“It’s been forty thousand—”
“It’s the extinction. Mother started it without us. That’s the only explanation.”
“There could have been a natural disaster… Massive power outages. Some cataclysmic—”
“She killed them already! She started the fucking extinction without us!” Whistler whirled around furiously, throwing the holographic globe at the porthole, where it silently shattered and dissipated. His black robe gracefully enveloped him as he slunk into his vacuum chair, sulking. “Mother owes us an apology.”
The vessel shuddered as it entered the thinning atmosphere of the dead world that had been Earth thousands of lifetimes before. Whistler sat, a scowling child, arms crossed over his chest as he dreamt of the extinction of which he had been no part.
“She owes us a fucking apology.”
The Vegas Gate was so named because of an ancient city that had once stood on the site where now the gargantuan alloy shield doors controlled access to the inner workings of a person named Mother on a planet named nothing anymore. Miles and hundreds of miles and thousands of miles down, the access tunnel stretched into the crust of the world. No one had ever measured the distance, but Hank suspected that they were pretty damn near the center. The other Gates had all been lost in the sporadic warfare that signaled the end of an era, before Mother’s mission had been successful. Hank sometimes dreamt of a simpler time and a simpler place where cowboys had been the norm. He felt out of place here at the Gate control. Hell, he felt out of place anywhere on this rock. How many tens of thousands of years had it been since he had seen another human being? How many hundreds of thousands of years since he had felt the soothing touch of a lady?
He stepped back from the edge of the Vegas Tunnel, which stretch vertically as far as he could see in both directions. Gate Control was little more than a ridge around the tunnel’s interior, a massive metal construct built over the course of centuries by the slave populations of entire systems. Hank leaned back against the safety cage that kept him within the confines of Control and prevented him from falling thousands of miles to his death at the center of the planet. Mother would not be pleased at all if her only surviving human fell to his death.
Hank retrieved an ancient pack of Marlboros from the front pocket of his denim shirt. He took great pleasure in removing the cellophane from the pack and tossing it over the side of the Control cage. It floated lazily down into the blackness of the tunnel. How long would it take for the wrapper to finally hit bottom? How many millions of wrappers would it join on the bottom of the Vegas Tunnel?
A shiny golden Zippo ignited his delicious sin, and Hank inhaled deeply, never fearing for life. Mother would see to it that the cigarettes, one of the few luxuries that he had requested for his tour in Vegas, would never spin any free radicals out of place to damage tissue and spur cancer growth. Mother looked after Hank quite well.
He looked out across the void of the tunnel. Sometimes he imagined that he could see the other side, the faint flicker of his cigarette reflected on the mirrored wall. Hank had never been one for imagination. It was not his place in Mother’s plan to imagine.
He took one last draw from the cigarette and tossed the butt over the side. He wondered for a moment if the cellophane wrapper had even landed yet.
Hank’s jaw dropped and he frowned reflexively and he spun around to the simple control panel on the wall of his makeshift living quarters. Incoming vessel? There hadn’t been an incoming vessel in decades. The control panel flashed with the display of a standard Agent corvette cutting through the atmosphere.
“Identify.” Hank blinked at the croaking sound of his own voice. How long had it been since he had spoken out loud?
“Anyone else?”
“Identify.”
“Fleur.”
“We’re in the tube.”
The Agents’ corvette slid into the silver passage to the interior, a great reflective phallus cleaving the retracting miles-thick doors of the Vegas Gate. Centuries of accumulated debris from the surface fell away before them along the sporadically-illuminated drop, creating a dun-colored light show as the corvette’s thrusters shifted prevailing weather patterns in the vertical hole in the planet.
Nine stood at the porthole, looking out into nothing but polished silver drop. Fleur was lost in her thoughts, sitting in the vacuum chair with her arms looped around her knees, which were drawn up to her chest. Whistler observed her from the shadows he dragged around him wherever he went…Was she shivering? It wasn’t cold in the vessel, or at least he didn’t think it was too cold for the organic.
“Something wrong, poppet?”
Fleur’s head snapped around and her gaze traveled up and down the form projected before her. “What does it matter now? We’re here, aren’t we?”
Nine sat back down, looked from Whistler to Fleur. “Mother will not be pleased, but she is forgiving. She is a creature of—”
“Divine Mercy and Wisdom. Don’t. Just don’t. We know why I’m here.”
They fell.
Hank stood on the edge, looking up for any sign of the approaching vessel. He could not yet see it, couldn’t even really hear it, but there was something…He could sense a change in the pipe. A resonance. Something different in the natural resonating frequency of the metal tube that had been his kingdom for centuries. He lit another smoke, inhaled, exhaled, tapped ash off the edge of the hole in the world and waited.
He watched as the docking cradle, dormant for decades, silently whirred into life and slid out into the blank center of the pipeline, deftly catching the vessel that fell suddenly and without warning into its waiting embrace. Hank took another draw from the butt between his lips, then tossed it disdainfully out over the edge, watching the still-burning ember arc out into nothing as the vessel in the cradle drew closer. The cage opened in front of him as the dock engaged. All was accomplished in near-silence, the only sound the hiss and crackle of the cooling phase drives at the aft of the corvette. Hank cleared his throat, coughed loudly, the noise echoing out and back and forth along the pipeline. How long had it been since he had spoken? It felt as if his throat were covered in a thick layer of dust from the disuse of his vocal cords.
The docking port of the corvette opened with a liquid slurp as the phased vessel re-integrated into a solid. Exterior lock, interior lock parted, reminding Hank so much of female genitalia that he smirked under his luxurious handlebar moustache. The interior of the vessel proved to be just as dark and mysterious as the unintended metaphor.
Two black shadows emerged from the short passageway into the ship, hoods drawn over their features. Hank flinched for a moment in uncertainty, hand moving in a flash to his side, where a shiver gun fashioned to look like an ancient revolver hung from a leather holster. Faster than his human form could ever manage, one of the black- hooded forms flew forward, knocking Hank asunder and painfully disabling him with one tap of a hidden energy weapon. Silvery threads of weapon silk spun around Hank’s torso, pinning his arms to his sides as he fell with a meaty thud to the metal floor.
Whistler threw the hood back from his face and bent down to Hank’s level, where he produced a slender black device and thrust it into Hank’s neck. The old cowboy gasped with the sudden and sharp pain, and struggled under his silken snare. The black tube in Whistler’s hand beeped, and the weapon silk disintegrated. He stood, outstretched a hand, helped Hank to his feet.
“Whistler, you fucking prick.” Hank rubbed the reddened spot on his neck where a faint line of blood was running.
“Just following procedure, my dear pretty waste of flesh.” Whistler’s grin illuminated the dock. “Wouldn’t want an imposter, would we?”
“Who the hell would want to impersonate me? They’ve all been out-system for centuries.”
“Well, we didn’t know that, did we? We just got back from picking up the poppet from her hiding place. When the master’s away, the Hank is at play, I trust?”
“Bored as shit, if you really want to know. She hasn’t talked to me in years.”
