“Where—Where are we going?”
Mother swam over to Fleur, held her hand gently. Her smile was wide and terrifying in its implications. Before she said a word, Fleur knew her answer.
Zero tried not to be disturbed by the line of black-clad men that walked in silence on either side of him. The Stranger was at his side, walking at his slow, exhausted pace. Zero was beginning to suffer the adverse effects of gravity re-entry. His body ached for the fluid enclosure of the bowl, the warm comfort of liquid space. The only sound in this passage was the shuffled steps of hundreds of feet. The men walked in silence down the slightly- canted corridor, constructed entirely of matte plastic? metal? something, curving upward so that he couldn’t see the end.
“Your Machine has been dissembled and absorbed into—” The Stranger paused, Zero feeling the search for the correct term
Zero’s watched as the Stranger reacted to his expression of confusion, and found it reflected in the man’s face. He stopped walking. “Heaven?”
“Our creator…and benefactor. You will experience it. It is ineffable. Difficult to name.”
“And you? What should I call you?”
Again, that disarming grin. “Stranger will do. My name doesn’t matter.” A reassuring squeeze of the shoulder, and they walked on, flanked on both sides by black and silence. Soon, they came to the end of the corridor, which opened out into an impossible expanse that took Zero’s breath away, almost quite literally.
The walkway extended out to an airlock, at which was docked a shiver vessel of uncertain design. The airlock was the only blemish on the surface of a clear globe, the walls of which were constructed of miles of transparent, glassy plastic. On the other side of the clear shield was an enclosed solar system, millions of miles wide. At its center, shimmering weakly, was a dying star. Zero turned to Stranger, his face broadcasting his amazement at the phenomenon that he was witnessing.
“It was a binary system. When your Extinction Fleet first made an appearance, we were able to hide one of our stars here. This vessel is all we have left.”
Zero touched the miles of glass before him, which greeted his fingertips with a cool, static attraction. The airlock door cycled open beside him.
“You have the technology to place a solar system inside of a vessel?”
Stranger scoffed. “Not the entire system. Just one star and forty planets. The others were left behind, where Mother’s fleet eventually got to them. We’ve been hiding in the Outer ever since your genocide spread this far.”
Zero slumped against the glass in realization. Stranger made no move to help him up this time, but stood behind him, arms crossed. Zero looked at the assembled black-robed men standing in formation on either side of the airlock, watching him. Silent. Expressions of such loss on their faces…
“No women. Mother’s fleet—”
“Your fleet, Zero. Of course, you never knew. Your Fleur never knew. You were just following orders. The virus killed them all, even after we escaped with half of the system under shield. The catalyst was at work even before the final seal was welded into place.”
“I never—”
“Come on.” Stranger motioned toward the open airlock and the shiver vessel beyond, embedded within miles of solid glass.
“Where are we going?”
“Heaven.”
Zero warily stepped through the airlock and into the confines of the shiver vessel’s passenger area, where two vacuum chairs sat behind the transparent front needle of the ship. Stranger took a seat, and motioned for Zero to do the same as the lock doors cycled shut behind them. They were alone in the vessel, the men of sadness left on the other side of the door. Zero could feel their touch, though, the subtle undercurrent of hatred that permeated every breath.
Before them, through the front of the shiver, the dazzling visual dance of miles of protective shield glass stretched, bending the light of the dying star at the center of this impossible expanse into infinite prisms and rainbows. A bark from Stranger and the vessel responded to his guttural language, firing up the spinners inside of its phase engine, resonating the vessel until Zero felt certain that his teeth were being jarred loose from his skull. He had always hated the resonance of shivers, that sickening vibration that at once tickled your entire body and made you nauseous as it created that perfect phase shift that could cut through anything solid. Whenever he was in a shiver vessel, Zero always felt like he was the slug in the barrel of a common shiver gun, which, in essence, he was.
“How thick is the shield?”
“Thinner than you think. We’ll reach Heaven in no time.”
With a wave of his hand, Stranger signaled the vessel and it was off, phasing at Light X through the globe of glass that protected all that remained of his homeworlds. Zero sat back in the vacuum seat, gritting his teeth against that uncertain shift from solid to near-liquid. He much preferred the comfort of the bowl, the complete immersion in phased gelatin. Traveling in a shiver was the dry-fuck of interstellar travel: plenty of motion, but little pleasure.
Stranger caught a bit of this thought, and shot Zero a sly smile. “You miss her, don’t you?”
The vibration of the shiver was almost too much for Zero to take, an aural onslaught, but he heard Stranger clear enough. “Who?”
“The Catalyst. Poor boy, you loved her.”
Zero was silent, but his mind broadcast all Stranger needed to know.
“We’ll have to kill her, you know. Nothing personal.”
Zero turned. “Right. Nothing personal.”
Stranger’s eyelids drew together in suspicion, but he said nothing. And he heard nothing; Zero’s mind was far too shielded now to read. He watched the needle before them, and the swirl of primaries blending to tertiaries.
Fleur’s heart lurched into her throat, so sudden and unexpected was her realization. Just a young woman, floating here in the void within the planet that had once held a childhood, a hope, a little stream and ferns and wind blowing in the valley, peace, sunshine. An awful mockery of that childhood swam beside her in this incomprehensible world, a little girl of five, wearing bright pink corduroy overalls and holding in her hand three silver spheres.
Mother smiled that smile, tossed the three projectors to Fleur, who mindlessly caught them and held their metallic warmth in her new left hand, still under warranty.
“Yes.”
A machine approached at breakneck speed, hovered dangerously close for a moment, long enough to tousle both Fleur and Mother’s curly locks.
“Bring it back. The room. Whistler and Hank. And Ze—Nine. Nine.”
Mother grinned savagely.
“Bring it back.” Another machine was fast approaching, this one hauling a nondescript metal phase drive segment that was easily the size of a mountain.
