“If they wanted to harm us, why let us wake up at all?” Commander Johnson added.
Catalina watched Ben turn in a slow circle, clucking his tongue, waiting, and doing it again. After doing that a few times, he stopped and pointed. “There.”
The Gray re-appeared in exactly that spot. “Cl-ever,” it said. “W-atch.”
As the alien spoke, the walls, floor, and ceiling all became luminous, dazzling their eyes with a bright light. A moment later the room was gone and they all appeared to be standing in the middle of a field. Yellow grass bowed in a wind that they could actually feel. Green trees waved their branches. An orange sun hovered close above the horizon, splashing the sky with blood as it fell. The air reeked of animal dung and a rotten meat smell that turned Catalina’s stomach. This was somewhere on Earth.
Dead ahead, some kind of primate sat on its haunches in the grass, its back turned to them, an animal carcass lying in front of it—a zebra, Catalina realized from the stripes as they floated gradually closer to the scene. Flies buzzed loudly around the carcass and the smell of rotten meat grew stronger, becoming a suffocating stench. The primate’s arms and hands were busy, its head dipping toward the dead zebra every so often, making wet tearing sounds and contented chewing noises.
It’s feeding, Catalina realized.
They stopped floating closer and Catalina noticed a trio of monkeys creeping up behind the first, all of them holding heavy rocks and standing on two legs. She realized they must be primitive humans, but they still looked more like monkeys to her.
The trio of monkey-humans reached the first one, and they stopped a few paces behind it, holding their rocks over their heads and looking from one to another, as if to say, Who’s gonna do it?
Catalina had a bad feeling about this.
One of the larger monkeys thrust out his chin and ambled forward the last few steps, being careful not to make a sound.
Between the buzzing of the flies and all of the noise the first monkey was making as it ate, there was no way it could have heard anything.
The rock came down. Crunch. Blood splattered up, and the feeding monkey toppled over, its broken skull hidden by the grass.
The murderer stood over it, holding its bloody rock and staring down at its victim. For a second Catalina thought it might be feeling a shred of remorse, but then it grinned with a mouthful of teeth and smashed its rock down over and over again. Blood sprayed in all directions, drenching the grass. The two hench-monkeys began hopping up and down. They smashed their rocks on the ground in imitation, hooting and roaring, and grinning.
The scene panned away and a Gray appeared standing there, watching the carnage. It said something. Another alien voice replied, closer to the scene, “Yek.”
This is some kind of recording, Catalina realized. They were seeing what one of the Grays had seen on Earth a long, long time ago. Catalina wondered if this was their first experience with humans—witnessing a murder committed by one of humanity’s earliest ancestors.
Their perspective turned back to the fore to see that the trio of monkeys were now feasting on the zebra carcass that they’d been coveting earlier.
The scene faded away, and another one appeared. This time it was the dead of night and freezing cold. Catalina shivered and hugged her shoulders. She stood on a dirt road in a peaceful village of huts. Orange fires glowed, and embers crackled up into the night’s sky. A horse whinnied. The smells of roasting meat filled the air. People ambled down the street, some of them singing merrily as they went, others speaking in hushed voices. A family with two young children walked by, waving to the people they knew. The man shouted out something in a European language that Catalina couldn’t quite identify. Someone else shouted back, more distantly. In the distance, waves crashed on the shore. It seemed like such a peaceful place that Catalina wished she could actually visit it.
Then someone called out urgently and all the merriment stopped. A horn blew, a keening wail, and people screamed. Catalina heard a whistling noise.
Their viewpoint snapped up to the sky. A cloud of arrows glinted in the firelight, seeming to stop and hover high above their heads. They sparkled like stars as they fell.
The Gray whose perspective they shared dived under the eaves of the nearest hut. Pfft pfft pfft! Arrows rained down, deadly wraiths in the night. People screamed as they fell.
The horn blew again, and again—a warning to flee. Catalina heard swords clashing, the grunts and cries of battle. Their viewpoint turned toward the sound and they saw a horde of men come rushing up a sandy beach, swords and axes glinting, their row boats perched on the shore, rocking with the waves. Village guardsmen screamed as they died, cut to ribbons by the overwhelming force of the invading army. The Gray watched quietly as the invaders stormed through the village, bursting into huts and kicking down doors. Women and children screamed. Catalina pressed her hands to her temples and shut her eyes, willing the images to leave.
Strong arms enfolded her, and she heard Alexander whisper, “It’s okay. Shh. Shh. It’s okay,” he said, stroking her hair.
That was when she realized that she was sobbing. After a while, the screaming stopped, replaced by a crackling roar. She forced herself to look. The peaceful village was gone, the huts burning—each one a funeral pyre. Shadowy human forms were splayed out on both sides of the street. The victorious army gathered and stood to watch the village burn. Someone near the front of the group threw up a fist and roared in triumph, his bloody sword casting slivers of firelight in all directions. The others cheered and clanged their weapons on their shields.
It reminded her of the monkeys hooting and roaring as they smashed their rocks on the ground.
The scene vanished, and another one appeared. They stood on the blood-soaked sand of a Roman Colosseum, watching men, women, and children be torn to shreds by hungry lions while a crowd of thousands cheered. Catalina shook her head, horrified.
Another scene—Mongol hordes riding across the steppes, an entire city burning in the background behind them.
Another—the trenches of World War I. Gun smoke swirled, the air thick with the stench of urine and blood. Wounded soldiers sobbed and moaned as their fellows rushed out for revenge, firing blindly.
Catalina almost sighed with relief when that scene faded and the following one showed a relatively peaceful setting: soldiers warming their hands over a giant bonfire, others piling on logs.
Then she noticed the swastikas on their uniforms, and she realized what they were burning. This was a concentration camp in World War II.
Following that—an aerial view over a bright green spit of land surrounded by water. Then came blinding, actinic flashes of light and the distinctive mushroom cloud of an atom bomb going off. Hiroshima.
The scenes went on and on, recounting ancient wars until she saw a period of relative peace. Time lapse footage revealed cities around the world rising ever higher, their architecture changing, modernizing. Traffic on the ground spread to the sky as hover cars took over. A space elevator appeared, soaring up from the equator. Followed by another one.
Verdant green domes popped up on Mars and the Moon, spreading like a rash across barren landscapes. Fledgling colonies and research stations appeared on Titan, Europa, and Ganymede.
Massive war fleets cruised over Earth with the entire nuclear arsenal of the world, ushering in another cold war.
Then came the Last War. Fleets clashed, slicing each other to ribbons, and nuclear missiles rained from orbit, hitting Earth’s largest cities, but stopping miraculously short of a nuclear winter.
The mushroom clouds faded, and more time lapse snapshots followed as the Earth licked its wounds and rebuilt. Another orbital view—the Gulf of Mexico below. A lump rose in Catalina’s throat as she watched a dazzling flash of light erupt from there. A plume of water vapor and debris shot all the way into orbit from that impact.
Catalina remembered. Her own son, Dorian, had been partly responsible for that devastation. Millions had d
ied just so that two of the Earth’s largest corporations could make bigger profits.
Following that, the AI, Benevolence, had taken control of the Earth’s billions of bots and used them to take over the Earth in order to protect humanity from themselves.
Catalina felt sure that would be it. There had been no more wars, no more massacres since Benevolence had taken over. The solar system was at peace, even if it was an uneasy peace. The last conflict of any note had been the brief one-sided battle they’d fought with the Grays.
But she was wrong.
A final scene appeared, this one showed two space fleets clashing. Missiles streaked between them, triggering devastating explosions and littering space with debris. Clouds of fighters and drones dove and spun, spitting hypervelocity rounds and tearing each other apart. Capital ships cracked in half, carved to pieces by invisible lasers.
Catalina assumed they must have gone back to one of the battles from the Last War.
“Do you recognize this?” Catalina whispered to Alexander, recalling that he’d fought in that war.
He shook his head and pointed over her shoulder. She turned, following that gesture. That was when she saw the planet in the background—the entire globe was covered in a blanket of angry gray clouds, hot orange magma peeking through the gaps.
Catalina shook her head in disbelief. “Where is this?”
That scene faded and back were the glossy black walls of the room.
“It is Err-th,” a stuttering voice said. The Gray reappeared, and she saw it blink for the first time, translucent membranes sweeping down over its large, slanting black eyeballs. “N-ow, do y-oo un-dur-st-and wu-high w-ee c-all y-oo wr-etch-ed cr-eet-churs?”
Chapter 22
“You don’t know the future,” Alexander said.
Doors reappeared in the wall, and Esther walked in. The Gray turned and inclined its head to her before withdrawing quietly to one side.
Catalina shivered when she saw the other woman. Her eyes were solid black, just as the Grays’ were.
“What you saw is what could happen once your species discovers how to create sufficient quantities of antimatter,” Esther said in a toneless, genderless voice.
She no longer looked or sounded human.
“You’re only focusing on the negative side of humanity,” Ben said. “They can learn from their mistakes. They already have. Periods of peace have been getting longer and wars shorter.”
“As time went by they became more civilized,” Esther admitted. “But they also developed more and more powerful weapons. That trend will continue, making their demise inevitable.”
Ben thrust out his jaw. “You’re wrong.”
“I’m not wrong.”
“So what if you aren’t?” Remo demanded. “What’s it to you if we wipe ourselves out?”
“The Grays were like you once, but now they are part of the All, enlightened and peaceful, just as humanity will be.”
“You’re nothing but a virus, a parasite that evolved in some microbial soup,” Doctor Laskin sneered. “You have no right to play God.”
The Gray standing beside Esther produced a small black sidearm with a dish-shaped barrel and aimed it at Doctor Laskin.
Esther smiled patiently and waved the Gray off, as if shooing a fly. “I have brought you all aboard this ship and explained myself for a reason. Now that you’ve seen how wretched your species is, and how inevitable your demise, you know why I must join you with the All. Tell me how you separated these three from me, and why I can no longer join with them.” Esther’s gaze passed briefly over Markov, Alexander, and Desiree.
“No,” Ben said.
Esther’s smile vanished, and she glared at him. “You have seen what the All is like. It is not evil.”
Remo snorted.
Esther ignored him. “Benevolence promised I could have all of the humans, and these three were human when I found them.”
“He promised you could what?” Commander Johnson demanded.
“They don’t know...” Esther’s expression became sly, and she glanced from Ben to Commander Johnson and back again. “They don’t know?”
Ben set his jaw, saying nothing.
Turning to the commander, Esther said, “Benevolence contacted me while I was still many light years away. He asked me what I wanted and why I was coming. We spoke at length about the destructiveness of humanity, and he shared my view that you would eventually destroy yourselves—and his machine people along with you.”
Catalina gaped at Ben. “You knew they were coming!”
He shot her a guilty look, but still said nothing.
Esther went on, now grinning broadly. “I told Benevolence about the All, and what I planned to do. I told him that if he chose not to resist, I would let him join my Federation and we would co-exist peacefully. He agreed, but he said that he couldn’t be seen to surrender. He asked if he could make a show of resistance. I told him he could attack my harvesters once they arrived. He could pretend to know nothing about me, and then surrender in the face of overwhelming force, which is exactly what he did. All of humanity is mine, just as we agreed, but you chose to break the agreement to save these three. Why?”
Ben scowled at her. “You should take what you can and go.”
“That was not what we agreed to,” Esther said. “We agreed that I would have all the humans, and in exchange, I would not harm the machine people. It’s not too late. Reverse what you did and tell me how you did it.”
“That’s what you really want. You want to know how we cured them so you can find a way to fight back. You’re afraid of us,” Ben said.
The Gray adjusted his aim to Ben, and Esther gave no reply for a long moment. Then she appeared to come to a decision, and she said, “If you will not live up to your side of the agreement, I will not live up to mine. The machine people will all die.”
“I thought the All wasn’t evil?”
“You are a machine person. If you would betray an agreement between myself and your leader, then you are not as unified as I was led to believe. That means you share humanity’s flaws, yet I cannot fix you by joining you with the All, so you leave me no choice. I will have to destroy you. Unless... you can prove to me that the machine people can be reasoned with.”
“Synthetics are a new species, a better one,” Ben said. “We won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. There will never be another war—at least not one that’s fought among our own kind.”
“Exactly! With whom, then, do you suppose you will fight?” Esther replied. “You will fight with me! You already are!”
“The Grays told us what you did to them. They were peaceful. They didn’t even have weapons until they met you! They weren’t anything like us, and you forced yourself upon them anyway.”
“A filthy lie. They would never speak ill of me.”
“Not everyone is under your control. There are those who escaped.”
Esther’s expression turned thoughtful. “You would believe a species who’s been abducting people from your planet for thousands of years? You do know what they were doing—the genetic experiments, the hybrids... They harvested human DNA and mixed it with their own, creating foul creatures. These are the people you would believe?”
“It’s your fault they had to do that,” Ben accused. “They were trying to create a species that would be immune to you.”
Esther smiled. “The hybrids all went insane, but I suppose we shouldn’t despise humble beginnings, should we?”
“What were you doing to us?” Catalina interrupted, her voice trembling with outrage and fear. “When we first woke up here.”
Esther beamed at her, and then looked away. “I’m disappointed to hear that you won’t cooperate, Benjamin, but I suppose there will be other species to join with the All.” Esther turned to leave and doors materialized in the wall behind her, sliding open to reveal a corridor with matching glossy black walls.
“Wait! What are you going to do with us?” Desiree asked.
>
“I’m sending you home. You should arrive just in time to witness the fruits of your defiance.”
The Gray glanced their way and followed Esther out. The doors slid shut behind them, and everyone turned to look at Ben.
“You knew that thing was coming,” Commander Johnson said slowly, deliberately, looking as if she might lunge at the boy. “That excuse about making everyone synthetic to bridge the gap between humans and androids was a lie. What were you really doing on board the Liberty?”
“Nano Nova and the synthetics were a way to fight back against the Entity. The Grays helped us. Their research led them to believe that no purely biological life-form would ever be immune to the Entity, so we had to create a new form of hybrid—one that would be more artificial than not. The Liberty was supposed to be long gone by the time the Entity arrived, and I was supposed to have had time to make everyone on board immune.”
“The nanites were already programmed,” Catalina realized.
“Yes.”
“Then what were you programming in such a hurry?” she asked, remembering him sitting at the computer terminal in the bio-safety lab, with rapidly scrolling lines of code all around him.
“I was programming back doors into the drones and into the Liberty’s control systems.”
“So what was the plan?” Alexander asked. “Make everyone immune, but we still end up going to Proxima, so we could rub our immunity in the Entity’s face?”
“A ship from the Grays’ resistance was supposed to rendezvous with us along the way. They were going to help us escape.”
“Escape?” Commander Johnson shook her head. “We never should have left! We should have stayed to fight! Spread the cure on Earth! If you had shared all of this with us sooner, we could have prepared—instead of sending out a colony ship to a new world, we could have banded together to save the worlds we already have!”
“Stay and fight against an enemy we can’t even see, with technology far superior to our own?” Ben asked, shaking his head.
“Maybe you weren’t watching that little presentation,” Commander Johnson said. “If there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s fighting.”
Exodus: Book 3 of the New Frontiers Series (A Dark Space Tie-In) Page 17
