Broken: A Plague Journal (11 page)

“How long’ve they been asleep?”

Cork’s fingers traced over the biologics readings. “Brand new batch. Twenty, thirty years.”

“Good.”

“What’s it matter?”

She shrugged. “I prefer fresh meat.”

His eyes performed unmentionables. “I bet you do.”

The passage through the vessel graveyard was uneventful. Maire froze images as Cork’s ship increased speed: the shell of a destroyer, a planetship scuttled and taken apart for spares, smaller shreds transporting reclamation teams through the complex of spinning metal and hollowed asteroids.

Cork yawned.

He caught Maire’s glimpse and tossed it back.

“You’re different.”

“Hmm?”

“Exactly.” He wagged his tongue from his mouth, the tips circling and rubbing together. “Your voice is different. Flat.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s alright. I’m different, too.” He wiped saliva from the badly repaired cleft on his lip. “But you... There’s something wrong with you.”

Maire smiled. He disgusted her.

around and never through those nonspace tendrils, the black matter that stippled, and swung, and reached

All time went flat.

She’d gasped for a while as the cockpit bubble flooded with nitrox gelatin. Cork’s breathing was steady; he’d been sucking the shielding for decades, and inhaling that bittersweet fluidish was a comforting return to the non-womb of space.

“Let me know where to point this thing.” The voice was choked, slurred. His tonguetips flicked over slicked lips, teeth. Sludgy echoes. Flat time.

“Give me flight control.”

“Listen, no one flies this shred but me, and I’m—”

“Give me flight control.”

Eyes narrow, relent. Cork thumbed the panel release and slid the sticks across to Maire’s side of the bubble, where they locked into place. Her considerably smaller hands gripped the shafts.

“You know how to run one of these?”

“Should’ve asked that before you slid these over.” Smirk.

He watched as she expertly adjusted the shred axes. She boosted the dark mix to 75%. “You’d better know what you’re doing with that mix.”

She gunned the engines. “I was a pilot. Don’t worry.”

They flew.

She locked coordinates and eventually lilted off to sleep in the sway and slosh of the mineral slime’s warm caress. Cork took the opportunity to extrapolate the path she’d set into the vessel’s slave. She was taking him deep into the Drift’s crotch, that hook of realspace bordered with dark matter so thick that entry was a suicide and exit was just as deadly.

He scratched an itch buried beneath suck.

Maire shifted in her seat. Her face rolled toward Cork, her mouth open, struggling to inhale the bubble sludge.

Gotcha.

He leaned closer. There
was
something different with her; her tongue was deformed. He absently fingered the scar of his cleft palette. He’d seen other deformities who’d been born in the wake of the trinary collapse, but never anything like that...

Her robe had come unsecured in the bubble’s tide.

He considered.

He acted.

Reaching out, his hand navigated around her shoulder, below and through the loosed interfaces above her eyes. He tugged on the front slit, gently enough to mimic the natural pull of the sludge. The robe flapped open.

Her chest was smooth, marked only by the small canyon of her cleavage between two breasts and a scattering of moles. No cardiac shield. No—

Her eyes opened.

She struck out at him, a savage blow to the throat with a backswing that shattered the bridge of his nose. The bubble blackened with the blown ballast of his blood.

For an instant, just an instant, Cork could have sworn that Maire’s eyes were silver.

She pulled her robe shut. “How dare—?”

Klaxons roared to life.

Maire spun to the flight control sticks. In her sleep and Cork’s distraction, the shred had pirouetted dangerously close to a tendril of dark matter. She flailed the sticks and the vessel spun away from the reaching black, over a ridge in the texture of space, down through a valley and

the ships, if they were ships, lay in wait.

Maire gasped.

They scattered, converged, enveloped. Michael had told her what to expect, but what she saw was beyond expectation or reasonable comprehension.

A wave of light swept the bubble. The vessel shuddered.

All around them, the ships swam through space, the tendrils of dark matter licking and following. It was a dance of horror and beauty, the magnificent school of black spiders thrusting through light and something deeper, something ancient and

a tug and

Maire sat alone on the floor, vomiting shield gel into and out of the spot of light in which she wretched. Cork was gone; the shred was gone. Beyond the circle of light, all was the absence of light, but she sensed something there, someone there, someones there. Another fit of coughing wracked her as bubbles of gelatin worked their way out of her lungs.

It was cold.

a heap of shattered images and

zero

flicker

zero one

flicker

one zero one

resolution

you are

fear and

you are ((?))

Maire stood, covered her now-nude breasts with goose-pimpled forearms.

you are ((?))

“I—I’ve been sent.” She struggled to remember what Michael had told her. “I’ve been sent by your creator.”

silence and

you are of loss, of ruin

“I am.”

purpose. completion. forevers.

One heart: one, and frequent exhalation, shudder, the scrape of exquisitely-manicured nails over flesh, over metal, over flesh and

“I am Omega.”

“Do you believe in werewolves?”

Samayel shrugged as best he could beneath her, his nacelles rising and falling in lubricated silence.

“I do.”

She clambered to the edge of his central hub, looked down upon the captured star. The heat was a pleasant slap compared to the months of timestream cold in which they’d been. She rolled to her back and let her nest of hair dangle over the side.

Looking up, away from the stark light of the sun below, she saw a scatter of wounded forms returning home, Judith vessels with phase scoring, here and there a vessel being dragged along by one nacelle. They couldn’t afford to leave the wrecks behind anymore. She glanced the tickle of tight-beam signals Sam sent to his returning soldiers.

It made her sad, so she turned over and looked down again.

“Fort Myers, good ol’ Fort Myers. I’m gonna miss this place.”

The orbital ring had been split into halves, into quarters, into countless fragments of metallish, but remarkably, the containment layer that held the miles of breathable atmosphere in place above the star was still in place. Alina loved the smell of
air
, the heat of
sun
, the exposed warmth of Sam’s hull beneath her. How many Judith captains could say that they’d ridden their mounts on the outside?

A flock of three Judiths passed close enough to generate
wind.
Alina giggled as they tipped their nacelles in salute.

“What’s gonna happen to the Fort, Sam?”

retrieval crews will salvage what they can from the shell. they’ll collapse the star and conceal the evidence.

“It’s a shame. I really liked it here.”

The atmosphere parted as a Judith destroyer entered the shell, towed by at least a dozen smaller fighters. Alina stood, shielding the light from below with her still-gauntleted hands as she tried to get a better look. “Who’s that?”

i’m not getting any signal from it... but the markings say it’s from Fort Johns.

“Flagship Jasper. He’s—Uhh.. It’s coming in a little fast, isn’t it?”

The destroyer picked up speed as it plummeted into the atmosphere. The Judith tows fell behind as its billions of tons of metallish fell faster and faster toward the sun below. Caught by a flailing particle cable, one Judith rolled dangerously close to the destroyer’s hull, slammed against its side and erupted with fire and splinters of black. Other Judith began to disengage their cables as the destroyer fell out of control.

Alina smelled the smoke as it surged past Sam: something between plastic and flesh, something between bitter and sweet. The sound it made: screaming.

The helpless destroyer erupted miles below against the containment layer, great arms of black and fire blotting out the brightness of the star.

“There goes another one.”

yeah.

Alina felt dizzy, not from the disconcerting vertigo of standing on a vessel without protection miles above the shield layer, but a deeper sickness wrought from two-point-five decades of servitude and horror.

“I think I’ll come back inside now, Sam.”

She loved Samayel, but she hated her command. She hated the war. She hated that even in a world of war, even when those last scattered remnants of her species were trying to make a stand, people could still be cruel. Boys could still be cruel. They could still work up the balls to call her “Banana Tits.” She hated those boys. She hated her breasts. She wanted them to be fuller. She hated her face: how it drooped, how her eyes looked perpetually sad and her high, high cheekbones, that in another time and place would be deliciously inviting for biting and nibbling, just made her feel so intensely ugly. Round face. Banana tits. No ass. She had a funny nose, and her body, even in stripped-down emulation, was still stippled with patterns of freckles and moles. She thought maybe if she improved her posture, just stood a little straighter, smiled a little more, maybe then she’d be beautiful.

She hated that space and time had made her sterile, removing the monthly threat of droplets of blood gumming up the systems of the ship, but hair still grew in the places where she wished it wouldn’t. Not that it really mattered. Everyone caught in this war seemed too tired to fuck. She wanted love. She wanted to
make
love. She wanted someone to love her. She wanted someone to remember her or care if she didn’t come back from a combat run or think of her as he drifted off to sleep, or at least what true sleep this war would allow between the killing frenzies and the running.