Ascent

Luna ran forward, plunging into the crowd and slipping through the spaces with every advantage she could get from being smaller than most of the people there. She ducked under arms and skidded between legs, taking Ignatius’s arm and not letting go.

Luna spotted Cub, and Bear, and the rest of them, and she snatched the gun and whirled around.

“What are you doing?” he cried out in alarm.

She sprayed a cloud of it that started to slow the controlled around her, spraying Cub and Bear and all the rest of them.

“Come on,” she said, as she kept her finger down on the trigger. “Change!”

Luna saw Cub blinking in the sunlight, stretching out his hands and staring at them.

She looked around until she saw Bobby in the shadows of a building and held out a hand to him.

And then she turned with the others and ran.

And didn’t stop running.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kevin recoiled when Purest Xan came into the room that held him and Chloe. Hanging there alone and unattended was bad enough, but somehow he knew it wouldn’t be as bad as anything the alien chose to do now.

“Fear is a weakness,” Purest Xan said, the words coming out a moment later through its translator. “Just one of many we have conquered.”

“What do you mean?” Kevin asked. He tried to hold back the fear he felt too, because he didn’t want the alien to see it now.

Chloe looked scared enough for both of them, but she looked angry too. If the twisted gravity hadn’t been there, holding them to the frames, Kevin suspected that she would have tried to attack the alien.

“Once, we were as weaker beings,” Purest Xan said, making a gesture so that a section of wall shifted into a screen that showed things that were like the Purest and not like them, all at once. They weren’t quite smooth-skinned, weren’t quite as graceful or as perfect looking, and certainly didn’t have the sense of cold implacability that the Purest had. They looked like the kind of things the Purest might have been a long, long time ago.

“We fought and we warred with one another. We turned our home world into a place that was almost unlivable with the weapons we used.”

The image on the screen shifted, showing a world that started out green and beautiful, only for all of that plant life to wither and die, and explosions to ripple across the surface, with fire and tearing winds spreading out in ripples from what looked like the heart of cities.

“We had to find ways to adapt.”

“By attacking other people’s worlds,” Kevin said. “By tricking us into letting you in so that you could take over people’s minds.”

“You’re evil,” Chloe added. “You’re nothing but monsters.”

Purest Xan looked at them without a hint of emotion. Kevin doubted that the creature was capable of them, and in some ways that was scarier than if Chloe had been right. These creatures weren’t malicious, or filled with hate, or determined to wipe out everything they feared. They acted as coldly and calmly as a glacier rolling over a town, not caring about the lives within.

“Your worlds do not matter,” Purest Xan said. “You are not of the Hive. You are not of the Purest.”

“You really think you’re the only things that matter in the universe?” Chloe demanded.

“We are the Purest,” Xan replied, as if that answered everything. “We created the Hive to solve the wars of our world. In coming together, we learned to put ourselves beyond the weaknesses of emotion. We learned from the worlds nearest us how to transform the lesser to be all that we require them to be. We built the Hive ships to carry us and gather materials with which to regenerate our world for the Purest.”

“So you just take and take, and give nothing back,” Kevin said.

“All else is lesser,” Purest Xan said. “All is ours.”

“Until we stop you,” Chloe said, struggling against the gravity that held her. If it felt anything like the shifted gravity that held Kevin in place, he knew that she had no chance of breaking free, but he guessed that telling her that wouldn’t persuade her to stop. If anything, it would probably make things worse.

“You are weak. You cannot stop the Hive,” Purest Xan said.

“Then why are we still here?” Kevin asked. “If you think we’re so weak and useless, why didn’t you have us killed the moment we arrived on your… ship?”

“We do not destroy what is useful,” Purest Xan said. “We gather it. It is our purpose.”

Useful. Kevin wasn’t sure he liked the idea of being useful to something like this. From what he’d seen of the other creatures they had found useful, the aliens went around reshaping their flesh, transforming them. He’d already felt the pain involved just with the aliens going through his thoughts. The visions he’d seen of the aliens’ world had been even worse.

“I don’t want to be useful to you,” Kevin said.

“You get no choice,” Purest Xan said. “You should be grateful to us. The chosen of a world are typically destroyed, to stop them being… a danger to us. You survive because we permit you to survive.”

“Why?” Kevin insisted.

Purest Xan didn’t answer for a moment or two. Instead, the alien moved around the room, making adjustments to some of the machinery.

“They’re going to look in our minds again, Kevin,” Chloe said, sounding terrified by the prospect. “They’re going to use those tentacle things again.”

“Not on you,” Purest Xan said, sounding almost contemptuous. “You will be intriguing enough to dissect and reshape. Your mind is quite interesting, but you are not worthy of more.”

“You can’t dissect Chloe!” Kevin yelled, fighting against the gravity that held him. It pressed him back into the frame easily, no matter how much he struggled to break free. The pressure held him flat, like a lead weight pressing down on his chest.

“We may do as we wish,” Purest Xan said. “If that is the greatest use the female can be to the Hive, that is what will happen. We will be generous, though. You will get to choose what happens to her.”

“Then I choose that she doesn’t get dissected!” Kevin said.

“After we are done,” Purest Xan said. “After you have joined our Hive.”

“What?” Kevin said. He shook his head. “No way.”

The alien moved to him, the tentacled devices ready in his hands.

“Your brain has capacities that the Hive requires,” Purest Xan said. “Therefore you will join us.”

The alien made it sound like an undeniable fact, as if it was simply the way the world was. It made the idea sound as obvious and natural as water being wet, or as the sun being hot. There was nothing natural about the tentacled things that Purest Xan held in its hands, though.

“So, what?” Kevin demanded, mostly because every moment he could delay this felt like a good idea. “You’re going to make me into one of the Purest like you? Do I get to lose all of my hair and have freaky eyes?”

Maybe if Kevin could annoy the alien enough, he could distract it from what it was about to do. Of course, it might then decide to do a whole host of things that were even worse, but right then, Kevin couldn’t think of anything worse than being changed into one of them.

“You are not of the Purest,” Purest Xan said. “But you can be made of the Hive. You will become our emissary, one of our chosen. You should welcome the honor.”

“You think it’s some kind of honor for Kevin to have his brain invaded?” Chloe demanded.

“It will not be an invasion,” Purest Xan said. “Kevin will welcome us. He will agree to become one of us.”

“Why do I have to agree?” Kevin demanded. “Why don’t you just do it if you’re going to, instead of playing games?”

The alien looked almost offended by that, although Kevin doubted that it could feel that emotion either. He doubted that it could feel anything.

“We do not play games,” it said. “Your species’ brains are delicate, though, and we require yours intact for the tasks that the Hive has for you. If you fight too much during the process, there is the potential that you could be… damaged.”

“I’ll fight you,” Kevin promised. “I’ll die rather than do anything to help you.”

The alien stood there staring at him, apparently not comprehending what he had just said. It frowned at Kevin slightly, tilting its head to one side as though listening to something only it could hear. Kevin got the feeling that it was trying to make sense of him, and trying to work out what to do while it did so.

“Your statement is foolish,” Purest Xan said. “Yielding is to your advantage. You get to continue to exist.”

“I’m dying anyway,” Kevin said, thinking about the moment when the doctor had diagnosed him with his illness, had told him just how little time he had left to live. “Do you think I care about threats?”

The alien stared at him for another moment or two, and again, Kevin had the sense of it getting advice from the others of its kind.

“We can save you,” it said, dropping the words there like lead weights.

The shock of that ran through Kevin like ice water. The best scientists Earth had to offer had tried and failed to help him. Now here the aliens were, offering to make him well as if it were nothing.

“You’re lying,” he said. He had to believe that they were lying. “You already lied about so much, do you think I’m going to believe this?”

He thought about all the ways they’d lied to get him to help with their invasion of the Earth. They’d told him that they were refugees seeking the safety of another planet. They’d told him that they were the ones fleeing destruction, rather than causing it.

“You have seen what we can do,” Purest Xan said. “We can manipulate flesh in ways your human mind cannot imagine. The Purest of the Hive are preserved almost indefinitely. We have every reason to want you alive. We could heal you, if you were of the Hive.”

What could Kevin say to that kind of temptation? It was everything he had wanted from the moment the doctor had told him what was happening. When he’d been at the NASA institute, he’d secretly hoped that one of the scientists there might find some way to help him, to make all the shaking and the pain stop. He’d thought that he would give almost anything to be well again. It took almost everything Kevin had to shake his head.

“If I have to die to stop you getting what you want, then that’s what I’ll do,” Kevin said. He meant it. He wanted to live, he’d hoped for a cure, but by now, he’d had plenty of time to accept what was going to happen to him. If dying could help to stop the aliens… well, he didn’t want to, but he would.

“And what about the other things the Hive can offer?” Purest Xan said. “We are told that your species values parents and friends. As one of us, you could decide what was done with those we controlled.”

Kevin swallowed, thinking of his mother, thinking of Luna. There were so many people he knew back on Earth, so far away that it was no longer visible on the screen. If he could help them… no, if the aliens wanted something from him, that wouldn’t help them at all.

“Then there is the question of your friend here,” Purest Xan said. “As this one has said, as one of the Hive, you could determine what happens to her. If you do not do this, the female will be experimented on while you watch.”

Kevin froze, looking from the alien to Chloe and back.

“No, Kevin. Don’t do it,” Chloe said. Kevin could hear the desperation there. “Let them kill me. Do whatever it takes!”

Kevin could hear the sincerity in her voice, but… he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t stand there and watch while Chloe died. He knew that they would do it. There was something about the cold, emotionless way Xan made its threat that made it something else. Not a threat exactly, more a simple statement of what would happen.

“We will change you anyway,” Purest Xan said. “It is simply a question of how much you fight, and how much it hurts. Make your decision, Kevin McKenzie.”

“Fight them, Kevin,” Chloe said. “Don’t give in!”

Kevin looked at her, trying not to think of all the things the aliens might do to her. It was impossible, though, to do anything but picture what might happen once they started to experiment on her. Could he really stand by and watch if they started to take her apart to see how she worked, or started to transform her into something that wasn’t human? Could he do that, when all it would mean was that they would transform him by force?

He couldn’t, and he knew it.

“Okay,” he said, hating every moment while he did it. “Do it.”

“We were always going to,” Purest Xan assured him. “This will hurt more, the more you struggle.”

“Kevin,” Chloe said. “Please fight it. You have to stay yourself. You have to stay strong.”

That, Kevin guessed, was the only hope here. They couldn’t break free. They couldn’t fight back physically. The only chance was to join with the Hive, and somehow hope to retain enough of himself…

He didn’t even finish that thought before Purest Xan applied the tentacles to his skull, and the Hive lanced invisibly into his brain.

Kevin cried out with the pain, swift and sudden, like an icicle being stabbed into the depths of his mind. He’d thought that he was used to pain; with his illness, he’d thought he’d known what pain was, but now he realized that it was nothing compared to what was happening now. He could feel the tentacles questing through his thoughts and his memories, the unpleasant sensation far too familiar from when the aliens had first probed his mind.

This was different, though, because the aliens weren’t just looking this time.

Kevin could feel the Hive inside his thoughts, mind upon mind, interlinked and powerful. It was hot and cold and painful all at the same time. It felt like ground glass being worked through his thoughts. He could feel the wash of the controlled on the far fringes, not even a true part of the whole. He could feel the sharp-edged minds of things bred for war, and the softer, slower thoughts of beasts of burden. Then there were the Purest and their servants, shining strands against the web of the rest.

Come to us, they urged, the voices deep and seductive. Become us.

Kevin tried to pull away, and the effort hurt more than he could have imagined. He heard himself scream, but the sound seemed to come to him from far away. It was like claws holding him in place, hooked into his brain, too powerful to ignore.

Even so, Kevin fought. He could feel the Hive moving through him, taking over parts of his mind the way an invading army might take over fields and towns. Kevin started to hide parts of himself, remembering the way he’d tried to hide how scared he was for his mother’s benefit, trying to hide away whatever he could while the aliens continued to push forward within his mind. If he could do it enough, he might be able to hold himself separate from the Hive. He might still be himself.

He felt the moment when they linked him to the Hive, going from seeing all the separate strands to being one of them. He could hear the messages and the thoughts of the others there, the commands of the Purest and the obedience of the rest.

A mind that picks things apart, one of the Purest thought in his direction.

A mind that is everything we need, another agreed.

Kevin could feel Purest Xan’s presence beside him. Wake, Kevin, join your new life.

Kevin’s eyes snapped open, and he couldn’t remember closing them. The world around him looked strange, cloaked in a sheen of new colors, details he would never have noticed before coming to his eyes. It was as if he could focus on every mote of dust and fraction of color change.

He looked around at the machines, and the Hive within him told him what each was for. Had he succeeded in holding back some part of himself? Kevin didn’t know. He still felt like himself, although everything else about the world seemed strange. It seemed both more alive and more connected than he could have ever imagined.

Purest Xan moved to him, working the controls on the frame. The alien operated them, and Kevin felt the gravity that was holding him in place shift back toward the floor.

“Welcome to the Hive, Emissary Kevin,” Purest Xan said.

CHAPTER FIVE

Luna and the bikers ran from the controlled as they closed in, lunging for their bikes, trying to make it to them before the greater speed of those the aliens controlled brought them too close. Luna ran toward the spot where her own bike had stopped, lying on its side now with the sidecar up in the air, obviously overturned in whatever chaos had followed the moment when they’d grabbed her.

She struggled to right it, shoving her entire body against it, the weight of it making it feel as though she was pushing against a solid wall. Luna felt it shift slightly as she kept pushing, and then it toppled, raising a small cloud of dust as it hit the ground beside the road.

“Get in, Bobby,” she called to the dog, who was still busy growling at the advancing horde of controlled as if he might be able to fend them off. “Hurry!”

She pointed to the sidecar, and the dog got the message, hopping into it and sitting there, looking around with his teeth bared. Looking back, Luna could see why: the controlled were getting closer, running in that way that put them far closer than they should have been every time she blinked. Luna went to start the bike, determined to put as much distance between her and the controlled as possible…

It wouldn’t start.

“Not now,” Luna said through gritted teeth as the engine coughed and spluttered. “Come on!”

She jumped her entire weight on the kick-starter once, then again. She could see the controlled getting closer now, so that they were twenty yards away, then ten. Luna could feel the fear building in her. She really didn’t want to know what the controlled would do to someone who wasn’t one of them anymore.

She jumped on the starter once more, throwing her whole weight down onto it, and the bike roared into life. Luna didn’t hesitate, accelerating as hard as she dared away from the onrushing crowd of controlled people. She felt the heaviness as an unfeeling hand clamped onto her bike, a woman with unseeing white pupils holding on tight enough that the bike dragged her along, making her skid along the ground when even her enhanced speed wasn’t enough to keep up.

Luna found herself trying to remember if she’d seen this woman while they’d all been forced to work. She found herself thinking about the person who might still be trapped somewhere behind those eyes, the person who might be fighting to stop herself even as she reached for Luna. Luna knew exactly how bad it was to be one of the controlled now, and she knew that there was nothing the person in there could do to stop themselves.

On the other hand, she knew that they didn’t feel pain.

“Sorry,” Luna said, kicking out at the woman from her perch on the bike until the controlled woman tumbled back onto the road, letting Luna’s bike shoot forward fast enough that she had to cling to it tightly so she didn’t fall off.

Around her, Luna saw the members of the Dustsides Motorcycle Club grabbing their bikes and pulling away in formation, the bikes forming a broad V shape as if they might be able to smash through anything that got in their way. She saw Ignatius jump onto the back of Bear’s bike, still clutching his precious vapor gun.

There were more controlled coming out of side streets now, lunging for the bikes from every direction. The only hope seemed to be to keep going as fast as possible, hoping that sheer speed would carry them past the mass of the controlled before they could close in on them like water pouring into a basin. Luna was fine with going faster. Being scared of the sheer speed was definitely better than thinking about the prospect of being torn apart by the controlled.

“Don’t stop!” Luna called out to the others, as loud as she could so that it would carry over the noise of the bikes. “We need to get away.”

They kept riding, as fast as possible. With the controlled approaching from the back and the sides, their bikes popped out of the mass of them like a cork from a bottle. In an instant, they were in clear space, hurrying through Sedona, trying to get as far from the onrushing horde of controlled as they could. They were moving faster than the controlled could follow now, heading for the outskirts of the town.

“I think we’re clear,” Cub called back with a grin that said how happy he was to be free of the aliens’ control.

Luna smiled back at him, because she was just as happy to have made it. She was happy that he had been saved too. She wouldn’t have liked the idea of Cub still being back there while she and the others got away. She rode up closer to him, ready to call across to him, although she wasn’t quite sure what she was going to call. Maybe that she was glad he was there, maybe more than that.

Whatever she was going to say, the words fell silent in her throat as the shine of something up in the sky caught her eye, growing larger by the moment.

“A ship!” Luna called out as she looked at it square on.

The ship was one of the smaller ones, but this one looked sleeker than the others somehow, and more dangerous. If the others were worker bees built for carrying things up to the bigger ships, this one seemed more like a hornet, sharp-edged and deadly, designed to kill anything that got in its way.

“It’s coming this way!” Luna shouted.

It came in rapidly, and Luna found herself wondering where it had come from. The big ship above Sedona was gone. Even the world ship that had been there was gone, vanished from the sky as rapidly as it had come. This one must have come from one of the other ships, still hovering over other towns and cities to take what they could. From the speed it was coming in, it must have shot toward them as fast as its engines would carry it.

“They’ve sent a ship from another city for us?” Cub called out.

It didn’t make any sense that a ship could be there for them that fast, or that they could possibly mean that much to the aliens. Yet she couldn’t think of another reason why a ship like that would be coming toward them so fast, or so low, just a few hundred feet off the ground. Them coming back from being controlled seemed to have upset the aliens more than anything else they could have done.

“They must have sensed people breaking out of their control,” Luna called.

“I have found that the controlled hurry in quickly towards my efforts,” Ignatius explained from the back of Bear’s bike. “I think they’re trying to stop my attempts to help people.”

Luna thought about the aliens who had controlled her. How would they react to people breaking free of them? How would they respond to any loss of control when all they seemed to want was to take more and more?

Luna thought she saw something starting to glow at the front of the ship, a fiery orange that made it look as though someone had set light to a point on the vessel’s nose. She tried to decide if it might be a trick of the light, and then a far more horrible thought occurred to her.

“Everybody scatter!” she yelled, pulling her bike to one side so fast that it took everything she had to keep it upright.

The road ahead of their small convoy erupted in a blaze of energy that tore through the asphalt, sending dirt and stone flying in every direction. Luna saw one of the bikes skid and topple, the rider tumbling over the ground as the road disappeared from under them.

Luna went off road, ignoring the jolts and the judders that came from the uneven ground as rocks and potholes threatened to unseat her. Around her, she could see the other bikes following, heading into the rougher terrain, staying away from the straight line of the road as the alien ship shrieked overhead. Another gout of dirt and rocks flew up as it fired again, and then it was past them, banking sharply as it started to turn back toward them.

They were an easy target in the open. Luna could see the alien ship getting further away from them, lining up another run at them. If it fired at them from a distance, it would have plenty of time to aim and hit them all. They needed to find cover, and they needed to do it now.

Luna looked around and then pointed toward some of the red rock valleys close to Sedona.

“There!” she yelled. “It’s our only hope.”

She pushed her engine, the bike speeding forward with the others following in her wake. Dirt exploded around them as the ship made another pass, and for a moment or two Luna couldn’t see anything ahead. When the cloud of dust cleared enough for her to see again, she had to veer left sharply to avoid the remains of a tree, torn apart by the latest blast. Luna just hoped that she was leading the others in the right direction.