He lived in strange times, if the end times could be called strange. He searched for a better adjective and found he no longer had the energy or patience for an eloquent vocabulary.
The transport he now rode carried him away from Command to the dockyards. It was still a breathtaking sight, this foothold in the Whenstream, hopefully as yet undetected by the Enemy. A last bastion of hope thrust into the fabric of the night.
Judas Command, Fort Iscariot, Fort Hope, Fort Richter, the Cyst, the Bubble, Program Seven, no matter what they called it, this was the place where the remnants of humanity lived out the end times. Command was anchored between times, a place of refuge and solace in the war for eternity. Here, the Judas carefully guarded the precious patterns reclaimed from the Enemy and amassed the knowledge of the countless dead civilizations that the Enemy had uploaded. This place was a virus in the code of the Enemy Purpose. This place was history and memory and hope.
Zero-Four watched the swirls and eddies of forgotten futures and impossible pasts flow around the transport as it docked. He turned from the window, hands folded in his lap. He leaned forward, feeling empty and ancient and gray.
Simon loomed below him. Zero-Four studied Simon’s new chassis, a Golgotha-class. The refit was impressive. He was a full-fledged warship now. Of course, the Golgotha were no longer top-of-the-line. The development of the prototype gunships had seen to that. The gunships were meant as a replacement for the aging class of vessels. Eventually, all lower classes would be refit into Golgotha. Well, if they lasted that long… Losses in the Gethsemane and Eden classes had been terrible in the last engagement.
There was a pang in his heart as he remembered the massacre in the Belt. Simon had fought like a madman to avenge the death of his beloved Magdalene. Such a senseless loss…Why had she been sent in alone, anyway? Before leaving that When, they planetfell and rescued her crew from the harvest upload. Exiting orbit, Simon had gone to maximum speed too soon, burning most of his primary hull off in the process. Then the icy fingers of hibernatory stasis had taken them.
Simon had drifted for weeks in the void, wounded, terrified of the Enemy becoming aware of their presence. He had not dared to broadcast an emergency beacon for fear of being discovered and uploaded.
Zero-Four remembered being revived at Command. Simon was in refit at the yards. Reynald and his crew had seemingly disappeared. And Jennings, the refugee they had picked up, was being interrogated.
Now this.
They docked at the yards.
Zero-Four arose from his seat as the transport gently nudged the docking ring. Jesus, this program feels real, he thought, and smiled inwardly. Too real. Why do I have to feel so old? When did I last feel young? Program Four, Program Five?
With the confusing realization that he no longer knew how old he was or how long he had been fighting this war or how badly his signal had degraded since the last Update, he palmed the opening mechanism to the lock and entered the dockyards.
“Simon?”
((…michael.))
“How are you, old friend? How does it feel to be in a Golgotha chassis?”
((i feel… bigger. more powerful.))
“Good. You’re going to need it. We’re going back.”
((…))
“Simon?”
((forgive me. i was…))
“I know. I’m so sorry, Simon.”
((why was she—))
Zero-Four put a finger to his lips, the familiar gesture of silence. His gray eyes surveyed the chamber, and Zero-Four wondered how many minds were touching his without his knowledge. “Simon, something’s changed here, and I don’t think that we should continue this conversation.”
Simon understood. He sensed it too.
“There’s been a web breach. Timesweep waves coming from that When are off the scale. Something or someone on that planet was powerful enough to take out an upload generator. The web is leaking more pattern than we’ve ever seen before. We’re going back to investigate. Kilbourne is sending us back into the fire. With escorts, of course.”
((escorts? what—))
“Simon, the questions must wait. We’re going to be accompanied by two of the new gunships.”
((may i speak to reynald?))
“He’s gone. I don’t know where he is. No one knows. This place has gone to hell. Forts are falling to the Black along the whole length of the Stream. The war doesn’t go well for us.”
((michael, what’s going on here?))
“The center cannot hold, Simon. The center cannot hold.”
heartbeat…
in the hell that was between times and realities two people clung to each other the man in an ecstasy of the purest agony as the shadow within his essence worked to tear him apart to cut the cords of sanity that held him together his body mind soul the woman screamed in silent terror as she became something more than and less than human and they both entered a realm of binary hell as synapses firing firing transferred soul to zero and mind to one and zero and one and the man shifted shifted shifted
heartbeat…
“What was THAT?”
Hayes sat up from where he and Flynn had been thrown to the ground.
A searing pinpoint of light on the distant eastern horizon held Flynn’s gaze. No mushroom cloud…
“That wasn’t a nuke, but the shockwave—”
Another wave hit, and they grasped each other to steady themselves. The ground still seemed unstable, like some giant force threatened to tear it apart. The light on the horizon grew whiter and whiter…
The sun was a small white dot in the sky, cold, distant, but for an instant—
“The sun!” Flynn pointed upward. “Look!” The sky overhead, which had been clouded by the silver and purple blackness of the alien web, suddenly grew much brighter as the web cracked, shattered, fell from the sky in great shards of black.
The sky is falling Simon thought, and his confused, desperate eyes searched for an answer in Maggie’s. Her eyes became a mirror of his fear as a fierce wave of sound washed over them, a sound that filled his head with an impossible image of screaming and wailing and hell and he noticed that the light on the eastern horizon was now somehow closer, and the sky was falling down upon them. Maggie’s face contorted in fear, turned back to the wave of light that flew at them from the east at a speed too fast to comprehend. They stood on a lightly wooded hillside overlooking a valley. Maggie could see that the light was a wall of white crashing into and through anything in its path. Too fast she thought as the wave poured over the other side of the valley, large shards of the Enemy web falling into its path as they stabbed into the landscape. Where the shards touched the light, where anything touched the light, there was a snap and a flash like lightning and the object vanished in a flash of silver. This is going to touch us. This is going to kill us.
The deluge of light reached the bottom of the valley, began to ascend the hillside. The very road upon which they stood began to vibrate with an alien energy as the light touched it, ripped into it, reached out for them.
Simon watched, face pale, motionless, helpless. Maggie looked from the light to Simon, from Simon to the light.
She reached out for his hand, grasped it. She turned his shocked face to her own, looked resolutely into his eyes. He broke from his reverie, squeezed her hand in sudden awareness of its presence.