Their faces spoke only of confusion, so Whistler answered for them.

“Dark. Black. Nothing. It’s nighttime. Do you see any cities? Any lights at all? Do you see any evidence that this planet is inhabited?”

“It’s been forty thousand—”

“It’s the extinction. Mother started it without us. That’s the only explanation.”

“There could have been a natural disaster… Massive power outages. Some cataclysmic—”

“She killed them already! She started the fucking extinction without us!” Whistler whirled around furiously, throwing the holographic globe at the porthole, where it silently shattered and dissipated. His black robe gracefully enveloped him as he slunk into his vacuum chair, sulking. “Mother owes us an apology.”

The vessel shuddered as it entered the thinning atmosphere of the dead world that had been Earth thousands of lifetimes before. Whistler sat, a scowling child, arms crossed over his chest as he dreamt of the extinction of which he had been no part.

“She owes us a fucking apology.”

The Vegas Gate was so named because of an ancient city that had once stood on the site where now the gargantuan alloy shield doors controlled access to the inner workings of a person named Mother on a planet named nothing anymore. Miles and hundreds of miles and thousands of miles down, the access tunnel stretched into the crust of the world. No one had ever measured the distance, but Hank suspected that they were pretty damn near the center. The other Gates had all been lost in the sporadic warfare that signaled the end of an era, before Mother’s mission had been successful. Hank sometimes dreamt of a simpler time and a simpler place where cowboys had been the norm. He felt out of place here at the Gate control. Hell, he felt out of place anywhere on this rock. How many tens of thousands of years had it been since he had seen another human being? How many hundreds of thousands of years since he had felt the soothing touch of a lady?