Free Broken: A Plague Journal by Paul Hughes Page B

goose-pimpled forearms.
    you are ((?))
    “I—I’ve been sent.” She struggled to remember what Michael had told her. “I’ve been sent by your creator.”
    silence and
    you are of loss, of ruin
    “I am.”
    purpose. completion. forevers.
    One heart: one, and frequent exhalation, shudder, the scrape of exquisitely-manicured nails over flesh, over metal, over flesh and
    “I am Omega.”

SYSTEMS OF DESIRE
     
     
    “Do you believe in werewolves?”
    Samayel shrugged as best he could beneath her, his nacelles rising and falling in lubricated silence.
    “I do.”
    She clambered to the edge of his central hub, looked down upon the captured star. The heat was a pleasant slap compared to the months of timestream cold in which they’d been. She rolled to her back and let her nest of hair dangle over the side.
    Looking up, away from the stark light of the sun below, she saw a scatter of wounded forms returning home, Judith vessels with phase scoring, here and there a vessel being dragged along by one nacelle. They couldn’t afford to leave the wrecks behind anymore. She glanced the tickle of tight-beam signals Sam sent to his returning soldiers.
    It made her sad, so she turned over and looked down again.
    “Fort Myers, good ol’ Fort Myers. I’m gonna miss this place.”
    The orbital ring had been split into halves, into quarters, into countless fragments of metallish, but remarkably, the containment layer that held the miles of breathable atmosphere in place above the star was still in place. Alina loved the smell of air , the heat of sun , the exposed warmth of Sam’s hull beneath her. How many Judith captains could say that they’d ridden their mounts on the outside?
    A flock of three Judiths passed close enough to generate wind. Alina giggled as they tipped their nacelles in salute.
    “What’s gonna happen to the Fort, Sam?”
    retrieval crews will salvage what they can from the shell. they’ll collapse the star and conceal the evidence.
    “It’s a shame. I really liked it here.”
    The atmosphere parted as a Judith destroyer entered the shell, towed by at least a dozen smaller fighters. Alina stood, shielding the light from below with her still-gauntleted hands as she tried to get a better look. “Who’s that?”
    i’m not getting any signal from it... but the markings say it’s from Fort Johns.
    “Flagship Jasper. He’s—Uhh.. It’s coming in a little fast, isn’t it?”
    The destroyer picked up speed as it plummeted into the atmosphere. The Judith tows fell behind as its billions of tons of metallish fell faster and faster toward the sun below. Caught by a flailing particle cable, one Judith rolled dangerously close to the destroyer’s hull, slammed against its side and erupted with fire and splinters of black. Other Judith began to disengage their cables as the destroyer fell out of control.
    Alina smelled the smoke as it surged past Sam: something between plastic and flesh, something between bitter and sweet. The sound it made: screaming.
    The helpless destroyer erupted miles below against the containment layer, great arms of black and fire blotting out the brightness of the star.
    “There goes another one.”
    yeah.
    Alina felt dizzy, not from the disconcerting vertigo of standing on a vessel without protection miles above the shield layer, but a deeper sickness wrought from two-point-five decades of servitude and horror.
    “I think I’ll come back inside now, Sam.”
     
     
    She loved Samayel, but she hated her command. She hated the war. She hated that even in a world of war, even when those last scattered remnants of her species were trying to make a stand, people could still be cruel. Boys could still be cruel. They could still work up the balls to call her “Banana Tits.” She hated those boys. She hated her breasts. She wanted them to be fuller. She hated her face: how it drooped, how her eyes looked perpetually sad and her high, high cheekbones, that in another time and place would