“How many?”
“None.” Nine turned to her, his voice a basso growl. “Yours was the last.”
Tears threatened to erupt from her bloodshot eyes, but Fleur maintained her composure, at least enough to squeak out an almost-inaudible “Zero?”
“What, dear?”
“Zero? What about Zero?”
Again, Whistler’s grin dropped from his face for an instant. “We don’t know. We’ve not heard from him in quite some time. Machine could have been lost eons ago, and we wouldn’t know for decades.”
“I would know.”
“Of course, dear.” Whistler rummaged through the folds of his robe, his hand finally emerging with a silver flask. He unscrewed the top and took a long drag from the amber liquid within. He held it out to Nine, who silently shook his head, and then to Fleur.
“No thanks. I don’t drink.”
“Suit yourself, missy. It’s going to be a long ride home.”
Fleur turned to the porthole, looked out into black and nothing.
Home. A long ride home.
It was a dream, she hoped. A dream… Such peace in that thought. Such quiet. It was a dream, not a memory. It had never happened. She had never lived that. She could never have lived that.
Great silver teardrops falling from the sky, bursting open in the city center with flickering laser fury, spewing forth hundreds thousands tens-of-thousands of Mother’s perfect society’s rejects, each armed heavily with light and projectile weaponry, heavily armored with fields and shields and wielding their blessed black blunderbusses before them as they carved apart the unsuspecting inner sanctums of the worlds upon which they were unleashed… In the eon of civil war, Mother’s rejects were also her closest allies, her most precious resource on the planets that they were sent to pacify. Humanity was a failed experiment. Humanity was a brat of an offspring. Mother’s rejects were often sent to the colonies to correct mistakes that she never could have foreseen, or if she had, she simply sat in the earth and watched as thousands of her most hated and treasured children laid waste to those worlds who would not bend to her will.