“I wish it was,” Donald said. “I’m not a big fan of being pumped full of alien jizz.”
“It’s not jizz,” Dr. Beck said. “Although, we don’t really know what it was. So, I suppose it could—”
“My big fat mouth,” Donald said. “Just let me believe it wasn’t an alien species’ fun juice if you please.”
“Fair enough,” Dr. Beck said. “We had no idea what effect it might have on you. But you’ve been changing. And I can see from your specimen that you are beginning to change, to turn into something else. Into a Bug.”
“What?” Donald said. “But I look the same, feel the same.”
“You do right now,” Dr. Beck said.
“You’re saying I’m going to turn into one of those things?” Donald said.
“Right now, we have to say that is a possibility,” Dr. Beck said. “We don’t really know anything about the creatures we’re up against. We don’t know what kind of effect they might have on you or anyone else.”
“How does this affect what happened to me when I was bitten?” Donald said.
“Because the virus was specifically catered for us,” Dr. Beck said. “It is like a specially-made key for a single lock. That lock is our DNA. We know the virus doesn’t work so well against other species and animals. It still has a negative effect but it doesn’t turn them into undead monsters. The Bugs designed this virus so it would have the most disastrous effect on us, extremely aggressive, so it would hunt for genetic weaknesses and then strike us where we are most vulnerable. It isn’t affecting you the same way as humans because, well, you’re no longer human.”
“Come again,” Donald said.
“Physically you look much like you did before, but genetically, things tell a different story,” Dr. Beck said.
“I don’t understand,” Donald said, still reeling from the revelation that he might turn into some creature from another world.
“They engineered the virus so it would adapt quickly, fast, and become whatever it had to in order to infect us and wipe us out,” Dr. Beck said. “Their haste and aggression may work out in our favour.”
“Great,” Donald said flatly.
“You have been infected by both the Bugs and the Rages,” Dr. Beck said. “Don’t you understand? You can infect them. You can infect the Bugs. You’re the bridge, the transition. If it can infect you and your DNA, it can infect the Bugs and you can pass it on to them. You’re the Bugs’ patient zero.”
78.
JAMIE REALLY had to learn to stop being surprised by everything technology was capable of. Now, he was speaking with his father and Dr. Beck in the same room. . . and they weren’t even there!
They were still down on the Earth’s surface. There was a slight delay when they spoke and replied but it was a small price to pay to see his father. Their images were projected using lights that came from holes in the ceiling. They called it a ‘hologram.’ They were sat around the middle table in a large meeting room.
“Thank you both for coming,” Lucy said.
“Does he have to be here?” Donny said, arms folded and pointedly not looking at the man he was referring to.
“Dr. Beck explained to me what he did and the reasons for it,” Donald said. “I know it’s hard to believe but he really was trying to do what was best.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Donny said. “You weren’t the one who almost got killed by those actions.”
Donald was silent a moment, staring at his hands. Or perhaps he, in fact, did have the same experience at Dr. Beck’s hands. Before any of them could inquire into what it was, Donald spoke:
“Let the past exist in the past. God knows we’ve got enough of it to worry about already. Do you really want to have this meeting without him? He’s a scientist—one of the best in the world, I might add. I think we should at least listen to his opinion.”
“Fine, we’ll listen,” Donny said without adding anything about acting on those opinions.
“I’m sorry for what I did to you guys,” Dr. Beck said. “It was never my intention to harm any of you.”
“What about what you did to Lucy?” Jamie said.
“I’m not apologetic for creating Lucy,” Dr. Beck said. “None of us would be here if it wasn’t for her.”
“That was her doing, not yours,” Jamie said.
“That is certainly true,” Dr. Beck said. “But the point remains: she wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t created her.”
Donald held up his hands to prevent any further argument.
“We’re creating a new future,” he said. “The sooner things get back to the way things were, the better. When can you guys return to Earth?”
“I’m afraid we won’t be returning to Earth any time soon,” Lucy said.
Donald looked up. Lucy, tiny in the large seat, sat at the head of the table. It was clear who was in charge here, whose opinion mattered most. That was why Jamie had insisted she sit there in the first place. The rest of the others on the Mothership sat to either side of her, Donald and Dr. Beck’s holograms on the edges.
“Why not?” Donald said. “We defeated the Bug ship. The threat is over.”
“The immediate threat is over but there’s more to come,” Lucy said. “We started salvaging the remains as soon as the battle ended. Drones weren’t the only things we found.”
An image flashed up on the screen. The intergalactic map of the galaxy with little red dots. There were perhaps a dozen of them spread across the cosmos.
“We found some of their computer systems, still intact, floating in space,” Lucy said. “It survived the explosion.”
“What is this?” Dr. Beck said.
“A map of our corner of the galaxy,” Lucy said.
“And the red dots?” Dr. Beck said.
“Computer identifies them as potentially hospitable planets, capable of sustaining life,” Lucy said.
“There are millions of such exoplanets,” Dr. Beck said. “Why would the Bugs be interested in these ones specifically?”
“Because they’re the ones that already have advanced life on them,” Lucy said. “Like Earth.”
She pressed a button and a yellow arrow pointed at one of the dots on an outer arm of the Milky Way.
“This is Earth, our planet,” Lucy said.
“How do you know these other planets have life on them?” Dr. Beck said.
“There’s no way for us to be sure,” Lucy said. “But we found this piece of information floating on another backed up system in space.”
Another image. A picture of an unknown alien species, tall and thick-limbed with sagging flaps of skin—if it was skin—and two bulging eyes on stalks on the top of its head. Scrolling across the page showed a 3D schematic of the alien creature’s internal organs, labeled in the Bugs’ bizarre-looking language.
“What are we looking at?” Donald said.
“Schematics, designs, research,” Lucy said.
“Weaknesses, strengths,” Fatty said.
“What is it?” Donald said.
“Don’t you recognize it?” Fatty said. “It’s similar to a book we’ve got at the commune. The one we add to every time we come across a new dangerous creature or plant in the desert or forest. We study it, cut it up and figure out which parts of it might be useful to us and which parts we ought to stay away from.”
“It’s another alien race,” Lucy said. “According to the fragments of the reports we found, we believe they live on this planet here.”
She pressed another button and another yellow arrow flashed on the screen.
“Here’s another alien race,” Lucy said. “And another.”
The weird and wonderful alien species flashed onscreen, each belonging to a single planet.
“We believe they are advanced intelligent species, much like our own,” Lucy said. “Advanced but not yet spacefaring. We believe they might have unlocked some of the secrets of the universe, although it’s possible some of them haven’t advanced as far as the equivalent of the
Middle Ages yet. There’s not enough information here to go on.”
“This is incredible,” Dr. Beck said. “You’re saying these creatures live on other worlds? And the Bugs know about them?”
“Not only do they know about them,” Lucy said. “They’ve been studying them. Just as they’ve been studying us.”
Another image. This one of the human race. The same forensic-level analysis, the same research as the other alien species. Close up images of hands and feet with detailed descriptions. A skull, brain, and other body parts. Dr. Beck quietened, his excitement restrained as it dawned on him what it meant.
“I don’t understand,” Donald said. “There are other alien species out there. So what? Why is that surprising?”
“That’s not the surprising thing,” Lucy said. “This is.”
She pressed the button again. This time small blue dots appeared beside each distant alien planet.
“What are those things?” Donald said.
Lucy zoomed in. The blue dots were Bug ships, exactly like the one they had destroyed. Lucy was silent a moment, letting the truth sink in.
“You’re telling us that these Bug creatures have been exterminating intelligent species across the galaxy?” Dr. Beck said.
“Yes,” Lucy said.
“They’re not going to be too pleased when they discover we blew up their ship,” Donald said.
“Exactly,” Lucy said.
“But the galaxy is a big place, right?” Donald said. “So it could take them years to realize what we did here today. And then even longer for them to get here.”
“In the past, that would have been true,” Lucy said. “Unfortunately, they appear to have developed the ability to create wormholes.”
Fatty raised a hand.
“Excuse me but what are wormholes?” he said.
“Holes in the fabric of time and space that allow a spaceship to travel from one part of the universe to another almost instantly,” Dr. Beck said.
Fatty stared into space, nodding his head, completely lost.
“Oh,” he said.
“It just means they can travel anywhere very fast,” Lucy said.
She turned back to the others.
“The science doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s the facts that do.”
“How do you know they can do this?” Dr. Beck said.
“First, it’s hugely impractical for them to do this travelling even at dizzying lightspeed,” Lucy said. “Second, we found a piece of their wormhole technology.”
“You found it?” Dr. Beck said.
His hands were pressed hard to the table—the table in Denver City. Here, the table was an inch lower, and so his hands hovered in midair.
“Are you telling me you found their wormhole device?” he said.
“That’s correct,” Lucy said. “It’s badly damaged but the core appears to be intact. Computer is working on rebuilding it now.”
Dr. Beck spluttered.
“With that level of technology. . .” he said, unable to sit still.
“We’d be on a more even footing with the Bugs,” Lucy said, nodding. “Unfortunately, we don’t know how long it will take Computer to rebuild it. It could take hours or days. By then, it might be too late.”
“Why?” Donald said. “Their ships can travel that fast but messages and signals can’t. Right?”
“Unless they created a wormhole and sent a probe through it,” Lucy said, pressing another button. “Which is exactly what they did.”
A fuzzy freezeframe of a probe disappearing through a hole just as the Bug vessel blew up.
“I picked up a strange signal during the attack but didn’t know what it was,” Lucy said. “I’d never seen anything like it before.”
“Which means they could be here any moment,” Dr. Beck said.
“Which is why we have to leave,” Lucy said.
“Leave?” Donald said.
“Yes,” Lucy said. “They will send another ship to investigate what happened here. I don’t believe they’ll be too lenient.”
“What do you suggest we do?” Dr. Beck said. “No doubt they’ll send something extremely powerful. As we struggled to defend ourselves last time, I doubt we’ll last very long next time.”
“Which is why we need to leave as soon as possible,” Lucy said. “And there’s one more piece of information. Something that might defeat the Bugs once and for all. It’s also the reason the Bugs didn’t simply wipe us, or the other alien species, off the face of their planets the first moment they could.”
“What?” Dr. Beck said.
“The Covenant,” Lucy said.
79.
“THERE ARE other powerful alien species out there,” Lucy said. “They’ve colonized hundreds, thousands of other planets, capable of technology we can’t even imagine.”
Another image. Purple dots in another section of the galaxy. Then pink dots, overlapping the purple ones. More and more, each of the alien species conquering a vast chunk of the Milky Way. Then, unbelievably, even more, these ones in faraway galaxies.
“This is the Covenant,” Lucy said. “A collection of the galaxy’s most powerful alien races, all coming together for peace. According to the files we found, there were once two powerful alien races fighting for resources on the same planets in their vicinity. Finally, after almost destroying each other, the leader of each species met and talked. It was the first time they’d ever done that.
“They agreed to a deal. They divided up the galaxy between them. Whatever resource-rich planets existed within their quadrant belonged to them. But they had rules. The first and most important was this: that no other intelligent species must already exist on the planet. The resources belonged to that species. And no advanced weaponry could ever be used on the indigenous lifeforms.”
“How do the Bugs fit into this?” Donald said.
“The Bugs are part of the Covenant,” Lucy said. “By law, they cannot attack species that already exist on the planets. The weapons they could use for mass-extermination require a lot of power and that kind of world-ending weapon leaves a trace.”
“That’s why they used the Perseid Shower asteroids,” Jamie said. “As part of an invasion technique to wipe us out. To make it look like a natural event.”
“Right,” Lucy said. “Mass extinction events happen across the universe all the time. By infecting rocks already bound for the Earth with a virus, they hoped to create a natural disaster where there wasn’t going to be one. If another Covenant member asked questions, they could point to the asteroids and the virus aboard them as evidence of yet another planet wiped out by a natural event. They plan to strip the Earth of every natural resource it has to build more ships and grow more powerful. But so long as humans exist here, they’re not meant to harvest any of it.”
“They’re breaking the rules,” Fatty said.
“Finding planets with valuable resources must be rarer than we thought for them to go to this much trouble,” Donald said.
“Not rare,” Lucy said. “But unfortunately, greed is not an exclusively human trait. They have ambitions beyond the Covenant. In fact, so far as I can tell, they mean to overthrow it and take control of it.”
“To control the entire galaxy,” Dr. Beck said with dawning realization.
“That’s the beginning of their ambition,” Lucy said. “They won’t stop there. Once they have one galaxy they will have everything they need to consume the next one, and the next. Nothing will stand in their way. Galaxies will fall like dominoes.”
“In order to do that, they must first wipe out dozens—even hundreds—of innocent species,” Dr. Beck said.
“What happens if this Covenant discovers the truth?” Donald said. “That the Bugs have been breaking the rules and destroying innocent species?”
“They will be severely punished,” Lucy said. “Maybe even wiped out themselves. You have to understand how powerful the Covenant is. If a homeworld is threatened, the rest of the Covenant immed
iately responds, sending in ten massive warships each. No single species can compete with that kind of firepower.”
“You said there was a silver lining to this,” Donald said. “So far as I can see, we’re doomed no matter what we do.”
“Our only way out is via the Covenant,” Lucy said. “If we can get a message to them, tell them what the Bugs are doing here, to us and our planet, they can stop the Bugs. They’re the only ones powerful enough to do it.”
“If what you said about the Covenant rules is true, they won’t be too pleased with what the Bugs are doing,” Donald said. “But will they really take our side in this? Covenants tend to stick together.”
“There’s no way to know how they’ll respond,” Lucy said. “But it’s the best—and only—chance we’ve got against them. We can’t stand against the Bug warships. They’re too powerful. They’ve had centuries to develop their arsenal. We’ve had twenty years. And we’ve had to do it in secret. We’re no match for them.”
“So, what are we waiting for?” Donald said. “Hurry up and send this Covenant a message.”
“Once Computer has unlocked the wormhole technology, we can try,” Lucy said.
“Why not send a message right now?” Donald said. “Without wormholes?”
“Because the Sun will have exploded and turned into another star by then,” Dr. Beck said. “They’re very far away.”
“What if sending a message through a wormhole fails?” Jamie said. “What then?”
“Then we lose,” Lucy said. “A flame that loses oxygen is as dead as anything else. But at least we tried.”
“The Bugs will come here, to Earth,” Dr. Beck said. “Because we destroyed their ship. Their armada could wipe us out.”
“Pray they’re that stupid,” Lucy said. “Do that, and the Covenant will detect them.”
“Earth will be destroyed,” Donald said. “It’s not much of a victory, is it?”
“Not for us, perhaps,” Dr. Beck said. “But it’d be the greater good for the universe, for the future of all other alien creatures that are trapped in the Bugs’ grip. They’ll be free.”
“They’ll likely never learn of our sacrifice,” Donny said. “That kind of victory somehow feels very hollow to me.”
After the Fall- The Complete series Box Set Page 56
