her chest. Aiden was the only one who didn’t look particularly grim. Instead, he was sipping from a small cup of coffee, the coffee provided by one of the makers they had sunk into the biological wall of the cafeteria. While no one here needed to eat, drink or breathe anymore, they all enjoyed it. That was also why the caff was the only room on the spaceport that could have the Pro-Tas visit it without suits.
Aiden knocked his head back, gulped down the coffee, then set the cup down. “Well,” he said. “That makes life easier.”
“It makes life easier ?” Annie asked. “We’re fighting a fucker that blows up suns for a living. No, whole chunks of the galaxy!”
“No we’re not,” Aiden said. He swung his legs down and stood, grinning. “We’re fighting the surviving part of the guys who blow up chunks of galaxies. Like, guys, we heard it from the horses own mouth: Their civilizations were cinders by the time they got to talking. Anyone here ever play Fallout?”
A few hands went up.
“Apocalypses gut your technological base,” Aiden said, nodding. “We saw it on our planet, with the Romans. Right? That led straight into a dark age?”
“Actually,” Rose said. “That’s a six hundred year old myt-”
Aiden waved his hand. “We know that they aren’t sterilizing planets because they haven’t. Zeradar, they fought your civilization for hundreds of years. Did you have any victories?”
“Yes, several-”
“And yet, they never brought out the big guns!” Aiden said, grinning as he clapped his hands together. “I may just be a technician, third class, but I’ve seen how Sarah works. She can turn a lifeless planet into her own personal garden in an afternoon – if Evil wanted to, he could have sterilized the galaxy with a few gamma ray bursts and set up shop. But he didn’t. Which means he... can’t .”
Sarah bit her lower lip.
“We’re fightingsaucing Angry Alex,” Spez said, clapping her hands together and springing to her gangly feet. “All grr and gar, but driving a shite car with scrap built weapons and no idea how anything works!”
“Don’t you mean Mad-” Tasha asked, nervously from the table she was seated at.
“Angry Alex was public domain,” S
pez said, nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, we gotta chance.”
“Only if you can turn the fury of the human race upon Evil,” Zeradar said, his voice blunt as his translation orb rotated around and around his head, spinning on its axis as it orbited. “That is the true question. Can you unshackle yourself in time? The...Evil knows that you are no longer his slave, Spez. He will not make the same mistake a third time.”
“He’ll head right for Earth,” Sarah said, nodding.
“Yeah, prolly,” Spez said, nodding. “And to think, I worked so hard convincing him to not attack the Earth. You’re. Welcome. By. The. Fucking. Way.” She nodded, significantly to the others.
“So, what’s the plan?” Rose asked.
Sarah bit her lip. She thought through every variable she could imagine – remembering the battles she had been in. The wars she had fought in. And an idea occurred to her. It was...brilliant. It was elegant.
It was utterly revolting.
Sarah looked at the rest of the room, then sighed. “You’re not going to like it,” she said.
“Well, we’re still going to vote on it,” Annie said, her voice arch.
Sarah nodded.
Spez blinked. “Waitzwha, we getta vote ? Fuckin speely, this is the best fuckin’ defection in my whole fucking life. And I once defected from the Chastity Gang to the Orgy Gang in Slumcity. Long story.”
Sarah shook her head with a wry little smile, her head spines flexing and tightening as stress coiled in her gut. And so, simply, Sarah laid out her plan. She explained the rationale. She explained the reasoning. She laid out the basic truths behind it, gleaned from her own experience with war. She was backed up by Space Belisarius, who immediately saw the idea and was able to supplement it with his own expertise, reinforcing that Sarah had chosen correctly – in his words, the sign of a gifted amateur.
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