‘You still don’t understand, do you?’ the Primarch said, shaking its head. ‘They were already dead. One way or another, it was just a matter of time. It wasn’t my Voidborn who created the technology that enslaved your people. All that the Motherships did was alter the control signal that the Illuminate were broadcasting, even if they had not yet used it to exert their control over your planet. It was their signal that robbed your people of their free will. The Voidborn merely intercepted it when they arrived and altered it to suit their own purposes. If they had not, the Illuminate would have eventually assumed control of your species, as they had always intended to do. That is why I have inflicted such torment on the humans sleeping below. The sensory overload caused by their agony makes it impossible for consciousness transfer to take place. As long as the humans suffer, the Illuminate are unable to possess them, even with the Bridge. Any attempt would cause fatal neural shock. That’s all humanity ever was to the Illuminate, the perfect hiding place, a lowly species on a backwater world. It would never have occurred to me to look for the Illuminate within you. They would have simply erased humanity from existence in a heartbeat and overwritten them as if they were no more than junk data. A new life for them at the expense of the lives of every last one of your kind. Your consciousnesses erased and replaced in an instant, as if they had never existed at all. So spare me your indignant talk of genocide,’ the Primarch said, turning towards Sam with a sneer. ‘Because what your friends intended to do to you was just as bad. Perhaps worse. And best of all, it was all your father’s idea.’
‘No . . . I can’t . . . I won’t believe that,’ Sam said, shaking his head, not wanting to entertain the idea that what this monstrous creature was telling him could be the truth. His mind raced, trying to rationalise what the Primarch had told him. The more he thought about it, the more it all started to make sense, whether he wanted it to or not. He had always wondered why the Voidborn had gone to the trouble of enslaving humanity when it would have been much simpler to wipe them out.
‘Tell him, Selenne,’ the Primarch said, looking towards the captured Illuminate. ‘Tell him that everything I have just said is a lie. Tell him that the Illuminate had nothing but humanity’s best interests at heart.’ The creature walked up to her, staring down at her as she turned away from it. ‘Except you can’t, can you? Because you know as well as I do that everything I have told this child is the truth.’ It faced Sam again, pointing a single claw-tipped finger at Selenne. ‘So now you see your allies for who they really are and perhaps, just perhaps, you are beginning to understand why they have to be destroyed.’
Sam’s mind raced. His initial reaction had of course been to assume that the malevolent creature standing before him was lying, but if that were true, why did Selenne say nothing? A memory from just a few hours before leapt into his head unbidden. It was something one of the Illuminate, General Indriss, had said to Jay when they had first visited the virtual world within the Heart. The general had called Jay something odd in the heat of the moment; the word had been strange enough that it had stuck in Sam’s head. It had been meant as an insult, a single word said with a dismissive sneer.
Vessel.
At the time, he had dismissed it as some quirk of the Illuminate language, its true meaning lost on him, but now . . . Sam felt something almost like vertigo as the implications of what he had just learned began to sink in. There was nothing left to fight for. If he didn’t open the Bridge for the Primarch, the monstrous creature would scorch the surface of the planet. London would just be the start. He suddenly realised that the desperate battle his friends were presumably still fighting far below was meaningless. Even if they were somehow victorious, all they had done was hand control of an army to the Illuminate, a species whose only hope of survival was the effective murder of every last human being on the face of the Earth. Sam suddenly felt something he hadn’t felt for a very long time. Not since the very first earliest days of the Voidborn invasion. Despair.
‘It’s all true, isn’t it?’ Sam said, staring at Selenne, his voice filled with anger.
She looked up at him, her face a mask of grief.
‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘all of it. We have lied enough. Here, at the end for both our species, you at least deserve the truth.’
‘This, all of it, it’s . . . it’s your fault,’ Sam said, feeling a hot rage building in his chest. ‘This is because of you, everything – the Voidborn, the invasion, Rachel, Adam, Stirling, all the dead. London . . . Damn you . . . My family . . .’ His voice cracked as he felt the sting of tears in his eyes, grief suddenly overwhelming him. He turned back to the Primarch.
‘I’ll open your damn Bridge for you on one condition. If I help you destroy the Illuminate, you leave the Earth and never come back. Humanity has suffered enough.’
‘You are hardly in a position to negotiate, human,’ the Primarch replied. ‘But you may rest assured that when I have finished with the Illuminate, it will bring an end to my interest in your meaningless little planet.’
Sam knew it was only the slimmest hope of survival for humanity, but that had to be better than no hope at all.
‘Then show me what you want me to do.’
11
‘I hope you know where you’re going,’ Mag said, as she, Jay and the Servant ran down the corridor leading away from the room where they had found the golden Voidborn just a minute earlier.
‘I share a bond with the Illuminate,’ the Servant replied. ‘My own nanites are still integrated with his system, despite the recent physiological changes he has undergone.’
‘What do you mean, your nanites . . . Oh, yeah, right, his arm,’ Jay said, sounding slightly out of breath.
Sam had lost his arm in their first encounter with the Servant, when she had still been loyal to the Voidborn. The golden, shape-shifting limb that had replaced it was composed of the same nanites that made up not only the Servant, but also all of the Voidborn units that were part of the London Mothership. It had been one of the first indications that there was something both strange and unique about Sam.
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ Mag said, pulling to a sudden stop and waving for quiet. ‘Can you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ Jay said. ‘There’s nothing . . .’
But there was something. A scratchy, hissing sound that was coming from somewhere behind them and slowly increasing in intensity. It was a sound that had become horribly familiar to both Mag and Jay over the past couple of days.
‘That’ll be the guard dog,’ Jay said, shooting a worried glance at Mag.
‘We are on board a Voidborn vessel in high Earth orbit; it is most unlikely that a Terran canine is pursuing us,’ the Servant said matter-of-factly, her head tipped to one side.
‘Yeah . . . no . . . you see, that’s just a figure of . . . never mind,’ Mag said, shaking her head. ‘Point is, we need to get out of here now.’
‘Mag’s right,’ Jay said. ‘We need to find Sam. Show us the quickest route to him.’
‘Understood,’ the Servant said with a nod. ‘Follow me.’ She set off at a sprint, with Jay and Mag close behind her.
In the darkness, somewhere behind them, the swarm that had been summoned by the release of the Servant gathered speed in pursuit of its new prey.
‘Fall back!’ Anne yelled, watching as the others took up new positions behind the outer line of Illuminate Grendels defending the gaping hole that led to the core chamber below. The swarm had now completely engulfed both the top and the underside of the span and the giant structure was beginning to lean precipitously. The cutting beam beneath the core sputtered and died; its control systems had finally failed due to the cumulative damage the structure had suffered, and a chain of small explosions ran through the underside of the span. They all felt a sickening jolt and heard a low rumble from the far end as something beneath the heaving mass of the swarm finally gave way.
‘Will, grab Jack and get airborne,’ Nat yelled.
Will gave a quick nod an
d took off into the air, rocketing towards Jack and scooping him up off the ground just as the massive Voidborn structure dropped five metres in one sudden, heart-stopping lurch. Nat and Anne launched themselves into the sky, watching helplessly as the Grendels stranded on the top of the building struggled to maintain their balance. A series of huge explosions came from the far end of the structure and finally it lost its battle with the Voidborn swarm and gravity. The Hunters attached to the underside of the core chamber fought pointlessly to keep its colossal weight suspended, their antigravity generators screaming in protest and then overloading in showers of sparking, fiery debris. The doomed building plunged towards the canyon floor far below, the core within still active until the end, burning bright with chaotic, violent discharges as it fell. It smashed into the Voidborn buildings that covered the canyon floor, now barely visible beneath countless millions of skittering swarm drones.
Nat, Anne, Jack and Will raced up into the sky, climbing as fast as their suits would safely allow, pushing them to the limit. Below them, the Voidborn core imploded, instantly vaporising everything within five hundred metres, whether it was Voidborn or Illuminate controlled. Nat slowed her ascent, staring down in horror at the devastation below. The canyon was a hellish, blazing wasteland with a giant crater at its centre, and as she watched the few Hunters that had survived the explosion tumble from the sky, their tentacles flailing limply, severed completely from Illuminate control, she could only assume that exactly the same thing was happening all over North America; their final desperate gambit had failed.
‘What do we do now?’ Anne asked quietly as she dropped into a hover beside her friend and joined her in surveying the catastrophe below.
‘You tell me,’ Nat replied, shaking her head. ‘There’s no point us staying here now.’
‘So where do we go?’ Will asked as he rose up alongside them, hanging on tightly to Jack.
‘Honestly?’ Nat replied. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
‘Kill them and bring me the bodies!’ the Primarch snapped at the dozens of tiny crawling swarm drones that scurried across the surface of its hand and forearm. The drones dropped to the floor as the Primarch lowered its arm, skittering away into the darkness. ‘It seems some of your friends have a death wish.’
‘What do you mean?’ Sam asked with a confused frown as the Primarch shoved him hard in the back, sending him staggering down the corridor ahead of it. Selenne walked along beside Sam in silence, her head hung low. ‘Who’s here?’
‘It hardly matters,’ the Primarch said with a growl. ‘They’re already dead. My swarm drones are far more efficient hunters than the previous generation of Voidborn. Your friends will not escape them.’
Sam said nothing, but he was secretly encouraged by the fact that the Primarch could not instantly locate whomever it was who had managed to get on board. The fact that it needed to rely on the swarm drones to find the intruders suggested the creature was not perhaps as omniscient as it would like to appear. This was not much of a weakness, but it was something.
‘You are privileged, human,’ the Primarch said, shoving Sam into the massive chamber at the end of the corridor. ‘Very few creatures have ever seen this.’
Sam’s eyes widened as he tried to make sense of the scale of the colossal machine in front of him. The walls of the vast space were lined with larger versions of the nano-forges that Sam had seen on board the Mothership above London. Dozens of streams of white-hot liquid poured from the massive, crackling portals on the front of the huge cylindrical structures before cascading down the slope that led to the centre of the chamber. There, the streams collected in a bubbling pool, strange alien shapes forming and then melting back into its boiling surface as Sam watched. Above the pool a giant, silvery black ball was slowly rotating. It was formed from countless writhing snake-like creatures, their intertwined, segmented bodies sliding over and between each other.
‘The Voidborn Nucleus,’ the Primarch said, stepping out on to the suspended walkway that led to the centre of the chamber. ‘Once, these were Illuminate constructor nanites, designed to prepare new worlds for Illuminate colonists ahead of their arrival. Now they are mine, the Voidborn in their purest form, the clay from which I built my armies.’
Again, Sam heard the slight manic edge to the Primarch’s voice. There was no doubt in his mind that the creature’s grasp on sanity was fragile at best, but Sam couldn’t tell if it was something that he could exploit or if it simply made the Primarch more unpredictable and therefore dangerous.
‘I didn’t come here for a guided tour,’ Sam said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
‘I have waited millennia for this, human,’ the Primarch said as it moved across the walkway towards the hovering silver ball. ‘I will savour the moment for as long as I wish.’
Sam followed behind the towering creature, his mind racing. There had to be something he could do, some way of derailing the Primarch’s plan. Despite what he had told the Primarch a few minutes earlier, he had absolutely no intention of granting the insane creature access to the Heart if he could possibly help it. At the same time, if it really did come down to a choice between humanity and the Illuminate, Sam knew exactly what he would be forced to do. What he had to do now was somehow come up with a way of ensuring he didn’t end up in that nightmarish situation.
As they walked closer to the giant squirming silver ball, Sam could see that the snaking creatures were in fact writhing chains of much smaller machines. When they were within just a couple of metres of the Nucleus, Sam noticed that those smaller devices were themselves made up of even tinier networks of intricate machine work. It was the perfect illustration of exactly how the Voidborn worked, their nanites building upwards from the microscopic level to the macroscopic. Horrors made of dust.
‘This is the Voidborn,’ the Primarch said, raising one of its giant clawed hands towards the squirming mass. ‘In our purist form, nothing but unfettered potential. With it, we can become anything, create anything, destroy anything . . . whatever is required. We are the true heirs to the stars, not you, Selenne, and certainly not these fragile, organic life forms with their fleeting, useless lives.’
‘Sabiss, these things are machines,’ Selenne replied, walking slowly towards the Primarch with a look of terrible sadness on her face. ‘You were lost and these machines found you. You . . . your vessel was damaged and these machines simply did what they were programmed to do: they repaired you as best they could. The Primarch was supposed to be our first proper step into the universe, a pioneer vessel, exploring and building homes for us amongst the stars so that we could all follow in your footsteps.’
‘All lost in the darkness,’ the Primarch said, without turning to face her. ‘I remember nothing before that.’
‘I do,’ Selenne replied, her voice sounding desperate. ‘I remember you, Sabiss. I remember the man you were. I remember you designing your ship, the Primary Architect. That was what you were intent on calling it until Suran convinced you that you needed to call it something shorter. You’re not the Primarch, Sabiss, you’re the man who designed it, built it and ultimately piloted it, but you are not what this ship has become.’
‘I do not expect you to understand,’ the Primarch replied, its back still turned to her. ‘No, you cannot understand. You might think you can imagine what it would be like to drift through nothingness for an eternity, your eyes pinned open, awake and yet dreaming of a sleep that will never come, but you can’t. You can’t imagine what that forces you to become.’
As the Primarch spoke, a stream of glittering black dust began to pour from its hand, rushing towards the slowly rotating sphere before being absorbed into its endlessly shifting coils. A few seconds later, the surface of the Voidborn Nucleus began to split and divide, the dark squirming mass opening to reveal a ball of red energy that flared with the brightness of a tiny sun.
‘Perhaps watching your people burn will be enough to give you a true taste of horror,’ the Primarch said. ‘Co
me here, human.’
Selenne shot a pleading glance in Sam’s direction and he suddenly felt sick to his stomach as he realised they were out of both time and options.
‘Sabiss, I’m begging you, please,’ Selenne pleaded with the creature. ‘I know you’re still in there. The colony ships that found you were simple machines with basic programming. The Voidborn are intelligent: they plan, they reason, they think. That had to come from somewhere, Sabiss. That had to come from you!’
She reached towards the Primarch, her outstretched fingertips brushing its arm. Without warning, the creature whirled round to face her, a single outstretched hand held out in a claw-like grip, as if crushing some invisible object in his palm. The response from Selenne was instant, her face contorting in a rictus of agony as her body began to shift and morph horribly, taking strange, nightmarish forms.
‘We are Voidborn!’ the Primarch bellowed, its voice suddenly filled with insane rage. ‘We are many; we are one, indivisible, eternal! We will outlive the night and when there is nothing left but us, we will still endure.’ Its words came out in a manic torrent, as if something within the creature had finally snapped. ‘This child will open the Bridge and the final tattered remnants of your people will be mine to do with as I please. The cursed light of the Illuminate will be erased from the universe for ever and only we, the Voidborn, will remain.’
Selenne let out a bloodcurdling scream, collapsing to the ground, writhing in agony, while the Primarch tightened its fist in the air above her, as if crushing the life from her body. The creature raised its other hand, jabbing a finger towards Sam.
‘Come here, boy,’ the Primarch snarled. ‘It is time for you to play your part.’
Sam stared back at the monstrous creature, knowing in his heart that defiance at this point would be an act of utter futility, but determined, all the same, not to let the Primarch see any sign of the fear that was churning in his gut.