“Yeah, I’m West.”
Silver eyes swept forth, back under furrowed brows, sculpted with laser precision, fixed on Adam’s again. “Sir?”
“Listen…” The firefight below and above intensified. “I’m not your West. Where are we?”
Realization. “Shit, sorry. Let’s get back to the ship.”
They ran.
That disconcerting joggle in the stomach as inertial dampening systems compensate in an alien atmosphere, butterflies: monarchs? and he felt the suck of the vacuum chair as they rose into a sky shot through with beams of light and plumes of black.
Beside him, Benton wiped beads of nervous sweat from her upper lip. One eye was developing an unpleasant bruise from their rough entry into the wrong When. She caught him looking and smiled quietly, looked toward the front of the cabin where the battle chamber elevator was falling to the floor. The Muj captain got off.
“Okay, let’s figure this out. I just checked with our batteries; nav’s taken us to strato, so we’re out of the battle for the moment.” She palmed the release mechanism on her armor, and silver blades retracted across torso, limbs, settled in seams. “You’re not Commander West.”
He pried himself from his seat, reached to shake her hand. “Not yours. We seem to’ve landed wrong.”
She shook. “It happens. Captain Mindel Frost, Judas Mujahadin Kate, out of Fort John Wayne.”
His eyes lit up. “Mindel Frost? You know Breine Frost?”
“My father.”
“He served with me in the first Jaguar war.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “Same here, too.”
“Is he—”
“Pattern erased two years ago standard.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“So what’s your business in this When?”
“Well…” West looked over at Paul. “It’s complicated.”
Frost turned to the author. “You are..?”
“Paul.”
“Right.”
“We’re here to fix some things, but it might not be exactly here. Can we take a little trip north?”
“Where to?”
“Search Judith ME for coordinates for Lascaux.”
“Judith Em Ee?”
Fuck. Paul gave himself a mental slap to the forehead. “Can you find where France will be?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
the most painful of our memories jarred loose from the recesses and wrinkles of gray-pink flesh by that most poignant of our senses: scent, and I knew watching her wasn’t good for me. Smelling her was worse.
Scent and taste intrinsically linked: mouth-melting mints, fireplace logs, the claw-footed table, the brown ceramic cup into which he’d spit chewing tobacco juice and saliva, the taste of tongues and lips, teeth closed to bar entrance into mouths, adolescent, yearning, to be rid of the heat and roofing nails, the tear of white t-shirt and back, scars now, wounds then (and this is how we heal by primary) intentions uncertain: cigarette smoke and vodka? The pressure of three on a green flannel comforter, giggles, sisters, shaking hands move to breasts, necks, cheeks, and taste and scent collide in their spectrum, lost in themselves, the self a wondering observer from the periphery of my own world, taste and scent collide in the thrash of limbs, descent of clothing to tiled floor, callused fingers within softest folds, the shudder and gasp, the disconcerting slap of flat sweetness, sweat, the tang of exertion and desire, and desire across all senses, all pasts brought forward into tomorrows constructed solely of impossible memory and the loss of
“What’s in Lascaux?”
My attention snapped from Frost, now poised over viewscreens of the battle at Jaguar. Hope Benton beside me: her scent accompanied an entirely different spectrum flood of memory into the conscious. She was adjusting her armored left arm; a snap of her wrist and silver plates schhhicked forward.
“Snow. Wind.”
“You know what I mean.”
I knew what she meant. The Judas weren’t supposed to be here, weren’t supposed to be anywhere. Now we were aboard Judas Kate watching Mindel Frost assess the progress of her fleet’s attack against an Enemy insurgence force. Judas? Judith? Where could I have gone wrong? We’d been within two percentage points of A/O stability.
“Maire’s here.”
I saw her eyes flick to Frost and West at the screen. The Muj hit some slight turbulence. The scene required thunder. She leaned in. Whisper.
“That’d explain a lot.”
It didn’t require a response.
“Should we tell them?”
And a commotion from the screen: Frost’s hands moved over controls. “You should see this!”
Walls faded from non-reflective alloy to the snowflake-stippled battlefield around Jaguar. The vacuum chairs upon which Hope and I sat seemed intensely out-of-place from our vantage point in the sky above the battle, a parasite image drawn from the eyes of another Judas.
Frost’s hands clasped, unclasped. Eyes were drawn, slight smile. “Wait for it.”
Hundreds, thousands of Judas soldiers fled from the valley; Enemy stood motionless, flickering. Flocks of Judas focused fire on the upload generator sunk into the lake. Great black shards splashed to the surface, ice cracking from a glacier into frigid Arctic waters. Three focused phase bursts at the spire’s base and it shattered, a wave of purple and silver leveling the Enemy vessels and downloads across the valley floor. The Judas flocks arced to the sky to escape that explosion of stolen souls.
To be above it, to be within that wave of chaos and screams, was the closest I’d found to stillness.
Frost waved a hand and the image merged back to black walls, cold walls.
“We win.”
within
and within
shattered images: a star, an inhalation, silver and blood
the poetry of us loss is ruse, a delta converge, assess, act alpha. omega. hidden from and Delta purpose will be forgiveness; please forgive a gnashing of teeth, a rending of flesh stutter c:c It begins.
“You’ve won the battle, but not the war.”
“Nice. Cliché.”
“Thanks. I’m an author.”
Faint look of disdain from Frost. “We’re approaching Lascaux. Want to tell me why we’re here?”
Paul walked to the screen, still guttering with images from Jaguar: smoke, flame, stars. “Show me the Stream.”
Frost paused, looking skeptically into eyes torn between green and mud. Fingers slid over depressions and the image changed: the linear temporal path from Alpha to Omega, branches of charted Whens and alternities spidering out in the pipecleaner cartography of the collected knowledge of eons.
“Illuminate known Enemy progress in this fragment.”
Fingers: a pale blue-green field washed a majority of the time/space in the direction of Alpha from Omega. With few exceptions, blank areas on the Stream’s spine, the Enemy had already uploaded a majority of this universe.
“See those?”
“What?”
He pointed. “Magnify this.”
The area he indicated filled the screen; there was a noticeable fluctuation in upload success during that time.
“Bring it to two-dimensional.” The image flattened. It could have been a depiction of a recorded waveform. Just below his finger, there was a severe decrease in uploaded pattern. “There it is.”
“What am I looking at?”
“Delta Point.”
maybe it was the interlocking of those life strands that made the loss of both so poignant, so unbelievably painful.
I’d considered writing it into Enemy, but it was one of those ideas that just wakes me from hesitant sleep, accompanies me through a cigarette, two, three, and the hours of trying to return to dreams, only to have left in the morning (afternoon) light. Judith had told me of the next book I’d supposedly written; there was no mention of it there, either.