Then he bent his head against the last thread of his arm, dropped it off his neck, and let it melt under the force field. His eyes seemed to drift everywhere, seeing everything, without the ability to focus.
He hated every second of it.
I’m not human anymore.
It didn’t help.
It was still the most horrifying thing he had ever done, and once outside the shield, Pax reformed himself as quickly as possible. He was shorter, skinnier—he’d lost a lot of mass. He started absorbing sunlight. He was pretty sure he could figure out how to convert energy to mass, but probably not in the next two minutes. On the other side of the purple shield, the alien was still thrashing around on the ground.
The inside of the ship is packed with the crystal octagons—crammed with these things, all of them with weapons that could dissolve astral material.
It boggled the mind. Worse, for all he knew, a thousand ships had come through the rift and were already hiding out in the galaxy.
He looked up, trying to spot the rift, but he couldn’t. It must be on the other side of the moon.
Gray moon-hills ringed the horizon, and the sky was a black field of stars, ending abruptly at the edge of the hills. Until he’d been in space, Pax had never really paid attention to the night sky, not really. Plus, he’d basically grown up in a hospital bed in Manhattan. It wasn’t like there were a lot of stars to see in the first place.
From the moon, space looked a lot less friendly.
The plant-monster bits were still digging through the obsidian plates. The purple field flickered and went out again.
The alien lay still on the moon’s surface, leaking black fluid. Pax bent over and dragged a finger through the liquid. It didn’t eat through him as quickly as the stuff from the canisters, but it still chewed through the tip of his finger by the time he straightened up. He pulled off the finger and tossed it away.
One of the plant-monsters dropped off a plate and landed next to the alien centipede—it crawled right through the black gunk and started eating the invader. It steamed a little when it touched the gunk, but the plant-monster quickly neutralized the material and began absorbing it.
Some of the other plant-monster fragments had already ditched their tin, steel, and fiberglass shell materials and were plating themselves with cut panels of obsidian.
One thing was clear: he should be helping the plant-monster, not killing it.
Fucking Terry. He could have just said something.
He pulled a couple of the plant-monsters off the obsidian plates and fed them through the big split in the hole, being careful not to step in too much gunk. He ducked out of the shadows into the bright sunlight. The surface was getting hot, too hot. He peeled off the bottoms of his feet and left the plant-monsters to their work.
Time to go.
Pax pushed off the moon gently, getting far enough away from the surface that he could see the rift. The moon’s gravity tugged on him, but he resisted it easily.
He didn’t bother with the hamster ball this time.
He wasn’t human. He didn’t need it.
He’d known it, but he hadn’t really believed it until he’d oozed under the purple force field. He didn’t need protection from space. And he didn’t need to use the balls for propulsion if he didn’t want to.
Not anymore.
He jetted a thin stream of superheated, ionized gas out of his feet as bright blue plasma, aiming himself toward the rift.
When he looked back, he saw the plates of the ship had been mostly destroyed, and the plant-monsters were crawling all over the hull, pulling out chunks of crystal and dead aliens.
Fucking Terry.
He hadn’t come to Earth to save Pax or be his mentor. Terry had come to Earth to turn Pax into the perfect tool for saving the universe, even admitting it. But, again, it wasn’t something Pax had been able to believe until now.
It felt horrible being used…
But also it felt kind of great.
Because now that he wasn’t really human, he might be able to do it.
Onward to the rift.
Epilogue
The monster clung to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, a place the primary race rarely visited, and even then only on distant black boats that crawled over the surface of the water, a long, shimmering distance away. It grew tendrils through the coral canyons surrounding it and hid under the large, waving leaves of underwater plants. Fish crawled over it and through its tentacles.
It resisted the urge to consume them, to consume everything on the planet.
The monster had received a message from the part of itself that had been carried into outer space. The emissary from the primary race had encountered one of the Enemy and had helped destroy it.
The primary race of this planet might become an ally. It would be inopportune to destroy the entire ecosystem before it established whether the primary would be a help or a hindrance. With greater mass had come greater intelligence, and now that it had reproduced its core spores, it felt calmer, more able to reason.
The rift had grown to an appalling size, even larger than the one in its ancestral memory, galaxies away.
It had drained its other universe, then. Consumed it.
It was trying to bring the Dark City through.
The monster tried to communicate with the fish swimming in and out of its tentacles. You should fear what is coming, it told them, or tried to.
The fish didn’t answer.
It needed to learn how to communicate with the primary species. The plant-monster had stored the genetic codes of all the species it had consumed since it had been awakened; it had plenty of material from the primary species, but they seemed to be powerless, ignorant.
Terrified.
It wondered whether or not the primary species was, in fact, the primary. The plant-monster identified some of the material it had taken from the emissary, the one who had hurled most of its mass into space. That one, at least, would be worth communicating with.
The material was odd stuff, very similar to the material from the Enemy, yet fundamentally different—based on astral material rather than dark matter. The monster created a small, relatively stable pocket in its body, placed the emissary’s material inside, and then regenerated it. Some of the emissary’s memories had been destroyed, but it looked like the sample had remained, more or less, holographically intact.
The monster reawakened the material, setting its consciousness into motion, and studied it carefully. It appeared to communicate primarily via visual and auditory cues, assisted by verbal coding. Its memories were easiest to access; they appeared to be mainly visual. The plant-monster generated multiple eyespots and triggered the emissary’s material to begin reviewing its memories.
Pax blinked and the world changed.
The plant-monster watched everything, slowly beginning to understand what had been done to them: to the emissary and to itself.
It went through its own stored material and found the one member of the primary race that had not been terrified of it. A musician. It reawakened the material inside another pocket, recreating the place where it had been sitting, the table and ethanol next to it, and its instrument.
Play, it said, testing out the new form of communication.
What do you want to hear? the primary said.—The man. It was called a man.
Anything, the monster responded. Just play.
The man began strumming the instrument, and the monster’s tentacles moved with the ocean waves, as if it were dancing.
Bad day? the man said.
Not as bad as it’s going to get.
Well, shit, the man said and played on. It was almost pleasant.
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I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) Page 32
