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CHAPTER TWO

Kevin watched out of one of the ship’s windows as space passed by in a blur, stretched and bent to let the ship pass through by the power of its shields. He, Ro, and Chloe sat together in a room that was open and airy and almost empty. To his surprise, General s’Lara was there too.

Kevin flashed back, recalling General s’Lara’s hand on his shoulder, after the trial.

“We have made our decision. It seems… it seems that you will all be permitted to stay among us. You will be taken to our outpost world, and together, we will seek a way to stop the Hive. I just hope that we can find a way to do it.”

Kevin could not believe how close they had come to death. He snapped out of it and looked around.

“Don’t you need to… I don’t know,” he said, “be in charge of the ship?”

“As if my ship would let me tell it what to do,” she said. “We work with our AIs. We do not enslave them. That is Hive thinking.”

“Kevin and Ro aren’t the Hive,” Chloe said, hotly, maybe a little too hotly.

“I never said they were,” General s’Lara said. She seemed to be watching Kevin and Ro carefully though.

Kevin thought he understood. “You’re trying to learn more about the Hive, aren’t you?”

The general hesitated, listening in that way that said she was in communication with her AI again.

“Yes,” she admitted. “You and Purest… sorry, Ro here have been a part of it. You’ve had access to everything that it is. You can help us to understand it better. You might actually be able to help us beat them.”

“I’m not sure they can be beaten,” Ro said. “I’m sorry. I feel… hopeless.”

“But you managed to break free,” General s’Lara said.

“With Chloe’s help,” Ro replied.

Kevin nodded. Without Chloe, none of them would have been able to escape.

“I still want to know as much as you can tell us,” the general said. “What is it like being a part of the Hive?”

Kevin wasn’t sure that he had the words to explain it. Even so, he wanted to try. “It’s like… there’s this web of connections, and every one is a living thing. It’s being a part of something bigger, and feeling that nothing matters but that whole.”

“It’s beautiful,” Ro added. “But we have no way to feel that beauty. We feel nothing. No conscience, no happiness. The Hive is everything.”

“Well, that means negotiating is out of the question,” General s’Lara said. “Still, maybe there will be something. We’ll be there soon.”

“Where?” Kevin asked. He had no idea where they were heading; hadn’t even considered that they had to be going somewhere.

She gestured, and one of the walls shifted, providing an image of a planet. It seemed small on the screen, but was a bright point of color in an otherwise black and white view of space. It was largely green, in a way that seemed strange compared to the blue of Earth.

“This is Xarath,” the general said, by way of explanation. “Most of its water is underground, but the plant life comes up to the surface. We have a small base there. It was never intended to be a home for all of us, but we will have to make it one. I’m told that it is beautiful.”

“How long until we reach it?” Kevin asked. He had no real sense of how fast the ship was moving. Was it as fast as the Hive ships? Faster?

“A few more minutes. We have been folding space to get closer for a while now, but most of the delay has been to try to lose the Hive forces tracking us. We will need to be some of the first onto the surface. Come with me, we should get to one of the landers.”

For the second time, the general started to lead them through the inner workings of the ship. People turned to stare at them as they passed, and while some of them seemed to be waiting for orders from the general, others were definitely staring at Kevin, Chloe, and Ro. Not all of them seemed friendly.

“Looks like not everyone agrees with the trial,” Chloe said. She sounded to Kevin as though she was ready to fight off anyone who looked at them for too long, or in the wrong way. He could see her altered hand clenching as if ready to punch someone.

“People get to disagree,” General s’Lara said. “We are not the Hive, where everyone must obey. They can think what they like, but we have made a decision the fairest way we can, and I doubt anyone will act against it.”

She didn’t seem entirely certain to Kevin, but then, he thought, how could she? She was right. Unless they controlled every mind there like the Hive, there would be no perfect harmony. Kevin would rather have people giving him odd looks than have to live without his own thoughts, his own choices.

He and the others followed the general to a hangar where a number of smaller ships sat, looking like darts waiting to be spat out by the giant mouth of the ship. General s’Lara led the way to one that was partly blackened by fire.

“Here. My own craft. I’ll show you the planet. Come on.”

The inside of the ship was stranger than the outside. It looked as though it had been patched and rebuilt so many times that there was hardly anything of the original left.

“I worked on this one myself,” General s’Lara said, and then did the glancing away thing again. “Yes, all right. We worked on it. Take a seat and we’ll fly down.”

There were chairs that looked more like armchairs than the kind of benches or flight seats that Kevin would have expected from a military craft. It seemed strange to have such comfort in a general’s ship.

“What’s it like being linked to an artificial intelligence?” he asked.

“It’s like being two halves of a whole,” the general replied. “They can provide more information, react faster, and work things out that I never could, but we provide the emotion and the intuition. It works.”

Kevin tried to imagine it, and couldn’t. The closest he could get was the connection to the Hive, and that had been nothing like the way General s’Lara described. It sounded more like a kind of perfect friendship, the way he’d had with Luna back on Earth, each of them filling in for the other’s weaknesses, each of them looking out for the other without question.

He missed Luna so much right then that it hurt.

“Hold on,” General s’Lara said, but in truth, the movement of the ship was perfectly smooth as it exited the larger vessel that held it, sliding down toward the surface.

As they descended toward the world below, Kevin could see the greenery ahead of them, so great that it seemed to encompass everything. For the first few seconds, it was just one giant wash of green, but then he started to make out different shades and textures within it. There were areas that appeared to be open grassland, and far more that seemed like nearly endless forests. There were patches of dark green similar to firs, and others that looked like tropical palms.

As they got still lower, Kevin started to get a sense of the scale of them. Many of the trees seemed to be normal sizes, but there were others that were as tall as cathedrals, and whose canopies spread out to cover huge swaths of land, so that the ground beneath seemed almost like an afterthought.

“It’s a beautiful place,” General s’Lara said. “So much lives here, but it was never intended to be a world for us. It is too wild, and too many of any species will upset its balance.”

She took her ship down low, and Kevin could see buildings now, nestled amongst the trees, disguised so well that for a few seconds it was hard to pick them out from among the foliage. They hung like great fruit, or balanced in the branches, so beautifully constructed that they might have been a natural part of the forest.

“How many people do you have here?” Kevin asked.

“A few thousand. Not enough for a true civilization,” the general replied. “Even with all the people we’ve brought with us… we’re a shadow of what we were.”

Vehicles shot between the trees, moving rapidly, high above the ground. More moved slowly at ground level, disguised by shifting fields of color that changed as they caught the light.

“Do you have weapons here?” Kevin asked. He had to hope that they would have something that might destroy the Hive.

“Some,” General s’Lara said. “We like to be able to defend the places where we have bases, but the main defense we have is secrecy. This was always supposed to be a hidden place.”

“But we’re coming here now,” Chloe pointed out.

“We’re desperate,” General s’Lara said. “We’re out of people, out of places, out of everything except this. We’ll hide here for as long as we can.”

“And if the Hive finds us?” Kevin asked.

General s’Lara shook her head. “We lost them when we started to bend space. Even they can’t track us at those speeds. Unless you know something we don’t?”

There wasn’t any note of suspicion there, but even so, Kevin felt as though he wasn’t entirely trusted. He looked over at Ro, who shook his head.

“The Hive has stolen many technologies before, but they cannot track the Ilari. It was why they required you, to trace their signals. Without you…”

“Without me, they would never have been able to destroy the world they ran to,” Kevin said.

General s’Lara shook her head. “There will be others who try to blame you for it, Kevin, but I do not. You were controlled, and we are safe now.”

They flew forward, in amongst the trees, the ships finding their way between the trunks to land on great platforms that extruded from the side of the buildings amongst the trees. This close, Kevin could see that there was a whole city there.

The ship touched down and they stepped out. Inside the landing craft, surrounded by walls, there hadn’t been the sense of space there, but now, Kevin could see just how high up it all was. It was high enough that the air felt thin and made his head hurt, while he stumbled unsteadily. His brain felt bewildered by the sheer height.

“Come on,” General s’Lara said. “I announced that we were coming as we approached, and people will want to meet you. They’re excited by the prospect of people who could break free from the Hive, and they think that you, Kevin, are very special.”

“Now I’m feeling left out,” Chloe said, but she didn’t sound as though she meant it that much.

Kevin put a hand on her shoulder. “I think you’re special.”

“You are,” General s’Lara assured her. “If you will let our scientists study you all, we will potentially learn so much.”

Chloe looked worried by that. “I’ve had enough of being studied for a lifetime.”

“We won’t force you,” General s’Lara said, and there was something understanding about her tone then. “It’s your choice. Now, come on. I’ll show you the base.”

Inside, it was every bit as impressive to Kevin as it was outside. The corridors had the same impossible scenes on them as had decorated the inside of the ships, each one turned into a canvas that it seemed the Ilari’s AIs could manipulate, since Kevin saw one of the blue-skinned aliens manipulating the wall into a strange kind of abstract work as they passed. He turned to look at them, offering a kind of bow to the general.

“Oh, stop it, Cler, you know I’m the one who should bow to you,” the general said.

They kept going, and the general started to explain the buildings they passed through as they went.

“In theory, people take whatever rooms they need for whatever they’re trying to do, and reshape them to suit, but there tend to be common areas to it all,” she said. “There are living spaces on either side here, in pods branching off the main corridor. These spaces seem empty. You can have those.”

Was it really as casual as that? They needed a room so they got one? She led the way into a big open living space with couches and beds set out around it. The whole place was empty and still, but didn’t seem sterile in the way that Kevin knew from the Institute, and it lacked the precise opulence of the Hive’s golden towers. It was comfortable instead, and felt as though it could easily be someone’s home.

“So we just wander in and take a room?” he asked, leaning against a couch as a brief wave of exhaustion hit him.

“How else would you do it?” the general asked, sounding genuinely puzzled that there might be another way to do things. She gestured to an open slot on a wall. “This is where we get food. It will be a little slower for you since you don’t have AIs, but you can still ask for what you want. Here, let me.”

She paused for a moment in front of it, and a tray of food just… appeared. Steaming strands of blue mixed with what looked like red berries sat there.

“My AI tells me that laxatha should be safe for you to eat, and it’s one of my favorites,” she said. “Here, try it.”

She set it out in front of them and sat down beside them, in a way that seemed strange for a general to do. Chloe was the first to taste the dish, and the surprised delight on her face told its own story.

“This is… good isn’t enough. It’s amazing. You have to try it, Kevin.”

Kevin took a tentative bite, and was surprised by just how good the mixture tasted. There was only one question on his mind, adding a slightly strange note to the meal while they ate.

“General s’Lara,” he said, “why are you here serving us food?”

“Because you’re our guests,” the general said.

“And that’s very kind, but you could have sent someone to do all of this. Don’t you have meetings and things you need to be at?” Kevin had met at least some important people, and he couldn’t imagine them doing this. “Why you?”

General s’Lara nodded. “I’ll admit that there are plenty of talks I should be having, but my AI is having at least some of them with others. Besides, here with you may be one of the most important places I could be right now.”

Kevin didn’t get it for a moment, but then frowned slightly as he did. “Because of everything that we might know?”

“I won’t lie to you,” General s’Lara said. “I think that you three may hold the key to this. We’ve been able to beat individual members of the Hive, we can do it easily when the numbers are equal, but the numbers are never equal. They just keep coming, and worse, they just don’t care. They throw creatures at us, and they don’t care if they’re killed or not. How do you fight something that doesn’t worry if it is going to die?”

Kevin wasn’t sure he had an answer to that. He’d used that against the Ilari when they’d been fighting. He’d thrown ships at them, seeing their desire to live as a weakness to be exploited.

“It’s the Hive’s greatest strength,” Ro said.

“The fact that you know them, and you were able to break free, might let us understand how to actually beat them. We might actually be able to win this war.”

“But we don’t know anything,” Kevin said.

“You might not know what you know,” the general said. “For a start, what do you know about this ability of yours?”

Kevin shook his head. “I hardly know anything. I hear signals, and I can translate them. I see things that need translating, and my brain just does it.”

“And it’s killing him for it,” Chloe put in, sounding somber. Just the words had Kevin feeling sad about the prospect of the ticking clock that had restarted in his body.

“What do you mean, killing you?” General s’Lara asked.

Kevin started to answer, standing up as he did so. The pain hit him almost immediately, and he realized that the things he’d been experiencing as they landed had been a lot more than just the background symptoms that had been plaguing him since he’d come out from the Hive again.

He’d gotten so used to ignoring it that he’d done it even when his body had been trying to warn him that something wasn’t right. Now it seemed that everything hit him at once. Dizziness overwhelmed him, spinning Kevin half around, so that he dropped to the floor in stages, putting out a hand to catch himself even while it started to twitch in the beginnings of a fit that seemed to wrack every inch of him.

Pain came with it, bursting inside his head in a supernova of agony. It felt like something broke inside him then, and he would have screamed if his mouth had still been under his own control. He’d felt himself lose control of his body before when signals had ripped through him, but this was different. This didn’t hold the promise of a message or an answer; the only promise it seemed to hold was the blackness that lay beyond it, threatening to rise up and overwhelm everything.

Kevin could see Chloe, Ro, and General s’Lara beside him, their lips moving as they talked. Chloe looked as though she was shouting something down to him, but he couldn’t hear any of it. It felt as though it was on the other side of a curtain, and slipping further away by the second.

He was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it.