He waited an entire minute until he breathed once more. Then he did it. One step after another of his long legs until he turned to face the window.
He tilted his head up and stared at the clouds.
They were glowing. The night was dark, but the clouds were not. He’d never seen anything like it. And the way they moved? It was like they were the curtains on a stage being yanked back.
And that’s when he saw it. High above. Something in the sky, visible through a gap in the cloud cover.
Metal. Glimmering under its own light.
A ship.
The belly of a massive vessel. It was no plane – it was at least 100 times larger than that.
It was a spaceship.
And it was hovering above London.
That ringing picked up in Nick’s mind, a crescendo that would not stop, one that rang through his skull, louder and louder, reaching into his furthest depths, grabbing hold of everything that made Nick up.
Until finally it pulled him.
Not away. But forward.
Nick Hancock pushed toward the glass.
He was up on the second floor of the airport. The drop to the ground below was at least 20 meters.
It didn’t stop him.
As his body struck the glass, it shattered outward, hailing around him, framing his form as it hurtled down.
He fell against the concrete of the tarmac. His knees bent as his feet planted into the ground. His body didn’t break. It simply bent as it absorbed the impact.
He planted two fingers into the tarmac, launched up, and started running.
Chapter 7
Kim
Kim gasped, consciousness returning to him like a punch to the jaw.
Outside, he heard the shouts of his neighbors.
The garage was on fire, burning around Kim, a wooden beam pinning his chest down.
He stared at it. Then he locked his hands on it and pushed. The sound of the beam grating off him was matched by the metal of his joints singing in harmony.
Kim stood, his clothes practically burned off him.
He reached a hand under the scraps of his shirt and tapped two fingers onto the dog tags he always wore.
This wasn’t a remnant of his stint in National Service. The two tags were dischargers. Two apparently slim innocuous strips of metal that, for the past however long he’d been under, had kept him alive.
Kim shrugged his shoulders, and inside, his endoskeleton creaked, coming to life.
Over the decades that Kim had been trapped on Earth after his ship had crash landed here 20 years ago, he’d been maintaining his Baxian Issue endoskeleton with every dollar he could get his hands on.
But now he didn’t need dollars.
He walked through the burning garage, his shoes now nothing but boiled rubber stuck to his naked skin. He pushed around the popped glass of the car door, settling a hand on the molten hot hood of the car as he shifted down to one knee and faced the remaining chunks of the Cartaxian.
As he picked up the screams of his neighbors outside, and finally heard Mi Na’s voice, he smiled.
And he reached forward. The two apparently innocuous dog tags around Kim’s throat were heat disruptors. And they were more than enough to push away the relatively low heat of the fire. They protected his skin as he reached forward and rummaged through the scraps that remained of the armor.
He quickly found what he was looking for.
A power source.
He plucked it up, the small, cube-like battery looking like nothing more than a chunk of polished steel.
Kim chuckled. He brought the cube up, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger as he used his other hand to rip open his chest cavity. He didn’t suddenly take a bone saw to his sternum and tear through it. Instead, locking his thumb and middle finger against two points near his collarbone, he pushed in with precisely measured force until there was a click. Then he twisted to the side.
And Kim’s chest opened.
He pushed the cube inside.
It wasn’t what his endoskeleton usually ran on, but unlike the cheap armor this Cartaxian had been wearing, Kim’s endoskeleton was some of the best. It could run on anything as long as it was sufficiently energy dense. And the Cartaxian cube was more than energy dense enough.
As Kim placed his chest back together, he let his hands drop, tipped his head back, and closed his eyes.
He logged onto a central processor and watched his power output levels rise.
He smiled.
Then he looked down at the other chunks of the Cartaxian armor. He gathered them together, grabbing a metal box that hadn’t burnt up in the fire and throwing them inside.
Kim walked out of the garage, the armor rattling around in the box as he pushed through the clouds of smoke and gas produced by the burning car.
Instantly, he tipped his head back and looked at the sky.
He’d been right this morning.
The clouds were wrong.
Because they weren’t clouds.
When Kim had crash-landed on this planet, he’d always suspected a day like this would come.
It was here.
Day one of the invasion, ha?
He’d be prepared for day two.
Chapter 8
Linh
“Why are we ditching the car?” Harry could barely breathe, let alone push his words out.
Linh pulled the keys out of the ignition, pushed open the door of her Jeep, and jumped down, her balance perfect even as her boots struck the uneven jungle ground beneath her. “Because it’s time to ditch the car.”
Linh turned her head, tipping her chin up slightly as she tuned into the natural world around her. The rustle of leaves, the tickle of the wind across her cheeks, and the ever-present dark, bulbous clouds above.
They’d driven several hours out of the city to Mỹ Sơn – historical ancient temples dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, the defender and transformer of the universe.
“We need to keep driving – we need to get further into the jungle.”
Linh brought up a finger, requesting silence.
She’d driven up the jungle track behind the ruined temples.
Though they were far away from the panic of the city out here, she’d faced it on the roads and highways. If she peeled her hearing, she could even hear the screech of jets scrambling overhead.
Harry was shaking – he’d been shaking since Da Nang. The poor man was as pale as a glass of milk. “Why are we here, Linh?”
“Because this is where I kept them.”
“What?”
“My keys.”
“Your keys are in your hand.”
“Not these keys,” Linh said as she casually tossed them over her shoulder. They fell into a bush by her side.
Harry spluttered and threw himself at them. “What the hell have you done? Are you out of your mind?”
“Trust me when I say that I am more centered within my consciousness than most people on this planet right now.”
Harry was obviously done asking what the hell Linh was on about. He finally grasped up the keys and stood there, shaking.
Linh could feel he was trying to come to a decision – whether to ditch her crazy ass or whether to expend yet more energy trying to convince her they had to get going.
Linh paused, her hand on some jungle leaves as she pushed them half to the side. She nodded toward the Jeep. “You can go if you need to, Harry. But I don’t suggest you do. There won’t be anywhere safe near Da Nang. There won’t be anywhere safe this side of Asia.”
“We don’t know what’s going on,” Harry tried.
She looked right into his eyes. “The Earth is being invaded by aliens,” she said point-blank.
She’d been working with Harry for two years now, and if there was one thing that marked his personality, it was his skepticism. He was a card-carrying member of the International Skeptical Society, for God’s sake. He loved debunking conspiracy theories.
&nb
sp; So she could tell he desperately needed to reject every word she was saying.
But all he had to do is tilt his head up and look at the meteorologically impossible cloud formations to realize this wasn’t normal.
Finally, his skepticism won out. “We don’t know that it’s aliens. It’s just—”
“What? Some weapons test that’s gone wrong? You think that was some kind of nuclear blast?” She pointed toward the massive cloud bank that was still climbing high into the sky and would presumably continue to climb high. Because they weren't clouds.
It was a tunnel.
She could understand what had happened now. That had been no meteor that had struck the South China Sea. It would’ve been a gate ship, one designed to blast past the Fold that was meant to keep the Earth safe. And one that was right now creating a gate back through the Fold.
“Yeah, maybe it’s a nuclear—”
Linh pointed patiently to a butterfly that fluttered in front of her. She didn’t point out that the butterfly would be dead. She just kept tracking it across the sky with her finger until it darted out of sight. Then she pointed that same finger back up. “The sea boiled, Harry. The fish died. And this, this, Harry, is an invasion. Now you can leave – but you’ll be safer with me.”
“Why?”
She pressed her lips together. She came to a decision. “Because I’m an alien.”
Harry looked at her, as pale as ever, and forced a laugh.
There would have been a time when Linh would never have shown her true self.
That time had ended at approximately 4:45 this morning when that probe would’ve penetrated the Earth’s atmosphere.
Linh shrugged. She took a breath, half closed her eyes, and tipped her head to the side. “Two jets are about to scramble overhead. In precisely 30 seconds.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Linh? You’ve cracked. This is insane,” Harry pointed out.
Slowly Linh raised a hand and pointed upward.
Precisely 30 seconds after she’d said it, two jets scrambled low overhead, the sound of their sonic booms blasting through the jungle and rattling the dense foliage around her.
“Jesus hell,” Harry managed as he clamped his hands over his knees and staggered back. But by the time he tilted his head up to track the path of the jets, they were already gone.
He tilted his head down.
Linh had never stopped looking at him.
He appeared to pause, then he shook his head, the move wild and jerking. “Did you hear those coming? It doesn’t prove anything.”
Linh laughed. “You want proof, Harry? That cloud,” she jammed her thumb toward it, “is about to discharge red lightning to the west.
As Linh spoke, she did not make guesses. She tuned in to every fact that flowed through her senses, and she grouped them together. She threw herself into the skill her race was renowned for.
Once upon a time, long before she’d crash landed on this planet, Linh had been the battle mind of an interstellar cruiser.
There was only so much a computer could do, even a sophisticated AI.
A conscious being, however, could go a step further. And that is precisely what her race did.
They conducted battles, predicted targets, altered the whole course of wars all by seeing and attuning to the level above facts.
It was not prediction – it was understanding.
And now as Harry shook his head once more, she reached a hand out to him. “A butterfly is about to land on my palm.”
Harry managed to shake his head once more until a butterfly landed in her palm.
He stilled. His face paled even further, framing his wide-open blue eyes.
She cradled the butterfly for several seconds until she pushed her hand up and encouraged it back into the air.
It took her several seconds until she dropped her hand. “You need more proof, Harry?”
She brought a finger up. Just one finger. She rested it into the shallow indent in her left temple. She traced one finger down her jaw line and tapped on her chin.
Her race, the Covax, looked remarkably like humans structurally, save for several key differences. Covax blood was luminescent – energy and information-rich like electricity.
And as she dragged that finger down her face, she disrupted the holographic filters she’d managed to craft from the matter replicator in her vessel just after she’d crash landed.
It was only a momentary disruption, but that was all it took. She commanded the filters to switch off, two blazing lines of light appearing on her face.
Harry backed off, jerking to the side so quickly, he fell over his own feet and slammed down onto his butt.
Linh removed her hand.
She watched him as he scuttled backward. Then he stopped. He stared at her. He shook his head once, then paused halfway through, his body frozen like a still frame.
“Like I said, Harry – you can take the keys and the car and go. Or you can stick with me. You’ve got a better chance with me.”
“What the hell are you?”
“It’s not going to mean anything to you, but I’m a Covax. We are high-level processors of information. Once upon a time we were used as central processing brains of large cruisers. Until the purge began.” She couldn’t control her voice as she said that.
“Purge?”
“I could stand here all day and relay the sorry history of my race to you, but trust me when I say there’s no time. You’re either with me or you’re not with me, Harry. Which is it?”
Harry was still clutching hold of the keys, his hands now bloodless.
He looked down at them, then he dropped them into the dirt as he pushed toward her.
“This is crazy,” he managed.
“If this is crazy, gird your loins, because it’s about to get a whole lot worse.”
She pivoted on her foot and walked through the jungle, heading for the crash site of her vessel.
She just hoped it was still there and that other aliens hadn’t found it and picked her tech dry.
If they had?
… She would cross that bridge when she came to it.
Overhead, more jets scrambled, and the clouds reached higher to the heavens.
Around the world the aliens would be attacking. She had no idea which race they were, but whoever they were, the humans wouldn’t be ready.
And right now, they would be falling.
Chapter 9
Hena
This shouldn’t be happening.
The Fold should never have fallen.
Alice knew that. Though Alice was not and had never been her name. Her title as a Peacekeeper was Hena.
Alice was the moniker she had chosen for herself after she had come to this planet.
She hadn’t been deployed here. This was no active mission. Her people did not operate behind the Fold.
But she had been sent here nonetheless.
The Peacekeepers had a long tradition of sending their people out into the various cultures of this universe.
Her ancient, powerful race had always understood one thing. There is no greater protection than understanding.
Since time immemorial, the Peacekeepers had protected the universe. From outer disturbances, from inner wars.
And though, once upon a time, they’d operated under their own control, as the spacefaring races of the universe had grown in power and influence, their activities had been brought under the control of the Universal Governing Body.
There was one pact, more than any other, that locked the Peacekeepers in place. The Hysian Accords.
No one Peacekeeper, no matter how powerful, could break that pact. Do that, and the UGB would turn against her people.
When the spacefaring races of the universe were young, they’d celebrated the protection of the Peacekeepers. But as they’d aged, and critically found their own power, they’d became covetous, then scared.
The activities of the Peacekeepers had not changed – the attitu
de those races had toward power was the only thing that had altered. When somebody cannot protect themselves, they seek protection from others. When they can protect themselves, they seek to control others.
But none of this changed one simple fact – the Accords should not be broken.
Hena pushed her hand to the side, energy picking up along her fingers, distributing up her palm, over her wrist, around her arm, and over her entire body. As the pocket of energy enshrouded her, she pushed through space. At one moment she was floating there, above a ridge in the Southwest National Kim. The next, she transported two kilometers up into the air. The air pressure didn’t affect her. Even without the energy enshrouding her skin, she wouldn’t have felt it. Alice’s skin, appropriately, was only skin deep. The rest of her was essentially an energy being. And the glowing blue light that covered her form and that could be morphed into any weapon or defensive item was an extra appendage, if you will. It was a symbiotic light form each Peacekeeper was given when they came of age.
Right now Alice used it to cut a hole through space and transport up into the sky, and as she arrived, she stared down on the landmass of Tasmania beneath her.
It was unchanged. But as she shifted her head to the north, she saw the approaching storm clouds. They were not natural meteorological activity. Though some of the great towering gray and white cumulonimbus were a natural weather reaction to the excess heat in the atmosphere and rising off the ocean, the rest were camouflage created by the invasion.
As Hena floated there in the air, her light form covering her and stopping her clothes and hair from buffeting and the remaining moisture covering her form from turning into ice, two of her fingers twitched in as they tried to curl into a fist.
But she stopped herself in time.
She knew why she was on this planet, and it wasn’t as a Peacekeeper. She was here to understand humans. It was a sacred rite of her people that they must be deployed throughout their long lifetimes into emerging cultures to understand the various races of this universe.
Earth was not part of the Hysian Accords. The Accords strictly stated that as a Peacekeeper, she must be deployed by the UGB. Apart from acts of self-defense, she must never take on an offensive without permission.
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