“Stay away from me.” He deflected Arik’s grip from his arm.
Tallis walked from his slither, cracked his neck seal. “Do you have a problem with me, Windham?”
He walked up close, too close. Breathing heavily, fraught with bitter emotion. “How long have you known?”
“Known what?”
Hunter swung, but Tallis blocked. He’d always been the swifter of the two. He held Hunter’s forearm and grinned.
“I repeat: Known
“That
there are worlds out there, boys, so many worlds we could never hope to count them all, and on some of them are monsters.”
Hunter turned to Brendan, whose face stared at Uncle in rapt fascination. The boys sat in the schoolroom, Uncle at its center beneath a slowly-spinning holograph of the galaxy. Hunter frowned. It was the only sign of his fear.
“Where did they come from?”
“Good question!” Uncle smiled, patted the inquisitive boy’s head. “Very good question.” He zoomed the display out, their galaxy shrinking to a point amidst thousands, thousands shrinking to a point amidst eternity.
Hunter didn’t understand. He leaned forward, cradled his chin on his palms.
“There’s a place out there somewhere, a galaxy much like ours. It’s a bad place, very far away, and that’s where the monsters come from.”
“And they killed Earth?”
Uncle smiled sadly, nodded at another boy. “Yes, son. They sent the worldships to kill Earth.”
“Why?”
Hunter remembered the pause, the tilt of Pierce’s head, the bobbing swallow of his Adam’s apple.
“Who gave us the ability to fly, boys?”
“Mother!” Unison. Disconcerting unison. Hunter realized that he had replied in reflex.
“And who took away war and disease, gave us all a new purpose? Who cured the world of affliction?”
“Mother!”
“Yes.” The affirmative was a hiss, slow and calculated. “Mother.” He circled the room, sweeping his gaze across the pre-pubescent soldiers of the night. “The aliens hate Mother. The monsters want to kill Mother. They killed Earth to try to kill her, and now we’re going to make them pay for it.”
Hunter saw that Brendan was smiling widely.
“We’re the last hope, boys. We’re here to kill them all. We’re here to cleanse the universe of this disease. We can’t let the aliens win.”
“Never.” Brendan whispered to himself.
“We have to be the best soldiers we can be, boys. We have to learn to fight, to fly, to kill. We have to save Mother from the monsters.”
“Uncle?”
Pierce scanned the crowd, turned to Hunter. “Yes, son?”
“Did the monsters kill all the girls?”
Pierce nodded gravely. “Yes, they did. They poisoned our world before the attack and made sure that all the girls would die.”
“But what about Lily?”
Another pause to consider. “Lily is special, son. She’s the last little girl ever. She’ll help us hurt them.”
“Uncle?”
Pierce turned to Brendan. “Yes?”
“When do we learn to fly?”
Pierce chuckled. “Soon enough, son. Soon
enough of this shit!” Mandela wrestled Tallis away from Hunter.
“Stay out of this, Arik.”
“No. We need answers. How long have you known that we’ve been killing people?”
The pilots were gathering around the combatants, uneasy, confused. They’d seen the target population as well, but they’d carried out Tallis’s orders to the end.
“They aren’t people. They’re monsters.”
“Who’s to say Mother isn’t the monster? Who says she’s not the one who started killing the women with silver? Just think about it.”
“Arik, what the hell would you—”
“We saw them on the worldship. Near-humans. All men. So they came to Earth to kill Mother, right? There wasn’t a female on the whole ship. They were cloning boys in a chamber. They had angels that look just fucking like ours.”
“You don’t—”
“I saw them too.”
“So they aren’t monsters. So they look like us. They still tried to kill Mother. They—”
“Did you ever stop to consider that maybe we aren’t the good guys? That maybe we’ve been killing the wrong people for years?”
Tallis snapped.
He struck out at Mandela first, fist colliding with throat, leg sweeping out behind his knee, cutting the man down with a sickening thump. He fell to the ground, gasping, clawing at his neck.
Hunter and Tallis collided in a fury of swinging limbs. Tallis easily threw Hunter to the floor, leapt upon him. The pilots clambered to separate their commanders. Tallis lashed out at them.
Hunter used the moment to throw the distracted Tallis away with his still-suited legs. A flash in time and Tallis was back on his feet, hand reaching down to retract his blade from his leg sheath. Hunter rushed to his feet and slammed into Tallis before he could pull the knife. They both staggered backward from the collision into the docking cradle of a slither.
The vessel rocked. The phase molding drained to the reservoir, it was nothing more than a thin metallish framework sitting atop the cradle supports. Hunter held Tallis’s left hand to his side, disabling his blade arm, struck out to slam his head against the slither leg. Tallis clawed for Hunter’s eyes with his free hand, fingertips digging for connection with soft, supple flesh. Hunter bit him.
The dance of war, the combat between men without rifle, without push-button bombs, without silver or the fluid mechanics of space/time: they grappled. They fought without romance, grunting and shouting nonsense syllables at each other and the silent audience, sweating and gnashing teeth, tasting that lust, pure lust for survival, pure lust for a victory decided by the death of the opponent.
Drops of blood traced lazy paths down Hunter’s cheek where Tallis’s fingernails had carved away skin.
Hunter let go of Tallis’s blade arm long enough to allow it to snap up for purchase on his neck. Hunter’s hand moved down, grabbed his commander’s knife, and brought it to target between his ribs.
Tallis inhaled. Jaw dropped, eyebrows furrowed, eyes darted forth, back, forth in realization.
Hunter slammed Tallis once more against the slither support, wrenched his body from his own. He held Tallis between the twin hydraulic lifts of the cradle, stabbed the blade between metal and rubber, twisted it, releasing a stream of gelatin and the seal broke and the slither began to descend from raised position.
Tallis’s hands reached out again for Hunter, his body jerked, but tons of metallish slither fell on his head between the cradle lifts.
The body fell motionless, geyser of black erupting from crushed skull.
How the body is weak, how fragile biology bursts upon cool metal, how the final crack of the spine signals an end.
“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.
