Authors: Paul Hughes
“Okay.”
He lifted her face up to meet his gaze. “Are you okay?”
She weakly smiled. “No.”
He kissed her cheek, her nose, her other cheek. “Me neither.”
“Will we be okay?”
“We’ll find a way. We’d better get to the hangar.”
“Uncle is gone. I’m your Commander now.” Tallis paused in front of him. “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.”
Hunter bit his tongue.
“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.”
Tallis nodded toward him. He 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, and that breach in the primary flux generator has to be contained before we can move. Decks one through ten are flooded. Let’s get to work.”
Officers barked orders. Hunter took one last look out the hangar entrance: Uncle’s coffin was invisible against the fabric of night, just another dot against black.
What cairn in this sky, what memorial to the lost soldiers in the midst of the night?
He caught Lilith’s gaze as he walked by her. Mind to mind, touch to touch. Her lips attempted a quiet smile that he could not return.
“Arik.” He grasped the man’s shoulder as he went by. “You have a working slith?”
“Yes, sir.” Arik Mandela snapped to attention. “Attack Three is at ninety percent.”
“At ease.” Hunter already didn’t like the new hierarchy, the new formality. Uncle had been a good commander, a human commander. There was something about Tallis that tickled the base of Hunter’s skull. “When can you be ready to fly?”
“Now, sir.”
“Good.” Hunter looked across the hangar at Tallis, in animated conversation with members of Attack One. “We’ll take a ride over to the worldship wreck.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Arik?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Call me Hunter. Stop with that ‘Sir’ shit.”
Mandela smiled. “Alright.”
Hunter patted his shoulder and went to suit up.
Door alarm. She activated and swam. Tallis.
“We need to talk.”
“What is it?”
“You’ve spoken to Windham recently.”
“Before the ceremony.”
“Do you know why he slithered up?”
“He didn’t tell me anything.”
Tallis slumped into a vacuum chair opposite Lilith. “You can tell me.”
“He was upset. He didn’t say anything about taking a ship.”
Tallis nodded. “Why weren’t you shielded when you two were alone together?”
“I—” She stumbled over her words. “I was. Of course I was shielded.”
“No. I inherited access to the phase logs. We were running a diagnostic on the cistern and I saw that you’d recently shielded up again. Logs indicate there were two people in your chamber at the time.”
“There must be a mistake. I wouldn’t—”
“You were unshielded in the presence of my top officer. Why and how?”
“I’m telling you, it has to be a mistake.”
“Arch doesn’t make mistakes like that. Each and every time you’d been unshielded in the last twenty years has been recorded without error.”
“The attack must have damaged the ship’s systems. There could have been a—”
Tallis surged from his seat in one swift motion, hand impossibly reaching through three feet of phase gelatin. Lilith gasped in horror at the look in his eyes, that burning from within. He palmed the release mechanism on her cardiac shield and her phase splashed to the floor in a wave. Her hands reached up to grab his forearm, to wrench it away from her body. He pulled her from the vacuum chair with one hand, crushing her neck as he lifted her from the ground.
“Don’t fucking lie to me.” He growled through clenched teeth. There was no sign of the infection, no silver runnels underneath his skin. He threw her to the floor.
“I don’t—”
“He’s immune to the silver. How?”
She sobbed from the cold of the floor, rubbing her bruising neck. She palmed the cardiac mech, but it didn’t respond.
“Don’t bother.”
“You’re not—”
“So now you know. It’d been Mother’s plan all along. Pierce taught us to be good little soldiers, but his death means that I’m the leader now, and it’s time to start the real work. We can’t have a flesh construct commanding a war against flesh.”
Lilith crawled back, away from this machine. She had to tell Hunter, had to let the others know.
Tallis bent, grabbed the front of her jumpsuit, slammed her up against the chamber wall.
“This will be our little secret. If you tell anyone, I’ll see to it that we space your little Windham at Light X.”
“You can’t—”
“I
can
.” His eyes were mercury fire. “You won’t tell anyone. You’ll do the job. You’ll sit in the firing chamber like a good little girl and we will destroy them.”
Lilith nodded, shaking with her tears, breath heaving in and out in great gasps of fear.
Tallis let go of her uniform, his face inches from hers. She could smell the stink of his non-adrenaline, could feel the warmth of his non-body. Swimming behind those eyes, the tug of an eon of Maire’s plan for vengeance, the flicker and
“What are you?”
Tallis grinned.
silver
was everywhere on the charred remains of the worldship husk, writhing in the valleys, reaching out from spinnerets in a last attempt to snare human biology.
Hunter and Mandela palmed their shields.
The slither hovered above the atomic crater, descended into the vessel interior slowly. There was no fire, no movement. The silver cooled, slowed, died, dissolved.
“Any lifesigns from the interior?”
Mandela checked his instruments. “None on scope. There’s movement, but no biology. Sections are still collapsing. It’s a dead ship.”
“Take us down.”
Mandela searched for a secure area on which to attach the fighter. One edge of the crater had fused together, providing a firm enough strip of slag for a landing zone.
“Does Tallis know about this little trip?”
“Fuck him.” Hunter frowned, looked out at the derelict world. “He doesn’t need to know.”
Mandela nodded. “Glad to see someone else shares the sentiment.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“But he made you second.”
“I still don’t trust him.”
“No one trusts him, Hunter.”
The vessel’s landing gear reached out and grabbed a segment of blackened deck.
“Keep that in mind. Let’s go find some answers.”
Windham didn’t expect to find any of the enemy quickly or easily. The atomic blast had gouged a vast hole into the vessel, instantly exposing dozens, perhaps hundreds of mantle decks to space. Slither systems revealed that there were still pressurized interior areas, but the atmosphere was alien, almost pure nitrogen. The silver from the attack was still present, but not a threat from within their phase shields. He walked with Mandela through decks now open to the void. The worldship’s gravity was light, but it was enough to hold them down.
“We have a bulkhead.” Mandela’s gunbeam revealed a sealed door, now half-melted into the wall around it.
“Take it down.”
“I don’t know how much atmosphere is behind this... Let’s secure a bubble.”
“Right.”
Mandela unsnapped a phase generator from his pack and locked it to the wall. He activated the bubble and a half-sphere of gelatin enveloped the bulkhead. He affixed a charge to the entryway. They ran clear of the particle blast. It cut a hole into the solid steel((?)) of the door. Atmosphere poured out, stretching the bubble as pressure equalized within and without. The edges of the hole cooled to black.
They flanked the hole. Mandela nodded to Windham, who thrust his weapon into the new entrance and swept the interior with light slugs. Nothing. The gunbeam revealed a dead chamber.
Windham
grabbed the upper lip of the bulkhead and swung himself into the next room, legs first. His feet made jarring contact with the floor and he helped Mandela through.
The floor, the walls, everything was covered with the invasive silver dust. Three feet of solid metal shielding had not been enough to protect the enemy from the weapon. They were in a hallway, doors on each side, stretching away farther from the crater area.
“Critical systems will be at the center. I doubt that transport mechs will be operable.”
“We don’t need to get to the bridge. We just need to find a body.”
Mandela paused. Windham kept walking, stopped, turned around. “Why a body?”
“I want to see what the aliens look like.”
“Why?”
“Ever seen an alien up close?”
“Well—”
“Ever engaged one in hand-to-hand combat? Ever had to fight one to the death?”
“No.”
“That’s right. We’ve always fought them from above, targeted them from space. We’ve relied on the sensors to see them. And what do they look like?”
Mandela shrugged his shoulders. “Humanoid.”
“Bipedal humanoid. Sometimes armored. I want to see what’s behind the mirror.”
“Are you sure we should be doing this?”
“We’ve never seen them. Not really. We’ve killed them, but we haven’t looked at them. I want to know what we’re up against. I need to know who killed our home, our parents. I need to see who we’re going to end.”
“Then let’s find them.”
Down hallways, down stairs, across levels, nothing. The same silver dust, the same brittle quality of the walls, the floor. It hung in the air, swirled around their phase shields, sending currents of shimmer, contrails of glitter behind them, walking through a suffocation, choking through a world of glass and sparks.
Mandela studied his projector display. “Faint biologics ahead.”