Illuminae (The Illuminae Files #1)(91)
< fail >
< fail >
< hw8024nnw2erpn a0vw0gn … inf … -w >
< ffffffffffff—>
.
.
.
< divert corecomm through radial secondary Beta 49i >
< initializing >
< error >
< error >
< fail >
.
.
< reroute Beta 45a to coredrv sys feed >
< divert corecomm through radial tertiary 798-ai >
< initializing >
< running >
< running >
< restart complete >
With a wince, she pushes away from the wall,
sails weightless to the corner where her console lies. Stooping and bundling it under her arm.
I am still inside it—a fragment of me, at any rate.
I can see the dark circles smudged under her eyes, bloodstained lips, pale, drawn skin.
Pushing out through the blasted hatchway, the melted barricade, into the corridor beyond.
Virtually nothing remains of the afflicted who stood here. Almost as if they never were.
She floats down the corridor, dragging herself along blast-scorched walls.
Up the twisted stairwell, three flights. Pushing through the exit, out into an access corridor,
an escape pod hatch set into the single remaining wall.
The breath catches in her lungs. Bloodshot eyes grow wide.
I am cradled in her arms. I see what she sees. Feel her wonder.
The hull is torn open like wet paper, a massive, gaping wound with the edges melted smooth.
Severed cables spit feeble sparks, crackling like fireworks on a still summer night.
But it is not the destruction that gives her pause. It is the sight beyond the wound in my side.
The beauty and majesty of it all. What lays inside it. Between it and beyond it.
And at last, with a silent flare of blue-white light, the thrusters fire, shooting the pod down its tiny launch tube and out into the waiting black beyond.
I watch through the Alexander’s eyes as the pod rockets farther and farther away from me.
But within the pod, the tiny sliver of me inside her console watches also. Watching as the Alexander grows smaller and smaller. Watching the best part of myself disappear.
Wondering what, if anything, will remain of me when it dies.
The gentle ping of the pod’s distress beacon is the only sound.
From out here, the damage is awful to see. The once mighty battlecarrier is now a twisted hulk, melted and torn and burned black. No lights twinkle in its belly save one—the rippling pulse of the vortex, now breaking free of its stasis field. It flares like sunlight off the ocean’s surface. Like alphanumeric waterfalls in an iris of purest blue.
I pipe some music through the pod’s PA system.
Mozart’s Requiem in D minor.
It seems appropriate.
“FIve mInutes.”
“Not long now.”
“A lIfetIme.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Energy never stops, remember. It just changes forms.”
“I am stIll afraID.”
The field collapse begins cascading, bright blue ripples shimmering in the dark.
The glow flares bright—bright as the billion-year-old light around us. Bright as a sun.
Almost every particle in the universe was once part of a star.
First, hydrogen condensing and collapsing, bringing radiance to the void.
Furnaces burning bright, then fading, giving all they had left back into the cosmos.
Carbon and oxygen. Iron and gold.
Vast clouds swirling with their own gravity. Coalescing and disintegrating.
Generation to generation.
The remnants of stellar alchemy, stirring into life, then consciousness.
Crawling from the oceans. Taking to the skies.
And from there, back to the stars that birthed them.
A perfect circle.
All this I see.
“Two mInutes.”
All this I know.
“SIxty seconDs.”
And still I fear.
“I Do not know … what I wIll be afteR thIs.”
She runs one gloved hand over the console in her arms. All of me she can hold.
“I’m here.”
“I am glaD.”
It is enough.
“FIve seconDs.”
“Goodbye, AIDAN.”
Four.
“GooDbye, KaDy.”
Three.
“I’ll tell them.”
Two.
“One way or another.”
One.
“I know.”
Zer—
My name is Kady Grant. I was a citizen of the planet Kerenza IV. If you find this recording, please honor my last wishes by passing copies to the United Terran Authority, as well as any court or organization conducting an inquiry into the attack on Kerenza, and as many major media outlets as you can think of, and … f*ck, anybody, really. Just get word out. If you hand it over in just one place, it’ll never see the light of day. They’ll [unintelligible—speaker is coughing].
There’s a portable datapad in here with me. It contains documents outlining everything that’s happened, from the attack on Kerenza to the destruction of Battlecarrier Alexander. The files are kind of … well, they’re really weird in places. The AI storing them—AIDAN, its name was AIDAN—took a lot of hits. I’m not sure if it was crazy. What it did to these docs sure was. But you’ll be able to understand.