Chapter 28: Bones of a Dying World
Ria peered into the tiny lavatory mirror on the UNF shuttle. She splashed a bit of water on her face.
There was a tiny crack on the mirror in the upper corner. The hairline fracture traced down to the center of the mirror where she stared into her own light green eyes. A flash of light reflected off the hairline from the hard light above her.
There was a knock at the door and instinctively she pulled the latch open to leave.
Lance Verbius stood before her, "Oh sorry, are you done in there?" he asked.
"Uh- yeah, go right ahead." She started to scoot around him but then stood face to face at one point and stopped. It was a tight squeeze. And she felt something within her heart that she couldn't explain.
"You know- I think I knew your son."
"Oh?"
"He and I were- close."
"Oh."
"No, I just thought I should tell you- I think- he taught me something."
"Well- I see. Dare I ask- what?"
She looked back in the bathroom at the hairline fracture, then back at the red gash on Royce's father's face. "Oh nothing, it's nothing important. I forgot what I was going to say."
"Well, alright then. Mind if I-"
"Oh sure, sorry." She scooted around him, then ventured back to the bridge.
She floated down the central aisle and clasped Ikuno on the shoulder.
Bright purple craft were beginning to appear before them. Dozens of giant frigates, each tore a hole in the fabric of space as they screeched into place before them.
Ethereal words spoke to her mind directly from no discernable source:
"DO NOT FEAR US, HUMANS. WE HAVE COME TO LIBERATE YOU FROM YOUR BODIES INTO OUR WARM EMBRACE."
"Ikuno-" she whispered.
"It's okay, Ria. We're not going out without a fight. We'll hold them off. We'll give Royce and Diana as much time as we can."
In the window before them she saw a long square barrel tilting forwards into position. Behind her she heard a deep, calm voice, "alright everyone."
She didn't have to turn to know who it was. She continued to gaze forward at the invasion fleet before her, and elder beside her.
"You all signed up to go into the grand abyss. To leave your homes, your comfortable lives, your safety. Those things out there- they know nothing of bravery. Bravery cannot exist without individual responsibility. Heroism doesn't exist in a collective. And if we don't stop those bastards that's exactly what we'll be. Now, there's two escape pods on this shuttle. If anyone wants to go back and sit this one out. I've got the keys right here."
She heard a few light metallic clinks.
"No judgment."
There was a long pause.
"No takers? Well then, together we fight. And we show these invaders that we'd rather die than lose what makes us human. Ensign Dirac!"
A scrawny guy, no older than twenty stood from his console at the front of the bridge.
"Yes, sir?"
"Prepare to fire Stylet. Everything we've got. Use every bit of energy we've got stored and every round in the quill. You run out, start firing nuts and bolts off the ship."
"Understood."
"On my order-"
Wherever you are, Royce.
"Fire!"
I forgive you.
Royce looked down at his communicator. Its obsidian screen shattered like a spider's web. He aligned his eye with the point of impact and saw dark cracks covering his face. Through the clear glass of the dome and through the branches of the strange oak tree he saw bright blue, white and purple flashes in the shadow of the moon. He wondered if they were real or imagined.
No more looking-glass to guide me, Royce thought. Zero hour. Time to go.
He followed Diana as she led Victor, Morisato and himself toward the massive tree, glowing with purple veins where a great rabbit's hole had opened within its trunk. Only darkness stained with violet light stared back at him from the cavernous maw.
She pointed down the hole, "that's it. He's down there."
"Ishigami," he asked her.
She shook her head, "Ishigami's long gone. The mouthpiece of the invaders is all that remains in that hollowed out skull."
Her once vibrant eyes were turning glassy. Her once vibrant expression gone cold. Her hand was like ice as he squeezed it. She did not squeeze back.
Morisato peered into the hole, "Screw that! I'll stay guard up here."
Victor nodded, "yeah Royce- Diana, it's all you."
"Shall we go, Darling," Diana turned to him and whispered.
She stuck a single foot inside the hole and began to lower herself down but he grabbed her arm and stopped her. She looked back at him in surprise.
"What's the matter?"
"I can't! I can't let you do this."
"Why not?"
"You'll lose your humanity. Whatever's left of it!" He shouted. "I WON'T! I won't leave you or anyone else to clean up my mess. Not them, and certainly not you. This time it's me. Hyyroc even said- it's got to be me."
He heaved her with all his might and flung her away from the hole. She landed and clambered her way toward him but he was already one foot deep.
"No, Royce!"
"It's my turn."
She stared into his eyes and finally some life returned to her own. Only a glassy sparkle of tears remained. "Be careful." She gulped, "I'll be here when you get back. Okay? You better come back!"
"I will," he nodded, then he focused on Victor, and Morisato, "I will."
He released the edge and slid down the gruesome slick tunnel into pulsating darkness.
The walls inside the tunnel felt sticky, cold and organic. Like the inside of an esophagus.
Pulsating purple veins intermingled with solid blue lines of light that fanned out like cracks in a mirror.
All around him, the pulsating of blood vessels. Dark, organic, and fleshy.
There was a dim blue glow ahead of him. The ground was flat and he stumbled to his feet and walked toward it.
A short woman wearing a gleaming blue dress and blue fluorescent skin stared back at him. She had a single great glowing horn protruding from her forehead and eight glowing blue tentacles darting around the cavern from her back. He locked eyes with her and one of the tentacles whipped around and held him down against the far wall before he could brace for it.
"Who are you, human?"
"R-Royce. Ver-bius."
"Your name is unfamiliar but your voice- I know this voice. I recognize it from long ago." She continued to stare directly at him, speaking directly to his mind without moving her lips.
"What- are you?"
"You may call me the Klaxosaur princess. The last descendent of an ancient race. A race you continue to defile through your actions."
A scene flashed through his mind of the giant serpent he impaled through its mouth. The sea creature. The lava creature with a hole blasted through its chest by an orbital round. He remembered Diana's eyes as he caused her pain, forcing her to relieve the most horrible parts of her childhood just so he could understand his own.
"Aaaah!" he yelled.
"Yes, I can see you've done much. Not as much as your predecessors. But much. Although it seems you're a bit smarter than the others. Funny how that happens with humans. Even identical twins are different. Unlike us, you can only have one body. You only occupy one volume of space at a time- for your entire life. But that one," she pointed at the other man pinned to the far side of the room with another of her tentacles, "All he can imagine is the collective."
"What are you talking about? Who is that," Royce looked at the horribly disfigured man leaking ichorous black fluid from his hand which resembled tree roots more than flesh.
"That is the mouthpiece of the invaders- who even now thinks he can control me."
"Are you- the core?"
The blue woman looked down at her ankles, restrained by some black metallic material festooned with copper and gold. He noticed she also had a silver collar locked around her neck, chained into the wall behind her.
"The one who called himself Hachi called me that, after he freed me from the dredge heap of rubble in the Gran Crevasse. The place where I lay for hundreds of years. A 'living fossil' he called me. As he chained me inside this tree and used my boiling blood to power his space station."
"I don't know-"
She continued with renewed anger, "and THIS ONE," she rammed her tentacle harder into the struggling man's throat, "Ishigami- infected my bark with a virus. The same one he infected Star Entity with all those years ago. That's the problem with collectives!" He heard another jerk and a gurgling sound, "no creativity!"
Then she released her grip on both of them and Royce dropped to the ground, gagging.
"I know she's waiting for you, Royce," she looked at him with sympathetic eyes. "it won't do any good if I kill him. The virus will spread from his blood and infect this tree- this station. The invaders will just send others. But you- he can't control you so easily. You can control this station after I succumb to the invaders' virus. You can remove me from these chains."
The old man still stood on his hands and knees, gagging.
"If he takes control of this station, he'll it to control every optogenetic cell on the planet. He'll be able to integrate all Klaxosaurs and most humans into the VIRM collective."
"And if I kill him-" he looked at the old man stumbling around on the ground, "can you seal the portal? Repel the invasion fleet?"
"Yes," she hissed, "This station has weapons that will make short work of the invaders."
"What about the portal?"
"Once the VIRM see that it's hopeless, they'll stop coming."
"That's a lie…" coughed Ishigami.
"Quiet, you wasted little man," the princess hissed.
"Only I have the code to close the portal. Without that code, they'll keep coming. Forever-" he spat. "Eventually we will all transcend the boundaries of our flesh. Whether we want to or not."
The princess hissed and bared her razor sharp teeth, then tore one of her own whip-like tentacles right off.
Blue fluid leaked from between her teeth. Then she spat the limb out onto the ground where it transformed into a blue sword.
"Take it, human. The choice is clear," she hissed.
He reached down slowly and picked up the sword.
Then he walked toward the gasping man on the ground and held the sword at his neck.
Suddenly a scene flashed before his eyes.
A little girl no older than ten years old- a gun pointed at her own father's head. "You are not my father!" Followed shortly after by the blast of a spent cartridge and the rack of the slide.
He gulped.
The sword shook in his hand and he whispered, "no."
"What's that?" the princess looked at him.
"I won't," he said forcefully. "Only kids believe in fairy tales blindly. As adults- we get to choose what we want to believe- what meaning we wish to draw from experience, what values to bring to the world. We don't have to repeat our past mistakes- the mistakes of our parents- our lovers, our friends. We don't have to perpetuate the barbarism of the past. We don't have to believe the prophecies. We don't have to sacrifice the sacred king. We can make decisions. If we truly want- to change things for the better."
He lowered the sword and reached out with his free hand.
"What are you doing, foolish human!"
"What," Ishigami gasped.
"Tell me the code."
"Why?"
"If you don't, this cycle will continue. I'll kill you. You'll infect her. We'll go back to fighting the same war," he nodded at the princess still in shock, "the same war they've been fighting since the beginning. Many more humans and klaxosaurs will die. And in return we'll ram this whole station and half a dozen Shrikes through the portal and decimate your collective." He peered down at the old man, "or you can take my hand, give me the code, and we can have peace."
He saw the cogs turning in the empty, hollowed out skull behind empty pitch black eyes, filled with the thoughts of a billion faceless forms humming together in synchronous thought.
"Very well, human. The code is Y.Y.A.N.W.Y.Y. We will respect- your primitive individualism. And if you want peace, I hope you will learn to restrain your constant expansion."
He reached down and gripped the man's hand.
"You got yourself a peace treaty- filthy invader."
The slightest hint of a smile crept over the old man's face.
As violet roots began to slowly retreat from the walls around them, he saw the blue woman shake her head. "The invaders cannot be trusted. But at least, for the first time in a million years, someone's doing something different. You impress me, human. Only time will tell if your choice was wise."
Victor sat up against the gnarled bark, leaning his crossed arms on the stock of his rifle. The long dark hole sat beside him, and Diana and Morisato on the other side of it.
Diana was half awake- drifting in and out of consciousness. Morisato was passed out. His head uncomfortably close to the edge of the abyss.
He stared out the vast glass dome at the moon where bright lights flashed and sparkled. He had no idea if the lights were exchanges of a great battle or the photonic booms of more VIRM ships warping in.
The sun was creeping over the edge of the great dome. Long beams of light cast between the tree's branches and as the glowing orb passed behind a solitary leaf it turned from opaque green to translucent gold. He reached out a hand and imagined he could grab the sun in his palm. Just for a moment. Then he heard a rustling from the depths beside him, and grabbed his rifle.
"Who's down there?!" He woke Diana and Morisato and pointed the gun down the hole.
"It's me!" came a familiar voice. "We did it."
He peered up at the moon. The twinkling lights had stopped.
"How in the world-" he gasped. Diana covered her mouth. Morisato grinned from ear to ear.
"We did it," came the muffled voice again from the depths.
Great black and aqua tentacles emerged from the hole. They darted out and grabbed onto the tree limbs. A young blue woman who reminded him of the Khanian minister emerged from the hole followed by a young, dark haired man, and a discarded husk of blackened organic tissue he scarcely recognized as commander Ishigami.
"Royce!" Diana jumped on him and the pair embraced as soon as the blue octopus-woman released him from her clutches.
He approached the strange woman cautiously.
"Are you- a klaxosaur?" Victor asked carefully.
"Yes."
"Did you- defeat Ishigami?"
"No. I merely witnessed a truce between worlds."
"Royce," he walked toward the couple now staring into each other's eyes, "you killed Ishigami?"
"No. The VIRM just finished with him. He was dead long before we got here."
They both looked at the body lying on the soggy ground. He heard a low rumbling noise as the tree behind them began to heal, its gaping wound slowly closing before his eyes.
"So we can go home?"
"Yeah Victor, at least - until we once again succumb to that primordial urge- to explore, to descend into the abyss, or until we move beyond it." Diana still clung to Royce's shoulder, her wide green eyes stared down at Royce's sweat-drenched head.
He felt a pang of loneliness in the pit of his stomach. In that moment he understood what Royce meant about the abyss. For in it lies the boon. And without it there is only the bittersweet comfort of isolation.
The mysterious blue creature nodded her head, "leave this place. I'll be behind you- I'll take this station back where it belongs."
"Let's go home." He smiled.