Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

We will follow the plan.

  “We can’t kill them all. Ask Eternity. She felt what happened when they pushed too hard into Carl Nairobi’s mind. We’re bound to them, like two organisms sharing a bloodstream. You can’t destroy one without destroying the other. Not anymore.”

  You are not in charge, the Titan’s mind protested, still sweating at his hairless brow, his eyes still straight forward and averted.

  “Eternity is fighting a futile battle because she’s become too human. But there is another way.”

  Irrelevant. The collective follows commands.

  Divinity pushed her plan into the Titan. Into the collective. She’d already explained it to Eternity, but Eternity had emotional reasons for refusing, not logical ones, and thus had gone soft.

  It will not work. You cannot increase the force of the Forgetting so far. It will blank them entirely. They will be unable to function. They will be worse than dead, and the experiment will be over.

  “It is the only way.”

  The Forgetting is at maximum already.

  “Not if you obey my order and send that shuttle. I only need one thing, then I can turn it up as high as we need it to go.”

  Divinity smiled across her human lips, and nodded toward the panel.

  “Do as I say.”

  The Titan looked into her eyes, then returned them to front, again unmoving.

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

  Divinity stared up at the Titan for several seconds. From the corners of her eyes, she saw the other Titans minutely shift, eyes cast around. The collective seemed to be reorganizing, incorporating this new power struggle and ensuing defiance.

  They wanted Eternity rescued. Their will was like iron, and Divinity could feel it radiating from every Titan in the room.

  Dozens of nodes in a hive, all suddenly finding their individual spines.

  Divinity shook her head, looked to the corridor at Control’s end, leading toward the Nexus and its two occupants. Locked in. In need of a stupid, heroic rescue.

  “Fine,” Divinity said, sighing. “Give me your weapon.”

  The Titan’s fingers moved slightly, but nothing more. His face was etched with human conflict. Divinity kept her hand out, waiting. This time, he’d have to obey given that there were no longer opposing imperatives. She’d make him do it — wait until he did — lest the others in this room get the idea that she wasn’t in charge.

  Finally the Titan shrugged the strap from his shoulder and handed the weapon to Divinity.

  She turned its muzzle on the Titan and used its highest energetic setting to cut him in half.

  Divinity looked around the room. The Titan’s lower and upper half had collapsed into a reasonably neat stack at her feet, but its guts had sprayed the five closest soldiers, all of them flinching in ways Titans shouldn’t, their eyes now moving in concerned flickers like Titans’ never had.

  Fear.

  It ran through them, lubricated by humanity’s disease, like wildfire.

  Divinity watched it happen. There were others armed in the group, but they were unpracticed in making choices. Petty defiance was easy. But growing a spine strong enough to turn against a ship’s leader? That was far too advanced to make any of them a threat.

  Divinity turned the weapon toward the next Titan.

  “Send the shuttle,” she said. “Please.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Movement caught the corner of Kamal’s eye. He looked up to see a shooting star. Except that it was a bit too long-lived for that, moving like a streak, vanishing over the nighttime horizon rather than petering out in a partial second.

  “Did you see that?” Clara asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think it was a shuttle?”

  Kamal nodded. “I do.”

  “I keep waiting for them to zero in on us. On you, anyway.” Peers indicated Clara and Sadeem — the two members of the party the Astrals had tried so hard to abduct.

  “I think the same rules apply as before,” said Sadeem. “They can’t see the Lightborn.”

  “What about us?” Peers asked.

  “If you vanished from one place and came here, maybe the rules don’t apply to you at all.”

  “I meant all of us. Or just you two.” He flicked his fingers toward Sadeem and Kamal.

  Sadeem looked like he might answer again, but Kamal scoffed. “We’ve been here for two decades, and something tells me they never even knew about us. I don’t think they knew we left Ember Flats; I don’t think they knew we landed just down the sand from Clara’s village and somehow never realized we were near each other; I don’t think they could have seen the fires we set every night if their alien spy scopes were trained right on it in the middle of all this darkness. I think we’re a blind spot. Something they can’t see because they’re not supposed to.”

  “You seem awfully sure.”

  Kamal said nothing. He’d let that one go. He had his reasons for believing it the same as he had his reasons for believing everything else, but the Astral blind spots that so conveniently coincided with Stranger’s manipulations — back when he’d been able to make them, and held his old magic — were the least of their concerns.

  Kamal waited, not wanting to raise the big issue himself. He wasn’t even sure what he knew. This sector of memories was far more reluctant to return than those that told Kamal who he was and whom he’d taken to his high school dances. Until an hour ago, he hadn’t known what Stranger might have sent him to tell Clara — and, Kamal felt sure for some reason, Stranger himself had forgotten entirely. But even now that he had the corner of those hidden thoughts, the knowledge itself still moved like cold tar. He couldn’t explain starting from zero. They’d have to drag it from his mind with questions.

  “What direction is that?” Peers asked, still looking toward where the shuttle had vanished.

  “Why?”

  “I just wonder if they’re swarming on the freighter. Sending reinforcements now that we’ve found out they’re protecting something.”

  “I hope not.”

  Nobody asked Sadeem why he’d said it. They all knew they’d need to return to the freighter. To the cargo Stranger had arranged for Carl to bring to this place. To the Ark. Kamal didn’t think any of the others knew precisely why they needed to go back or what they’d do once they arrived (if they did, he amended) — but they knew, all right.

  “They didn’t leave Reptars behind to guard the Ark before,” Clara said.

  “They had us before. The Mullah. We can move it even if they can’t. Which, as it turned out, was exactly the problem and why they didn’t let us in on the secret this time.” Sadeem shifted on his rock, aborting an attempt to cross his legs in the flickering light. “And besides, they probably planned to take their guards and leave once they could be sure we’d stay Forgotten. At least until the freighter was buried.”

  “Maybe they’ll leave now,” Kamal said.

  “They can’t leave until we forget. Besides, they have my grandfather up there.”

  “Again,” said Peers.

  “Again,” Clara echoed.

  Her eyes turned to Kamal — pits of shadow in the firelight.

  “Why did they take him the first time, if he was Astral?”

  “He’s not an Astral.” Kamal’s head tipped, considering. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I’m not even sure I fully understood it when I figured it out in Ember Flats. But right now, it’s even harder. Those memories are sticky. Stuck way down deep and are taking their sweet time coming out. At first I barely remembered doing the research while waiting to drown. Now I can remember that and some of the punch lines. But the rest?” He shrugged.

  “What do you remember?” Peers asked.

  Kamal rearranged himself, trying to find a comfortable position and failing. He moved from his rock to the sand.

  “
It started with what you said you told Stranger, Peers.” Then to Sadeem and Clara: “Peers said he and Stranger were listing the Archetypes. At first everyone who knew the legend thought that Meyer was the King. It made sense. He’s always been a leader. People who studied this stuff figured the Astrals chose their viceroys from a pool of folks the world already knew and mostly respected. So much seemed to focus on shuttling Meyer around, of getting him out of tough situations, of setting him up as a leader. A King. Hell, based on what you told me, Meyer being the King was the spark that let you recognize the Archetypes in the first place, right?”

  Peers nodded then recited from the Mullah legend: “‘The King survives.’ I assumed it was Meyer and Kindred, since they struck everyone as two halves of a whole.” He turned to Kamal. “I said that right in front of you. How can you not remember?”

  Kamal rolled his eyes. It was probably a good thing, solidarity-wise, that Peers could joke about assaulting Kamal before discussing matters of future life and death with Ravi over his unconscious body. Nobody loved being the knocked-out butt of a joke. The fact that Kamal didn’t protest at least said they were finally sharing a team.

  “They’re not two halves of a whole?”

  Peers turned to Sadeem. “Meyer is the whole. Kindred and Stranger are two halves.”

  “Halves of what?”

  “Of Meyer.” Peers seemed to take Kamal and Clara’s bafflement as reason to elaborate. “Based on all I remember and all Sadeem and I discussed in the past, I think the Astrals maybe didn’t know what they were getting into when they tried to make the first Astral duplicate. It ‘malfunctioned’ for want of a better word. And so in the end it turned on them, siding with the human resistance. After your father killed it …” Peers had been looking at Clara but now stopped, adding apology to his expression. “Anyway, the Astrals tried making another copy after that, and ended up with Kindred. But before they made him, they filtered out whatever ‘excess humanity’ they felt had caused the first copy to go bad. I think that ‘garbage’ became the Pall — and I think that when Cameron opened the Ark and sacrificed himself to it, his acts turned the Pall into Stranger. So the equation goes like this: ‘Pall plus Kindred equals a complete copy of Meyer.’”

  Clara was slowly shaking her head. “I don’t know, Peers. That’s kind of …” She trailed off, unsure how to articulate the absurdity.

  “There’s a lot of kind of these days. I stopped worrying about what was and wasn’t possible when I teleported across several miles of open desert without knowing how or why.”

  “His explanation is consistent with Mullah mythology,” Sadeem said. “The Legend Scroll says that the King has two heads — a symbolic interpretation of one entity split in half. But I don’t think there has ever been the rise of a singular King — something that in the scrolls reads like one head being removed. But I don’t know. By this point in the legend, the Astrals have always made us forget, and so the One King never rises. So much of this is uncharted water.”

  “So one of them will die?” Clara asked.

  “I don’t think so. The King grows in power. The scroll makes further sacrifice among the Archetypes sound possible or perhaps even probable, but not in the case of the King. I’d say it’s more likely that Kindred and Stranger will combine, not be struck down.”

  “How?”

  Sadeem shrugged.

  Clara turned to Kamal. “Is this what you’re supposed to tell me? That I have one and two halves of a grandfather now?”

  “I don’t think so. But it’s like I told you: the Da Vinci Initiate, once the viceroys were first taken, always insisted that Meyer Dempsey was special. It was unclear why. But the Astrals tried to replace him (and failed) twice, whereas apparently all the other viceroys ruled as humans — sneaky, conspiratorial humans prone to disobedience that the Astrals pretended not to see but who were probably always part of the experiment. And there’s more: the Initiate also believed the Astrals took Meyer first out of the eventual viceroys. First by several days, no less. Heaven’s Veil had a Money Pit, whereas no other capital had one. And then there’s you, Clara.”

  “What about me?”

  “The Lightborn were something the Astrals didn’t expect, for sure. But the others gave up. They were willing to pretend to forget, probably because they didn’t have your power. If you weren’t here, this Astral visit would probably have ended like all those visits from the past. But you were here, and now things are different. This time, the Forgetting didn’t stick. And coincidentally, whose granddaughter are you?”

  Clara’s tongue found her cheek, thinking.

  “Your mother was one of the Archetypes. Kindred and Stranger, who are basically two halves of a split Meyer, are one of the Archetypes. You’re one yourself. That’s three out of seven, all in the same family. And on top of that, Peers conveniently came to join you. So did Sadeem. I’m not an Archetype, I don’t think, but I found you, too. How else can you explain all that coincidence, other than what the Initiate had been saying all along: that Meyer is special, even among viceroys and Archetypes?”

  “But how is he special? I can see his energy in the collective. I don’t understand it even as I’m staring right at it. In the network inside my head — in all of our heads, I guess. My grandpa is clearly different from everyone else, but I don’t know why. Or what it means. And it keeps changing, Kamal! He’s growing somehow. Connecting more. Becoming … something else.”

  “Or maybe becoming what he always was.”

  Clara shrugged at Kamal, eyes wide and frustrated. Kamal wished he had a quick answer. But the memories came slowly, reluctant to emerge.

  “I started looking through Mara’s archived research because I was bored and expecting to die. I didn’t do it because I was searching for something — or even if I was looking, what I might be looking for. So I sort of poked around the files in the bunker server. Stuff that was classified but that I had access to as Mara’s aide. I never cared because they struck us like any old records: as things you’ve gotta keep, but that nobody would ever want to look at. Mountains of Da Vinci stuff. Ancient aliens theory. Archaeological records. Communications with Benjamin Bannister’s Moab group; I know you were friendly with them. And honestly much of it read like those nutso documentaries they used to air on the History Channel. Like a new-age tour through Crazy Land.”

  Kamal stopped, looked around the fire, continued.

  “I didn’t know where to start, so I followed the threads that amused me most. Some topics struck me as interesting — stuff I didn’t know the Da Vinci people had known or even made theories about, like how the ships might travel. On that, there was a mixture of old and new information: theories Da Vinci worked up before Astral Day that Mara and others added in after the aliens’ arrival. They made guesses that seem close to what ended up happening. For instance, nothing can travel faster than light. That meant the old idea, proposed before Astral Day, was that ancient aliens would have to use wormholes to reach us from far enough away that we hadn’t found them already. And lo and behold, I remember people thinking there must be a wormhole parked out near Jupiter for the Astrals to have reached Earth as they did, at fast but still sub-relativistic speeds, while we all waited for them to park in our driveways. Their arrival triggered new research. I remember some of the buzzwords — quantum physics stuff, way over my head: non-local interaction. Heisenberg uncertainty. Quantum entanglement. That last one is where two things in two different places appear to be different objects, but are actually the same object seen two different ways.”

  “How does that work?” Peers asked.

  “I don’t know. Like I said: It’s way over my head. But Mara’s files were stuffed with things like that: the world’s remaining brains trying to figure out how the Astrals might move around or think in a collective. How they might have been watching us from much farther away than Jupiter given that it would take years for a signal to travel from us to them. Endless pages of files about physics that bordered
on metaphysics. Four-dimensional beings presenting themselves in three dimensions. Shit like that. I’ve had enough theoretical physics to last a lifetime. If I see one more tesseract …!” Kamal waved his finger as if scolding.

  “What’s a tesseract?” Sadeem asked. But it was a joke, and Kamal was already moving on.

  “Like I said,” Kamal continued, looking at Clara, “I stuck with things that amused me to kill the time. But only half of what I read was amusing. Funny.”

  Clara apparently hadn’t expected that. She looked up. “Funny?”

  “Do you remember that old movie Men in Black? There’s a scene where they check the hot sheets to keep abreast of alien happenings, and it turns out that the hot sheets are tabloids like the National Enquirer. So, like, ‘Bat Boy Sighted’ was supposed to be a real thing with actual aliens that the rest of the world other than the whackos thought was hilarious. That’s how I felt going through Mara’s files. It was this long, unending joke without any end. Layers of conspiracy. And to be fair, I think it amused me because Mara’s files kind of had everything — including the report Cousin Merle in rural Alabama made once when he was drunk. But then I started to see patterns in all that crazy bullshit and realized that in all the garbage, there was a thread of something true — real, honest-to-God happenings mixed in with all those tinfoil hats.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the idea that there were aliens among us. That there always have been, I mean. I’d read about Elvis being an alien and Richard Nixon being an alien and Jimi Hendrix and Donald Fucking Trump being aliens. And I’d laugh, and that was great because the alternative was to face the fact that I’d soon have to decide between drowning in a basement, slowly starving, or shooting myself in the mouth. But the more I read …” He shrugged.

  “You believe it?” said Clara. “Are you saying that—”

  “Not as such, no. Not Elvis. Not Donald Trump. Not even Little Green Men at all, not in the way you might be thinking. I don’t believe that we’ve always been ‘occupied’ by beings from other places. But the Initiate thought something a lot like that was happening, and the more I read, the harder and harder it got to shake the feeling that they were right.”