‘Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ Sam whispered at the door, glancing over his shoulder at the submarine. Just seconds later the Vore pack poured out of the conning tower, half leaping and half falling to the ground below, before springing to their feet and charging across the room towards him. Sam dropped to his belly and scrambled under the door with barely a centimetre to spare before leaping to his feet and slapping the identical door switch on the other side. The door juddered back down, hitting the ground with a satisfying thud. Sam leant back against it and slid to the floor, sitting there for a moment or two and catching his breath, waiting for his heart rate to return to something like normal as the Vore pounded pointlessly on the other side of the fifteen-centimetre-thick armour.
He looked around the vast space, taking in the scale of the chamber. Once upon a time it would have been a wartime shelter for the UK’s fleet of nuclear submarines, buried dozens of metres below the rugged rock of the Scottish coast. Now it felt like a tomb.
‘OK, I’m here,’ Sam said. ‘Tell me you didn’t know about the Vore.’
I do not understand, the voice in his head replied.
‘Never mind, I’m here now,’ Sam said, climbing to his feet. ‘What do you need me to do?’
Go to the furthest dock from the entrance, the voice replied.
Sam walked the length of the pen, past the listing hulk of the one sub that had been in the pen at the time of the Voidborn invasion. He looked at the name painted on the concrete at the end of the dock: HMS Victorious. It represented the pinnacle of human weapon technology and now it sat here rusting, rendered irrelevant in the blink of an eye when the Voidborn arrived. Every movie he’d watched about alien invasions when he was younger had implied that humanity would fight back somehow, even if it ultimately proved futile. The reality had proven far worse.
Sam reached the empty dock at the far end of the room, the black water within still and deep.
‘What now?’ Sam asked.
In the wall you will see a pair of yellow doors, the voice replied. Open them.
Sam walked over to the brightly painted doors and pulled them open. Inside was a bewildering array of switches.
Now I need you to listen very carefully and follow my instructions.
For the next five minutes the voice inside his head that Sam was still reluctant to believe was his father talked him through a complicated procedure of throwing switches and setting dials to the correct position.
Now hit the large red button in the bottom right-hand corner of the panel, the voice instructed.
Sam did as he was told and somewhere below him he heard a rumble, and one by one the floodlights in the roof of the chamber far above lit up and bathed the dock with light.
Now do you see the switch labelled ‘Evac Pump DD1’?
‘Yeah, I see it,’ Sam said, after scanning the control panel for a few seconds.
Press it.
Sam hit the button. The place was suddenly filled with the sound of blaring klaxons, and yellow warning lights began to flash at the end of the nearest dock. Slowly, a huge metal panel slid up out of the water, locking into position when it was a metre clear of the surface. This was followed by a roaring sound, and the previously calm water of the dock began to churn as it was slowly drained away. As the water level dropped, something began to emerge. At first it looked like the curved white fin of some sort of sea monster rising from the ocean, but a few seconds later it became clear that it was a smooth, curved pylon and Sam could start to make out the pale shape of something large beneath the surface of the churning water. The giant pumps continued their work, draining the dry dock, and slowly, centimetre by centimetre, a huge, gleaming white vessel was revealed, the elegant lines of its dagger-like hull flaring into the curved pylons at the rear of the ship.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Sam said. ‘What is it?’
This is the vessel that brought Talon and myself to your planet many millions of years ago. In our native language she is called Naruun Pash Tanakk – the nearest English translation is Scythe of the Stars.
‘Mind if we just go with Scythe, instead of Naruun . . . uhh . . . whatever it was called?’ Sam said, walking along the deck, admiring the sweeping lines of its hull. It couldn’t have been more different to the sharp, angular shapes of the Voidborn ships.
Of course, the voice replied. The Scythe was not the most powerful ship in the Illuminate fleet, but she was the fastest and most manoeuvrable. That is why she was chosen to bear the last remnant of our people to this planet when we fled the Voidborn. It was this vessel that brought the Heart to Earth and it is this vessel that may now be the only way to protect it and every other living thing on this planet.
‘Just this one ship can destroy the Voidborn?’ Sam asked with a frown. ‘If that were true, why haven’t you done it already?’
It is not the Scythe that will destroy the Voidborn; it is where it will allow us to go.
‘Which is where exactly?’ Sam asked. ‘I’m not a big fan of cryptic.’
If you board the Scythe, the voice replied, I will explain.
Sam felt a moment of doubt; he had no idea whether or not he could trust this mysterious voice inside his head and there was no way of knowing what might happen if he did as it asked. But what it had told him a few minutes ago was true: if it did mean to harm him, there had been ample opportunity to do so on the journey up here.
‘OK, if it’s going to get me some answers,’ Sam said. ‘How do I get on board?’
The ship is keyed to the implant inside your head, the voice replied. All you need do is touch the hull.
Sam climbed down the nearby ladder that led to the bottom of the dry dock and walked towards the ship, stretching out his hand and placing it on the hull, which, despite the fact it had just emerged from the water, felt dry and warm. As his skin made contact with the Scythe, he watched patterns of blue light radiate out from his hand and ripple across the ship’s hull. A moment later there was a solid clunk and a hiss, and a hatch that had been invisible just before opened in the side of the vessel, a few metres away. Sam walked towards the hatch as glowing blue blocks of energy materialised in front of it, forming a staircase that led inside. He climbed up the steps and into the brightly illuminated interior of the Scythe, the clean lines of its hull echoed in the smooth, white internal walls that pulsed with the same blue lights that had lit up on the exterior hull at Sam’s touch.
Follow the corridor to your right, the voice said. It will take you to the bridge.
Sam followed the voice’s directions and soon came to a hatch that silently slid open as he approached. The chamber beyond was dominated by a central dais upon which was a curved reclining seat. Arranged around the central seat were half a dozen more seats in a semi-circle. There was no sign of anything that Sam might have recognised as controls or instruments. In fact, its bare walls and simple shapes reminded him more than anything else of the spartan interior of the Voidborn drop-ships.
Please sit, the voice said, as the raised seat in the centre silently lowered.
Sam walked over and sat down, feeling the warm, soft lining meld itself to his body as he leant back. A moment later the seat rose back into its elevated position and the air in front of Sam’s face was filled with a glowing holographic screen displaying an array of strange icons and what looked like words in an unintelligible angular script. He watched as the display shifted, the readouts moving to the edges of the screen and a face appearing in the centre of it. Sam felt a shiver run through his body as he stared into the eyes of his dead father. It was not the human face that Sam had grown up with, but his father’s true face, that of the Illuminate scientist Suran.
‘Hello, Sam,’ the holographic image said. ‘I am sorry to have brought you here like this, but there is much to do and little time to explain.’
‘What are you?’ Sam asked, relieved to be able to hear his father’s voice normally at last, instead of as a whisper in his skull. ‘Whatever you are, you’re not my d
ad. I watched him die.’
‘You are correct,’ the hologram replied with a nod. ‘I am an engram construct.’
‘Which is?’
‘It is a concept that is difficult to express in your language,’ the Construct replied. ‘I am an artificial recreation of your father’s personality that is based upon centuries of his recorded experience. Your father is indeed dead, but he left me here as an echo of himself so that he could warn you of the danger that you face.’
‘So you’re some kind of digital ghost of my father?’ Sam asked.
‘An over-simplification, but yes,’ the Construct replied. ‘That would be one way of putting it.’
‘How did you get me here?’ Sam asked.
‘The implant that your father placed in your cerebral cortex effectively blocks the Voidborn control signal by overlaying it with a separate, stronger signal that it generates itself. That signal usually does nothing but block the commands sent by the Voidborn, but it can, if necessary, be used to control the individual who carries the implant. That was how I was able to bring you here.’
‘You could’ve just asked,’ Sam said with a frown.
‘No, I could not,’ the Construct replied. ‘I was pre-programmed by your father to summon you only in certain, very specific circumstances. One of those circumstances has arisen and so I was forced to bring you here like this. You, your planet and what remains of both our species are in mortal danger and we must act now before it is too late.’
‘I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but we’ve been in mortal danger for a couple of years now. It’s not exactly breaking news.’
‘No,’ the Construct replied. ‘There is a new threat, something that neither you nor the Illuminate have seen before. Observe.’
The display shifted and an image appeared of the Earth and the moon hanging in space. A point halfway between the two was highlighted by a pulsing red light.
‘What’s that?’ Sam asked.
‘I am not entirely certain,’ the Construct replied, ‘but I fear that it may be the vessel that was controlling the Voidborn fleet when they first attacked the Illuminate. Our fleet was never able to get near enough to observe it directly, but we were able to detect power emissions on a scale quite unlike anything we had ever seen before. Whenever we encountered the Voidborn, we detected those emissions, but we could not determine exactly what it was that was creating them. The object that you see in front of you matches that emission signal perfectly.’
‘When did it appear?’ Sam asked.
‘Within the last twenty-four hours,’ the Construct replied. ‘It is also transmitting an extremely powerful signal to the Voidborn vessels within the Earth’s atmosphere, a signal that is then being relayed to the other members of your species.’
Sam thought back to the Sleepers writhing in agony in Stirling’s laboratory. It couldn’t be just a coincidence that their change in behaviour coincided perfectly with the arrival of this thing, whatever it was.
‘We have to stop that signal,’ Sam said. ‘It’s doing something to everyone without an implant, something awful.’
‘That is why I brought you here,’ the Construct replied. ‘You are the last of the Illuminate and so you are the only one who may access the Heart.’
‘My father told me about that,’ Sam said. ‘Some sort of archive that stored the personalities of the Illuminate.’
‘That is correct,’ the Construct replied. ‘It was our last hope for escaping the Voidborn after we suffered our final crushing defeat in the war. Billions of Illuminate consciousnesses, digitised, compressed and stored within a near-indestructible data crystal. Our last desperate gambit when the only option that was left for us was to run and hide. It rests within the molten core of your planet, somewhere we thought it would never be found. We were wrong.’
‘And that’s what the Voidborn have been searching for; that’s why they came here and built those drilling rigs like the one we disabled in London.’
‘Yes, and now we must assume they have finally retrieved it or are at least very close to doing so,’ the Construct said. ‘I do not understand exactly what the Voidborn intend to do at that point. If they had wished simply to destroy it, they could have forced your star to explode into a supernova, but the lengths to which they have gone to preserve the lives of the inhabitants of this planet while seeking to retrieve it suggest that they have other motives of which we are, as yet, unaware.’
‘So whatever they’re planning has something to do with the Heart,’ Sam said, ‘which means we’ve got to stop them from getting their hands on it.’
‘Yes, I believe so,’ the Construct replied.
‘Then I need to get back to London as soon as possible,’ Sam said. ‘Is this thing ready to fly?’
‘All of the Scythe’s systems are fully operational,’ the Construct replied.
‘Then let’s go,’ Sam said. ‘If we’re going to stand any chance of stopping the Voidborn from retrieving the Heart, we’re going to need all the help we can get.’
3
Stirling stared through the microscope at the sample of the dusty remains of the Servant. At that level of magnification the tiny particles were still little more than smooth ovals that gave no hint as to how they functioned as self-assembling nano-technological machines. He suspected it would take something with the power of an electron microscope to even begin to understand how the tiny machines worked. Unfortunately, that was a level of technology they no longer had access to. Given time he might have been able to adapt some of the Voidborn technology for that purpose, but that, in turn, would require the assistance of the Servant. He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes, feeling a frustrating sense of helplessness. They had been unable to communicate with the Voidborn around the compound for nearly twelve hours, ever since Sam had departed. They were fortunate at least, he supposed, that the Voidborn didn’t appear to be listening to their original masters either; in fact, they appeared completely inert.
The timing was terrible; Stirling and the others had to try to stop whatever was happening to the Sleepers before it was too late and they all started to succumb to dehydration. To do that they needed access to all the resources that Sam’s control over the Motherships above London granted them. After their successes in London and their defeat of Talon and capture of the second Mothership, Stirling had allowed himself to believe they were starting to build a platform from which they could launch a meaningful counter-attack against the invaders. Now he was beginning to wonder if all they’d ever been doing was prolonging their inevitable defeat. He could never allow the others to see it. He knew they all viewed him as the unflappable founder of their resistance movement, but he was starting to doubt whether they had ever really had any chance of truly being able to fight back. There was only a handful of them, and even with the help of the Servant and the Voidborn she controlled, it was, perhaps, just too mammoth a task.
‘Come on, Iain,’ Stirling said to himself, leaning forward and pressing his eyes to the lenses of the microscope, ‘can’t afford to give up now. Focus on the work.’
He spent a couple more minutes studying the nanites, subjecting them to ever increasing levels of voltage in the hope that the electricity might stir them back into life somehow, but still they remained frustratingly inert. He was just scribbling a note on the pad next to the microscope when the door to his laboratory flew open with a bang.
‘Doctor Stirling,’ Jack said breathlessly. ‘There’s a ship landing in the compound. It’s not like anything we’ve seen before.’
Stirling leapt from his chair and hurried out of the lab, following Jack into the compound courtyard, where a streamlined white ship was settling to the ground, slim white struts sliding out from its underside and then sinking into the dirt as they took the vessel’s weight. The rest of the group was already there, the expressions on their faces a mixture of curiosity and concern. Stirling noticed Jay thumbing the safety catch on the assault rifle he was carrying to the firin
g position.
‘Stay back,’ Stirling called as the roar of the craft’s engines dropped to a low hum.
Moments later, a hatch opened in the side of the vessel and Sam appeared in the opening, looking completely human; all trace of the strange changes that his body had undergone had vanished. He walked down the glowing blue steps, his smile fading as he saw the look on Jay’s face. Mag took a step towards Sam, but Jay put a hand on her shoulder, holding her back for the moment.
‘Jay, come on,’ Mag said, ‘it’s Sam.’
‘I can see that,’ Jay said. ‘Let’s just make sure he’s feeling himself before we get any closer, yeah?’
Sam looked at the faces of his friends and saw something he’d never seen before . . . suspicion. It was exactly what he had always feared would happen when his friends found out the truth about his condition. Mag had been right: this was worse than facing the truth.
‘You OK, Sam?’ Jay asked. Sam couldn’t help but notice that his friend looked prepared to use the rifle he was carrying.
‘I thought I was, but something tells me I don’t have the full picture,’ Sam replied with a frown. He had no idea what had happened between his last memory of standing in front of them all and waking up in Scotland. The expressions on their faces suggested he might not want to.
‘Yeah, I think we all know how that feels,’ Jay said. ‘Wanna tell us what happened to you?’
‘Actually, I think you guys might have to fill me in on most of the details,’ Sam said. ‘Last thing I remember was standing in the common room. Next thing I know I’m running for my life from the Vore.’