Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  They were still alive. Somehow, amid the huge knot of Reptars, they were all still alive.

  Firing their weapons.

  And the bullets were going right through the Reptars, striking nothing at all.

  Stranger’s shoulder struck Peers’s shoulder. Marcus was to his side, weapon raised. They’d stopped firing. Bullets didn’t always knock Reptars down, but they never failed to nab their attention. But these weren’t flinching. No shattered scales, no blood, no sounds or sights of impact. The Reptars weren’t coming — marching in a circle, feinting as if to strike without ever attacking.

  “They’re not real.”

  Clara held tight as Sadeem tried to pull away. She was low, looking across the all-black battleground, watching the fearful sight of Reptars swarming just feet away. But something was still off. She’d seen her share of Reptar attacks, and this was like none of them.

  “Let me go!”

  “They’re not real, Sadeem! Look at them!”

  Sadeem looked. Shots rang out, raising tiny blasts of sand.

  One prowling from the other side, moving without hurry toward the knot where Kindred and his small group of warriors had vanished, surrounded.

  Sadeem saw her eyes.

  He traded the big rifle for Clara’s handgun, snatching it before she could protest. Then he ran toward the Reptar, robes flapping.

  Sadeem raised his weapon and fired at the lone Reptar. He was too old. His joints ached; his hands weren’t used to the heavy firearm. His teeth wanted to rattle whenever it kicked. He could barely hear after a few of the thunderous reports.

  The Reptar Clara had been staring at flinched. Recoiled. Turned to face Sadeem, leaping, pining his gun hand, rattling the weapon loose. Then its dark and bleeding body was above him, wounded but not enough. His head rolled to the side, trying to torque his body around to reach the gun with his free hand. He saw the nearest clutch of Reptars and noticed a curious thing: maybe a third of the Reptars that had been circling were now wavering. And bleeding.

  The thing raised its head and bellowed, then swung its rows of teeth down, whip-fast. But Sadeem was faster; he brought his toe hard up under the Reptar’s jaw, stunning it, making it choke.

  Free hand.

  Gun.

  Sadeem was right-handed, but the quarters were close enough that an imperfect shot would do. His clumsy left hand found enough strength to grip it, and pull the trigger. The blow glanced off the Reptar’s side, doing little more than making it reel. The deterred teeth connected but did so imperfectly; razors cut into Sadeem’s flesh at the shoulder. But it was his right shoulder, and his left was still free so he fought the spreading agony and shoved his barrel into the thing’s mouth, managing another shot, watching the slide lock back.

  Empty. That was my last bullet.

  But it was enough. A great glut of thick blood coughed from the Reptar’s throat, and the thing collapsed atop him, then rolled away.

  A third of the Reptars on both groups collapsed, suddenly dead.

  They’re not real, Clara had said.

  Sadeem scanned the scene. Another two Reptars were coming, each by itself, moving fast.

  Logan, mouth open, looked right at Kamal when a bunch of Reptars dropped dead. It felt like something from an action movie he might have seen as a kid, before Astral Day: a villain sliced and diced by the hero, only realizing after a few pregnant seconds that he’d been cut into pieces. Kamal was holding the group’s only assault rifle. It was as if he’d shot all the Reptars after all, but it had taken them a moment to get the message.

  “How—?” Logan managed the single word before a big black body leaped from the churning mass and hit him full on.

  The Reptar, having overshot its mark, turned and stalked back toward Logan as he fumbled for his gun, which he’d somehow hung onto. Kamal’s eyes lit, but then a large group of Reptars moved between them, and Kamal and his machine gun were gone.

  Logan raised his weapon. The Reptar knocked it away. Its mouth opened, a purr escaping on foul, meat-flavored breath.

  Oh hell. I’m going to die on my back.

  The thing came. Stalking. Purring. But then something else came: small, lightning fast, swinging something like a board or bat. There was a crack, and the Reptar recoiled, struck in its big armored face. It staggered as if dizzy, then Logan was moving backward, dragged from under his armpits. But — horror of horrors — his savior was pulling him into the swarm.

  Clara came around him and squatted. Logan tried to focus on her but couldn’t. He was trying to hold his ground, but it was hard with all the Reptar legs and claws and purring heads knocking him all about.

  “We’re safe here.”

  “We’re safe?” Logan couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly. Clara could have been speaking Chinese.

  “They’re not real. They’re … projections.”

  Something stepped on Logan. It hurt.

  “They feel real to me!” he was hysterical, barely able to listen for all the panic, all the fight-or-flight.

  “Logan. Listen. There are only a few of them. The rest are duplicates. I don’t think they can pay attention to more than their own eyes, so they can’t see us, or get to us. I think most are smoke and mirrors. You saw how the bullets were going right through.”

  A Reptar opened its mouth right beside him. Logan flinched back, seeing teeth and that blue glow. But the thing closed its mouth and moved away: just another horror show.

  “The one I hit,” Clara said, looking back the way they’d come.

  “Hit?”

  Clara shrugged — a strange gesture amid the Reptars. As she stood, one of the many alien arms went right through her: one of Clara’s smoke and mirrors beasties, true to her word.

  “I didn’t know how to shoot Sadeem’s rifle,” Clara said, “but it worked fine as a bat.”

  A scream.

  Piper had run toward Kamal and Logan and Kindred, somehow ending up in the middle. She remembered the freeway catastrophe outside Chicago a thousand years ago, recalling those close quarters, and feeling the same sensation now. How had she been surrounded? She’d been firing the entire time but didn’t think she’d killed a single Reptar. She’d been prepared to kill or die herself, but neither happened. When that massive batch had dropped dead all at once, she’d seen Logan, Kindred, Kamal, and Kamal’s friends. Now she was in the middle. Why weren’t they attacking, until the one struck at Logan?

  Clara had pushed right through the Reptars, not minding them at all, and whacked the one over Logan hard with what turned out to be a rifle. It was still where she’d dropped it, but Clara and Logan were gone, retreated through a wall of Reptars like a bead curtain.

  Now the scream. Piper saw the Reptar Clara had clocked recovering, now ripping the woman from Kamal’s village down her middle. Blood spurted as she separated. The man shouted, pointing his gun at the Reptar’s body, firing, bullets scoring only fractured scales. He needed to aim at its mouth, its eyes. Getting a body shot with a bullet, on a Reptar, came down to luck.

  Piper watched as the thing turned him to mincemeat.

  Peers watched a bloody-armed Sadeem cross the space between the groups, already feeling the oddity of all that was happening. The Mullah had legends about this sort of thing — about illusions pulled by the Horsemen. But what were these creatures if not Reptars? He’d fired through several, struck a few without any damage. The dead had fallen without effort from Peers, but he could already tell that whatever riddle had transpired, Sadeem had figured it out.

  He took off after the old man, watching him raise a weapon to a solo Reptar that was very near Stranger, shooting at it from the other side. There was something in its jaws. By omission (not Clara, who’d run the other direction; not Sadeem; not Peers or Stranger), the anonymous puree dripping from its maw had to be Marcus — a guy who, Kamal had joked on the way in, had once perfected the art of making copies and bringing coffee to Jabari.

  Sadeem seemed to hear something. His h
ead turned, and he moved away, toward another bit of quarry, leaving Stranger to duel with the Reptar alone.

  But when Sadeem was a handful of yards away, the Reptar turned its attention from shots fired by Stranger, opting for a less painful direction.

  It took Sadeem down, ending him before the old man could look back.

  Logan heard a cry. Clara watched his eyes widen, then saw the rarely observed hero within the skinny man surface. A woman’s shout; it had to be Danni or Piper. Logan was off his ass, gun in hand and through the surging mass of decoy Reptars, before Clara could shout. And then she was alone.

  She tried tuning her attention to the collective but could no longer hear her grandfather. Was he dead? He’d cut off so suddenly. She’d have to close her eyes and focus to see if he was still on the grid, but she couldn’t do that here. At least two of these boogeymen Reptars were real, yet she had no idea where to find them. The real ones acted differently than those Clara gathered must be “the same thing seen in many places,” which was as far she understood Meyer’s impossible concept. But if Clara couldn’t see beyond her protected knot, she couldn’t tell.

  Toward Logan?

  Yes, it made sense. But she’d already lost his direction. She guessed, knowing that staying where she was would end up being the only wrong choice, suddenly and surprisingly sure that dying today might not be all that bad. The years had been hard, and death promised rest.

  But beyond the knot, Clara found herself in a curious calm. They were fighting behind her, but there must not be any real ones over here. None were paying attention.

  Then she saw two people between the fighting groups — Stranger and Kindred, now moving slowly toward each other.

  The air crackled. From the ship, from the Ark. From the two men. A current of deadly potential.

  They moved forward. Moved forward. The sizzle lifted her hair, filling Clara with foreboding.

  She opened her mouth to shout.

  “Don’t—!”

  “—get any closer!”

  Peers’s head spun to find the source of the shout: Clara, yelling at Kindred and Stranger, their faces confused, as if they’d woken from twin trances.

  As all three began to study one another, Peers wanted to raise a shout of his own. He was out of ammo, as were several of the others. Something strange was happening, and they had to figure it out. Several were dead, including his late-life mentor. Their only option was a hasty retreat.

  Dazed, Stranger and Kindred were now both walking slowly backward, wary, seeming only now to realize they’d narrowly avoided doing something deadly.

  But then Peers saw movement. On the left. Coming fast. Clara didn’t catch it, but Peers was closer.

  He didn’t think. He ran. Full out, he ran.

  He wasn’t going to make it. The Reptar was too fast, and Clara still hadn’t noticed. Stranger had, and was, shouting. But he wasn’t close enough, and his bullets — if he was still aware enough to have kept his weapon — might hit Clara from that far away. Peers realized only once sprinting that he’d dropped his own empty gun.

  So what are you planning to do?

  He didn’t know. It didn’t matter. He could barely see Clara. Instead he saw the temple he’d visited as a child, entering the dark room with the voice he’d learned was Astral, telling them it was cool if they came for a visit. He saw the cannibals outside Ember Flats. He saw the day he’d lost Clara in the hallway when she’d been little, knowing that no matter what, he couldn’t lose her again. And for some reason he saw his son, James, whom he hadn’t allowed himself to think of for years. James would have been over forty by now — old enough to fight in this battle for himself if the Ember Flats security forces hadn’t ended his life so early.

  Was it really bad, sparing him a life in this place?

  Yes. Life was always better than death, Peers thought as his lungs burned — running toward Clara, who’d had one of the hardest lives he could ever imagine.

  Peers gasped, his legs on fire. The Reptar would take her first, for sure. The beast knew it, and so did Clara; her head had turned, now hearing its approach.

  The Reptar leaped, struck Clara, and knocked her flat. No pause. It reared back with its throat flashing and swung down, hard, as Peers watched visions of failure in his head, knowing there was nothing he could do, no weapons in his possession, no time at hand to so much as grab the thing. He had nothing at all, except for sand and …

  A millisecond flash of a small brown face. A face Peers failed like he’d failed everyone else, all his life.

  And himself.

  The Reptar bit down.

  Clara rolled away as Peers thought his final thought, his torso thrust between the thing’s closing jaws.

  The thought went out to a small brown boy, taken before his time: I’ll see you soon.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “Find me Divinity,” Melanie ordered.

  The Titan before her did nothing. She didn’t like the way it was eyeing her. Maybe Melanie’s time in Meyer’s captivity inside the Nexus was coloring her perceptions, but she’d have sworn his expression was one of condescension, perhaps even pity. They usually appeared neutral. Her time in a human body had flavored that neutrality, allowing her to see it as polite, or perhaps even pleased. But this one’s face struck her as belligerent. Annoyed by Melanie’s instructions.

  “Is there a problem?”

  She was speaking like a human. Like a military commander from a pre-invasion drama, bustling to retain order as their command fell apart. Titans didn’t speak. It wasn’t going to snap off a salute and say, “Sir, yes, sir!”

  Its lips wouldn’t tell her the Titan’s reasons for not moving — she had to dip into the collective and listen.

  Divinity is here.

  Well, shit. Melanie knew that. The entire Divinity class was inside the collective, same as the Titans and Reptars — lines between the latter two almost indistinguishable at the mental level. More than even the soldier classes, Divinity’s home was inside the collective. It (they) had bodies, but only due to biological necessity. The same as Eternity was supposed to be, before the surrogate. But these days she didn’t like the collective much. It had always struck her as a place of serenity and order — a place where her mentality felt at home and right. These days it felt as chaotic as the ships. When the Titans escorted her away from Meyer and the Nexus, something had rampaged through her quarters. It was barely a surprise because that’s the way the collective seemed right now.

  Everything inside was tipped over and messy. So much was broken. It was as if something had stomped through and laid waste. Now even the line between Melanie and this Titan felt untidy. It should have felt like they were adjacent cells in a larger body, working as one toward a common purpose. Instead she felt their butting heads. Trying to convince the Titan to cooperate rather than knowing and accepting that it always and inevitably would, and that the alternative wasn’t possible.

  “I mean Divinity’s surrogate,” Melanie told the Titan.

  But now she got the distinct impression that the Titan was toying with her. She’d swear it was on the verge of asking, Why would you need to locate its puppet body if you need to speak with it? Instead its mind asked something more poignant — something Melanie found herself struggling to articulate. Something she had no reason to voice or specify at all.

  Which surrogate?

  Meaning: Which Divinity do you want? Which pointless, artificial line do you wish drawn to separate an entity that is normally considered to function as a singular, distributed mental being?

  “The short one with the dark brown hair.”

  She could have sworn the Titan smirked. She shouldn’t have said that. She might as well have asked for the Divinity that wore culottes and liked long walks on the beach. But the words had come out because lately she (as a surrogate) had only interacted with the one Divinity (as a surrogate). And because of it, she’d come to think of “Divinity” as that one’s name, just as hers
was Melanie.

  That surrogate of Divinity is in Control.

  “What is she doing in Control?”

  This time, the Titan’s silence inside the hive felt less smug and more like uncomfortable uncertainty. She didn’t want to poke the Titan further; Melanie could find the roots of whatever-it-was on her own. But she could sense echoes of what the Titan had said from many facets of the disorderly collective. Whatever Divinity was up to was something the Titans, Reptars, and remainder of Divinity either didn’t know or entirely trust. It had the feeling of a disagreement or a schism within the group — but more on the level of intuition than anything fully understood.

  It is not entirely clear.

  “Bring her to me.”

  Divinity is not alone in Control. She seems to be with a hybrid.

  “A hybrid!” But no, Melanie’s knee-jerk alarm was absurd. Meyer was back in custody where he belonged. A trio of Titans, if nothing else had fallen apart between her orders and now, would be sitting opposite him, staring him down and holding his thoughts in a vice. Maybe he could push through three mental guards and communicate with the surface, but she doubted he could do it without them at least knowing what he was up to.

  “Fine. Bring them both to me.”

  More uncomfortable thoughts from the Titan. Had it always been like this? Was she the one out of touch, feeling the collective as it had always been from her own warped perspective? Or was the Titan different too? This interaction should have been simple, almost immediate, and transparent. Instead it felt like an interrogation — of a reluctant subject.

  “What?”

  And the Titan’s thoughts said, Control has been rendered inaccessible.

  “She’s locked you out?”

  Emotions swirled, fogging Melanie’s capabilities, same as her emotions always did. The mute white form seemed like an enemy. She wanted to shout at it, hit it, rail against this single stubborn body as if it would solve all the baffling problems gone so recently, terribly wrong. It would do nothing; the correct response was to focus surface Reptars on hunting down and eliminating the three humans harboring the remaining Archetypes. Only then could order be — hopefully — restored to the collective.