by Sean Platt
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 31
“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—<
br />
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.
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.”
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 32
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.
“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.