Ascent

by Morgan Rice

  The one standing at the heart of the trio spoke. Its words came out in English from a translator on its arm, but Kevin didn’t need it to translate the flat monotone. His brain did that for him.

  “Welcome, Kevin McKenzie. We have been waiting for you.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Kevin stared at the alien who had spoken, horror flooding through him.

  The alien stared back at him with those large pale eyes, and it spoke again while the two others beside it stood silent, the words translating in Kevin’s head before the device it held could do it.

  “This one is Purest Xan of the Hive,” the alien said. “The two beside this one are Purest Ix and Purest Ull. And you are Chloe Baxter and Kevin McKenzie, ape things of the planet Earth.”

  Kevin was stunned. It took him several moments to collect his thoughts.

  “We’re humans,” Kevin said, wanting to correct them, to talk to them, even to persuade them. After all, they were talking to him in a way that they hadn’t bothered talking to anybody else.

  “As I said,” Purest Xan replied, “ape things. Lesser things, but perhaps things worth learning from.”

  There was no emotion to the way the alien said it, but there was something about the way it talked about learning from them that sent a shiver down Kevin’s spine.

  “What do you mean?” Kevin demanded. “What are you going to do to us?”

  “Our world ships travel to gather resources,” Purest Xan said. “Technology, minerals, minds, bodies we can reshape. We will test you and understand you until you prove worthless. Then we will discard you.”

  Kevin saw Chloe’s face turn pale, and he could share that fear. The thought of being ripped apart for study and then discarded was terrifying.

  “We aren’t afraid of you,” Chloe said, struggling to put a defiant note in her voice.

  “Yes, you are,” Purest Xan said. “You are a lesser being, with fears and needs, weaknesses and flaws. You are not of the Hive. You are not of the Purest. We have no such weaknesses, only the improvements of our flesh shapers.”

  “You think you’re perfect?” Chloe demanded. “You think looking like that, you’re perfect?”

  “Not yet,” Purest Xan said. “But we will be. Enough speaking to lesser orders.”

  The alien turned to the others with it, and Kevin knew that the next thing it would say was grab them.

  “Run!” he yelled to Chloe, and they spun away from the aliens, starting to sprint as fast as they could from the square. Kevin ran as hard as his body would let him, ignoring the pain and effort, ignoring the way his illness tried to drag him down with every step and hoping that, if he and Chloe could make enough ground, they might be able to lose Purest Xan and the others with it in the chaos of the world ship.

  “Where are we going?” Chloe demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Kevin said. He had no plan right then, no idea what they were going to do next.

  He kept running, risking a quick look back to see if the aliens were chasing them. They just stood there, apparently concentrating. One of them touched something on its arm.

  Without warning, the world felt heavier. It felt as though heavy weights were pressing down on top of Kevin, too solid to lift. He struggled to keep standing, and saw Chloe doing the same, pushing up against it as if she could lift the sky above her. It wasn’t the air, though; it felt as though Kevin’s own bones and muscles were too heavy, gravity dragging him down toward the floor many times harder than it should have.

  “It’s the stuff that lets them stick to the walls,” Kevin called out, thinking of the way the aliens had been able to walk sideways and upside down through the interior of their world ship. If they could control gravity well enough to do that, of course they would.

  Chloe shouted back, “It’s dragging me down. We’re trapped!”

  She sounded on the verge of panic, just as she’d been back in the spaceship.

  The gravity pulled him down to his knees, the pressure making it hard to breathe. He fell forward, feeling the weight of his own body pinning him down to the floor.

  A scream of frustration from Chloe told him that the same thing must have happened to her. It took everything Kevin had just to be able to roll over onto his back and look across to where she lay, pinned in the same way.

  “No, let me go! Let me go!” she screamed. Kevin could see her crying as she tried to thrash her way clear of the force holding her in place.

  The three aliens were there then, and they must have sent some signal to others, because two hulking creatures with carapaces like armor walked out from the golden spire carrying what looked like two large metal frames. They set them down near Kevin and Chloe, standing them upright so that Kevin could see the glasslike sheets set inside them, making them look like two windows standing up on their own.

  “Attempting to run was foolish,” Purest Xan said. The alien gave a signal to the two armored creatures, and they reached down to grab Chloe from the floor. As soon as they lifted her, she started to thrash and twist, struggling to get free, but they held her as easily as a feather while she cried.

  “Stop it,” Kevin said. “Leave her alone!”

  It didn’t seem to make any difference to them. The creatures were as implacable as machines, moving with the kind of strength that said they could have easily torn Chloe and Kevin apart. They took Chloe and lifted her against one of the clear plates, and one of the Purest pressed something on its arm again. Chloe stuck to it as surely as if they’d glued her there, still fighting against it, and still crying when nothing happened.

  They came for Kevin then, and big hands clamped around Kevin’s arms, lifting him and pressing him against the second glass panel without giving him any chance to fight. Kevin kicked at them, but his foot just bounced off their armored hides. Then the alien with the device touched it, and Kevin was stuck to the glass just like Chloe.

  It didn’t feel like being glued to something, though. There was no stickiness to it. It was more like lying down, except that he couldn’t hope to get up because of the gravity pressing him into place. It wasn’t as strong as on the floor; it was even quite comfortable if he didn’t try to fight it, but Kevin couldn’t hope to pull his way clear of it.

  “Kevin,” Chloe said, looking absolutely distraught as she hung there on her own frame.

  “I’m right here, Chloe,” he said. He didn’t try to promise her that it would all be okay. That didn’t feel like a promise he could make then. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  It turned out that they were both going somewhere though, because the large, armored aliens lifted the frames, carrying them like builders moving panes of glass into position. Weirdly, Kevin had no sensation of being lifted, because for him, down still felt as though it was toward the frame.

  “Where are you taking us?” Chloe demanded. “Let us go!”

  “Try to stay calm,” Kevin said, hoping that none of the fear he felt in that moment crept into his voice. He was afraid of what might happen to both of them, but he was really afraid for Chloe. With how much she hated being trapped, this was the worst possible thing that could happen to them.

  Except that it wasn’t, and Kevin knew it. There were still plenty of worse things that could happen. Would happen, if they didn’t figure out a way out of it.

  The aliens carried them toward a golden spire, through a large door that opened automatically to admit them. The interior was everything that the rest of the world ship was not: clean and bright and comfortable looking, so that to Kevin it looked like a very expensive hotel might have, or perhaps a palace. There wasn’t the huge variety of different angles and directions here, either; unlike the rest of the ship, everyone seemed to have agreed on which way was up.

  They carried Kevin and Chloe up to a room where dome-shaped banks of machinery stood, looking half-built, half-grown. A section of the wall flickered with an image of the Earth below, and Kevin didn’t know if that had been done simply to stop the walls from being feature
less, or as a kind of additional cruelty.

  Purest Xan followed them into the room, standing between them, by one of the dome-shaped devices. It took tiny, squid-like things from an opening within the dome one by one, each no bigger than the tip of the alien’s finger. Purest Xan placed them on Kevin’s head, where they stuck, feeling warm and slimy all at once.

  “What is all this?” Kevin demanded. “What are you doing to us?”

  “We are going to examine you,” Purest Xan replied. “We will see what use you are to the Hive. There will be pain.”

  It said it as though it was nothing, or at least as though it didn’t care. Kevin could hear Chloe crying again now, and he wanted to say something, wanted to comfort her. Then the pain hit, and there was no time to do anything but cry out with it.

  It felt like cold fingers rummaging around in his thoughts, picking things up and putting them back again, or maybe it was the tentacles of the things stuck to Kevin’s head. He tried to push them out, concentrating as hard as he could, but it made no difference; it just brought more pain.

  Kevin could feel other presences now, dozens of minds, hundreds, connected in a kind of silent communion, their collective presence pressing into him and exploring every corner of his being. He heard himself scream, and he heard Chloe too, suggesting that exactly the same thing was happening to her.

  Kevin saw images then, flooding into the forefront of his mind and flickering there. There were images of friends, of family, of everything that had recently happened. Kevin saw images of the Survivors jumping into his mind, and he tried to think about something, anything else, so that the aliens wouldn’t know where they were. He could feel their lack of interest though; it seemed to make no difference to them.

  He started to see other things, the visions flickering through the rest of it, although the truth was that he couldn’t tell whether they were real visions or something flowing back along the connection to the Hive’s collective. The images filled his mind, blotting out the pain, the sensation of being pinned in place, even the fear of what was happening to Chloe.

  He saw a planet floating in space, huge and dull. Moons spun around it, but even as Kevin watched, he realized that they weren’t natural moons, but more world ships. He saw one move out of orbit, the space around it bending and shifting as it moved impossibly fast for something that size.

  He felt his consciousness being pulled down toward the surface of the planet, and as he reached it, he saw that the surface was blasted and ruined, polluted and inhospitable. There were towns there in spite of that, filled with hunched figures who looked similar to the Purest, but hunched over and changed, their flesh twisted to live in the ruined environment. Kevin found it hard to believe that anyone would want to live in a place like that, but through the connection to the Hive he knew that these figures didn’t get a choice. They were the ones not chosen for the world ship.

  He saw other things there. He saw the camps of creatures stolen from world after world. He saw the flesh factories where they were tested and reshaped, tortured in way after way, with electricity and fire and more. He saw creatures dissected while alive, or forced to breed with one another in combinations that produced monsters. Among the desolation of the wasted planet, he saw small green domes too, like islands of perfection among the horror of the rest of it. Kevin wasn’t surprised to see golden towers standing at the heart of each one.

  He came back to himself, gasping, feeling as though every scrap of energy had been pulled out of him. Kevin lay on the platform, looking around and seeing only Chloe in the room now. It felt as though the visions had only lasted seconds, but it must have been longer, to give Purest Xan enough time to leave the room.

  “Chloe?” Kevin said.

  He heard her groan, her eyes opening as she looked over at him. They were red with crying now as she stared over at him.

  “I saw… I saw…”

  “I know,” Kevin said. “I saw it too.”

  “They’re going to kill us,” Chloe said. “They’re going to pull us apart to see how we work. They’re going to experiment on us like some little kid pulling the wings off flies.”

  Kevin would have nodded if he could have pulled his head away from the frame enough to do it. That was the problem, though: they could talk about how much they needed to get out of there, they could see everything that was going to happen, but they still couldn’t move. All they could do was stay there, staring at the screen in front of them, and the Earth rotating slowly upon it.

  It took a second or two to realize that it was getting smaller.

  It was gradual at first, the planet shrinking away a little at a time. Then it started to move faster, and faster still, receding until it was just a dot. Then it wasn’t even that as the space around the world ship folded around it and it shot away through space.

  Kevin stared at the screen in horror. He didn’t know where they were going, or why, but whatever could persuade the aliens to move their whole world ship from the Earth, he knew that it couldn’t be good for him and Chloe.

  Or for Luna.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Luna fought. With every scrap of energy she could find, she tried to fight back against the immobility creeping through her body, making her slow, making her stop. She stood in the middle of Sedona, at the heart of a group of controlled people, and her mind screamed with the effort of trying to keep herself from becoming like them.

  It felt as though her body was turning into stone, or… no, more like her limbs were going to sleep while inside she was still awake. She couldn’t feel her fingertips, but she kept on fighting. She could feel herself slipping into the controlled state, though, becoming more and more of a prisoner in her own body with every passing second. It felt as though she was trapped behind glass, her personality and her ability to control herself an exhibit in some museum made from her own flesh and bones.

  The world even looked as though she was looking through a kind of strangely filtered glass, colors shifted so that all the ones Luna expected had a milky opacity to them, and new ones crept in around the edges of her vision. Luna didn’t need a mirror to know that her pupils would be a vivid white by now, and she hated it.

  I will keep fighting, she told herself. I won’t give up. Kevin needs me.

  In spite of her determination, it was hard to ignore the fact that her arms and legs wouldn’t do what she ordered them to. Luna was just standing there, the same as all the others waiting in Sedona, as still as an unused puppet, unable to do more than blink and breathe by herself.

  Luna fought to do more. She focused on the smallest finger of her right hand, willing it to straighten. It seemed to move achingly slowly, but it moved. It moved! She tried to move the next finger, focusing on each joint, each muscle…

  She screamed inwardly when nothing happened.

  At least Kevin had gotten away. Luna had seen him make it through the ranks of the controlled and get to one of the ships. She’d seen him and Chloe sucked up into one of them too, and that made Luna worry more than anything that was happening to her.

  You have to fight, she told herself again. Kevin is stuck on an alien spaceship without you. You know he’ll just get into trouble on his own, and not even the fun kind.

  Of course, Kevin wasn’t on his own, but that thought didn’t make things better. It wasn’t that Luna hated Chloe or anything, but it was pretty obvious that she liked Kevin, and… well… so did Luna. It was weird how that was easier to admit when her mind was busy being taken over by aliens, but it was, maybe because she knew no one else would find out.

  She’d tried making it obvious to him plenty of times in the past, although he never seemed to get it. Maybe that was a boy thing, or maybe it was just a Kevin thing, able to understand messages from across the galaxy, but not anything right in front of his face. Now he was up on an alien spaceship with Chloe, and if they weren’t exactly alone together, Luna was pretty sure that aliens didn’t count. Even if nothing happened, Luna still wasn’t
sure that Chloe was a good choice to get Kevin back safely. Yes, she’d helped save Luna on the boat, and she could hotwire a car, but that wasn’t the same thing as hijacking a spaceship, and Luna didn’t trust her not to panic when things went wrong.

  Then things did go wrong, and Luna had a perfect view of it.

  One moment, the aliens’ world ship was hanging moon-like in the sky; the next, the sky around it rippled and flickered, as though space was a pond that someone had thrown a stone into. The world ship started to drift away, its shadow passing from the sky. There was a moment when the space it was in seemed to fold around it, and then it was gone, moving far faster than Luna could hope to follow.

  For a brief moment, hope flared in her. Was it over? Kevin had gone up into the small ship above Sedona, and that had gone up to the world ship, and now both were gone. Had he found a way to end this? Had he and Chloe saved them all?

  Luna tried to move her arm, hoping against hope, but nothing happened. Nothing had changed.

  A bark beside her caught Luna’s attention. Bobby was there, the Old English sheepdog running up to Luna and nudging against her leg in a way that might almost have knocked her over if he had done it before the controlled breathed their vapor into her. As it was, she stood as solid as stone, unmoved and unmoving, not even reacting as he moved to her hand, licking her with a big, rough tongue.

  Good boy, Luna thought, and tried to say it, but she couldn’t get the sounds out. She couldn’t reach out to pet him either, and that just showed her how much control the aliens still had over her. Bobby nudged against her again and then ran back as if expecting her to follow, and when she didn’t, he lay down and whined, looking up at her with sad eyes.

  I’m sorry, Bobby, Luna thought, but she couldn’t say that, either.

  It wasn’t the only thing she was sorry for. Around her, Luna could see the Dustside bikers standing just as still as everyone else. She could see Bear hulking over the rest of them, all of the sense of strength and command leached out of him by his transformation. She could see Cub just a little way away, the boy staring back at her blankly, where before he’d been confident and obviously interested in her.