Authors: Paul Hughes
“You needn’t worry about our escorts. They’re just observing.”
Something in Stranger’s voice resonated with its own undercurrent... Zero tasted distrust in that statement, and he caught a brief unshielded image of an accusatory finger pointed at a man in white, or perhaps just a white beard, a soundtrack of that guttural bark that these creatures used as a language. Stranger was definitely hiding something... But Zero could sense already that not all was well under this glass sky.
One of the smaller vessels swooped dangerously close to the shiver, then fell away, phase drives leaving a contrail of blurred space behind it. Stranger looked intently ahead, ignoring the display. Zero, however, watched the smaller vessel move to rejoin the formation of similar vessels that it had been flying with. A brilliant flash and it was cut apart in mid-maneuver by a corvette that came in fast and low. Several destroyers moved to intercept the corvette, and another group moved in close around the shiver. The world inside the snowglobe erupted in a lightshow.
Stranger barked orders at the vessel, which increased speed and rocketed toward the sphere closest to the trapped star. All around them the world was lances of fire and phase and shiver.
“Just observing?”
“Quiet,” Stranger growled back. “We’ve had some trouble since your arrival.”
“Some trouble? All is not well in paradise?”
[paradise?]
the word slammed into Zero’s mind with horrifying force.
[it’s not been a paradise since the Exile sent us your precious little flower. how dare you speak of paradise when you have the blood of an entire species on your hands?]
The words echoed through Zero’s mind, a sickening sensation much like the shiver. “it’s a civil war. You don’t know what to do with me.”
“That’s right. We’re killing ourselves out there,” he indicated the skirmish taking place around their vessel “Because of you.”
The shiver continued toward the first satellite of the dying star, flanked on all sides by massive destroyers. Corvettes and fighters still swooped in and out of their path, but they were for the most part instantly cut apart by the shiver’s escorts.
The shiver slowed as it entered the atmosphere of the first planet. The surface below them was bereft of signs of life, a black icescape on the side that they approached. Their destroyer escorts stayed in orbit, and the shiver was followed by an array of smaller atmospheric vessels. Zero strained to see the lights of cities or airstrips, but was disappointed. As far as he could tell, there was nothing constructed by humans on the surface of this planet.
“It’s beneath the surface, at the planet core.”
Zero understood then, of course Heaven was at the planet core. Where had they found Mother when the planet had begun to cool and die? The planet core. These creatures were not surface-dwellers; they preferred the privacy of the interior.
“Something like that.” Stranger folded his hands across his chest.
A great gap opened in the darkness, illuminated from within, an immense silver mouth stretching into the planet interior. The shiver fell inside, and the mouth closed. With one swallow, the vessel plummeted into the distant cousin of the Vegas Gate. Pearly gates or not, Zero was on his way to Heaven.
Foreboding, suffocating sense of foreboding.
Higher and higher, caught in the swirls and eddies of the new atmosphere at the center of the planet, hovering like eagles, linked hand to tiny hand, two human forms gracefully swimming through air to the warship that was named War but preferred to be called Gary. Mother laughed, the child that she had become laughed, and Fleur cringed as she heard the depth of the decay, echoing forever through the tumult of a machine ocean. Mother was dying, and dying quickly. The destabilization of that presence that had permeated the entire galaxy of her exile in these last hundred-thousand years was evidenced in that child’s blissful laughter. Fleur shivered from the cold and from the depth of her despair.
They approached the warship from beneath. Machines were affixing the final phase drive to the aft of the vessel. Countless automaton assemblages of stone and metal and fiery shift swam in schools through the current of Center Earth, crawling over Gary and putting finishing touches on his superstructure. Mother deftly avoided the dutiful slaves, and her grasp on Fleur’s hand tightened as they floated up to the underside lock.
[gary!]
Mother shouted with all of her mind.
[let us in!]
US? WHO’S “US”?
[me and fleur, gary. let us in!]
FUCKIN’ A.
Mother visibly blushed, much to Fleur’s amazement.
[gary hasn’t been properly trained yet.]
The underside lock began to cycle open. Mother towed Fleur along behind her as they rose up into Gary, who was spouting a string a silverthought expletives into the void.
As the lock slid shut below them, Fleur took in her surroundings. She had expected a cavernous interior, but it would appear that most of the bulk of Gary was taken up with the phase drives and megascale mechanics that would launch them into the Outer. The room into which they floated was another simple construct of Mother’s mind, a suburban living room with a comfy couch, beanbag chairs, even a pool table and wet bar. Instead of a cockpit, Fleur found herself in domestic tedium. Instead of a control panel, Fleur found a twenty-seven-inch television. As Mother descended and as her feet touched the shag carpet, Fleur could have sworn she heard music. Elevator music.
[welcome to your new home, Fleur. we’ll be spending lots of quality time together.]
GIRL, YOU CRAZY.
Mother frowned.
[gary, be quiet.]
She walked over in the restored gravity and threw herself down on a beanbag.
Fleur stood, taking it all in, then remembered her own passengers. She released her clenched first and threw the three silver projectors into the air, where they sparked to life, emitting Hank, Whistler, and Nine in perfect emulation.
MOMMA, WHAT THE FUCK—
[gary! i’d like you to meet whistler. whistler, gary. gary, hank. hank, gary. nine, gary. gary, nine.]
AND A PARTRIDGE IN THE MOTHERFUCKING PEAR TREE?
Whistler flattened the front of his robe. “Mother, what is this?”
[this, whistler darling, is gary. he’s our new home.]
Nine walked to Fleur’s side, his cold projected hand engulfing hers, fingers looping through fingers. She smiled, but not before catching the icy gaze of the five-year-old in the beanbag chair.
“Gary is a vessel. Where are we going?”
[somewhere marvelous! i know that you’ll enjoy it.]
Hank took in his surroundings with his trademark scowl, reached into his pocket and was pleased to find that Mother had been kind enough to emulate a pack of smokes for him. He pulled one out and found in that dreamlike sense of hazy possibility that was the new life of the recently-uploaded that the cigarette was already burning. All he had to do was place it to his lips and inhale.
NO SMOKING ON THIS WARSHIP!
A bubble of nonspace erupted around Hank’s hand and the cigarette was gone, along with a large portion of the hand itself. Hank frowned silently, retrieved his projector from his pocket with his remaining hand, shook it a few times. A new hand faded into place with a little burst of static.
“This is gonna be a long flight without no smokes, Mother. Where we goin’?”
Nine and Fleur sat on the loveseat beside Mother, and Hank and Whistler plopped unceremoniously down on beanbags of their own. The television flickered to life, displaying a field of stars.
[the extinction isn’t over yet, my children.]
she sat forward as she spoke, eyes glimmering with an interior silver.
[you could say that the jihad was just a test run.]
GIRL, YOU SO COLD-HEARTED.
Mother glared up at the voice from nowhere.
[there are people who hurt me, long ago. they sent me here to get rid of me, and now it’s time to go back.]
“She’s the Exile.” Fleur looked down at Mother with sad eyes. “They hurt her. And now she’s going to use us to hurt them. Not just a war or a jihad. Not just an extinction.”
[little flower—]
“She’s going to use us to destroy Heaven.”
The pleasure displayed on the child’s face was unmistakeable.
[that would be a fitting end to this charade, wouldn’t it? what divine irony if i were to destroy her by the end of this... yes. i’ve made up my mind. time to go.]
Whistler cleared his throat. “Shouldn’t we wait until Gary is *ahem*
built?
”
FUCK YOU SAY?
[gary is finished enough. right, gary?]
DAMN STRAIGHT.
Mother rolled her eyes.
[right. so can we leave?]
HELL YEAH.
[good. take as many machines from the center as you need, and let’s go home.]
With Gary distracted with the takeoff procedures, Hank lit a cigarette. Whistler fanned the smoke away, pulled his collar up around his neck and cheeks, his eyes darting toward the child. Fleur huddled closer to Nine, her dark curls tickling his neck and chin and cheek as he bent, kissed the top of her head, inhaled her scent, dreamed those dreams that he could never live for his lack of body and soul and future.
Mother was practically bursting with excitement. Her face radiated joy at the impending departure, her smile wide, dimples marking flushed cheeks, her entire body rocking back and forth in the ridiculous beanbag chair, ridiculous for its blatant anachronism in a universe now devoid of romper rooms and hepcats.
[we’ll bring it to them. an end of sorts, but more... so much more.]
Gary
began to resonate with the shiver of a million phase drives. Fleur closed her eyes, sick to her soul with the realization of what they were about to do.
[Heaven awaits.]
They left.
She knew very little, but she knew beyond a doubt that she loved chocolate milk.
She drank as much chocolate milk as she could, which really wasn’t that much, but she knew that chocolate milk brought her almost as much if not more happiness as anything in the sterile world that had been her home for her entire life. The angels disapproved of her mass-consumption of that silken chocolaty goodness, but they really couldn’t do anything to stop her. Nan would voice her disapproval in that tugging, lecturing way, but she would just smile sweetly and ask for more. Always more chocolate milk. In her little world, there was an unending supply of anything that she desired. The angels had to do exactly as she ordered, a fact that she was just now beginning to take advantage of on a regular basis. Some would call her spoiled. She preferred to think of herself as a child of privilege. Chocolate milk? We’ve got oceans.
“Lily, dear?”
She looked up from the tabletop where her gaze had been transfixed on the colloidal action of millions of brown chocolate flecks interspersed throughout her glass of white near-milk. The silver spoon with which she had thoughtfully stirred the chocolate powder into her beloved drink stopped its revolution, came to rest.