The Apocalypse Ocean (22 page)

The wolves were running up the dusty streambed in retreat.

Until ten minutes ago, the drones had provided air support. They’d zipped around, destroyed anything airborne, and scoured the ridges despite the withering chatter of fire laid down by the now thousands of League soldiers gathering up there.

The drones had filled the sky, but over the last hour they’d slowly contracted to the area around the dusty pond. They zigzagged through air, swirled around each other, and acted to protect the area in a tight hemisphere of boiling yellow.

The wolves huffed up the stream, Pepper right behind them. Kay followed with a small team of League soldiers, rifles up and covering them from all directions. They’d given her a small pistol, but she preferred letting them do the shooting. It wasn’t her style. She could point them in the direction they needed to be firing.

Pepper skidded to a stop, feet kicking up dust as he stopped. The wolves didn’t. They leapt into the air. Long bounds that took them clear of the pond’s rocky banks up into the air, and then down toward the dusty bed, nose first.

They plunged through and disappeared. 

More wolves slunk from the other banks and dashed forward to disappear as the yellow drones spun overhead.

“They’re retreating?” Kay panted as she caught up to Pepper.

“Or something worse is coming through,” he said. He looked up at the drones. “They don’t seem interested in us anymore.”

“They were looking for something,” Kay said. “We’re the sideshow.”

Pepper put a leg up on a rock. “I think you’re right,” he said thoughtfully. “But what were they hunting?”

They watched the wolves jumping into the dirt and disappearing. Pepper even threw a few rocks in with them. The drones left them alone, circling overhead like buzzards.

“Nashara will have the big thrusters working again soon,” Pepper said. “See if you can get these League soldiers to set up some big guns around the pond. Just in case …”

A green bubble burst through the fake image of the dust bed and rose into the air. Inside floated a boy.

The League men aimed rifles at it, but Kay held up a hand. “Don’t shoot!” she shouted with a crack of authority. She glanced at Pepper. “It’s Tiago.”

He squinted. “He was eaten by one of those wolf things.”

“I know.” Nashara had killed all the wolves in the cockpit, smashing their bodies to tiny bits of cogs and gears that had been designed to work in the dead zone.

“They took the boy,” she’d growled at Kay, and she’d leaked anger and impatience, which had surprised Kay.

The green bubble wobbled through the air. Yellow drones moved to surround it, bumping it along toward the edge of the pond. It burst once clear of the wormhole. Tiago slumped out of the air to hit the ground and bounce.

He lay there, still.

Pepper approached him and kneeled down. He put a finger on his neck. “He’s alive.”

Tiago coughed and sat up. “I am,” he said, and spat green fluid out onto the ground. “I …”

One of the wolves burst out of the trees toward them. “Wolf!” Kay shouted.

“Don’t shoot!” Tiago ordered. He staggered to his feet and held up a hand. “Stay.”

The creature’s large mouth snapped shut, the wormhole scrunched down somehow in its throat, and it obediently sat on its haunches. It regarded them with electric blue eyes.

Pepper shot it right in the center of its temple. The wolf slumped onto its side with a sizzle.

“Damnit,” Tiago snapped. “I made it sit. You didn’t have to kill it.”

Pepper ignored him and walked over to the wolf. He picked it up under one arm. “I want to study this thing later,” he said placidly. “Besides, I don’t know who it, or you, now, Tiago, really work for. Do I?”

“You’re supposed to be dead,” Kay said to him, with honest and undisguised wonder in her voice.

Tiago stepped forward and looked in her eyes. “I shouldn’t trust you,” he said. “But I’m going to have to. Because you’re going to have to trust me now. You’re going to need to look at me and believe everything I’m saying. I’ve been to the other side of that wormhole.”

“We saw you come out of it,” Pepper said. “I believe that. But that doesn’t mean I trust what you will say next.”

“This weaponry isn’t trying to hunt us,” Tiago said. “It’s hunting the Thinkerer and anyone it thinks is helping him. Which, until I talked to them, was us.”

Kay glanced at Pepper. Tiago really believed what he was saying.

“There is the very strong possibility that Thinkerer lied to us,” said Tiago. “What’s on the other side of that wormhole isn’t invading. Something else is trying to come through from beyond them. And Thinkerer is helping it. We need to get to Nashara now or something alien, and worse than the Satraps, will be coming through the wormhole.”

He looked over Kay then. “Look at me. You tell me if I don’t believe what I’m saying. Right here, look at me.”

And she was. Studying every muscle in his face. She glanced at Pepper, thinking about the fact that Thinkerer was still missing. A seed of doubt blossomed inside her. “He really believes it.”

“I know.” Pepper said thoughtfully, and hefted the dead wolf under his arm. He turned his back to the dusty pool and the drones hovering overhead and started walking back toward the
Saguenay
. “It’s time we took a look around for Thinkerer.”

Tiago was still coughing green liquid up as he jogged after Pepper. It felt strange to be back in the valley when just a few minutes ago he realized he had been light years away in some other galaxy. He had seen the Structure. Now he returned with information about Thinkerer. Information Nashara and Pepper might not choose to believe.

Hadn’t Thinkerer gotten them here? Helped them get the
Saguenay
up the mountain?

In just the short time since he’d left things had changed. He recognized the League soldiers everywhere. Pepper and Nashara must have reached some sort of agreement, but he realized as they walked about that it was Kay the soldiers all nodded at. Had she somehow wriggled her way into being in charge of an entire League army?

He couldn’t put it past her.

And it didn’t matter, he reminded himself. What mattered was the larger picture.

“We could be very wrong about Thinkerer,” he told Nashara in the cockpit of the
Saguenay
.

For a long moment she just stared at him. And he realized when she’d last seen him he’d been eaten by one of the wolves. There was some sort of emotion there. Relief, shock. Then a wariness. He’d come back from the other side, after all.

“It’s still me. I talked to something that called itself the Structure. It’s like the group mind you saw on Chilo, Pepper. But older. And voluntary. It called that a weaponized spore. The Doaq just transported people and things for them to study, and those people don’t want to leave the Structure because for them, it’s like me visiting the Xenowealth from Placa del Fuego. It’s nicer. That’s what it told me. All those people it took, they’re not dead – they joined it. When it looked inside their heads, they became part of it and didn’t want to leave. It didn’t infect me, or try to get me to join it. It sent me back here, to ask if I would help shut down the wormhole right away.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” Nashara said.

“They say Thinkerer will betray us …”

Kay stepped forward. “Lock him in a room,” she told Pepper. “We’re almost about to kill the wormhole. If that’s what some group on the other side wants, that’s fine. But he may be here to confuse us. We can tell he believes his story, completely, but he may have been lied to. He may be under the control of something else You have to consider that.”

“I’m here to warn you,” Tiago insisted. “I’m trying to explain what’s happening.”

He turned to Nashara. She took a deep breath. “I’m happy to see you’re alive. But Kay’s right. You’re a possible threat. You delivered your message. Now let us take it from here. Pepper? None of the crew are responding to my calls, they’re too busy working on the thrusters, I think. You’ll have to find a room for him.”

“Kay,” Tiago said, turning to her. “You’ve known me the longest. Look at me. See that I’m still Tiago all the way. I’m not a threat.”

Kay turned back to him. “You were on the other side. We don’t know what happened there. It’s safer.”

“Why would they manipulate us into telling us to hurry up and destroy the wormhole now? To be on our guard?”

She looked away. Tiago snarled. They were going to jail him for bringing the news.

Nashara stepped forward. “We’re almost ready to fire. I agree with Kay. Until we can scan Tiago to clear him and debrief him, we don’t know how dangerous he is. We’re going to fire the wormhole killer up, Tiago, so don’t worry. It’s a precaution. All systems are go; let’s not waste time.”

She turned back to the control console, and as she did so a piece of the nearby wall ripped away. Thinkerer stepped out from some nook he’d been folded up in and calmly looked around. “You will not be firing the
Saguenay
just yet, Nashara,” he said.

Pepper took a step forward, and Thinkerer pointed a finger at him. “No. I don’t think I’d do that. In your present state I will come out ahead in a battle in fifteen point three seconds. I operate in the dead zone with my full capabilities. You don’t. I have killed all the crew quietly over the last fifteen minutes. You can leave and check if you wish.”

Kay stepped forward. “What are you doing? I don’t understand.”

“I’m taking the ship. It’s mine now,” Thinkerer said. “As it should have been all along. You were a temporary inconvenience I had to route around.”

“What were you doing crawling around in those walls?” Pepper asked, casually taking another step forward.

Thinkerer pointed at him again. “Stay put. I killed the crew and mined the structural points of the ship with explosives.” He held up a small egg-shaped detonator. “I squeeze, it clicks and generates a pulse powerful enough to be heard even in the dead zone. And all the explosives take us with them.”

Kay was shaking her head, Tiago saw. She couldn’t believe it. “But you said you needed the spaceship to kill the wormhole, to stop us from being invaded.”

“I want to kill the wormhole, yes, but not until after the individualists come through,” Thinkerer said. “That was my mission, to prepare the way on this side for a breach. To help them establish a zone where individualism can thrive. Your people will be welcome, and we will protect you against the Structure. Pepper, you’ve fought the Structure on Chilo, just as Tiago noted. You know what it is. Imagine that, but evolved millions of years, seducing people away from your world one by one to join a virtual dream. That is what we fight against.”

“If we close the wormhole right now then all of us on this side are guaranteed to survive,” Nashara said. “Why mine the
Saguenay
?”

“Because if you close the wormhole early, an entire civilization will die,” Thinkerer said. “Trapped on the other side, hemmed in by the Structure. It will not offer voluntary assimilation, but allow its weaponized fringes to sweep through us in retaliation for the war.”

“They can call a truce,” Kay said.

“The Structure is a group will, a group mind. It believes the actions of individuals represent the will of all on a fundamental level. Three hundred years ago we last sued for peace. But that can only hold if all individualists hold the peace. All it takes is a few attacks, one small group to make the decision, and the war begins anew.”

“If you destroy this ship, the Structure just comes through anyway.” Pepper took a step left, putting himself between Nashara and Thinkerer.

“But it gives them a chance to get deep into this Concern and burrow in for a solid fight. Given a head start, we can search the Concern for other wormhole destroyers, and seal ourselves away. The League has another device, one that I’ve tracked down. We wouldn’t hold as much of the Concern as we currently plan, but it is a superior alternative to letting you close the wormhole down before they can come through. It’s a plan that gives our diaspora a chance.”

“I just have one question,” Nashara asked from behind Pepper. “How long would it take for you to kill me?”

“Eleven seconds,” Thinkerer said flatly.

“Eleven?” Nashara sounded disgusted. “He’s broken up and still healing. I’m ready to go.”

“Pepper will drag out the fight to gain time to think. He’s a tactician. You will go for the kill. But I will overpower. Because you will not delay, it will not take as long.”

The inside of the cockpit shivered.

Thinkerer looked over at the screens. “They’re coming,” he said. “It’s too late, now.”

Tiago looked. A fat, crab-shaped vehicle hovered in the air over the dust-bowl facade of the wormhole. For a second, gravity held it in place. Then engines fired from the tips of its legs, and it began to wobble and climb into the air. It headed over the mountain, moving faster and faster as it gained altitude.

The force of its engines sent League soldiers scurrying for safety. Several of them ran for the
Saguenay
to demand answers.

One, two, then three more tube-shaped ships followed rapidly behind. The individualists had broken through the Overwatch, Tiago knew. 

The invasion had started.