Lindsay’s Scribblings

Particle bombs exploded at a distance; the flick of a wrist. Rainbow fireworks of tiny atoms chain-reacting. Closer now.
Through her microscope, she carefully inserted the red matter into the blue cell with a steady hand and a plastic pipette. Earth’s only defense.
As the first offending bomb tore through the solar system, shaking the earth, she skillfully and subtly tossed out her own red-centered blue particle from a raised, open platform, tethered above the atmosphere. When they raised their hands to signal the next bomb, she uncurled her fist and tensely splayed her fingers, mimicking their action: activating the particle she had created. Their explosion began, densely, and just as quickly – countered by the force of her creation – froze and then collapsed upon itself.
She smirked smugly at their surprise. Not quite so superior after all, then.
Finish her, finish it, finish earth; they told him. This can still be quick, if no longer painless. He nodded; he had no reason not to. Commanders have power, but even Commanders can be commanded, even Commanders have responsibility. His responsibility was to destroy this stubborn, selfish, misplaced world. Annihilate it. Annihilation demanded no standing opposition.
He did try, anyone would grant him that. He tried negotiating; he tried outright destruction. But she was the last hope, brilliant; she refused to be outwitted. She kept working towards survival even as he circled around scenarios for her death. The background buzz of higher authority – whispered suggestions from mentors and auditors to a favorite pupil, an inspired protégé – flitted through his edicts, but this was meant to be his command and no other’s. A test, of sorts.
She was the last hope: she did everything that could be done. She researched, she assembled, she compiled, she commanded. She petitioned for supplies, and slowly they trickled in, just enough for earth’s last stand. Enough to compose her secret weapons:
The red bundles – jumbled rods and knobs, thin and tiny – that snapped and popped, in every direction. They were weapons of economy, inflicting more damage for less production – all that earth could afford. The computer virus designed to divide his navy, destroy the perilously balanced Babel his civilization thrived on. The virus that would take advantage of a pre-existing divide between the members of his large empire. It would disassemble all orders, transmitted in Fleet Common from the flotilla’s flagship, and replace them with characters from the obscure and minor tongue of an outer-world. Like everything else, it was released into space upon creation, latent until she chose to revive it. Some coders would be able to catch it before impact, and some crews would be able to muster a translator who could begin to reassemble fragments of language before the damage spread, but at least half wouldn’t – setting the odds between earth and non-earth relatively even.
He didn’t know about her secret weapons, he only knew that she was dangerous and real. That she was his responsibility, his mark. He knew that she was dangerous and beautiful and the savior of a planet. He knew that she was an incredible kisser. His superiors didn’t know he knew this last, and he himself, though aware that an affair by no means meant a compromise, did not know exactly the havoc she intended to wreak on his flotilla.

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He was unofficially court-marshaled. Denied rank. He existed outside the military hierarchy and yet his “superiors” still controlled him, coerced him with promises of restoration. They clandestinely hinted that if he could distract her, seduce her, for just a few critical moments, he could regain everything he lost and more. If he could turn his fault into a net-benefit, he too would reap a handsome profit. And her planet would be destroyed.
Such is the price of victory, and only the truly ambitious ever reach the rank of Commander.

The icy ketamine-laced water chilled her naked flesh up to her navel, chilled her elbows and her breasts as she clutched her knees in a shallow semblance of futile fetal protection. There were no goosebumps. No raised hairs. There was nothing except the sallow cyan tint slowly flushing her skin, a creeping ascent to her face, to betray her frigid state. Had they been open, her eyes would have added a hue to the monochromatic madness sweeping her body – darkest royal blue. But after two shots of sodium pentothal, she was unconscious. Unconscious and dreaming deliciously. Vehement dreams; prescient.
In the fluorescent light, there was an unnaturally shadowy figure ignoring the live-feed vid-screens that other staffers focused on behind their surrounding Plexiglas walls – their keyboards clacking, rendering analysis. His attention was rapt - there was no movement from the knee-high sunken glass tub the woman occupied; there were not even the stifled screams she emitted in natural sleep. But her fingertips were white with insistent pressure against her calves.
Sustainable intensity is passing. He hesitated, allowing himself to momentarily devour her figure – swift curves, arched spine, muscles athletic and trim – then resolutely signaled the charge cut. Soon enough, he knew, when they finished, he would be able to stare at his leisure.
Webs of reality tapered into tendrils before disintegrating from the screens entirely. Doubtless, the impact of this feed was already ricocheting through the Washington office. Even with the assumptions such predictions had to rely on, the majority of future time-lines had been explicit: one more heavy assault would break the Chinese battle advantage.
Indoctrination, he heard her whisper, as the flush of longing rose again, equally unbidden and unchecked. Under her momentary sway, he doubted his cause.
It was, he reassured himself smoothly, a necessary and noble cause – the best and only cause, if empirics had any say: patriotism.
Liberty paled in comparison to security, a mere perk against the necessity of life. The patriot act, Guantanamo, the end of private media. It had started innocuous and grown to this: the “friendly” incarceration of a citizen for “the public welfare” – the trapping of a mind for it’s intellect; deliberate disregard for the ephemeral husk nominally recognized as the associated body.
And yet, this mind, this particular mind, would be deified, at least in his own private thoughts. The prophetess Cassandra made martyr for his great and noble cause, that best and only cause of all truly heroic endeavors. Pythia, showering him in obscure greatness, ambiguous distinctions – waiting for an Apollo to tame the intimacies of her enigmatic tongue.

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Harsh concrete steadfastly absorbed his pensive gait. Sharp clicks and the turnstile accepted his progress, registering his presence with the depressing semi-rotation of a numeric counter. The glossy metro-ride to his apartment was a duel – traditionalist loyalty wrestling sympathy for an unwitting vessel of fortune. Smothered beneath layers of swollen prescience was a drugged awareness laboring to inhale even the briefest clarity, gasping for external stimuli. He could wake her.

The slight amber tint of cold autumn sunlight trickled over the stone road and glazed the surrounding hilltops. Her father was certain to chide, even upon her safe return - it was not wise to walk alone through the outskirts of Milan in barren twilight. Not wise for a peasant, certainly less so for a distant Medici, a silk merchant’s coveted daughter.
But wares had sold well today at market, and foolishly, wispily, she had decided to detour through the quieting dusk. Her own tiny, weary sigh slid to liberty before she could stifle it, burdening her stride with the weight of consideration. Escapades such as this, however brief, were rare indeed in the well-monitored society of aristocracy – even the oft-snubbed mercantile lines.
There were not more than three streets between herself and her uncle’s small holding, where her father’s caravan was bedding. He was a worrier, her father, and though she longed to delay, he was already wracked with anxious preparations for their return to Florence.
With a single throaty gulp of air, delicately picking her way around the murky puddles socializing in the crevices of uneven cobbles, she began the pensive melody of an aged folk ballad.
It wasn’t until another voice – treble, full – joined hers that the youthful de’ Medici realized she had acquired a human shadow.
The knowledge snagged at her refrain, thinning her voice to a strained squeak. Thick skirts whirling, she confronted the owner of the assured, simpatico voice which had imposed a contentious duet upon her brusque solo.
“Maria de’ Medici?” the speaker softly inquired, dousing her temper with cool sincerity.
It wasn’t much blood she shared with Lorenzo – only a few drops from her mother, already a distant, if nominal, cousin – but she clung to any visage of authority.
“Si, who dares to intrude upon my regal solitude?” The words crackled with the taut caution of her mingling rank and fury.
Appropriately apologetic, he bowed his cloaked head and intoned lyrically, “Beg pardon, signorina , but the deed is done. I come only to assure you personally of Christ’s holy gratitude.”
Ahhh, but she should have known as much – his voice had the well-practiced discipline of the priesthood, and his vestments were ill-concealed to the alert eye.
With coquettish reverence, she murmured to the robed friar, “It is I who am grateful, father.” Conspiratorially, she squeezed his weathered hand, and he felt 10 discreet florins whisper in his palm.
Maria de’ Medici left the priest to his desperate rosary with a coy and painstakingly developed smile, confidently approaching what had been her paternal uncle’s villa.