“I’m not sure a ray gun would stop this war, but I’ll take what I can get.”
“Hm,” she said. It was a moment before she spoke again, and Ethan heard the words as they formed in her mind. “Actually…that’s kind of cool.”
Ethan didn’t know where to rest his silver eyes. He knew they creeped her out. One had been ‘kind of cool’, but two were too much.
“What do those letters on your chest mean?” she asked. “Why did they come up? How come when you’re touched your skin turns silver there?”
Everything came from the greater power, Ethan thought. Everything to remind him that he was in the service of that power, and though he wore a suit of skin he was not permitted to believe he was one of them, even for an instant.
“General Winslett wears colored bars on his chest to signify battles he’s been in, or medals he’s been given,” the peacekeeper said. “These are mine. Each symbol has a meaning, and together they spell out my purpose: Guardian, in your language.”
“I’ve seen runes like that before. Don’t they come from Earth?”
“They’re very ancient. I imagine they found their way to this world somehow, maybe in a crashed ship or as a gift. I’m sure other symbols did, and are considered now to be ancient or unknown languages. Sorry…I know I’m sounding kind of…” He searched for the word. “Weird,” was what he came up with. “As for my skin—Ethan’s skin—turning silver at the touch…I believe it’s a chemical reaction.” Living tissue to tissue that I am keeping alive by my own life force, he thought, but he didn’t want to speak this because to Nikki this would be way beyond the boundaries of weird.
“I understand,” she replied. Then she frowned. “I guess. Wow,” she said. “What my buds at the Bowl-A-Rama would have thought about this!”
“They would never have believed it, even if I was standing next to you. They’d think I was made up for…” He shrugged.
“A horror movie,” Nikki said.
He smiled a little bit. “Am I that bad?”
“With those eyes, you’re as scary as hell,” she said, giving him the truth.
“Let’s hope I can scare the Gorgons and Cyphers into ending this war.”
“Yeah,” she said, “let’s hope.”
Again he searched for the right language. Communication on this world seemed to be a matter of figuring out what sequence of words would hurt someone the least. “I’m sorry I took him away so suddenly,” he said at last.
“You said it was time, and I guess he knew that. You don’t have to tell me you’re sorry. Anyway…you’re something—somebody, I mean—special. Like astral. So who I am to say you did wrong?”
“Because even something astral can make a mistake. You came with us because you trusted him. I took him away from you. From all of you. I should’ve allowed him more time.”
“Well,” she said, “he’s out of this now, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“So I ought to be happy…but I really do miss him. He was a pretty cool guy.” She gave him back a tender, wistful smile. “And you’re pretty cool too, but you’re not him.”
“Weird, scary, but cool,” the peacekeeper said. “What more can an astral entity ask for?”
She was able to laugh, and he thought it was a beautiful sound. She had a distance to go, but she was going to be all right. Now he had to find a way to do what was needed, for Nikki and Olivia, for Dave and JayDee and Hannah, for everyone who had struggled on and lived with fading hope. Even for the memory of those who had withered away and died in barren misery, and even for Jefferson Jericho, who’d fulfilled a role that Ethan had not fully realized was waiting for him.
“Can I bring you anything?” he asked.
“No, I’m good.”
“Well…I suppose I should go now.”
“Ethan?” she said as he started to withdraw. He hesitated. “I forgive you, if you want to hear that,” she said. “But you did the right thing.”
“Thank you, Nikki,” he answered, because though he was not human and was far from being so he did need to hear that, just as much as if he’d been born from this Earth and not created in what seemed like a dream in the unknowable mind of the greater power.
Then he left her, and he continued on to where he needed to go.
H
The VH-71 Kestrel was in sure and steady hands. It flew into the gathering darkness, all its identification strobes turned off, the noise of the rotors a muffled hum within the helicopter’s soundproofed cabin.
They had been flying over an hour. Ethan opened his eyes and felt the Cypher tracker on him like a hot spot at the top of his head. It was always on him, and had been following since the Kestrel had left its helipad. Now there were other things out there, too. It only took him a few seconds to process the harmonic signals of two Gorgon warships, one to the east and one to the west, on courses parallel to their flight path. They were drifting along, following the tracker embedded in the back of Jefferson’s neck. Each ship was still over a hundred miles away; that distance was nothing to them, they could eat that distance up in less than ten seconds if they went to a higher speed, but Ethan sensed that they were moving slowly, not wanting to get too close. Of course, they reasoned he could feel them. There might be a specialized entity on board each craft who could sense Ethan’s awareness of them. They were in no hurry. And they were being cautious too, because on his own highly-tuned mental radar, he could “see” the movements of the sleek black Cypher warships prowling through the clouds at a higher altitude. There were five of them in a precise V-shaped formation. Those also were over a hundred miles distant, yet could speed across the miles in less than the time it would take for Ethan to tell Vance Derryman that they were being stalked.
But Ethan knew that Derryman already figured the Cyphers and Gorgons were not very far away. No one in this helicopter doubted that they were being followed. So Ethan closed his eyes again and rested while he kept his mental eye open for any change of speed in the warships. It would do no good to increase the anxiety of anyone here, particularly not Derryman, General Winslett, the President, or the pilots. They were aware; that was enough.
The flight continued without incident. Everyone was free to get up, to use the bathroom, to get a drink of water or a canned soft drink from the bar. At one point the President got up and stretched, and he went through the door into the cockpit and stayed there awhile. Derryman and Winslett talked in hushed whispers. Ethan declined to listen either to their words or the creation of those words in their minds. But they were deeply afraid, that was apparent. Neither one had dared to pull aside a curtain and look out a window since the flight had begun.
Dave slept, or pretended to, while Jefferson went back to talk nervously but earnestly with the two Marines. Olivia got up to use the bathroom, then she returned to her seat and remained quiet, lost in her thoughts. Ethan once did penetrate Olivia’s mind to see what was there and found the image of a lean, handsome, and sun-browned man with a gray goatee smiling as she opened a present at a party. There were many other happy people in the room, where flames crackled in the fireplace and the furniture was fine but not ostentatious. A birthday cake with pink icing sat on a table, next to the cameo of a horse’s head carved into a piece of white stone. When Olivia finished opening the present—not tearing the gold-colored wrapping but being as careful with it and the white ribbon as if those too were part of the gift—she opened a box and withdrew a black sphere with the number eight on it in a white circle.
“Just what I need!” Olivia said. “A ball full of answers to every question!” She was much younger-looking and fifteen pounds healthily heavier than her current condition. She held the Magic Eight Ball up for everyone to see, and Vincent raised a glass of wine and started to make a toast and that was when the moment crumbled because Olivia was losing the memory of what his voice had exactly sounded like. So in Olivia’s silent distress, Ethan had left her mind as she jumped ahead and was blowing out five white candles on a strawberry cake, her favorite.