The Rogue World

by Matthew J. Kirby

  “Gun it!” Luke said.

  “I’m trying!” Betty called back. “You want me to blow out the engine and strand us here?”

  The transport surged, and surged, and surged, until finally, they lurched forward.

  “That’s it!” Luke said.

  The squeal became a grinding as the transport inched forward.

  “That’s step one,” Betty said. “Now we gotta climb out of here.”

  She revved the engine, and the nose of the transport lifted, tipping Finn back in his seat. They crawled up, foot by foot, until their angle made it feel as if Finn was lying on his back, looking up at the sky through the cockpit windows.

  The vehicle climbed a little, but Finn could hear the strain it was putting on the motor. Then their whine suddenly downshifted in tone, and at the same moment the transport jolted. The vehicle fell backward, and when Betty tried again, the same thing happened. After the third unsuccessful attempt, she called back over her shoulder.

  “The tread is slipping. It’s too steep!”

  “Damn,” Luke said.

  Betty let the transport ease backward into its resting place before shutting down the engines. The cabin went quiet, leaving Finn’s ears ringing.

  “We’ll have to do some more digging,” Luke said.

  “Eleanor’s not back yet anyway,” Finn said.

  So they went outside with the shovels and got back to work extending the ramp by half its length, evening out the angle so the transport wouldn’t have such a steep climb. Somehow this phase of the job didn’t feel as difficult as the first, even though Finn was more exhausted. By the time they finished, the sun had moved low on the horizon, and Finn felt it getting colder.

  But their efforts paid off. This time, the tread did not slip, and they steadily inched up the ramp onto the surface.

  “We’re ready to roll!” Betty said. “Whenever we decide to.”

  Finn turned to Jack. “You mentioned there were other ways Eleanor could get out?”

  “Caves,” Jack said. “The Sky Caves.”

  “Where?” Luke asked.

  Jack tipped his head to the left. “Back on the other side of the valley.”

  “We could go over there to wait for her,” Finn said.

  “That’s a good idea,” Luke said. “It’ll also put some distance between us and the G.E.T. when they show up, which could be any moment.”

  “I’m surprised they’re not here already,” Badri said.

  “I’m not,” Jack said. “They’re dealing with the alien ship.”

  Finn looked over at him. So did everyone else.

  “Alien ship?” Dr. Von Albrecht asked.

  Jack coughed, and then grimaced. “Yeah. Um. Watkins told us an alien ship landed near Stonehenge soon after we left Cairo. The whole world knows about it.”

  An alien ship.

  “Does that mean . . . there are pissed-off aliens on earth?” Finn asked. Up to this point, the Concentrators had just been stealing energy and beaming it up to space. The idea of an alien invasion was something else entirely.

  “Watkins didn’t say anything about little green men.” Jack sounded like he was trying to talk through a stupor, perhaps an effect of the painkillers. “It’s just a ship.”

  “But the world knows about it?” Betty said. “What does that mean?”

  “Riots,” Jack said. “Fear. The UN is turning against the G.E.T., and Watkins is rattled.”

  “And we left Eleanor in there with him,” Luke said, almost under his breath. He hiked his thumb toward the cockpit. “I say we get moving.”

  Betty climbed back into the driver’s seat, and a few moments later they were on their way, rumbling across the valley. They covered the distance much more quickly than they had on foot, especially since they could take a direct route, driving right over and through the shallow, half-frozen river. When they arrived at the place where the caves surfaced, Betty shut down the engine to save power, and Finn felt the rumbling beneath him cease. That gave him an idea.

  Finn turned to Jack. “Eleanor said you can feel the Concentrators, too, right? So can you tell if she and Watkins have shut this one down?”

  That question seemed to rouse Jack a bit. “If they did, I would expect to feel a weakening, like I did with the others.” He closed his eyes and craned his head slightly, like he was listening for something. Everyone in the transport watched him and waited, and a few moments later, he frowned and opened his eyes. “I just don’t know. The currents feel the same. I don’t know about the Concentrator. But then, I never felt it the way Eleanor did.”

  “So it might be shut down,” Finn said.

  Betty looked out across the snow. “Or it might not.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  ELEANOR STARED AT THE FAINT IMPRESSION IN THE CONCENTRATOR’S control panel. It was about the size of her palm, but thinking about jellyfish zooid aliens suggested it might be intended for an utterly different and perhaps incomprehensible appendage. Her first attempt at taking control had almost destroyed her mind. Or at least, that’s how it had felt. And she was about to attempt it again.

  “Are you ready?” Watkins asked.

  “No,” she said. “How do we do this?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never attempted cooperative contact. It should have occurred to me earlier to study it, but perhaps I felt threatened by the idea of anyone else sharing my ability.”

  His admission startled her. It didn’t sound humble or apologetic. It was simply a statement of fact regarding the cause of his mistake.

  “The question,” he said, “is whether we should attack the intelligence within the Concentrator from two separate angles, or whether we should attempt to join our minds to confront it as one.”

  Eleanor did not feel comfortable with the second option, but she asked, “How would we join our minds?”

  “I don’t know. But when I have connected with previous Concentrators, it feels as if my mind has moved into a new medium, like moving from air to water. I wonder if that medium could provide a place in which our minds could meet.”

  That seemed possible, based on Eleanor’s experience.

  “Shall we attempt it?” Watkins asked.

  Eleanor looked at him askance.

  “I made a promise to your uncle,” he said. “If I can prevent any harm to you, I will.”

  Eleanor nodded. Then she took a deep breath and raised her palm. “Okay, let’s try it.”

  Watkins raised his hand and held it side by side with hers in the air. She noticed its wrinkles and spots, its veins and its bones. It seemed frail, much frailer than Watkins had seemed in Cairo.

  “On three,” Eleanor said.

  He nodded.

  She counted.

  “One. Two. Three.”

  She touched the cold metal, but this time, the intelligence within the Concentrator seemed to have been waiting for her.

  It yanked her into its domain. Her mind recoiled, but had no defense other than to curl in on itself. She thought of Uncle Jack, and her mom. Her mom who she had left behind in Egypt. She thought of her house in Phoenix, and all she wanted was to be back there, to be in her bed under the covers. She had cried herself to sleep there many times, back when she let other people hurt her with the things they said. Back when it pained her to be a freak. Back when her own mom couldn’t make it better, because Eleanor knew she was a disappointment to her.

  “Eleanor,” came a strong voice. “Eleanor, reach for me.”

  She pulled the covers tighter over her head and kept her eyes closed.

  “I can’t reach you,” the voice said. “You need to come to me.”

  But she didn’t want to. She wanted to stay right where she was, away from everyone and everything.

  “I can’t do this . . . alone,” the voice said. “This is why we came here, remember?”

  “Where?” Eleanor asked.

  “The Himalayas.”

  The Himalay—?

  She pulled
the blanket away, feeling the static corona of her hair. She opened her eyes. The voice belonged to Watkins. She wasn’t in her bed. The alien intelligence was attacking her, and she had retreated to the only place of safety her mind could find. But now she felt Watkins nearby, somehow, and she reached her thoughts toward him.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  The intelligence had wrapped itself around her again, like before, and she felt it squeezing.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” She sensed him straining, too. “I’m fighting it as hard as I can.”

  The darkness tightened. They didn’t have much time. She tried to push back against the alien intelligence, but it was still too powerful for her. She and Watkins needed to combine their strength, but she had no idea how. He was completely different from her. He thought differently. He felt differently. He made different choices than she would ever make.

  “We should retreat.” Now she heard fear in Watkins’s mind. “While we still can.”

  “Wait,” Eleanor said. “You’re . . . you’re afraid.”

  “Of—of course I am.”

  “So am I. We’re both afraid. Maybe we can use that.”

  “You mean find something we share, and concentrate on it.”

  “Yes.” She found it harder and harder to think. Harder to fight the blackness closing in around her. “Something deep.”

  Another moment passed, and Eleanor lost sight of where or who she was, could only push back the weight that smothered her.

  “I—I’m alone,” Watkins said, his voice growing faint. “I’m different. And alone.”

  “So am I,” Eleanor said. “I always have been.”

  She reached out for him, using the feeling she knew well as a guide. The pain she knew well. The loneliness. Wishing someone understood her, wishing her mom understood her, wishing anyone would simply accept her for who she was, knowing who she was.

  And she found that pain, inside herself and outside. His pain and her pain.

  She found Watkins hiding in a janitor’s closet in his childhood school. He was sitting on an overturned bucket, eyes and nose burning from the smell of bleach, waiting there until the recess bell told him it was safe to go into the hallways, back to his class. She opened that closet door, reached her hand in, and pulled him out.

  The moment their hands touched, the alien intelligence flinched. Eleanor felt it like a ripple, and she felt a deep connection to Watkins unlike anything she had ever experienced. Eleanor knew him now, and knew herself better. She knew his thoughts. She knew his intentions. Though she sensed keenly the differences between them, the things about him she would never be, she ignored them. She maintained the link.

  The Concentrator’s intelligence had slackened its grip a bit, perhaps uncertain about the combined strength of two human minds. Eleanor and Watkins seized that moment together, without having to say a word to each other, and pushed back. Now they had the strength, and the alien intelligence pulled away from them.

  They grappled with it, and though this one was much more powerful than the others had been, they had begun to take control. Eleanor sensed its shifting, alien consciousness, at first one entity. But then she felt the seam between its two parts: the intelligence that had been left in the Concentrator, alone on earth for thousands of years, and the new intelligence that had recently come down on the ship.

  She and Watkins focused their attack on the part of the alien that had been isolated in the Himalayas. It gave way before them, and though the stronger entity tried to help, Eleanor sensed the damage she and Watkins could do. If they could destroy one part of the combined intelligence, she hoped they could kill the whole.

  They renewed their attack on the Concentrator, strangling it, crushing the life out of it. The ship intelligence tried to defend it, but so long as Eleanor and Watkins maintained their link, it wasn’t strong enough to stop them.

  Bit by bit, thought by thought, they smothered the Concentrator’s intelligence, until it collapsed, dead and scattered.

  At that point, the ship’s intelligence thrashed. Eleanor felt its pain and rage as it tore itself free from its dead companion. She and Watkins turned their attack toward it, and Eleanor thrilled at the thought of victory. They were doing it. They were winning.

  But as they closed in, Eleanor saw their enemy with greater clarity. She saw into its mind, and there she found the dried and frozen husks of countless worlds. The Concentrators like poisoned tentacles, digging their barbs into planet after planet. She saw endless fleets of ships, black vessels streaking through space like the shadows of crawling spiders, with intelligences of their own. Eleanor quavered at the sight of them, but Watkins bolstered her.

  “This one is alone!” he said. “Let’s be done with it!”

  But it didn’t feel alone. Not entirely. It seemed that something else was there, watching them, a presence she hadn’t noticed before, keeping its distance. Eleanor regained her footing and readied herself for a charge. But as they threw her minds against the ship’s intelligence, the entity vanished.

  “Where did it go?” Watkins asked.

  “I don’t know,” Eleanor said, feeling as though her mind echoed inside an empty chamber. “It’s just . . . gone.” The silent observer had gone with it.

  “It fled.”

  “Where?”

  “I can’t be sure, but I believe it went back to its ship.”

  “Why don’t I feel weak, like I did the other times?” Eleanor asked.

  “The nature of the system has changed now that the ship is in control of it. Our reactions to it will likely be different, too.”

  Eleanor’s thoughts returned to Uncle Jack and Luke. “Let’s get out of here.” She pulled her mind away from Watkins, letting go of their shared connection, and departed the space inside the Concentrator. Then she opened her eyes, back in the cavern, and pulled her palm away from the alien console. Above her, the branches of the Concentrator had gone still.

  Next to her, Watkins let out a sigh, looking up at the trunk of his World Tree. “I should be able to get it running again.”

  Eleanor spun on him. “What did you just say?”

  “The threat hasn’t passed,” Watkins said. “The rogue world is still up there, the ship is still down here, and we still need the energy this device can collect to survive the Freeze.”

  “I can’t believe what you’re saying.”

  “I am being logical—”

  “You’re being stupid!” She pointed up at the Concentrator. “You can’t control that thing! Haven’t you learned that by now?”

  “I can’t control it yet,” Watkins said. “But we said the same thing about the energy locked in the atom before we made bombs and reactors.”

  Eleanor couldn’t find any of the empathy she had felt for him but moments before. “You—”

  “Calm yourself,” he said. “I do not intend to do anything unless we are unable to find another solution. Right now, I suggest we find our way out and travel to England. I think we need to finish the job we started.”

  “Destroy the ship’s mind.”

  “Precisely.”

  Eleanor could agree with that plan. “Then let’s go.”

  Now it was her turn to lead Watkins, across the chamber, toward the entrance to the Sky Caves. The opening proved difficult to find, which explained why the G.E.T. hadn’t discovered it, but eventually she located it and crawled through. From there, she had to find their way back out.

  Eleanor remembered the last few turns she had taken with Uncle Jack, and reversed those to go back the way they had come. But a few corridors and junctions later, she found herself disoriented and confused.

  “It’s a labyrinth,” Watkins said, swinging the beam of his flashlight. “How did you find your way?”

  “I followed the Concentrator,” Eleanor said.

  “Then how will we find our way out?”

  Eleanor didn’t know the answer to that, and it was only
now occurring to her that she had lost her compass when they’d shut the Concentrator down. And Watkins was right. The caves formed a maze in which they could easily get lost, stranded underground until they . . .

  “I’ll try to remember the way,” she whispered, hoping she didn’t sound as panicked as she felt.

  Watkins nodded, his mouth set in a grim frown. “Lead the way.”

  Eleanor took several more steps, but felt no confidence in any of them. She worried she could be leading them astray, taking them irretrievably into the darkness. She searched the walls for signs of her descent hours before, for familiar shapes and contours. At times she thought she saw something she recognized and believed they might be going the right way. But then she would see an unfamiliar passageway and doubt herself.

  So they proceeded slowly, and it soon felt as if they had been in the cave system for days. Watkins said nothing as they moved through the honeycomb tunnels, but Eleanor thought she could feel his recrimination of her, and his fear.

  They walked, and walked, and walked, in silence.

  “Can you imagine it?” Watkins finally asked, startling Eleanor.

  “Imagine what?”

  “A planet of beings like that. A species of advanced zooid. Can you imagine their combined strength?”

  Eleanor shuddered at the thought.

  “Humans would be no match for such a species,” Watkins said. “Look at our world right now. Look what the Freeze has done to us. Separate groups, tribal and petty, battling each other for survival. The aliens would have that advantage over us.”

  “I don’t believe that. I’ve seen people work together. Amarok and his people in the Arctic. Nathifa and her family in Egypt. Badri—”

  “Those alliances can be so easily broken.”

  Eleanor stopped walking. The tunnels around them were like the underwater caverns in Peru. She remembered Amaru’s betrayal. The gunshot, the blood. The death of a man she had thought was her friend, who Watkins had manipulated with fear. Eleanor swallowed down the knot of grief rising in her chest.

  “Fear, anger, and hate,” Watkins said. “We will always be ruled by them.”