Alien Game (The Thousand Worlds)

by Rod Walker

  They were like a vast black cloud, moving from world to world, devouring their victims and moving ever onward. They could twist time and gravity together, letting them step from world to world like a man crossing a stream on stepping stones. I saw fingers of them reaching for Earth, sinking into it like poison into a bloodstream.

  I watched the Dark start devouring our world, and as I watched, I gradually sensed that they were aware of me too.

  In the dream, I didn’t have sight or hearing or smell or any of the other senses, but I was aware of everything happening around me, and I was aware of the Dark. Their collective will and hive mind moved towards me, and I could feel them thundering inside of my head, their combined mind ancient and titanic and overwhelming.

  A voice hammered into my mind, and it had one very simple message for me.

  Submit. Images flashed through my thoughts, pictures of worlds they had destroyed, worlds with city made of living glass, or worlds where the aliens living there had been able to manipulate gravity the way that humans could manipulate sound, worlds where the aliens had no idea what metal was, but could grow an entire city from a single seed. Submit. Submit.

  The Dark devoured peoples. It devoured worlds. It devoured planets. It swept across the whole universe in a gargantuan black tide of blood and death.

  That terrible tide, that irresistible force, turned its implacable will upon me and demanded that I submit.

  I refused. They had killed my father and millions of other people. There was no way I would ever submit to them. To it. I snarled defiance at the black force, cursed it with every fiber of my being, totally indifferent to whatever it might to do me. And to my surprise, the vast will of the Dark recoiled before my angry resistance.

  Then everything went black, and I found myself floating in peaceful nothingness. It was nice. If this was death, I decided I was okay with it.

  Eventually I heard the beeping noise again. At first I thought a truck was backing up, but then I realized it was a heart monitor.

  My gummy eyes blinked open.

  I was still in the hospital bed in the emergency ward. Various wires and tubes were hooked up to me, and I heard people moving about the ward and talking in low voices. After a bit, I realized that I wasn’t dead, and that I hadn’t been shot.

  That was good.

  Come to think of it, I didn’t feel all that bad. Absolutely exhausted, sure, but considering that I had been about to die from getting a face full of zombie goop, I didn’t feel all that bad.

  Except for one thing. My head felt strange. Not bad, not exactly, but very weird. I couldn’t find the words to describe the sensations. I raised my hands to my face and head, worried that they had cut off my nose or something, but everything felt like it was where it should be.

  “Roland?”

  I blinked and turned my head.

  Maggie was sitting in a chair next to my bed, and she leaned forward, her eyes wide with excitement.

  “You’re awake,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Uh…good, I think,” I said. “Little weird, but I’m all right.”

  She reached over, buried her face in my chest, and started to cry in relief. I put my arms around her and patted her on the back. I had to admit that I was tearing up a little myself. The air was dry in here, that was all.

  “Are you okay?” I said, trying to make sense of the odd feeling in my head. My head didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel bad. It just felt strange, like I was hearing spikes of static, but all I could actually hear with my ears was Maggie and the hospital machines.

  “Yeah,” said Maggie, straightening up. She wiped at her eyes. “Better now, actually.”

  “Are they treating you well?” I said.

  “They are,” said Maggie again. “They’re giving me things to do. Some computer work, some cleaning. Guns, mostly. They were surprised that I knew how to field-strip and clean an M4, but once they found out who Dad was, they said it made sense.”

  I started to think that there were child labor laws against that sort of thing, but civilization had collapsed, and they were feeding her. And it wasn’t as if she could go back to school, get good grades, and go to college. Not that she would have gone to college, unless it was a teenage rebellion thing. Dad had very low opinions of college, and said we should learn how to do something useful.

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “I’m just glad you’re awake,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “None of the doctors were sure that you were going to wake up. General Culver visited a few times and said you were doing as well as could be expected, but I don’t think any of them knew if you were going to wake up or not. Or if you would still be…you know…”

  “Not a zombie,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Maggie.

  I lifted my arms and said “braaaaaaains” in a low voice.

  Maggie’s eyes went wide, and then she burst out laughing and hit me on the shoulder.

  “You hit me!” I said.

  “You’re not funny,” she said, laughing.

  “Then why are you laughing?” I said.

  “Because you’re not funny,” said Maggie.

  A boot clicked against the floor, and a man in fatigues walked up next to Maggie. He was somewhere in his middle thirties, lean with sharp lines cut into his face. He had a major’s insignia on his uniform, and his name plate read RANDOLPH. After a moment, I recognized him. He was the major who had talked to us at the gate.

  He still had that odd bronze microphone pin near his collar.

  “Major Randolph,” said Maggie.

  “Mr. Kane,” said Randolph. “My name is Major Philip Randolph, US Army, Black Division. How are you feeling?”

  “Better, sir,” I said. “A little weird, though…”

  “Let me guess,” said Randolph. “It feels like you’ve got static inside your skull. If you turn your head right and left, the static seems to decrease or increase in strength, as if you were drawing closer or moving farther away from the sound. You can also feel several points of pressure in your skull. They’re not painful, but it’s like someone is tapping your skin. Am I right?”

  I blinked in astonishment. That was exactly how I felt but had been unable to articulate.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that’s exactly it. Is that a side effect from the treatment?”

  Major Randolph nodded. He looked pleased.

  “Not quite,” said Randolph. “Let’s try something. The nearest source of pressure in your head. Point to where it feels like it is coming from.”

  I complied.

  “The second nearest?” said Randolph.

  I pointed in a different direction.

  “What would you say,” said Randolph, “if I told you that you just pointed exactly towards downtown Spokane and downtown Seattle? Or what’s left of them, anyway.”

  “I would say that’s really weird,” I said.

  “You get used to it,” said Randolph.

  “Why did I just point towards Seattle and Spokane?” I said.

  “Because,” said Randolph, “you are sensing the location of the nearest major gates. The static in your head is the presence of the Dark’s hive mind. Castle Base is too far away from any active Darksiders for you to sense any individual creatures, but as you get closer, you would be able to detect them.”

  Maggie frowned. “You mean…he can detect the Dark?”

  “That is correct, Miss Kane,” said Randolph. He tapped the bronze microphone pin on his collar. “Mr. Kane, welcome to the Listeners.”

  Chapter 5: Training

  I spent about ten days in Castle Base’s infirmary recovering from the treatment.

  After that, I didn’t have another idle moment for about seven months.

  Major Randolph gave me the rundown on what had happened to me as I recovered.

  “I don’t know how much your father told you about the Dark,” he said.

  “Not muc
h,” I said. “A little bit before he died. I didn’t know about them until Invasion Day.” We had already started calling it that.

  Randolph nodded. “Not surprising. Daniel always took opsec seriously. Anyway, I’ll tell you what they told me when I became a Listener. The first Darksiders started showing up in the 1950s, mostly coming out of very small gates located in rural places. We don’t have any records of them before that, which is why the scientists think it was the first nuclear explosions that attracted them to Earth. The first recorded instance of a Dark gate is in Ukraine in 1953, and at the time the Soviets thought that it was something we had done, some kind of American superweapon in answer to the H-bomb. Then in 1954, Darksiders wiped out a village on a reservation in South Dakota, and our government realized that the Soviets were not making these things up. President Eisenhower understood that the Dark was going to be a serious threat, and so he established the Black Division in the utmost secrecy. The Soviets did the same thing, more or less, and so did the Chinese and the other regional powers at the time.”

  “Okay,” I said. Randolph had encouraged me to ask questions, so I was going to take him up on it. “Then I guess Black Division’s mission was to fight the Dark?”

  “That is correct,” said Randolph. “Our official directive is to repulse any Darksider incursions, gather any and all knowledge about them, and serve as the nucleus around which a larger fighting force will be formed in the event of a full-scale invasion. Which, as you have probably guessed, has already happened.”

  “Another question,” I said. “If we’ve known about the Dark for seventy years, why weren’t we more ready to fight them?”

  Randolph grimaced. “That is something of a sensitive topic. We’ve known an invasion was coming for decades, and officers from the Black Division have briefed every single President and Secretary of Defense over that time. Suffice it to say that the last few Presidents have been more interested in squandering money on foreign adventures and in building up the domestic bureaucracy than in actually doing anything likely to prove useful. Maybe the situation is different in other countries—I don’t know. We don’t have a clear idea of anything that’s happening outside of North America at the moment. No one trusts anyone, and although we’re in touch with various resistance groups, no one is telling anyone the truth. But that’s beyond our present area of concern. Right now, we need to talk about what has happened to you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Why am I hearing things in my head?”

  “As we fought Darksider raids over the last seventy years, we learned many things about them,” said Randolph. “For one, their technology is entirely based on biological manipulation and genetic engineering, and they can do crazy things with it.” He waved a hand at the infirmary. “If we wanted to a building, we would have to build it. If the Dark wants a building, they code a seed with the appropriate genetic specifications and grow themselves a building.”

  “Suppose that saves on construction costs,” I said.

  “We don’t think they use money,” said Randolph, “or even understand the concept. They’re a hive mind of some kind. The Darksiders you’ve encountered already, the ones that killed your father, those are just drones. They are basically organic computers programmed to hunt and kill. The more dangerous Darksiders are sapient, to some degree, and can communicate with us using language, but they’re still a part of the hive mind.”

  “Is that what I’m hearing in my head?” I said. “The hive mind?”

  “Exactly,” said Randolph with a nod. “The Dark’s biotech is very advanced by our standards, and permits them to commandeer other organic creatures in order to rewrite their nervous system. That joins them to the hive mind. After being brainjacked, the zombies become part of the Dark’s hive mind, and it uses them as scouts, guards, cannon fodder, and so on.”

  “So I was supposed to become a zombie,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Randolph. “Until about twenty-five years ago, there was no known cure. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia fell apart for a while, and for most of the 1990s the Russian government lost the ability to deal with the Dark effectively. A Russian oligarch named Mikhail Gregor took matters into his own hands…”

  “Sorry. What’s an oligarch?”

  “In this context, a rich billionaire who is wealthy and powerful enough to put himself outside the law,” said Randolph.

  “I think I’ve heard of Gregor,” I said. “My Dad used to talk about him. He said that Gregor was one of the top ten candidates to reveal himself as the Antichrist. He said Gregor was one of the chief architects of the New World Order, or the empire of the reptile people, or something.”

  “An exaggeration, to an extent, but more or less in keeping with Gregor’s reputation,” said Randolph. “He got his start supervising KGB prison facilities in central Asia. The man is, or was, I suppose, a nasty piece of work, and if things had gone differently he might well have become a dictator somewhere in one of the former Soviet republics. Anyway, he assembled his own private army to deal with incursions, then he started capturing Darksiders and experimenting on them. He thought there was money to be made by reverse-engineering their biotech. In the process, his scientists discovered a method for treating the conversion technology that created the zombies.”

  “Which saved me,” I said.

  “And me,” said Randolph. “Gregor’s treatment was an accident, but a useful one. What he wanted was a way to hack the Dark’s conversion technology and use it as a targeted retrovirus for killing cancer cells. What he got was a method of hacking the biotech and putting it under the control of the conversion victim.” He tapped his forehead. “That’s why you and I are Listeners, Mr. Rand. We both have nervous systems and bloodstreams full of crippled Darkside biotech. It can’t control us, but it still functions…which means we are still connected to the Dark’s hive mind.”

  “That’s…well, that’s just creepy,” I said.

  Randolph smiled. “It is extremely creepy. I’m still not entirely used to it. That said, it’s very useful. Our abilities let us detect the Dark, and over an extremely long range. In military terms, that is a tremendous advantage on both the strategic and tactical levels. We can hide from the Darksiders, but they cannot hide from us. Gregor gave his treatment to the Russian government to stay in the good side of the security services, and the Russian government shared the information with other governments that had active anti-Dark organizations. Black Division was one of them, of course, and that was when the Listener program started.”

  “So we’re Listeners,” I said. “People who can sense the Dark.”

  “We can sense Darksiders,” said Randolph. “Perhaps more usefully, we can also sense their gates. That’s the sharp feeling in your head. You’re sensing the open gates in Spokane and Seattle. Specifically, you’re sensing the transductor crystal they use to power the gates and keep them open. The crystals are alive and connected to the hive mind, so that’s why we can sense them. The main role of the Listeners before Invasion Day was to find and destroy the gates so the Dark couldn’t establish a beachhead. Now that we’re at war, our primary role is reconnaissance and discovery. General Culver means to retake the entirety of the United States from them, and we’ve got an important role to play in that.”

  “So we’re basically signals intelligence?” I said.

  Randolph blinked. “More or less. I see your father taught you well. Look, I can promise you, you won’t be bored. We need more Listeners than we have.”

  “When do I start?” I said.

  “After you complete basic training,” said Randolph, “when you’re well enough.”

  Six days after that, the doctors pronounced me well enough to leave, and I went to basic training.

  Boot camp was…I’m not going to say it was easy, because it wasn’t. That said, while I did learn new things, I knew a lot of the stuff related to handling firearms and explosives already, thanks to Dad. The exercise was a challenge, yeah, but I
just plowed on and kept at it. Learning to salute and navigate the rank hierarchy and obey without question wasn’t hard either, since that was basically how Dad raised me and Maggie.

  In the end, I would say boot camp was difficult but often boring, which as it turned out was a good preview of life as a soldier.

  Except life as a Listener could got really dangerous and really weird. But more on that later.

  Boot camp involved a lot of work and a lot of exercise and taking orders, so I’ll skip over most of it. Our instructor was Drill Sergeant Lawson, and despite what you see in movies, he never swore, he never insulted anyone, and he only raised his voice to make sure that his orders were heard by everyone in the training company. That said, the man was a harsh taskmaster, and failure or laxness of any kind was punished lots of pushups, or long runs, or cleaning the barracks latrines, or his personal favorite, pushups followed by running followed by cleaning the barracks latrines.

  I did that one a couple of times.

  There were a lot of recruits in Castle Base during those months. I didn’t know it at the time, but Invasion Day had destroyed the federal government and the upper tiers of the military, and General Culver was essentially acting as an independent warlord. He had taken control of most of Washington and Oregon east of the Cascades (west of the Cascades belonged to the Dark), all of Idaho, and big chunks of Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada. Evidently the Mormon Church had taken control of Utah and most of Colorado after destroying the Darkside gate that had opened in Temple Square. Dad did always say that the Mormons had a lot of guns. The Mormons had their own independent state now, but no military, so they had allied with General Culver, since he and the officers of Black Division were the only people in the country who had any idea what was going on, even though the General was some kind of Baptist or another.

  Whoever was in charge of the Mormons decreed that it was a religious duty for every young Mormon male to fight alien invaders in lieu of a missionary trip, and so thousands of them turned up to join General Culver’s army. I think my training company might have been the most clean-cut and orderly one in the history of the United States. The Mormons were friendly, and I got along well enough with them, but I wasn’t a Mormon and didn’t have any interest in becoming one, so I never really became friends with any of them.