ember burning deep down. We can use that ember, Maggie. We can save you from execution. Would you like us to build you a new set of
lungs. They saved me from execution and from Pearl addiction. I was a member of the Blood Army; I did kill those people, but it was for something I believed in. When the ASA annexed the UK, it just brought back all those feelings that we had hoped had been buried after the Civil—”
“Maggie, you don’t have to explain yourself.”
“I sold my soul to Milicom for a set of lungs and freedom from Pearl. That’s why I’m here, in Seattle, in a Milicom uniform, and not at home, buried in the ground.”
“The special project… It was the Styx project, wasn’t it? They needed young people like you to experiment with.”
“Something like that.” Her hand shifted, going from flesh-colored to translucent, flickering, waves of color lighting up Hayes’ face as he looked on.
She studied her shifted hand. The shimmers illuminated her face.
“How the hell do you do that?”
“What?”
“How do you—” He made a waving motion with his arms, frowned. He reached out to take her shifted hand, at which she pulled it quickly away. It flickered, solidified. Maggie reached out, took Simon’s hand in her own.
“Sorry, but—Well, you shouldn’t touch me when I’m shifted. It’s too dangerous for solid matter to touch shifted matter.”
“Shifted matter. That’s how you killed the—the things. The black things. The enemy.”
“Yes.”
“How do you go right through them?” He held up his blood-spattered fatigues. The Enemy’s blood. “And how do you start fires with your hands?”
“You mean shifting.”
“Yes. Shifting.”
“Well, I—”
“The medical journals were faked, weren’t they? Styx aren’t genetically altered. Where did Milicom get that kind of tech?”
“A little town called Diablo.”
“It’s not human technology, is it?”
“It’s… You could say they stumbled upon it. There was a mine. The workers found something down there…”
Their eyes locked. She pointed up.
“One of those. An alien vessel.”
A vessel of black and silver and nightmares and everything that little kids feared at midnight cruised silently over them in the starless morning sky.
Desert. Arizona.
His black rubber-soled boots crunching over sand and grit and spiked desert plants was the only sound besides the constant, dry, coughing wind. His black cloak flew out behind him, swirling the dust into a whirlwind contrail. The sky was not as bright and the desert was not as hot as it should be. He casually brushed encrusted salt and sand from his face. The grit was somehow cleansing. He whistled a song he had once danced to in a life and a place that had been erased from his heart long ago. Dry tongue attempted to wet dry lips. The song continued. How did that song go? Something about shaking hands and unraveled kingdoms and flying dishes and awful aim.
Richter stopped walking for a brief moment as one of the massive black forms flew almost directly overhead, impossibly stopped in mid-air and turned on an unknown axis, presumably now facing him. The amorphous object made discernment of spatial orientation almost impossible, as it changed its form almost constantly, like some hideous black airborne tumor. It began to move again and sped away from him. One human must not have warranted a landing to pick up.
Richter made time stop for an instant and his fiery silver eyes illuminated his world. A rage of energy built within him.
He reached out with his mind and tore apart what he assumed were the aft drives of the vessel. The enormous ship thundered to earth and crashed half a mile from where he nonchalantly stood. It rolled end over end, finally coming to rest after littering the desert floor with shards of black.
He walked toward the wreck, whistling to the beat of his bootsteps. What was the name of that song? He frowned, shook his head to no one, smiled bemusedly. It was going to be a great day.
West followed the shore of Lake Superior until Chicago lay before him, or rather, where Chicago should have been. It was no longer recognizable as the Windy City. The wind remained, a cold, harsh breeze that did not belong in June that seemed to emanate from where Chicago used to be. In what appeared to be a blast crater that was quite a few miles across, there were very few vestiges of the city that should have been there. The only feature noticeable from the rubble was the huge black spire standing in the center of the crater.
So this was the hub.
He had realized that the alien vessels that cruised overhead had to come from somewhere, and apparently this was it. The sky was black with approaching and departing vessels, descending and landing within the blast crater.
No. Oh god no.
People.
Ringed by the black demons, large crowds of people surrounded the spire. A group was being forced into the black tower as he watched. So this was where everyone was.
What is in there?
There was a sudden flash of silver light. Must be dissent in the ranks, West thought. A rebellion against the aliens? Apparently not successful.
West walked on, toward the edge of the crater.
Richter.
The aliens that survived the crash were wary, on edge. They saw him coming and moved to intercept him. He calmly kept walking.
He saw that the vessel had held a cargo of human beings. He saw their remains among the spreading flames. Their bodies were quickly consumed by silver, dissolved.
The aliens rushed at him.
He studied them with mild interest before he tore them apart with his mind. Limbs flew.
Too bad he couldn’t have saved the people.
And then…
Something crawled over his mind, icy fingers grasping for his soul. He forced the thoughts from his mind, and went to find the cockpit.
“That can’t be,” Hayes insisted. “One of them?”
They looked up in unison. The vessels continued to fly over, impervious to them.
“It wasn’t exactly like them. It didn’t change shape; it looked like a double-bladed dagger. It was so big… It had crashed a long time ago, so long that it was embedded in the rock layers. A town grew up at the base of the mountain, and their main business was a copper mine. When the main shafts dried up, they went deeper, and they hit a wall they couldn’t blast through. A metal wall.”
“In the earth. A UFO in the earth.”
“Milicom silenced the miners and moved in.”
“No wonder Jennings was so jumpy in the end. He must have thought the little green men were coming back for their lost toy.”
“It was no toy.”
She paused, and her hand drifted to the healing gash across her left eye. A reflex.
“Jesus. Milicom was using alien technology to build new weapons.”
Ember’s frigid gray eyes drifted up, somehow judged him. She turned, hiding the wounded eye from him in the firelight.
“The vessel in the earth was a warship, once piloted by… by some kind of humanoids. There was tech greater
