The Final Battle

You only find out if you are a hero after the war is over. Of all the things my progenitor taught me, that’s the only one I remember. Everything else was lost. I’m told we won, but it’s never felt like that at all. The war took so much from us, but surviving it has taken so much more.

It used to be simpler. The world, I mean. We talk about the world like that, but never ourselves. Maybe we were simpler then as well. I don’t know. They came. We fought. Simpler, that: ignoring the years of peace and trading. Pretending we can recall one truth, forget that there were battles for peace as well. But no one ever really fights for that.

I move through one of the old hospitals slowly, scavenging wreckage for anything of use. My optics are still good enough for this. There are some who put more effort into their weapons. Death machines even in this era, most without a functioning targeting array. It would be funny. If anything was funny anymore.

I move slowly, because of caution as much as nature. There is movement behind me. Soft. I spin, powering up my right arm cannon. It could be nothing, but it never is. Sometimes I am hunted. Sometimes I am the hunter. We survive, and there are no prices paid for that.

Human.

A human stands outside the ruins. Male. Devoid of atmospheric gear, impossibly so. But the scan does not lie. I fire off six rockets – a precious six, four out of pure instinctive fear. He avoids them. Faster than anything human. Even faster than one of the Convex. Just here, in front of me a moment later.

“Don’t. You don’t have enough power to keep doing this.”

I stop. Not the words, but no human can speak in Word. They have their language but not ours. We think too fast, speak too fast. But this one speaks our tongue perfectly.

“You are not human.” I speak in one of the six human languages I know.

He smiles. The smile isn’t human. Not us. More than that. “No,” he says in same tongue. “I wear it for – familiarity. Appearing as one of your kind would cause confusion.” His expression goes distant, like an access point and then I’m staring at a Durchen. Tendrils stretch slowly. “Is this better?”

“Hingari.”

“No, but I can change my form. I’m Jay.”

I pause. “The Jay?” The humans told us stories.

I hadn’t even known a Durchen could wilt pink before now. “Probably. There are... lots of stories about me.”

I study the alien. “I can read humans better.”

Jay shifts back into the human form. “If you promise not to try and kill me again?”

I make a promise to a human without even thinking. I think my progenitor would be horrified. “They say the entire Yweth system fell to you. A trans-light drive unlike anything else, and you – broke it. No one even knows how many systems fell when it did. It was the lifeblood of the intergalactic system and you unmade it in a moment.”

“I know. Destroying it made me thirteen.” He lets out a sigh. “But it had to be done. It was using pathways it wasn’t meant to. Tapping into forces and energies that could not be disturbed.”

“And you decide that?”

“I closed those pathways myself, so – yes, I guess I do.” He looks small. Tired. “A long time ago, I was told that a Jay can sometimes be a Jaysaurus but will always be jaysome. Some times I don’t have it in me to believe that.”

“And that is not you?”

“Pardon?”

“You have power.” It is no power like ours, but I am no fool. “Maybe enough that you can be anyone you want to be, including who you were?”

He laughs. There is nothing young in the sound. “If I could still do that, there wouldn’t be people who are terrified of me.”

“The human armies left. We were losing. We don’t have the resources carbon-based life does, to keep coming and coming at us over and over. But they left.”

“I altered the reactor cores of several of their fleets to be responsive to emotions. Finding out how to use them successfully will keep them occupied for a time. Some mentioned this world, I decided to find out how it was doing. Then we met.”

“I tried to kill you.”

“And you aren’t right now. Maybe you can learn to be anyone you want to as well?” His smile is gentle.

“Maybe. The war is over,” I admit.

“We can hope this was the final battle,” he says as easily. “At least here. I need to check on other worlds though.”

“Wait. If you are not here, how will I convince others you ended the war?”

Jay blinks. “I don’t see why you should. I did what felt right more than necessary, but I did it because it was right. If I stay, if I seek applause, then I begin to worry at my motives. I don’t want the stories about me to be like that.”

“You consider being a hero a false hope?”

“It is when you are not one,” he says, and is simply gone a moment later.

I give up on trying to scavenge for more parts. The war is over. I do not know if anyone will believe me. I do not know if this knowledge has changed me. I can only hope that my optics are not the same as the final look I saw in Jay’s face before he vanished. Maybe I told him a truth. Perhaps it was only one I wanted to believe myself. But I hope not.

For all our sakes.