Authors: Paul Hughes
Helen screamed and couldn’t stop.
The weapon kept firing.
Again.
Again.
“Again?”
“He likes it outside. Just sits there and stares at the river all day.”
“Okay. Would you mind if I went down there?”
“No, of course not, Mr. Reynald.”
“Windham.”
“Excuse me?”
“Mr. Windham.”
“Oh, sorry. I thought you were his—”
“No, not his son. Just an old friend.”
Windham
smiled at the young nurse, whose face was rouged with embarrassment. He noticed her not-so-subtle glance at the silver band he now wore prominently on his left ring finger. He was in civilian clothing today. If he had worn his military uniform, she would not have been so casual with him. These days, civilians were seldom casual, seldom comfortable around the military.
“We served together in the war.”
Again, emotion revealed through subtle shifts in eye placement. Lids ever-so-slightly widen, a short, almost inaudible inhalation.
“I’m sorry, sir. Please, feel free to go see him outside, if you would like, sir.”
“Thank you.” Quiet and friendly, and as he passed by the nurse, he reassuringly touched her arm. He felt a brush of her mind, just a little tugging
oh my god what have i said what if he
as he walked away. The machines were beginning to work, as he knew they would in time.
The corridor was long, dark, doors on either side that he felt guilty passing, for each and every room held a man just like Reynald, and he knew that more than likely, Reynald was the only man in this place that was allowed visitors. He did not look to the side, but stared straight ahead, where a door, flanked by armed officers on each side, permit entrance to the back lawn. He saluted to the officers, who opened the doors for him.
Gray day. They were always gray days now. Crisp wind blowing leaves over the steps, that scratching sound they made on their journey jarring something loose in Windham’s mind, a glimpse of some future contained behind tall iron bars and a force shield.
The lawn stretched out, sloped off, descended to the riverbank eventually, but a stone and force wall protected the patients from the outside and the outside from the patients. From the bottom of the slope, the river was invisible. Windham found his old friend sitting in his wheelchair at the place on the lawn just before it dropped away, still permitting view of the river, but also providing some distance between the compound and those wishing to escape it for a while.
Windham
approached from the side, at a diagonal. He did not want to sneak up on Reynald, even though he knew that the old man had known he was there even before Windham had made the decision to visit him that morning.
“Jean?”
The man turned to him, gentle smile on his lips, eyes engulfed in purest silver. The wind stopped for a moment, and the day was silence.
“It’s starting, son.”
“Sir?”
“The invasion. The war. It’s so close...”
“Jean, I—”
“Perpetual autumn. It’s—
—closing in!”
Windham
spun around in the liquidspace bridge enclosure of the destroyer. His breath was ragged, sucking in the unfamiliar atmosphere of gelatin. He held his hands to his face, confused. Projected control displays followed his hands’ movement, blinking out only as he touched his slick-wet face. Disoriented, lost.
“Sir?”
A swarm of fireflies fell from the ceiling, schooling around his head, entering his ears, mouth, nose, eyes. Awareness of his surroundings snapped back into place as emergency machines took control of his body to stop the bleeding and leeching action of the gelatin. The projected displays flickered to life once more.
The armada was closing in on Windham’s destroyer, the last of his detachment of the Extinction Fleet. Across the bridge of the Teller, Windham’s crew were enclosed in liquidspace bubbles like his own. He could see that three of the ten bubbles had cracked under the last volley of weapons fire from their hunters, the contents of each bubble now smeared in human biologics, simmering physical forms smashed against phased silica.
Windham
reached out with his control wetlink, ejected the corrupt bubbles from the bridge expanse. The vessel automatically reshaped itself to compensate for the loss of mass. The gelatin swiftly filtered out the blood and human flesh fragments from the bridge sea. He saw with some alarm that his own bubble had suffered a crack, and faint rivulets of high-density gelatin from the main bridge expanse were seeping into his likely coffin.
“Orders, sir?”
Windham
looked at his projected displays, felt the touch of his remaining crew through the wetlink.
“How many worlds?’
“Just one.”
“Inhabited?”
“Billions.”
Windham
breathed deeply of his gelatin world.
“Take us in. Focus the weapon.”
“Yes, sir.”
The ship reshaped again, the haunting scream of the liquid civilizations echoing through Windham’s submerged ears. The Teller fast approached the target planet, slingshotting around it to achieve escape velocity. The enemy armada split into a dizzying formation of fireworks.
“Weapon aligned. Coordinate lock.”
“Activate EM anchor.”
“EM lock.”
“Do we have incoming?”
Silence...
“Do we have fire?”
“Incoming weapons fire on screen.”
The vessel shuddered as the solar system bent toward the quantum bullets arriving in-system and Light X speed. Windham’s bubble cracked a little more. Almost time.
The enemy armada scattered at the sight of the horrible white arcs of nothing being thrust at their planet from a rent in space/time. Starlight bent, vessels resonated, pilots liquified. The light emanating from the dark side of the planet blinked out as the first bullet hit. The successive rounds began to knock an equatorial incision into the world’s crust.
Windham
could look no longer. The quantum trebuchet would soon tear the planet apart, and he did not want to be around to see it. He’d killed too many worlds already.
“Get us—
—out of here, Lily.”
The little girl blinked her eyes once, twice, trying to bring Nan into focus. She had been having the most wonderful dream about playing with other little girls just like herself, dancing in a circle, laughing as they held hands and danced and fell to the ground in a heap of unattainable happiness.
“Nan?”
The angel’s image was flickering, fuzzy. For an instant, Nan disappeared completely, but came back into focus, overcompensated, stood there in harsh contrast, then returned to fuzzy.
“No time to explain, dear. We have to get you to safety.”
She felt it then, the shivery resonance, the undertone that filled the room and made her teeth vibrate when she closed her mouth far enough.
“Nan?”
“No time, Lily. They’re in the sky.”
Lily pushed back the covers, sat up in bed.
“I have to go see the lady now, don’t I?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Will it hurt?”
Nan’s heart would have broken if she had indeed possessed a heart.
“Only for a little while, my little flower.” Nan knew it was a lie.
Lily reached out, touched Nan’s hand. The phase disruption from the incoming fleet warped and confused the infinite number of silver machines that laced together underneath Lily’s touch; Nan’s skin was cold and felt more like a screen door than human flesh.
“It’s okay, Nan. I don’t blame you.”
Nan
sobbed and embraced the Catalyst.
The weapon kept firing.
“Nav is gone, sir. Buffer cracked, EM drain—”
“And the enemy fleet?”
“Regrouping.”
The vessel rocked as two more command bubbles corrupted and cracked. The bridge sea realigned in an attempt to maintain vessel homeostasis, but with half of the crew gone... Windham reached out and felt the crack in his own bubble. The high-density gelatin that seeped through tickled his fingertips, bounced around his hands. The darker bubbles were increasing in size. Windham’s world was being invaded by near-matter.
The flashes of quantum fire abruptly ended and he could see through the translucent hull of the liquid vessel that the hole from which the rounds were arriving in-system was collapsing, a great white spiral of space/time confusion in the black of the enemy system. He watched the last of the rounds slam into and through the surface of the enemy’s world, spreading vast chunks of molten continent into space.
“Orders, sir?”
Windham
struggled to focus, but he could already feel the bridge gelatin dissipating into his atmosphere, clogging his body and mind. Schools of firefly machines swarmed around his face, but they seemed to be just as confused and resigned to death as Windham was.
“Commander?”
Windham
pressed his hands to the broken phase before him. Dark streams of bridge gelatin were now virtually pouring into his bubble. Each liquid inhalation choked him; each exhalation burned. Through the hull, he saw the hunters regrouping, their scattered firework formation solidifying as they found the Teller on scope.
“Enemy fleet in pursuit. Orders, Commander?”
He tried to remain calm, bracing himself for the moment that he had anticipated for years. Cessation. No afterlife, no redemption, nothing. They started then, the images of his wife, his son, his beautiful family that he had left behind. He was beginning to hyperventilate, but the fireflies were now floating dead in the corrupted bubble.
“Eject my bubble upon collapse and get out of here.”
“Commander, I—”
“Just do it. You have to get word to home. They have to know what we found out here.”
He could hear it, the collapse, when it began: a faint crinkling sound of ice plunged into a tepid drink, the spidery latticework of his end, the disorienting influx of tons of bridge gelatin, displacing the bubble’s atmosphere almost immediately, but not fast enough to displace those final thoughts, that resignation to nothing, that pang of love for his Helen, that broken heart for his people and his time and everything and and crushing suffocating burning torrent rage of sound and fury pressing in and through and
white world didn’t fade to black but fell into white and