She smiled when she noticed his gaze, and looked sheepishly down at her utensil. “Sorry.” She pushed the bowl away. “Can’t really help it.” She snapped her silver fingers and they made a distinctive peal. “Just call me the Metal Woman, Batman.”
West shook his head, put his soup bowl down next to Patra’s. “You aren’t going to give that one a rest yet, are you?”
“Not yet. I figure I can get a few more days out of it before you get too annoyed with me to speak to me anymore.”
“Yeah, probably.”
They sat as best they could with their backs to the curved wall of the room, facing the orb. The swirls of light leisurely played on its surface, turning the sphere into an obscene, hypnotizing disco ball that illuminated the expanse in splashes of luminescence. If only there had been music…
West stood, grabbed Patra’s hand, and pulled her to her feet. She frowned in surprise, not sure of what West was doing. Her silent question was answered as West placed his right hand on her hip and raised her left hand into the air, then spun her around and dipped her low to the floor.
“Do you dance, Ms. Jennings?”
She laughed. “It appears I do now.”
They moved as one around and around the orb, dancing a ridiculous impression of a tango to silence, neither caring about the fact that there was no music and the planet was dying and it was the end of the world.
They journeyed.
Days. Weeks. Whatever. Now that the aliens no longer swarmed across the sky, they had no fear of capture. They walked across the scoured, blackened face of the once-great nation. Ghost towns. Suburbs of the dead. Flattened cities. Hopes and dreams and tomorrows that would never be.
There were no people, no bodies, no sign that anyone had survived the invasion at all. They were surrounded by the total absence of life. The Enemy had indeed been thorough.
They talked. And talked. Never before had Hayes known someone with whom he could be so open. They shared many a laugh under the faded western skies. He found Flynn to be an amazing individual. Someone he could have fallen for in a different world, in a different time. Someone he was falling for now.
They walked in silence, the only sound their boots crunching through the black crystalline earth with which the destruction of the generator had salted the continent. They had found warmer clothing; they had been lucky. The air was frigid; they could see each exhalation as a white cloud of breath, and each inhalation was cold enough to be painful if not first filtered through their scarves. Simon looked over at Maggie, and her beautiful eyes smiled at him through the gap in the fabric around her face. How could she remain so calm and content when the planet was dying before their very eyes?
How much colder would it get before the end?
How are we going to get off this corpse of a world?
And where are we going to go?
He wished that they could watch the sun set on a beach or the stone breakwater in Harkness that extended into Lake Superior, where he could hold her hand as he had held Brigid’s. He wished he could tell day from night. He wished that he could love her.
He forced the thoughts deep into his mind. Buried and forgotten. It was easier that way. He could not love her here, now, inasmuch as he knew that he wanted to, needed to. It was how he had lived his entire life. Bury your shattered dreams.
Slowly and coldly the miles to Wyoming counted down.
Fourteen days
They converged.
“Judas Golgotha Simon, you’re cleared for departure.”
((affirmative, command.))
“Good luck, Simon.”
Indeed. Good luck. He chose not to acknowledge the blessing of Judas Commander Hannah Kilbourne.
((engaging shadow drives.))
The massive vessel flickered, faded from existence. Simon strongly suspected that he would never again see Program Seven.
“Judas gunships Malachi, Shiva, you are cleared for immediate departure on preset contrail coordinates.”
{malachi concurs.}
[shiva concurs.]
“Watch him. Watch him closely. You’ll receive your orders when it’s time.”
The stiletto shapes of the crafts ceased to exist.
They would watch, and they would wait, and when the time came, they would see to it that Judas Simon would not unravel the most important plans ever made. With Magdalene gone, Simon was the weak link now.
“What’s that?” She spoke into the hollow of his neck with her metal voice.
West opened his eyes to a swaying spherical world that he was creating by slowly dancing around the now- silent orb chamber with Patra. “What?”
“What song was that? You were humming something.”
West frowned, stopped moving, looked down at Patra. “I was? Sorry. I don’t remember.”
“It was beautiful. Whatever it was.” Her hand still rested on his side. West turned away from her, walked a short distance.
“They’re getting closer. I can feel them. Hell, it was probably Richter humming that song, not me. He always hummed or whistled. It annoyed the hell out of me.”
“You’re sure it’s them?”
“It’s them.”
“How many are coming?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Two, maybe three. I can’t tell… There should only be two others, unless MSI released some of the prisoners without telling us.”
“Prisoners?”
“The Styx who were placed on Santa Fosca. The ones we didn’t kill after Chicago.”
“Chicago.”
“Yeah, it was a small town in Illinois, population forty-two million, home of the Bears and the Bulls and my kind of town. You’ve heard of it, right? I believe you were sightseeing in that lovely city when first we met, Miss Jennings.”
She gave him a very dirty look and sat down against the wall of the chamber. The orb illuminated her face with slivers of light and shadow. West sat down next to her.
“What happened in Chicago, Adam?”
He stared silently ahead at the orb of stars for a moment, then turned and looked sadly into Patra’s silver eyes. “We tasted blood for the first time in Montreal. We walked over the piles of Seventh Assault’s bodies that covered the streets and we retook the city from the French by walking into their bunkers and killing them. Nothing they had could stop us. The images of the peace accords, the videos of your father signing the Containment Line agreement with the French Premier, all of it was faked. There were no Quebs left when we were through cleaning out the city. We made sure of that.
“You want to know what happened in Chicago? I’ll tell you. We were sent in to contain the rioting after all those churches were bombed. We were sent in to protect the First-Amendment rights of the New White party when they held their reactionary rally. What Milicom didn’t anticipate was the arrival of half a million protesters who started tearing the city apart to get at those racist bastards. We were given the authority to end the riots using any means necessary. Well, some of the Styx felt that using deadly force was the only option, and they opened fire on the crowds, going through the city and killing thousands. We chased after them, tried to save as many civilians as we could.
