“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.
Sam loved her. She knew that because she knew everything he knew, but it just wasn’t the same being loved in that way. Besides, Samayel was a machine forged from metal and plastic and stars, and his soul, older than hers by at least four decades (he refused to tell her his real age), was forever and hopelessly queer.
She sighed a lot.
To one, it was a Paris cafe, filled with American expatriates of the fin de siecle. To one, it was a Laredo saloon, the rough-and-tumble crowd clustered around an overworked barhand. To one, it was an East Village dive where Bob Dylan had once been slated to perform as the opening act for a science fiction author. To Alina, it wasn’t much of anything. A few tables, a few smokers, a few glasses. She caught Sam’s beckoning smile and sat down beside him.
“Have a drink, little lady.” Hank tipped his glass to her. A smoldering Marlboro hung from his lips, the ashes considering the jump to the table. “It’ll help.”
“Not tonight, sugar.”
“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” Sam’s deep eyes swept the non-space construct, “but we lost Fort Myers today. Cleanup and collapse crews are en route.”
“Tragic.” Whistler hissed through his teeth. “Tragic, tragic. Sorry, my dears. It seems each day the Delta’s redrawn.” In his version of the projected construct, an attentive garcon placed another bottle of absinthe on the table. Whistler poured green over the sugar cube. “And each day, we lose more ground.”
“Shit, Jim. You know that ain’t true. Why, just last week we—”
“Which week?”
“Last week.”
“Which last week?”
Hank reddened. “You know what I mean. They’re doing their best to fix it all.”
“Bullshit.” Alina bummed a smoke from Sam’s pack, used Hank’s scarred Zippo to light it. “That kid doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”
Sam pushed his ashtray closer to his captain. “Sure that’s not the jealousy talking, Al?”
She blew smoke into and through his chocolate face, frosted with bushy vanilla beard. “You of all people should know there’s nothing to be jealous about.”
“And you, of all people,” he stole the cigarette back, inhaled, “should know there is.” He tousled her hair, which was already and perpetually tousled. “Benton needs some competition. It’s good for her. Keeps her maths pure.”
“It’s not her.” Alina blushed, a furious bloom of red across nibbleable cheeks and nose, neck and down through the periphery of her banana zone.
“Somebody’s got a crush!” Hank swigged back the last of his beer. “Ain’t it wonderful, Jimmy?”
Whistler’s eyes rolled under the swirl of his mane. “Charming. You dirty old men should leave the poor child alone. Intellectual badgering and Old West hullabaloo. You’re an episteme all your own, Messieurs.”
“Ally needs some competition. It’s good for her. Keeps her strats pure.” Hank grinned.
“Oh, fuck off. I’m out.” Alina snapped from the construct, leaving the three Judith emulations at the table.
“Aww. Something I said?”
Sam patted Hank on the back. “Not our fault. Just young love.”
“Has she ever even met the author?” Whistler dipped his sugar cube.
“Not really. A few words in passing here and here. But there isn’t a young woman this side of Omega who doesn’t have a hard-on for him.” Sam’s eyes indicated a group that had just arrived within the construct. “And not an inconsiderable percentage of the young men, too. Oh, to be young and foolish again. To feel—anything.”
At the entrance point along one of the far walls, three figures faded in. They shrugged off their blade armor and found an empty table. Metal retracted to reveal the old soldier, the author, the maths egg.
“To the young and foolish,” Sam raised his glass. “May they contain multitudes.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“What?”
“This.” She indicated the room. To Benton, the walls and tables were bare metal. Before her on the table, a simple flask of nutrient slurry steamed.
“Use your imagination. It’s a nice way to spend our recharge time. People need people. As long as we have the resources, we’ll keep this place running.” There was a Killian’s Red and a charred steak in front of Paul.
“I don’t need people.” Benton plugged the slurry flask into her arm. “It’s a waste of bandwidth.”
“Spoken like a true child of the Judith.” West took a fishstick from his plate, bit into it, wondered why he’d chosen fishsticks of all things; Judith knew there wasn’t a squirt of tartar sauce available for centuries around them. “If you’d known a world, a real world, you’d appreciate this place.”
“I appreciate it. There’s nothing trying to kill us here.” She adjusted the pack on her arm. “Most days, at least.”
Paul caught Sam’s wave from across the room. “I’ll be back.” As he stood, his hand traced across Benton’s shoulder.
West waited for a safe distance before he asked. “So?”
Benton leaned in. “A/O reports sixty-five/thirty-five. We’ve lost ground, and—”
“No, no.” West cleared his throat; his eyes locked hers. “What’s going on? With you two?”
Benton sat back in her chair. “How many times do I have to tell you? There is no ‘you two.’”
“Not the word on the street, kiddo.”
“What’s the word on the street, then?”
West shrugged. “Apparently Judith brought the author in from his When to fix all this shit, and now she sends him out on missions with that old man West and the delicious young Hope Benton. Word is that I’m a mere chaperone.”
“Bullshit, and you know it.” Benton scoffed. “One more reason for me to hate this construct. Gossip.”
West bit into a fishstick. Flecks of what could have been fish glinted in his grin.
“Good run today?” Sam offered a smoke. I accepted and sat down with the characters at a table that looked suspiciously like it had come from the old U Inn. I blinked and noticed the booths in the back, the chubby drunk sorority girls. Music from a wedding reception seeped through from the back room. Heard myself on the jukebox. Smoke, shadow, echoes: illusions, all.
“It was okay. How’re you guys doing?”
Sam did his best Burl Ives impression, but his grin faltered. “Lost Fort Myers. Al’s pretty upset.”
“Fuck.” I’m better with words in my head. “How about you two?”
“Still lookin’, son.” Hank scooped a slug of Red Man into his mouth. “Ain’t much out there, but we’re still lookin’.”
“What my dear cattleman is trying to say,” Whistler smoothed his lapels, “is that we’ve run out of promising leads, and we’ve not yet found anyone of significant tactical value.”
“There have to be more characters out there somewhere. You were.”
“So we were, but we’re not, shall I say, entirely truthful?”
I knew where Whistler was pushing the conversation. “Sometimes it’s hard to be truthful about people you never really met.”
“Perhaps you should have focused on biographical research. I would never have worn this ridiculous cape.”
Hank guffawed. “Sure makes you pretty, though, Jim.”
Whistler hissed at the cowboy.
Sam just shook his head. “Any leads on Delta yet? Anything new you can tell us?”
“It’s there.” And it was, a great stabbing tickle behind my eyes, a tugging toward and a pushing from and the words escape: it was. “Just haven’t excised it yet.”
“Word is we’ve slipped to Alpha seventy-over.”
“Sixty-five.” I hated how fast the Judith mind essence relayed everything to everyone, and how fast that relay distorted truth. “That’s the word. Watch my mouth and call me the horse.”
“Rough insertion today?”
Dirty old man. I drank, swirled the beer around my mouth, over bruised gums and a loose molar. “Could say that.”
“Meet anyone interesting?” He considered. “Again? Any words of wisdom from the Great Within?”
Thinking back to the shattered images I’d catalogued that “day”: “People shit when they die.”
Sam chuckled.
I pulled on the cigarette, exhaled through my nose. I vaguely remembered when that had used to hurt. “Just another day. Erased a few more post-silver characters.”
Hank spit tobacco juice into his empty bottle. “Seem to be getting better at that, buckaroo.”
It didn’t matter that he sounded artificial. He was artificial. His television show had never really existed. The dialogue did concern me, though. I knew I could do better.
“We’ve almost got a lock on the bear. Should be able to grab him in the next insertion.”
“You bringing him in?”
“Might as well. He’s a fragment we can use to get a better lock.”
Whistler sighed. “‘Fighting wars outside of time and space,’ with a cowboy, a painter, and a teddy bear. Whatever would the Hugo committee think?”
“Doesn’t matter. No one’s gonna read this when I’m done.”
“I know I wouldn’t.” Sam’s face broke from stern steel to friendly laughter.
“Ah, well.” Whistler pushed away from the table. “Ready to get back to work, my captain?”
Hank spit, gouged the spent tobacco from his lip. “You betcha.”
“On the morrow, gentlemen.” Whistler smoothed back his hair, twirled his white streak into the air. “One question, dear boy…Why does Hank get to be the Captain and I his mount?”
I shrugged. “Never really thought about it.”
“He just hates my spurs. Let’s go, Jim.” Hank tapped his subdermal and became static and nothing.
“Next time,” Whistler pointed his cane at me, “I’m the Captain.” He snapped and faded.
“Those two make a cute couple.” Sam thought another beer to the table.
“You think?”
We laughed.
“Just like you and…” His eyes indicated Hope, who was lost in conversation with West at their table, her glass displaying the day’s kill stats.
I’d heard it all before. “Sam, there is no ‘me and…’ Regardless of what you hear. This place is such a soap opera sometimes.”
“You sure about that?”
“Jesus, I’m sure, okay? She’s in love with her integers.”
“And you’re in love with impossibilities.”
“I’ve killed almost everyone I’ve ever loved.”
“And you’ll have to kill the rest before this is done.” Sam had a way of cutting not only to the chase, but to the end credits.
“Pretty much.”
I studied the table, my bottle. I knew he was staring at and through me.
“You should meet my Captain.” Some smiles, the most conspiratorial, evidence in eyes.
“Oh yeah? Why?” although I already suspected. I’d written her to cursory life, but my characters always had a way of growing into themselves, adapting, becoming people without any input from me.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” his eyes swept the construct, “but Al has a little crush.”
Suspicion confirmed. Only in a universe I’d made would that happen. “Well…Huh. Send her my regards. Tell her to keep up the good work. The Author appreciates all she’s done. Purpose be and all that jive.”
“You conceited prick.” Another sip through the grin. “‘The Author,’ huh? I’ll be sure to tell her.” He winked.
West called to me from the other table.
“Better go, Sam. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Good luck with your insertions.”
“Good luck with your own.” I patted his back as I stood. “Bring Alina with you tomorrow.”
“Ha! Will do, buckaroo.” Sam snapped to fade through the echoes of his best Hank impression.
“How’re the boys?” “Getting by.” Paul sat down, the now-cold steak on the table before him. He thought it away.
“Nice Jedi powers, Obi-Wan.”
“Nice fishsticks, Batman.”
Benton looked from West to Paul to West, rolled her eyes. Her gaze fell flatly back to the numbers on her glass.
“Working through recess, Hope?”
“No rest for the quantum theorists.”
“Any leads?”
“If we pick up the bear, it should push us to Alpha fifty-five-to-sixty-over. Seems that toy was a big part of our target’s pattern.”
“God, I hated that fucking cartoon.” West grumbled over his ketchup and maybefish. “And those toys were just creepy.”
“I never had toys.” Benton didn’t look up from her calculations.
West studied his plate.
“You can play with Honeybear once we get him. Fair enough?”
“Great.” She snapped the glass shut and it faded from the construct. “I’ve mapped the insertion for tomorrow. You boys get some sleep at some point. We want a good run.”
“Yes, dear.”: unison.
Benton shattered from the construct.
“Enough exposition for today.” West wiped his mouth. “I’m turning in. Night.”
“Goodnight, Adam.”
After he’d faded, Paul sat at the table until the bar construct was empty and he was alone. Well into the non-night of his consciousness, he mulled over the select regrets, fears, and dreams that had created the person he had become, and when the false sun had risen over the false horizon, he decided to sleep.
There’s a moment when panic becomes sensual: you can taste the copper of your blood, the tang of adrenaline and sweat, and the deeper wash of terror. Suddenly I felt that the innovative new helmets I’d designed for insertions were entirely too suffocating.
My breath came hard and ragged as I began to choke on the blood filling my left lung. I felt the suit envelop the shard of phase flak and begin to repair me.
I struggled to my feet. Another wave of splinters from the wrecked vessels coming apart in the atmosphere above us struck the city.
“Take cover! Jesus fuck, take cover!” My words sounded like a blood clot feels.
I glanced right to see West throw himself over Benton as the shards fell. His armor was fluctuating phase; one shard hit his leg but harmlessly faded from being. He grabbed Benton and hefted her to safety under a shattered concrete support tilted precariously against the nearest building. I crawled into a doorway across the debris-littered street.
“They’re not here!” Benton shouted over the roar of the battle above. She had her glass out, and I saw numbers flickering through the display. “Something’s wrong with our position!”
“Stay here.” I heard West speak to Benton over his subdermal. He ran from the protection of the overhang across the street to my side. “You okay?”
“Just some flak in the lung. Suit’s fixing me.”
“Okay…Okay. Hope! Can you make it over here?”
She did.
Her eyes and hands swept my armor. “Is it bad? Oh god… Are you—”
“I’ll be fine.” I sat up against the wall under the grind of my still-shattered ribs. “What’s your glass say?”
“Half-empty. Position’s off. The attack’s happening, but our target isn’t at the Maire complex. Neither’s his mother or the toy.”
“Any readings at all on them?”
Another blast of flak hit the street. Benton flinched. “Too much shit in the sky. Can’t get a lock.”
“Okay.” West rose from his crouch. “Maybe they’re still at home. We have to go check.”
“He’s wounded. We could log out and try a closer insertion.”
“I’m fine.” I grunted through the words and stood with West’s assistance. “We can’t risk slipping even more.”
“Fine. Where do they live?”
I paused. “You have the stats.”
“You wrote the book. The stats are fucked, anyway.”
“Okay.” The hole in my chest sealed. The grating of bones was almost gone. “Let me remember.”
By the time they reached Helen Windham’s humble apartment, Paul’s wounds had healed and he was walking without West’s assistance. The veils of phase flak falling from the sky became more and more sporadic as the battle ended. The quiet in the city was broken only by the collapse of the massive cannon to the west as it broke apart and fell into the ocean.
West kicked down the door to the apartment.
It was dark. The curtains were still drawn. They activated their halo lights and began to search the home. There wasn’t much to search.
They found the figures in the living room, two husks of silver dust prone on the floor, the larger mostly concealing the child below.
“Don’t touch them.” Paul sighed. This was an unfortunate development. “Got any signal on the glass, Hope?”
She opened her panel. “Yeah.” She hesitated. “Running at Alpha ninety—”
“Shit.” West shook his head through blades. “Must have just missed ‘em.”
“What about Honeybear?”
Her face brightened. “He’s here. He has to be! The reading’s off the scale.”
“Okay, where’s the kid’s room?”
“No…” Paul walked to the far side of the living room. “I remember where he is.” He reached under the couch and pulled out a ragged brown bear. “At least that didn’t change.”
Benton ran her sensors over the toy. “It’s a close enough signal match. Should bring us back down to Alpha sixty-over.”
“What about those two?” West stood over the dead shells of silver that had recently been Helen and Hunter Windham. “Does this seriously fuck up our line on Delta?”
“It shouldn’t. I can bring in Helen from one of the Seattles, and Hunter…We can try to bring Hunter and Lilith both in at once.”
“That’s gonna be tricky.”
“That might be mathematically impossible.”
“We’ll do it.” Paul tossed the bear to Benton. “Trust me.”
retrieval and concealment crews are finished with the salvage and load placement.
“I guess we’re leaving now?”
time to hit the road.
“Alright.” Alina stood up on Samayel’s hull. She’d miss the warmth from below. She’d miss the light, and the wind, and the real air. “Real” air. “Sam? How far down to the shield layer?”
three hundred miles or so.
“That’s enough.” She ran toward Samayel’s edge. “Catch me at fifty!”
al, don’t—
But she did.
The rush of vertigo, the wind and heat around her body, caressing in ways no lover could, enveloping, becoming. She spun to see Sam dropping away above her, his nacelles flickering to life as he dove after her. She swam.
The heat grew.
It was freedom; it was everything.
She laughed through the tears of that limit experience.
Falling, falling through light and heat. Falling through silence. She felt the stillness, but knew she was falling. How the senses are deceived into stasis; how the senses lie through the truth of the heart.
It seemed hours before Sam matched her descent and she landed gently on his back. He coasted along the shield layer, swept upward on an exit vector.
girl, you’re crazy.
“I know.” She couldn’t force her grin from her face.
By the time Sam had reached the atmosphere barrier, Alina was snuggled into her command chamber, sleeping peacefully the sleep of those who had fallen into a sun.
They left Fort Myers forever.
“Mmm hmm.” Judith looked at the bear with skepticism. “That’s it? A toy?”
“Not just any toy, Jud. Honeybear Brown.”
She picked him up and turned him over. “And this toy is important to our mission how?”
“He’s a character in both timelines. A potential Delta crossover in and of himself.”
“Paul,” her metallish eyes betraying her disbelief, “it’s a fucking toy.”
“Not to Hunter.” He took the bear from Judith’s grip. Static and shift and
The bear moved. Jud jumped.
“Honeybeeeeear, Honeybear Brown!” The toy’s eyes lit up. “I’m the nicest little bear in the whole darned town!” He looked around the room. “Where’s Windy?”
Jud looked like she was about to answer Honeybear, but she shook her head. “Paul, that thing’s god damned scary. I should know. I’m god.”
“You’re neat!” Honeybear smiled at Jud.
Paul stifled a chuckle.
“Take that talking bear and get back to work, author. Next run, you’d better bring me back a human being. No stuffed camels or ostriches, you freak.”
“Gotcha, sweetness.”
He picked up Honeybear and faded with a smirk.
She’d heard that their counterparts on the Judas side of the Delta bleed piloted vessels powered and protected by black holes, and the captains linked with their ships through mechanical gauntlets and webs of silver (not exactly her silver, but a silver nonetheless). She’d heard that they had fought a war against an army of consciousnesses emulated with machines from the future. She’d heard that they were cannibals. She liked cannibal movies; she still believed in werewolves.
Sam draped her with her silver, the veil webbing and penetrating her skin, concentrating over her cardiac shield plate. Locked securely into the firing chamber, she shared all that was her existence with all that was Samayel.
She wondered how different she was from the Alina on the other side, if there even was an Alina on the other side.
“What’s on the plate for today?”
smash and grab mission. we’re meeting up with remnants of the fort john wayne fleet.
“Frosty’s fleet?”
captain frost, yes.
“Wait.. This is a frag or a bleed?”
bleed.
“Oh.”
well, lock and load, kid. we’re hitting the stream.
“Jim?”
shut up.
“Jimbo?”
shut UP.
“Come on, pardner. You gotta talk to me sometime.”
no i don’t.
“You just did.” Hank grinned from his command chamber. “Anyhow, what’s it look like out there?”
whiter than jo’s inner thigh.
“That white, huh? That must be pretty white. You know, one time I was at a saloon in—”
for the love of all things holy, shut UP.
Crawl, crackle.
“You feel that?”
certainly did. initiating full sensor sweep.
“Looks like we ain’t alone out here, buddy.”
They fell through time.
tomorrow and tomorrow andjust make a thread that says “no” and
“Hey, dude.”
I won’t lie. His voice caught me off-guard. No one had ever been with me before, not there, not in the little bubble I’d carved for myself, just for myself, deep within the registry of the Judith ME.
“What’s goin’ on?”
I’d thought people into existence before, but they’d only been characters. Whistler and Hank. Benton and West. Jacob’s voice slammed into and through me, echoed through the sphere of nothing within which I floated, and all became my parents’ living room: the old green carpet snaked with guitar cords, the bite of woodsmoke, brownies for us in the kitchen. I knew this without vision; I was too tired and broken to open my eyes.
Lithe fingers climbed over nylon strings, coaxed forgotten songs from a long-dead soul.
“I don’t know anymore.” I knew that choke in my voice.
He stopped playing.
They’d told me, of course. I’d asked to be inserted into the fourteen-seven variant, just two years into the future from which West and Benton had removed me. Hope had come with me, had stood with me behind the mourners at the burial. Wraiths. She’d held my hand between its frequent trips to my mouth, choking back sobs that no one but she could hear in that when.
When my future self placed a guitar pick on the coffin and touched it, he looked up for a moment, and in those eyes, I saw everything that I knew I must end. What tragic cycle, what series of events could inspire such madness in those once-forever eyes? The then-gaunt frame sweating under a gray suit suddenly entirely too big, the sun-burned nose a red foil to those pools of teared ash, hands and wrists shaking, scarred with
He was the madness I must end.
Other friends would have asked if I wanted to talk about it. He knew better. He started playing the guitar again and
bonfire, scorching the leaves of the ice storm-tilted tree that was now entirely too close to the pit and the wind was entirely too cold for the early-summer night I knew it was from the taut skin on my nose and arms and neck, the slivers of chaff now roiling beneath the surface of my forearms, placed there not tenderly by hundreds of bales of hay stacked mindlessly into the mow.
His song never changed, never faltered. He hummed along sometimes.
“I miss you.”
A string snapped. His hand went to his neck, found the speck of blood and wiped it away, red from flesh too lifeless, too gray. I thought color back into him.
“Miss you, too, dude.” He pulled the broken string from the guitar and threw it into the fire. He kept playing; he could do that.
There were so many things I wanted to ask: the hows and whys of his hanging, those last moments. What happened after the electricity had flickered away? But I knew that there were no answers in this place. No one within the Judith or Judas programs had any idea what happened when we died. I guess I’d written it that way for a reason. I didn’t really want to know.
“We’ll have to get together the next time you’re home. I should be around.”
The broken string crimped and danced as it burned.
“Yeah.” From that side of the fire, he couldn’t see eyebrows furrow, lips twitch, two lines of tear slip down stubbled cheeks. “I should be home again soon.”
“It’s easier when nowhere feels like home.”
Jagged exhalation. I struggled to maintain.
“Well, the bed is looking pretty good right now.” He placed the guitar back in its battle-scarred case: stickers, newspaper clippings, scatter of plectrums. Snapped the snaps, stood up, brushing ash and bark from his knee-holed jeans.
“Damn, I want some eggnog.” He smiled that sly, shy smile. “Goodnight.” He started to walk down the driveway.
“Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“What do I—How do I—What am I supposed to do?”
He frowned. “Huh?”
I forced a smile. “Want me to drive you home?”
“Oh. Nah. I’ll walk. Stars are out.”
“Be careful.”
“Yeah.”
He walked down the driveway and the image faded to nothing: bubble.
I sat there for a long time.
midsagittal plane breachedit’s spread intoready lesioning probe on myphysiologic confirmation of the target locationinitial pass in threetwo
but if i take a few days between sleeping, my dreams have answers in them, and
a pain so great and sudden that he dropped his cup of coffee to the table.
“Paul?” Hope’s voice: confusion and concern.
He felt tissues give way as blood surged from his nose. He coughed in reflex, a fine mist of red spattering his hand as he clamped off the flow with a napkin entirely too flimsy to contain it all.
“Jesus, boy.” West pulled more napkins from the dispenser at the table’s center. “You okay?”
He waved away the extra napkins. His eyebrows furrowed, and the blood was gone as he thought it away. “Don’t know where that came from.”
Benton’s eyes met West’s.
“You need to sleep. You can’t stay awake like this.”
“I don’t need sleep.”
“That wasn’t normal, kid. Nosebleeds don’t just happen like that. Maybe you have high blood—”
“Cardiac shield’s not beeping, is it?”
“Well, maybe—”
“I’m fine. Just have a headache.”
“You need sleep.” Benton touched his hand.
“I’ll be fine.” His words were cold and final. He pulled his hand from beneath Hope’s.
She’d noticed the shaking.
“Seems empty here tonight.”
“Lots of ships are out. Myers meeting up with John Wayne, Spear and Riley for a Fuck-Run-and-Go.”
Benton shook her head. “You boys and your cute little names.”
“Behind your back,” Paul took a sip of coppered coffee, “we call you ‘Sugartush.’”
“Now I know you’re sleep-deprived.”
Paul and West looked at each other and grinned.
“Hi!” Honeybear jumped onto the table.
West flinched. “God, I hate this bear. Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. West! How are you today?”
“Shut up.”
“Okay!” The bear sat down between Benton and West, glassy-eyed smile directed at Paul.
“I guess we have to take him out on a run sometime?”
“Yeah…Should be able to get a pretty good lock on Windham with him.”
“Great.”
“Oh, he’s not so bad.” Benton patted the bear’s scruffy head.
West grumbled.
“Big run tomorrow. You two should get some sleep.” Paul picked up his cup to take another sip of coffee, but Benton took the cup from him. It snapped from the construct.
“You, too. No more coffee.”
“Yes, dear.”
“We close enough yet?” fleet on scope.
“Bring Mindel up on gel.”
calling.
Alina slumped against her interfaces and leaned into the warm slurp of the neuroflux gelatin. She blew a few bubbles from her mouth, which danced outward to her command chamber’s metallish crust.
Eddies wrapped, swirled into a form a little taller, a little more angular than Al’s. Static snap and the form sculpted a translucent smile, swam forward to embrace her. Sam adjusted the gelatin consistency accordingly to make the contact convincing enough.
“Frosty!” The two young women, one molded in flesh, one carved in jello, giggled and covered each other’s cheeks in slimy kisses. “It’s been forevers.”
“Too long, babe. How’s it hanging?”
“Oh, you know. Mediocre, but it gets the job done.”
“Ready for a little midnight special?”
“Fuck and run, you know it. How’s your fleet holding up?”
“Just fine until they pulled us out of the Jag. Sent us to patch up hotzones closer to A-Point. Lost our fort sometime last—Well… A while ago.”
“Time flies in the mind of—”
“Minolta. Oh! You’re going to hate me for not telling you sooner, but I met him.”
“Met who?”
The gelatin form’s eyes pinched to mischief. “The Author.”
The bridge slime Alina inhaled took on a bitter cool. “Really?”
“Jud’s little retrieval team misfired into our Jag When. Kate and I got to personally deliver him to the suspected Delta bleed at Lascaux.”
“You bitch!” Her stage frown became a smirk. “What’s he like? I mean, in real life?”
“Didn’t say a lot. Didn’t smile, either. His hands—”
sorry to interrupt, darlings, but we’re closing on-target.
“Okay, Sam. Meet me after the dance in the construct?”
“Sure thing, Al. Let’s lube up.”
“Bang their bottoms out, hon.” Wink.
“Later!” Mindel Frost’s gelatin form drizzled back into the bridge tide.
Alina sighed and sank back into her gauntlets. “You get that?”
it’s all recorded. Judith ME confirms Delta bleed on Fort John Wayne patterns.
“Bring them to visual.”
All around her, the dusk of Sam’s bridge faded to the intense white of the Timestream. A scattering of Judith vessels flocked according to home forts.
“Secondary confirmation?”
neurological extrapolation confirms Delta bleed. tainted code. she’s silver.
“Sweep for crawlies?”
negative on enemy pattern.
“Okay, open channel to my kids.”
done.
“Judith Ft. Myers fleet,” her fingertips raced over the projected timescape, “close on these targets and engage on my mark.”
Her finger hesitated over Mindel Frost’s vessel, Judith Kate.
“Open fire.”
tracing these constellations of flesh, greater silences than stars provide
“You, too. No more coffee.” Benton pushed back from the table. She was about to stand up when she saw Samayel and his captain approaching.
“Yes, dear.” Paul’s eyes were locked on hers. He hadn’t seen Sam & Co. yet.
“Al, don’t—”
The young woman walked right up to Paul’s side and struck him across the face before Sam could grasp her flailing arms, hands pulled to fists. West jumped up and took one of the fists harmlessly to his barrel chest. He growled as her forced her arms behind her back, slammed her to the tabletop.
“Shit. Fuck. I’m sorry, Paul. She’s—”
“The fuck’s your problem?” West bore down on her, incapacitating her against the metallish table.
Paul said nothing. He wiped a line of blood from his crumpled nose, upper lip split by that inherited chisel of teeth. With a thought, it was gone. Silver burned behind muddied eyes.
“I don’t care who you are.” Alina struggled beneath West’s heft. “If you send me on another mission like that, I’ll fucking kill you.” Her bared teeth looked entirely too sharp.
“Wanna help me out here?” Paul searched Hope’s eyes.
She activated her glass, waited. “They went on a bleed containment run today. Took out the Fort John Wayne fleet remnants.”
Paul sighed.
“She was my best friend!” Alina blinked back tears.
“Captain Mindel Frost.” Benton snapped the glass shut. “Delta-infected, 99% certainty.”
“We met her…When this all—”
“Get off me.” Alina shrugged from underneath West. He lifted her with one hand to her feet.
“You gonna control yourself?”
She didn’t answer as she fixed the tie in her hair.
“Have a seat. You three let me handle this.” Sam, West and Benton faded from the construct, now empty except for Alina and Paul.
She sat. Two distinct lines of tear wet her too-big cheeks. She wiped them away.
“I’m sorry. Really.” He reached out to take her hand, reconsidered and withdrew. “I know it wasn’t easy.”
She scoffed. “It was easy. All I had to do was reach out and think.”
“I know the feeling.” He thought a scotch into his hand, drank most in one draw.
“Listen—” She studied the tabletop where she’d been splayed and writhing a minute before. “I shouldn’t have hit you.”
“It’s okay. I can’t feel anything anymore.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I do.” He placed his now-empty glass on the table and extended his hand. “Let’s try again. I’m Paul.”
“Alina.”
“Sam’s told me all about you.”
“Ditto.”
Awkward silence.
Paul’s glass filled itself again. Sip, swallow, clink.
“I’m sorry about Frost.”
“Yeah.”
“You know you didn’t really kill her.”
“I know she’s out there somewhere, outside of this.”
“A ghost.”
“Shaking chains in the attic, droning amps in the basement.”
Something twinged behind Paul’s eyes.
“It’s all going to be okay. Trust me.”
“I can’t.” She took his glass and drained it. “I don’t know you.”
“Then know me.”
Flush of red. “I’d better go get sliced. More fun tomorrow.” She stood.
“Keep up the good work.”
“I’ll try.”
i want to know your midnights to bear witness to youryawns, twists and turnsyour valleys andyour breath, neither betternor worse than mine.i want to be your stars and sunrises, first kissesof ever and of morning.i want to see yourfirst smile and hearsleeping mumbles and sighs.i want to see your waking face in the stillness of our quiet dawn.i want to be your
Cowboy lately?” He shrugged off the drape of sleep as he got out of the slicing chamber, the blades retracting, still wet with the flesh fragments of his previous day’s body.
Benton not-shyly toweled pattern scum from her pubis. “Haven’t heard anything from Jud. Adam?”
“Nah. Last I knew, they were heading outer. Trying to draw a bead on young Windham.”
Paul blew pattern from his nose, wiped it from his ears. He felt the final touches solidify: scars, wrinkles, hair. He caught Benton’s stare.
“What?”
“New scar.” She approached, touched the right side of his face. “Blade impact.”
“Yeah, well—” He wiped his face dry. “Your tits are bigger today.”
She scowled. “Glad you noticed.”
“It’s true.” West chuckled. “What have you been dreaming?”
She ignored him, snapped her glass open. Figures illuminated face and chest. “We’ll be out on runs for a few days. Recharge in the forts. A few little hotspots to seal up before we hit half-and-half.”
West shielded with a ssschiick and sheen. He flexed the blades of his right arm and slammed a needle cartridge into his right shiver pistol, repeated the process with his left, flipped both back into their forearm holsters. “Let’s fucking do it right this time. I’m getting old, kids.”
Benton shielded and locked her glass into place on her chestplate. “We’ll be good to go. Coordinates are golden.”
“Silver.” Paul pulled his faceplate down, locked it into place. His cardiac shield hissed and frosted blue as it blinked an affirmative. “Coordinates are silver.”
They went
back into the wind and it amazed me, all of it, the incomprehensible enormity of the system within which I now operated, the Judith Mind Essence. They’d taken some of the best parts of each book and combined them into the hive mind generated by the countless Judiths held in metastasis in the construct.
A twinge: too much. Right eye watered, from pain or from the sunlight reflected from white stretching away in every direction.
“That ridge. We’ll find the cave there.”
The hulk of Task’s vessel still smoldered on the ice plain of Lascaux. I smelled, tasted his blood in ice crystals, in the bite of the wind, the singe of melting metallish.
We trudged, West and I crunching down through the surface skin of melted and re-frozen snow, Benton walking along beside us, sweeping the field with her instruments and colorless eyes.
“I got a reading. Faint.”
“Human?”
She shook her head. “Two hearts. Berlin or Task?”
“Don’t know.” And I didn’t.
“We takin’ ‘em, or bleed?” West unslung his shivers.
“This one’s pure Judith patty. We’ll take him.”
They walked from wind into the dark of the cave, flooded it with schools of halo dust, lighting their way over ridge and around protrusion and under overhang.
“Reading’s close.” Hope’s voice was barely a whisper.
She need not have consulted her glass to conclude the proximity of their target; the two lines of tacking blood in the snow draped on the cave floor were barely freezing, two imperfect plow rows through drifts, the scrape of shattered femurs across ice.
It was an ugly place to die.
The tunnel widened, bubbled, tapered off into a series of smaller shafts into the rock. Laying propped against the ledge, the dying man who was Task gasped his agony through bloodied mouth. His glass eyes swung to view his three visitors in a way that suggested he was already dead.
In the plastic interface glove of his left hand, he still held a twitching, sparking something. It appeared to be the index or ring finger of his dead lover, the near Elle.
His right hand was crushed into a smear of bone and strips of flesh.
His legs were held on by what muscles hadn’t torn completely through in the crash of his vessel.
As Benton crouched beside him, surveying his damage, another twinge needled through and besind and before Paul’s eyes.
“Who..? Who—”
“Don’t try to talk.” Benton injected him with numby mist from the kit at her side.
West remembered a young doctor from Michigan who’d designed something like that once. Sweeping, flailing, tides of memory and something else, deeper and darker and alien.
“Task,” Paul took a knee. “Where are they?”
Blinking confusion and fear. Red teeth, crusting and browning.
“Berlin and Maire. Where are they?”
Task clutched the finger tighter. “Elle..?”
“It’s dead. You know that. You saw it die. We need to know where the others are. What happened after the crash?”
Eyebrows furrow, a gasp, exhalation and drift into meds-induced coma.
“He’s out.”
“Dead?” Paul reached to check Task’s pulse.
“Metastasis for now. He’ll die if we stay here much longer. He’ll cross over with us, minimal damage.”
“Looks like we’re heading home early.”
Paul stood. “You prep him for exit. West, let’s check out the rest of the cave for signs of
silver erupted everywhere, that piercing brand of light that exists beyond our concept of vision.
The force of the blast was enough to knock Hope from her feet. She not-gently hit the stone and snow floor, her head snapping back in a sickly and palpable crack of shielding.
I saw Task’s limbs flutter in ways that human arms and legs shouldn’t. Now passed out, he couldn’t have realized that what had remained of his left leg had just sheared off.
The blast knocked me back against the cave wall, but I kept my footing. I immediately thought my shielding to its highest phase.
The mountain that was West bore the explosion the best of us all. He had his weapons drawn and was returning fire before I even realized what was happening.
Blocking the light with an outstretched hand, I looked into the white that the tunnel entrance had become to finally see somethings that had crawled behind my eyes for centuries.
I hadn’t imagined them that way.
Beyond simple words or concepts, the Enemy spidered along the cave walls, tens, dozens, fifteens of them, a flickering, sub-screaming mass of writhing silverblack silverthought.
Each of West’s shiver blasts, accompanied along its trajectory with a stream of profanity that only he could seem to muster with such aplomb during combat situations, struck home on its intended Enemy target. The intruding Judas timeline patterns shattered and were re-absorbed into the Enemy mind-essence.
More came.
Bent physics fucked my mind for an instant before realization, but I tore myself from the big picture and focused on smelling the roses instead: I lifted Hope from her crumple on the ground and snapped the emergency exit pin on my chestplate. I did the same to Hope’s. I reached down to grab hold of Task’s arm.
“West! We’re out!”
A few more kills, a dozen more new arrivals, the cave ceiling cracking and collapsing into dust and chunks. He walked backward, dodging silver tendrils, almost to us—
He tripped.
The uneven ground met his bottom and back with a rough slap, but still he fired, the shiver blasts echoing and rupturing rogue code from the ME. He slid back, kicking with his feet, trying to get as close to us as he could before the jog jerked us back into nowhere.
He’d almost reached us when a shot went wide, an Enemy got too close, a silver tendril snaked and severed his right arm from the elbow down.
The shiver fired once upon impact with the ground, taking out the Enemy’s legs. It snapped to grid.
West dropped his other shiver and tore the emergency exit release from his chest. When he was within reach, I helped him into what was supposed to be our exit bubble.
It wasn’t there.
I knew something was wrong. There was no tickle, no copper anticipation of jog or exit, no visible shimmer.
I was covered in other people’s blood.
The Enemy patterns stopped their advance. Silver snakes paused.
A fuzz of static, a shared mind, orders from beyond. I could seetastehear them speak as one: that horrible One, the Enemy mind-essence, that which had kept me awake for years as I’d attempted to unravel its intricacies, its secrets and horrors.
It spoke.
The voice was ancient. The magenta bib overalls looked brand-new.
Click.
She walked lazily around the still Enemy patterns, each leg she passed a veritable tree trunk in comparison to her five-year-old form. As she passed each pattern, the silverblack rippled, reached, retreated from her purity.
Maire wasn’t smiling.
“Ah, Author. You think too much.” She sat on the floor before the four where their exit bubble should have been. Her raven curls bounced and settled. “Let’s talk.”
The Enemy didn’t move.
Paul ignored the child for a moment, checked Benton’s vitals from her plate. She was stable. West held his cauterized stump with his good arm. “I’m fine,” to the silent question in Paul’s gaze.
“I’ve been watching you, Paulywog.” Her voice was playful, singsong. “Nice job with the bear. I never would have guessed that he was under the couch.”
“Thanks. It was a shining moment in literature.”
“So what should we do now? I could have my shiny dead soldiers back there kill all of you right now. That’d be the easiest solution.”
“I die, you die.”
“Unfortunate, that. You shouldn’t have written me so well.”
“You weren’t meant to be a main character.”
“Good thing I was, though. Brought credibility to an otherwise-sappy space soap.”
“I should’ve deleted you.”
“You never did like kids.” Her finger dragged through the slush of mixed blood on the floor. She stuck the tip in her mouth and smiled. Dimples. “How’s Judith?”
“You won’t find her.”
“I will.” She sculpted the child’s face into a scowl. “We will.” An adult gesture, that: the slight tilt backward of her head, indicating the Enemy patterns.
“A simple keystroke. You would never have happened.”
“Too late. I’m coming. I’m here. We’re here, and we’ll find her.” Maire’s eyes sparked silver.
Paul’s eyes sparked nothing in the mud of his gaze.
“This concept of ‘Delta Point’ as you so lovingly call it.. It’s—”
The space where her hearts had once been erupted with white
and I saw the Enemy patterns shatter one by one. All was fire and scream and shiver as
Alina shifted her weapon from where the girl had been and started taking out the Black. The cave crawled. Her troops surged forward, confident with the courage that new-Awake gives them. The Black patterns destabilized, crumbled, sunk into the rock of the ground, but the Judith forces didn’t let them get far; Alina tight-beamed orders up to Samayel, and he doused the hotzone with phased tethers, securing their codes in that When.
Alina charged through the still-dissembling patterns, throwing a few fuck-you shots into a few black skulls as they melted. She saw the author and his glorified bodyguard West scramble to their feet as they realized what was going on, that they were being rescued.
Alina’s kids cleaned up the cave in no time.
Benton wasn’t moving. Next to her, Task lay dying. West tried to hold his blood in.
“Alina!”
It was the first time Paul had said her name. She felt something.
“Judith ME picked up your exit request before the Enemy blocked the signal. They sent us in. Sam’s waiting above to take you back.”
“Good. We have serious wounded. Task’s critical, Benton—”
“Paul?”
He turned to meet West’s gaze.
“She’s—Hope’s—”
“No” and he fell to the floor, pulled off the girl’s helmet, placed his hand over her chestplate. He frantically tried to revive her, activating the shield suit’s recharge system, and when that didn’t work, he leaned over her and fisted his weight down into her chest. He stopped to check her breath, her pulse.
West gently placed his remaining hand on Paul’s shoulder. It fell, rose to the rhythm of the attempt to start her heart.
“Stop it, Paul.”
He kept going.
“Paul—”
The author threw West back and almost succeeded in tumbling the man over. West reached forward and one-armed Paul off of Benton.
“She’s dead.”
These systems of desire and ritual, silver lies and betrayal: what love could breathe in a world of such uncertainty and echo, what morning whisper or crawling dawn could ever replace that scent, that taste, that perfect moment in which we look into eyes not our own and realize that they are?
Paul again shrugged off West’s hand, walked past Alina and her troops as he studied the ground in front of him. As he passed Alina, he looked up, and in those eyes, she knew the fragments of him.
Alina thought she felt something in that moment.