And in these final moments, in this final terror, I find stillness.
I remember her eyes.
They give me silence, the pause to reflect, the stillness that exists between two old souls brought together through tragic circumstance. As I hold this weapon, as I prepare to end this war, I remember and it gives me strength.
This is the moment of ultimate truth; I inhale and know all. I know what I have to do to end this. Even as the child stands before me, even as I hold this weapon to target on her heart, I know what I have to do.
It is a flood of thought and emotion; this is the moment before an end, those instants when the world pauses, those instants when everything is revealed and I am held motionless in a hesitant peace.
Inhale.
She begs me to end it. I will, but not before telling you the story of how it all came to be. Seconds stretch to hours, years, decades, forevers. I will take my time.
They’re all dead now on this dusty plain, this barren world where it began and where I will enact an ending. Only now do I realize the depth of my loss; I’ve killed the woman I love by killing the doppelganger sent to replace me. The shot went right through him and hit her as well. What have I done?
Exhale.
She’s in my arms right now, lifeless body. I hope her soul is elsewhere.
So much to say. So little time. The child yearns for this weapon, yearns for cessation and stillness.
She can wait.
How far back does the mind go? How far back does this story stretch? I barely remember the Earth. What still remains in my memory are broken images: a talking teddy bear, a gravel parking lot, the weapon jutting from the ocean, firing the white balls of phase that would begin the war. I remember a fence, a little girl, the static of the dead television. Daddy leaving. Mommy’s gloves. My baby sister, and the tears late at night.
I remember the smell of the smoke rising from my mother’s broken chest as she lay on the ground, dying.
They lied to us. They said we’d be reunited with our families once Archimedes was out of harm’s way. I knew that they were all dead, and I knew that Uncle and the angels were lying. Maybe that’s why I did what I did.
I think my heart has stopped beating.
Is there love between stars and times? Can the lost soldiers ever know that most poignant of emotions? Can something develop between two people brought together by loss and war that transcends explanation, safety, reality?
I can feel her blood through my shirt.
The child laughs at me. The temptation…I can taste it. I want to kill her, will kill her. Not yet, though.
I can’t kill her yet. I don’t want to leave. Images flood this confusion: a hand, her eyes, subtle smile and the shudder of her release. Forbidden love, forbidden coupling. I killed Tallis for what he did to her. I would have killed Uncle if I had known in time. His heart gave out. In this moment, I feel my own, each beat distinct. I feel the blood coursing through my veins, flushing my face, reaching every last extent of my body. I feel the gun warming to my touch.
This is the final moment. I know everything, I see everything.
dream that your someday child never knows of the rain
I can smell her hair, tainted as it is by sand and blood, sweat and dust. I can smell her hair.
How did it come to this?
Gary’s wreckage to the south, Hannon’s final gambit spilling fire and black smoke into the afternoon sky…What is this place? Can it be home? Did God die for these bleak plains, this impossibility of continuation? Did Lilith die so that I could kill her Mother and be left alone here?
This is the final moment. The ultimate truth. Senses are heightened, flashes of memory dance before my eyes, replacing the child with past, this desert with the cold of space, this corpse with warmth and touch and life.
I know it all now.
We tore the ship apart after I killed Tallis.
The angels tried to keep us from the bridge. They’d seen what happened in the hangar. They’d known all along that Tallis was a special little present that Maire sent along with Arch to keep watch over us, to take over once Uncle had died. They’d known it was coming, could see it in Uncle’s eyes for months before the final heart attack. His great crop of kinked black hair turned from salt-and-pepper to pure white, his rich chocolate skin turned sickly gray, eyes once brilliant white yellowed with age and exhaustion. I don’t blame him. I now know that he was an unwilling participant in this slaughter, just as my father and Uncle Jean were long before I was born.
Did my father see this world before he died?
I can feel that final collapse. I felt it then…But in this moment, he is with me.
Is it the silver? Is that the link between our past and present and whatever lies beyond? It crawls just beneath my skin, jabbing behind left eye, right. It is alive, so much more alive than the little girl, so much more alive than I am in this pause.
Brendan’s blood was still on my hands when we went to the bridge. The angels tried to stop us, but we fell upon them with blades and fists, slashing throats, knocking them down, gouging biomech eyes from silent, confused sockets. I felt nothing. They felt nothing. We emptied the ship of Mother’s spawn. We smashed things. I paralyzed Arch with stripped circuits, broken boards. Lobotomy.
At last, we were alone. Just men in the middle of nowhere.
And woman.
I remember being alone with her for the first time.
We thought it was a drill, but it wasn’t. Must have been fifteen or sixteen at the time, just starting our outside flight training. Brendan’s Attack One was running formations in what we thought was an empty system. Turned out to be inhabited. We were told they were the aliens; I know now that they were probably just an advance team from Hannon’s systemship. Arch went into evasive, left the slithers outside. I was on Catalyst guard shift with Arik. He abandoned his post; I don’t know where he went. But when Arch started shaking, I almost panicked. We’d never been bombarded from close-range before. EM slugs. We lost phase containment on the lower decks, and the system glitched. The Catalyst chamber opened.
She was in there, alone. Crouched on the floor, so scared. I went to her.
I don’t know if she’d ever been held by another human.
It wasn’t until after the attack was over that we realized that my shielding had never activated. I’d been in the chamber without phase, but nothing had happened.
We kept it a secret. Our little secret.
I owe it to decades of planning. When my father was in the service of Mother, she changed him. This child…She knows that I’m the son of Joseph Windham. She knows, she knew, but she still let me get on that ship. Maybe she had plans for me. In the end, she decided to kill me, replace me with an angel named Nine. She never suspected that Hannon would find my Machine in the outer. She never suspected that I would kill her.
This silver is starting to
Maybe she wanted this. Maybe she knew.
She is weak. I can feel her. Digging, clawing, struggling against this, even as she knows that it must be done.
She fades, lashes out. Final struggle against this
Maire is ancient. She is older than this world, older than home Earth and Hannon and the system she tried to kill. She is older than her Judith. She comes from the night between times, the void between stars. She waited for forevers to find a suitable host. She found it in Maire. The
silver
speaks to me without lips, without voice or tongue or breath.
She is.
life like fire
And now I begin to understand. Laughter like pleas for mercy resonate. Purpose. Will be completed. I heard it in the wind and saw it in the sky; I thought it was the end.
Please, give me strength.
I’ve seen God. Judith. Touched her. Held her hand as she died. I wept for her. I don’t know if there are others. I can only pray that there is something beyond this dust, this plain, this dead weight of my love bleeding out into the hardpan. I can only pray that in these moments, it will guide me, give me the strength to do what I must do, to end this war, to kill this child, to find that stillness between
There was music in her voice.
Is this all there is? Please give me solace and strength. Please direct finger to action, pressure against metal, brace for the shock of
We’d trade glances during briefings. As we got farther into the Outer, closer to target, Uncle allowed her into the briefings. She remembered that attack, the way I held her and didn’t dissolve from contact with the catalyst. She remembered a moment of adolescent compassion. All I did was hold a frightened girl, but she knew. You know. You do. She remembered the fence, the afternoon walks where I held my mother’s hand, gloved hand concealing the affliction that killed our species, afternoon walks where I waved to the only little girl left, pretty little girl inasmuch as I could recognize pretty: colorless colorful eyes, curls, unruly. Sad girl behind walls, faceless angel watching over her. She remembered my grocery trips long after we’d left the planet and groceries and the galaxy of home.
I think Tallis knew all along. I think he was jealous.
We found time to be alone, little moments stolen from my menial tasks and her recoveries. We grew into adults in that metal box flying into war. I never wore a shield. I thought the resistance would last forever.
This crawling proves me wrong. This ripple of flesh, this tickling beneath scalp and wrist and thigh. These shaking hands
will find your back; the kingdom i’d unravel in our
So tired. I’m so tired.
Rebecca found us.
We’d crossed paths with other destroyers before, pauses on target, angels gathering to discuss the mission, probably using the boosted signal strength of two vessels to talk to home and Mother. We’d wait it out, just wait without orders until they were done. We’d meet the other crews, trade stories of combat and victories against our faceless enemy, confident that we were doing the right thing, spreading our jihad across timespace.
I’d heard of the Rebecca long before they caught us.
Rogue vessel. Canberra Compound. We heard that something had gone wrong; they’d left target, gone off-course and scope. There were a few ships that just did that. Just disappeared. I assume some of them were destroyed in combat. Everyone assumed the Rebecca had been lost.
and this heart for
It was a hushed conversation, without Tallis, without most of my officers. They never took to other crews, never liked waiting in nonspace for course alterations. They never liked anyone.
I tried to be friendly to most people.
I don’t remember which crew first told me of Canberra Rebecca’s reemergence. I remember the captain was trying very hard to grow a beard. I remember he spoke of a targeted world, arriving in-system to find the planet cracked in half, moons hanging perilously close to contact. He said there was a beacon, transmitting faintly, whispering into the night: Rebecca was here. That was it. That was their sign.
He’d found angels spaced into that system. They’d killed their angels.
What if Lilith had been on the Rebecca? Would there be anything left of this at all? They killed worlds, killed systems with the very basic weapons provided, without benefit of Catalyst. The slug generators we’d left outside of the Earth system, drawing fire from the suns, channeling it into phase and directing it on target from decades away…I don’t know why she didn’t change the access codes. I don’t know why she let that crew use weapons of night against innocent worlds, other Fleet vessels, eventually themselves. It was a game to her; she loved watching us struggle. We were puppets.
They caught up to us in those three days.
I don’t regret killing my angels, even though we probably would have survived with their help.
The Rebecca must have been listening all along. Must have intercepted Mother’s kill order. I don’t think they really cared about me or about maintaining the Catalyst integrity in a controlled environment. I think they wanted to kill everyone, just to spite Mother. If the painter and the ghost hadn’t gotten there in time, I wouldn’t be here today. It wouldn’t have mattered. Thousands of years of planning would have been lost because of a metal box of bloodthirsty Australians.
How much of Gary was Australia? Phase rudder, starboard side, deck three lavatory? Was his cockpit made of Kansas, his airlocks of Belgium, his voice the wind that scraped Africa?
I didn’t know him long, but he swore a lot.
I don’t want to be awake.
The Rebecca rammed Arch at full speed. Role reversal, sexual politics, the dance of metal sex, pheromones of phase dripping off into the night, sweat and cum of non-life struggle, fingernails scratching, no screams in that silence but fire, fire. And blood.
Too close for slithers. We flew across alone, armed, army of boys, not men, not boys, guarding our female against invasion. They met us halfway, conflicting invasions, hand-to-hand. Astronauts?
I saw so many of my men smeared to pulp between the grinding warships, caught between the tons, never knowing life, just this. Just this night.
The heart breaks because of
There was no reason for it, no reason for their fury without purpose or thought. They wanted to kill us, and they did, many. We killed many of them in return.
I watched Arik die. He was my best friend. He was cutting into the Rebecca hull, trying to board. He made the hole. Got that done. His troops poured in after him, flash of fire, spatter of red, limbs. Limbs everywhere. They were waiting on the inside.
We went in after them.
So tired.
Disease to disease, contagion to contagion. We are the plague. We are the
Could I have lived a normal life?
All this I have known: combat and bloodlust, training for decades for a final conflict that has now emerged as a child, a gun, a desert plain. I’ve known the love of the final woman, the brotherhood of the lost soldiers. I’ve touched God. I’ve killed millions, with my own hand, with her own heart, with blind and reckless abandon for a tainted purpose. I’ve known. Silver. And more. I’ve known the stillness, will find it again soon. There will be silence on this expanse, silence interrupted by wind, by scream, by despair of solitude.
Could I have lived as another, as the painter did in the time before Maire, as my father did before the war, as my mother, spectacled, carrying books and given letters, as the author, the author and coffee and marbles, blue, two, hidden in pocket, hidden away from, away from vain struggle? I’ve heard the stories, faded stories of a planet long gone, final, final wreckage smoking to the south, blackened pile of the interior made exterior, made into Guerra.
She stole more than futures.
Could I have known a night under rain, warm breath and soft bed, watching the sleep, watching the
don’t
This gun becomes heavy.
No sound, but they lied. No sound as Arch’s phase rudder was torn apart, as Rebecca’s belly split. No sound in those pulses of light, explosions of metal and men. I remember watching, stretching to feel her, reaching to sense that touch, to know that she was safe. And this heart, for
I felt her touch.
We stormed the Rebecca interior, phase and light and fire. We killed. They came apart. Struggle for center, scrambling down hallways, cutting, cutting. We killed. Gutted Rebecca from the inside, as I knew they would do to Arch. I left my troops to continue their evisceration.
Swarms of men outside, sparks and radio screams, bits of metal stippling shield, razoring to center flesh.
Arch: hangar open, spilling slithers into the night, unmanned, grotesque miscarriage of technology.
I could feel her running, gasping. Hull was near, Hull was there where I should have been. She carried a weapon and used it as the boarding party made its way to the Catalyst chamber. Hull died, she didn’t, some of them did. Some of them.
She struck out but they were shielded, hands and snares, grabbing, binding, stealing.
I jumped like flying, free-falling, between light and void, shield bubbling from heat and cold, slugs and fire. Embraced Arch. Felt them near.
All of these words approximate. There are no words for this, for Us, for
I feign strength and we
The painter walks through the streets; he’s had a fight with his mistress. She wants a ring. He doesn’t want to give it to her. He looks into the sky, sees stars, falling. Fighting starlight. It was his calling; she whispered to his blood. He went to the caves.
The authors walks through the streets; he’s lost his lover. He wanted to give her a ring. She couldn’t accept it. He looks into the sky, sees stars, falling. Fighting starlight. It was his calling; she whispered to his blood. He went to the coffeehouse.
I’ve never tasted coffee, but I remember its scent.
I don’t know how else to be.
my lips remember
Daddy had a guitar. Why would a soldier have a guitar, strumming late at night, Mommy silent, sitting, smiling? They thought I was asleep. I don’t remember the words, but it was her song. Tears.
I miss
Killed them as they tried to escape through the hole they cut in Arch, as they carried the bound and gelled Catalyst out. She struggled, but there were many. I killed them, severed her restraints. She embraced me. It was all falling apart, Arch dead, Rebecca dead, most of our crew torn to pieces between the vessels, but she embraced me. I was so afraid that I’d lost her.
They must have sent a signal from the Rebecca. Maybe it was automatic. Black turned to white, stars folded and stretched to lines, stretched toward
The phase slugs arrived in-system, shot from guns we’d placed decades before. Rebecca became shards. Radio chatter: screaming, screaming and dying. My men caught in between. The initial shot hit Rebecca directly, sent what remained of Arch spinning away.
I remember grabbing Lilith’s hand and jumping from the hole, pushing off as hard as I could, hoping that the momentum would be enough to reach one of the jettisoned slithers.
It was.
We got in as quickly as we could, laden with gallons of gel shielding, freezing from exposure. I slammed the cockpit hatch home as the second and third slugs arrived, again hitting Rebecca, some of Arch, so many soldiers. So many dead.
I don’t know if anyone else got away, but I didn’t see any other active slithers. I think we were the only survivors.
We flew.
I hated to hear her cry, but I was crying, too. Strong commander of the Extinction Fleet vessel Archimedes, Hunter Windham. Crying at the loss of the only home I’d known for twenty years, the only family I’d had. I’d killed Tallis with my bare hands, watched my best friend die in a cloud of blood vapor, seen my Mother mouth “I love you” even as I could see the pavement through the hole in her chest, but only then did I cry. Alone in the night with Lilith, tears floating lazily before my face, batting them aside so I could see the slither monitor, plot a course, escape the system of phase slugs and debris.
System showed four more vessels arriving in-system soon. Wolves to the scent of blood drawn. Three destroyers and something else…Something huge.
Mother would want evidence that I was dead. Mother would want Lilith intact. Another vessel would take her and use her. I couldn’t let that happen.
She spun me around, took off my helmet, hands going to my hair, wiping sweat from my forehead, cheeks. Her lips moved on nothing. No words. In that moment, no words. I felt the silver stirring, but I didn’t care. Subtle pain behind eyes. Her touch was worth the risk.
Tangle of lips, tongues. Noses fencing. I knew my stubble scratched her face. Skin sweat-slick, tear tracks.
I searched on all bands for something, anything. Galleons. Had to get to a galleon.
They called them prisons, but they really weren’t. When Earth system fell to the “alien” attack, there were billions of humans on the outer planets, the colonies, a few nearby systems. They became the galleon refugees, searching for inhabitable worlds in the near-Outer. We came across them from time to time, interacted with the crews. Uncle disapproved. I’m sure Mother disapproved. I’m sure some of the alien worlds we were sent to cleanse with the silver were refugee worlds.
Two people, tiny sliver of slither, searching for
i love you for your hands.
long, lean fingers interlaced with my own, the interruption of your rings, long nail, long nail, short nail. the grasp of small hand within my clumsy, shaking own, the tightening of your grip on my shoulder as you gasp, fingers slipping to my neck, pulling me into a kiss.
i love you for your skin. smooth, soft, infinitesimal hairs. i love your taste, the salt of our passion, the warmth and wetness of two bodies joined together by desire and love that has waited so long to appear.
i love you for your lips, the medium of the first hint of Us: stolen kisses.
i love you for your hair, that halo of tickling that descends to my face when you are above me and shines out around you when you are below. kissing ears through gateways, pulling traces of you from my mouth.
your dimple. perfect dimple. i love you for your dimple.
i love you for your tummy. you hide, yet it is beautiful, taut skin interrupted by button, stippled with my kisses on a journey into abandon.
i love you for your eyes. cliché in action: they are the window in which i see our future.
your heart. i love You for your heart, that organ of fire that i cross with my fingers, kiss with my lips, feel in the depth of my own. curled together, tender moment: i hear you, the quickness of your acceleration, the echoes of our times together, the futures i
love you for your soul. my soul. Our soul. decades of searching before we found Us again. i felt the touch of your essence years ago, but never knew that i would find myself within you, that perfect soul resonating with my own, all pieces of one returning to the eternal, two souls traveling the same path for the moment, the perfect moment.
i love You for your Love.
How we deny. That moment. Within stillness and cold, how we deny.
Never had a dog. Our neighbor had a dog. And a baby. For a while.
Do you know of silver? What she told us, the ice, the wind, a blade? Do you know? Believe?
There are things we know, resident memory, special memory, species memory coded into us. We know. Just because. There are things we’re told. To read, to watch to be. I read of lions and witches and robots, a desert, a jihad, rabbits and a warren, a submarine, boys on an island. Arch had no Piggy. I read, Mommy read to me, and I liked the stories, although the room shook, the sky was fire. I liked those stories before bedtime, although sometimes they made me think too much, too much to sleep, to breathe. I knew of broken glass: and blood.
We read of Ender because we were supposed to. There were girls on his ship.
I read about Hank years before I met him, many years before he died. I never knew he was real.
Those stories…A different dust, a different wind, a different showdown at noon. Hank was
How he’d stand, hand poised, brow furrowed, staring, staring down. Hank didn’t wear a white hat, but he killed men in black. Primitive. I can’t imagine
a lifetime without you, yet it stares me in the face right now
and he smoked. I’ve never. Smoked. He chewed tobacco sometimes. Spit on the desert floor. Disgusting process, but
why do i enjoy it so much?
How the hell did Hank end up in this? Anachronism, fictional character made popular by a return to traditional values after the war of the turn of the century. Hank, last-name-less Hank, on billboards and action figures and prime-time pay-per-view. Hank. He. Was good. For the world.
A painter, a cowboy, a ghost, a child, a warship, a
Love.
Know? Believe?
that I didn’t want her to shiver besind me, hated that it was so cold, that my skin crawled with silver infestation, that I had to keep shielding in that cramped cockpit so that I wouldn’t
Her smile was so sad.
We found a school of unknowns on screen and raced
like vultures to the
toward them, hoping beyond hope that air would last.
I tried to breathe less, slower, but I knew that she didn’t really need the air anyways, hybrid of silver and something, calm to my rage, cool to my heat, heart to my heart. Target locked, we flew. I let the system drive. We huddled together as best as shielding and timing allowed, allowing precious hours to slip by unprotected until the jabbing started along fingers and wrists, behind eyes, and I retreated behind liquid glass.
Can you appreciate the touch of a lover not marred by distance, flesh to flesh, swimming into, entering, not echoed through phase, cold, wet, not shivering and yet feeling the same pang, the same pain, the same
The realization of distance physical.
I was so scared that the galleons wouldn’t be friendly.
How I miss home, or the idea of home: safety, family, parents still alive, teddy bear unburned, cartoons on the television, no grocery store walks past a little girl, waving. I miss an idea that would have prevented this love. Which life would I choose?
Better to have loved and lost…Is bullshit.
I’ve killed her. Weight of body, smell of sweat, tack of blood. I’ve killed
Lies since birth, all that they taught, all that they taught. I’ve known truths, but I’ve assembled them myself from fragments of Us. I’ve known the silver, the stillness, the loss, the night. I know. i Know. You. Do you? You?
Focus. Inhale. moment
It isn’t like books or movies, holograms or
a boy a girl and the end of the
No words.
A mind dissembles.
I’d passed out by the time we were in range. Lilith activated the beacon, mindful that it might draw unfriendlies too. There was nothing more we could do, dead ship, cold and silver onset within me. I remember snap of static and gush of warmth as they released the cockpit seal in the galleon hangar, shadowed images, old men in miner’s jumpsuits, jaws agape at my passenger. Woman. Shielded.
Weakness: they lifted me up, out. Conversation like waves, echoes, forth and back. I knew it wasn’t English. French.
I remember fever: slurred speech, sweaty brow, cool floor, a man squatting beside me, looking from his shipmates to the sick destroyer captain and his companion. Deactivated my shielding, let me breathe deeply of old air, taste of ore, reach out to Lilith, please, just let me hold
She was uncomfortable. Center of attention, moreso than I was. Because. Just because.
A new man, my vision fading from black to
Silver was retreating.
He knelt, touched my cheeks, forehead. Spoke to his shipmates with foreign tongue.
Lilith: standard? english? anyone?
oui. yes.
I don’t remember what happened after that, but waking up in their sickbay. Warm. Normal, stabbing gone, heart regulated. Rested. I panicked but she was at my side, shielded but there. I wanted to hold her hand, but knew that it was getting too close. To time. The time. When we could no longer be together. She kept her distance, a distance that I knew could only grow. You know. You do. grow.
She’d spoken with the man in broken Standard. Told him everything. Incredible story, but she was the proof. She. was the proof.
It was a group of three galleons, miners. They worked around the periphery of a single system where they’d found the closest approximation to Sol that they could. Dead system, planets harvested of almost everything, but still breathable atmosphere, a little water. Nothing left but desert, flattened cities, a spire…Three ships, a few hundred crewmen. When she asked where they came from, they told a story as incredible as ours, yet there it was, intersections, intersections, paths crossed in the night.
Many of the colony came from rogue Fleet vessels. Soldats perdus. And now I knew, and I knew.
His name was Berard, and he’d known my father.
There are histories hidden between these stars, histories that die before revelation. I feel them; they bring poignant tears to tired eyes.
out of the hell of whatever it was
Do you know of France, interior struts of Guerra’s midsection, wine country converted to bulkheads? Do you know of Paris, the war, the hole in the earth that led to
Berard served under Jean Reynald and Joseph Windham after the war, during Mother’s rise. He knew Whistler, the original projection. He was responsible for the Paris Compound. He was the Pierce de Paris, taking his boys to the sky when the “alien” invasion began, for a while turning them into good little soldiers, later breaking target and killing angels and leaving the master plan of the jihad. Berard saw through the plan. Maybe Pierce did too.
They hid. Found a home. Became soldat perdus of a friendlier persuasion.
He knew of her beginning, those precious secrets held by precious few: ice, wind, blade. He knew. Maybe she saw it all: intersections in the night. Maybe she let him escape.
He said I looked like my father.
Joseph Windham was the strongest man in the world. I saw tears in his eyes once, that day that he left and I knew he would die only months and centuries later, in the cold of this, bathed in a bridge sea, bubbles of gelatin glass, the sound of cracking shell, an instant of
My father never trusted his path, chose to tell a small circle of his officers that which he’d seen in Mother’s eyes. He wanted them to distrust. He needed them to distrust, because he knew.
My father told him of
long summer bonfires, those stupid cushions we put around the fire that get wet as the air cools, sending everyone else off to play hide and seek so we can be alone, a cute girl throwing dandelions at me, the time when we first laid by the fire and i explored every inch of your face with my lips because we were both too terrified to kiss.
i could go on. i think too much. i wish things had not changed.
i still love you.
The child is dying. Younger and younger. The process speeds. Tears of frustration and fury. She begs.
This weapon is
The ice plain slipped toward night and
i win
I know now of a system of two stars, a species with two hearts who buried their god in the center of the world. I know of centuries of civil war, a fragile peace enacted by machine angels. I know of a woman from the edge of the worlds, trees that swam through the sky, an alien called silver, between times and whens. Silverthought. I know.
She could have talked, but she was action. She could have talked, but no one would have listened. She heard the whispers in her blood, whispers in her single silver heart, and she acted.
Berlin, Kath, others. They had access to the lumbers, had access to the inexplicable resonance of flight and time. They helped her at first, wanted to make a difference, wanted things to change. They knew that their god was asleep, that machines were taking key positions in the power structure, that left unchecked, the machines could decide to replace biologic with mechanic.
and this heart, for
They never knew that she would try to kill them all.
His superiors found out about Berlin’s involvement after she struck, after she was captured. They had no intention of letting him off the damaged planet. He would have died in the cold and the dust if he hadn’t found the photographer Task and his machine lover Elle. They tried to stop it all, tried to warn Hannon of the contamination. They were caught in the phase flux and followed Maire’s exile craft to Earth, where it this all began in earnest, where eons of waiting culminates in a man, a gun, a child, a desert.
Forty thousand years she waited in that cave.
Task died soon after the crash from his injuries. Berlin’s hand was crushed, became infected. His mind and body toxic, but she didn’t care. She had all she needed: code. The planet wasn’t empty; she made men of monkeys.
The mind
Simmering until fruition, sleeping for millennia, sleeping with intent, letting her evolution spread. She recovered that which she had lost, recovered and augmented. She waited, taste of Berlin on her lips, in her blood. She fed from him as she would later feed from Reynald: soul, code, rebirth. Hibernation.
out of the reach of our sea
Believe?
that she walked through the impressionist streets a wraith, marveling in all that she had spawned: thousands, millions, billions. She looked for him, felt him there, somewhere, that old soul with the stigmata of white. She walked for years, seduced and ravaged, fed upon and found him outside of a jewelry shop, arguing with the mistress Hiffernan.
Followed, whispered as stars falling in the night sky, whispered to his blood and he knew, he knew. What. Futures and distances and silver. She whispered.
She waited for that moment, as she had lifetimes away. Hid through three major conflicts, hesitant, uncertain, but knowing that it was not yet time; the world could not yet produce what she needed for completion, for purpose, for infection. She waited until they made machines like men, and it began. With the painter’s help, it began.
Decades of construction, hidden from man. Angels and gates and tunnels. They fought their surface wars, struggled over black lines on a map, experimented with their atoms and their planets and their politics. She hid and built and waited.
In those days between the death of everything and the rebirth of less than humanity, it hurtled into damnation and spawned and its progeny spread outward and outward and consumed everything in their path, and before Omega, it judged that all that it had created was good and redeemable and it sent the newborns back into the blackness to save those unfortunate enough to have remained behind.
They would live forever. In the ocean of silver fire, Omega would be the salvation and the nirvana and the extinction and the hereafter.
Honeybear! Honeybear Brown! Cuddliest little bear on our side of town! Honeybear! He’s our friendliest friend!
Lilith giggled like a child when I sang that.
My quarters on Arch were cramped. Everyone’s were. But she’d sneak in and we’d make love and talk for hours. Forbidden, but yeah. We didn’t care. Knew that someone might figure it out eventually, but didn’t care. Long before the resistance began to weaken. We’d spend those hours unshielded, wrapped in each other, talking and laughing about Honeybear Brown and memories. Other memories. Laughing so that we wouldn’t think. About. What we were doing. What we were sent out here to do.
She told me of life behind her gates and I told her of life outside her gates. What we remembered of a world now dead, of a time now dead.
We figured out how humans fit together to make one.
She’d tell me stories that she made up and dreamt: rain and marbles, paint and coffee. A betrayal, time, people wrapped in monsters, flying machines through yesterday, stealing souls and sometimes taking time, taking time to sit on a rusty swingset next to a mountain, something buried beneath, tunnels and stars.
Sometimes her stories scared me.
She told me about Nan. She missed her like I missed my mother.
She’d hide behind the pillow, quickly peek out, Hunter!, and I’d laugh like an idiot. She’d do it again; I’d laugh again. Remember me like that. Please don’t forget me. Us.
I don’t know what she saw in me that she didn’t see in the others. I don’t know why she let me in. Never felt so vulnerable, such surrender. Never let anyone that far in before, and now
We found such beautiful stillness in those moments, just Us. None of the confusion of our purpose, none of the war, the flight, the silver. Those are the moments that I remember when I close my eyes. Hers is the face I see. Hers is the heart I feel beating in my own chest. Quickly, now. Accelerated. Because
Exhale.
I now know that at the end of the war, Jean and my father found the entrance. I know that Maire sent Whistler to transport them to her, and I know that she changed them. They would be the first of many.
I know she whispered to them in that voice like wind and
They oversaw the Fleet modification, the construction of the Compounds on each continent, the mass-production of angels. They readied the populace for the realization that they had a greater purpose, and that purpose involved submission, war, sacrifice. They were the men people blamed when the female babies started dying, and the world realized that it would all end within a generation.
End set in motion, Maire placed my father on the flagship of the advance force she sent to Hannon’s system. She hid Reynald in a military hospital, and sent for him when it was time to create Lilith. Their daughter, my Love, the Catalyst of the Sixth Extinction.
Berard’s story broke an already-broken heart. How some could have known and not acted…I know that the silver was strong, but how could they not have killed her? Why must I be the executor of that act? After so many have died, after this extinction complete, silver now seeded throughout our known universe, dripping beyond into times and times, after such loss, after I’ve killed my
Berard assured me that the galleon was running as fast as it could from my pursuers. We’d find someplace out there to hide. Had to. Failure was no option. We ran.
We failed, of course.
The hardest part is the fact that I’d gotten used to the idea of forever.
i do know, and you know, too…
Please rest now, knowing that I’ll join you soon enough. Be still; wait for me.
Three destroyers, a corvette, and something still coming at us through the stream…They arrived in-system with a flash and my heart sunk. Galleons couldn’t outrun Fleet vessels in real space. We knew that; they knew that. Galleons have few if any weapons. We were unarmed, outrun, surrounded.
Funny how time pauses in those moments, in this moment, how the mind calms, the clouds recede, all becomes clarity and truth. I knew in that moment that we’d be separated, but our paths would converge again. Someday, somehow.
Whistler was surprisingly polite.
There was nothing we could do. The corvette docked. We met them in the hangar. Berard, his officers, myself. Lilith stayed in the sick bay.
Seeing Seven wasn’t like looking into a mirror.
Hello, Hunter.
I remember a print of a painting. Not the mother, as everyone knows, but the mistress, although I didn’t know it at the time. Animal rug. Wolf? White dress, white girl. She looked so sad. Eyes empty like
Whistler held his hand out to shake mine. I didn’t accept. He grinned and let his arm fall to his side.
He explained that Seven would be my replacement. I wasn’t to be killed, but sent away. I hadn’t expected that. He asked where Lilith was and I said that she was hidden on another galleon, although I knew he could feel her, knew that he would find her.
The destroyers outside opened fire and took out one of Berard’s other two galleons.
Still hidden?
They directed me to the corvette, took me outside to the waiting surprise that had arrived in-system. Something big. I felt Lilith’s touch, her fear, her desperation. I tried to reassure her but couldn’t. I didn’t know how long it would be before I saw her again, if ever. Tried to reassure myself but couldn’t. Just tried to stop thinking, the dead painter on one side, the ghost of myself on the other, draped in black, eyes cold and
It arrived with a silent fanfare, a machine the size of a solar system, something special Mother had created just for me when she realized what I was doing, when she realized that I had a little more resistance than my father, that I had thrown her jihad off-track if even for a little while. There it was: Machine, and it scared the hell out of me.
Too tired to fight, to weak to resist. The silver onset had done more than ravage my body.
please don’t let this
They’d take Lilith from Berard’s ship and place her on another destroyer. Seven would become me. He would ensure that the jihad moved forward, ever forward, spreading the silver amidst, eventually making it to Hannon’s system and ending them all.
The corvette was but a particle to Machine.
Penetration, insertion, docking. They took me to the center.
Eight was there. Mirror after mirror, but no true
Crucifixion.
The bubble was bigger than a destroyer, and at its center they gently, gingerly removed my clothing, affixed bindings to my arms and legs. Whistler was always in good cheer. I was silent except for breathing, heartbeat, whispers between
I didn’t fight. I couldn’t. I felt her, knew. There with me. Tears wept for me. But I couldn’t fight. The restraints were painless.
This is Machine. This is your forever home.
Walkway withdrew and the painter and ghosts left the chamber. A heartbeat echoes from walls miles apart.
The bubble sea began to flood from the bottom of the chamber. Slowly, faster, faster. I strained at first against that tide, closed eyes and mouth and held breath until my temples throbbed, lungs screamed out, but in the end it was useless. I resigned myself to that. I opened my eyes in the shimmer of phased glass and took a breath and saw
Machine glistening with the churn of phase, preparing for the beginning of an exile and
Whistler’s corvette departing from Machine’s hangar and
Berard’s lesser galleon flying at it and
Berard’s ship itself blinking from the system to escape and
the lesser galleon crushing Whistler’s corvette against Machine’s phased hull and
bodies spinning off into space, erupting and
destroyers on Catalyst target trajectory and
i felt
her
safe, for now, in Berard’s galleon, running away
and
Machine began.
The shudder of a million phase drives, each and every particle of my being dissembled, wrapped in warm viscous glass, ripped apart and placed tenderly back together, that tickle, that annoying tickle everywhere, everything. A vessel the size of
I faded into the stars, into tomorrow and yesterday on a path into uncertainty. All I knew was that we were going far, going fast, going away from Lilith, away from Earth, into the deep Outer. No aliens, no robots, no things that go bump in the night, but ultimate terror at the realization of my isolation. This was the beginning of my forever exile, ordered by a woman now a child, ordered out of spite and frustration because I tried to stop her from ending a species.
Stretched out far beyond body, mind, soul, stretched beyond that vessel of glass and rock, metal forged from planets and asteroid belts. One with everything, yet solitary in that void.
Memory and desire, an ocean of scattered, shattered images: arch of eyebrow, line of nose, colors of eyes: forevers and hands, long lithe fingers, tips tracing my cheek. Lips. And. Smoothness of cheek: hers. and philtrum, the way the lips part, the way lip to gum to teeth: smile. Neck. Collar bones and the space between breasts, the skin above her heart, precious, accelerated heart, that weapon that I denied, that weapon I loved. Love. Will
Screaming, crying out, but there was no one.
Given years to ponder eyes, given decades to wonder in those eyes: futures. One. and I
How much of myself did I hold in that stillness between our gazes?
long-winded, esoteric. self-indulgent
but what more do I have?
I remember memories not my own. Coffee and marbles and cigarettes. Discussions of subjunctive case, sub-human species, something about a pillow, cheek-biting, and robots that complained about films.
I know now that Berard ordered one of his galleons to ram the Whistler corvette. Ultimate sacrifice by men I never knew, never will. They died to save my Lilith, to save the
The shudder of a billion phase drives. Decentralized soul. Faster than light, out and north, as the stars go, toward that single wish. Sense of nonsense, the mind expands to embrace, yet there is no one there, no one forever out there.
Felt her fading, that touch…That touch faded. Until. lost.
Alone: screaming because I didn’t know how to stop.
c: format c.
I don’t know who I am anymore.
i think she’s perfect.
when she’s here, i’m really here. when she leaves, a part of me leaves with her, that splinter of my eternal being that has hidden within her beautiful heart forever, and has finally returned after so long away. we resonate as one.
i know that someday we won’t have this distance dividing us, these difficulties keeping us apart. i know each time that i look into her eyes that this time it is forever. i am patient. i can’t imagine a lifetime without her, now that i’ve found her.
she fell asleep in my arms, and i followed her willingly, but not before studying every inch of her face, impressing each line around her ancient eyes, the bullethole dimple, the shape and feel of lips, the arch of eyebrow, the warmth of exhalation. so warm under that comforter, bodies curled together, limbs intertwined. i felt her breathing regulate, saw the flicker of her eyes behind closed lids, fell asleep with the girl i love in a perfect moment of peace.
this is nothing like i’ve ever known, and i can’t wait for our next moment.
i see forevers in her eyes.
Shudder of a trillion phase drives, and I realized the depth of my loss.
I knew that Mother would send someone else to get Lilith. The loss of Whistler and my ghosts wouldn’t stop her. She’d make someone else, send them in a faster ship, hunt that galleon down. She’d take her time, do it right this time. She had me out of the equation now, but her daughter was still loose. The most important piece of the jihad was somewhere between stars and times. I thanked Berard, hoped he knew. Hoped he’d take care of Lilith for as long as he could. I knew that Mother would get her eventually; I just had to find a way to escape from Machine before it was too late.
my silence is my self defense
Machine eventually severed my restraints, allowed me to swim free. There was nowhere to go; I was no threat.
He wasn’t the best conversationalist. I’d ask questions that he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. He’d give answers that I couldn’t or wouldn’t believe. He had faith in Mother’s plan. He was friendlier than Gary.
I found numbness in those years.
Wondered what she was doing, if she was safe, if she’d been captured, if they had made the final attack on the “alien” homeworld. I didn’t know at the time that my father’s fleet had been the first wave, and that as a result of his discovery and attack, the “aliens” had hidden a star and half of their planets in a systemship. I didn’t know at the time that fate would bring our paths together in a very palpable collision.
I know now that during those vague and silent monthsyearsdecades, Whistler and ghost Nine caught up with Berard’s galleon, fought the crew to the death. They found Lilith on the bridge, about to activate the destruct sequence. A heart breaks to think that she would take her own life. A heart breaks to know that I took her life with my own hands, and she lays here in my arms, blood now tacky brown, lips parted as if she wants to say something, but eyes closed in sleep, eternal sleep. I’ve killed her.
Mother’s plan had changed. She no longer wanted a trusted angel to oversee the jihad. She got greedy. She wanted her daughter back, and she wanted to go to find Hannon and kill him herself in a ship named War, with a painter, a cowboy, a ghost. She wanted vengeance. She was dying, as she is now, each moment growing a little younger, feeding from this desert plain, the silver within my dying body, the silver that whispers to her even now: purpose. completion. an end.
kissing the life into something that’s already died
When she reached to activate destruct, they shot off her hand.
Precious cargo: Catalyst. Maire was a jealous mother. She wanted her little flower returned.
Slipping into madness. Strength through calm, confidence. No room for weakness, emotion, showing that emotion. The weak show emotion. The most poignant struggle: devotion to what seemed a lost cause, drowning within phase and something so much more. Never gave up hope, although voices commanded from the space behind eyes. Grasped to that which was ineffable: memory, cherished memory. Wound. To wound. Me.
Would I have taken my own life, given something more than a bubble, an ocean, a Machine voice?
Hold on…So tightly to those memories, of the moments, the sighs, the
To know that I killed her…To know that a fragment of me shot her hand off. Did he love?
How the work suffers for lack of clarity. How these final moments seem so trivial, not a fitting testament at all to a love that spanned decades and souls and something so much more than words. Ours is the story of a plague; we were the lost soldiers; mine are the tainted lips; ours is the broken love, spreading this contagion through the night. It is almost over.
The child looks younger.
Frantic now because I can feel its grip tightening. Silver. Suffocation. Crawling. It whispers.
They shot off her hand and took her home. They left Berard’s vessel to collapse upon itself.
I can only imagine her fear, her confusion. Going home to a world now dead, now empty of all life except the child sleeping at its center, the machines she made in those centuries, hollowing out the planet to create Guerra, and a cowboy named Hank. Fictional character, but she made him real. Twisted mind of a broken child playing god: let’s build a cowboy.
Lilith went home to meet the mother she’d only known through dreams, through whispers at night, through that tickle at the base of the skull. Role-reversal: child becomes adult, adult becomes child. They fed on one another, fed on this war created by silver. One died as one lived.
I miss her. She’s right here in my arms, in my heart, but I miss her. For the first time in so long, that touch is gone.
Let me fall; let me join her soon, but not before vengeance. Please give me strength.
Whistler and Nine safely transported her home to a dead world, a dying parent. Maire and Whistler and Nine and Hank and Lilith, all strapped into Gary, turning Earth inside-out in his departure, killing our home that we barely knew, feeding from the entire system to fuel his journey beyond light. Maire knew the target, knew even then: a systemship within which Hannon had hidden a star, a dying god, the last remnants of his species.
They flew.
I remember Machine’s capture, the collision and scraping. I remember the draining bubble, torches cutting into my prison, that tug of language behind the eyes as they lifted me out.
i don’t feel worthy of her sometimes. i’m trying to learn, but it is difficult. she is beauty beyond beauty, kindness beyond kindness, that soul and those eyes that i’ve felt and seen for so long and now with whom i’ve finally been re-united.
she sees beauty in things that i’ve taken for granted for years.
i’ve never felt that complete: arms around my girl, in that place, in that moment.
i saw beauty in the forever we share.
The child speaks to me without words, begging. Begging. Time is paused; this weapon
The truth I saw finally in Hannon’s eyes, the lifetimes he saw in mine. He’d found me, or maybe I found him, drawn together between stars and times by the ineffable, inexplicable. Our paths intersected and it was the way it was supposed to be.
Moments of proof and realization.
Maire’s attack on god, that clandestine infection of the host body, the release before her exile…The infection had spread to every world in Hannon’s system. Immediate, deadly, certain. This was a different silver, pure from the lumbers, pure from Maire’s time on the edge of the system. Will we ever know where it came from?
It spread from Berlin and Hannon’s command vessel above the silenced first planet, using the carrier lines to crawl to each planet, disseminate in each atmosphere, attack and kill everything without the marginally-protective Y chromosome. It was neither a quick nor painless death. Hannon was allowed to watch his wife and daughters writhe in agony from afar, become infertile, silvered. Afflicted. Within a century, all would be lost. There would be no next generations.
They developed a way to contain the infection with a cardiac shield placed above and around their hearts. It only prolonged; it didn’t solve.
His was a systemship of men. By the time he found me, there were no more women.
I remember looking at the shielded star hidden at the vessel’s core. So lonely. And within…
What placed me in this body, this mind, this soul? What made me a part of this jihad, made my life any more significant than the trillions of others who have fought and died in this war? Why does a man become a focal point of history and existence when he would have so much rather lived in blissful anonymity? There are strands that connect us throughout time and space, drawing us together, pushing us apart. I just wish I knew why I wasn’t born into someone else, someone who died in the initial invasion, someone who rests now, unknown, forgotten forever. I don’t want this.
I saw so much when I touched Judith, when I touched God, but I never saw the answer. I never found out why it has to be me. I don’t think she knew; the silver is something so much more than a dying ancient. The silver transcends time and space, comes from somewhere we can neither comprehend nor acknowledge. It screams from beyond, itches under my skin and there is the trigger, cool and unyielding, yet it could yield if I applied pressure. Voices.
The heart speeds toward
How human they were, how exactly like us except for two hearts, black blood, less oxygen in their atmosphere. The same uncertainties, the same power plays, the same emotions of loss and rage against Maire. She was our creator; forty thousand years hidden below the surface, directing our evolution, bumping our ancestors a few steps up the ladder. We were born of her.
How human they were, fraught with the same desires, the same weaknesses. We were born of a defect: Maire and her prey: Berlin. She called to those early men, drew them into caves, altered their course toward
How human they were.
I remember shiver and tickling, that resonance that allowed us to pass through miles of solid glass into the trapped and wounded solar system.
I saw the first signs of Hannon’s troubles, the fireworks of his civil war. Even in that moment, they fought from within, internal power struggle threatening to ruin everything Hannon had set into motion, the great showdown between the remnants of his species and she who had ended so much.
Great fleets of vessels within the systemship, men fighting a war because they could, not because they really understood the severity of the situation. Maire had killed because of a plan gone horribly awry, an attempt to make a statement about her species’ dependency on the machines. She wanted to kill, yes, but that desire became ultimate. The taste of blood drowned her senses. Machines no longer mattered; she was consumed by silver machines herself. She lashed out, initially with Berlin and Kath’s help. They realized their mistake, and paid for it with everything.
Visions of a night sky, stars unlike these or home, great wailsong of the lumbers in schools, blotting out the stars with blackness miles long. Warmth of skin, cool of air, the hope that they could change things, that they could retake their homeworld from machines with the simple technology reaped from giant flying trees.
Maybe some of the men on Hannon’s vessel felt they no longer needed God. Maybe they thought if they surrendered her to Maire, the plague would end. So they fought, vessel to vessel, surrounded by glass, a sun trapped within metal and phase, lances of light enacting endings on their brothers.
I’d never imagined that I would feel sorry for God when I met her. Never imagined that I would pity her.
She looked so young. So scared.
We’d made it through the rebels, through the bubble to the center star, tiny planet in orbit. We descended within, where they’d hidden God, this time not for sleep but for safety and hopefully recovery, but everyone knew. Everyone knew.
We got out of the shiver. This was Heaven.
Men lined the walkway in silence. Men, not angels, guarding the gateway to the kingdom.
They said nothing. They looked at me blankly. They knew.
And I met God.
please protect my loved ones from the evil that is all around us. please help us to be strong.please help us to do the right thing.please help us to persevere.please help us to understand why there is pain, why there is loss, why we must suffer in this existence you’ve made.please help us to see the beauty in simple things.please help us know Love.please help me to understand that which i cannot: your existence, your eternity, your endless reach.please cast away that which would do us harm, so that we might live out our lives in peace.please give me solace.please give me silence.please understand that i am trying.please help me to find home again.amen.
Prayer, incantation, beseeching, pleading, those whispers behind my eyes each and every night since I could remember. Those words kept me from
She was younger than me.
Huddled, fetal position, shivering. Not what I expected. So young, so fragile. Eyes of pure silver, the lattice crawling freely beneath her skin.
So this was Heaven, a shell carved from a blackened world drifting lazily around a hidden star. This was Heaven: no angels, no clouds, no shining halos or golden gates or harps. Silent men afflicted with a silver plague, watching a young girl die.
Hannon went to her side, stroked her face. She smiled. Blind, but she knew. Of course she knew.
She struggled to sit up. So weak. Hannon helped her, held her. Both afflicted, neither caring about the possibility of cross-contamination. This was a race that acknowledged its impending extinction. He helped her sit up, and she motioned for me to join them.
you’ve been touched
And she touched my face, my neck and face. Silver eyes seeing but not seeing, looking into and through my own.
this is the one?
And I told her. Everything, although she knew. She was God. Judith.
No words, but I felt her pull those memories from my mind: my mother’s affliction, my father leaving for war, the attack on Earth, leaving on Arch into the Outer. Growing and learning and fighting. Killing. Soldats perdus. She knew all that I knew: of Lilith, of the stillness, the silver, our escape from Maire’s jihad, our separation complete. She knew that I’d had the silver within me always, but only through contact with Lilith was it activated. She knew that I was dying just as certainly as she.
your father…the exile used your father
And I saw his death, collapsed bubble, ejected into space in the binary system. The wounded system within which I had killed Tallis and the angels, from which we ran, from which we had hoped to escape Maire forever.
I saw the species reacting to Joseph Windham’s advance force. They knew that Maire’s vengeance would soon arrive, so they took what they could and ran. Megascale engineering: the construction of Hannon’s systemship, the gentle nudging of a star out of orbit, planets, enveloping all in glass and metal, hiding. They could re-align the night sky, but they couldn’t stop a little girl with an alien disease.
Her touch like fire and
Tears of pain and frustration. Her hand fell from my face as she slumped back, exhausted.
what do you want?
to go home
what do you need?
lilith
Such weakness in her blank eyes. Ancient eyes housed in a dying body. Never believed in God. Never believed in anything more than that which I could see and hear, taste and smell: lips and sweat and blood and eyes. Lilith. I never believed, but she was there, right there, resonating with
she’s coming. the exile will be here soon
My heart dropped. I knew that Maire sought her final vengeance. She would destroy this place, this hidden Heaven. She would kill Hannon, Judith, God. I knew that Lilith and the painter, the cowboy and my ghost would be with her, unwilling participants in this end.
music?
And God’s hand grasped mine, touch like fire and silver, burning, burning, and I saw, and I knew. You know. You do. That touch…For the first time, I believed.
soon, it ends
and I felt the struggle within her touch, not just the dance of silver beneath flesh, but the war inside of God, striving to defeat that crawling metal, that substance without explanation or purpose. Ancient, tired eyes. Tired of fighting, but knowing that she must. Knowing that she couldn’t let the silver consume her until
she’s almost here
and I saw the warship Guerra, weapons charging, felt at its center the child grinning, ready, smug. Vengeance.
For the first time in
I felt Lilith.
it’s you. you have to end this. You
Hannon closed his eyes with interior communication from his ship. Incoming vessel. But we knew already, and there was nothing we could do.
Gary sliced through the systemship hull, venting an ocean of phased silica into the void. A vessel studded with weapons, erupting in fire, cutting through Hannon’s civil war. It didn’t matter. Gary killed without politics.
Judith shuddered, gasped. Such despair in those eyes. Lines of tears that weren’t tears: silver, running down her cheeks. She pulled me close.
remember. remember this. you have to end this. You.
She motioned to one of her guards, who pulled his weapon out of its holster and handed it to her. She opened the charge corridor, ejected the round. Shaking hands stumbled over smooth cylinder.
She used the nails of her right hand to slice into her left palm, let the now-silver blood wash over the round. Faint mist, smoky dance into the still chamber, dissipate. She chambered the round, handed the weapon to me.
you know what to do with this
Hannon exhaled. I looked at him and he nodded. we have to go.
I studied the heft of the weapon, the same weapon I still hold. Cool, featureless black, the round in the corridor now imbued with the blood of the ancient, tainted and perverted into something more than a phase slug. So much power in my hand. No longer helpless for the first time in
I began to stand but Judith placed her hand on my shoulder, pulled me into an embrace. Shaking with pain. She whispered. I felt her sobs as it all came apart.
my son…know that you avenge more than just your own species
i know
and she fell silent, motionless, slumping into my embrace.
God was dead.
I remember numbness, the not-knowing as I gently, tenderly laid her body down to sleep. Silver tears from her eyes, mouth open but silent, pale skin fading to gray as silver catalyst solidified, deprived of her bioelectricity. I don’t know if God perished with its host, but Judith was no more. Hannon closed his eyes.
All vessels, open fire.
Hurried to the tube, hurried to the surface to find the sky on fire, a new moon hanging in orbit around the imprisoned system’s first planet: Gary. Guerra. Mother had brought her war to Hannon’s world at last.
Gary engaged the fleet of destroyers and planetships. Hannon’s men had waited for centuries, millennia for this moment, and they fought with unmatched ferocity, but they were no match. One by ten by a hundred, they fell. They’d struck, and struck hard, but
Into orbit, into the fray. I knew that Mother would escape from her wounded vessel, that she’d take Lilith and the others. Hostages? Guarantee. That we wouldn’t just kill them in orbit.
Judith’s weapon burned at my side.
I saw planetships crumble under Gary’s fire, great swarms of tiny vessels erupt into light. Fireworks. Splashes and ripples of dissolving phase. It reminded me of the day my mother died, the way the sky had looked. It would have looked like that if it had been night instead of morning.
I felt it about to
and then it did. Gary opened up and the combined silver of Maire and Lilith lanced outward, punching into and through the Heaven planet. Hannon deftly maneuvered away from the line of fire, but many of his vessels were caught in the backlash. The planet below glowed with Catalyst, shimmering, glittering Catalyst.
She thought that she’d killed Heaven, but I knew that God had died in my arms. I knew that Maire’s was an empty victory.
Planet venting plasma into orbit, but the silver strike wasn’t enough. I saw a slither detach from Gary’s underbelly, tiny dot compared to the warship, which increased speed and slammed down onto Heaven, shattering into fire and ash, sending great chunks of continent into the sky.
I knew that Lilith was safe on that slither. It entered the burning atmosphere. Landing? The touch of her
my lips remember the echoes of
I saw the webs then, the faint tendrils spreading out from Heaven, tearing through the silica expanse of the systemship. Like the halo spreading from Berlin’s vessel to all of the original worlds, it was happening again.
It’s not at all like Ender, like science fiction books or movies. War isn’t that glorious. It’s a series of shocking images slamming into your mind one after another, giving you no time to react. There is no glory in this, only loss, only raw despair as you just try to survive, to inhale and exhale one more time. Everything becomes that singular goal of seeing her again, holding her hand, kissing her. Everything becomes survival until you detach, watch it all in silence, and just breathe.
I saw the shell of the systemship crack from the silver pressure, plates the size of planets lift and spin away. I saw stars outside, more and more stars. And I saw the silver, spreading like spiderwebs, forever outward, forever
I knew there would be no escape for anyone out there. This time, the silver won.
A shard of Gary cut through the atmosphere and impaled our slither. Phase flak. The side of Hannon’s head erupted and we began to depressurize before I even knew we were hit.
He slumped forward in his vacuum chair. Alarms roaring to life, protective bubble washing over me. I saw his jaw move on unspoken words and his eyes blink once. He died.
Chaos to order to chaos: life dissembles. We lose humanity in those moments between and
We lose them all in time, those we love, those whom we’ve learned to love. I didn’t stop to think about the dead mass of flesh in the cockpit next to me. I knew that I owed him my life; he could have killed me immediately upon removing me from Machine, but he didn’t. He knew. And now
He’d given so much, lost so much. I hoped that he was now somewhere better than this dying universe, somewhere beyond the reach of a child, of silver, of loss. I hoped.
I took over the shiver controls and followed Maire’s slither down to the surface. It was time.
No way to stop it now. With this much phase packed into such a convenient containment, I don’t know how far the silver will spread. I have no hope of ever finding anyone else out there. There is only this desert plain, this little girl. And me. Only this, and soon, nothing.
It’s won, but not before I
landed the shiver on the ravaged surface, illuminated by the false incandescence of the silver in the atmosphere, wind still blowing over the scoured expanse. I landed near them but not too close.
They got out of their slither one by one, Whistler helping the child down, then Hank. The ninth incarnation of Hunter Windham. And then
She
saw me from across the winds and dust. Looked from Nine to me to Nine to me. Started running toward me.
Hunter!
but Maire reached out and her footsteps stopped, dust still swirling up from the impact.
The child continued forward.
I remember that tugging, the sensation of silver speaking without words, without even the whispers. It was everywhere, everything, and we were the focal point. We were everything on that barren plain, the beginning and the end of the war. We were
you’ve come to kill me, yes?
One.
Whistler and the cowboy Hank stood on either side of Lilith. Hank lit a cigarette and I shot him.
Moving between times and places, speed beyond vision or comprehension, even too fast for Mother to see. I was becoming, and still am, and the last of her is within and I can be
Hank’s projection dissembled from the phase slug. A tiny silver marble fell to the desert hardpan. No place for a cowboy, not on this world, not in this story.
I saw Whistler swallow hard.
He had no idea, this ghost of a painter, stalked on Paris streets eons before by a woman from below, chosen for his personality and code, not knowing that he would be resurrected again and again to serve her purposes, never knowing that she loved him as a child although she was now the child, a dying child, and the mind dissembles in this, under this sky.
He was probably the best of us. At least he had created something beautiful in his life. Les soldats perdus had only destroyed, had only mindlessly spread the contagion throughout systems, following orders they were born with, living lives pre-determined by a criminal child from another galaxy.
I saw him reach inside of his cloak for his weapon. He paused, cape billowing out in the gusts, had poised, but then it fell to his side. He looked at me with tired eyes and nodded. I pulled the trigger and Whistler was no more.
Maire clapped her hands. Big smile. She was enjoying this. She’d won. She knew that I would kill her and her pain would be gone before the silver consumed her entirely.
Such peace in that moment. Six reduced to four, but not really four. Nine looked at Mother, as if he expected her to order him to kill me. I was the only one with weapon drawn. I was the only combatant in this final battle.
Such peace in that moment. I looked at Lilith and she looked at me. There was nothing more we could do. There was no reason for Mother to kill me now. She’d won. I had the gun, but she’d won. Gary’s attack had been successful. She thought she’s killed Heaven, killed God. She knew that the silver was sweeping out across everything.
Such peace in that moment, in her gaze. We were together again, no matter what. It didn’t matter how much time we had left; we were together, separated by only feet of gravel and dust and sand, not thousands of years of space. We were together, and that’s all that mattered.
Nine pulled his weapon.
No she shouted and grabbed him from behind, tiny hands latching on to black folds of cloak and
I remember Maire smiling. Knowing. You know, you do and
I remember trees and
I remember singing and
I remember
the stillness between us, that warm and best place, the moment before kissing her for the first time, the time we spent curled together, just Us, just. Us. and the laughter and how it was forbidden and We were forbidden, love growing between two kids trapped on a metal box flying off to war, and the fence that kept her safe, Mommy’s hand holding mine tightly through black glove that concealed her disease, the same plague that was now complete, and Daddy buying my Honeybear Brown, spoiling me because he knew he’d have to leave, that he’d die between stars, and Hannon, how I mourned then for that innocent, for that species, for Judith and Berlin, for the unnamed dead, trillions and the way she would hold my shaking, clumsy, rough hand in her own, kissing knuckles as I lay with eyes closed, just Us, just Us. Just. Us. and I see now the coffee house, a marble, a pack of cigarettes and i Know. I Believe.
the child begs me
there is no more resistance. no more time. it is
I don’t remember the weapon firing, but it did.
how she begs me. dying
i train the weapon on her heart
I only intended to hit Nine.
because i had to say this, because i needed you to know, because this can’t be the end, because this can’t be, not the end of Us, not now, please not now. i believe in forevers, in all of this, all of this can’t be the end, it can’t, and i know now that we are as one, one decentralized soul taken apart by time and circumstance, allowed to find itself once again even if only for a moment, and i know that we will meet again, and we will just be. just Us. please know. you know. you do. you
so many questions left unanswered, this war, this plague. i am only a lost soldier, lost because of
this war, this plague. i am only a lost soldier, lost because of
i am only a lost soldier, lost because of
lost because of
“Hunter?”
the
Nine spun around, his face a mask of horror. He clutched his chest, rapidly dissembling from the EM slug. His mouth opened to form her name, but it was too late. Nine flashed from his illusion in a burst of silver.
the stillness
Zero ran to Fleur, her crumpled form leaking a steadily-growing puddle of red onto the hardpan. “Lilith…Oh no. No. Oh god. Lilith.” The weapon dropped from his hand, clattered to the ground.
She smiled, mouth moving to speak, but there was no time. No life. The slug had passed through Nine and torn through the right side of her chest. Struggle to breathe, struggle to hold on to Hunter, Hunter, not Zero. Not that person at all anymore, or ever again.
“Lilith?” he sobbed, stroked her face, so white now. He didn’t look at the fine mist of crimson on her neck. He pushed the unruly curl back behind her ear, touched her face, the life draining from her skin, the silver crawling just underneath the surface.
the stillness lost
“Let her go.” Maire stood over them, her black robe whipping in the breeze, hair untied and dancing to the song of the wind, hands still bloody. “There’s nothing we can do now.”
Hunter reached out and grabbed the weapon before Maire could stop him, raised the barrel to target, just inches from her forehead. The child didn’t flinch.
“Do it. You know you want to.”
Lilith slumped in his arms. Silver ran from her eyes.
“You know you have to.”
Hunter cried out in frustration, in grief. He pulled Lilith’s limp form closer, keeping his weapon trained on Maire.
“If I don’t—”
“Do it.” She took a step closer to the tip of the weapon. “End it now.”
He closed his eyes, saw the image of her face burned into that perfect darkness.
“End it.”
he is knowing…and this hearti containfor Youi have come again tozam zam?rupture rend rive split cleaveplease don’t let it—is it too late?he knew what she couldn’t believe.she knew very little, but she knew beyond a doubt that she loved chocolate milk.
it was a beautiful hand.
my lips remember the echoes of that night
and in these final moments, in this final terror, I find stillness.
“I win.”
Hunter Windham placed the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.