Enemy (27 page)

     “Hmm?” Patra turned to West, a distracted look on her face. She had been staring into the clouded orb at the center of the chamber. West was next to her, rummaging through his pack. He held out two unlabeled metal cans. “Oh. Sure. Thanks.” She took the can from his outstretched hand.

     “No problem.” He cracked open the seal on his can, revealing a mysterious pink substance that in no way resembled meat but most likely was. “Fresh from the ruined suburbs of Chicago. Yummy.” He extracted a bit of pink quasi-protein and tentatively placed it in his mouth. His face attempted to hide his disdain and didn’t entirely succeed. He swallowed, shook his head, put the top back on the can. “Better save this for later.”

     Patra looked down at the can West had given her, placed it back in the pack. “Not really hungry anyways.” She turned back to the orb, which weakly illuminated her silver-laced face. Her voice still filled West with an odd feeling that he was conversing with a machine.

     They had explored the vessel from end to end, finding little that they could comprehend. It was obvious that whatever had piloted the vehicle was about their size, perhaps humanoid. They traversed the interior until there was nowhere else to go, which really wasn’t that far. They found the entry point that Milicom had burned into the surface of the vessel. An airlock to the surface had been constructed after the discovery of the vessel. They would explore the surface later. For now, the interior of the vessel was much more important than an abandoned mining town.

     From the central hub where the orb was contained, only three “hallways” went outwards in a T from the orb chamber. Everything was constructed of the same matte black substance, which felt like metal and was strangely cold to the touch. One of these paths led to a small spherical room within the central hub with recesses in the walls covered with glass. They reminded West of the stasis tanks used to regenerate burn victims he had seen used after the Quebec War. On the “ceiling” of this room was a circular panel that neither West nor Patra could open. Whatever lay beyond that panel would have to remain a secret. West did not want to attempt to shift through the unknown black material of the vessel.

     The other two slightly canted hallways led to identical spherical chambers on opposite sides of the vehicle. West and Patra were amazed at the size of the chambers; they had not known how big the vessel really was. All along the wall of the spherical expanse were circular hatches. They attempted to open one of the hatches and succeeded, but the interior was empty. The cylindrical interiors of these odd spaces were just big enough for West and Patra to enter, but they did not. What could have been stored in these chambers? There must have been thousands of the cylinders in each of the spherical rooms, each the size of a human… West thought about the possibilities and decided that he no longer wanted to think about what the chambers were used for.

     Whoever or whatever had constructed this vessel obviously had a fascination of spherical spaces and tubular hallways, a bleak and utilitarian interior architectural design suitable for the cold infinite black between the stars. Nowhere could they find any control panels, any viewscreens, anything at all that indicated the origin of either the vessel or the vanished occupants thereof. Had Milicom taken the crew’s remains, or had there been no crew? Certainly the area had been secured long before either West or the other Styx had been created. There were so many unanswered questions.

     West suddenly felt suffocated sitting in the orb chamber, watching the black swirls of color play upon the surface of the dying light. He stood, picked up his pack. Patra understood how he felt. “Let’s get out of here.” West looked back over his shoulder as they left the chamber. “There’s a town up there. The light’ll be here when we get back.”

     They walked up the inclined hallway to where the Milicom airlock had been burned into the hull of the vessel. West activated the opening mechanism and the massive door silently slid open. They stepped through and the interior door closed behind them as the exterior door smoothly opened before them. A wash of surprisingly cold air wafted from the mineshaft. They ascended to the surface on one of the mining elevators that thankfully still worked. As the elevator rose above the surface it revealed a landscape that had been scoured by some massive unknown force, leaving behind trails of glassy black earth. On the mountainside, several large black edifices had been erected since West had last been here: shards of the Enemy web that had fallen to earth. He looked down into the valley and saw the scattered ruins of what had been Diablo. Most of the buildings had been flattened by the force of the shattered upload generator, but some of the heartier stone buildings had withstood the blast. They would search those buildings first.

     Patra and West walked leisurely down the mountainside in the dark gray light of what should have been early evening. Neither knew why they were in Diablo, or what they were supposed to do next. West had a suspicion that they would not be the only people in Diablo before long. He suspected that the other Styx, if any remained, would come home before long. They would come to Diablo.

     He would wait for them.

     Desert. Somewhere.

     Richter sat alone under the starless sky. He had not made a campfire. He did not need warmth or light. Oh, father, where have you taken my stars?

     He had given up trying to remember the name of the song he had been whistling incessantly for days. He had given up whistling for the moment as well; his parched lips and dry mouth made his forays into the realm of music a near-impossibility for now. His mind was abuzz with his mental replacement for the mystery song; it replayed over and over again the theme song from the opening credits of “The A-Team.” He had always loved those ancient television shows as a kid. He had always fancied himself a younger and scrawnier version of Mr. T, with fewer gold chains and more hair.

     I pity the fool…

     Father, where are my friends the stars? You did not ask my permission before you slaughtered the innocents and threw their blood into the sky.

     He attempted sleep, but as always, the unnecessary biological imperative eluded him. Instead, he laid on his back, looking into the frigid black desert sky. Never had he been in a place so cold and black. For all he knew, he could be floating in the void of space at that very moment, so dark was the world around him. He could be dead already.

     You are dead already. You’ve been dead for centuries.

     In the middle of a dead desert, a dead sky above, with only the grit of the desert ground beneath him to signal that he was indeed still a prisoner of gravity, he shut his eyes to shut out the black.

     Oh Father, where have you taken the stars?

     A flawless, featureless sky above, faded dying red embers of the fire the only illumination of an expanse like black velvet, the air was frigid; he was warm.

     He slept beside her, eyes twitching beneath closed eyelids in a dream she hoped was not at all like the nightmare within which they lived. She moved to get closer to him, rested her face on his chest, her hand playing with his chest hair, fingers combing though dark brown curls. She looked up, kissed his sweet sleeping mouth, tasted herself on his lips. She listened for, found his heartbeat. The silence of the dead world intensified every sound: each heartbeat a thunderclap, each inhalation and exhalation a grating windstorm.

     They had made love like forces of nature, like storm fronts colliding. They shifted as one entity between dimensions of heaven. In Simon, she had found what she had sought for eternities.

     In his sleep he turned, draped his arm over her back, instinctively pulled her closer to him. She smiled, more content than she had been in… Ever.

     She let sleep wash over her, knowing that tomorrow they would start the journey to Diablo. There was a long, cold road ahead of them, but together, she thought they could walk forever and never tire. She drifted off to sleep with a smile on her face and Simon in her thoughts.

     “What’ll it be, Ms. Jennings?”

     “Oh, I don’t drink.” She folded her hands on the bar.

     West frowned, pulling a dusty bottle of something brown and alcoholic from the dusty shelf of a dusty bar on the dusty main street of a dusty dead town. “Well, that’s a shame. You’ll have to start.” He unscrewed the top of the bottle, took a small pull, and painfully swallowed the amber liquid. He coughed, eyes squinted, eyebrows arched at the awful, wonderful taste, covering his mouth with the back of his right hand as his left hand gingerly placed the cover back on the bottle and put the bottle back on the shelf. “Or maybe not.”

     She smiled a sad smile of silver and terrible metal lace. “My mother was an alcoholic. They did a pretty good job of covering that one up. The Kennedy tradition.”

     West turned from the wall of bottles. “I’m sorry. I had no idea—”

     “Don’t worry about it. No one knew. But feel free to have a drink; don’t abstain just for my sake.”

     West sat down on a stool behind the bar facing Patra. He adjusted the wick of an ancient oil lantern they had found in an antiques store on the main street of town. It illuminated the bar with murky, somehow foul light. They had no reason to be here, but somehow it felt so right. This was one of the few remaining buildings of Diablo, and as such, it was one of the first last ties to humanity that they had seen in days. The force of the shattering spire had flattened almost everything in its path. Fortunately, Diablo was located on the other side of the mountain, so it had been somewhat sheltered from the blast. The bar was a sturdy concrete block building. No frills, but sturdy. And still here. So they sat in an abandoned bar in an abandoned town in an abandoned world. Anywhere was better than beneath the mountain in that alien vessel.

     “Oh, what the hell.” West reached behind him, took down a bottle of Remy-Martin champagne cognac. “Classy stuff for a beer-town like Diablo.” With some resignation he saw a tap behind the bar for the beer of his youth, Killian’s Irish Red. How tragic that electricity had rendered the kegs of beer below the bar useless flat piss-water weeks ago. He pulled a dusty glass from under the top of the bar, wiped it off with his rough drab sleeve. He filled the glass partway with the syrupy amber liquid. He reached under the bar again and pulled out an unexpected surprise for Patra: a warm glass bottle of Pepsi. There was a case of the drink underneath the bar, looking strangely out of place.

     He swirled the cognac around the inside of the glass, admired its color. He held it up before Patra, who had opened her Pepsi. “Here’s to…” West frowned, not really knowing what to toast to anymore.

     “Here’s to fellow travelers.” Patra smiled widely, her glimmering eyes searching West for approval. He smiled in return. “To fellow travelers.” The clink of glass and the sweet fire of cognac filled the cool evening air.

     West sighed, content for the moment, leaned back on his stool. “What this place needs is a mean old bartender with a shotgun behind the bar, some crazy leather-clad Hell’s Angels playing pool, and a jukebox that only plays country unless you want to get yourself beaten with a pool cue in the parking lot.” He squinted, leaned over and reached for something out of Patra’s line of sight. Patra was not surprised when he pulled a sawed-off shotgun from underneath the bar. West laughed, eyebrows raised, placed it back. “Well, one out of three ain’t bad. Where’s the Kenny Rogers albums?”

     Patra grinned, took another drink from the Pepsi bottle, swallowed slowly. “This really is pretty bad stuff. Must have been sitting here forever.”

     “Not much call for soda pop in a working man’s town.” Patra noted how the cognac glass rested gently in West’s upturned palm, stem nestled between middle and ring fingers. Very civilized. “Trust me on that one.”

     “Where are they? The miners, the soldiers, anyone?”

     West sipped slowly, contemplative. He cleared his throat and looked into his glass. “Well, I’d suspect that they’re in places very much like the place you were.”

     “The tower? All those ships—”

     “I saw hundreds of those vessels dropping off human payloads at that one tower. I doubt it was the only one. The planet’s probably covered with them.”

     “What are they for?”