The Next Thing I Knew (Heavenly) (27 page)

We merged with the soldiers.  I sent out a burst of hatred so pure into the one I took that he passed out.  The others dropped.  I left mine and aimed for another.  I hit him the same way.  He went down.  But my strength evaporated and I faltered.  Chris and Mike took down another before they too fell.  Jane struggled free of her first soldier and launched at another.  Bethany was out cold after her second attack.

Confusion and panic hit the ranks.  The soldiers yelled in alarm as their comrades collapsed for no apparent reason.  Only Azriel remained calm and none of us could touch him with Harb in the way.  Azriel fired at a casket in the center.  I saw the name on it:  Chris.  I dove at Azriel, willing myself to merge with him.  Harb's presence acted like a shield and I bounced off.

I screamed bloody murder as light enveloped the casket.  I felt an arm on my shoulder.  I looked into Chris's blue eyes.  His lovely sad eyes.

"I love you, Lucy.  Always."  And he was gone.

I stared at the empty space where Chris had been, my mind in shock.

Azriel took aim and blasted another casket.  Missy went with it.  Then Tatiana Ivanovna, then Liu Chan, Piotr Ivanovich, and Erika Jannsen.  Azriel could see us with Harb inside him.  He smiled.  The bastard was enjoying this murder spree.  Mike staggered to his feet and into the last remaining soldier standing.  He took him down before slumping out of the Shaval's body and onto the floor.  Mike's eyes were closed, his body translucent from weakness.

All we could do was watch helplessly as Azriel had his way.  We had nothing to fight him with.

"A shame he won't be awake when he dies," Azriel said.  He took aim at Mike's casket.

White energy speared into Azriel.  He and Harb screamed simultaneously as Azriel's body disintegrated from the center out.  Harb ejected and fell to the ground, still screaming.  His body morphed back into that of the young boy I'd first met.

I launched myself at him though I felt so weak I could hardly move.  I wrapped my hands around his scrawny neck and squeezed for all I was worth.  Harb's face reddened.  I willed for him to suffer.  I wanted him to pay for the murders he'd committed.  I wanted the floors red with his blood and hot with his agony.

Chris is gone.  Chris is gone forever.

Someone grabbed me and pulled me back against their chest.  I screamed and thrashed until the last ounce of strength evaporated from my body.

"I've got you," Kyle said.  Bob's unconscious form slumped nearby.  I'd asked Kyle to bring him in case we found the caskets and needed to move them.  He'd been the one to kill Azriel.

"Everyone's dead, Kyle.  They're all dead."

"I know, sweetie.  I know."

I felt his tears drop into my hair.  I turned and hugged him and we sobbed together.

Jane brought us back to our senses.  "We've got to go," she said.  "Load the bodies now before those soldiers wake up."  She formed a length of rope from nothing, tied Harb's unconscious form with them, and secured him in the ship.  I knew from Ms. Tate's new order in Heavenly that Harb couldn't flit while tied up like that.

Kyle nodded and merged with Bob.  The gel caskets were easy for one Shaval to move.  And now there weren't many left:  only eight, although mine and Harb's were unaccounted for.  We searched the apartment but couldn't find them.  Harb had probably hidden them with care in case Azriel double-crossed him.

The rest of us were exhausted, too weak to fly, so Kyle used Bob to fly us back to the ship in an aircar.  As the minutes stretched, my rage gathered to a point where I could barely control the seething demon roaring to get out.  I wanted payback for the crimes perpetrated against Earth.  For the deaths of my dear friends and the one I loved.

Bethany returned to consciousness on the way back.  She hugged me and cried the rest of the trip.  Chris had been her best friend like Kyle was mine.  If I'd lost Kyle too, I would probably have gone catatonic.  But now my sense of purpose was crystal clear.  My intent had changed and I had gone cold.

Mike awoke and lunged at Harb, murder in his eyes.  It took several of us to restrain him although he walloped the kid a few times.  I noticed that Harb still had purple bruises on his neck where I'd squeezed.  Something was happening to our ghostly bodies.  Either we'd changed them or we'd figured out how to truly injure others like us now.  I didn't know.  I didn't care.  I was happy.  It meant I could hurt Harb.  It also meant he couldn't escape so long as he was bound.

When we reached the ship, I took a head count.  Only four hours remained until nightfall and our assigned duties.  But now our link to the database administrator was gone with Chris.  I was short two people, and Kyle was short by five.  He could deal with fewer since they only needed the three battleship captains.  The ships were so highly automated that the rest of the five-man crew was hardly necessary to pilot them to Earth.

Since Jane and a few others could already control their hosts, I assigned a couple of them to control another committee member as well so we'd have the votes to change the database.  I told Kyle I'd assimilate one of the battleship navigators since we'd need one of them to program in Earth's coordinates once we had control.

Another plan formed in my head.  I didn't dare tell anyone what it was but it was there and it probably needed doing.

Harb drifted in and out of consciousness.  The death blow to Azriel had messed him up good.  I took the opportunity to merge with him during his discombobulation and discovered where he'd hidden my body and his.  I took Fergie in her aircar to pick them up and delivered them to the ship without telling the others just in case I decided to vaporize Harb's corpse.  Or kick his body into the far reaches of space.  Then I dropped her back at home and worked on my side plan.

The day of the vote arrived.  As committee head, I called the vote using Fergie, saying routine maintenance was required to update obsolete records.  It was a standard vote according to Fergie's memories, and it also gave the database administrator wider latitude.  With our control, the vote passed by a wide margin and I realized that it probably would have passed if only because Fergie called the vote and the other members respected her judgment when it came to routine matters like that.  Still, it was better to be safe.

Jane had taken double duty as the database administrator as well and downloaded the encryption key from the committee to the console that controlled the database.  From there it was easy to run a search on all references to Earth by its Shaval designation.  Rather than delete the entries which might stand out to an audit, we changed the records to show that our solar system had no useful resources or life in it.  That would keep us off Shaval radar, maybe forever, or maybe just a few years depending on variables out of our control.

She also altered the records of the Rrilk who were working on Earth to indicate their duties were finished and they were allowed to go to their home world.  I wished I could do more to help the Rrilk overall, maybe free the entire from enslavement, but that required a lot more than just fiddling around with the database.  One baby step at a time.

Next up were the battleships.

I updated Zhrrii and Ciirr with our current status.  Both were more than ready to get the hell out of Dodge.  I joined Kyle on his shiny new battleship.  We'd decided to imprison the Shaval crew from the ships since each one performed a useful duty that we'd need to learn if we wanted to actually use the battleships to do anything besides look pretty.  We did merge takedowns on all crewmembers but the captains since they were already under the control of Kyle and his gang.  Over the past day, I'd taken time to assimilate the ship's navigator.  Otherwise it would've taken forever to figure out how to get back to Earth.  That was my excuse, anyway.  I had other plans that I didn't want to share with the others.

I stood on the bridge of Kyle's battleship in the Shaval navigator's lithe female body and gazed at the rotating blue planet below.

"Beautiful," I said, though my heart felt cold with anguish.

"Yeah," Kyle said, a tremble in his voice.  The Shaval captain stood almost ten feet tall with broad shoulders and cropped gray hair.  He looked too grim and noble to have such a sad little quirk in his voice.

 Kyle had locked the other Shaval crew members in the brig after we'd taken them down.  Now all that was left was setting the coordinates for Earth and going home.  I strode across the large bridge and to the navigation console.

A blip appeared on the communications console.  Zhrrii was signaling us from the smaller ship we'd hijacked to get here from Earth.  I activated the battleship's hangar controls and Zhrrii ferried the smaller ship inside.  I entered the coordinates for Earth and transmitted them to the other two battleships now under our control.  The lumbering space cruisers weren't required to report their destinations to any central location unlike civilian ships.  The Shaval military wouldn't have a clue where they'd gotten off to.  How pissed would that make someone, I wondered.  These behemoths had to be worth a gazillion dollars.

The other battleships under our control acknowledged receipt of coordinates.  We'd put the gel caskets with the corpses of the respective team members on board the other battleships since we had no clue what would happen if they were out of range of their old bodies and got yanked off the ship while in that other universe.  The thought of it made me shudder.

The other two ships rotated slowly away from Zalista and faced outward.  They shifted and winked into another dimension.

Kyle put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed.  "Let's go home."

"Okay," I said, and activated a command on the console.

Multiple white beams speared from the battleship.  One lanced into the large grey space station that encircled Zalista and blew a chunk from it.  Another vaporized the capital buildings in Chandara.  The others beams destroyed nearby defense satellites.  Kyle gasped as a cloud of steam, dust, and debris became visible on the planet surface, marring the otherwise crystal blue.  Bethany cried out.  I watched in numb fascination at the magnitude of destruction and murder I'd just committed.  I watched as the massive space station cracked and tore itself apart under the strain.  I imagined the bodies being blown into space at this moment, hurling briefly out into the expanse before caught in the gravitational pull and burned into dust in the atmosphere.

But revenge didn't fill me with a sense of justice or make me happy.  It made me feel emptier.  I continued to watch the injured planet as our ship rotated toward home and shifted away.

Nobody said a word about the atrocity I'd committed on the way back.  We talked about plans to revive Earth, about how best to defend her, and all sort of other things except the elephant in the room.  Actually, forget elephants, this was a one-ton monster.  If God existed he was probably preparing a very special place in Hell for me right this very minute.  A place right next door to the Shaval.

I already felt like I was there.  Grief swelled in me every time I thought of Chris.  Every time I thought how I could have saved him.  I couldn't have done anything though.  I'd been useless without a host to stop Azriel.

Harb was still tied up in the smaller ship in the cargo bay.  I hadn't decided what to do with him.  I'd planned to nuke his body while he watched but since the mass destruction of Chandara, I'd lost the will to do anything.  There was no justice that would make me feel better.  Only having Chris back would do that.

* * * * *

We arrived on Earth a few days later.  Less than a hundred people gathered to express their thanks and welcome us home as heroes.  The families of those who'd been lost mourned them.  My parents, of course, were still absent, presumably in Ms. Tate's evil hands.  I couldn't think about that right now.  There was too much else to do.  My emotional range seesawed from comfortable numbness, to leaden grief, to apoplectic rage.  It made me question my sanity.

Bethany saw Chris's parents and ran to them, crying the entire way.  Their eyes lit with understanding the moment they saw her expression.  They beckoned me over and brought me into the fold.

"We're so proud of you," Chris's father, Mr. Rogers, said.

"Your parents would be so proud of you too," Mrs. Rogers said.  "There are plenty of us in Heavenly trying to make things right.  Unfortunately Bertha has too many people under her control."

"Bertha?" I asked.

"Bertha Tate.  Otherwise known as the God Hand."

I tried to laugh but even that seemed unfunny.  "I never knew Ms. Tate's first name.  I'll be sure to use that next time I see her."

"Things are bad."

"We're going to make things right on Earth," I said. 
And then kick some ass in Heavenly.
  For the first time in days, a sense of purpose returned to me.  We had a job to do.  I had something that would take my mind off Chris, at least in short stretches.

The battleships had miniature automatic factories in them used to fabricate all sorts of things the military might need in a campaign on another planet.  Cloned body parts were among those items.  It took a couple of months to figure out the proper tweaks, but using the combined knowledge of the captured Shaval, we were able to configure it to make human bodies using our DNA.

We had DNA samples from all team members stored in the Rrilk cube.  After several raging disagreements, we decided to use Chris's DNA for the first clone.  I forced the issue until everyone was sick of arguing and told me to do whatever the hell I wanted.  I had wild ideas about what might happen, pipe dreams and fantasies most likely.

We placed Chris's DNA sample in a large clear tub of gel.  The cloner analyzed the DNA sample and started weaving a body from the gel proteins.  At first it was only a tiny button of flesh encased in a sea of gel.  A knot of tension in my stomach tightened every day as I checked the progress.  By the end of the first week, the bones were in place.  By the second week some internal organs were identifiable.

I held my undisclosed desires close to my heart.  I hoped against hope that this clone would somehow revive Chris's soul and bring him back.  That whatever magic existed in the universe would do the trick and give him new life.

I think Kyle knew what I wanted, but he remained silent.  He'd argued against using Chris's DNA for the first test, instead volunteering himself.  Nobody knew what would happen.  Maybe the body would come with a soul already inside, or it might come empty.  Maybe we weren't really souls in the first place, just trans-dimensional beings created by a massive discharge of life when the Shaval had killed us and the real Lucy Morgan and friends were all truly dead.  End of story.

The questions gnawed at me deeper and deeper until I could barely stand the passage of time.  I literally could not wait for the cloner to finish.

By the third week, sinews, muscles and veins showed through the translucent skin.  The body was young, perhaps the equivalent of Chris when he was fourteen.  There were ways to set the age of the final clone but we'd left the parameters alone.

One month, two days, and six hours after starting, the cloner declared the body complete.  It sent a shock of electricity to the heart and a puff of oxygen into the lungs.  The clone coughed and started breathing.  The console displayed the vitals:  healthy and functional.  After verifying normal function for an hour, the cloner placed Chris's new body onto a bed where it lay staring at the ceiling, occasionally blinking.

I merged with Diana's body and went to him.  I took his hand and held it.  "Chris, it's Lucy.  Are you in there?"

He looked at me with a placid expression.  Then he looked back at the ceiling.  I instructed the computer to scan his brain patterns.  It showed normal base autonomic activity.  Higher functions showed almost nil.  Not much going on upstairs.  I snapped my fingers in his face.  He looked at me again with a blank expression.  I took his hand and pulled.  He lay there staring at me, not moving a muscle to help.  I don't think he knew what I was doing.  After all, his mind was a blank.  Diana's body was plenty strong enough to carry him.  Instead, I pulled him into a sitting position and swung his legs over the side of the table.  He sat there, staring ahead at the wall.

Maybe taking him to the planet surface would do something.  I dressed him in shorts and a t-shirt, loaded him in a shuttle, and took him down to his old neighborhood where he'd grown up.  After a frustrating hour of attempts, I gave up teaching him to walk.  He tottered around like an infant, constantly toppling over his long legs.  Only Diana's strength and height kept him from falling over.  I could hold each of his hands in mine and walk behind him like one would teach an infant to walk.  I cursed at the futility but loaded him onto one of the hover stretchers in the back of the shuttle.  It morphed into a seat that fit him and I pushed him inside his old house like an invalid.

I had cleaned up his house and mine during the cloning process if for no other reason than to give me something to do.  I took him to his room and showed him Chris's stuff.  I did that for hours without a positive response or spark of interest from him.  Even infants had some responses.  Maybe something had gone wrong with brain development.  He learned to pick up things and look at them but he didn't have the curiosity to examine them.

I called Bethany and asked her to help.  She showed up in Laylah's body.  Her face twisted in disgust when she saw him and almost left.  I begged her to stay.  She spoke with Chris for a while about the old days and incidents from high school.  He stared at her the same way he had me.  Then he pooped in his pants.

"He's not in there," Bethany said.  "This is just a shell.  And it's wrong to have given
it
a life like this."  She waved her hand to ward off the odor.  "Chris is gone."

I clenched my fists in an effort to hold my temper at bay.  "Maybe he's not.  Maybe this will bring him back."

"No."  She shook her head as a tear rolled down her cheek.  "This just makes it that much harder to let him go."  She broke into more tears and looked away.  "I can't do this, Lucy.  I have to move on.  You do too."

I ground my teeth.  "I'm not giving up that easy."

"It's not giving up if it's impossible."

I barked out a laugh.  "You're saying that after everything we've been through.  After everything we've done?  We've done the impossible.  We survived death and maybe Chris somehow survived the destruction of his body."

"If he did, this--this construct isn't bringing him back."  She made a noise of disgust and left.

I cleaned up the clone's rear end and used Diana's holo-emitter to create another pair of clean pants.  I loaded him into the shuttle and took him to a new facility the Rrilk had built near Zhrrii's cube.  Word had spread like wildfire about the cloning technology so we'd had the battleships build several more cloning units and placed them in the facility which everyone called the Factory.  We asked for candidates and received more than we could handle.  Out of those we took ten individuals and cloned their bodies.  Each would take a month to create, but we had fifty cloners online by then.

I talked to Chris's clone every day, trying to get a response.  But each day passed like the last.  His autonomic functions kept on ticking while everything else stayed close to flat line.  The auto-doc unit warned that the clone's brain was slowly becoming atrophied as were its muscles.  The clone could walk and manipulate objects with its hands, but only under direct guidance.

"Lucy you have to give this up," Kyle said to me one day.  "You haven't done anything but babysit this thing since we returned.  Our parents are still trapped in Heavenly and there are people who need our help right now."

"I can't leave him.  What if he comes back?"

"He's not, Lucy."  Kyle pounded the table where the clone lay and looked at the diagnostic console.  "He's gone.  Let it be, just for a day or so.  The first batch of clones is done and we need to help these people into their new bodies."

I gazed at the clone, at how I could see Chris in every line and every detail of its flesh.  But I saw nothing in the eyes.  No love, no recognition, no desire to exist.  Kyle was right.  I'd been so selfish with my time.  I needed to help the people who were still around.  Rejuvenating the human race would give me purpose enough to care about something else for a change.

Kyle, Jane, and others from our team had been training the test subjects and showing them how to merge with a body.  When the clones were done, we took them inside.  I was assigned the old guy of the group, Tom Sanders.  He approached his clone and gasped at the sight.

"It's so strange seeing me lying there breathing.  But it looks like I'm not even really alive."

"That's exactly what your clone is right now," I said.  "Just a hunk of meat with no spark.  Are you ready to dive in?"

"I dive into the body like they do in the movies?"

I laughed.  "Sorry, bad idiom.  Are you ready to start the process?"

He nodded.  His hands trembled and he gulped.  "You're so young.  Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"It's how we saved the Earth, Tom."  I should put that on my resume, I thought.

"If something goes wrong, will I die for good?"

I didn't know the answer to that, not under these particular circumstances.  But I had experience.  I could guess.  "You'll be fine.  If you don't like it, you can leave the body."  I pointed to Diana's slumbering form in a chair nearby.  "I'll have her on hand to help you afterward."

He licked his lips and placed a hand on the clone.  He closed his eyes and a moment later the body sucked him in.  It was unlike any merge I'd seen before.  The clone's eyes opened.  It screamed.  I heard asynchronous screams echo from the other chambers where the other test subjects were.  The clone jerked upright and whipped his head left and right.  He saw Diana's body.  His face blanched in terror and he backed away.

I merged with Diana and stood up, motioning him to calm down.  He kept screaming and backing away.  His screaming was driving me crazy so I had the auto-doc sedate him.  I heard other screams go quiet as my team mates got the same idea.  We were each in a Shaval body so we easily moved the new bodies into a single room where we could keep an eye on them.

"What the hell?" I asked.

"No idea," Kyle said.  "We can't communicate with them in our Shaval bodies.  It terrifies them.  Maybe they haven't assimilated or something."

"Or maybe it's because their minds are blank," I said, a wash of horror sweeping over me.  "What if we just wiped them clean?"

"Oh no," Jane said.  "I hope not."

Then the obvious occurred to me.  "Hold on, I have an idea."  I should have thought of it long ago.

I grabbed a shuttle and took it north a ways to a nice house we'd set up for a very special inhabitant.  Nick was there mowing the lawn.  He raced over to me and gave Diana's large body a big hug like a child would to an adult.  I had to bend way down.  I gave him a kiss on the cheek.

"How's the hottest alien I know?" he said with a smile.

"Diana would tear you apart," I said, smacking one of her four large hands on his scrawny butt for emphasis.

He laughed and smacked Diana's butt which was about even with his face.

"I need your help," I said.  He had a translator device that repeated what I said in English.

"Thank God.  I'm bored stiff out here."

I took him back and briefed him along the way.  He was bursting with enthusiasm by the time we arrived.

"This is wonderful news.  You mean I may have real humans to talk to again?  Not that I have issues with the Rrilk, of course.  Bloody nice chaps and all, but a bit on the ugly and smelly side."

I showed him to our new patients.  I stepped from Diana and watched as Nick had the auto-doc awaken Tom.  Tom jerked awake and looked at Nick.  He sat up and stared with confusion at the other slumbering patients.