Twenty-seven
Jeremy awoke to darkness and the remnants of a
seductive dream in which a girl whispered questions that made no sense.
"What are you feeling, Jeremy? What do I make you think about? What
would you like me to do for you?"
Reorientation came with a jolt. He opened his eyes
to pitch blackness. The hard walls of a confined space absorbed his
initial cry of alarm. Abruptly claustrophobic, he cried out again and
scurried naked into a corner where panic continued to feed upon itself and
left him numb and gasping for breath.
He lay staring into the darkness, haunted by the
lingering memory of the girl, an agent of the Hive, but another human
being like himself. Or so he had thought at the time. He recalled soft
skin and a yielding body, drawing away when he failed to answer her
questions, pressing closer when he responded, even with nonsense.
And then he had found the cables connecting her to
machinery in the walls, a cable running from her lower spinal column like
the tail of an animal. She hadn't even been real.
Darkness was better than the nightmarish
interrogation, the claustrophobic space around him better by far than the
various fates his imagination could conjured. It wouldn't last, unless maybe the
Hive forgot about him, and let him die in peace.
Sounds of docking conducted through the bulkhead and
deck. He rolled to his knees in astonishment. Was he aboard a ship? He
had lost track of time. Existence itself had shattered into fragments of
surrealistic nightmares that couldn't be put together into a coherent
whole.
And now this, an apparent flight through space, alone
and naked in the dark in more ways than one. The scope of his imagination
wasn't up to the challenge. He could only wait and monitor the pitiful
few clues fed to his inadequate, unaugmented human body.
Light flared, a pinpoint at first glaring through a
hatch irising open, and then a veritable flame of radiation gushing
through the yawning cavity in the darkness. He cringed from the blinding
light, waited for his eyes to adjust, and then peered with narrowed
eyelids into the luminance.
Something moved. Something stood silhouetted black
against the glare. A head like a giant teardrop. A frail body with arms
like sticks hanging at its side, and four slender fingers. Nothing
remotely human.
Jeremy opened his mouth wide, gasping for air, unable
to breath at all. Thinking that his air had been sucked away by an alien
environment, Jeremy pitched forward into more welcomed darkness.
His next sensation was of the extreme cold and thin
air burning in his lungs. He lay curled in a fetal position upon a crude
bunk with the edge of a thin blanket tickling the bridge of his nose. He
opened his eyes to a deep, ruddy light and then closed them and whimpered
in renewed terror.
"Jeremy? Are you awake?"
His eyes flew open. Shock catapulted him to full and
acute alertness.
A shadow moved over him. "It was only Jeep. She
wouldn't have hurt you."
Myla knelt at his side, her face hovering inches from
his own. Her skin looked darker than he remembered, and her eyes
brighter. Her hair stuck out in all directions, pure white now, devoid of
any hint of gold strands like he remembered. But her smile warmed his
universe, and he sat up to join her. As an afterthought, he pulled the
cover about him. He was still naked.
"You're cold," Myla said in
concern. She flashed a smile. "I have a spare body glove for
you to wear. You can't run around like that." She picked a
package from a cabinet on the wall of a portable hut and tossed it to his
side. "I'll wait outside so that you can get dressed. I'm so glad to
see you, I want to hug you, but you look so scared, I'm afraid I'll break
you into little pieces."
Jeremy looked around,
confirming his initial evaluation of his surroundings, a portable hut of
some kind placed upon bare rock. He threw off his blanket, tore open
the package and proceeded to slip arms and legs into the sleeves of the
body glove. When the seams sealed themselves and the glove adjusted
its internal temperature to compensate for the frigid outside air, he
sighed deeply and went to the door for a look outside.
He was in a little opaque hut
placed inside a larger, transparent dome. Beyond the dome, the molten face of a red dwarf sun
filled a dark sky. He had already taken note of how
light on his feet he felt and estimated the gravity to be a fraction of
Covonia's near standard mass. The climate beyond the dome looked
forebodingly desolate. A distant wind howled across the pure black, rocky
surface. Overhead, the thinnest wisps of ice crystal clouds streaked the
star-studded daytime sky.
Then, Myla reentered the room
and something small
and snarling came bounding through the open door streaming red light and
attacked his right foot. Myla laughed, and Jeremy recognized the creature
before he reacted too violently. A Covonian mud dragon. He hadn't seen
many, but he knew of their comical reputation for attacking feet. Its
presence in this alien environment completely defused his fright. He
sat cross-legged on the cot in self-defense and wrapped himself in his blanket
for additional warmth. All he needed now was an explanation for what
had happened.
Myla lunged at him and
embraced him fiercely. This was the moment he had waited for since
childhood, the chance to be alone with Myla. He clung to her just as
tightly and wept openly at the utter joy of their unexpected reunion.
She held him at arm's length. "Jeremy you look
awful."
He looked down at his frail body in distress. "But
this is what I really look like. It's my own body."
"I don't mean that, silly. You look so scared."
He felt more than just scared. "What was that
creature I saw, the green one with the big head? Was it real?"
Myla ruffled his hair. "That
was Jeep. She was inside the ship that crashed on Covonia. She's harmless. Jeremy, I
have so much to tell you. But please don't be so upset. I know what they
almost did to you, but it's over now. I won't let them get you. I
promise."
A girl child reassuring a Tech against the hazards of a
universe gone berserk. She studied the confusion in his expression and
embraced him again, and this time, it was she who wept and trembled.
Jeremy wanted to melt into her, join her body and soul. She had become
the core of his very existence. He had thought her dead and his own life
nothing but a repository for unending torture and despair.
Still, before he could rest easy, he had a thousand
questions. "Who is Jeep? Myla, what are you doing here? Where are we?"
Jeremy left the cabin in an
attempt to answer his own question. Within the larger, transparent
dome beyond, the mud dragon emerged from a pool
of water dragging a mass of white seaweed and proceeded to attack it with
relish. Myla appeared at his side. She watched the creature devour its meal with a warm and curiously trouble
free gaze. She glanced back at him and said, "I don't know where to
begin."
"You had an appointment with Overlord Nome. We
talked that morning, remember?"
"Lot of help you were, Jeremy Kael. You were always
so afraid Khalin would disapprove of us." She sighed. "Okay, I'll start
there. He tried to talk me into taking an avatar again. We met at the
Ark and he took me down and showed me the avatar that you were wearing
when you saved my life. Jeremy, I never knew about that. He tried so
hard to scare me, but now I'm not so sure I made the right decision by
refusing him."
She stared at him. "Are you cold?" she said.
Jeremy noticed that he was still trembling. "I'm not
cold. I haven't been in my own body in years. I feel vulnerable, and I'm
absolutely terrified."
"I guess I can imagine what it would be like after
being a Tech for so long. Or maybe I can't, not really. But we're safe
here."
Her confidence astounded him. "How can you say
that?"
"I still feel like I've been
responsible for every terrible thing that has happened. It's so
strange. It was certainly very odd that General Hague cared enough
about you to have the Hive send you to me."
Hackles rose on Jeremy's back. "What?"
"General Hague talked the Hive into sending you to me
to try to get me to give up, or whatever."
Jeremy shook his head in denial of the idea. "How
could he do that? Myla, nobody has any direct contact with the Hive."
"General Hague does.
Or so he said. And then you
arrived. So it must be so."
It couldn't possibly be so. Nothing was making any
sense. "You met with Overlord Nome in the Ark. How did you wind up in
the forest?"
"I didn't want to go back to Bolphan. I was afraid
Khalin would put me to sleep and take me to the Ark and I'd wake up the
next morning wearing an avatar. So I ran away. The flier wouldn't allow
it, so I dived out into a sink hole. That's where I got the mud dragon.
It followed me, and I almost got ate by one of the those carnivorous
plants. I planned on going to the park by the mountains. I thought maybe
if Bolphan knew that I had run away, they'd help keep an eye on Khalin for
me. Then Jeep's ship crashed."
Anguish tore at Jeremy. She had survived all
of that to wind up in the cross-hairs of his warcraft. He had almost
killed her. Another few hundredths of a second, and she would have been
gone forever.
"I met Jeep in a cave, and then Dikki came and showed
me the way to a transport and said you were waiting for me in the outer
system. But a Hive probe followed us, and I didn't think we'd make it
without getting captured, so I had Dikki destroy the probe, and then I hit
a piece of rock near Immamat hoping the Hive would think I died. I shut down the engines so they wouldn't
be concerned about me one way or another. It would have been a pretty stupid thing to do,
except that I was hoping you'd figure out what I had done and get to me
before I ran out of air."
"I never made it," Jeremy said numbly.
"The Hive got you."
He nodded, his eyes were wide with the horror of a
story of his own he did not want to relive in the telling.
Myla didn't ask for details. "They didn't hurt you,"
she said instead, and the comment startled him. "They usually do that
vivisection stuff right away, but they didn't hurt you."
It seemed a strange comment for the girl to make.
"How do you know a thing like that?"
"I've seen for myself," she said. "I know how it
works. But it doesn't hurt like we thought it would. There's
no pain. They're conscious, but they just dream.
The dreams aren't always nice, but they don't usually know what has
happened to them. The Hive is always trying to figure out how people
think."
Jeremy opened his mouth to protest.
"We were running out of air," Myla said, "but Dikki
spotted a Hive courier that had broken down. We used that to go to the
station where we found those people I was talking about. I thought they
would have some navigational coordinates to a human colony. A pilot told
me that they change and that nobody would have anything useful for me."
"Wait a second. What about a courier?"
"Inert. Dead. Dikki said it had suffered a software
hang-up like they do now and then. It was just drifting near us. Our
transport was shut down, and Dikki said we couldn't get the engines
restarted without help, so I had to go out after it. I almost didn't make
it."
Jeremy stared at her in disbelief.
"What? It wasn't all that big a deal. I had EVA
equipment to use, and Dikki told me how to use the plasma attitude jets to
dock with the transport. Dikki told me how dangerous it was to go
outside, but it hardly mattered. I broke my face shield, and my body
glove got all tore up." She sighed heavily and beamed a smile. "But I
made it."
None of it made the least bit of sense. None of it
was at all possible.
"What? Why are you looking at me that way?"
"You said the courier was not working."
"Oh! Dikki got it working."
Jeremy hated to state the obvious. "Myla, Dikki is
not compatible with Hive technology."
She stared at him. "Well, he had those built-in
barriers so that he wouldn't fit. There were three of them."
"Barriers?"
"I had to knock them off before he could get in.
It's hard to explain. Dikki said people couldn't interface with MIs
without buffers and things, but I had to try, and it wasn't a problem at
all. It's like I can see a whole other universe, a lot bigger one than
the only one I ever knew about. Dikki doesn't know what to do with
himself sometimes, but with everything he knows, the two of us got into
that Hive station, and we found all those people..."
Her expression smoothed over and became suddenly
unreadable. She looked away, lost in her own thoughts. "It was awful. I met a pilot. I never
even asked his name. I don't think I wanted to know. He thought I was a
girl name Beshi. I blew that awful place up when we left, Jeremy. I took
everything with me I could at the last minute, and then I unbalanced one
of the field engines. They all died, but they were mostly dead anyhow."
Myla glanced at him with a pained expression. "I had
a bunch of warcraft and mining equipment, and they chased us clear out
here to the edge of nowhere. They attacked me and Dikki, but we held them
off, and now we got more equipment and weapons than they do, except we
can't stay here forever, and I'm not quite sure what to do next. The Hive
is out there, thousands and thousands of them, and the Alliance followed,
and the alien ships that were chasing Jeep..."
Jeremy rose unsteadily to his feet and backed away.
Myla shot to her feet. "Jeremy? What's wrong?"
He shook his head, appalled that she could seriously
ask him that question.
"Did I do something wrong? Jeremy, nobody could have
helped those poor people! He wanted me to do it! I had to!"
Jeremy gave her a nod and a foolish smile of
reassurance and turned carefully around on wobbly legs. He made his way
back into the hut, closed the flap behind him, and curled up on the bunk with
every muscle in his body painfully rigid.
Red light washed through the room. "I don't want to
leave Jeep alone too long," Myla called to him. "She’s in orbit with
Dikki. Is it okay if I bring her back down with me? If we're all
together, I can do everything else that has to be done from here, and you
can help me figure out what to do next."
The silence gathered. Jeremy gave another nod simply
to defuse mounting tension.
The flap dropped back in place. Myla called a
cheerfully farewell to the mud dragon from outside. Jeremy rolled to his
feet and reached the door to the hut in time to watch the girl cycle
through the airlock and run in impossible bounds in the light gravity to a
skiff. Jeremy recognized the Hive configuration. Myla went aboard. The
silvery craft suddenly became a ball of light and shot skyward and out of
sight within a fraction of a second.
Jeremy dropped the flap and wandered back to the
bunk. He sat and tried to make his mind work. Who was
responsible for this madness? A twelve standard year-old child? The Hive could not have
rigged so complex a deception. The Hive was far more simple-minded and
naive than Myla had ever been. If not the Hive, then who?
The question implied its own response. The alien
presence, minds beyond human comprehension in scope and complexity. Myla
had become a pawn in a game of cosmic proportions, and himself a game
piece of no great significance.
Trapped in a web of helplessness, his emotional
tirade went in circles, from fear to anger to escalating panic and
numbness and then back again to cold, creeping fear. His beautiful little
Myla was in terrible danger, and he had been stripped to his naked
flesh-and-blood body and his own pathetically useless human brain. He
held his trembling hands before his face and wondered how humanity had
ever blundered so deeply into an inhuman and inhumane universe.
