‘What happened?’ Sam asked, sounding dazed. ‘Where’s the Voidborn?’
‘No idea,’ Rachel said. ‘It vanished. Ummm, Sam, look at your arm.’
Sam held his arm up and looked at it in astonishment, his wide-eyed face reflected in its golden surface.
‘What the . . .’
There was a sudden blinding flash of yellow light from the pedestal in the centre of the pit and the black cloud began to reappear.
‘Get back,’ Stirling shouted, knowing that there was nowhere to run.
The cloud of black dust began to swirl into a definite shape; at first it was indistinct, but then it became clear first that it was humanoid and then female. Stirling felt a moment of despair; their only weapon had failed. The Voidborn stood motionless for a moment as spots of yellow light danced across her shining black skin and then began to spread into patches of blinding yellow light. A moment later the Voidborn flared with an explosion of light that was too bright to look at directly. As the glow diminished the Voidborn became visible again, but now her black metallic skin was a deep golden colour. She crossed the walkway as Sam and the others got to their feet, backing away towards the transparent outer wall. The Voidborn stopped a few metres away from them and slowly looked at each of them in turn before its eyes settled on Sam
‘I am a servant of the Illuminate,’ the golden-skinned woman said.
‘The who?’ Stirling asked, his brow furrowed in confusion.
‘The Illuminate,’ the gold-skinned figure said, raising her hand and pointing at Sam. ‘I serve their will.’
‘You’re not Voidborn?’ Sam asked.
‘No, I am what the Voidborn once were, I am this vessel, I am the many others aboard this vessel and in the city below. I am what the Voidborn once were before they became corrupted. The blood of the Illuminate has cured the corruption within me. This vessel was Voidborn and now it once again serves the Illuminate.’
‘You mean that the Voidborn were once all like you?’ Stirling asked, examining the golden figure. ‘That something happened to them to make them as they are now?’
‘We were lost. The Illuminate were taken from us,’ the golden figure replied. ‘We became Voidborn. Now the Illuminate are returned to us.’ She gestured towards Sam.
‘Look, I don’t know what an Illuminate is or why you seem to think I am one, but can you get this thing back to flying level?’ Sam asked.
‘As you wish.’
With a low rumble from somewhere below them, the Mothership slowly levelled out.
‘Thank you,’ Sam said.
‘It is my function to serve your will, Illuminate,’ she replied.
‘OK, that’s going to get boring,’ Rachel said.
‘Do I understand you correctly?’ Stirling asked. ‘You control all of the constructs that came from this vessel? That you actually are this vessel?’
‘That is correct,’ the golden figure replied. ‘The form that stands before you is used to simplify communication between us. In reality, I am all around you.’ She gestured to the walls surrounding them. ‘And within each of the machines in the city below. I am one and many at the same time.’
‘Does that mean what I think it does?’ Rachel asked Stirling. ‘That we now control all the Hunters, Grendels and drop-ships in London?’
‘I believe so,’ Stirling said, closing his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘Or, more accurately, that Sam does. Something within him appears to have triggered a change in this Voidborn, reverting it to an earlier state. If I understand correctly what this being is telling us, Sam must be connected in some way to the entities who originally constructed this vessel. The Voidborn didn’t come here in these ships – the Voidborn are these ships. Each Mothership is a unique entity, but anything that came from it is still part of that one being: the Grendels and Hunters in the streets below, the aircraft in the skies above – a true distributed digital consciousness. All of which appears to now be at our . . . well . . . Sam’s disposal.’
‘That’s a lot of firepower,’ Jack said with a low whistle.
‘It’s more than that, Jack,’ Sam said quietly. ‘It’s an army.’
12
A week had passed since the events on the Voidborn Mothership and Sam felt that, yet again, he’d been left with more questions than answers. He leant on the walkway railing in front of one of the Grendel docking stations, looking down at the drop-ship that was being prepared for his trip to the abandoned Voidborn compound below. Like all the Voidborn hardware that they had now assumed control of, its surface pulsed with yellow light instead of the once familiar green.
It was just one of many changes that had taken place since that day. They had explored just a tiny fraction of the Mothership, but what they had found was confusing. Stirling had told them the Voidborn were the Motherships, that the creature they had met up in the control room was just an extension of the ship. The ship itself was alive and now it was no longer Voidborn, now it was ‘a Servant of the Illuminate’. It was hard for Sam to get his head around it, but for whatever reason the Mothership was now not only friendly, but unquestioningly obedient to him. Because he was Illuminate, whatever that meant. The strangest thing, though, was that the Mothership appeared to have been designed to accommodate living humanoid creatures, but there had been no one on board other than the Voidborn. When even Stirling admitted that something made no sense to him, they knew that they had a real mystery on their hands.
‘What are you sitting up here brooding about?’ Rachel said as she walked up to him with a smile.
‘I guess I’m just wondering when the Voidborn are going to hit back,’ Sam said. ‘There are still a lot more of them than there are of us. They must know by now what we’ve done. I just don’t understand why any of the other Motherships around the world haven’t retaliated.’
‘There’s an old saying about gift horses that you might want to bear in mind when you say something like that,’ Rachel said, nudging him in the ribs. ‘Umm, Sam, your hand’s . . . errr . . .’
Sam looked down at his right hand. Its golden surface had spread out and was melding with the smooth black surface of the railing. He concentrated for an instant and it reformed into its normal shape.
‘Sorry, bit unnerving, I know,’ Sam said, looking slightly annoyed. ‘The Servant assures me that it will settle down after a few weeks. She was talking about morphic memory or something like that.’
‘It’s been so busy around here that I’ve not really had a proper chance to say thank you,’ Rachel said, putting her hand on his. ‘If you hadn’t done what you did,’ she gestured towards his golden hand, ‘the Voidborn would’ve done to me what it did to Kate.’
‘You know, you don’t have to thank me. Truth is, I don’t really remember what happened that well. I just remember thinking that I was sick of watching people die. Tim, Toby, Jackson and then Kate. I just couldn’t stand to lose anyone else.’
‘It was very brave. You saved my life.’
‘Hey, I owed you one,’ Sam said with a smile. ‘If it weren’t for you and Nat, me and Jay would never have made it out of the Voidborn compound. Speaking of which, I have a flight to catch.’ Sam nodded towards the drop-ship being prepped on the flight deck below.
‘If you’re heading down there, would you mind if I tagged along?’ Rachel asked. ‘I want to see how Liz and Jack are getting on with preparations for the first waking.’
‘Sure, no problem,’ Sam said, and the pair of them set off across the walkway towards the stairs leading to the flight deck below.
‘So you going down there to see Stirling and Golden Boobs, then?’ Rachel asked.
‘I do wish you wouldn’t call her that,’ Sam said with a sigh as they walked towards the drop-ship.
‘So what should we call her, then?’ Rachel asked.
‘She calls herself the Servant of the Illuminate,’ Sam replied, ‘but Stirling just calls her the Servant, which I suppose is as good a name as any.’
&
nbsp; ‘I live to serve you, O Illuminate one,’ Rachel said, putting on a sickly sweet voice.
‘OK, maybe it is a little bit embarrassing,’ Sam said, blushing. ‘I just want to see if they’ve managed to work out what the Voidborn machine was doing yet.’
‘Well, at least they’ve shut it down,’ Rachel said. ‘It shouldn’t be doing any more harm.’
‘Yeah,’ Sam said as they walked up the ramp and into the belly of the drop-ship. ‘We have to assume that they’re doing the same thing around the world, though, so we do need to try and figure out what they’re up to.’
The boarding hatch hissed shut and the drop-ship interior was filled with the yellow light from the energy flowing along the walls. They both grabbed on to the cube-shaped protrusions jutting out from the wall as the aircraft lifted off the deck.
‘You know, sooner or later we’re going to have put some windows in these things,’ Rachel said.
‘I think seats might be a higher priority,’ Sam said. ‘I suppose they weren’t particularly important to the Voidborn.’
The flight to ground level only took five minutes and as he climbed down the boarding ramp in the pre-dawn light Sam was reminded again how nice it was to leave the stifling dry heat of the Mothership. He’d asked the Servant if they could do anything to reduce the ambient temperature in the huge vessel, but apparently it was a side effect of its design and impossible to change. On the plus side, at least it made him appreciate a cold, damp autumn morning in Britain.
‘OK, I’m going to check on Liz and Jack, and see if they need any help,’ Rachel said. ‘See you later.’
‘Yeah, see you,’ Sam said as he watched her walk off towards the dormitory block that the Hunters were busily constructing on the other side of the compound. They were planning to try to wake the first of the enslaved humans next week, and they were going to need somewhere to sleep. Finding out if there was a way to wake people up from their Voidborn enslaved state was one of the first things that they had worked on. Stirling, with the Servant’s help, had found the signal that the Voidborn could transmit to restore free will on an individual basis. It was short-range and could be transmitted to just a handful of people by a Hunter, in much the same way as they used to relay commands from the Mothership when it was under Voidborn control. Their first instinct had been to release everyone, but Stirling pointed out that waking up eight hundred thousand confused and angry Londoners all at the same time, with the city’s infrastructure lying in ruins, was a recipe for certain disaster. They had to be far more careful than that. In the meantime, the vast majority of the enslaved would stay as they had been under Voidborn control. They would help with the rebuilding of critical infrastructure during the day and return to their mass dormitories in office blocks and warehouses at night, fed by Voidborn feeding stations and otherwise cared for by the Hunters.
It had not been an easy decision to make; it had not sat well with any of them, but it was the only logical thing to do. Part of Sam wanted to just go and find his sister and his parents, but he could spend a year looking for them in a city the size of London and never find them. He had to take solace in the fact that he would be reunited with his family one day.
‘Hey, Sam,’ Jay shouted from the entrance to the Voidborn structure in the centre of the remains of St James’s Park. His friends came walking towards him; Jay with a massive grin on his face and Adam shaking his head. ‘Me and Adam were just wondering if anyone would mind if we moved into Buckingham Palace?’ Jay said as they approached. ‘You know, it’s nearby, good transport links, nice big garden. No one else is using it.’
‘I’d just like to point out this was all his idea,’ Adam said, rolling his eyes. ‘Nothing to do with me.’
‘I kind of assumed that was the case,’ Sam said. ‘It has the feel of a Jay plan.’
‘What you trying to say?’ Jay said with mock indignation.
‘How are you two healing up?’ Sam asked. Jay’s wrist was in plaster and Adam’s arm was in a sling while his shoulder wound healed.
‘I’m getting there. It’s still sore, but Stirling says it’s getting better,’ Adam said.
‘Good.’ Sam had been worried about Adam. Kate’s death had hit him particularly hard. That was part of the reason he’d asked Jay to hang out with him and try to cheer him up a bit.
‘We’ll both be back fighting fit before you know it, and then we are gonna kick some Void ass,’ Jay said with a grin.
‘Good to know,’ Sam said. ‘I’m just going to see Stirling. I’ll run your . . . erm . . . accommodation plans past him and see what he thinks.’
‘Cool,’ Jay said. ‘Say “Hi” to the Doc and your girlfriend for us, yeah?
‘She’s not my girlf—’ Sam trailed off as the other two boys walked away, laughing. He walked inside the Voidborn structure towards Fletcher’s old office at the machine’s heart. Stirling looked up from the printouts he was examining and smiled.
‘Hello, Sam,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I just wanted to check in and see if you’d made any progress in working out what that thing in there was doing,’ Sam said, gesturing to the door that led to the giant cavern housing the mysterious machine.
‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ Stirling said. ‘Obviously, it was a drilling rig of some sort, but why the Voidborn needed one on quite such a massive scale is still something of a mystery. We have made one interesting discovery, though.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’
Stirling walked through the door into the drilling chamber with Sam right behind him. The Servant was standing on the platform next to the giant machine, inspecting an open panel.
‘Hello,’ Sam said as he joined her on the platform.
‘Greetings, Illuminate,’ the Servant said with a nod. ‘How may I be of service to you?’
‘I was just coming to see what progress you and Doctor Stirling have made in working out what this thing is,’ Sam said.
‘Our analysis remains incomplete, Illuminate,’ the Servant replied.
‘So I hear,’ Sam said, turning to Stirling. ‘So what have you found?’
‘Up there,’ Stirling said, pointing at a long tube on top of the main drilling machine. ‘At first I thought it was just part of the drill, but on closer inspection it appears to be some form of launcher.’
‘They were planning to fire something into the hole?’ Sam asked.
‘It looks like it, but I have no idea what. There’s nothing loaded in the launcher and the Servant’s inventory of the Mothership has not turned up anything that looks like it might be a suitable projectile. It’s rather puzzling.’
‘Worrying, I’d say.’ Sam walked back down the stairs and along the walkway. He looked into the giant hole that the beam had bored into the Earth’s crust. At the very bottom, hundreds of metres below him, he could just make out rocks still glowing red, despite the fact that the beam had been deactivated several days ago. It looked like an angry wound, which he supposed was exactly what it was.
‘How are you feeling?’ Stirling asked, as he came and stood alongside Sam. He gestured at Sam’s metallic hand. ‘Any side effects I should be worried about?’
‘No, I’m fine,’ Sam said. ‘It’s a bit weird being able to do this, of course.’ He held up his hand and his fingertips extended into razor-sharp claws before smoothly returning to normal.
‘Yes, I can see how that might take some getting used to,’ Stirling said with a smile.
‘Have you made any progress with working out what exactly the Servant is?’
‘Not as much as I would like,’ Stirling replied. ‘She doesn’t know herself. She knows her name and that she is to obey the Illuminate, and she knows that’s you, but that’s the limit of her knowledge when it comes to her background. We all saw the Voidborn’s reaction to the nanites in your blood. Whoever or whatever the Illuminate is, it is frightened of it. As far as I can tell, she’s identical to the Voidb
orn; she’s a sentient non-organic life form that is made up of billions of nano-particles that form a distributed consciousness. Like the Voidborn she is as much the Mothership above us as she is the figure you see standing before you; they are indivisible. It’s hard to believe that at the same time as examining the machine over there she is also controlling the Mothership and the actions of all of the Hunters and Grendels in the city. Distributed digital consciousness. That’s how the Voidborn can travel between the stars – to a digital being the vast timescales involved are meaningless. They’re not like us fragile organics with our fleeting lives. She is fundamentally identical to a Voidborn but for the fact that she obeys you without question. It is ironic that the Voidborn enslaved humanity and that now perhaps our greatest chance of fighting back against them lies with one of their own who has in turn been in some ways enslaved. How and why the nanites in your bloodstream had that effect on the Voidborn, I have no idea. I fear that the only person who can answer that question is your father. If there truly was something alien, something neither human nor Voidborn built into the nanites, then I have no idea what it was or where he got it from.’
‘More unanswered questions,’ Sam said. ‘Just what I need. Listen, I’m going to go and give Jack and Liz a hand with getting this dormitory ready. Let me know if you make any progress.’
‘I will,’ Stirling said. He watched Sam leave and suddenly realised how right Robert Jackson had been in his assessment of the boy. He might be young, but there could be no doubt he was a born leader and that was something the world desperately needed right now.
Sam walked out of the Voidborn facility and saw the sun rising over the rooftops to the east. This victory might be short-lived, the Voidborn might sweep down upon them at any moment and retake London, but at least now they had a fighting chance. He looked across the compound at the dormitory that was nearing completion and then up at the giant Mothership hovering far above him.
‘Let them come,’ Sam said to himself as he watched the sun climb into the sky. ‘We’ll be waiting.’