“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?”
“WHAT?”
“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.
“We’ll meet up with a galleon. We’ll find a way to hide you. We’ll split up. I can take the Fleet back to Earth and—”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You have to. When she finds out that we’re off-target—”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Lilith.”
“Hunter.”
The phase shield was an echoing frustration. He longed to hold her, reassure her. The silver wouldn’t allow any contact at all very soon.
“Our first concern right now is to outrun the Rebecca.”
“We can’t outrun them. We’ll have to fight.”
“Are you willing to kill a destroyer of humans?”
She tripped over words. Heart pounded beneath cardiac plate. “It would appear I have been all along.”
“Lily—” He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“I know.”
“We’ll find a way to end this.”
“We will.”
“Us.”
“Just us.”
They flew into the void, machinery of night and war, wounded soldiers without certainty, grasping what hope they could from the dream of ending the jihad of silver.
“What’s that?”
He placed the Bic micro metal black ink pen on the countertop, reached for his cup. Slow sip, clink, napkin to lips.
“Just something.”
She smiled, releasing solitary dimple, hiding her eyes. “It’s a new book.”
“Nope.”
“Yes it is! What’s it about?”
“It’s not a new book.”
“A short story?”
He tapped the pen against the counter. “I don’t know.”
“You have to know what it is.”
“It’s something.”
“A journal?”
“Do you remember when you first came here?”
The shop was empty, past closing time. He wrote while she made order of cups and saucers, filled sugar dispensers. He’d helped her put the chairs on the tabletops earlier. She walked around to his side of the counter, took the stool next to him. Her eyes studied the floor, the pen, his hands. Not his eyes, old eyes now gray, old eyes now buried in furrows of wrinkle and thought.
“Yes.”
He reached, took her hands in his. Gently, so gently raised them to lips, traced knuckle and fingertip, slid over ring and ring. He tilted her face up with fingertips layered in callus, guitar callus of decades and night. Her bottom lip trembled, mouth opened to say something, anything. He kissed her cheek.
“I knew it would happen…I wrote about it months before it happened. Something inside me knew.”