Black Hull (30 page)

Do you know there’s even a poem for such
a parting as this?

All of it?

Listen close, close your eyes, and go: I
leant upon a coppice gate when Frost was spectre-gray, and Winter's dregs
made desolate the weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the
sky like strings of broken lyres, and all mankind that haunted nigh had
sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be the
Century's corpse outleant, his crypt the cloudy canopy, the wind his
death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken hard and
dry, and every spirit upon earth seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice
arose among the bleak twigs overhead in a full-hearted evensong of joy
illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, in blast-beruffled
plume, had chosen thus to fling his soul upon the growing gloom. So little
cause for carolings of such ecstatic sound was written on terrestrial
things afar or nigh around, that I could think there trembled through his happy
good-night air some blessed Hope, whereof he knew and I was unaware.

A
thousand dreams passed in the blink of an eye. All of human emotion and
history. Then nothingness, just the poem.

He
awoke, looked down, and saw someone else’s hand where his should have been.
There, in its place, was a robotic hand. He stood up inside a high tube next to
a console station. He looked around at an empty warehouse. Then he saw it—a
ship, just like FOD had said. It was another light-class, but somehow, as
futuristic as it was to him, he recognized something about it—the exterior was
all black, without a notch or any other kind of identifying mark.
That son
of a bitch. He did have one last contingency plan.

Mick
stepped forward, new power in his gait. Next to the ship, on a broad computer
table, lay a set of keys. He grabbed them, climbed aboard, and started to test
the throttle and navigation display.

“This
is the computer. Please enter your coordinates.”

“This
is Mick. I’m a thousand year old hunk of meat looking to get home. What do you
say we hit the trails?”

“That
did not register, please repeat.”

“2.56743
x 2.2113042 x d7 o 9.12 {0.0011138},” he said from memory.

“Coordinates
received. Prepare to enter space.”

FOD descended the stairs quickly, metal
clanking under his feet. He felt tired, ready to go. He’d done everything he
could—the rest, he was powerless over.

“Boys,” FOD said.

“Oh, it’s you,” GR said.

“Don’t know what to make of him, do
you?” XJ asked his friend.

“
You
were the one who said
that—those are
your
words,” GR replied.

“Have you seen Mick? He’s supposed to
play me next,” XJ asked.

“He’s waiting for you to make your
move,” FOD said, pointing at XJ’s pieces. XJ had to make one single pawn
movement, and the game would end in checkmate.

XJ reached out, grabbed the pawn, slid
it across the wood grain, then looked up and smiled.

FOD extended both of his arms, pistols
in his hands. The droids’ slumped to the floor. A wailing came from the
corridor behind him. He turned, then slowly traced his way back to Axa. She was
still lying against the cold steel.

A loud crash shook the ship, the first
wave of weaponry hitting the near-field disintegrators. FOD sat down.

“Do you know, as a child, I was once
optimistic about our species?” he said, smiling. Axa looked up from between her
arms, wondering why he bothered to speak at all. They would soon be dead. “I
did. I saw the best in people. In my childhood stories they called all people,
all animals, all life—friends. Each was a friend. When I hardened into a man,
the cover was pulled, thread by thread, until I understood. I understood what it
all meant. Was it ever that way? The way the stories and poems say it was? If
it was, I cannot say. History does not go that far back.”

Another rocket blasted into the
near-field disintegrator, rocking FOD over. He landed next to Axa on the floor.
He stared at her beautiful face, its perfect form, symmetrical, designed by
humans, for humans, to be the epitome of salable beauty.

“You, me. We are products of human
thought.”

He reached his hand out, touched her.
She was surprised to find that it was warm. She had expected his touch to be
equivalent to his gaze, his distant, cold appearance. He took off his robe,
exposing his bare chest, his legs. He moved on top of her. She could not help
it—she pulled his warm pseudoskin down into her.

“There was once a thin veneer between us
and primitive animals. We strengthened it, thickened it, so much that it became
something more than a veneer. It became a set of blinders, so severe, that
there could not be conceived a connection from us to any other creature.
Finally, from us to even ourselves. All of it was lost. The falcon could no
longer hear the falconer. The centre could no longer hold.”

“Please, kiss me,” Axa said. He was the
last thing that could ever happen to her.

“Just so much honor, when thou yield’st
to me, will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.”

He drove into her, ripping her clothes
away, drowning in her legs, locked into her calm eyes as the walls of the ship
exploded. Their mouths shared in each other’s, and then the freezing vacuum of
space.

“You have arrived at your destination,”
said the computer.

“Thanks,” Mick replied. “What’s your
name?”

“I am UCA ship-comproc 11.3112.”

“Comproc. I like it,” Mick said. He
grabbed a pistol from the cockpit and stepped down to the landing.

Family. Tunnel vision for them. That’s
it. Kill whomever, whatever else you see.

After entering the fuel facility, a
clerk came up to Mick.

“Sir, I will need to see some
identification,” said a young woman.

“Here.” He raised his pistol, firing
into her mouth. He moved past before the blood could pool.

A guard rushed out from by the elevator.
“Stop right there!”

Mick fired again. The guard fell. Room
13—it was all somehow in Mick’s memory. He reached the large metal panel in
front of the door, punched in a code. The door whizzed open, and he saw the
fuel cells. Bright orange, smoke rising from them. Cold. He grabbed one and
returned to Comproc. A scientist stood by the door, examining it, looking for
some sign of affiliation.

“You won’t find it, she’s a black hull,”
he said. With a low buzzing thunder, he shot and killed the scientist.
 “Comproc, break planetside please.”

The black hull light-class cruised
through a long, rippling plume of spacedust. In the viewscreen, Mick watched a
tiny moon enlarge. Ominously radiating behind it was a purple gas giant. Mick
double-checked the coordinates FOD had given him.

“Take her down,” he told the computer.
The ship, already in descent, ignored his command. The port windows frosted as
the ship dove through a thin layer of lunar atmosphere.

“Landing imminent, remain locked in
position,” said Comproc.

“In position,” Mick said.

One more stop after this. The final
steps. In my wake a deluge of destroyed promises. I, I am the only one left.

The ship hit dusty soil, releasing a
wave of debris into low gravity. The hull door opened at the rear of the ship
and Mick walked out, pistol drawn. In front of him was a metallic hut carved
from the side of a sandstone crater. He reached some silver inlaid steps,
hopped down, and ventured through a door that emptied him into blackness.

He didn’t say there’d be no lights.

Working from the starlight that had
followed him down the stairs, Mick searched for a switch. He found several
knobs, hit them. Nothing.

No instructions. Why even make the stop
here? Why follow through? Go straight to the third location—T-jump the hell
out.

But when do you decide to start changing
the way you act, instead of acting like you’ve changed the way you think? What
has the universe become? Why believe FOD at all? He infiltrated your thoughts
for christ’s sake.

Sometimes you have to go with your gut.

Two more knobs, and then one worked.
Blue light lit the chamber. The metal-walled room, sterile in look and smell,
centered around a hole in the middle. Mick drew near to it, peered down, and
saw nothing but void. He looked around, found the fuel cell housing, inserted
it in. A computer terminal nearby lit. He walked over, input the commands he’d
been told.

SET TIME TO IGNITION > ?

He stared at the screen, letting the
question mark blink.
A moon. Hollowed out. Its body the creator of the end
of all things.
He swiped three times on the screen and left. Behind him
blinked the computer screen:

TIME TO IGNITION OF G-10 BLACK HOLE
EVENT: 23 HOURS 59 MINUTES 59 SECONDS.

A square of light appeared in the
distant, sparkling pattern of nebulae. Other than the square, growing and
changing before him, nothing else disrupted the speckled beauty of space.

“What’s that Comproc?” Mick asked.

“What is what?” replied the computer.

“That anomaly, the glow ahead on the
right.”

“That is a UCA billboard.”

“UCA billboard…”

The black hull accelerated and the sign
grew. Soon, Mick could read its thousand-mile-high fusion-powered lettering:

UTOPIA –
Tickets nearly sold out.
Reserve your residence now for only 50,000 UCD!

Coordinates transmittable upon request
to your ship. Plant-pass required for entrance.

“How long ago did we leave FOD’s
station?” Mick asked.

“Request not understood.”

Singularity my ass
.

“Moon K4R-12. How long ago did we
depart?”

“Five hours and twenty minutes. Would
you like a more specific time?”

“No. Check the coordinates offered by
the billboard for Utopia.”

“Understood. Coordinates saved.”
“How long to reach them?”

“Projected travel time is ten hours and
fifteen minutes.”

“What about from Utopia to coordinate
set three?”

“From Utopia, travel time would be six
hours and forty-five minutes.”

I could make it.
But what
for? To see everyone. You’ll see them when you get home. I’d like to see
everyone. You can’t get in though. Why not? Plant-check, it said. Fuck it, I
have enough time to check it out. And what if you have another tail? Let’s just
hope this black hull is as stealthy as the one that got me into this shit.

“Change destination. Follow the
coordinates for Utopia.”

“Understood. Coordinates set.”

“This is UCA Utopia admissions board.
Please dock in the .HUM uploader station and prepare for plant verification and
storage.”

Mick eyed the enormous golden sphere—a
great stone, its surface reflecting the starlight that bordered it in every
direction. Uploader stations, as gold as the world itself, orbited by the
hundreds.

“Pull her in Com,” Mick said.

“Affirmative.”

The black hull cruised by several other
light-class vessels.

Not a single UCA ship. These places are
run by automatons.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Mick said as he
disembarked Comproc.