Broken: A Plague Journal (9 page)

launched, and that’s where the story really begins.”

He regarded his empty cup, motioned for the server. She smiled, one bullet-hole dimple, and went behind the counter for another pot.

“We’re here to bring you home.”

“Where’s ‘home?’”

His fingers tapped one through four on the plastic tabletop. “I wasn’t even supposed to be on the probe. I guess one of my over-eager or over-compassionate technicians must have ghosted my pattern while I wasn’t watching. They always had far more respect for me than I had for myself. Difficult to believe in yourself when you’re nothing more than a fourth-gen clone.”

The dimpled server returned with coffee. On her way back to the counter, her hand went to her partner’s back, lingered as she whispered something to him. Maire saw: the scar on her fingertip, the prominent bridge of her nose, the way her lips brushed his ear, brushing and whispering, perhaps the scent of smoke, perhaps the taste of him.

Maire absently rubbed the place where her hearts should have been.

“I know of your ambitions, Maire.”

She frowned.

“I built a machine that would save a world. And this is what it made, a thousand variants of my species scattered about our universe, a million variants spread across a million timelines, forevers expanding and contracting, and here, only here, have I found anything remotely resembling me. You know how hard it is to talk to crystals? To bioneural sludge? To control that evolution, to hope beyond hope that somewhere, somehow, things have lined up to create a semblance of familiarity? I’ll tell you the greatest secret of life: we’re all alone out here. No little green men, no hives or alien queens, no beings of pure energy. All we have is us.”

She didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything at all.

“Those silver machines that you hate so much? I made them.”

Eyes drew to slits.

“Something happened after the heat death. Maybe it was that dark matter, the holes in the universe we’d not been able to explain. My machine bred, its children bred, and somewhere along the line, something went tragically wrong. They don’t yet know we’re here,” his hand extended to indicate the air, the interior of the coffee shop, its patrons, “and I intend to keep it that way. They have to be stopped before they reclaim it all.”

Laughter from the counter. Michael turned in time to see a playful bite on the cheek, man to woman, tip to tip of nose, bite from woman to man: he had known love once, albeit unreflected. He closed his eyes and saw Richter’s spectrums of gray there.

“Why am I here?”

He looked at and through her question as it hung in the acrid air between them. “I need you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“I need you to kill a god.”

and she slammed to the floor from her stance, the lifeless body of the neuter falling beside her in a heap of unclothed flesh, a sickly crack as its fragile skull gave to the floor, the slap of meat on metal as legs bounced once and fell still.

Her first breath was fire. Her second was fire. She remembered

i contain multitudes

everything.

Hand to heart(s?) and she knew it had been real.

Her third breath was easier as she adjusted to two lungs, one heart.

She fastened the closure on her chest, concealing her lack of cardiac shield to anyone she might encounter in this vessel. She stood, dizzy, but stopped to bend and gently close the open eyes of the dead neuter.

She left the chamber without looking back at the Zero-Four probe.

i contain multitudes

Kath stirred in the bed from hesitant dreaming, the games of flesh remembered, the reward all around her in that bed, the tang marking sheets and lips with memory.

A brush of and then

She heard hushed movement in the adjoining room and knew Maire had returned.

With schlick and hiss, the door opened to the bedroom and she entered, still believing Kath asleep, moving to the wall panel where clothes were stored. She removed a rucksack and began shoving clothes in. From under a pile of stockings, she took out a shiver gun, checked the vibration chamber, placed it in her sack.

A pattern of light in near-dark: Kath knew the outline of the weapon by the spaces between shadows.

“Maire?”

Her hands stopped over underthings, fingers curling to fist. “I didn’t know you were awake.” She didn’t turn around.

Something was wrong. Kath couldn’t place it, tried to, failed, considered, almost gave up. Insight and

“What’s wrong with your voice?”

Fingers dragged against the wall, and the room gently illuminated. Maire placed her bag on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes avoided the touch of Kath’s. Reaching, reaching still

“Maire?”

She looked and Kath knew it wasn’t right, would never be right again, could never possibly be right again. The eyes were swimming between black and gray, each blink swirling tendrils of color into non-color. Blink and

“I have to go.” That voice, the horrible flatness of its tone, the single pitch, and grating, wheezing breath... “I’m going.”

“But—What happened? Maire, what happened to you?”

She was silent.

“Please, just tell me. I can—” and she reached for Maire’s shoulder.

“Don’t
touch
me.” The shoulder shrugged away in time to her growl. She stood from the bed and lifted her sack from the floor.

Tears verged. Kath’s breath came in halts and stops, the choke of sob, the confusion of the not-knowing. “Whatever happened, let me help you.”

“I have to go away. Now. I don’t know for how long.”

“Will I—”

“You’ll see me again when it’s time.”

“Time for what?”

The illusions our eyes play in night, without light or reason: an instant of static, a halo of silver, and Maire’s form returned to normal.
Don’t touch me

“When it’s time to strike.”

She turned and walked out the door, leaving Kath to an empty room, echo, and fear.

“You’re quiet.”

The observation platform hovered miles above the surface, the “grass” of thousand-foot trees, the embryonic stage of the lumbers. Kath had once seen a hatchery where a surrogate mother had nudged those infant flora into the sky with great cracks of vestigial root structures and the dusting of centuries-old branches to the forest floor. Those first hesitant leaps into the sky, that keening song, the wind made by the mature herd swimming above them... It had been beauty, steeped in the scent of pine pitch.

“Hmm?” Her gaze met his.

Berlin grinned. “Exactly.”

“I’m sorry.” Her fingers threaded through his, now wrapped tightly around the safety ring of the platform. She’d forgotten how disconcerting an observation flight was for those usually confined to galactic or surface travel. It was a different kind of falling. “Just thinking too much.”

“About what?” His fingers squeezed. That scar, those infinitesimal hairs, the ridge of callus denoting the bellies of knuckles.

Her answer hid in the tilting down of her eyes, the thin exhalation of carbon triox evidenced in the cool of the upper lower atmosphere. He smiled at the redness of her ears and the flush of her cheeks.

“What? ((Cat)) got your tongue?”

She frowned, awash in a memory not hers and a word not possible. Maire and smoke and bitter, bitter

“What did you say?”

“Kath, what’s wrong? You’ve barely spoken to me since I arrived in-system.”

“It’s just...” The thought was lost somewhere between wind and the long fall down.

“If it’s about the lumbers, I’ve told you. They won’t feel any pain. We need to do this. It’ll all be over in—”

“It’s not that. It’s not just that. I mean...”

She unlocked fingers and wrapped her arms around him. He pulled, squeezed, noting her height, the tickle of her hair in the scattering wind, and the scent of

In the distance, he saw the first harvest vessels begin to chase a small school of the enormous trees. Flash and snare, the screaming of wood, the foul defensive odor of burning and something intensely sweeter than sugar could ever be. She jumped in his grasp at the screams, and he pulled her closer.

The harvest continued.

Just a taste at first, a few hundred lumbers. They took the screaming specimens into orbit, held them in dissection freighters, took them apart and looked inside for that shimmer, that echo.

They found it in the tricarboxylic acid cycle, mitochondria resonating with an energy, a metal, a something they couldn’t explain. They took more samples.

The machines were confused. Concerned.

A breakthrough: isolation of a limited flux passage, buried deep within the pattern, teased forward and brought to the rippling surface. Vacuole inversion. They could ride on poisons. Liquid space travel became not a dream but a soon-to-be-realization.

Planet One sent orders.

Weeks, months and

the air burned with cold above the lumber plains on the night that she’d been so convincing. Winter had arrived in the hemisphere. The embryo forests stood snow covered in their first hibernation, sleeping through the frigid night until a spring that wouldn’t arrive. The platform didn’t offer much protection against the wind.

It wasn’t dancing, and it wasn’t singing, but the flora hovered in formation below them, basking in the phosphorescent hydrostatic mist of the mid-atmosphere. The canyons echoed with their midnight song.

Berlin wrapped his arms around Kath, hands clasped in front in a bundle of their intertwined fingers. Squeeze. Sniffle and one hand went to her face as demure form shook with sob and fear. In moonslight, twin tracks on windburned cheeks: just two tears, but they were two too many.

“They’ll all be harvested.”

“Analysis was conclusive. We can isolate the flux ability.”

“Then why—”

“Because they can. And they don’t want anyone else to figure it out.”

“So that’s it? They take a few lumbers for sampling, isolate the tech, and kill the rest?”

“That’s the way we work.”

“No.” She turned around in his arms. Gray eyes swallowed by black pupils. “That’s the way
they
work.”

“I can’t—”

“You can’t. But we can.”

She slipped from his grasp, walked to the other side of the floater, leaned precariously over the edge. The vehicle swayed in the wake of a forest passing above them. Berlin walked to join her.