Морган Райс - Ascent

This was different, though, because the aliens weren’t just looking this time.

Kevin could feel the Hive inside his thoughts, mind upon mind, interlinked and powerful. It was hot and cold and painful all at the same time. It felt like ground glass being worked through his thoughts. He could feel the wash of the controlled on the far fringes, not even a true part of the whole. He could feel the sharp-edged minds of things bred for war, and the softer, slower thoughts of beasts of burden. Then there were the Purest and their servants, shining strands against the web of the rest.

Come to us, they urged, the voices deep and seductive. Become us.

Kevin tried to pull away, and the effort hurt more than he could have imagined. He heard himself scream, but the sound seemed to come to him from far away. It was like claws holding him in place, hooked into his brain, too powerful to ignore.

Even so, Kevin fought. He could feel the Hive moving through him, taking over parts of his mind the way an invading army might take over fields and towns. Kevin started to hide parts of himself, remembering the way he’d tried to hide how scared he was for his mother’s benefit, trying to hide away whatever he could while the aliens continued to push forward within his mind. If he could do it enough, he might be able to hold himself separate from the Hive. He might still be himself.

He felt the moment when they linked him to the Hive, going from seeing all the separate strands to being one of them. He could hear the messages and the thoughts of the others there, the commands of the Purest and the obedience of the rest.

A mind that picks things apart, one of the Purest thought in his direction.

A mind that is everything we need, another agreed.

Kevin could feel Purest Xan’s presence beside him. Wake, Kevin, join your new life.

Kevin’s eyes snapped open, and he couldn’t remember closing them. The world around him looked strange, cloaked in a sheen of new colors, details he would never have noticed before coming to his eyes. It was as if he could focus on every mote of dust and fraction of color change.

He looked around at the machines, and the Hive within him told him what each was for. Had he succeeded in holding back some part of himself? Kevin didn’t know. He still felt like himself, although everything else about the world seemed strange. It seemed both more alive and more connected than he could have ever imagined.

Purest Xan moved to him, working the controls on the frame. The alien operated them, and Kevin felt the gravity that was holding him in place shift back toward the floor.

“Welcome to the Hive, Emissary Kevin,” Purest Xan said.

Luna and the bikers ran from the controlled as they closed in, lunging for their bikes, trying to make it to them before the greater speed of those the aliens controlled brought them too close. Luna ran toward the spot where her own bike had stopped, lying on its side now with the sidecar up in the air, obviously overturned in whatever chaos had followed the moment when they’d grabbed her.

She struggled to right it, shoving her entire body against it, the weight of it making it feel as though she was pushing against a solid wall. Luna felt it shift slightly as she kept pushing, and then it toppled, raising a small cloud of dust as it hit the ground beside the road.

“Get in, Bobby,” she called to the dog, who was still busy growling at the advancing horde of controlled as if he might be able to fend them off. “Hurry!”

She pointed to the sidecar, and the dog got the message, hopping into it and sitting there, looking around with his teeth bared. Looking back, Luna could see why: the controlled were getting closer, running in that way that put them far closer than they should have been every time she blinked. Luna went to start the bike, determined to put as much distance between her and the controlled as possible…

It wouldn’t start.

“Not now,” Luna said through gritted teeth as the engine coughed and spluttered. “Come on !”

She jumped her entire weight on the kick-starter once, then again. She could see the controlled getting closer now, so that they were twenty yards away, then ten. Luna could feel the fear building in her. She really didn’t want to know what the controlled would do to someone who wasn’t one of them anymore.

She jumped on the starter once more, throwing her whole weight down onto it, and the bike roared into life. Luna didn’t hesitate, accelerating as hard as she dared away from the onrushing crowd of controlled people. She felt the heaviness as an unfeeling hand clamped onto her bike, a woman with unseeing white pupils holding on tight enough that the bike dragged her along, making her skid along the ground when even her enhanced speed wasn’t enough to keep up.

Luna found herself trying to remember if she’d seen this woman while they’d all been forced to work. She found herself thinking about the person who might still be trapped somewhere behind those eyes, the person who might be fighting to stop herself even as she reached for Luna. Luna knew exactly how bad it was to be one of the controlled now, and she knew that there was nothing the person in there could do to stop themselves.

On the other hand, she knew that they didn’t feel pain.

“Sorry,” Luna said, kicking out at the woman from her perch on the bike until the controlled woman tumbled back onto the road, letting Luna’s bike shoot forward fast enough that she had to cling to it tightly so she didn’t fall off.

Around her, Luna saw the members of the Dustsides Motorcycle Club grabbing their bikes and pulling away in formation, the bikes forming a broad V shape as if they might be able to smash through anything that got in their way. She saw Ignatius jump onto the back of Bear’s bike, still clutching his precious vapor gun.

There were more controlled coming out of side streets now, lunging for the bikes from every direction. The only hope seemed to be to keep going as fast as possible, hoping that sheer speed would carry them past the mass of the controlled before they could close in on them like water pouring into a basin. Luna was fine with going faster. Being scared of the sheer speed was definitely better than thinking about the prospect of being torn apart by the controlled.

“Don’t stop!” Luna called out to the others, as loud as she could so that it would carry over the noise of the bikes. “We need to get away.”

They kept riding, as fast as possible. With the controlled approaching from the back and the sides, their bikes popped out of the mass of them like a cork from a bottle. In an instant, they were in clear space, hurrying through Sedona, trying to get as far from the onrushing horde of controlled as they could. They were moving faster than the controlled could follow now, heading for the outskirts of the town.

“I think we’re clear,” Cub called back with a grin that said how happy he was to be free of the aliens’ control.

Luna smiled back at him, because she was just as happy to have made it. She was happy that he had been saved too. She wouldn’t have liked the idea of Cub still being back there while she and the others got away. She rode up closer to him, ready to call across to him, although she wasn’t quite sure what she was going to call. Maybe that she was glad he was there, maybe more than that.

Whatever she was going to say, the words fell silent in her throat as the shine of something up in the sky caught her eye, growing larger by the moment.

“A ship!” Luna called out as she looked at it square on.

The ship was one of the smaller ones, but this one looked sleeker than the others somehow, and more dangerous. If the others were worker bees built for carrying things up to the bigger ships, this one seemed more like a hornet, sharp-edged and deadly, designed to kill anything that got in its way.