Visitor

• 5 •

Every morning is an afterlife. Every evening, I die anew in the trenches amid nightmares of artillery finding their target. To wake each morning is a surprise. To rise a miracle. To breathe another breath some gift foisted upon me and beyond my control.

My eyes flutter open and settle on an old man standing before a lighthouse, a great wave crashing all around him. I know what that feels like. The man seems unaware of what’s coming, but I think maybe he knows. I think maybe he’s numb to it all. I don’t think that’s ignorance on his bearded and weathered face; I believe that’s resignation.

A Ryph Lord moves before me and blocks the view of the picture. They say I’m one of the few who have ever been this close to a Lord and lived to tell the tale. Here I am again. Life appears to be full of coincidences like this, until you learn how it all pieces together.

“You’re awake,” someone says.

I recognize the voice. It’s Rocky, the stone I wear around my neck. I try to lift my arms to touch the rock on its lanyard, this little piece of asteroid that I found among the debris of the wrecked cargo, but my arms are bound. I look down at my wrists, seized together and tied to my knees, which are bound together as well. I can’t move.

The Ryph Lord hovers over me. My throat burns, maybe from dying out there among the stars. I try to focus my thoughts on Claire and Cricket, knowing I should remember something, a vision coalescing of them heading for safety, but I can’t remember if they made it. All I care about in that moment is whether they’re alive. I want my navy to come and rescue them. I lock down on this thought, trying to ignore the voices of my insanity. I try to see my love and my beloved animal safe and in some faraway place, some place where war will never reach—

“Yo, asshole, I’m talking to you.”

“Shaddup, Rocky.”

My voice is a rasp. I should be dead. I wish I were dead. I should’ve been dead a thousand times over. Unable to move, I feel my heart racing, despite my head being so close to the GWB. So it’s not the sitting still that calms; it’s the sitting still voluntarily. A soul can’t be pinned and made to heal. It has to be talked into stillness and quietude. It has to want it.

“I’d say this is rather important,” Rocky says. His voice seems to float up from my necklace, but I know it’s all in my head. I hear voices in my dreams. Don’t we all? Our brains can fool us. Mine makes a fool out of me.

The Ryph Lord shifts his great bulk from one leg to the other. The Ryph are bipedal, like all the sentient races we know, with skin like a shark’s beneath their flight and combat suits. A face split by a vertical rift reveals rows of sharp teeth. Eyes lie to either side, and they bore into my skull. Two three-clawed hands are balled into fists. Muscles like steel. The biggest and baddest of the Ryph, Lords are never taken alive, rarely taken whole. I don’t understand what this one is waiting for. Kill me, already. Or untie me so I can do it myself.

“Stop ignoring me,” my pet rock says.

“Not now, Rocky.”

“Yeah right, not now. Like I’m happy with any of this. I need this guy looking at us like I needed the hole you put in my head. And hey, what was up with that?”

“You aren’t real.”

“Let’s table that. This guy has a favor he wants to ask. So open your ears and give a listen. Give a listen, and I’ll shut up.”

I stare at the Ryph Lord. My mind is clearing a little. It occurs to me that every moment delayed like this is good for Claire, Cricket, and the navy. Maybe my death can be put off for a moment or two. Maybe these last few minutes can serve some larger purpose.

“I’m listening,” I say.

“Listen harder,” Rocky tells me.

I wait. I can feel a thrum in the deck from distant machinery somewhere in the beacon. I can hear the whirring of a pump way down in the living modules. I can hear Rocky breathing, as if rocks can do such a thing. And then I hear the whisper, a hoarse voice launched across the cosmos like a dandelion seed on a breeze, a hiss beyond the vacuum, a single word below the senses, too dull to register, coming like an ache in my bones, like neutrinos dancing across the surface of my skull—

hello

It is fainter than my imaginary voices, and yet somehow more real. Able to be believed. I hear Rocky holding his breath. I feel the welcomed numbness of the GWB leach into my mood.

“Hello,” I whisper back, the word held in my mouth, uttered inside my throat, not passing between my lips. A word of thought.

remember me

It’s not a question but a command. A desperate plea. Like how the dead wish to be remembered. Like great-great-grandfathers would have others know their names. Not the war heroes with the medals, but the obscure, those who didn’t fight. Those who died quietly with loved ones around and who were lowered into fathom-deep trenches rather than scraped out of kilometer-long ones.

The Ryph Lord moves, comes at me with his fist uncurled, those fearsome claws sharp as razors, and reaches past my bound arms. The alien grabs my shirt and yanks it up to my neck, handling me roughly, but almost as if arms so powerful have no choice.

Alien skin touches my flesh, my gnarled and ropey scars, the Ryph’s palm placed flat against my skin. I look down. The Lord’s hand covers the three gouges that lead into my surgically repaired knots of flesh. It covers the gouges perfectly.

remember me

“I remember you,” I say, the words trapped in my throat. I know that I am dead and that none of this is real, but nightmares aren’t escaped so easily. Dreams are where men are free, not nightmares. I can escape no more easily than I can slip my bonds. I am back on Yata, beneath the grand Ryph hive, the last one of my squad alive, sitting in front of the bomb we’d carried across hellish klicks. But I don’t set off the bomb. And then a Ryph Lord opens me up. It’s the last thing I remember.

“I remember,” I whisper. I little more than think the words. This is the same Ryph Lord. He came back to finish what he started.

look

I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at. The Lord moves his open hand up and presses it against my face. I don’t know how I’m supposed to see anything. Rocky gives me some advice:

“Close your eyes, asshole.”

I smile. I feel drunk from the GWB. And Rocky still sounds angry at me for drilling a hole through his skull. I only did it to keep him close. Woulda lost him otherwise. Do we have to hurt the ones we love to keep them close?

When I shut my eyes, I see the Ryph Lord standing in front of me, just as he is, but with his hands to his side. And yet I can still feel his hand over my face. My mind relaxes. I am no longer fighting life. This is what we fight. Not death. We fight life. I let go of that, and I can hear Rocky smile.

Your war-mate, who came here on our behalf, she is gone.

Clearer now, I hear the Lord talking. And I see visions beyond him of Scarlett, my old love from the trenches, who came to my beacon and spoke nonsense, who died in my arms, whose lifeless body was carted off by a bounty hunter in all black who never uttered a word.

I think all of this, and by thinking it, I say it. I say Scarlett’s name.

War is coming, the Lord says.

“I know,” I say. “It’s always coming. But you could stop. You don’t have to come for us.”

Both have to stop. Only we can stop this. Only you can stop this.

I think Scarlett’s insanity has leaked into my thoughts. Her nonsense is mixing in with the rest.

A great fleet moves to crush another great fleet. It will pass through here. You will not allow it.

I sense more than just the Ryph’s words; I sense his thoughts. His vision. I see ships beyond number. They’ve been gathering on every moon and every planet, set off in staggered precision, all to meet at once, a million weak lasers concentrated on a single cancer, poised to slice it free.

I see secrets laid bare, secrets the enemy knows. A mass invasion that will fool no one. I see why no ship came to protect us—because it would tip off our enemy. I see why the Ryph want to destroy my beacon. I see why NASA sent a second beacon, because the invasion was too important. I see my being stationed here not to get rid of me but to deploy me. I don’t know what to believe.

You and I are the same, the Ryph Lord thinks to me. You and I and your war-mate and many others. Those who do not wish to fight. Who spare lives. Who hate war. The sad soldiers.

“Who are you?” I ask. I no longer pretend to be talking. I’m thinking. I feel a deep connection like the one I have with Cricket, and more revelations hit me, more questions. Who is the empath? Maybe it’s me.

There are those like me among my people who wish peace. Not enough to take charge. But poised to strike. We made plans with your war-mate. A sudden de-escalation of war. A sudden deceleration of warships.

Deceleration. Bring the war to a sudden stop. Even though I’m seeing the Ryph, I can still feel his palm against my face, the back of my head pressed against the GWB. Knowing I’m already dead fills me with calm. Claire and Cricket are okay. Claire and Cricket are out among the rocks, hiding.

Claire and Cricket are there in the GWB with me.

I can see them, because the Ryph Lord knows about them. They are behind me, bound and gagged, on the other side of the dome, with another Ryph Lord standing guard over them.

I know they are there.

I hear their thoughts, their trembling minds, their terror and fear.

None of us are safe.

I weep into the palm of my enemy.