Ascent

by Morgan Rice

  “We did it,” Luna said, joyously. “We did it.”

  “We did,” Cub said with a tight smile. “There’s just one problem.”

  “What?” Luna asked, and Cub pointed to the window. Luna looked out and saw them.

  There were more than there had been at the Survivors’ base, far more. Worse, there weren’t just the controlled out there. Alien ships flew in, hovering just a short way above the ground. Where they stopped, things dropped down that reminded Luna far too much of the things that had been in the storm sewers. They moved forward on too many legs, trampling the controlled who got in their way.

  “We’ve left it too late,” Cub said. “We’re surrounded!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Kevin was at school. He wasn’t sure how he was back at school, but right then, nothing much made sense. The world seemed to spin, and he managed to stumble his way to his feet.

  “Kevin McKenzie, what are you doing?” his teacher called out.

  “I…” Kevin shook his head. “I was on a spaceship. The Hive… we’d escaped the Hive…”

  He tried to remember, but his head hurt so much now.

  “Kevin, you’re interrupting the lesson. There’s no time for more of your alien nonsense.”

  “Kevin sees aliens. Kevin sees aliens,” his classmates chanted.

  No, this wasn’t right. It didn’t happen like this. It hadn’t happened like this. He only learned about the Hive later…

  “Kevin, are you all right?” his teacher asked.

  Kevin tried to tell him that he was fine, but the only thing that came out was a spill of numbers in an endless stream that filled the world. The numbers spilled out from him and into his classmates, and now they were chanting the numbers, making them sound like a taunt even as they fell into step with one another.

  No, this wasn’t right, either. It hadn’t happened like this; none of it had.

  “Right, we’re taking you to the principal,” the teacher said.

  They marched down corridors that Kevin remembered from the NASA institute, in the direction of a spot he recognized as Professor Brewster’s office. The doors along the way opened in response to the stream of numbers spilling from him, although his mother looked at him sternly every time he spoke. When had it gone from his teacher to his mother leading him?

  The door to Professor Brewster’s office was open now, but the scientist wasn’t within. Instead, Purest Lux was there, along with a blade-limbed creature in surgical scrubs.

  “Ah, Kevin,” it said. “I see that you have been disrupting lessons again. We will have to do something about that. Are you feeling unwell?”

  Kevin wanted to say that he felt fine, but he didn’t. Right then, it was as though every symptom that he’d ever have was there at once, his head pounding, his balance nonexistent, pain and weakness shooting through his body.

  “We can make all of it go away,” Purest Lux assured him. The alien gestured, and the nurse with the blades for hands came forward while the world continued to shift, and whirl, and spin…

  ***

  The ship spun uncontrollably, and as he came back to himself, Kevin spun with it, floating free in the confines of its cockpit. He tumbled, weightless, and both Chloe and Ro tumbled around him, Chloe struggling for whatever grip she could find, Ro screaming out in obvious, uncontrollable fear.

  “I do not like this emotion!” Ro called out.

  Kevin tried to imagine what it would be like to have never felt fear before, or hope, or any other emotion. Even though he’d felt the blank logic of the Hive, it wasn’t the same for him, because he’d had all the time growing up to get the hang of emotions, at least in theory. He couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like for someone who didn’t know what fear was like, or who had never believed that they were going to die before.

  Kevin was scared too, of everything that was happening, of the great world ship outside, of the smaller ship that had shot at them, but he’d spent far too much time already being sure he was going to die to be paralyzed by the fear now.

  “We have to stop spinning!” he yelled.

  He reached out his arms until he could make contact with the walls, and pushed off them like a swimmer in the direction of the pilot’s chair. He managed to pull himself into it, strapping himself in and reaching out a hand for Chloe as she floated past. She grabbed for him, and Kevin’s fingers closed around hers as he pulled her in close enough that she could grab hold of the pilot’s console.

  “Ro next,” Kevin said, waiting until the alien was in reach.

  “Ro, hold out your hands,” Chloe shouted.

  “I don’t think I can. It’s all so frightening. There’s so much that—”

  “It’s okay to be scared,” Chloe said. “It’s okay to feel all kinds of things, but you can’t panic, or you’ll make it worse. You still have to do things. You have to trust people. The right people. Hold out your hands, Ro.”

  The alien floated a moment longer, then stretched out his arms toward them. Kevin was able to grab one, and Chloe the other, pulling him in to grab hold of the seat.

  “Ro, I need you to tell me how to stop the ship spinning,” Kevin said. “We’re out of control.”

  “I…” The alien appeared to think for a moment. “The joystick controls might still be functioning. If we can level out, we can see how bad the damage is.”

  Kevin reached for the joystick, wrestling with it in an effort to get the ship back on a level course. The stars spun around him, fast enough that they were blurs as the ship continued to spiral. Kevin hauled on the stick, throwing his weight onto it as he willed it to stop spinning. Chloe lent her weight to it too, her hands wrapping over Kevin’s, even though it left her floating again.

  Slowly, though, the ship leveled out, the planet visible ahead of them, the Hive’s world ship visible above, glowing with a blaze of energy. Kevin had to fight the way the ship wanted to go into a roll in the other direction, holding it there as steadily as he could.

  “The loss of gravity means that our internal shield is damaged,” Ro said. “We need to reboot it, or we will lose all of our oxygen.” A look of what Kevin guessed was terror crossed his face. “We’re going to die. We’re—”

  “We’re going to fix this,” Kevin insisted. “Chloe, can you fly the ship? Ro, you need to show me how to restart the shield like you said.”

  He released himself from the chair as Chloe clambered in, taking the joystick and setting the ship wobbling.

  “Hey, this is fun,” she said. “Trucks, boats, and now spaceships. I’m running out of things to drive.”

  “She makes jokes because she is scared,” Ro said, as Kevin floated over in his direction. “I saw that in her mind when I was there, but I don’t know how to do it.”

  “That’s supposed to be private, Ro,” Chloe shot over.

  Kevin pushed the alien’s floating form gently away from the cockpit space.

  “Come on,” he said. “You still need to show me how to get the shield working.”

  “Here,” Ro said, pointing. “This relay should control it. We need to open this panel.”

  Kevin braced his feet against the wall, pulling until he felt the panel give way. There were things inside that looked like wires, and other things that looked more grown than made. Points on the relay were blackened and withered, as if burnt by fire.

  “We need to reroute it,” Ro said, pressing long fingers to a couple of points in the relay. “Yes, I am not Pure anymore, but I know how to do this. I know.”

  There was a glow as some kind of connection came back into place, and Kevin found himself tumbling the short distance to the floor, landing with a bump.

  “The shield is back in place,” Ro said.

  “So we’re protected?” Kevin asked, hoping it would be enough to shield them from everything from the energy weapons of the planet’s inhabitants to the Hive’s world-shattering blast. Even as he said it, he knew the answer. The first blast had ripped through them l
ike it was nothing.

  “The shield keeps air in, allows control of gravity, and stops minor impacts, no more,” Ro said.

  That, Kevin suspected, was going to be a problem, especially since the view out of the window showed the ship that had shot at them coming around for another pass.

  “We’re limping in space,” Chloe said, pulling at the joystick. “This thing is moving slower than the boat did after the storm.”

  Kevin suspected that it was going a lot faster than that, but if they couldn’t maneuver properly, then it didn’t really make a difference. They were just sitting ducks for the aliens who were even now lining up to fire at them again. Kevin almost thought of them as his enemies, but they weren’t, they were the opposite of enemies. They just thought that he and the others were something that they weren’t.

  Maybe they should let them know the truth, then.

  “Is the radio working?” Kevin asked.

  Chloe shrugged. “I don’t know, let me try. Testing, testing, can anybody hear us?”

  “Who is this?” a voice called over the radio, and Kevin recognized the language of the aliens who had tried to warn them even as his mind translated it automatically.

  “Wow,” Chloe said. “I can understand them.”

  “It is probably an effect of the symbiont,” Ro said, which just made Kevin look uncomfortably at the thing covering Chloe’s arm. He hated that the people around him kept being changed or hurt. He hated that he’d told them to take her away and do it.

  “Who is this?” the voice repeated.

  “This is Kevin McKenzie,” Kevin said into the radio. “I have my friend Chloe here, and an alien named Ro who used to be one of the Hive. Um… please don’t shoot us down.”

  The radio crackled. “Kevin McKenzie? The human who tried to trick us? Who has helped to destroy this world?”

  “Um…” Kevin said, not sure what kind of answer there could be to that. It felt as though anything he said right then would mean trouble for them all.

  “That’s right,” Chloe said into the radio, while he was still trying to think of what to say. “They made him into one of them. They made him do… all kinds of stuff. But we got him back. We broke out.”

  Through the window, Kevin could still see the ship approaching, hanging there in front of them. Its weapons glowed with the prospect of the blast to come.

  “Impossible,” the voice said. “Those taken by the Hive do not break free of it. There is no way to beat the whole Hive.”

  “There is,” Kevin insisted. “I saw it while I was one of them. I know their weaknesses.”

  There was the briefest of pauses from the radio, presumably as whoever was on it conferred with a superior.

  “The risk is too great,” the voice there said. “We have never heard of anyone breaking free from the Hive, and you have already tried to trick us. We believe that this is just some attempt to get close to us. We are sorry, but you must be stopped.”

  “Wait!” Kevin shouted. “You need to listen to us. The Hive is going to try to destroy your world.”

  “We know,” the voice said, “and we cannot evacuate because you are targeting our escape ships.”

  Kevin winced at the reminder of that. He’d been the one to suggest it, and to find the ships for the Hive. He looked over to Ro.

  “Are you still blocking the Hive?” he asked.

  Ro shook his head. “There has been too much happening to maintain concentration, but I could try to reestablish the connection.”

  “Do it,” Kevin said.

  He saw Ro sink into the trance of concentration that he’d held before. “I have it.”

  “Listen to me,” Kevin said. “The alien who used to be a part of the Hive is doing his best to confuse the Hive. It won’t last long, but it should give your ships some time to get away.”

  “Do you think we’re going to listen to you?” the voice at the other end of the line demanded. “After all you’ve done? After all the people who are dead because of you?”

  Kevin swallowed at the thought of that. He knew the things that he’d done as a part of the Hive.

  “They didn’t give Kevin any choice,” Chloe snapped. “And now, you don’t have any choice either. They’re going to blow your world up; you can either get your people off it or sit there and argue with us.”

  This time, the pause seemed to stretch out for several seconds, and in those seconds, Kevin found himself staring at the ship coming toward them. It still raced forward, its weapons still charged to deliver the killing blow. What would it be like if it did fire? Would it be instant for them this time, vaporized in a wash of energy? Would they be sucked out into space?

  Then the ship raced past, lost to view in an instant, and Kevin saw more ships rising up from the planet’s surface, rising like spores from a mushroom, or the dying gasp from a drowning man. They were the last life on the planet.

  Some found themselves shot down, caught out by Hive ships that were in the right place to intercept them. More got through, though, and Kevin could see the Hive’s vessels pulling back, moving into the world ship, seeking cover against what was going to come. The world ship hung there, white hot and menacing, charged with power, ready to fire.

  It fired.

  The beam lanced out from the world ship to the planet below in an instant, in a beam of radiance that looked like a pencil-thin line to Kevin, but must really have been far wider, because he’d seen the scale of the opening that they’d made in the world ship to let it fire through. That line of energy struck down at the world below and Kevin watched in horror as it did its work.

  “When they fire, the atmosphere boils off first,” Ro said, as a rim of red appeared around the planet, as if the air itself there were on fire. To Kevin, it made the whole thing look like a comet on a scale a hundred, a thousand times bigger. “They usually like to strip it of useful gases before they do it, because of that.”

  “Don’t,” Chloe said.

  “Then the seas boil, and the land burns,” Ro said, as Kevin saw what looked like swirling hurricanes traveling over the surface, arching up into space because there was no atmosphere to hold them in. “Again, the Hive would normally drain such liquids, but—”

  “Don’t tell us what’s happening,” Chloe said. “It’s horrible enough without you telling us.”

  Kevin had to agree that it was. The world below had been a place of blue and green, a vibrant, living place. Now, instead, it ran with waves of red and orange, burning, then charring, pressures building up within it, the energy breaking it apart. He saw fissures opening on the surface as the energy beam lanced inside, great gouts of volcanic magma flaring up the way the seas had. The world seemed to throb from within like a heart beating too fast, pushed to its limits, the energy poured into it too much for whatever liquid metals lay at its core…

  “Prepare yourselves,” Ro said, taking a grip on the pilot’s console. Kevin did the same.

  Then the world below exploded.

  It did it in a blaze of light so bright that for a moment or two, Kevin couldn’t see anything. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the spot where the world had been seemed to be burned onto the inside of his eyelids, caught in the instant of splintering into a hundred thousand fragments.

  The ship rolled and shook as rocks battered it, the impacts banging and rattling as they struck against it. Without the shields that they’d managed to get in place, Kevin was certain that they would have been torn into pieces. As it was, they bounced around on a tide of fragments, the energy of the explosion carrying them along like a boat being borne by a tidal wave. It felt like being on a rollercoaster, and it took all the strength Kevin had to cling onto the pilot’s console. He saw Ro flung across the ship by the force of it, slumping against the far wall, while Chloe’s face was white as she hung onto the ship’s joystick.

  The force seemed to last forever, and when it passed, it took several seconds for Kevin’s brain to register that it had. He groaned and managed to strugg
le up from the floor, only realizing as he did so that he’d fallen. Ro and Chloe were groaning too, and that was probably a good thing in its way, because at least it meant that they were both alive to do it.

  “What…” Kevin managed. He looked around, seeing rock after rock beyond the confines of the ship, drifting in a field of asteroids, some small, some the size of a car, some the size of a city or a small country. They drifted and jolted, some smashing into one another and fracturing apart.

  There was no sign of the world ship.

  “They’ve pulled back,” Ro said. He sounded confused. “But the Hive does not work like that. The Hive takes the resources. It collects all that it can. It does not waste.”

  “Not here,” Chloe said. “Here, they just wanted to destroy everything.”

  “They wanted to make an example,” Kevin said. He’d been a member of the Hive long enough to understand that. “They wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t just about taking what they could. They’ll be back, though.”

  Once they were sure that they’d made their point, once the ashes had cooled, they would come for what they could. Ro was right: the Hive didn’t waste.

  “We’ll need to get out of here before then,” Kevin said. “Where are we?”

  Ro looked at some of the instruments on the pilot’s console. “We’ve been pushed further out by the force of the blast into the system. Things will be unstable here, with the gravitational effect of the planet gone.”

  “Then we should find a way to go,” Kevin said. “We need to work out a way back.”

  “How?” Ro said. “This is a small craft, designed to dart to a world and fight, not travel across the galaxy.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Chloe said, jerking at the joystick. Kevin looked up, expecting to see the sky outside swinging around. Instead, nothing happened.

  They were stuck there. They had no power, no food, and nowhere to go even if they had all of it.

  They were stranded.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE