When he finished speaking he touched a button on the side of the device. It played back what he’d said, amplified to audibility.
Sandy? Did they bring their radio?
“It’s here,” Jansen said, patting the neutrino gun where it was mounted at her waist. “They can hear you, back on Earth. Whatever you have to say, I’m sure NASA will get it to KSpace.”
Good.
“How?” she asked. “How did this happen? Did they—did the tendrils attack you here? Is that how you—”
She stopped because he was speaking again, through his handheld recorder.
Attack? No, of course not. I chose this.
“I don’t understand.”
Of course you do. I know you’ve been watching my videos. You must have seen what happened to Taryn. You heard what he said, while he was connected to the Object’s veins. It wasn’t just gibberish: he felt what the Object felt, if only for the few seconds before he died. Sandy and I confirmed it with her own experiment. It took some trial and error, but we figured it out. How to complete our mission. We were sent to make contact with the Object, and here we are. Here I am.
The memory stick popped up from the back of the recorder. Channarong removed it and threw it away from her, into the dark. There was a pile of fresh sticks lying next to Foster. She grabbed a new one and slotted it into place.
“You’re talking to 2I. Through the tendrils,” Jansen said, because she needed it made clear. She needed to understand exactly what was happening.
I’ve connected my nervous system directly to the Object’s nervous system. 2I. Right. That’s what you call her.
Jansen laid a hand on his arm. It felt like a dry stick, as if it might snap if she gripped it too hard.
Rao stirred behind Jansen. She stepped forward and crouched down in front of Foster. “I’m sorry—I’m Parminder Rao, the flight surgeon from Orion. Sir, I’m really worried about your physical condition. You look like you’ve suffered from severe malnutrition. You look like you haven’t eaten in months.” Rao looked up at Channarong. “I’m assuming this has happened since you left Wanderer. Right?”
Channarong just nodded.
She takes from me. I take from her. Don’t worry. I’m not even hungry. She supplies me with what I need. She doesn’t understand human physiology very well. She’s learning, though. She’ll keep me alive. As long as we’re connected.
“Look, we can get you loose from… from the tendrils,” Jansen promised. “We can get you out of here. There’s plenty of room on Orion, we can take you and Channarong home. I promise, we’ll make sure you get home safe.”
He whispered into his recorder. Then he hit play.
No, thank you.
“Maybe you’re disoriented,” Jansen said. “Maybe you’re confused. But we have to get you away from this thing, we need to—”
“Jansen.”
Hawkins was looming over her. She could feel his presence behind her. She didn’t turn around.
“Jansen, I’m the mission commander.”
To Foster she said, “I came a long way to find you, and I’m not leaving you behind now. Channarong,” she said, “help me. We need to get these things off of him.”
Channarong just stared at her, as silent and malevolent as a house cat blinking in a patch of sun.
“Jansen,” Hawkins bellowed. “Out of the way.”
Then he reached down and grabbed her shoulders and shoved her away from Foster. She sputtered and protested, but he was stronger than her. He squatted down on his haunches right in front of the KSpace commander.
“We had a deal,” Hawkins said. “I bring you the neutrino gun. You tell us what 2I wants with Earth.”
Foster’s head didn’t move. Maybe it was locked in place. He lifted his left hand, though, in an unmistakable gesture of dismissal.
Isn’t it obvious? he asked. She wants to feed her children.
ROY MCALLISTER: Orion 7 was launched to discover just this, to understand what the alien wanted from us. We’d thought we could handle it, whatever it was. And now… we know it was so much worse than we could have imagined.
AUDIO FILE TRANSCRIPT (6)
They grow so fast. They’re fattening up nicely. But mother’s meat isn’t enough.
In the quiet time—the time she spent between the stars—she gathered what she could. Hydrogen, mostly, but also water, some organic compounds. She hoarded it away, stored it through the lean centuries. It was enough to keep her going, in hibernation. There were some elements, though, some basic compounds she couldn’t find out there. Vitamins—think of it as vitamins, nutrients her children require, that she can’t make for them.
She needed to find a place that had those vitamins in large quantities. She traveled a long, long way to find such a place.
In the last few days she will slow herself down as much as she can, spreading her wings ever wider. She will enter Earth’s atmosphere in a ball of fire. The outer hull will function as a very efficient heat shield, but it can’t protect her from the impact when she lands, of course. That will kill her. Even this cage of bone won’t save her brain. She’ll perish… but most of her children will live, protected inside her body.
When that moment comes, when she dies, they’ll know. They’ll go crazy, devouring everything they find, even the bones of their mother, even her shell. They’ll pick her clean, but even that won’t be enough. They’ll burrow into the soil of Earth. Dig deep. They can eat anything, if they’re hungry enough. Their metabolism is so fast, so robust. They’ll eat the ground out from under the wreckage of our cities. They’ll feast on half-molten rock deeper inside the crust than any human has ever gone.
And as they eat, they’ll change. Get bigger, of course, some as big as she is now, or bigger. Their skin will thicken and turn to crystal. They will sprout wings.
And when they’ve had their fill of Earth, they’ll spread those wings and fly. Catch the wind from the sun and soar off in every possible direction. Only then will they grow quiet, only when they reach the outer frozen marches of our solar system. Like her, they will sleep. Until they find new suns, and new planets of their own.
This is their life cycle. The way they reproduce. Her species has been doing this for… Well. She doesn’t share our concept of time. But long before we stood up on two feet. Before the dinosaurs, or even the trilobites. Her kind spread, from sun to sun, across the galaxy, on a timescale we can’t possibly comprehend. And they’ll be traveling between the stars a long, long time after we’re gone.
Rao closed her eyes. She felt dizzy and weak. She wanted to take off her helmet and catch her breath. She wanted to be sick.
She looked up at the others, looked for one of them to roll their eyes or laugh, something to show her it wasn’t true.
Aliens had come to Earth. The thing she’d been dreaming of since she was a kid, and now here—here was the reality of what it meant.
Jansen stared at the ground, her eyes blank. Hawkins stood up, horror making his skin crawl.
“Why Earth?” he demanded. “Why come here, instead of any other planet?”
She didn’t choose us, any more than a dandelion seed chooses the field it falls on. We’re not special. And we’re not the first planet they’ve come to—or the millionth. They’ll spread across the entire galaxy, in time. Until there are no planets left. It’s a wonderfully simple system, an endless loop of life.
Sandra Channarong picked up the water bottle and put it into Foster’s groping hand. He wet his lips. Swirled water around his dry mouth.
“You sound almost sympathetic,” Rao said. The words came out as a whisper. “Like you might be OK with all that.”
Foster laughed. A very strange sound coming out of the voice recorder.
No. Though sometimes… It’s hard. She doesn’t think, you see. Not the way we do, not in words, or even images. Her senses are not ours. That’s why this is the only way we can communicate. But the connection is profound. It’s so intimate. I’ve never had
this with a human being, not even a lover. I forget sometimes where she ends and I begin.
The memory stick popped out of its slot. Channarong replaced it, throwing the old one over her shoulder.
“You have to find a way to convince… her,” Rao said. “Make her turn away from Earth. Before it’s too late.”
I’m trying.
“Try fucking harder,” Jansen said, climbing to her feet.
You don’t understand. How could you? When I first connected with her, she immediately tried to devour me. Just like she did with Taryn. Just convincing her that I wasn’t part of her, that she needed to let me live—that was a huge milestone. We don’t share a language, we don’t share so many basic concepts. Each day I learn more. I learn so much, and she learns from me.
“What?” Hawkins asked. “What are you telling it?”
Everything. I can’t keep secrets in here. It’s not possible.
“That’s not acceptable,” Hawkins said. “You can’t—”
Jansen shouted over him. “Stevens did it,” she said.
Foster didn’t say anything. A frown crossed his chapped lips.
“Stevens connected with this thing. He was dying, he was—he was brain dead.” Jansen said. “He was way past coherent communication. He wasn’t even plugged into its brain, but somehow—he made it move. Change course.”
Rao remembered the sounds Stevens had made, at the very end. Right before 2I smashed into Wanderer.
Stevens. I heard him… I heard his last moments. She can hear radio waves, of course. She heard you calling for me, Jansen, all those times. It was only Stevens she listened to. He was connected to her, nervous system to nervous system. Just as I am now. In fact—it would be fair to say there’s part of him in here, with us.
Puh. Puh. Puh.
Just nonsense, just sounds. But it had been enough. Yes—yes, it was possible, it was—
No. No, no, no. She refused to believe the thought that was hovering right there in the middle of her mind, the idea that had come to her unbidden, unwanted.
That sound, that repeated, horrible sound. It wasn’t nonsense at all. She hadn’t made the association before. Because she hadn’t wanted to. Because what it meant was going to hurt so much when she finally accepted it—
She doesn’t think in words, or even images. She has desires. Instincts. That’s the level where we can communicate. Interesting. You say Stevens was in extremis. So far gone that all he had left was the base, reflexive urges of his id. That’s what got through to her. Give me time, Foster said. I can use that. Give me a few more weeks and I’ll find a way. The two of us can come to some accommodation.
“Weeks?” Hawkins asked.
Behind her Rao heard him unzip a pocket of his suit.
“We don’t have weeks.”
I can’t rush this process.
“I’ve heard enough,” Hawkins told him.
Rao was vaguely aware of him behind her, of the fact that he was raising his arm. She saw the look of shock that came over Channarong’s face, and saw the woman reach toward her belt.
Then a gunshot exploded right next to Rao’s head. Even muffled by her helmet, it was so loud it deafened her, made her ears ring. She couldn’t see for a moment. She blinked and her vision cleared and she saw a round, dark hole in the middle of Foster’s forehead.
The voice recorder fell out of his hand and clattered to the ground.
Rao swung around and saw Hawkins standing over her, a snub-nosed pistol in his hand. Smoke leaked from the barrel, forming a fat cloud in the low gravity.
“No!” Sandra Channarong shrieked. She had her own weapon—a multi-tool she’d taken from her pocket. She had a three-inch blade out and locked into place. She raised it high and ran at Hawkins, her features consumed by fury.
He twisted a little at the waist and fired again, and she collapsed in a heap next to Foster.
On Earth Charlotte Harriwell jumped to her feet and grabbed the railing of the catwalk, her whole body tensing and straining. Roy McAllister looked over at her, but her eyes were locked on the grainy image in front of them. He reached out one hand, intending to grab hers, whether to offer comfort or simply solidarity, he didn’t know.
She didn’t take his hand. She looked paralyzed. Frozen in place.
“What did you do?” Jansen asked, ignoring her protesting knee and dropping to all fours next to the corpse of Willem Foster.
She looked up, hot tears filling the corners of her eyes.
“Why?” she demanded.
Hawkins was breathing heavily. He looked confused for a moment. Maybe disoriented, as if he didn’t understand himself.
“Why?”
“I had to,” he said.
He didn’t lower the gun or put it away.
“Was this—was this the plan all along?” she asked, horrified. “Did the space force tell you to do this?”
“Of course not! Kalitzakis would never order something like this. But sometimes when you’re the mission commander… you have to make hard decisions.”
“An MC is supposed to keep her crew alive,” Jansen insisted.
“They weren’t my crew. Anyway—you heard Foster say he was sharing our secrets with 2I. He was—”
“He was talking to it,” Jansen wailed. “And Channarong—you killed her, too!”
“She was coming at me with a knife! Listen. Listen to me, Jansen. It had to be done. It had to. He wasn’t even human anymore. He was some kind of perversion. 2I co-opted him. It was taking him over.”
Jansen shook her head wildly. “We could have got that stuff off of him. We could have saved him. Both of them—we could have gotten them home, safe. We were so close.”
“Home?” he asked. He stared down at his handiwork. The confusion had drained from his face, replaced with a terrible certainty. A confidence that he’d done the right thing. “They were never going home.”
He lifted the pistol and pointed it directly at Jansen’s head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you’ve got to understand. You of all people.”
“What?” she asked. She didn’t care about the gun. She was surprised to find she wasn’t afraid at all, even though she knew she was looking at her death.
She just needed to know why he’d done what he had.
“What are you talking about?”
“They were infected. You saw the necrosis on Channarong’s neck. You knew what that meant. You saw the necrosis—just like what happened to Stevens. Exactly like that. We couldn’t bring that back to Earth. My God, how can you even imagine doing that? After what we’ve seen, with what we know about 2I. What it can do to human bodies. Dying like this—I showed them mercy, Jansen. I saved them from their misery.”
“You son of a bitch,” she said.
It was clear to him now. It was so clear. He’d felt weird ever since he woke up on the island with a concussion. He’d felt as if his thoughts were foul mud being pumped through clogged pipes. Now, though. Now. The ringing in his ears, the echo of the gunshots, was like a clean wind that had blown away all the darkness. He could finally see clearly, and he knew what he had to do.
He had to protect the Earth. He had to save the world.
“General Kalitzakis,” he shouted, over the noise the women made. “General! I’ve found it. The brain. You can fire at will, sir. Fire, and kill this fucking thing.”
He had lifted his eyes as he addressed the dark air, sure that the general would hear him. That he had done his duty—he had found 2I’s weak spot. One shot, and all this would be over. One kinetic impactor straight through the brain, and 2I would be left dead in the water.
“Hawkins,” someone called, and for a single distracted moment he thought it was Kalitzakis calling him, calling to tell him he’d done his duty and now he could rest.
But it wasn’t. It was Jansen. She had grabbed his leg, and she was looking up at him with pleading eyes. Well, that made sense. He was her mission commander. He was the one who made the decisions. He knew what
she wanted.
Too bad he couldn’t provide it. But leadership sometimes meant taking the option no one else was willing to face.
“I’m sorry, Sally,” he said. “I’m sorry. But they couldn’t go home. And neither can we.”
He lifted his sidearm and placed the hot barrel against the side of her head.
“We’re infected, too,” he said. “The moment you took my helmet off, you signed my death warrant. When you took your own helmet off, you made this necessary.”
He started to squeeze the trigger, but then—
Something moved in his peripheral vision. Some new monster coming at him, coming to kill him. His thinking wouldn’t have passed muster if he’d given it a moment’s consideration, but there was no time to be rational. Something was coming at him, fast and with violent intent.
He twisted around and snapped off a single shot.
“It’s better this way,” Hawkins said. “I know you can’t see that right now. But it’s better… She’s in a better place.”
Jansen closed her eyes, but she just saw it again. Over and over.
Rao—running toward Hawkins, maybe thinking she could wrestle the gun away from him. Maybe she thought she had no other choice.
Then Hawkins fired, and a tiny hole appeared right in the center of Rao’s faceplate, and blood splattered the inside of the polycarbonate.
Jansen opened her eyes. She saw Rao lying on the ground, facedown, one arm twisted underneath her body, the other stretched out, the fingers grasping at the bone floor. Rao wasn’t moving.
“You bastard,” she said. “You bastard.” She couldn’t breathe. Her chest was heaving with big, choking sobs. She had just wanted—all she’d wanted was—
“You hate me. Well, I promise you. I’m going to make this quick. Then I’ll shoot myself. I have enough bullets left for both of us. I’m going to die here, too.”
She sucked in a deep breath, her body desperate for oxygen. The air was so thin here, near the axis. She cleared her throat and then looked him right in the eye.
“Why don’t you go first?” she said.
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