After the initial rush of emotions had finally been released, the moments thereafter once more subsided back into a quiet calm.

  Even after everything that had transpired, Hiau found herself on the other side of the gunship, standing towards the back while Lym and Vertan stood together towards the front, where the cockpit was. The latter two, even in spite of witnessing Hiau’s actions, found themselves suspicious of the individual. Hiau didn’t once protest or complain of this.

  A heavy weight hung suspended in the air as both sides eyed the other, unsure of what to say next. Should anything be said at all? Was there anything right that could be said right now?

  “I apologize,” Hiau finally began.

  Immediately, Lym’s eyes flicked over to the now disgraced general. Beneath her cold exterior, Hiau could feel a singeing heat that bore straight into her core coming through those eyes. Next to her, Vertan looked over more slowly, but in a manner that exhibited equal suspicion.

  “For what?” says Lym, with a cold and dead voice that sought no answer.

  “Everything,” Hiau finally relented. Slowly, she came to accept the person in front of her. “That I’ve done.”

  With her heightened senses, she could tell that hidden on the other side to her, Vertan was toying with his gun, his finger itching over the trigger. But she made no move or sound about it. If he decided for any reason to shoot her, so be it.

  “So what’s in it for you?” Vertan finally says. “Being here with us?”

  Hiau found her initially silent at the question. Not that she didn’t know the answer, but the weight of it was almost too overbearing.

  “Talk,” says Vertan.

  “My agency,” she finally relented. “My own agency.”

  “What agency?” Vertan asks. “Who else do you work for?”

  “No,” she replied. “Myself. I am in this for myself.”

  A visible expression of confusion overcame Lym and Vertan, and for a moment, their eyes flicked to each other. Hiau could hear Vertan pause himself from toying with his firearm.

  “How does helping us help you?” Vertan finally asks.

  “Helping you would hurt the Coalition back,” Hiau responds.

  “And why would you want that now, all of the sudden?”

  “Because of what they are planning.”

  “Tell us something we didn’t know.”

  An exhale from Hiau.

  “I take it I can assume what your plan is,” Hiau continues, looking at Lym. “She has a home with others like her, correct?”

  An uneasy nod from Lym.

  “Likely, you intend to bring this conflict straight to their doorsteps, am I correct?”

  “Right now is our best shot at ending this for good,” Vertan nodded in agreement.

  “Then I’m here to tell you that we don’t have much time,” responds Hiau.

  An unsettling aura of uneasiness suffocates the already stuffy air within the gunship. What did she mean by this, that they didn’t have enough time? After all that they have accomplished? How quickly had the Coalition caught up, and what are they so close to now that warrants such a statement? Time for what, exactly?

  “Elaborate,” responds Vertan. “If you could please.”

  “I don’t know what assumptions you were working with,” continues Hiau. “But since it seems that you don’t know, I am informing you that we have a deadline.”

  “We don’t know,” responds Lym. “Deadline to what, exactly?”

  “Extinction,” stated Hiau.

  A moment of eerie silence.

  “Working high up enough in their ranks, I was able to overhear some of their conversations and what they were planning,” continues Hiau. “We have all been lied to, given only the illusion of freedom of will and choice. The entire system, which I have been part of perpetuating, that has sought to harvest, extract, refine and replicate your people’s genetic code is for the use of a very elite few. You can likely tell that I am far from a natural person; you’re looking at one of their more successful experiments.”

  “We kind of figured this,” says Vertan. “At least, based on what Lym told me. Judging by your capabilities, it’s not hard to see where you could have gotten it all from.”

  “Allow me to finish,” says Hiau. “I am only a prototype, far from being refined to theoretical perfection. I am only a step in a series for them. At this time right now, they managed to come out lucky and recover more than they should out of Ritus. That puts them back onto the fast-track for when they could finish the entire project to its full completion.”

  “And what do they intend to do with it after that?” asks Lym, her angst ever growing.

  “They will kill everyone,” stated Hiau. “Quite literally, everyone. Every single individual they will deem beneath or obstructing them. The elites have always relied on the masses for their wealth, but making themselves as powerful as you and your people will eliminate that need entirely. Being in control of that gives them nothing to fear anymore. All of us will be culled regardless of who, where, or what we are to make way for their delusions. Forever.”

  “So it’s a cheat,” Vertan muttered with growing dread.

  “It’s the absolute final step for them,” continued Hiau. “It’s the culmination of a project that’s lasted for who knows how long. They want to live forever and have everything. If we don’t succeed now, there won’t even be a world in the future for us to have the luxury of fighting over.”

  Lym remained silent at the information. No wonder the Coalition has been so desperate, finding to the last drop for time immemorial against her people. This truly meant everything to them as much as it did to her people. The entire conflict is existential for both sides.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  A manufactured mass extinction event.

  “I—,” began Lym. “I need to sit down.”

  Moving back towards the cockpit, the seat forms from underneath her, and she sits down, her face in her palms. Instinctually, Vertan moves to console her, rubbing her head and shoulders.

  “They would kill you, too?” asks Vertan.

  “Especially me,” answers Hiau, slightly shuddering at the thought. “They don’t want the risk of a prototype like me still running about by then. I overheard them all laughing about the pleasures they’d indulge themselves in once I’m caught by their hands before killing me.”

  Vertan’s eyes widened as he audibly gasped, even if ever so slight, at hearing this. It was so abominably disgusting that he couldn’t help the natural gut reaction one would elicit upon imagining such a thing being carried out. In that moment, he in fact felt bad for the person in front of him, even after everything she had done. He found himself instinctually squeezing Lym out of some sense of self-soothing.

  “Oh, Gods,” he felt himself muttering, his voice wavering. “Oh my God.”

  “How long do we have?” asks Lym.

  “From what I heard in there,” answers Hiau. “They said a ‘couple months’. Knowing the speed at which they work, I’m not optimistic. They know how close they are and will devote all their resources to this last push. I expect far less, maybe several weeks’ time before they surpass what I’m already capable of now.”

  Lym’s breath shuddered as she hid her face.

  “Gnsúhc hnfìm x?s gnswáht,” she found herself whispering in a self-soothing prayer. “Gnsúhc hnfìm nfàac ir?hp gnswáht!” (We will win. We need to win!)

  Vertan once more found himself soothing Lym in an embrace, though truthfully, he was attempting to soothe himself just as much as well.

  It, in all, is just such an insane conspiracy. They quite literally want to destroy everything, just to secure their position at the top. Even a decade ago, he couldn’t have known that the peaceful life he lived at home could one day be completely gone altogether, because a group of delusional elites millions of light years away have been toiling nonstop at such a goal. Maybe if they were lucky enough, they could have gotten away with not being relevant enough for their purposes, but even then, one cannot reason with the unreasonable, and they could have come up with any obscene excuse to do anything, even if the destruction was out of pure fetishistic enjoyment.

  Vertan truly wished that he was in the wrong. That this was all a grave misunderstanding, a series of miscalculations and coincidences, and that he truly was insane and didn’t know anything better. He wished that were the case, that he would simply be the nut living in the woods while the rest of the Myriad Worlds and the rest of the charted universe could continue existing peacefully into the foreseeable and far future.

  But it was impossible to continually deny anything, given everything he’s seen and witnessed across the years. After all of his experience, the knowledge acquired, and the connections made, it would be an intellectual disservice to continue thinking otherwise.

  Hiau too wished she could be wrong. Suddenly, every single bit of what she was taught and trained over the years now read like hollow propaganda and blind dogma. Suddenly, she found herself standing in front of the very same “traitor terrorist” that she for so long had tried to catch. Suddenly, she found herself on the same side as him and the demon designated Subject-000002, a person with a name, people, and home.

  “Are your people as capable as you?” Hiau asks Lym.

  “There are many more above me,” Lym answers, having calmed herself from the earlier angst. “I am far from our more capable, by our standards.”

  “Can they work faster than the Coalition?” Hiau continues. “We don’t have much time.”

  “I think we’ll be cutting it very close, even being strategic,” answers Lym. But a hopeful smile rebels, and tiredly shows on her face. “But we’ve done it all before, haven’t we?”

  Hiau couldn’t help but return an equally exhausted smile.

  “You tell me,” she says. “But that does give me hope.”

  Having previously gone unnoticed to them, the light shining in from outside had begun to shift and change.

  Looking out the window of the cockpit, they watched as reality completely broke into fantastical kaleidoscopic fractures, constantly shifting, morphing, distorting inwards, outwards, upwards, downwards and towards itself. To a nearly infinite horizon in every direction, they could see endless images of themselves, each copy displaced by space and time. Behind them, they saw them as they were a few moments ago, and ahead of them, they saw them as they will be in another few moments. Upwards, downwards, sideways, diagonal ways, they could see endless variants of themselves each on the same path and journey. In some parts, they could even perceive every side, including the insides, of their vessels, all at once simultaneously, despite it all remaining opaque as opposed to any semblance of transparency.

  It was as captivating as it was disorienting. Soon, even Lym found her head swimming, and had to steady herself by grabbing onto something within the gunship, even despite having already sat down. Vertan and Hiau found themselves having to look away multiple times, lest they trip and fall down to their knees.

  And then as suddenly as it had come, it all melted away, the other versions of themselves seemingly disappearing into nothingness. They were once again all alone.

  Something swims up past them.

  Vertan and Hiau looked up in alarm, but Lym reacted differently. Her ears seemed to perk up, almost in a sense of relief, even if at the moment unsure. Her gunship likewise picked up the signal and seemed to communicate with whatever was out there, before it eventually swam away, once more leaving them in eerie silence.

  Another long moment would pass before this happened again.

  And again, and again.

  Each time it happened, it seemed that each occurrence happened with increasing frequency, with less time passing between. Eventually, they arrive at a point in which it seemed like there was a constant and ever morphing series of masses swimming about outside, recognizing Lym’s gunship, and joining it shortly on the way before returning to their previous positions back in the far distance.

  “It recognizes us,” says Lym, slightly emotional.

  Being able to gain a better look at what was occurring, Vertan could see that it wasn’t just anything. All seemed to be highly archaic yet simultaneously advanced pieces of technology, armed over the brim with wide arrays of tools and weaponry across their ever shifting forms. Some were smaller than they were, while others seemed to dwarf cities.

  But, undeniably noticeable to them, is the existence of the same kind of language, markings, and emblems in Lym’s gunship engraved or otherwise written on them.

  Lym’s gunship has found itself amongst its kin.

  “What is it?” Hiau uttered with awe.

  “Defense Cloud of the Happian Union,” Lym whispered, equally in awe.

  As their journey continued, this phenomenon seemed to grow exponentially dense by many orders of magnitude. It seemed to be that the closer and closer they approached the world, the more and more impossibly heavily armed its defense systems became. Eventually, for what may nearly be a straight light year, it became so thick that it appeared as though the interconnected web of these systems was all there is in existence, as though they had entered an entire dimension that consisted only of them.

  And suddenly, they came to the final breakthrough.

  Arriving to the other side, they could see that for approximately a light second across in diameter, they appeared to be within the inner core of an outer shell of obscenely dense interconnected defense systems. In fact, so dense was it that all of their flashing and beeping lights seemed to make up an artificially starry sky with technically identifiable constellations amongst them.

  But this was not what caught their attention.

  Because placed precisely in the middle of this configuration, lay a lone planet. It continued to rotate ever slowly, even in spite of the irrelevance of no longer having a day and night cycle, no artificial sun being present.

  And yet somehow, a strange aura emanated from the planet, and visible upon it, they could all make out the lights of cities, the outline of its single continent, and the elaborate networks stretching like veins and arteries across its vast oceans. Coming closer, and they could even see that, less visibly, there too is an impossibly intricate and complex webwork of systems, infrastructure, and weaponry placed in orbit around it, in fact taking up the entire space between the planet and the outer shell in the distance beyond it.

  Descending to the planet below, guided and escorted by its automated systems, everyone present could make only a single possible realization.

  They have arrived at Happia.