Ascent

Kevin froze, looking from the alien to Chloe and back.

“No, Kevin. Don’t do it,” Chloe said. Kevin could hear the desperation there. “Let them kill me. Do whatever it takes!”

Kevin could hear the sincerity in her voice, but… he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t stand there and watch while Chloe died. He knew that they would do it. There was something about the cold, emotionless way Xan made its threat that made it something else. Not a threat exactly, more a simple statement of what would happen.

“We will change you anyway,” Purest Xan said. “It is simply a question of how much you fight, and how much it hurts. Make your decision, Kevin McKenzie.”

“Fight them, Kevin,” Chloe said. “Don’t give in!”

Kevin looked at her, trying not to think of all the things the aliens might do to her. It was impossible, though, to do anything but picture what might happen once they started to experiment on her. Could he really stand by and watch if they started to take her apart to see how she worked, or started to transform her into something that wasn’t human? Could he do that, when all it would mean was that they would transform him by force?

He couldn’t, and he knew it.

“Okay,” he said, hating every moment while he did it. “Do it.”

“We were always going to,” Purest Xan assured him. “This will hurt more, the more you struggle.”

“Kevin,” Chloe said. “Please fight it. You have to stay yourself. You have to stay strong.”

That, Kevin guessed, was the only hope here. They couldn’t break free. They couldn’t fight back physically. The only chance was to join with the Hive, and somehow hope to retain enough of himself…

He didn’t even finish that thought before Purest Xan applied the tentacles to his skull, and the Hive lanced invisibly into his brain.

Kevin cried out with the pain, swift and sudden, like an icicle being stabbed into the depths of his mind. He’d thought that he was used to pain; with his illness, he’d thought he’d known what pain was, but now he realized that it was nothing compared to what was happening now. He could feel the tentacles questing through his thoughts and his memories, the unpleasant sensation far too familiar from when the aliens had first probed his mind.

This was different, though, because the aliens weren’t just looking this time.

Kevin could feel the Hive inside his thoughts, mind upon mind, interlinked and powerful. It was hot and cold and painful all at the same time. It felt like ground glass being worked through his thoughts. He could feel the wash of the controlled on the far fringes, not even a true part of the whole. He could feel the sharp-edged minds of things bred for war, and the softer, slower thoughts of beasts of burden. Then there were the Purest and their servants, shining strands against the web of the rest.

Come to us, they urged, the voices deep and seductive. Become us.

Kevin tried to pull away, and the effort hurt more than he could have imagined. He heard himself scream, but the sound seemed to come to him from far away. It was like claws holding him in place, hooked into his brain, too powerful to ignore.

Even so, Kevin fought. He could feel the Hive moving through him, taking over parts of his mind the way an invading army might take over fields and towns. Kevin started to hide parts of himself, remembering the way he’d tried to hide how scared he was for his mother’s benefit, trying to hide away whatever he could while the aliens continued to push forward within his mind. If he could do it enough, he might be able to hold himself separate from the Hive. He might still be himself.

He felt the moment when they linked him to the Hive, going from seeing all the separate strands to being one of them. He could hear the messages and the thoughts of the others there, the commands of the Purest and the obedience of the rest.

A mind that picks things apart, one of the Purest thought in his direction.

A mind that is everything we need, another agreed.

Kevin could feel Purest Xan’s presence beside him. Wake, Kevin, join your new life.

Kevin’s eyes snapped open, and he couldn’t remember closing them. The world around him looked strange, cloaked in a sheen of new colors, details he would never have noticed before coming to his eyes. It was as if he could focus on every mote of dust and fraction of color change.

He looked around at the machines, and the Hive within him told him what each was for. Had he succeeded in holding back some part of himself? Kevin didn’t know. He still felt like himself, although everything else about the world seemed strange. It seemed both more alive and more connected than he could have ever imagined.

Purest Xan moved to him, working the controls on the frame. The alien operated them, and Kevin felt the gravity that was holding him in place shift back toward the floor.

“Welcome to the Hive, Emissary Kevin,” Purest Xan said.

CHAPTER FIVE

Luna and the bikers ran from the controlled as they closed in, lunging for their bikes, trying to make it to them before the greater speed of those the aliens controlled brought them too close. Luna ran toward the spot where her own bike had stopped, lying on its side now with the sidecar up in the air, obviously overturned in whatever chaos had followed the moment when they’d grabbed her.

She struggled to right it, shoving her entire body against it, the weight of it making it feel as though she was pushing against a solid wall. Luna felt it shift slightly as she kept pushing, and then it toppled, raising a small cloud of dust as it hit the ground beside the road.

“Get in, Bobby,” she called to the dog, who was still busy growling at the advancing horde of controlled as if he might be able to fend them off. “Hurry!”

She pointed to the sidecar, and the dog got the message, hopping into it and sitting there, looking around with his teeth bared. Looking back, Luna could see why: the controlled were getting closer, running in that way that put them far closer than they should have been every time she blinked. Luna went to start the bike, determined to put as much distance between her and the controlled as possible…

It wouldn’t start.

“Not now,” Luna said through gritted teeth as the engine coughed and spluttered. “Come on!”

She jumped her entire weight on the kick-starter once, then again. She could see the controlled getting closer now, so that they were twenty yards away, then ten. Luna could feel the fear building in her. She really didn’t want to know what the controlled would do to someone who wasn’t one of them anymore.

She jumped on the starter once more, throwing her whole weight down onto it, and the bike roared into life. Luna didn’t hesitate, accelerating as hard as she dared away from the onrushing crowd of controlled people. She felt the heaviness as an unfeeling hand clamped onto her bike, a woman with unseeing white pupils holding on tight enough that the bike dragged her along, making her skid along the ground when even her enhanced speed wasn’t enough to keep up.

Luna found herself trying to remember if she’d seen this woman while they’d all been forced to work. She found herself thinking about the person who might still be trapped somewhere behind those eyes, the person who might be fighting to stop herself even as she reached for Luna. Luna knew exactly how bad it was to be one of the controlled now, and she knew that there was nothing the person in there could do to stop themselves.

On the other hand, she knew that they didn’t feel pain.

“Sorry,” Luna said, kicking out at the woman from her perch on the bike until the controlled woman tumbled back onto the road, letting Luna’s bike shoot forward fast enough that she had to cling to it tightly so she didn’t fall off.

Around her, Luna saw the members of the Dustsides Motorcycle Club grabbing their bikes and pulling away in formation, the bikes forming a broad V shape as if they might be able to smash through anything that got in their way. She saw Ignatius jump onto the back of Bear’s bike, still clutching his precious vapor gun.

There were more controlled coming out of side streets now, lunging for the bikes from every direction. The only hope seemed to be to keep going as fast as possible, hoping that sheer speed would carry them past the mass of the controlled before they could close in on them like water pouring into a basin. Luna was fine with going faster. Being scared of the sheer speed was definitely better than thinking about the prospect of being torn apart by the controlled.

“Don’t stop!” Luna called out to the others, as loud as she could so that it would carry over the noise of the bikes. “We need to get away.”

They kept riding, as fast as possible. With the controlled approaching from the back and the sides, their bikes popped out of the mass of them like a cork from a bottle. In an instant, they were in clear space, hurrying through Sedona, trying to get as far from the onrushing horde of controlled as they could. They were moving faster than the controlled could follow now, heading for the outskirts of the town.

“I think we’re clear,” Cub called back with a grin that said how happy he was to be free of the aliens’ control.

Luna smiled back at him, because she was just as happy to have made it. She was happy that he had been saved too. She wouldn’t have liked the idea of Cub still being back there while she and the others got away. She rode up closer to him, ready to call across to him, although she wasn’t quite sure what she was going to call. Maybe that she was glad he was there, maybe more than that.

Whatever she was going to say, the words fell silent in her throat as the shine of something up in the sky caught her eye, growing larger by the moment.

“A ship!” Luna called out as she looked at it square on.

The ship was one of the smaller ones, but this one looked sleeker than the others somehow, and more dangerous. If the others were worker bees built for carrying things up to the bigger ships, this one seemed more like a hornet, sharp-edged and deadly, designed to kill anything that got in its way.

“It’s coming this way!” Luna shouted.

It came in rapidly, and Luna found herself wondering where it had come from. The big ship above Sedona was gone. Even the world ship that had been there was gone, vanished from the sky as rapidly as it had come. This one must have come from one of the other ships, still hovering over other towns and cities to take what they could. From the speed it was coming in, it must have shot toward them as fast as its engines would carry it.

“They’ve sent a ship from another city for us?” Cub called out.

It didn’t make any sense that a ship could be there for them that fast, or that they could possibly mean that much to the aliens. Yet she couldn’t think of another reason why a ship like that would be coming toward them so fast, or so low, just a few hundred feet off the ground. Them coming back from being controlled seemed to have upset the aliens more than anything else they could have done.

“They must have sensed people breaking out of their control,” Luna called.

“I have found that the controlled hurry in quickly towards my efforts,” Ignatius explained from the back of Bear’s bike. “I think they’re trying to stop my attempts to help people.”

Luna thought about the aliens who had controlled her. How would they react to people breaking free of them? How would they respond to any loss of control when all they seemed to want was to take more and more?

Luna thought she saw something starting to glow at the front of the ship, a fiery orange that made it look as though someone had set light to a point on the vessel’s nose. She tried to decide if it might be a trick of the light, and then a far more horrible thought occurred to her.

“Everybody scatter!” she yelled, pulling her bike to one side so fast that it took everything she had to keep it upright.

The road ahead of their small convoy erupted in a blaze of energy that tore through the asphalt, sending dirt and stone flying in every direction. Luna saw one of the bikes skid and topple, the rider tumbling over the ground as the road disappeared from under them.

Luna went off road, ignoring the jolts and the judders that came from the uneven ground as rocks and potholes threatened to unseat her. Around her, she could see the other bikes following, heading into the rougher terrain, staying away from the straight line of the road as the alien ship shrieked overhead. Another gout of dirt and rocks flew up as it fired again, and then it was past them, banking sharply as it started to turn back toward them.

They were an easy target in the open. Luna could see the alien ship getting further away from them, lining up another run at them. If it fired at them from a distance, it would have plenty of time to aim and hit them all. They needed to find cover, and they needed to do it now.

Luna looked around and then pointed toward some of the red rock valleys close to Sedona.

“There!” she yelled. “It’s our only hope.”

She pushed her engine, the bike speeding forward with the others following in her wake. Dirt exploded around them as the ship made another pass, and for a moment or two Luna couldn’t see anything ahead. When the cloud of dust cleared enough for her to see again, she had to veer left sharply to avoid the remains of a tree, torn apart by the latest blast. Luna just hoped that she was leading the others in the right direction.

They headed into the valley, plunging past its mouth and speeding down it. Energy bolts slammed into the walls, sending dust up into the air and sending rocks tumbling so that Luna had to swerve and dodge to avoid them. They rumbled and bounced as they fell, one shooting past her head, close enough that she had to duck down to avoid it.

“It’s coming in lower!” Cub called out from somewhere close to Luna. Luna knew that she ought to keep her eyes on the way ahead through the valley, but she couldn’t stop herself from risking a glance back.

The alien ship was flying barely above ground level now, moving into the valley on their tail as it tried to line up its next shots.

“Faster,” Luna called out.

“We can’t lose it,” Cub called back.

“We don’t need to lose it,” Luna shouted. “We just need to find out how fast it can turn.”

She saw Cub grin as he understood, and their group of bikers hurried forward, pushing into the valley.

“Hold on, Bobby,” Luna said.

Luna clung to her bike, taking the twists and turns as fast as she dared, then faster still. The red rocks of the cliffs towered above her in misshapen stacks, the rocks that tumbled as energy blasts hit them a reminder of just how easily all of this could go wrong. One turn taken too fast, one twitch of the handlebars in the wrong direction, and she and Bobby would hammer into the walls of the valley, far too fast to survive.

Luna gripped her handlebars tight, hunched down over them, and rode faster.

She dared a glance back. The alien ship was still there, taking the twists and turns with them, firing at random when it couldn’t line up the perfect shot. It swung from one side to the other as it sped along the valley, and then, without warning, Luna saw one edge of it clip a wall.

“Watch out!” she yelled, as it bounced from one wall to the next, struggling to correct its flight as it ricocheted like a pool ball, sparks flying as it hit one wall, then another, angling down toward the valley’s rocky floor.

The noise as it struck the earth seemed to fill the world, dust flying up as it plowed in nose first until everything behind it was obscured. Luna and the others had to keep riding flat out just to stay ahead of it. They were running out of room, though, because the valley was coming to a halt, sealed in by a wall of rock that was punctured only by the opening of a storm drain. Luna rode toward that far end, hoping the ship would stop before it crushed them all against the wall. She pulled up next to the wall, wincing as the ship got closer.

Gradually, though, it slowed, squealing and scraping its way along like a plate dropped from a table until finally, rattling, it ground to a halt.

Luna pulled up in front of it, the others spreading out in a half circle around it, engines still running. She heard a hiss of escaping air as a hatch near the top opened, and she stood in shock as a figure staggered out.

This wasn’t one of the controlled. There was nothing human about the spindly, insect-like figure who clambered down from the hatch, spiny plates looking like armor, but broken armor, with rents that leaked clear fluid onto the ground as it advanced.

“Is that them?” she heard Ignatius wonder aloud. “Is that what the aliens look like?”

“Does it matter what they look like when we know what they want?” Luna asked.

“But we can study it,” Ignatius said. “We need to try to capture it.”

It kept approaching, reaching for them as if even now it would find a way to kill them.

“Get it!” Bear yelled, and the Dustsides bikers fell on it with fists and pipes and knives, striking again and again with anything they had. Luna heard the armored plates crack with a sickening sound that reminded Luna far too much of someone stepping on a beetle.

“No,” Ignatius said, “there’s so much we can learn.”

Right then, however, Luna felt as though they’d learned the most important lessons: they’d learned what one of their enemies looked like, and they’d learned that they could die.

Then a light flickered on the front of the ship, twisting in the air, taking the shape of a tall, hairless figure that looked nothing like the creature they had just killed. It spoke, and some technology in the hologram translated the words, the same way it had with the boxes at the slave camp.

“You have killed one of our servants,” the being said. “But it is not of the Purest. It does not matter. You do not matter. You are an obstruction to be removed, and you will be, unless you submit now.”

“We know what that feels like,” Luna shouted back at it. “And we broke free. We’re going to break everyone free!”

“You will not obstruct the Hive. You will die.”

It flickered out of sight, and in the sky beyond where it had been, Luna thought she could see the specks of more of the ships closing in. It seemed that the aliens weren’t holding back when it came to killing them.

“We need to get out of here,” Luna said.

“There’s no easy way past the ship,” Cub said, “and if we ride out onto open ground, they’ll pick us off easily.”

“Then we need to go into the storm drain,” Luna said.

Bear looked over at it, then at her and Cub. “I don’t like leaving the bikes.”

“I think it’s that or die, Dad,” Cub said.

“What do you think?” he asked Luna.

Luna was surprised by that. Bear was the bikers’ leader. Then again, she’d been the one to lead them into the valley. Maybe they assumed that she knew what she was doing.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” she said.

Bear nodded. “I guess not.”

“Ignatius,” Luna said. “What I said before to that thing… we can save everyone, can’t we?”

“I think that’s something we need to talk about once we’re safe,” Ignatius said. “I’ll explain everything, but not here, okay?”

“Okay,” Luna said, with a look back at where the alien ships were closing in. The only question now was whether they would ever be safe again.

She ran forward into the storm drain. Behind her, she could hear the first explosions as the aliens opened fire.

CHAPTER SIX

Kevin could feel the full beauty and weight of the Hive buzzing in his brain. No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t in him; he was in it. He was one part of the whole, a mote of light in a whole interconnected galaxy. Trying to keep track of it all was dizzying, seemingly impossible.

“It will get easier,” Purest Xan promised him, although there was no kindness or sympathy in that. It was simply an observation of fact.

“Has the Hive always been so… big?” Kevin asked, barely able to comprehend the scale of everything that he could feel.

“You are seeing the connections of one world ship,” Purest Xan said. “Look beyond, Kevin.”

Kevin tried to look deeper, and now he saw a shining strand leading out from the Hive that he was connected to, linking to a bigger, more complex web of connections in turn: a Hive of Hives, stretching so far out that just trying to comprehend the scale of it made Kevin’s eyes water with the effort.

“The Hive is what matters,” Purest Xan said. “We serve the Hive, and the Hive exists to preserve those of us who are still pure, still what we once were. Do you understand?”

In that moment, Kevin did. He understood it in a way that had nothing to do with words, or logic, or anything else that he would have understood before. He felt the need of the Hive to survive, built from the need of the Purest to preserve themselves and their world, whatever the cost to the rest of the universe. He understood the need to be a part of it, and to contribute to it all. He could see the pockets of thoughts there, and memories, the clusters of minds that worked on different projects, whole banks of them given over to calculations or contemplation. A part of him wanted to delve into those pockets, losing himself completely in their depths.

“Come with me,” Purest Xan said, drawing Kevin away from the complex web of the Hive’s connections. They were still there, he was still connected to them so completely that it was impossible to think that the world had ever been any other way, but now he was able to focus on his own body enough to move and follow, stepping in the alien’s wake.

Purest Xan led the way from the room, up through the spire, almost all the way to the top. From up there, it was possible to see out toward the other spires of the world ship, standing golden and pure among the grim grayness of the rest of it.

“Stand here,” the alien said, gesturing to a round disc on the floor that Xan stood on, golden and solid looking. Kevin stood there without hesitation.

It lifted into the air, silently and smoothly, still feeling as solid underfoot as the ground had.

“How does this work?” Kevin asked.

“It is a simple matter of gravity propulsion,” Purest Xan replied. “If you require more knowledge of it, the details will sit within the Hive.”

That idea filled Kevin with wonder. He hadn’t considered that the connections between minds he’d seen would be more than that.

“So it’s like an internet of brains?” he asked.

Purest Xan was still for a moment, and Kevin felt the barest brush of a mind against his as the alien tried to understand the word.

“Yes, that is almost correct,” the alien replied. “The knowledge that the Hive holds can be accessed by any. It is a part of us, though, not some external store.”

Kevin tried to picture the idea of being able to access clusters of other minds at will, and then realized that he didn’t have to imagine it. The Hive was there, and all he had to do was reach out to access it.

“Later,” Purest Xan said. “For now, there is more to see.”

“Did your people invent this disc?” Kevin asked, as the platform continued to float over the city.

“It was another thing learned from a conquered world,” Purest Xan said. “Their people were unworthy to survive except as materials, but knowledge such as this must be collected and put to the use of the Hive.”

Kevin felt as though he ought to have been horrified by the alien’s words, but he didn’t feel any of that horror. He didn’t feel much of anything beyond the beauty of the Hive.

“How does the Hive work?” Kevin asked.

“You could see it, if you looked for the knowledge,” Purest Xan pointed out, “but it is right that we should explain.” The alien gestured to the golden spires that stuck out from the interior of the world ship. “These are the homes of the Purest. We guide the rest of the Hive, and give it purpose. You have already seen the interior of one spire. The others will be similar.”

Their golden disc floated down now, into one of the complexes of the seemingly endless city that surrounded the spire. There were glass-walled greenhouses there, more like factories than farms, filled with vats and rows of growing things, stacked one atop another. Spiderlike creatures crawled through them, and Kevin could see them tending to the crops within. Reaching out toward them through the Hive, Kevin could see that they were little more than mindless drones, there to receive orders.

“These are the nutrition factories,” Purest Xan said. “The creatures within are changed versions of the ones who first created them. Their world was a thing of narrow caves, and needed factories like this to produce enough to feed them. Now they feed the Hive.”

Xan made it sound like a blessing, as though their world had only been waiting for the opportunity to serve the Hive in any way that it could be used. He even understood it, sensing the importance of the Hive, and the need for every resource to be used for its benefit. If a world could supply nutrient farms and workers, then wasn’t it right that it should?

“The farms are only the beginning,” Purest Xan promised, and Kevin could hardly wait to see what might be next in that case.

Their platform continued down through the contours of the world ship, into a space where it seemed that things were in the process of being constructed. Kevin could see hordes of creatures scuttling over spaceships like ants over a nest, fastening pieces into place in shapes that were almost too complex to make sense of.

He could see others working on what looked like energy weapons, calibrating them and testing them in flashes that lit up the interior of the ship further.

“The creatures who possessed this did not even see the possibility of using this technology as a weapon,” Purest Xan said. “They were peaceful things.”

The alien made “peaceful” sound like a curse.

Kevin could see workshops down there, and spaces where the creatures of the Hive worked on technologies he couldn’t begin to understand… and that he then did, reaching into the Hive for the knowledge. Waves of knowledge flooded into him about materials stronger than anything on Earth, about dust mote–sized robots, and weapons designed to overcome beings he hadn’t even known existed until that moment. It was hard to hold onto all of that knowledge, or even to truly understand it, but it was there.

Kevin could see all the individual pieces that went together to make the world ship function, and it seemed incredible that it could fit together so well.

“We integrated each piece into the Hive as we found it,” Purest Xan said.

Kevin suspected that “found” meant the same thing as “took” here. The Hive stole whatever it needed, whatever it saw, from the worlds that it encountered.

“Have you found new technologies on Earth?” Kevin asked.

The alien made a dismissive noise, as if the very idea that there was anything to learn from Earth was ludicrous.

“Then why come to Earth?” Kevin asked. “What did you gain?”

“That is a fair question,” Purest Xan said. The golden disc that the two of them stood upon changed direction, heading toward an area of the world ship that seemed to burn with the heat of forges and smelts, where warehouses and yawning pits of goods stood.

Below, Kevin could see worker aliens built with muscles and claws that could tear apart rocks and rip through steel. There were small, nimble things that could pick through piles of collected detritus, seeking out the smallest quantities of rare metals and unusual elements. They were loading floating carts by the spaces that they worked, for iron and calcium, wood and glass. There were barrels for water and other liquids, from the juice of fruits to the acids produced in its factories, while canisters stood there to hold gasses siphoned off from any world they encountered: oxygen and helium, radon and stranger things.

Kevin watched the aliens below picking apart things that had presumably been taken from his world, and he felt… nothing, had no response to the strange rapaciousness of it all.

“Why don’t I feel anything?” he asked. “You’re tearing apart things taken from my world, and I don’t feel anything.”

“Your former world,” Purest Xan corrected him. “You are of the Hive now, Kevin. We have made you a part of us, and you no longer have to fear such human weaknesses.”

It hadn’t felt like a weakness to Kevin before to feel things, but now he could see how obvious it was that it was a weakness. Had he still been held back by human feelings, he wouldn’t have been able to stand by and watch the resources of his world being plundered like this. He would have felt obliged to intervene, and then, no doubt, the creatures of the Hive would have killed him.

“You have made me strong,” Kevin said.

“Strong enough to fulfill your purpose for the Hive. Strong enough to serve it,” Purest Xan said.

“Do you do that for all the creatures you take?” Kevin asked.

Purest Xan made that amused, dismissive sound again. “Most are too weak to be anything but meat to shape. Come, I will show you.”

They flew toward a new space now, and in this space, Kevin could hear the screams of a hundred or more different kinds of creatures, translated only because his mind seemed to grab onto them automatically and understand.

“Remarkable,” Purest Xan said with a look across at him. “Your brain is exactly what the Hive needs, Kevin McKenzie.”

The alien seemed unbothered that below them, creature after creature was crying out in agony. It didn’t seem to matter that there were some being taken apart while still alive and others being put back together into new shapes, that there were benches there where aliens and animals and even some people lay while members of the Purest worked on them.

Then again, Kevin himself wasn’t bothered the way he probably should have been. He had a feeling that the sight of a man having his skin replaced in patches with what looked like grafts from other species ought to make him feel sick and angry and filled with hate toward creatures that could do something like that, but instead, he just looked at it, noting the results.

“Our flesh factories are complex places,” Purest Xan said. “The manipulations there are the oldest skills that we mastered, some even before we became the Hive. In each place we go, we seek the strongest DNA, the most useful traits. It is why we seek out planets that teem with life, rather than mining barren rocks.”