Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  “Show her that death is immaterial, Carl.”

  Carl squeezed. The woman made a gurgling noise, her feet frantic. The Titans advanced, and Carl pushed them back with his eyes, muscles tight.

  “We can’t send you back! You don’t understand!”

  “Make her understand, Carl.”

  “Wait!”

  Meyer crossed to Carl, bent, and punched the woman in the gut. Air left her human lungs. She grunted, face paled, panic etched on her features as she fought in vain to inhale. Carl stared the Titans back as Meyer squatted to look Eternity in her eyes.

  “I know you took this body to be your puppet. I used to share Kindred’s memories, and part of me remembers what it was like for him, standing in front of something like you, a giant light-filled anemone behind the puppet, controlling it. I’ve got insights coming at me so fast these days, I might break.” He snapped his fingers, and Eternity, still gasping for air, flinched. “It takes my breath away. But I think I know something else about you, and although I’m new to this, I think I can see it from the inside as well as out. I think you’re used to living in that body and are more attached to being an individual than you should be. I think you look yourself over in the mirror, wondering how it would feel to be born like us, and have that body admired by someone else. I think that no matter how much mind-over-matter bullshit you claim, right now you don’t need air to keep living by your usual definition but desperately want it anyway.”

  Eternity’s chest heaved, and she gasped, the effort of drawing breath bringing tears to her eyes.

  “You’re going to let us go. If you don’t, Carl will snap your neck. It won’t take much. Look at his arms. I’ll bet he can pop your head all the way off like the top of a dandelion.”

  “It won’t make any difference,” she said, her breath still coming in gasps, eyes still streaming.

  “It’ll make a difference to you.”

  “We have to fix you. If we can’t, we must destroy you all.”

  Meyer felt an acid grin spread across his face.

  “But you can’t do that, can you? I can see into my friend here and into you. I know that when you tried to do something to him earlier, it hurt you, too. You’ve stayed here too long. You’ve gone native. You started so high above, but now you’re more like us than you want to be. Look at you. The individual doesn’t matter, does it? Yet here we are, holding your entire race captive just because we’ve got one little toy and are willing to break it if we don’t get our way.”

  “If we let you go, everyone loses,” she said.

  “Better everyone than just us.”

  “You won’t make it. Even if we let you go, you can’t leave the ship. Maybe I do care, but the infection cuts both ways. We’re no longer an unclouded collective. Others will stand in your way no matter what I say.”

  “You mean the other woman? The short one?”

  “I mean just about any—”

  A soft electric sound cut her off. Something lanced into Carl’s shoulder from the rear, through the open door. Meyer looked up to see another two Titans approaching, weapons raised.

  They looked angry.

  The Titans looked angry.

  Meyer rammed into Carl and Eternity, sending them sideways, out of the doorway. He could already see the back of Carl’s shoulder spilling blood where he’d been hit by the weapon. There was no time to explain, or hesitate. As bad as this had become, it would only get worse.

  Push.

  Carl moved, throwing Meyer an annoyed glance for not speaking aloud.

  Not away from the armed Titans but toward them.

  They must not have predicted it; the Titans staggered back as Meyer and Carl, still holding Eternity, charged forward. They still should have had time to shoot again, but Carl held Eternity high like a shield, dangling with her feet kicking and one absent its shoe. They raised their weapons, sighted, failed to shoot. And in that split second’s hesitation, Meyer and Carl acted, Carl punching one of them hard enough with his free fist to crack something in the wall behind him as the Titan’s head rebounded from it. Meyer took the other, apparently more spry than he’d anticipated. The Titan’s size worked against it as the alien moved to grab Meyer’s much smaller form; he stepped back, reared ahead, and drove his elbow into the Astral’s nose. The Titan didn’t take it in stride, or transform, putting its hand to its face and falling back in obvious pain. Meyer grabbed its weapon from the floor and aimed it, confused for milliseconds, seeing ahead but not far enough.

  Just keep moving.

  He didn’t know where he was going. Except that he did. The Deathbringer ship was orders of magnitude larger than the ship he’d been imprisoned upon before, but now he could see through a crack in the wall: a glimpse, reaching a tendril into the collective. Shaking hands with something — a piece of himself, perhaps, stolen while they held him captive like a ghost.

  And at each turn, seconds in advance of reaching it, Meyer saw where to go.

  Right. Right. Left.

  They ran into Reptars. Carl held Eternity up again, but the Reptars came anyway. Meyer raised the Titan’s weapon. It fired like a human rifle. Perhaps a benefit of being seeded from Astral stock — made in the image of seemed also to mean able to fire the weapons of.

  One’s head was obliterated, walls coated with gore like a paintball fight. The other wounded, down one leg.

  On.

  And on.

  Finally a door. Eternity bucking in Carl’s grip, squirming like a child throwing a tantrum. She bore down and bit hard. Carl shouted and released her, blood now gushing from his earlier wound. His shirt was soaked red down the back, air pungent with the tang of fresh meat.

  Meyer lunged and struck her sidelong, more unintentionally tackling than successfully reaching. Eternity rolled to the side and struck the bulkhead. Meyer was reaching deep, grabbing the collective and squeezing, searching for access. The door behind them purred open as a single Reptar rounded the corner. Meyer had lost his weapon when he’d leaped after Eternity, and the thing was coming, coming, coming …

  NO!

  But it was too late. Carl had acted before Meyer could prevent it. One big hand on his chest, pushing Meyer down, through the open door. He had Eternity by the wrist. She was off-balance on one shod foot; she tumbled after him, and they landed in a heap.

  He got one last look at Carl, who’d put himself between the Reptar and Meyer.

  The door closed.

  Many sounds followed. But as his body was ripped apart, Carl didn’t cry out.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “She’s where?”

  The Titan stared dumbly at Divinity, its weapon dangling from a strap on its bone-white shoulder.

  “Is your jaw broken?”

  No, his jaw isn’t broken, said an internal voice that Divinity knew wasn’t the collective and that she had no reason hearing in a world where everything wasn’t going to shit. He’s a Titan, and Titans don’t speak.

  Internally, she said: Show me.

  The Titan seemed to settle, as if it appreciated Divinity’s return to form. She could feel the information coming at her, but it took a moment’s concerted effort before she could switch her own internal eye to see it.

  When the scene from the collective stream was finished — the entire thing witnessed from various Titan and Reptar perspectives as they chased Meyer through corridors — Divinity opened her eyes. She felt dizzy. A scene like that shouldn’t be difficult to pull from the stream and review in all its minutiae, but she was out of practice. Being many minds at once should have felt natural, but instead it gave her vertigo. But she had the required information, and now it seemed she wouldn’t need to face Eternity’s reaction to Divinity artfully rearranging her quarters after all. Not as long as Eternity remained as focused inside her surrogate’s limited mind as Divinity was in hers. For a while now (to borrow a human expression she’d pulled from their media and particularly liked), Eternity would have bigger fish to fry.

/>   But the location where Meyer had dragged her — and the insinuations that came with it — were inconvenient at best, troublesome at worst.

  “The Nexus. You’re telling me of all the places he could have taken her, he’s holding her in the Nexus.”

  The Titan didn’t respond, either in voice or body language. It hadn’t told Divinity anything. And Titans didn’t understand figures of speech, so the thing just stood in front of her like a big white wall.

  “Do you think it was intentional? Did he know what that place was?”

  The Titan didn’t seem to think anything.

  “Do you think he’s planning something, or is he grasping at straws?”

  The Titan offered no opinion.

  “This way.” Irritated, Divinity marched off. The Titan followed.

  A few minutes later, she found herself in the circular white space they called Control. Quite the misnomer. There weren’t (technically) any individuals in the collective, and so (in theory) the combined, always-agreeing will of the average within range could pilot the ship from anywhere and everywhere. And thus, there was no need for a space dedicated to control. In the usual order of things, most steering decisions were made without any questions asked, then executed from wherever the crews’ bodies just so happened to be without a single finger or claw raised. But this was hardly the usual order. Now the ship’s commander (when, in fact, the ship wasn’t technically supposed to have one) was being held hostage, and the captor seemed willing to kill her if approached — something that technically didn’t matter.

  But it somehow did, and the entire ship had snapped right into order. Titans were responding like human police. Reptars were grunts with rifles, eager to shoot the bad guys. Divinity supposed that made her the FBI negotiator. But the whole thing was embarrassing. The thing held hostage was one meaningless shell used by a localized intelligence blip. They should storm the Nexus and drag Dempsey back to his cell. But Eternity was at the center of this ship’s cluster, and apparently “Melanie” was inappropriately afraid enough for them all.

  At least two dozen Titans had congregated in Control, directly above the organic nerve facilitating the ship’s collective operation. They’d come as if drawn, though nobody had drawn them. When Divinity entered, white heads turned and seemed to brighten, as if relieved that the second in command (though there technically was no such thing, and Divinity technically belonged on her own ship rather than this one) would know what to do.

  Well. It didn’t matter if the whole Earthbound occupation contingent had gone whacky. Divinity had her own aims, and if their confusion could help her achieve them, it was a good thing. Lemons into lemonade, and all of that.

  “Dispatch a shuttle to BR-1 …” She trailed off, not wanting to spool off the long string of coordinates and frustrated that she couldn’t give simple directions like, “Go to the big rock, and turn right.” She set her surrogate’s mind’s focus and delivered her order.

  But it must have transmitted as weakly as it felt, because the Titans gave no signs of acknowledgement.

  She tried again, focusing more carefully, turning her increasingly default human vocabulary into Astral terms.

  Go get what I want from the place it’s hidden.

  But again, no reaction.

  Finally, a weak signal returned. It was the collective — or, hell, maybe even an individual somewhere nearby — attempting to speak Divinity’s adopted language. The signal was as pathetic as she imagined her own Astral language sounded to the collective, and her mind interpreted it as:

  Focus must remain with the situation on the ship.

  “The situation on the ship depends on doing as I say,” she said aloud. “Look at you. You’re diverting the entire fleet’s mission because one pointless human body has been threatened. It isn’t logical. The collective has been so infected that irrational judgments are being made. Do as I say. We need to cure the disease, not the symptoms.”

  She heard, ???

  Seeing absolutely no motion from inside the collective in Divinity’s intended direction, she sent a snapshot of her intentions inside.

  Overload the system like a human body uses a fever to burn off intruding organisms. This is the only way.

  She wanted to punch herself. Even her explanations centered on human metaphors the Titans could never understand, let alone be moved by — again, assuming Titans could be moved at all, when naturally they couldn’t. They were just things within the grand scheme, like Eternity’s surrogate body.

  She pushed, explaining further. Argued the point. Insisted on the logic of it all.

  But the collective pushed back. She’d already made these suggestions, and Eternity had said no. Eternity felt the human Archetypes were the way to go, and that once the Archetypes were rounded up and eliminated, their problems on Planet Earth would finally be over. The Forgetting could finish, and they could fly out to the rift, go home, and leave this rock alone for a few more thousand years.

  She’s wrong.

  And still the collective responded to Divinity as if it knew none of its own rules and didn’t understand the same laws she herself kept disobeying.

  It doesn’t matter. She’s in charge of this ship. Not you.

  Which was a lie.

  Which, really, was worse than a lie because it was based on false assumptions. There was no she. Or in charge. They were human concepts that made no sense to the hive.

  And still the Titans stared at Divinity as she stood in the center of Control. Not because they were unaware or stupid, Divinity now felt certain. It was more accurate to say they were being defiant. They knew the coup she was trying to stage and found her attempts laughable at best, treasonous at worst.

  There is no treason in a collective.

  But the Titans’ eyes no longer seemed vacant, fixed and unmoving upon her.

  Our “leader” is unable to make decisions, Divinity thought into the hive, deciding to lay it all out and go for an absurd kind of hierarchical broke. I am next in command, and it is my will that you dispatch a shuttle to the canyon to—

  A thought interrupted Divinity’s: It is forbidden to interfere once an epoch has begun. Her solo mind was gifted with a dozen images of things they all knew. The reminders were insulting.

  No contact, other than by the seeds.

  No undue influence.

  The archive must not be touched.

  And once the reset is complete and an epoch is unspooling, human artifacts must lie where they’ve been left.

  Divinity felt something strike her mind like an arrow. She spun. This little lecture wasn’t coming from the collective stream. It was coming from right here in this room, from someone who didn’t know any better than Divinity that their race didn’t possess individual minds.

  “Who is doing that?” she asked.

  Blank stares.

  She pushed out, sending anger out like a black wave. Stares remained blank, but several Titans, feeling it in an unfiltered, not-via-the-stream way they had no business feeling, flinched.

  But there was one, a rough concentric circle back, whose eyes moved as well.

  Divinity moved forward. She stood before the flickering Titan. A male, easily a foot taller than Divinity, even in her ridiculous human heels. It must have been one of the crew set on alert when Meyer captured Divinity because it was carrying a weapon. At first she wondered if this one might have killed Carl Nairobi and solved another of their Archetype problems, but no — that had been a Reptar, and there’d been no transforming.

  “You,” she said. “Walk over to the manual controls. Put your palm on the panel to activate it. Then enter the coordinates I gave earlier, to send a shuttle.”

  At first the Titan’s mind said nothing — or at least nothing Divinity’s mind could hear. But she could tell he was playing chicken, such that Titans knew how. A non-response was appropriate, seeing as they worked collectively. But this was the one who’d challenged her directly, and he was fooling no one.

&
nbsp; She could see his big white face twitching, though it should have looked blank.

  She could see the grip on his weapon’s strap tightening.

  And although Titan bodies only perspired to cool the skin, this one had beaded sweat on its brow, as if his body thought it was a different kind — one that perspired from emotion.

  “You’re sick,” Divinity said, knowing she’d created an airtight trap. Titans were supposed to obey because the collective commanded it, and right now Divinity had an internal fist on this part of the whole. But it couldn’t protest something as vague as an accusation of illness when the concept didn’t make sense — nor accept her assessment of sickness as a sign of something gone truly wrong.

  “There’s something on this ship. Don’t you see it?” Divinity said, too close to the Titan’s motionless face — or, due to their height difference, his chin. “The human collective is more resilient than we’ve seen before. It’s aggressive and has infected our collective. Even now, it’s growing, both out there in the wild and in our ships. There is only one way to solve the problem. Only one way for us all to get well again. And it’s not what Eternity thinks.”

  Her words and her stare must have got to the Titan — either that, or he knew he wasn’t fooling anyone and decided to surrender the act. Because although his lips didn’t move, she heard his rebuttal as clearly as if he’d been a human man speaking her adopted language aloud.

  We must eliminate their Archetypes. Two are already dead.

  “It’s not just the Archetypes. It’s also the Lightborn. They held the door open the first time, and they’ll do it again, Archetypes or no Archetypes. And now the Lightborn have children of their own, born awake. We can’t find them all. They have their own collective now, and all it takes is one to keep the infection alive and spread it.” Divinity’s lips pursed. She’d studied this next part, and it was maddening. “Someone saw to it that the network of those survivors had enough talent to do that all on its own — even if only one Lightborn, anywhere, ever, remains alive.”