Authors: Paul Hughes
“Movement?”
“None. Stationary targets. Signal is fading fast.”
“Where?”
Mandela drew a bead with his gunbeam on one of the many doorways in the corridor. There were markings, but he couldn’t read them. “This one.”
There were levers on each side of the doorway. Windham and Mandela both grabbed one, and Windham signaled a three count. Levers pulled down, door groaned three-quarters of the way open. Mandela swept the inside with light as a wall of warmth met them.
Hunter’s heart dropped.
They walked amidst silver, between the bodies and the angels and the tubes. They walked without words; there were no words for what they saw and what they felt: two decades of subterfuge unraveled in a simple room by simple evidence, machinery and bodies and angels.
Hunter was reminded of a day that started with
“Mommy?”
“Have to go outside, baby. Have to get out of here.”
“Why?”
“The gun, baby.”
his mother, quiet beauty Helen Windham, married to a commander of the Extinction Fleet, young bride, shaking hands, hands covered with the silver affliction of Maire’s initial ascent from the Paris Gate and hands covered with black leather gloves, hands that lifted him from bed, carried him outside, where she fell to the gravel parking lot, hands that grasped those stone shards and yearned for something, anything, as they watched the orbital defense system fire balls of white into the morning sky. The day started with his mother waking him, and she died less than an hour later, a hole through her chest, and Honeybear was at her side, on fire because of the flak from above, fighters in the sky, men dying to save him, to save the others. An angel lifted him from his dead mother, carried him to the escape vessel, and he knew. He knew that things would never be safe again, would never be right or the same. Things would be wrong until he found the enemy homeworld and killed them all. It was his life, their life on the Arch, those consoling words whispered to him from Uncle or the nicer angels. It was his life to kill those who had killed his world, those alien beings cloaked in black and haze, hiding on periphery worlds, rising up against Mother and the Extinction Fleet. It was his life to kill those strangers below, those monsters without faces. Twenty years of conditioning, twenty years and one goal. He found love in that metal box between the stars, and in her heart was the weapon that would kill those who had killed. He had found love, and together they would create an end. These bodies, these consumed bodies, these were the enemy. These twisted forms, faces masks of horror against the silver, hands frozen in time and space as useless shields against Lilith’s weapon, they were the enemy.
“They’re human.”
Hunter’s heart beat in his throat. His eyes filled with tears that he could never hope to control. Twenty years of lie.
“Human.”
Mandela’s mouth opened on words that he couldn’t speak, jaw hung open, grasping for meaning, sense, truth.
The room was nearly featureless save the rows of vertical glass cylinders, within which dozens, hundreds of boys now hung lifeless, each in varying stages of development. Babies and toddlers in suspension, now crumpled to the tube bottoms from the loss of ship’s power. In the paths between rows, near-biologic angels lay near weapons, medical instruments, each featureless artificial face attempting to convey the fear and confusion of that final moment of silver. There were a few fully-developed males between those rows, supervisors or doctors, all adult men.
“No women.”
Something tugged behind Hunter’s eyes.
“Scan one of them. See if you can isolate the code and match to Earth bloodlines.”
Mandela swept his instrument over the nearest corpse. “Not enough biologic left in this one.” He walked to another victim. Frowned as his panel chimed.
“Got a match?”
“No match. But there’s something else...”
“What?”
“He has two hearts. Had two hearts.”
Hunter spun around, pacing, shield sloshing lazily behind and around. Hands clenched, unclenched.
“No women.”
He remembered a hospital room, his mother smiling down at him from the bed. He was holding his father’s hand, remembered faint gray light from the window, overhead fluorescent lighting glinting from the button on his father’s dress uniform. Large hands slipped under his arms, lifted him up, held him close, for a moment inadvertently pressed his face against metal nametag pinned to crisp olive drab: Windham, and there were epaulets and a jaunty beret that his father hated. He sat snugly in his father’s arms and looked down at smiling mother, sad smile, smiling mother? and
The baby was more red than pink, more pink than gray, but they knew, and they knew. It was why they’d brought their son to see her so soon, to see that miracle of life, the miracle now denied a species by the lady from the middle of the planet. His father had sat with him at the kitchen table and tried to explain, but Hunter held Honeybear close and barely listened, preferring instead to eat his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and scribble spaceships and robots with crayons on his new construction paper. His father had done his best to explain the inexplicable.
The baby made noises.
Hunter remembered being afraid of her. He’d seen another baby up-close, the neighbor’s baby son who was too small to play with and kept them awake every night with crying. Hunter couldn’t tell why this baby was different, what made it a her and not a him, what would soon end the young life in suffocating silver.
His mother had smiled, but her eyes had been wet. She comforted the baby girl, held her tightly in black-clad hands, concealing her own affliction. It was a miracle that the baby had even been carried to term; the headlines in those first few years had reported the miscarriage rates almost as often as the construction projects, the conquest of the solar system, the impending jihad.
Hunter had taken refuge from the baby girl against his father’s neck.
Mommy came home a few days later without the baby.
“Lies. All lies.”
Mandela studied the floor. “They’re cloning boys.”
“The silver would have killed off all the women. Not all at once, but over time. Just like home. They aren’t human, but close enough.”
“But the Catalyst—”
“Isn’t the same silver. The Catalyst comes from Lilith. It doesn’t discriminate against biologic. The silver comes from...” Headache forming behind eyes, reflex to rub, glass shield prevents.
“Mother.”
“That’s when it all started.”
“The worlds we’ve hit already? Rogue planets, harboring the enemy?”
“They weren’t harboring anyone. They
were
the enemy.”
“And now we’re taking the Catalyst home. To her home.”
“She wants to finish what she started.”
They didn’t speak on the return to Archimedes. Hunter had made it clear that this information must remain their secret until he could find a way to approach Tallis. He didn’t think it would be easy to persuade the blood-thirsty new commander to re-evaluate their objective.
Tallis waited for them in the hangar.
“What the fuck have you been doing?”
“Recon.”
“Do you know how dangerous it was to—”
“I was aware of the dangers. It was a dead ship.”
“And you just—”
“We didn’t find anything, Brendan. It was slag.”
Tallis sneered. “Get out of the suits and into the bubbles. We’re ready to fly.”
“You’ve tracked them?”
“We know exactly where they are.”
“How far?”
“Days.”
“Will Lilith have enough time to regain her—”
“She’ll be ready.”
“Good.” Hunter feigned eagerness. “Let’s go.”
Ten thousand midnights, the blink of an eye in Light X, a slumber barely refreshing, fraught with uncertainty and echoes of a planet now dead, the woman hidden at its center, a vessel preparing for war, his love hanging at its center.
“Crew prep for aerial bombardment.”
“No.” Tallis strode across the bridge. “We’re going down.”
“There’s no need to risk—”
“They killed Uncle. We’re going down. Crew to transports.”
“We can hit them from above, just—”
“I want blood. We’ll take the tether down ourselves. Get to your transport.”
Hunter’s eyes locked on Arik’s as Tallis stormed from the bridge.
The target worldships had landed long ago on the central continent. The phase technology of the enemy apparently provided a faster ride; cities had grown around the sunken spheres. Hunter swallowed hard as he watched the descent from his monitor. He couldn’t let this happen.
The transports landed just outside of one of the cities.
There was little resistance.
Tallis’s Attack One cut through the city without mercy, slithers strafing from above, ground troops storming the streets. Hunter’s own Attack Two and Arik’s Attack Three were just as brutal, although Hunter himself never fired a shot in offense. He felt sick to his stomach at the slaughter enacted upon the “harboring” world.
Outside of the city, a city collapsing and a city on fire, the centerpiece the worldship hemisphere rising above it all, now cracked and falling. Tallis called all of his forces to the outskirts of the city for tether placement.
“Isn’t it great?” His smile disgusted Hunter, refracted behind the shield, twisted into a leer.
“We have to talk.”
“Leave it for the ship.”
“No. We have to talk now.” Hunter’s weapon swung ominously close to Tallis.
“Tether in place.”
“Incoming!”
A fresh sea of combatants stormed from the city, had to be combatants, couldn’t be unarmed people, unarmed men. Couldn’t be. Running, hands outstretched, shouting—
“Light ’em up.”
“What are they saying? What the fuck are they saying?”
“Who cares? Light ’em up. Trigger it. We’ll iron out the paperwork later.”
Hunter shook his head. “This isn’t right. Something isn’t right.”
Tallis glared through him, flipped his visor down. “Call in the fucking strike, Windham.”
“Sir, I can’t just—”
Tallis tore the comm from Hunter’s grasp, shoved him aside. He locked the device into the hardlink on his throat shield. “Tallis wing to orbital firing group. Bring the weapon online.”
copy, wing one.
“Sir, listen to them. They aren’t—”