Enemy (40 page)

     a light. flickering.

     the stream((?))        no.

     through a haze thick with the fog of age, faded memories emerged.

     this was not            the stream

     fire. a campfire.

     “simon?”

     a voice, rich, lush. he knew this voice...

     who was it((?))        he had heard it...          when((?))

     he placed the voice. he had not heard it in this form in so long—vital, full of life. human.

     he had last heard this voice in an altered form. mechanized. sterile. lifeless. metallic. what had her last words been((?))

     (...simon, i love you

     ((maggie, don’t leave me. i can’t do this without you.))

     (...you can

     ((I CAN’T LOSE YOU AGAIN!))

     (…love

     ((maggie, i—))

     (…

     ((i love you, maggie.))

     magdalene.

     my god. this is magdalene’s voice.

     “simon? are you okay?”

     what is this((?))

     “maggie?”

     “what is it?” she leaned over to him, grasped his hand. radiant in the firelight and her own beauty, she gazed at him with those hypnotic gray eyes, a grin on her face.

     “i... i—”

     “simon, shh...” her finger touched his lips.

     their eyes locked.

     he remembered this. how?... he had lived this.                   he pulled her to him in the crimson light.

     she kissed, passionately.

     the embers burned in the haze of the night.

     they were one.

     Michael Zero-Four leapt from his stasis chamber. The jump had been much too short. He flexed his hands, noticing the almost complete lack of pattern degradation. He had only been in the code for a few days, maybe a week. They had been sure that the jump would be much longer…

     “Simon, what’s going on?”

     ...

     “Simon? Situation.”

     silence.

     “Simon!”

     Zero-Four began to panic, calmed himself.

     “Judas Golgotha Simon command code reweb on my mark, clearance pattern Zero-Four, Michael. Reweb, mark.”

     Nothing. Silence.

     They drifted in the void.

            An inhalation. A pause. An exhalation.

     He felt her breath on the small of his neck. Her eyelashes, closed, were small brushes on his cheek. Her eyes danced to the music of an unknown dream as she slept. He held her tightly, and she moved in her sleep instinctively to get closer to him in the cool night air. He watched her, the wordless beauty of sleep, the carefree face of an angel. His lips explored the landscape of her face, and found themselves lightly pressed to her forehead. The scar of her eye was obscured in the night. Her shallow breathing both warmed him and gave rise to a stippled field of gooseflesh on his forearms. He pulled the blanket over them, locking out the night and holding in the warmth their bodies radiated together.

     this can’t be.

     she’s dead.

     In the darkness, moonlight bathed him. The intimate scent of woman, the magical feel of her pressed against him in the night. He was more content than he’d been in…

    
so long. so, so long.

     how can this be happening((?))

     He remembered their fall into the future. He remembered the war that had swept them from the safety of innocent humanity, his sacrifice of the physical so that he could be with her, how forces unknown had come from beyond time and space and sanity, how the machines from the light had torn brother from brother, sister from sister, soul from soul in their search for completion.

     Patterns of thought and codes of defiance. Guise of eternal life.

     Flailing, screaming masses...

     this has to be a dream.

     she’s dead.

     He remembered the feel of her death, the sound of her agonized mechanical scream coming from so, so far away. The feel of part of his soul excised. The feel of all that had given him hope and love and the power to continue in a world of chaos and blackness and impossibility. My god, the helplessness he had felt. But...

     Before then, there had been a time...

     Voices, from above and somehow within.

     “Who are they? How could they have—”

     “Quiet. He’s coming around.”

     “Their patterns aren’t in the registry. They could be one of the—”

     “No. No, they aren’t one of the machine codes. I know them.”

     “How could you possibly—”

     “Shh.”

     Simon opened his eyes slowly, painfully. First blackness, then the impression of television static in the form of two human outlines. He blinked and it was gone. One of the men reached out, gently touched Simon’s forehead and cheek.

     “Solid enough for now, but there was a hell of a lot of signal degradation in the transfer.”

     “But how could you know them?”

     The dark man turned, gazed icily at his companion with silver eyes.

     “I told them they’d get here eventually. I never expected them to arrive so soon. This wasn’t a part of the plan.”

     Simon watched this conversation through the haze of his aching mind. He finally placed where he had briefly seen the larger man before. Diablo.

     “I know them because they came from the same world I escaped from. They’re monsters just like me.”

     Simon frowned, unable to gather enough strength to say anything. The dark man leaned down, whispered into his ear.

     “Welcome to heaven, Simon Hayes.”

     He touched Simon’s soul with his own, giving him life anew.

     Richter.

     Simon fell back into the void.

     Waking, sitting up. A hand wipes sleep from eyes. Searching surroundings for familiarity, finding a precipitous lack thereof. Gnawing, thudding pain from behind silver eyes.

     “What do you remember, Simon?”

     He spun to face the source of the voice and found him sitting in a darkened corner of the room. He sat up in his chair, face falling partially into the light, but bands of shadow concealed most of it. Richter folded his hands in his lap, regarded Simon with a palpable mixture of curiosity and pity.

     “Where’s Maggie?”

     “She’s close. What I just can’t figure out is how you two got here. Please, tell me what you remember so I can piece together what happened. You aren’t supposed to be here.”

     “Where’s ‘here?’”

     Richter smiled sadly, shook his head. “What do you remember?”

     Simon shrugged his shoulders. “Not much. You disappeared into that light in the Diablo ship, and everything started to fall apart, so we ran to the surface. Those aliens were everywhere, except we found out they weren’t aliens when Maggie—Oh Jesus, she was wounded so badly, we tried to pull her into the ship—”

     “The ship? The Diablo vessel?”

     “No, there was a spaceship that came from above, not one of the alien ships, but one with other people in it who came to help us. They pulled us in and we tried to pull Maggie up but she was covered in blood and she fell—Is she really all right? She was bleeding so badly from—”

     “She fell from the vessel?”

     “Yeah, into the mountain. Most of it was coming apart anyways, being pulled into the sun, and she fell into the crack made in the earth. I saw the light from that vessel, the black sphere, just before she fell, and when she fell I let go of the man’s hand and fell after her.”

     “She fell into the sphere?”

     “I—I don’t know. I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up.”

     Richter touched Simon’s mind with his own and saw that Simon was telling the truth. He saw more than the truth, and he looked away for fear that anyone could possess within him the destiny of futures and not yet feel them trying to tear him apart.

     “Where’s Maggie?”

     Richter looked soberly into Simon’s eyes. “She’s very badly wounded, but she’s alive. We’ve been able to stabilize her, but she can’t maintain her pattern in that state for long. There’s been so much signal degradation.”

     Simon frowned his incomprehension. “What do you mean? Signal degradation?”

     Richter’s hands unfolded, and he walked over to sit next to Simon. “You really don’t know, do you?”

     Simon shook his head, face acquiring a veil of suspicion and distrust.

     Richter sighed. “Of course not. How could you? I’m sorry, it’s just—”

     “Tell me.”

     Richter nodded slowly, resigned. He cleared his throat.

     “Do you know what an emulation is, Simon?”

     Simon shook his head.

     Richter told him.

     Simon shut the door behind him, leaned against the wall, overcome with emotion and exhaustion and horror. The chamber was a vacuum of sound, and every inhalation and exhalation was magnified disgustingly. How could it still sound so real?

     The table at the center of the room was illuminated by a harsh light that came from above. The still figure on the table looked so small and peaceful and utterly still. They had contained her in stasis until the transfer could be performed. She was alive, but barely so.

     She lay before him, eyes closed, her body covered with a thin medical blanket that was stained with her blood. The erupting Enemy armor had torn her midsection apart. In her comatose state, she looked very peaceful. Unsettlingly peaceful.

     “Oh, Maggie…”

     Simon bent, crouched down. His face was at the level of the cold table she lay on. He reached out and touched her hair, brushed it away from her face. The unruly curl… A thin line of blood trickled from the right corner of her mouth. Simon wiped it away.

     “What am I supposed to do, Maggie?”