The Complete Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

“Gropped up?” Johnny asked.

  “Yeah, that’s…” Jarek frowned. “We can go with whatever that is.” He looked back at Alton. “So what? You guys tried to make a run for it and hide out with the humans on Earth and Enochia?”

  “We didn’t have a choice after the sickness hit us. Our lives are tied to the fate of you and your planet now. If you die, we die.”

  “And that doesn’t give us all a free pass with these masters of yours?” Jarek asked.

  Alton shook his head. “There are plenty more raknoth across the universe who do not share our affliction. Even if we’d been honest all along, the rakul would not deny themselves a hunt and risk infecting our entire species only to spare a few dozen raknoth. Of course, now they will certainly kill us for having tried to conceal our continued existence on Earth from them, but we’ve likely only accelerated the inevitable.”

  Why couldn’t the big bad aliens be on an intergalactic quest for hugs or something? But then they wouldn’t be big bad aliens, would they?

  “Man,” Jarek said. “You guys need to unionize or something.”

  “This is no laughing matter,” Alton said. “If a nest has been compromised, then the rakul will be coming. It could be next week or next year, but they will come, and they will destroy everything on this planet.”

  Jarek met Rachel’s eyes, and somewhere beneath that practiced cavalier expression of his, there was concern and a deep weariness.

  “What are we talking about in terms of numbers?” Rachel asked. “The rakul can’t be that much stronger than your people, can they?”

  Haldin and Alton exchanged a heavy look through the holo.

  “There are twelve of them,” Haldin said. “And they’re pretty terrifying.”

  “You could show her,” Alton said.

  Haldin shot Rachel a questioning look and tapped the side of his head. “You comfortable with that?”

  A trill of apprehension shot through her chest, unbidden and unpleasant memories of her telepathic struggle with the Red King leaping to the forefront of her mind.

  She most certainly wasn’t comfortable with that. Jarek spoke up before she had to say that, though.

  “You guys can’t just use your words and tell the whole class?”

  “Oh there are plenty of words,” Alton said. “‘World’ and ‘ending’ are two that come to mind. The twelve run the gamut from older and stronger than any living raknoth to absolutely ancient and quite possibly unstoppable. None of you will truly understand until you see them. And right now, Rachel is the only one in that ship who’s equipped to do so.”

  “And what if I don’t want to?” Rachel asked. “What if I’m hesitant to cross minds with an associate of the raknoth who helped destroy my family and doesn’t seem to give a damn about my friends now?”

  Haldin’s brow creased. “I’m the one who’s offering you free access here.”

  “So you say,” Rachel said.

  In truth, she didn’t see any real reason not to believe Haldin. It was Alton she couldn’t trust.

  If these rakul were real—and it was really starting to seem like they might be—they needed to find out anything and everything they could about them. But now that she’d put it out there, she wasn’t about to back down and pretend like Alton hadn’t done the things he’d done. No answers were worth swallowing that pill whole.

  So she let the tense silence stretch in the cockpit, refusing to take the bait.

  “Your friend,” Alton finally said. “The one who was affected by the nest burst. I did not intend to imply his life is unimportant.”

  She tried to hide her surprise at his acuity. Was she that transparent that he could see exactly which button to press to try to make this better? Maybe.

  Or maybe Alton actually meant it.

  “It’s my brother,” Rachel said slowly. “The—whatever, the nest burst—it put him into a coma.”

  Alton seemed to think about that. “I could see where that might happen, especially if he doesn’t share your telepathic gifts.”

  “He doesn’t. But he’s heavily glyphed against telepathic influence. You’re saying something got through those glyphs? That it was a telepathic attack that did this to him?”

  “Not an attack,” Alton said. “Probably more like an accidental overload. The messengers are not violent beings. They simply convey information over great distances.”

  “That’s what that light was?” she asked. “These messenger things?”

  Alton nodded. “The messengers’ relationship with the spatial dimensions of the universe is… well, suffice it to say it’s not like ours, so we use the nests to keep them tied down in one place until we have need for them. A bursting nest can be quite overwhelming for anyone who’s nearby when the floodgates open, so to speak.”

  “So what can I do to help him?”

  “Probably very little. I expect he’ll recover on his own in time, but he…” Alton’s expression was hesitant.

  Rachel leaned forward. “He what?”

  “It’s possible he’ll have been marked by that kind of exposure.”

  Her heart picked up. “Marked how?”

  Alton thought it over for a span. “Well, after that much exposure, he may act as a sort of beacon for any other messengers that find their way here. If and when he does wake up, he may see and hear more than he wants to.”

  “Even past his glyphs?”

  Alton gave a slow nod. “Possibly. Whatever protection you gave him is subject to your understanding of space. The messengers might have found unchecked paths we aren’t even capable of processing, much less seeing. Worse, if those unseen pathways were traversed by messengers, they’ll only shine out more brightly to their kin now.”

  Alton’s words piled in and hit her like a slow-motion gut punch. She said nothing, too occupied trying to consider what this might all mean for Michael. Assuming he woke up.

  No. She couldn’t think like that. And not that she could trust Alton, but she had a feeling the raknoth would have told her if he thought Michael was toast.

  He would wake up. And after that…

  “What do I do?” she asked quietly. “How do I keep my brother safe?”

  “We could try to find some way to enhance his cloaking,” Haldin said.

  “Or we do everything in our power to convince the rakul this planet and its people aren’t worth their time,” Alton said. “At this point, it’s looking like that might mean a fight, as terrible of an idea as that is.”

  “Fine,” Rachel said.

  Enough with the games. If it was a fight they were headed toward, it was time to see what the hell it was that had Alton and Haldin shaking in their boots.

  “Show me.” She gave Jarek and Alaric a pointed look. “Assuming you’re comfortable with precautions.”

  Taking her cue, Jarek stood and faced Haldin. Behind, Alaric drew a revolver and trained it loosely at Haldin’s back.

  “Hey!” Elise cried from the holo.

  “It’s fine, Lise,” Haldin said, holding his hands up peacefully. “We have to earn their trust if we’re all going to do this thing together.” He reached up to adjust the dial on his pendant. “Ready?”

  Rachel stood to face him, reaching for her own pendant.

  “You might want to stay seated,” Haldin said. “These are going to be my memories of Alton’s memories, so they’ll probably come through a bit muddy, but it’s still pretty intense stuff.”

  She ignored him and dialed her cloak out to encompass the entirety of the ship.

  Haldin looked as if he’d protest but then shrugged and closed his eyes. She closed hers as well and reached out.

  His mind was hard to miss, bright and powerful but also calm and gentle as they met in a kind of mental handshake.

  “This might be kind of disjointed,” Haldin’s voice came to her. “I’m not really used to doing this kind of thing.”

  “You and me both,” Rachel thought back. Then, remembering just how vulnerable Haldin was abou
t to make himself, she added, “I’ll try to be gentle.”

  Haldin’s mind rippled with mild amusement, and the surface of his presence softened and slowly began to peel open.

  Rachel braced herself and pushed into the opening, thinking gentle thoughts.

  16

  Rachel lay adrift in the stream of Haldin’s consciousness, floating so closely to his thoughts and perceptions that they almost felt like her own.

  An abstract spatial map of the cockpit was the first thing that stood out. Haldin knew exactly where each potential threat was, exactly how to move if he decided he needed to extract himself from the situation. Except he’d be hard-pressed to do that now that he’d surrendered himself to a perfect stranger, wouldn’t he?

  Was this the worst idea ever? Was it even going to work?

  It had to work.

  The somber weight of the thought reminded Rachel that it was Haldin’s, not hers.

  She needed to get herself centered before she got lost in here. And if the nervous fear radiating from Haldin’s mind was any indication, she needed to brace herself for some horrific shit once the replay started rolling.

  She’d watched the guy—Christ, the Enochian, she supposed—duke it out with raknoth and Fela barehanded. From what she’d seen, he could channel with the best of them, and he was apparently on par with a freaking raknoth in telepathic chops. Haldin was not someone she’d want to fuck with.

  And while he wasn’t quite quivering right now, he was clearly terrified of the rakul.

  “Are you still okay with this?” she thought.

  “I’m fine,” came his voice. “I mean, I kind of hate this. But you need to understand what we’re dealing with.”

  “Okay. We’ll go back to when Alton first showed you the rakul, then?”

  “You’re in control more than I am right now.”

  “Right…”

  They would go back to when Alton had first shared his memories of the rakul with Haldin.

  Their shared mental landscape began to shift in response to her will, as if she were simply recalling one of her own memories. She caught flashes of a cityscape, similar in many ways to the pre-Catastrophe cities of Earth, yet decidedly different in the angles and features of the buildings, which mostly all looked to be formed from the same gray material.

  Was this Enochia?

  Yes, his mind told her, it was.

  The foreign cityscape was beautiful, but there was something else hanging over the memory: a subtle background stain of pain and loss—Haldin’s own personal pain and loss, she realized. He’d suffered. On Enochia, he’d lost more and conquered more tribulations than most would in five lifetimes.

  “Best not to get sidetracked right now,” Haldin’s voice came to her.

  Right. Alton’s memories.

  They flashed to a compound surrounded by a high perimeter wall—a military base of some kind. A Sanctum stronghold. Haven. Another flash, and they were inside the base, facing Alton through a thick window of what looked like bulletproof glass. Alton’s cell. They didn’t trust him. Not one damn bit. But they had to know. Hal leaned forward, pressing a hand to the window. He had to kn—

  “It was a bit after this,” came Haldin’s voice in her head. “Focus on the time Alton first actually showed me the rakul.”

  Rachel did. Another flash, and they were in an odd, rather empty room with dark walls and… was this the raknoth ship? It was. She felt it. There were two others with Hal and Alton—a rugged man and an attractive woman she didn’t recognize. Hal was reaching for Alton’s mind. Reaching, reaching…

  Another flash, and now the landscape was absolutely different than anything Rachel had ever seen. It was like a winter wonderland village on acid. Odd, globular buildings of some amber, translucent material lined the wide, snowy paths that stretched out before them. Big treelike plants reared out of sizable snow drifts here and there along either side of the paths, their tops draped with something like partially unraveled balls of psychedelic yarn rather than canopies of leaves.

  As weird as the scenery was, it paled in comparison to the creatures that roamed the paths.

  Her first thought was that they were kind of like sky blue versions of the Incredible Hulk. Then she got a better look at the wicked-looking horns sprouting from their heads and the dark, bony spurs protruding from their bulky forms all along the legs, arms, shoulders, and backs, and decided they were entirely more beastly-looking. Then the one whose eyes she was seeing through started off down the snowy path, and as her senses started to adjust, she realized how big they were.

  They were goddamn frost giants. Or maybe frost demons was a better choice of words.

  The scene was patchy and blurry in spots, and the more she watched, the more she realized things seemed to skip oddly here and there. That must’ve been what Haldin had meant about it being a memory of a memory.

  Dozens of the blue giants tromped along the paths, groaning and grunting in strange, harsh language. Most of them were carrying boulders that must have been the size of trucks. Rachel’s frame of reference shifted as her giant looked over its massive shoulder to where its fellows were hauling their loads: a great clearing where several more giants were busy at work erecting an enormous shrine to what could have been a god or a king of some sort.

  “These are rakul?” she thought.

  “No. Just another one of the species the rakul have exterminated.”

  “I thought you said this was Alton’s memory.”

  “It is.”

  “But why are we in the head of one of these things?”

  “The raknoth don’t always walk around looking like humans. They take hosts from whatever planet they’re currently invading.”

  “Alton is—”

  “Was one of these freakishly strong giants, yes. About 2,000 years ago.”

  “I—What? 2,000?”

  She watched in numb shock as their giant—or Alton, apparently—plucked one of the big psychedelic trees from the ground as if it were a small weed and proceeded to take a big bite right off its stringy top.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Was that how the raknoth had been able to so thoroughly wreck Earth from the inside? She thought of the raknoth they’d met—suave, dark-haired Alton and the square-jawed, sandy-haired Red King.

  “So Alton and the others… Those were real humans before the raknoth, uh, took them?”

  “Exactly,” Haldin thought.

  Well that was disturbing as all hell.

  One of the giants bumped into his neighbor, who dropped his boulder onto another giant’s foot. What sounded more like a foghorn than a cry of pain erupted from the injured giant’s maw, then it whirled and clubbed the offender across the chest. The second giant staggered back, then caught itself and rushed its opponent in a full-on tackle. They hit the ground like a mild earthquake and tumbled around for position. One landed a solid kick, and its opponent crashed through the wall of one of the nearby amber buildings.

  Around them, the rest of the giants only laughed as if this was all perfectly normal behavior.

  “And what about the rakul? Where are they in this memory?”

  “You’re in control,” he reminded her.

  Right. She focused on what she wanted to see, and the scene shifted accordingly.

  It was only a little later now. Several giants were still at work on the shrine, but much of the boulder-hauling crew were taking a break to chomp down on a hearty lunch of psychedelic tree yarn. Everything seemed peaceful enough at first glance. But then why was Alton so apprehensive? She could feel the nervous energy like a permanent stain on the memory.

  A huge shadow passed over them, and she felt an inkling of her own dread join that of Alton’s memory.

  Around them, the giants were exchanging uncertain glances, a few of them rising wearily to their feet.

  A ship descended into view and… No. Not a ship. Massive wings flapped once, twice, three times, and even from a distance, the air they
displaced could be easily felt.

  The thing that rode those gargantuan wings down to the ground… It was a dragon. That was the only word Rachel could use to describe it.

  The mountain-sized quadruped slammed to a landing that shook the ground even from what she gauged to be a half mile away and kicked up an explosion of snow. Two fiery red eyes came to life, each at least the size of the huge boulders the giants had been lugging about.

  Then the thing roared.

  The sound was deafening. The psychic pressure that slammed into them was worse.

  It hit like a tsunami of molten lead. Rachel gasped, reaching for her defenses and—

  “It’s okay,” Haldin’s voice came to her, his tone tight. “We’re okay here, remember?”

  The last thing Rachel felt right then was okay, but the sound of Haldin’s voice at least jostled her from the memory enough that she could remind herself that nothing in here could actually hurt her. Psychologically damage her, on the other hand…

  “What the fuck is that thing?”

  “Kul’Naga, first and oldest of the rakul.”

  The giants were all on their feet now, some dipping into their big, amber houses and emerging with a variety of brutal-looking melee weapons. Kul’Naga watched them patiently as they grunted and groaned and prepared to make war.

  Then one of the giants by the shrine plucked a boulder from the waiting pile and hurled it at the waiting rakul, and the chaos began.

  It was a mighty throw considering the boulder probably weighed five or ten tons. Kul’Naga swatted it out of the air with massive forepaw and charged.

  What followed wasn’t a pretty fight.

  The giants fought without fear, reigning blow after heavy blow on the enormous rakul. The attacks weren’t without effect. Soon Kul’Naga was oozing green fluid from dozens of ugly wounds, but the rakul took the punishment in stride and continued indiscriminately tearing his way through the giants’ ranks with claws that must have been six feet long and sharp as razors. With each swipe, Kul’Naga hacked another giant to pieces like they were tissue paper.

  The sky vibrated with their foghorn screams until Rachel wanted to scream herself. “Okay! Enough!”