Alton nodded. “The messengers’ relationship with the spatial dimensions of the universe is … well, suffice it to say it’s not like ours, so we use the nests to keep them tied down in one place until we have need for them. A bursting nest can be quite overwhelming for anyone who’s nearby when the floodgates open, so to speak.”
“So what can I do to help him?”
“Probably very little. I expect he’ll recover on his own in time, but he …” Alton’s expression was hesitant.
Rachel leaned forward. “He what?”
“It’s possible he’ll have been marked by that kind of exposure.”
Her heart picked up. “Marked how?”
Alton thought it over for a span. “Well, after that much exposure, he may act as a sort of beacon for any other messengers that find their way here. If and when he does wake up, he may see and hear more than he wants to.”
“Even past his glyphs?”
Alton gave a slow nod. “Possibly. Whatever protection you gave him is subject to your understanding of space. The messengers might have found unchecked paths we aren’t even capable of processing, much less seeing. Worse, if those unseen pathways were traversed by messengers, they’ll only shine out more brightly to their kin now.”
Alton’s words piled in and hit her like a slow-motion gut punch. She said nothing, too occupied trying to consider what this might all mean for Michael. Assuming he woke up.
No. She couldn’t think like that. And not that she could trust Alton, but she had a feeling the raknoth would have told her if he thought Michael was toast.
He would wake up. And after that …
“What do I do?” she asked quietly. “How do I keep my brother safe?”
“We could try to find some way to enhance his cloaking,” Haldin said.
“Or we do everything in our power to convince the rakul this planet and its people aren’t worth their time,” Alton said. “At this point, it’s looking like that might mean a fight, as terrible of an idea as that is.”
“Fine,” Rachel said.
Enough with the games. If it was a fight they were headed toward, it was time to see what the hell it was that had Alton and Haldin shaking in their boots.
“Show me.” She gave Jarek and Alaric a pointed look. “Assuming you’re comfortable with precautions.”
Taking her cue, Jarek stood and faced Haldin. Behind, Alaric drew a revolver and trained it loosely at Haldin’s back.
“Hey!” Elise cried from the holo.
“It’s fine, Lise,” Haldin said, holding his hands up peacefully. “We have to earn their trust if we’re all going to do this thing together.” He reached up to adjust the dial on his pendant. “Ready?”
Rachel stood to face him, reaching for her own pendant.
“You might want to stay seated,” Haldin said. “These are going to be my memories of Alton’s memories, so they’ll probably come through a bit muddy, but it’s still pretty intense stuff.”
She ignored him and dialed her cloak out to encompass the entirety of the ship.
Haldin looked as if he’d protest but then shrugged and closed his eyes. She closed hers as well and reached out.
His mind was hard to miss, bright and powerful but also calm and gentle as they met in a kind of mental handshake.
“This might be kind of disjointed,” Haldin’s voice came to her. “I’m not really used to doing this kind of thing.”
“You and me both,” Rachel thought back. Then, remembering just how vulnerable Haldin was about to make himself, she added, “I’ll try to be gentle.”
Haldin’s mind rippled with mild amusement, and the surface of his presence softened and slowly began to peel open.
Rachel braced herself and pushed into the opening, thinking gentle thoughts.
Sixteen
Rachel lay adrift in the stream of Haldin’s consciousness, floating so closely to his thoughts and perceptions that they almost felt like her own.
An abstract spatial map of the cockpit was the first thing that stood out. Haldin knew exactly where each potential threat was, exactly how to move if he decided he needed to extract himself from the situation. Except he’d be hard-pressed to do that now that he’d surrendered himself to a perfect stranger, wouldn’t he?
Was this the worst idea ever? Was it even going to work?
It had to work.
The somber weight of the thought reminded Rachel that it was Haldin’s, not hers.
She needed to get herself centered before she got lost in here. And if the nervous fear radiating from Haldin’s mind was any indication, she needed to brace herself for some horrific shit once the replay started rolling.
She’d watched the guy—Christ, the Enochian, she supposed—duke it out with raknoth and Fela barehanded. From what she’d seen, he could channel with the best of them, and he was apparently on par with a freaking raknoth in telepathic chops. Haldin was not someone she’d want to fuck with.
And while he wasn’t quite quivering right now, he was clearly terrified of the rakul.
“Are you still okay with this?” she thought.
“I’m fine,” came his voice. “I mean, I kind of hate this. But you need to understand what we’re dealing with.”
“Okay. We’ll go back to when Alton first showed you the rakul, then?”
“You’re in control more than I am right now.”
“Right …”
They would go back to when Alton had first shared his memories of the rakul with Haldin.
Their shared mental landscape began to shift in response to her will, as if she were simply recalling one of her own memories. She caught flashes of a cityscape, similar in many ways to the pre-Catastrophe cities of Earth, yet decidedly different in the angles and features of the buildings, which mostly all looked to be formed from the same gray material.
Was this Enochia?
Yes, his mind told her, it was.
The foreign cityscape was beautiful, but there was something else hanging over the memory: a subtle background stain of pain and loss—Haldin’s own personal pain and loss, she realized. He’d suffered. On Enochia, he’d lost more and conquered more tribulations than most would in five lifetimes.
“Best not to get sidetracked right now,” Haldin’s voice came to her.
Right. Alton’s memories.
They flashed to a compound surrounded by a high perimeter wall—a military base of some kind. A Sanctum stronghold. Haven.
Another flash, and they were inside the base, in a small room, empty but for a table and two chairs. They sat in one, Alton across the table in the other, so heavily chained they could scarcely see the shape of his arms and body beneath. They didn’t trust him. Not one damn bit. Neither did Johnny or Elise, standing at Haldin’s flanks. But they had to know. They leaned across the table, heart racing, and pressed a palm to Alton’s forehead.
Another flash, and now the landscape was absolutely different than anything Rachel had ever seen. It was like a winter wonderland village on acid. Odd, globular buildings of some amber, translucent material lined the wide, snowy paths that stretched out before them. Big treelike plants reared out of sizable snow drifts here and there along either side of the paths, their tops draped with something like partially unraveled balls of psychedelic yarn rather than canopies of leaves.
As weird as the scenery was, it paled in comparison to the creatures that roamed the paths.
Her first thought was that they were kind of like sky blue versions of the Incredible Hulk. Then she got a better look at the wicked-looking horns sprouting from their heads and the dark, bony spurs protruding from their bulky forms all along the legs, arms, shoulders, and backs, and decided they were entirely more beastly-looking. Then the one whose eyes she was seeing through started off down the snowy path, and as her senses started to adjust, she realized how big they were.
They were goddamn frost giants. Or maybe frost demons was a better choice of words.
The scene was patc
hy and blurry in spots, and the more she watched, the more she realized things seemed to skip oddly here and there. That must’ve been what Haldin had meant about it being a memory of a memory.
Dozens of the blue giants tromped along the paths, groaning and grunting in strange, harsh language. Most of them were carrying boulders that must have been the size of trucks. Rachel’s frame of reference shifted as her giant looked over its massive shoulder to where its fellows were hauling their loads: a great clearing where several more giants were busy at work erecting an enormous shrine to what could have been a god or a king of some sort.
“These are rakul?” she thought.
“No. Just another one of the species the rakul have exterminated.”
“I thought you said this was Alton’s memory.”
“It is.”
“But why are we in the head of one of these things?”
“The raknoth don’t always walk around looking like humans. They take hosts from whatever planet they’re currently invading.”
“Alton is—”
“Was one of these freakishly strong giants, yes. About 2,000 years ago.”
“I—What? 2,000?”
She watched in numb shock as their giant—or Alton, apparently—plucked one of the big psychedelic trees from the ground as if it were a small weed and proceeded to take a big bite right off its stringy top.
“I don’t understand.”
Was that how the raknoth had been able to so thoroughly wreck Earth from the inside? She thought of the raknoth they’d met—suave, dark-haired Alton and the square-jawed, sandy-haired Red King.
“So Alton and the others … Those were real humans before the raknoth, uh, took them?”
“Exactly,” Haldin thought.
Well that was disturbing as all hell.
One of the giants bumped into his neighbor, who dropped his boulder onto another giant’s foot. What sounded more like a foghorn than a cry of pain erupted from the injured giant’s maw, then it whirled and clubbed the offender across the chest. The second giant staggered back, then caught itself and rushed its opponent in a full-on tackle. They hit the ground like a mild earthquake and tumbled around for position. One landed a solid kick, and its opponent crashed through the wall of one of the nearby amber buildings.
Around them, the rest of the giants only laughed as if this was all perfectly normal behavior.
“And what about the rakul? Where are they in this memory?”
“You’re in control,” he reminded her.
Right. She focused on what she wanted to see, and the scene shifted accordingly.
It was only a little later now. Several giants were still at work on the shrine, but much of the boulder-hauling crew were taking a break to chomp down on a hearty lunch of psychedelic tree yarn. Everything seemed peaceful enough at first glance. But then why was Alton so apprehensive? She could feel the nervous energy like a permanent stain on the memory.
A huge shadow passed over them, and she felt an inkling of her own dread join that of Alton’s memory.
Around them, the giants were exchanging uncertain glances, a few of them rising wearily to their feet.
A ship descended into view and … No. Not a ship. Massive wings flapped once, twice, three times, and even from a distance, the air they displaced could be easily felt.
The thing that rode those gargantuan wings down to the ground … It was a dragon. That was the only word Rachel could use to describe it.
The mountain-sized quadruped slammed to a landing that shook the ground even from what she gauged to be a half mile away and kicked up an explosion of snow. Two fiery red eyes came to life, each at least the size of the huge boulders the giants had been lugging about.
Then the thing roared.
The sound was deafening. The psychic pressure that slammed into them was worse.
It hit like a tsunami of molten lead. Rachel gasped, reaching for her defenses and—
“It’s okay,” Haldin’s voice came to her, his tone tight. “We’re okay here, remember?”
The last thing Rachel felt right then was okay, but the sound of Haldin’s voice at least jostled her from the memory enough that she could remind herself that nothing in here could actually hurt her. Psychologically damage her, on the other hand …
“What the fuck is that thing?”
“Kul’Naga, first and oldest of the rakul.”
The giants were all on their feet now, some dipping into their big, amber houses and emerging with a variety of brutal-looking melee weapons. Kul’Naga watched them patiently as they grunted and groaned and prepared to make war.
Then one of the giants by the shrine plucked a boulder from the waiting pile and hurled it at the waiting rakul, and the chaos began.
It was a mighty throw considering the boulder probably weighed five or ten tons. Kul’Naga swatted it out of the air with massive forepaw and charged.
What followed wasn’t a pretty fight.
The giants fought without fear, reigning blow after heavy blow on the enormous rakul. The attacks weren’t without effect. Soon Kul’Naga was oozing green fluid from dozens of ugly wounds, but the rakul took the punishment in stride and continued indiscriminately tearing his way through the giants’ ranks with claws that must have been six feet long and sharp as razors. With each swipe, Kul’Naga hacked another giant to pieces like they were tissue paper.
The sky vibrated with their foghorn screams until Rachel wanted to scream herself. “Okay! Enough!”
The memory faded at her will, leaving the image of Kul’Naga standing atop a mountain of dead giants covered in blood burned firmly in her mind’s eye.
“Jesus Christ. I don’t … That thing … It’s coming here?”
“I don’t know. Apparently Kul’Naga only makes the trip for promising planets these days. But if word has truly escaped that there are raknoth hiding out on Earth, the rakul will come.”
“They’re not all the same?”
“They’re more a collection of the top hits from all the species they’ve conquered.”
She was wrapped silent in her own thoughts when she felt the pressure of Haldin pushing her gently away from the center of his mind.
“As much fun as it’s been,” he thought, “I think you’ve seen what you needed to.”
For a brief second, she considered that she could feasibly delve deeper into Haldin’s mind if she wanted to. She could validate everything he’d said from the start, learn anything and everything about him, and he’d be hard-pressed to stop any of it at this point. That was the danger of letting someone into your mind this completely.
But she couldn’t do that—wouldn’t. The only times she’d ever taken information from unwilling subjects had been matters of immediate life and death, and even that had bothered her. Plus, after seeing what she’d just seen, it wasn’t hard to agree with Haldin: if something with even a fraction of Kul’Naga’s power was coming for them, they needed to be able to trust one another when it came time to fight.
So she collected herself and withdrew slowly from his mind, thinking gentle thoughts on the way out.
Jarek wasn’t used to feeling powerless. In fact, he’d pretty much ordered his life around never being in positions where he truly was. But when an until-then eerily still and silent Rachel had pulled a ghost act and blanched like a turnip, that’s exactly how Jarek felt.
He whirled on Haldin and saw that the Enochian was likewise looking like he’d just sprinted a mile through hot desert.
“You might want to be ready to catch her,” came Alton’s voice from the console holo behind.
Jarek glanced between the two, utterly unsure what was happening, whether he should or could help Rachel. “I thought he was just showing her a memory.”
“They’re quite strong memories,” Alton said.
Jarek was about to ask what the hell that was supposed to mean when Rachel’s knees gave out.
He darted down to catch her and hauled her up in his arms. Her f
orehead was brimming with sweat, and Fela’s sensors told him there was plenty more of the cold stuff plastering her shirt to her back and his arms. Light shivers trembled through her, but other than that, she made no sounds or movements.
Alaric was eyeing Haldin like he was trying to decide whether to kick him or be ready to catch him when the Enochian came to with a shudder.
In Jarek’s arms, Rachel did the same.
“Rache …” He searched her face for any signs of panic or danger.
Mostly, she just looked rattled and disoriented.
“I’m good,” she croaked. “We’re good.”
She reached toward the copilot’s chair.
Jarek swiveled the chair around and set her gently down. “I take it you saw them?”
Haldin plopped down on the bench across from Johnny’s. “We saw them.”
“You’re both okay?” Elise asked.
“Still mentally intact,” Haldin confirmed.
“Just awesome,” Rachel added. She snapped to and focused on Jarek. “They have a goddamn dragon.”
“A … What? You’re talking like Komodo, right?”
She shook her head, her expression grave and not the least bit joking.
“Bullshit,” Alaric said.
“You showed her the World Ender?” Alton asked.
Haldin nodded, his expression equally grave, and the first cold tendrils of fear crept through Jarek’s skepticism. “Holy crap. You guys aren’t kidding, are you? How big are we talking?”
“Big,” Rachel said. “He cut through an army of—well, I guess I’ll just call them frost giants—like they were papier-mâché pygmies.”
What in the everliving hell had Haldin showed her in there? Much as the idea of sharing head space freaked Jarek out, he wished he could have seen.
“A plus on the visual descriptions there, Goldilocks. And we’ve got a dozen of these freaking space dragons coming for us?”
“Only the one,” Haldin said. “The rest of the twelve have chosen their own forms over the millennia.”
“Nevertheless, you begin to see now how dire our situation is,” Alton said—a statement, not a question.
Rachel nodded.
“So what the hell are we gonna do about these things if they’re as bad as you all say?” Alaric said, still leaning by the doorway.
Hell to Pay: Book Two of the Harvesters Series Page 15