Epilogue #2
I gave her my best 'What?' gesture, arms spread, and eyebrows raised.
Turns out, some gestures are interstellar.
She tapped the air three times fast with a thin, grey finger, then pointed at the vein, and finally at the shard dagger resting warm and gritty in my hand.
More inspiration. The kind you get when you know your bank heist script should be set in Hawaii... in a skyscraper, starring a freshly divorced mom as the hero. I've changed scripts mid-write and made it work. I could do it again.
I crawled to the wall in silence, slow enough to keep the shadows from noticing. Heat bled into my skin from the stone, sending my fingers tingling. Faint illumination from the wall rippled out in waves, gathering in one pulse at the far end before fading into the dark.
There was a natural, almost musical hum to it, so what if I 'yell' into it?
Thomas had taught me one thing. Timing mattered, and one person could throw off a chorus. With the dagger, I tapped. Waited. Tap, tap, tap. Lights sped up and collected at the end as if a balloon were about to burst, then faded with a shudder. I did it again, and it flared brighter.
The Queen froze mid-bite, her glowing eyes narrowed into slits. She stepped toward me slowly, deliberately, like she was deciding which part to chew on first.
Tap, tappy, tap... tap—like an old Morse code operator out of sync.
It hit me again. More inspiration, and this one all mine.
I snapped the shard in half, drawing blood over my palm, and hurled one piece at the vein's end.
The first spun and landed high, but the second struck, sparking against mineral.
The glow swelled, blazing like a miniature sun.
The Queen's scream split the air, so sharp it might as well be a circular saw slicing into my head. Heat slammed, toasted every inch of skin, and I clamped my eyes shut. Light flashed through my lids, almost blinding me. The ground buckled under my hands, and vibrations thundered up my arms.
The rumble grew, a deep grinding roar. I heard the crack of heavy stone bursting open a black exoskeleton. At least that was my hope. A baseball-sized rock glanced off my shoulder, and a pointy stone dug into the back of my right leg. Grit and dust sprayed over my face and back.
Then silence.
I cracked one eye open, and slowly another. The cave looked like it had been through a blender with fine dust hanging in the air, and rubble rolling to its final stop. The Queen lay trapped under tons of rock, with only her black head sticking out. Her narrow eyes locked on me.
"Sheesh. If looks could kill."
I twisted, wincing from the pain, and scanned the debris until I spotted my buddy.
She got half-buried below smaller slabs, but her huge black eyes blinked at me steadily.
She twitched one grey finger up in a strange little spinning motion.
It wasn't a thumb-up exactly, but close enough to make me laugh with relief.
I shuffled over, shoving rocks aside to free her. A quick check told me she had no new serious injuries, and it made my chest a little less tight.
A thought came, not mine.
Take the head.
I hesitated, glancing at the Queen still pinned under a mountain of stone. Her eyes bored into me, furious and intelligent, as if she were thinking of ways to hurt me. I could have walked away and left her there, but that was a slow cruelty.
I took a long breath, weighing what I already knew. Two intelligent non-Humans lay here. One would never stop killing. The other? So far, they hadn't hurt anything. That tipped the scales already leaning against the Queen, but it didn't make the choice easy.
The newly found shards were sharp, and it wasn't clean or quiet work, but soon... it was done. Pulling the head free felt like dragging a warm log from a furnace. It cooled quickly and ended up lighter than I'd expected it to be.
My buddy had suggested this, uh, theft, and there had to be a reason. Maybe it would be a warning to the others: We took out your Queen, so don't mess with us. Or we just earned ourselves a promotion to royalty. Either way, they'd listen... or leave us alone.
I slumped against the wall, the Brain Zerlite still beside me and breathing slowly. Gently, I pulled her up to a kneeling position, and we stared at each other for a moment. Two aliens.
"I wonder what my friends would think of you?"
There was no way back to the others for an answer, not with a quarry's worth of rock blocking the entrance I'd come through. The tunnels ahead stretched into darkness.
Okay. Let's start fixing problems.
"Well... let's get you, us fixed up and find some food."
I rubbed my chin. Thomas would send probes down here, maybe a Simulacrum or two. All we had to do was survive until then. Would he and the big guy be behind our rescue? Now there was a thought.
He still had Tydalos to fight, but I wasn't worried. Not really. People like Thomas and his man? They found a way to win when others needed them.
But... I had other friends on Sudo.
Thomas was too busy with his pregnancy and adventures to notice anything off about his baby brother, Wyatt. I kept some secrets because they weren't mine to tell. I'm not Brody.
But there were stretches of time when I wasn't with Thomas, and in those moments, I learned things about another brother from Georgia and a certain former CEO.
Things about Wyatt and Ryan.
Revelations that would blow Thomas' mind when he found out, because there was no way he'd be able to keep a growing secret inside him.
Why do I think Wyatt, Ryan, and their Armored Dead 'friend' will be the ones to find us instead?
I turned to my new buddy.
"Wanna hear a story about a handsome screenwriter who changed the world?"
She gave me a small chirp in reply.
"I'll take that as a yes. It all started over twenty years ago with a children's show on a planet called Earth..."
***
Our friends from Sudo will return soon in
The Spaceman and His Triad.