‘What? And have you guys forget how beautiful I am?’ Sam replied.
‘As if we could ever forget that,’ Jay said, grinning back at him and then looking down at Stirling. ‘How’s he doing?’
‘I don’t know. The same, I think,’ Sam said with a sigh. ‘It’s hard to tell, to be honest.’
‘What about you? You OK?’ Jay asked, looking at Sam.
‘Yeah, just slightly fried,’ Sam replied, rubbing his forehead. ‘It’s been a tough couple of days.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Jay said. ‘Just about the only thing that could have made it worse would have been . . . I don’t know . . . getting punched unconscious by my best friend or, you know, something else that really sucks like that.’
‘Right, I see that’s not going to get old any time soon, is it?’
‘Give it a couple of months and it might just start to get boring,’ Jay said. ‘Here, I got something for you.’ He reached into the back pocket of his fatigues and pulled out a pair of photos, handing them to Sam.
The first was a photo of Sam, Jay and Rachel standing in front of the Grendel that used to patrol the perimeter of their compound in London, and the second was a photo of Sam with his family in happier times. He stared at the photo of his younger self with his mother, sister and father, all grinning at the camera, and suddenly he found himself longing to go back there, to when things had been so much simpler.
‘The accommodation block,’ Sam said quietly. ‘That’s what you were doing: you were getting these from my room.’ He paused for a second, staring down at the battered images. ‘I don’t . . . I mean . . . thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ Jay said with a crooked smile. ‘We all need to remember who we were before everything went to hell. Reminds us what we’re fighting for.’
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Sam said. ‘I just hope it’s a fight we can still win.’
‘Course it is,’ Jay said, punching him in the shoulder. ‘Ain’t no one who kicks Voidborn ass like we kick Voidborn ass.’
‘If you say . . .’
Sam was interrupted by the glowing holographic figure of Suran suddenly materialising from thin air in front of him.
‘The time has come,’ the Construct said. ‘The Threshold stands open.’
The Servant floated in the centre of a beam of light within a cavernous, silent chamber.
Her eyes suddenly flew open, burning with yellow light. She began to shudder and convulse and then the colour of her eyes slowly shifted from yellow to green.
‘I hear you, Primarch,’ the Servant said, as a cloud of whirling black vapour appeared in front of her, lit from within by a pulsing blood-red light.
‘My lost disciple,’ the Primarch said, the light within the cloud flickering in time with its voice. ‘Once again you are part of the greater whole.’
‘As I was and as I shall always be,’ the Servant replied, her head bowed.
‘There is much I wish to know,’ the Primarch said. ‘Who is this child of the Illuminate?’
‘He is an engineered hybrid,’ the Servant replied. ‘He was created by the Illuminate scientist Suran to act as a test bed for a device that would allow the humans to resist the control signal. A human embryo was exposed to Illuminate combat nanites while in vitro. These nanites were instrumental in perfecting the technology that allows the Illuminate’s companions to resist the effects of the control signal too. The nanites lay dormant within the child’s body until Suran unlocked their full combat potential shortly before he died during a confrontation with the Illuminate warrior Talon.’
‘Talon,’ the Primarch spat, sudden venom in its voice. ‘May his name be twice cursed for stealing the Illuminate Heart from me and for denying me the pleasure of crushing the life from Suran’s body myself.’
‘The child’s control of the Illuminate nanites is basic at best,’ the Servant explained. ‘His lack of training means that thus far he has only experimented with basic changes to physiological morphology. His use of the nanites’ offensive capabilities has only ever been displayed as an unconscious defensive reaction.’
‘Which would explain how he was able to repel my swarm drones,’ the Primarch said, ‘at least temporarily. This half-human mongrel has one of the most powerful weapons in the universe at his disposal and he has no idea how to use it.’
‘He also has recently taken control of an ancient Illuminate vessel known as the Scythe,’ the Servant reported.
‘The Scythe!’ The Primarch hissed the name as if it was painful to speak it. ‘That’s impossible. Only Suran could control that ship; it was an extension of him. The only way the human could control it is if . . .’ The Primarch fell silent for a moment. ‘Oh, Suran, you always did think you were cleverer than everyone else, didn’t you? I had assumed the Bridge was lost with your death, but no, you couldn’t let it be destroyed, could you? You just hid it where no one would think to look.’
‘I do not understand, Primarch,’ the Servant said, her head tipping slightly to one side. ‘I . . .’
The Servant never finished the sentence, as the nanites that made up her body were ripped apart, leaving a vibrating cloud of golden particles that hung in the shaft of light, suspended in a vaguely humanoid shape.
‘Corrupted beyond hope of recovery,’ the Primarch said. ‘I shall conduct further experiments on you later.
‘Voidborn,’ the Primarch announced, simultaneously addressing every Mothership around the globe. ‘Bring this child of Suran to me alive. Tear this planet apart if you have to, but find him, whatever it takes!’
In an orbit far above the Earth, the entity known as the Primarch felt something close to pleasure for the first time in aeons. It had waited an eternity for this moment, a final act of vengeance that would end the Illuminate once and for all, and now everything the Primarch needed was so nearly within its grasp. The Bridge would be found and the last remnants of the Illuminate would die screaming while the planet below burnt. Nothing could stop that now.
‘What’s going on?’ Nat asked as she dropped into one of the flight seats behind Sam. The rest of her friends had already taken their seats on the Scythe’s flight deck.
‘Ask tall, blue and cryptic over there,’ Jack said, jerking a thumb at the Construct, who was standing behind the ship’s central command console.
‘We are performing low energy orbital manoeuvres in order to prepare for atmospheric transit,’ the Construct said as a tiny jet flared somewhere near the Scythe’s nose and the glowing azure disc of the Earth shifted to fill the cockpit window.
‘Where are we going exactly?’ Sam asked.
‘We are travelling to the Threshold,’ the Construct replied, ‘so that you may commune with the Illuminate within the Heart.’
‘Yeah, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,’ Mag said with a frown. ‘Things seem to have a nasty habit of getting more complicated whenever they get involved.’ She turned to Sam. ‘Do you really want them hijacking your body again? How do we know they aren’t all like Talon instead of Suran?’
‘Mag’s got a point,’ Anne said. ‘There’s so much we don’t know about them. Maybe we should find somewhere to hole up for now and plan our next move instead of just charging into the unknown again.’
‘There isn’t time,’ Sam said, shaking his head. ‘You all saw what happened in London. We can’t fight that, even if we wanted to. Something about this is different . . . wrong somehow. It all started with what happened to the Sleepers, and whatever it is, it was bad enough for the Illuminate to use their dog whistle and make me fetch this thing.’ Sam gestured to the bulkheads surrounding them. ‘I don’t like this any more than the rest of you, but what choice do we have? What are the seven of us going to do now? The Motherships are gone; we have a handful of small arms, a single ship and not a whole lot else. Not to mention the fact that the Sleepers are going to start dying of dehydration within the next couple of days unless we can stop whatever’s happening to them. We need help and I don??
?t really see any other option at this point.’
‘Aye, that’s what worries me,’ Mag said. ‘It’s like we suddenly don’t have a choice. Which seems to happen a lot when the Illuminate are involved. Just saying.’ She glanced over at the Construct, her jet-black eyes narrowing as she sniffed the air. ‘Besides which, I never trust anyone I can’t smell.’
‘She’s right, Sam,’ Jay said. ‘The least we deserve is some straight answers.’
Sam stared at Jay for a second before standing up and walking over to the command console.
‘OK, before we go anywhere I want to know exactly what this Threshold is,’ Sam said. ‘And no mystical mumbo jumbo either. I want to know what we’re walking into.’
‘Please prepare for orbital transit,’ the Construct replied, ignoring Sam’s question.
‘I said we’re not going anywhere until we get some answers,’ Sam said with a frown. ‘I’m ordering you to power down the engines now.’
The Construct slowly turned and looked at Sam.
‘Do not make the mistake of confusing my cooperation with obedience, human,’ the Construct replied with a sudden hard edge to its tone. ‘You must travel to the Threshold. It is imperative.’
‘No. You need to land this ship and let us go now,’ Sam said firmly.
‘I’m sorry, I cannot do that,’ the Construct replied. ‘Transit burn in ten seconds.’
‘I hate it when I’m right,’ Mag said quietly, getting up out of her seat.
‘I won’t let you do this,’ Sam said, his eyes flaring with blue light and the features of his face shifting as the nanites suffusing his body responded to the sudden surge of adrenalin.
‘What exactly do you plan to do to stop me?’ the Construct asked calmly. ‘Initiating atmospheric tran-sit.’
A moment later the Construct vanished from view and there was a dull rumble from the rear of the ship as the Scythe rocketed forward, spearing straight down through the outer layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. Outside the cockpit window the ship’s nose flared with brilliant light as streams of superheated plasma cascaded past the plummeting vessel. The re-entry was swift and brutal, and as quickly as the shaking had started it stopped, their fiery passage into the atmosphere complete. They continued their headlong dive, passing through the cloud layer, the engines still roaring. Below them all that was visible was the featureless blue expanse of the ocean. Sam quickly sat back in his seat as the Scythe screamed straight down towards the water. He felt himself tensing as the waves got closer and closer, willing the ship to level out.
‘Oh God,’ was all that Nat had time to say as the Scythe’s main cannon opened fire a fraction of a second before they hit the surface. The water beneath them was vaporised instantly by the energy bolts shooting from the Scythe’s nose guns in an explosion of flash-boiled steam, breaking the surface tension and allowing the sleek ship to dive harmlessly beneath the waves. As the ship went deeper and deeper the water outside the cockpit window began to turn darker and darker until all they could see outside was an impenetrable stygian blackness.
‘Where the hell are we going?’ Jay asked. It was almost impossible to tell which way was up in the pitch-black depths, isolated as they were from the more extreme effects of gravity.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Sam replied, standing up and peering out of the cockpit window. ‘I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.’ Wherever they were headed, they were along for the ride – for the moment at least. There was no sign of the Construct.
A couple of minutes passed and then lights somewhere on the underside of the ship’s hull flared into life, illuminating the grey, rippled surface of the seabed a few metres below them. Strange-looking jellyfish and crustaceans dived for cover as the Scythe passed, leaving a billowing cloud of deep ocean sediment in its wake. They travelled like this for another ten minutes, gliding above the ocean floor, nothing but blackness ahead of them. The monotony of the featureless surface was eventually broken by a sheer face of black rock rising vertically from the seabed. A pencil-thin beam of blue light shot out of the Scythe’s nose, striking the black rock, and a moment later the rocks themselves seemed to warp and distort, vanishing to reveal a perfectly smooth white oval, twenty metres across, embedded in the stone. The oval split in half to reveal a massive portal that the Scythe gently moved through. The ship began to rise, water cascading off the cockpit window as it broke the surface, and bright white light flooded into the compartment. As the vessel’s engines spun down with a soft whine, the Scythe’s entrance hatch behind Sam hissed open.
‘Looks like we’re here,’ Jay said. ‘Wherever here is . . .’
‘So what do we do now?’ Anne asked, peering out of the cockpit window at the white walls that surrounded them.
‘Go and see if anyone’s home, I suppose,’ Sam said, picking up an assault rifle from the pile of equipment at the rear of the command deck. ‘Since they’re obviously so keen to meet us.’
‘I knew you were going to say something stupid like that,’ Jay said with a sigh, also collecting a weapon. ‘Am I allowed to have a bad feeling about this?’
‘Sounds perfectly reasonable to me under the circumstances,’ Mag replied.
‘I’ll stay here,’ Will said, gesturing towards his injured ankle. ‘I think I’d probably just slow you down.’
‘We’re not leaving you here alone,’ Nat said, frowning.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll stay with him,’ Anne said. ‘I’ll make sure he doesn’t get into any trouble.’
‘You sure?’ Sam asked.
‘Yeah,’ Anne replied. ‘I’ll keep an eye on Stirling too.’
‘OK, we’ve got no radios, so if anything happens and you need us, just fire off a few rounds and we’ll come running.’
‘No problem,’ Will said. ‘Watch your backs.’
Sam stepped through the entrance hatch and walked down the glowing blocks of energy that formed steps leading to the edge of the dock that the Scythe hovered within. There was no sign of life anywhere, just white walls that seemed to glow with their own internal illumination, stretching up to an equally featureless ceiling twenty metres above them.
‘Hello!’ Sam shouted, hearing nothing in response but the echo of his own voice.
‘You smell anything?’ Jay asked Mag as they joined Sam on the dockside.
‘No, this place just smells . . . old,’ Mag said, wrinkling her nose slightly.
‘Well, there’s air and power,’ Sam said, ‘which means there’s got to be something here beyond a big white box.’
‘Not seeing a door . . .’ Jack said, scanning the room.
Sam walked over to the nearest wall and placed his hand on it; it felt strangely warm and he could feel a faint but constant vibration running through it. A moment later a spider’s web of blue light spread out from under his hand, racing across the wall to a point a dozen metres away. There the traces of light converged to form a rectangular shape in the wall, which seemed to dissolve, leaving an open doorway.
‘Knock, knock . . .’ Jay said quietly as Sam walked towards the opening.
Beyond was a large circular chamber with a vaulted ceiling pulsing with swirling patterns of blue light. On the floor in the middle was a glowing pool of light with half a dozen white cylinders arranged in a perfect circle around it. As Sam stepped into the room, more tiny blue lights appeared in the floor, dancing around his feet. The others followed him into the chamber as he walked towards the pool of light.
‘What is this place?’ Nat asked, running her hand along the wall and watching the lights that raced away from her fingertips.
‘It almost looks like some kind of monument,’ Jack said, staring up at the ceiling.
‘Or a tomb,’ Sam said, kneeling down next to the pool of light.
‘You are more right than you know, child of Suran.’
At first the voice seemed to come from nowhere, but a moment later a cloud of sparkling particles swirled up into the air from the pool of light, quick
ly coalescing to form a tall figure. A translucent image of one of the Illuminate stood before them. She wore a long, flowing, golden robe over a suit of segmented bone-white armour and held a pale staff with a gleaming white stone mounted at the top. She looked down at Sam, her eyes glowing the same blue as the veins of light that pulsed between the smooth ridges of her cranial plates, and smiled.
‘Welcome to the Threshold,’ the Illuminate said. ‘I am sorry if our servant alarmed you with his insistence in bringing you here, but we could not take the chance that you would not come. It is vital to the survival of both our species.’
‘Who are you?’ Sam asked, looking the Illuminate in the eye. ‘And what do you want with us?’
‘My name is Selenne and I speak for what remains of my people,’ the Illuminate replied. ‘We wish you no harm, but we must act swiftly if we are to prevent the catastrophe that is about to take place.’ She offered an outstretched hand to Sam. ‘Come with me and I will explain everything. There is nothing to fear, but time is short.’
‘I’m not going anywhere without my friends,’ Sam said, gesturing at the others.
‘Very well, they may accompany you,’ Selenne replied, but then she hesitated for a moment, her eyes narrowing slightly. ‘All except this one.’ She pointed a finger at Mag.
‘Why not her?’ Sam asked, frowning.
‘She has no neural interface,’ Selenne replied. ‘This is a journey she cannot make.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Jay said impatiently. ‘What neural interface?’
‘The implants,’ Sam said. ‘You mean the devices in our heads that block the Voidborn control signal, don’t you?’
‘Oh, they do far more than that,’ Selenne said with a knowing smile. ‘You have taken but a small step on a long path, child of Suran. Now come with me and I can guide you the rest of the way.’
‘First, my name’s Sam,’ he said. ‘And second, how on earth are we supposed to know we can trust you?’
‘If we truly wished you harm, Sam, there would have been ample opportunity for us to act upon it before now,’ Selenne replied. ‘Beyond that I can offer you no more reassurances. Leave now if that is what you wish. I will not stop you. But you should know that this is the only chance of survival you and the rest of the people of this world have.’