Authors: Paul Hughes
A perfect silence, in those moments before dawn. Two people, under stars.
Two people, under the stairs, or at least what he thought were stairs, or people. Not stairs... And not people, either. Disorienting motion down dimly-lit hallways, sound of airlocks cycling open before and closed behind the stretcher.
Eyes attempt to focus, but are unable. Choked with silver, swimming with that vision of futures eons dead, the vision of the young woman with the gentle voice and the bitter eyes.
Static snap of phase shielding deactivating. Air cool, faint breeze from within the
Detach. Floating free. A stretcher surrounded by angels, falling into the earth, falling down a silver tube. Their faces above him, gentle faces above him, walls of the Seattle Gate sliding away at impossible speeds. The angels remained unruffled, their dun robes hanging languidly in a gravity projected by silver. Reynald’s remaining hair whipped around his face, and he although he could feel that his mouth was open, he was not sure if there was a scream emanating or not.
The angel who could have been Nan leaned over Reynald, peered into his eyes. He was unresponsive, yet still alive. Respiratory rate was nearly undetectable. Eyes were unblinking, unmoving, locked in some dream that Maire would hopefully be able to unravel.
sand
falling to knees
shadow of that shard, that accusatory claw sticking into the sky, the symbol of her end
his fist outstretched, clenched in a rage beyond expression, body shaking
maggie don’t—
—leave me, Hunter. I can’t do this without you.”
The sky was a torrent of sound: the city alert, the static scream of phase engines as the defense forces flew from the atmosphere to engage the incoming enemy fleet, the human tumult of hundreds of mothers who had brought their sons to the evacuation point outside of the city’s Complex.
Hunter watched the sky, holding that tattered bear, hands clutching velveteen. A child within the beginning of the war that had killed his father and would eventually kill him.
Helen wanted to break, felt herself breaking, knew her heart would soon tear itself apart in fear and in the depth of her loss.
Angels were swarming, emotionlessly tearing children
sons
from the arms of their mothers. A great crack like thunder filled the sky above the complex as the wreckage of a slither lost phase containment and erased a sizeable amount of the lower atmosphere from existence. Flaming shards of black metallish rained down upon the crowd gathered before the complex gate, and many families were spared the pain of separation by the certainty of an end.
Helen threw herself over Hunter, who cried out as the full weight of his mother slammed him to the ground. Helen was a small woman, but Hunter was a smaller boy. He heard the angels shouting in that voice that lingered between the ears and tickled behind the eyes
hurry, hurry, little soldiers
and he wanted to answer, he wanted to obey, but Mommy wasn’t getting up, and Mommy was pinning him to the ground.
Hunter panicked.
Helen was coughing, it sounded like coughing, it had to be coughing, not gasping, anything but gasping. He wriggled from underneath his mother as another wave of phased flak struck the city. He pushed his mother onto her back, and it was only then that he saw the perfectly-cauterized hole in her chest, stretching all the way to the sidewalk underneath.
“Mommy?”
Two tears slid from Helen’s silver eyes, and she tried to smile, tried to reassure her son that things would be all right, but the air was gone, and no matter how hard she tried to inhale, to catch her breath, to form a word with lips slick with something, something copper, something silver, every time she tried to speak, she drowned a little more.
“Mommy!”
The angel picked him up from behind, held him tightly as the little boy struggled against her holometallic grasp. The angel embraced him with that screen door sensation that was not and never could be human, walked away from the fading body of Helen Windham, whose arm reached out to touch her son, hand outstretched, fingers yearning for the touch of all she had left in this world. The angel walked away without a glance back, but Hunter fought, screaming, sobbing, watching his mother’s arm fall to the ground, seeing her body go limp, feeling that silver return to the eternal silence.
Helen felt her arm hit the ground, felt her heart stop, felt blood flood into the remains of her lungs, her muscles relax, her bladder release. Her eyes dried, and she tried to blink, but control had gone, and her body was no longer hers. She could see them, the men of the war, fighting the invaders in the sky above Maire’s City. How many had fought with her husband? How many had seen the worlds of the void set to the flame of the Jihad?
She felt the touch of their minds as the silver began to dissemble, heard the screams of the young men of the war as their vessels shattered.
Is this what you want?
Flickering of static within synapse
Helen’s head lolled to the side, and she saw Honeybear Brown in the dust beside her, silently staring back with his one eye. A plume of smoke drifted from his hide, where a microscopic sliver of slither had mortally wounded the toy. Another cloud of piercing shrapnel fell on the city. One shard struck close enough to Helen to crater the pavement, scattering dust all around, clouding her unresponsive eyes, stealing her vision, stippling her flesh with bloody craters of its own.
Sensation fading... Pain, yet
She
saw her son holding that bear, smiling his quiet smile, waving to the little girl behind the fence
saw her husband in his uniform at the farewell ceremony, felt the sob within her chest
saw her fiancé walk into the coffee shop, looked back down, pretending to be engrossed in The Stillness Between
saw the soldier run up to her from the street, holding two letters
saw
felt
tears. and
helen?
his touch... an eternal embrace. a resonance of one soul shared by two people and
stillness
A flicker of electricity, a dissolution of pattern, silver fading into nothing.
you know... you do
eternal embrace. solace.
Helen fell to stillness.
“Jean Reynald.”
The voice came from the shadows of the room, shadows he could not see with his now-non-existent eyes, but shadows that he could feel with the sockets from which liquid silver seeped. Angels lifted him from the stretcher, held him upright as force generators took him from their grasp, pulled him into the center of the spherical chamber.
Tongue wet lips, jaw unclenched in an attempt to form speech. The flesh of his face, hands, entire body was numb, pins and needles.
“Don’t try to speak; you’re far beyond that now.”
He heard footsteps, sensed the owner of the female voice approach.
“You don’t need to speak, Jean. Just see.”
Fingertips brushed his cheek with the touch of ice, sandpaper brush of something not human, yet in human form. He felt the silver teardrops solidify on his cheeks, so cold, so alien. They fell from his face, mercury pellets. He blinked and saw for the first time in
“Hannah?”
She smiled. “Not this time, Reynald. Call me Maire.”
“What is... Why am I—”
“I need the code.”
“I don’t know any—”
She struck out, slicing a fingernail into Reynald’s neck. The wound wasn’t deep, but a line of crimson slid down his neck, clavicle, puddled in supra-sternal notch before winding into the hair of his chest.
Maire leaned in close, looking directly into Reynald’s eyes as she licked a bit of blood from his neck. She pulled back, tasted her lips.
“That code, Jean. Genetic code.”
“Commander, what is it?”
Reynald did not have an answer for his subordinate. Windham stood beside him, in awe, weapon still held before him, as if a projectile weapon would be able to stop the enemy. The human forces were alive at the whim of the projected.
Reynald cleared his throat, tapped the side of his neck twice to activate the direct connection to Command. “We need aerial reinforcement. Align satkills to our coordinates.”
The connection responded in his ear. “Wait for orders.”
The atomic had created a beautiful blast crater in the countryside, dozens of miles across, at least a mile deep. The strike had been intended to destroy the entry point of the projected enemy, but the visual confirmation revealed otherwise.
“It goes deeper than we thought.”
Deeper was an understatement, Reynald thought to himself. They had assumed that the projected were coming out of an alien vessel under the surface of the planet. They had assumed that bombing the entry point would destroy the vessel and end the enemy threat.
At the bottom of the blast crater, Reynald saw the twisted and burned edge of a circular hole, an immense silver cylinder sinking into the earth. Their atomic attack had blown the top off of a tube that someone had built into the center of the planet.
Someone.
The projecteds were standing at the edge of the tube, androgynous, motionless. Some of the men had taken to calling their enemy “angels.” Reynald and his soldiers were among a very select group who had survived more than one engagement with the projected humans. He suspected that this would be the last encounter. He could feel the end of this war approaching, and something in his gut told him that it would not be an end beneficial to the human race.
“Orders, sir?”
Reynald impatiently raised his hand, silencing Windham. He looked at the crater’s floor with his implants, magnifying his field of vision until he could make out the individual faces of the projecteds. So uniform. So emotionless.
“Satkill offline. Reinforcement unavailable. Hold your position and wait for orders.”
Reynald shook his head. If those projecteds decided to attack, his forces would be outnumbered and slaughtered by the angels.
As if reading his thoughts, the angel within Reynald’s magnified layer of vision turned its head and started walking toward him. The hundreds of other projecteds began to follow.
Windham
slammed another EM pack into his weapon, brought the scope up to his eye. Reynald placed his hand on the top of the weapon, pushed it down to aim at the ground.
“This time, I think they want to talk. Hold your fire.”
“I knew you would understand, Jean. I knew you were different than the hot-blooded men in suits who thought they ran the world.”