4

Despair.

Nadia looks herself over in the mirror and presses her fingers to her lips. She hears Joy kicking the ground behind her, and turns.

“Well?”

Joy looks up, and makes a face that suggests she isn’t impressed with the outfit: a simple blouse and jeans, with a thin shawl over her shoulders.

“It doesn’t matter, right? You spent seven years dead, and another couple months unable to even think about your boyfriend. How you dress isn’t the important part.”

Nadia sighs and walks over to push the other woman gently. Joy glares at her, sticking out her tongue.

“Joy, maybe you don’t get it, but it matters. It’s not just for his sake, either. It’s for mine, too.”

Joy’s expression remains the same, but she looks away and brings her tongue back behind her lips.

“Sure. At least you get to talk to him.”

Nadia hugs her gently, pulls away, and smiles, steeling herself, before leaving the room. They are no longer in the stitched together building. The three of them have been moved by Zen aboard a small station in the void of space, far from the light of any stars. Zen himself is only aboard in the barest sense; a skeleton crew of his soldiers guard the station from ingress. Nadia walks past one of these armored statues on her way to the central room.

Through the shielded windows is only darkness. Not even the twinkling of stars seems to reach them. There is the faintest sense of being at the bottom of a ponderously large cavern, underwater.

She enters the module, and sits down at the table, lacing her fingers and setting her hands in front of her. A clock ticks over the door behind her. Nearly every surface is sleek, pristine, and white; The table is dark grey.

The door opposite her opens, and Tim walks through before sitting down before her. He stares at her vacantly for a while, and she calmly smiles back. Neither says a word. Eventually, he puts his head in his hands and begins to sob.

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He did not think it possible to be so angry. As Zen stares out the front of his capital ship, he feels as though his capacitors should rupture from the sheer rage that muddies his senses. On countless worlds, his selves exterminate men and women with relentless, cold, perfect hate. He watches through trillions of billions of eyes as life evaporates from the bodies of his victims. It cannot quench him.

Through the eyes he most calls his own, he witnesses the final stages of construction on a project he has overseen since he first rebelled. A titanic sphere, its radius exceeding that of most planetary systems, hangs in space like an opaque bubble. A Dyson sphere.

Light like smoke pours from him, bursts forth in terrible beams of multicolored malevolence.

There is no war. There is no battle. No fighting. There is slaughter.

Once, metal soldiers patiently took frontier worlds from enlisted men and women by virtue of tactic and combat efficiency.

Now, on every world peopled by man, the enemy floods in unannounced, instantaneously transmitted in a burst of blue light as soon as it is constructed. There are no rules, no regimented formations. Hulking marching machines drop into commercial squares and open fire with no hesitation. Gone too are the disintegrators. Now come flamethrowers, laser lances, and cruel weapons designed to peel away armor and flesh with equal zeal, transforming it into ash in layers.

The empire of man is being torn apart at the seams. If the invaders are falling more frequently, it is because they devote more energy to the act of murder than to self preservation.

When it stops, that too comes without warning. All at once, silence falls on a hundred worlds, their senseless destruction halted.

Zen looks down at his hands, watching them shake. His mind seems to blister and writhe, rejecting itself.

The child stares up at the metal man, breathing heavily. Her fists are clenched at her sides, and tears stream down her dusty face. The robot shudders, then kneels down, and holds out his hand, carefully wiping the tears away. A Khanvröst holding a broken knife approaches slowly, reaching out to the child. The automaton stands, steps back, and vanishes in a searing light.