“We’ll find a way.” Her eyes to his eyes, her soul to his
“Arch?”
“Have you met the Rebecca before?”
“Why don’t I remember that?”
Lilith held his hands. “We’ve been through so many—”
“Arch?”
“Where’s she from?”
“Soldats perdus. City?”
“Fuck.”
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Arch, set course and engage.”
“Deep Outer, full speed.”
“Just fucking
“Hunter?”
“What?”
“Who are they?”
He slammed his fist to a dead control panel. “They’re a rogue…”
Pacing. His hand moved to his right temple, rubbed. Reflex.
“Hunter?”
There was a building pain underneath his fingertips. Lilith looked from his closed, frowning eyes to his temple, fingers massaging in a circle: forth, back, forth, around.
“Hunter?”
He opened his eyes, grabbed a dead angel from one of the command chairs, threw it across the room with a growl of fury. Mechanical guts spilled across the bridge floor. His hand went back to his temple and forehead.
“Hunter?”
“
“Your hand.” His heart broke a little more when he saw her eyes, her gaze. The way her hands were clustered before her mouth.
He looked, horrified before he even saw, because he knew, and he knew, and he knew.
Faint lattice of silver, just below the skin. It crawled from fingertips to palm to wrist. He spun an overhead monitor into the light, saw even in the reflection of the dead display that the silver was working its way underneath the skin above his skull.
Lilith sobbed as she activated the shield mechanism on her cardiac plate. The phase gelatin engulfed her form as she stood from the vacuum chair. “Hunter, I—”
“No, it’s not—”
“I’m so—”
“It’s not your fault!” He cried out as the silver gave one last twinge in his head that brought him to his knees. “It’s not your fault.” The pain subsided as Lilith’s shielding provided a buffer between his flesh and her affliction.
She knelt at his side, dragging the slosh of phase behind and around her.
“It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”
Hunter nodded, although he knew that their love would kill him.
Pierce took off his jacket and slumped into a bridge chair. “When did you find it?”
“About ten minutes ago. Faint at first, then a signal spike. It’s definitely for us.”
“Stop Arch and snag it.”
“Yes, Uncle.”
He hated the machines, hated the way they spoke to him, hated the way they looked just enough like real humans to disturb, to place that sliver of doubt in his mind. He hated the machines, hated Mother (
“Temporal brace in position.”
“Display.”
The bridge bubble shielding retracted, allowing Pierce to see the quantum physics of their communication: all of space bent toward a single point, starlight forsaking points for curves, time bending to the will of an ancient species.
“Let’s see if it works.”
“Wire mechanics aligned.”
“Open tight beam.”
He squinted at the array and saw the particles erupt, faint patterns of phased communications bullets shot into the quantum singularity. He thought of rainfall.
“Carrier beam aligned.”
“Lock and load.”
The bridge lights dimmed, leaving an illuminated platform at the chamber’s center. Light bent toward the platform and Maire was there, image at first filled with static, half-translucent, but the wire mechanics adjusted to secure the signal from thousands of years across space/time.
“Mr. Pierce.” It was a voice of echoes.
“Maire.”
“What’s the situation?”
“Cargo intact.”
“I trust they’ve all been fed and tucked into bed by now?”
“Of course. Training starts tomorrow.”
“No time to waste.”
“Has the enemy fleet—”
“Orbital defenses held them off long enough for most of the childships to escape the system.”
“But not all?”
“Forty percent losses.”
Pierce’s heart leapt at Maire’s interpretation of the word “most.”
“And we’re on target?”
“Courses projected and fleet on targets. You’ll rendezvous in-system with several others eventually.”
“Will you tell me the specifics of this mission?”
“Just keep the girl safe. The angels will handle the rest.”
“Yes, Maire.”
“I’ll check in monthly.”
“Yours or ours?”
“Your months. My millennia.”
“Understood. Maire?”
“What?”
“Is there anything left?”
