Broken: A Plague Journal (6 page)

“Don’t—!”

The helmet hissed and released, retracted into his clavicle armor. The silver leapt. He exhaled, closed his eyes.

Benton gasped as the silver blackened, fell to the packed snow in lazy swirls of ash.

Paul cleared his throat. “Adam, what’s your wife’s name?”

West blinked. “What?”

“What’s her name?”

Eyes narrowed and jaw clenched. “Abigail.”

“Right. Frost, what’s your West’s wife’s name?”

She looked from West to Paul, confused. “Patra.”

“Any children?”

“Two daughters. Twins.”

“West?”

“One son.”

“And therein lies the problem.” Pasts and futures intertwined in the knot of an impossible present. “How’d Abby die?”

West blinked. “In childbirth.”

“Right.” Paul flicked the last of the silver from his claws. “Judith and Judas, Patra and Abigail, West and West. Frost, have you ever met her before?” His outstretched hand indicated Benton.

“I don’t think so.”

“You wouldn’t have. She doesn’t exist here. West does, though...”

“What’s this mean?”

“Maire’s breaking through. She’s achieving Delta point completion.”

Paul’s cardiac shield began to beep. Benton rushed to his side, looked over the monitor. “They’re locking on to our signal.”

“Save these coordinates.”

“Done.”

“We’ll be back, Frost. As soon as we can. We’ll bring reinforcements.”

“But what if—”

“Just wait for

and all was static, shimmer, shift as the three soldiers of the Judith faded from the plain of snow and silver.

Frost, alone now, palmed her communications panel. “Get me Commander West.”

A formation of Judas Muj fighters screamed through the sky of perpetual winter.

“Great timing, Jud. What happened with our insertion?”

“Call it a short circuit. We don’t know yet.” An army of Judith technicians plugged, unplugged, analyzed, removed armor, placed nitrox masks over gasping mouths.

Paul felt the ache of reality begin to pound once again in the place behind his eyes. “There’s been a few developments. Do you have our output coordinates?”

“They’re locked. Rest for a while. I’ll debrief you after you’re reloaded.”

“Sounds like kink.”

“You wish.”

Paul smiled, sighed as he leaned back into the reload chamber. Technicians removed his armor. They slammed the chamber door shut above him. Through its clear metal cap, Paul observed Benton’s already-reloading figure in the oven next to his. Cutting lights moved in to flay her. His eyes crawled from peaceful, sleeping eyelids to gentle philtrum to supra-sternal notch, the placement of her nipples, the indentation of navel and the soft southern path to the pudendal cleft. Flesh flew away in the thinnest strips as the spinning whiteness recycled her body. Skin, fat, muscle, bone were removed and then rebuilt with untainted code from the Judith ocean. Hairless. It grew. Muscles toned. A wash of freckles, a mole, a scar. Breath of life and her eyes opened. She caught his gaze and threw it not ungently back.

He closed his eyes and felt his layers of offense and defense stripped from him by harsh, beautiful, sensual light.

“Feel better?”

“Like a summer’s eve.” He toweled tousled hair. “You’re looking better.”

Judith leaned against the chamber entrance, arms folded. She looked over the flesh constructs: the aged West, the hairy author, the ripe smoothness of Benton, brutal cardiac shield scar painfully visible above and between hanging breasts. She self-consciously suited up under the feminine gaze.

he has good taste

Paul reached out.
so does she. now stop ogling her.

fair enough.
“What’d you see?”

schlick
of armor closing over his arms, legs, chest. Cardiac lock. “Your favorite one-hearted psycho is bleeding through into the Whenstream.”

“Fuck.” Judith slumped. “You’re the author. What’s this mean?”

“It means

two distinct universes colliding, splintering both along that fault to history-sized fragments: rupturing, rending, riving, splitting, cleaving. It meant that two distinct universes that I’d written into existence were merging into one.

dissolution

then strike in my name. Strike for all of those whose lives were shattered. For the trillions dead and broken. For those who still bear scars of flesh and thought. Strike because I don’t want my children to die for the Purpose. Strike because there is evil, and it is not me. Strike because history will remember the loss if you don’t.

fading

I’ve begun a war of desire. A war of technology.

All fears realized, all hopes questioned, all boundaries erased, all secrets of form and space brought forward into hesitant light.

None of us will survive this

intact, but it’s not a good chance. If she’s in the Stream already, chances are she’s started all over again.”

“And you’re convinced this Jag When is the crossover point?”

“It’s Delta. Silver is off the scale, and Enemy pattern exhibits a sharp decline. It’s where she broke through.”

“No good... No good.” Judith activated the display. A glowing representation of the Timestream flickered to life. “Okay, we can divert forces from—”

“It won’t be enough.”

“The Fleet’s—”

“She’ll equip the Enemy with silver. If she’s focusing on Delta Point, I wouldn’t be surprised if she has forces en route to the trees right now.”

“Shit, never thought it’d come to this.” West tapped nervous fingertips on the display surface. “Place any bets, Miss Maths?”

Benton thought for a moment. “Negative to at least five decimals.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“Enough.” Paul’s fingers went to his temple: throbbing with the silver ache. “We gather forces, we travel back, we take out the Zero-Four probe before silver infestation.”

“Easier said.” Judith smirked. “But you can do it. Get out of here.”

“See you tomorrow, Jud.” Paul rose with West and Benton. “Whenever tomorrow might be.”

“Watch your ass.” As the chamber door sizzled shut, something crawled between her hearts, took residence there, and began to gnaw. She shuddered.

They left.

Four hearts: one, and frequent exhalation, shudder, the scrape of exquisitely-manicured nails over flesh, over metal, over flesh and:

She realized through closing her eyes, opening to watch the ceiling spin, the gritting of teeth, fingers through hair, that the absence of stubble was a refreshing and welcome change, and that she could feel the inverse imprint of dimples on her inner thighs as Maire smiled, looked up, went back to work, the drape of raven locks, curled with effort, hours, sweat, hiding most of their collective sin:

The inhuman tongue shaped, re-shaped, the central division splitting, flicking, rearranging and reconceptualizing the meaning of pleasure, of desire, as the interior vocal cords housed within resonated reflexively, whispering without thought through muscle, through the tips of the snake’s voice, one ruddy finger caressing, one circling, both speaking into wetness and soft, soft magenta:
do we
and with a frantic shifting of position to the other tongue, to other, darker recesses, bound not with teeth, but with lips, kissing, dragging, inhaling the essence of
have an agreement?

Maire arose from thighs, wiped moisture from her mouth. She smiled over a tongue closing upon itself, sealing with mucus both her own and another’s. Shattered voices repaired as one:
Do we, sweet-ness?
The tugging of a voice formed beyond the vibration of flesh, somewhere within the electricity, the halo.

The response was slow, not as a result of thought or consideration or reticence, but simply because Kath couldn’t calm her hearts enough to form words. Hands now idled from intertwining with hair danced lost across her bare thighs, abdomen, breasts, settled over her cardiac plate. La-la-duh-dub. La-la-duh-dub. Slowing, the edge of orgasm, the recession of the interior oceans of loss, of desire for a moment, an hour, a day with this dark partner, replaced with the richness of pleasure.

“Of course... Of course.”

“Good.” Her smile seemed misplaced, given the decision, the alliance. “Blinds off.”

The panels walling the entire chamber shifted from murky gray to reveal a projection of the planet surface far above them. Realized in four dimensions, the outside was a disconcerting veil of sensuality: the bitter wind, the brittle scrape of the lumber schools drowsing through waves of chlorostatic mist far above the surface, the heady intrusion of pine pitch into membranes just now waking from aromas hidden in uncovering, in opening, in sex.

Maire rolled on to her back and snuggled against Kath’s side. It started from above: the singing of the trees, lilting, howling, branches miles long quivering through the mists, sparks floating down, a lazy display of fireworks that sputtered out long before planet impact. The song...

“This is where it begins.” Maire looked into her eyes, lids narrowing, lips bracing with resolve. “This is how we win the war.”

Kath looked into a night sky brazen with perpetual sunset from the system’s binary stars, the great black forms of the sentient trees blocking out swathes of meager starpoints, their own shower of silver falling to ground, never reaching, never reaching:

Silver.

It was terror and it was beauty and it was all.

Michael made the final decision and launched the Zero-Four probe from a Gauss pipeline that stretched miles within the planet to the void between stars, between times: one hundred grams of alloys and plastics and the echoes of biology. The primary propulsion rockets separated and the solar sail deployed in a flash of gossamer golden filaments. The sail spread out to grasp the stars, and a fusion concussion fed the ever-increasing velocity of the precious spacecraft. At several million astronomical units and several hundred thousand years, the unit achieved nine-tenths light speed. The journey of infinity had begun.

Nanotechnological ramscoops collected the materials required to procreate, and in the night between the galaxies, the tiny vessel created an exact copy of itself. The two remnants of a civilization now eons dead separated, and for an instant, the first machine felt an emotion. It dismissed the feeling and began to replicate another child. The second vessel set off on an alternate trajectory, the translucent solar sail sweeping eerily before it, mute golden wings in the void of silence and nothing, forever departing from its immaculate and sole parent.