Colonization (Alien Invasion Book 3) (41 page)

It took hours to find the way out.

Cameron’s mind kept wanting to dwell on his father’s death, but he wouldn’t allow it. The emotion was too raw, and if there was one thing Cameron Bannister had learned throughout his life, it was how to bury uncomfortable feelings about his father.

But Benjamin hadn’t just been Cameron’s dad, he’d also been the group’s best historical mind. The last of their hope might have died with him. Charlie was an extremely competent research scientist, but his focus was on the science, not the history. He’d followed Benjamin on many of his later adventures, but his focus had been on lichens, carbon dating of artifacts, how acids might have been used in the Queen’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid to send out some sort of energy beacon. Charlie didn’t know half of what Benjamin had — information essential to finding Thor’s Hammer before the Astrals.

But most of all, Cameron tried to be strong for Piper.

Piper was usually an open book, but the final seconds she’d glimpsed of the Cottonwood archive had killed her emotions like a cut connection. Cameron didn’t like it. Her big, blue eyes rimmed with stubborn tears that refused to fall. He tried to hug her or offer a strong arm to lean on when they stopped to rest, but she shook him away and sat alone. He tried talking to her (about idle things, like the types of rock the tunnels had been bored through), but she stayed mostly silent. When he asked her what was wrong — a stupid question if there’d ever been one — Piper said “Nothing.” An answer to match his inappropriate query.

Still, Cameron told himself that staying tough was his job. It was always easier to maintain strength for others than to face the demons inside. That’s probably why Cameron, on his band’s tours through so many borderline places later in life, had always made room for charity. Helping others fostered a sense of control. It made a person feel that some day, he might find the strength to help himself.

He shut down, and so did she. Charlie was as unreadable as ever — perhaps, for once, a necessary rock amid the storm. Over the past few years (even before Astral Day), the recently slaughtered had composed the entirety of Charlie’s existence. He’d interacted with no one else. Even Cameron and Piper had been relative latecomers. Now they were gone, save the few who’d stayed to attend the Moab lab while they were away. Cameron doubted that the facility had survived the Astrals’ anger.

It sounded as though the Reptars had quickly broken the latch on the hidden door and made their way into the tunnels behind them, but spent minutes to do so. By then, they’d made it through two more intricately concealed doors in the rock. Cameron had quietly thanked the Templars, the Freemasons, the Mormons — whoever had earned his gratitude.

After that, they could only move forward.

They found Andreus and Coffey about thirty minutes after entering the tunnels. To their credit — and contradicting the cowardly way Cameron felt they’d left — the pair had found the first of the linked chambers throughout the tunnels and waited for anyone who might follow. When Cameron told them that no others would be coming, they all left together.

The air was stale. The way was hard and dirty. Whoever had made the system had courteously pocked it with air shafts, like holes punched in a jar’s lid made to trap a butterfly. But since that day, several of the tunnels had caved slightly, and twice they had to move rocks one by one before they could proceed.

Finally, they reached an underground lake. After some searching, Cameron found a hole in the wall under the water’s surface. All five of them waded in and moved through it, thinking it another of the tunnel system’s many sumps. But this time, instead of coming out in another tunnel past a low-hanging obstruction, they emerged into muted sun in the small pocket of a little lake near the mountain.

Piper, who surfaced just after Cameron, flinched back and looked upward. He sympathized; they’d been assuming for much of the journey that the only reason the shuttles weren’t leveling the mountain to find and kill them was because the Astrals cared slightly more about the archive than the escapees. Instead, their thinking went, the shuttles would simply patrol the mountain and wait. Eventually, the remainders would burrow out … and be dealt with.

But there was nothing above them.

After a while, they climbed onto the shore and into the sun to dry in what remained of the day’s heat. When dark came, they ventured away from the rock to look around, and waited just far enough into the desert that retreat into the tunnels — if necessary — would be possible.

But nothing happened. There were no Reptars. No Titan patrols. No shuttles. No motherships.

Their final egress had been rushed. It felt possible that the Reptars either hadn’t seen them dash through the door or (and this seemed more likely) simply had lost that information in the day’s shuffle. The Astrals, after all, had proved that they weren’t infallible. Sometimes, your average Titan-turned-Reptar soldier simply forgot, or didn’t bother to report.

They were — so the expression went — only human.

The idea gave Cameron an ounce of hope as they slept through the night, huddled for warmth. If they could be tricked, defeat was possible. And if Cameron, Piper, Charlie, Nathan, and Jeanine Coffey had been lucky once, they could get lucky again.

If the key Cameron still held unbroken in his satchel could activate the Thor’s Hammer device, perhaps it could deactivate it, too.

In the morning, Andreus held up his cell phone and waved it around, every motion betraying futility. He repeated the motions with the BB detector. He’d kept both dry inside a sealed bag in his backpack. They worked. But there was nothing to detect.

“No network means no help,” said Andreus.

“And Terrence?” Cameron asked.

Andreus shrugged. “He must not have made it.”

“Can you contact him on … on whatever you were using before?”

Andreus pointed at his dead cell phone. “No network,” he repeated, “means no help.”

What Andreus didn’t bother to say because they all knew it was that no help didn’t just mean help for the five of them, in terms of finding safety. It also meant help in solving the Thor’s Hammer puzzle. It meant help in terms of reaching Lila, Clara, and Meyer, who were the only remaining survivors in the world Piper likely still cared about. It meant help in terms of knowing anything that might be happening in Heaven’s Veil, Moab, or anywhere at all.

Nathan sat on a rock, looking defeated. Coffey put her hand on his shoulders. Seeing the tenderness of two ruthless people sank Cameron deeper into his helpless despair.

There was nothing left in the world. Nothing but the quest.

Cameron stood. Piper looked up, her enormous blue eyes unfathomably sad, yet somehow more normal than they’d been throughout the exodus.

He extended his hand. Piper took it.

They walked, passing Charlie, Nathan, and Jeanine on their rocks. Headed vaguely south, toward Moab and whatever of his father’s records might have survived.

“Where are you going?” Andreus asked.

Cameron didn’t turn.

“The only place we can go,” he said. “To try and save the world.”

C
HAPTER
66

“You
do
understand, correct?” the woman asked.

Alpha straightened, attempting to heed the strange way the being in front of him was communicating. Beta and Omega were flanking his sagging body, still holding his arms.

Alpha looked down. The hands of the two others, on his white flesh, were like his own. Their arms were like his arms. The fact that he noticed this told Alpha that something had already changed, and he wasn’t sure he liked it or could even abide it. He’d always been one among many, but with a unique sense of identity necessary for finding his place among the others. If none of them truly understood separateness, they’d be unable to do the simplest things. They wouldn’t be able to work their positions in the city below, because none would know where to go if all were truly the same. They wouldn’t be able to form a line without knowing who had to go first. But still, through it all, there had been the collective. He had a concept of
his arms
and
his hands
now, same as always. But that sense of “his” was twisting into something impure as seconds ticked. He didn’t just notice
his arms.
He was also beginning to feel that he didn’t want the others to put
their hands
on
his arms
because they were
his
and nobody else’s to touch or possess.

The human woman looked at Omega, on Alpha’s right. Alpha turned to look as well. Omega had the same hairless head as Alpha. The same strong features. The humans claimed they couldn’t tell his kind apart, but the humans also felt that the Titan form appeared large and strong. From their perspective above, things had tilted in the other direction. Rather than seeing himself as large, Alpha thought the humans seemed small and fragile — mere shadows of their proud genetic stock. But humans were their children nonetheless, and worth the attempt at understanding.

Alpha, even as tired as he felt, found he could still catch the flavor of groupspeak running between the woman’s mind and Omega’s. Beta would hear the groupspeak as well — but Beta, like Alpha, was not whom the woman was groupspeaking to. Noticing such difference in
who
was speaking to
whom
wasn’t something Alpha ever remembered noticing. Of course groupspeakers needed to have primary recipients in mind or nothing could be communicated, but it had always just sort of happened. Only now was Alpha noticing the duality. They were all one, but also separate.

Alpha didn’t like the realization. The humans — this time anyway — were an almost entirely separate species. Their way of existence seemed isolated to Alpha, like a dark room with no potential for light. How did they live without the emotions, thoughts, and assistance of others on their frequency? And worse: If the humans had the capacity to be like their progenitors (something they’d proved in past epochs), why had they turned out so foreign in this one? Time, such as humanity understood it, had marched forward. But did the society on the planet below represent progress? Alpha didn’t think so, and the idea made him uneasy.

The woman’s groupspeak to Omega — duly translated by Alpha’s sluggish cortex — sounded like,
He does not understand.

It is early,
groupspoke Beta.

The woman looked at Alpha. Out loud, using her human voice, she said, “You
do
understand. We can hear your interpretations.”

“Interpretations,” Alpha repeated. Speaking aloud felt strange. He’d tried it before — all of them had at some point since arriving at the planet — but he found it clumsy and almost destructive, like a bludgeon.

“We have animated this surrogate — ” The woman, wearing a blue dress and bright-orange hair, gestured down at herself. “ — to facilitate groupspeak in a way that will be easiest for you to comprehend and internalize as the process takes hold.
Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“And you understand the medium we are using to communicate,” she added, almost a question.

“The language,” Alpha said.

Now that he’d spoken a few words aloud, he found spoken words coming more easily. Beside him, Beta and Omega were looking over with curious eyes. They were very like the woman’s human eyes. Alpha hadn’t noticed
that
before either.

“The
language
, yes,” the woman said, duly corrected. “We are less familiar with its nuances, perhaps, than you are at this point.”

“It is their language,” Alpha said.

“One
of their languages.”

“But your surrogate speaks the language.”

The woman took a moment before responding, possibly assessing the truth of Alpha’s statement. Divinity could animate surrogates to do just about anything, but speaking always came easier when the human puppet held a tongue’s raw materials in her brain ahead of time.

“Yes. We are not used to it. It is strange to us.”

It was strange to Alpha, too. He tried to shake off his odd fog, which he could feel deepening.

“I request direct audience.” He didn’t like communicating through the surrogate. It was clumsy. It felt wrong.

“You would no longer understand us if we groupspoke natively. Do you understand?”

Alpha looked behind the woman. In the nest, he could just see the subtle glow from the true speaker’s body — translucent, sparkling, teeming with light. He found himself understanding why the few humans who’d seen the beings called them Divinity. The word finally held meaning, whereas in the past he’d translated it into something that meant space — confusing because space was empty, and the mind was the opposite. Now, standing before the human woman, Divinity made sense to Alpha. It suited the humans’ perception of gods. Which also made sense, because many
had been
humanity’s gods, as Earth’s ancients had seen them. The perception was its own loop, curling back on itself.

“I understand,” Alpha replied.

“The process will continue. Soon, use of a surrogate will be the only way you’ll understand. The capacity for groupspeak will remain dormant inside you. We will train you to use it again once you are ready. But you will not recall how or why, or what it means when the time comes, and you will not realize that groupspeak was once normal to you. Do you understand?”