An End (39 page)

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.