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Chapter 17
Slouching Toward Gomorrah
Below the silver wing of the Gulfstream business jet, a carpet of argent clouds drifted by with an illusory languor. It was a profoundly peaceful view, thought Buffy, a tapestry of silver-white that suspended reality and for a brief time gave her peace.The peace was broken by Xander, who slipped into the seat beside her. She turned to him and smiled half-heartedly. Willow and Lillith were a few rows behind them, asleep. Cordelia was engrossed in a Tiffany’s catalog. Spike was in the galley foraging for food. And Angel was far to the back of the cabin, distracted and distant and doing his best to ignore the existence of both Spike and Xander. Actually, thought Buffy, “brooding” summed him up quite nicely. It was the Angel of old, the tortured and sad vampire of her youth revived in spirit, if not in substance.
“He’s not doing too well,” said Xander.
“Elisa’s been his whole life for twenty years,” said Buffy softly. “I don’t think he has anything else.”
“Yeah, he does,” said Xander. “He’s got you again.”
“What about you?” asked Buffy. “What do you have?”
“Me? Not a damn thing, Buff. Haven’t had anything in a long time.”
“Since your wife, Tracy.”
“Yeah, since Tracy. Angel told you?”
Buffy nodded.
“Ancient history,” said Xander.
“Obviously not. Willow’s got the scar to prove it,” said Buffy.
“That was a mistake.”
“Yeah, I’d say so. It’s also the past. I want to know what the future’s going to be, Xander. I’d like another chance to be your friend if you’d be willing to have me as one. But it’s not going to happen if I have to keep worrying about you and Angel. I let it slide when you lied to me about the ensoulment spell with Acathla because I didn’t see how knowing would have changed anything. I’ll let this slide, too — it’s between you and Angel and Willow. But I’m not going to let you go for a third try. I need to know it’s over,” said Buffy.
“It’s over. It’s been over for awhile now. You killed the part of him I hated. My mistake wasn’t seeing that earlier.”
“Are you sure it was just the demon you wanted to kill?”
“I hated the demon. I envied the man. I still do, but it’s not anything I can’t deal with,” said Xander.
“How’d you get so tough?” she asked, realizing only after she said it that it was the same question Echo Fox had asked her.
“I could ask the same thing of you,” said Xander.
Buffy tilted her head back against the headrest and said. “When you start walking the road alone, that’s when it happens. Maybe if I’d never left Sunnydale, never left you and Willow …”
“If you hadn’t, maybe we’d all be dead now,” said Xander. “There’s no point in talking about ‘ifs’. We all made our choices.”
“Did we? Or did I make the choices for you and Willow? I brought you two into my world. I’ve never been sure I did the right thing. You probably would have been a lot happier without me in your life.”
“Probably. Happiness is okay. I don’t have anything against it as rule. You showed me it’s not the only thing that’s important in life, though,” said Xander.
Buffy glanced back toward Angel. “Maybe I was wrong.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Sometimes I do.”
He reached over and brushed her hair away from her face. “It was all supposed to get easier once we took that magical step onto the road of adulthood. Where did we make the wrong turn, you and I?”
“Maybe we didn’t. Maybe we’re right where we’re supposed to be, Xander. Maybe there really is an ultimate meaning, a purpose to everything we’ve done and been through.”
“I’d really like to think that.”
“It’s a lot better than the alternative.”
Xander chuckled. “Listen to us. We sound like a couple of philosophers. We’re a long, long way from Sunnydale High, huh?”
“A long way and a lot of years. But we’re still the same people. We get older, hopefully wiser, often more jaded and cynical, but deep down I don’t think we change fundamentally. I don’t think you’ve changed. I still believe in you even if you don’t always believe in yourself.”
“That’s why I always loved you,” said Xander softly.
Buffy squeezed his hand and smiled understandingly. “I know.”
“Bloody Hell! We’re out of honey roasted nuts!” snapped Spike as he headed back into the main cabin from the galley. “First class my ass. Who do I complain to about the service on this flight?”
The two old friends sat up straight, the retrospective moment gone. The present had intruded into the past. But what else was new, Buffy wondered. Something always came along to disrupt anything good in her life. Friendship, love, happiness — none of it stood a chance against her destiny.
She sighed and slid a copy of Psychology Today from seatback pouch in front of her.
“Figuring Out Your Interpersonal life,” the cover read.
Buffy turned to the article and began to read. In a hundred and seven years, nothing else had gotten her interpersonal life straightened out, but it certainly couldn’t hurt.
* * *
“I have to leave for a bit,” said Flynn.
Willow Six Five November turned from the probability status holo she was studying and asked, “Leaving? Where? For how long?”
“There have been some … developments … that require me to spend some time in conference with some of my fellow elder statesmen of the multiverse.”
“A superpower confab. Okay,” said Willow.
“I’d like you to be in charge while I’m gone.”
“Me? Don’t you mean GHOST?”
“I expect you to work closely with GHOST of course, but for all her intellect, GHOST lacks a certain degree of intuition that running this operation requires. I need you to make the human decisions, the ones that require more than just a calculation of odds and cost/benefit ratios.”
“But me? Why not Mac or … or … I don’t know, Buffy Three Echo Foxtrot maybe?”
Flynn shook his head. “I want Mac available for field work, not stuck running Pubspace. And Echo Fox doesn’t have the temperament for this sort of thing. You can do this, Willow. I wouldn’t ask you to if I didn’t know that.”
Willow looked at him suspiciously. “I think maybe you better tell me what’s really going on here. I’m not going to run the show blind.”
Flynn drew her aside, out of earshot of any nearby technicians.
“I can’t tell you much,” he said. “But I will tell you that the next few hours may well determine the fate of the multiverse, of nearly all parallel realities, of the Eternal Conflict itself. It wasn’t supposed to play out this way, but this is the hand we’ve been dealt. I need you to hold the fort here because this place is our side’s last line of defense if things turn very bad on us.”
Willow just nodded as if she understood. But she didn’t, and she was afraid. Very afraid.
* * *
“What the Hell have you gotten us into, Flynn?” asked Erin softly as the data scrolled across her electronic contact lenses. From her point of view, the graphics and words hung suspended several feet in front of her in mid air.
She didn’t like what she saw.
“Probability graph. Rotate forty five degrees right, three quarter perspective,” she said as she made a motion with one hand. The readout changed, words and numbers being transformed dynamically into a graphical probability diagram that was no more encouraging than the raw data was.
At that moment, the door to the quarters she shared with Xandra swung opened and the brunette sidekick entered.
Erin closed her eyes and moved her eyeballs up, down, left and center, a series of movements that shut the data display feature of the lenses off.
“What are you doing?”
“Research.”
“You were staring at a wall and making hand gestures. Looked more like one of our Willow’s magical rites than research.”
“If you must know, I’m jacked into GHOST,” said Erin.
“You stole a GHOST-link?” asked Xandra.
“The latest and greatest. It’s tactical Head Up Display tech from Six Two Five Zulu, year twenty-one sixty-three. Basically it’s a set of electro-optical contacts with a subcutaneous ether transponder linkup courtesy of Willow and Jenny.”
“You and your toys — I swear, Erin, sometimes I think you’re more Cyberpunk than Slayer. Even Mac’s Killer Elite bunch doesn’t have anything like that. Flynn’s going to go ballistic.”
“What Flynn doesn’t know won’t hurt him. What we don’t know could very definitely hurt us, however.”
“You’re implying something here. I know an Erin Delacey implication of sinister goings-on when I hear it,” said Xandra.
“I ran an event chain analysis and had GHOST do a probability workup on this mission to see where we stood now that we’re into the terminal phase …”
“Could you choose a better term, please?”
“Okay, now that we’re into the final phase. Is that better?”
Xandra nodded. “Much. Semantics is everything, you know.”
Erin rolled her eyes and continued. “Anyway, the odds have actually gotten worse for us.”
“I don’t get it. Are we doing something wrong?”
“No, according to GHOST, we’ve hit every mission objective perfectly so far. It’s just that the odds refuse to improve. There’s something missing from the analysis somewhere, something GHOST didn’t account for in her simulations.”
“I thought GHOST sent data probes in,” said Xandra. “I mean, we have telemetry, right? Doesn’t GHOST know all the parameters?”
“The probes can only pick up general environmental and probability trends, Xandra. They’re very good at telling us how likely it is that we won’t be alive next week, but they’re particularly dismal at telling us why, exactly.”
Xandra scowled. “You know, there’s an awful lot that’s out of whack with this mission. I mean, what’s so damn important about Aston and Hudson anyway? And if they’re so important, why are we risking them in this hopeless cause?”
Erin shrugged. “I don’t know. Flynn’s got all that information locked away behind encryption schemes that are way beyond anything Willow Six Five November ever taught me. But I’ve done some cross-analysis of some of the key Realities related to this operation, and as far as I can tell saving Reality Two Six Alpha’s Aston and Hudson raises the chances of their Reality’s Buffy Summers surviving something down the road. There’s something about Summers Two Six Alpha that Flynn doesn’t want us to know, because I can’t get to any simulation data concerning her. As for why we’re risking everything in this ‘hopeless cause’, as you call it, there’s a very good chance that Pike is a Magnitude Four Significant Core Persona. Even I’m only a Magnitude Two, so that should tell you something right there.”
“Yeah, it tells me that we don’t get a whole lot of respect,” said Xandra.
“It also tells us that Flynn hasn’t been straight with us.”
“Oh, and this surprises you?”
“No, but it does disappoint me. I’m not going to let it get to me, though. No one ever said being a Slayer was going to be all fun and frolic. I managed to deal with the damned Watchers and their secret agenda, I can deal with Flynn and his,” said Erin. She winked at Xandra. “Besides, this looks like the perfect opportunity to play catch-up in the Dead Pool.”