The Apocalypse Ocean

by Buckell, Tobias S.

  “It’s still me. I talked to something that called itself the Structure. It’s like the group mind you saw on Chilo, Pepper. But older. And voluntary. It called that a weaponized spore. The Doaq just transported people and things for them to study, and those people don’t want to leave the Structure because for them, it’s like me visiting the Xenowealth from Placa del Fuego. It’s nicer. That’s what it told me. All those people it took, they’re not dead – they joined it. When it looked inside their heads, they became part of it and didn’t want to leave. It didn’t infect me, or try to get me to join it. It sent me back here, to ask if I would help shut down the wormhole right away.”

  “That’s what we’re doing,” Nashara said.

  “They say Thinkerer will betray us …”

  Kay stepped forward. “Lock him in a room,” she told Pepper. “We’re almost about to kill the wormhole. If that’s what some group on the other side wants, that’s fine. But he may be here to confuse us. We can tell he believes his story, completely, but he may have been lied to. He may be under the control of something else You have to consider that.”

  “I’m here to warn you,” Tiago insisted. “I’m trying to explain what’s happening.”

  He turned to Nashara. She took a deep breath. “I’m happy to see you’re alive. But Kay’s right. You’re a possible threat. You delivered your message. Now let us take it from here. Pepper? None of the crew are responding to my calls, they’re too busy working on the thrusters, I think. You’ll have to find a room for him.”

  “Kay,” Tiago said, turning to her. “You’ve known me the longest. Look at me. See that I’m still Tiago all the way. I’m not a threat.”

  Kay turned back to him. “You were on the other side. We don’t know what happened there. It’s safer.”

  “Why would they manipulate us into telling us to hurry up and destroy the wormhole now? To be on our guard?”

  She looked away. Tiago snarled. They were going to jail him for bringing the news.

  Nashara stepped forward. “We’re almost ready to fire. I agree with Kay. Until we can scan Tiago to clear him and debrief him, we don’t know how dangerous he is. We’re going to fire the wormhole killer up, Tiago, so don’t worry. It’s a precaution. All systems are go; let’s not waste time.”

  She turned back to the control console, and as she did so a piece of the nearby wall ripped away. Thinkerer stepped out from some nook he’d been folded up in and calmly looked around. “You will not be firing the Saguenay just yet, Nashara,” he said.

  Pepper took a step forward, and Thinkerer pointed a finger at him. “No. I don’t think I’d do that. In your present state I will come out ahead in a battle in fifteen point three seconds. I operate in the dead zone with my full capabilities. You don’t. I have killed all the crew quietly over the last fifteen minutes. You can leave and check if you wish.”

  Kay stepped forward. “What are you doing? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m taking the ship. It’s mine now,” Thinkerer said. “As it should have been all along. You were a temporary inconvenience I had to route around.”

  “What were you doing crawling around in those walls?” Pepper asked, casually taking another step forward.

  Thinkerer pointed at him again. “Stay put. I killed the crew and mined the structural points of the ship with explosives.” He held up a small egg-shaped detonator. “I squeeze, it clicks and generates a pulse powerful enough to be heard even in the dead zone. And all the explosives take us with them.”

  Kay was shaking her head, Tiago saw. She couldn’t believe it. “But you said you needed the spaceship to kill the wormhole, to stop us from being invaded.”

  “I want to kill the wormhole, yes, but not until after the individualists come through,” Thinkerer said. “That was my mission, to prepare the way on this side for a breach. To help them establish a zone where individualism can thrive. Your people will be welcome, and we will protect you against the Structure. Pepper, you’ve fought the Structure on Chilo, just as Tiago noted. You know what it is. Imagine that, but evolved millions of years, seducing people away from your world one by one to join a virtual dream. That is what we fight against.”

  “If we close the wormhole right now then all of us on this side are guaranteed to survive,” Nashara said. “Why mine the Saguenay?”

  “Because if you close the wormhole early, an entire civilization will die,” Thinkerer said. “Trapped on the other side, hemmed in by the Structure. It will not offer voluntary assimilation, but allow its weaponized fringes to sweep through us in retaliation for the war.”

  “They can call a truce,” Kay said.

  “The Structure is a group will, a group mind. It believes the actions of individuals represent the will of all on a fundamental level. Three hundred years ago we last sued for peace. But that can only hold if all individualists hold the peace. All it takes is a few attacks, one small group to make the decision, and the war begins anew.”

  “If you destroy this ship, the Structure just comes through anyway.” Pepper took a step left, putting himself between Nashara and Thinkerer.

  “But it gives them a chance to get deep into this Concern and burrow in for a solid fight. Given a head start, we can search the Concern for other wormhole destroyers, and seal ourselves away. The League has another device, one that I’ve tracked down. We wouldn’t hold as much of the Concern as we currently plan, but it is a superior alternative to letting you close the wormhole down before they can come through. It’s a plan that gives our diaspora a chance.”

  “I just have one question,” Nashara asked from behind Pepper. “How long would it take for you to kill me?”

  “Eleven seconds,” Thinkerer said flatly.

  “Eleven?” Nashara sounded disgusted. “He’s broken up and still healing. I’m ready to go.”

  “Pepper will drag out the fight to gain time to think. He’s a tactician. You will go for the kill. But I will overpower. Because you will not delay, it will not take as long.”

  The inside of the cockpit shivered.

  Thinkerer looked over at the screens. “They’re coming,” he said. “It’s too late, now.”

  Tiago looked. A fat, crab-shaped vehicle hovered in the air over the dust-bowl facade of the wormhole. For a second, gravity held it in place. Then engines fired from the tips of its legs, and it began to wobble and climb into the air. It headed over the mountain, moving faster and faster as it gained altitude.

  The force of its engines sent League soldiers scurrying for safety. Several of them ran for the Saguenay to demand answers.

  One, two, then three more tube-shaped ships followed rapidly behind. The individualists had broken through the Overwatch, Tiago knew.

  The invasion had started.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Kay couldn’t stop staring at Thinkerer, trying to pull the pieces of her mind together. She realized that she’d trusted him. He was a blank slate, a robot, a machine, and because she couldn’t read him, she’d projected onto that clear space.

  Everything she’d been assuming had been wrong.

  But could they trust Tiago’s story?

  “Tiago?” she asked. She wanted to ask him more about what he’d seen. She could sort through what he thought he had seen, what he had actually seen, and what he’d come to believe if she interrogated him. But it would take time.

  Time they didn’t have. Not with Thinkerer standing there calmly.

  Trust me, Tiago’s face screamed. Trust me. I believe what I saw. He was staring at her, as if willing her to do something.

  But she couldn’t.

  There was no trust left.

  There’d never been any there to begin with, until Thinkerer built it up. Then snapped it.

  But there was always anger.

  The bump of the small pistol in her belt nagged at her. So she reached down and pulled it free. When she aimed at Thinkerer, he looked at her, unconcerned. “What do you think that will accomplish?” he asked.


  Kay couldn’t say. She was out of words. Out of plans. She couldn’t see any further into the future than just simply … pulling the trigger.

  It cracked. She was expecting more of a kick. More of an explosion. But it wasn’t a large gun. It just made a loud pop sound.

  But the explosion of activity it set off was more extreme.

  Nashara leapt out from behind Pepper, a machine gun in either hand battering away at Thinkerer’s torso. He’d been stepping toward Kay, calmly raising a hand. The bullet Kay had fired had stung Thinkerer’s cheek, knocking his head back and exposing that odd bronze sheen underneath. But the shot hadn’t killed or hurt him.

  Neither did any of the skin-peeling chatter of shots that ripped over him now.

  The constant impact of bullets physically forced him to stagger back for a split second, and then he pulled his hands up to his face and leapt forward.

  Nashara collided with him. They spun for a moment, Nashara prying his fingers apart so that they couldn’t squeeze the detonator. Thinkerer threw Nashara against a bulkhead. The steel gonged, and her head left a dent in it. But she held up Thinkerer’s right hand, still clutching the detonator, with a self-satisfied grin. “You lost something,” she said.

  “Get down,” Kay hissed at Tiago. “Get away.”

  He scurried her way, keeping low.

  Pepper ignored the fight. In the seconds since he’d provided cover for Nashara getting her machine guns ready, he’d ducked over to the control panels and started tapping out control sequences. Monitors flipped their images over from showing large individualist ships thundering their way up into the air, to showing scripts and overlaying the images with arrows and vectors and other information Kay didn’t understand.

  The Saguenay rumbled, and Thinkerer glanced over, realized that something was happening, and took his eyes off Nashara.

  She took the opportunity to close with him and ram a knife into his eye socket. Thinkerer reached up and grabbed at it, and she flipped another knife up and slammed it home.

  Pepper crouched and fired the thrusters.

  Saguenay trembled. It was minor at first. Then it built. And slowly, with a tortured scraping sound, the spaceship began to shove its way across dirt and debris toward the wormhole over the dusty remains of the streambed.

  Thinkerer tore at Nashara, trying to get at the detonator, but she balled up and kept it away from his grasping, remaining hand.

  The golden robot raised his broken stub of a wrist and started stabbing her with the metal wreckage of it. Nashara winced as he plunged it deep into her ribs, but stayed put.

  The spaceship’s skin ripped and tore as it ground across boulders, and Pepper increased the shaking power. Thinkerer slammed Nashara’s head into a beam again and again.

  He sparked, something long cleaving through his chest. Another one of Nashara’s ridiculously long knives spitted him. She picked him up and ran across the cockpit with his body and slammed him into the wall.

  This time, Thinkerer left an imprint in the solid metal.

  Nashara’s clothes were bloody, Kay noticed, and she left a trail of red across the floor as she ran.

  Then the wall slapped Kay in the back and catapulted her across the room as the ship struck something. She threw her hands up in front of her as she struck a console and bounced.

  Blood trickled from her forehead as she hung onto the edge with her fingers and looked down. The front of the cockpit no longer existed. The screens were gone. There was just blackness. The entire ship shook and rattled, thrusters holding them in place. Pepper had flipped the Saguenay face first into the wormhole.

  He held himself in place calmly with one hand, looking somewhat like a crouched gargoyle, and tapped commands with the other.

  “It’s shoved too far in, we’re going to rip the front of the ship off when you trigger it,” Nashara shouted.

  Pepper didn’t show any sign he heard. His coat brushed the edge of the wormhole and disappeared into it. He pulled his booted feet up under him with a grimace.

  Thinkerer began struggling to leap at Pepper. Nashara grabbed him by the boot. She held up the detonator between them, and then let it drop. It tumbled away, down into the wormhole below. Thinkerer leapt after it.

  Nashara grabbed his legs and held him dangling in the air. Thinkerer sliced at Nashara’s arms. She let go, and he fell away into the black void.

  Kay needed to focus. Her own fingers were slipping. She was going to follow Thinkerer over to the other side any second now.

  “Grab my hand,” said a voice.

  She looked up. It was Tiago. He’d pulled himself up and wrapped his legs around a chair and straps.

  But she’d broken him, she thought. Once she let go, she was in his hands. And what happened next? He’d let her go once she dangled in the air. Let her drop through that wormhole after Thinkerer.

  She couldn’t read him right now. She could see the capacity to do that. She could see that he was considering it. And she could see that he was fighting it.

  She slipped further. Maybe it was better this way. To find out what was on the other side. To go after Thinkerer and make it pay for what it did to her.

  That was a quest that felt right.

  She couldn’t hang on any longer. The joints of the remaining fingers holding on cracked and gave up. She dropped.

  Tiago caught her wrist with a grunt. They hung for a moment over the wormhole, and then she scrambled up over him to grab the straps, using them pull herself onto the side of a console. She pulled herself out of the cockpit from there.

  Light flashed from in the cockpit. Metal screamed. The world twisted itself inside out, and a loud thump reverberated up and down the Saguenay as the wormhole killer was fired.

  The void underneath her snapped away, replaced with rock and rubble.

  The entire ship started to fall over onto its side.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The Saguenay collapsed. Tiago felt the impact ripple through the superstructure. Deck plates buckled and roofs collapsed in. Dust swirled and added to the chaos, and he clung to the straps, waiting for something to fall and hit him.

  But despite the groaning and screeching, nothing did.

  Everything fell silent.

  Pepper appeared through the dust. “Where’s Kay?”

  “I don’t know,” Tiago coughed. “She crawled up higher.”

  Pepper picked Tiago up and pointed him toward the light. “Get outside, Nashara’s there. Keep an eye on her.”

  Pepper moved further into the gloom of the wreckage of the Saguenay.

  Tiago put an arm over his mouth and carefully stumbled through the wreckage of the cockpit out into the light.

  Nashara lay propped up against a boulder, a mangled arm limp in her lap. She was leaking from stab wounds all over her body. Tiago ran over to her, looking around for someone to help.

  “Look up,” she said.

  He ignored her. He could see distant League figures trudging along the carved-out trail the spaceship had left behind in the dirt. He waved at them. Someone there should be able to help her.

  A bloody hand grabbed the back of his head and forced it up. “Look,” Nashara ordered. “The dead zone’s gone. They’re fighting.”

  Five long cylinders passed overhead and the sky lit up with the crackle of energy weapons. Seconds later a rolling thunder swept across the valley.

  The individualist ships responded. Two of the human ships were sliced in half by some invisible force.

  It was clear they were outgunned by the individualist weapons, but both League and Xenowealth ships kept on hounding the new alien ships.

  The individualist ships fled toward Trumball, heading to hide deep in League territory, League and Xenowealth ships harassing them all the way until they disappeared behind the mountains.

  Pepper rejoined them after the League medics stabilized Nashara. He’d spent half an hour searching the remains of the spaceship.

  “Will Nashara
be okay?” Tiago asked him.

  “With the dead zone gone, yes,” Pepper said. “She’ll heal. The League soldiers will help. In fact, most of the League is working with us until we get this new threat contained. We worked together once to fight off an alien threat. I guess we can do it again, despite our disagreements.”

  “Where’s Kay?”

  “She left a letter outside the cockpit.” Pepper started walking away.

  “A letter?” Tiago didn’t understand. “What did it say? I don’t understand.”

  Pepper didn’t answer. He walked off to follow the medics carrying Nashara away. Tiago followed him. As he hurried to catch up he noticed that the end of Pepper’s trench coat was now two feet shorter, cut cleanly and exactly where it had been hanging just inside the wormhole.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  To Tiago, Market-square still looked just as it had last month. But underneath, so much had changed. The newspapers still hung in their racks. But now they ran headlines like INDIVIDUALIST SHIPS CLASH WITH FORCES AROUND GAPTHIS.

  There was a lot more about a change in League parliamentary proceedings that Tiago didn’t understand. The individualists had only gotten a few ships through, but packed aboard them had been the ability to create hundreds more.

  A small war had blossomed somewhere out beyond Trumball. But the individualists were losing. Too few of them had come through. Their magical technology could only do so much.

  But the Xenowealth’s technology – that had done a great deal here on Placa del Fuego. There was the new clinic on Fulstrom Street. Dentists were getting retrained. They had machines that could grow new teeth.

  Tiago walked his way into the house where he’d been imprisoned by Kay. Nusdilla and her mother sat in the foyer, the immense, ridiculous foyer, and their faces changed to shock when they recognized him.

  “Tiago!”

  He hugged them both. No doubt they’d given him up for dead when he’d left. There had been rumors of the Doaq attacking people he’d been seen with. The ice ship attack. He’d gone missing. And now he’d turned up and asked them to meet him in the lobby of this house.