Enemy (15 page)

     HARVEST COMMENCES. UPLOAD COMMENCES. LIGHT FADES. THE PATTERN COALESCES.

    
ALL THEN IS WELL. DOES THE PRESENCE OF BLASPHEMY HINDER US ONCE MORE((?))

     THEY HAVE BEEN DRIVEN OFF FOR NOW.

    
TO RECOUP, NO DOUBT...

     NO DOUBT.

     contemplation. palaver of damnation.

    
ALLWHENS JOIN THE HARVEST((?))

     A CERTAINTY. ETERNITY’S RIGHTEOUS COME FORTH TO SHARE IN THESE HOLY SPOILS.

    
PURPOSE BE. LIFEBLOOD IS SPILLED.

     PURPOSE BE. INQUIRY. WHEN DOES NEXT HARVEST TARGET ARISE((?))

    
EVEN AS WE BATHE IN THE BLOOD OF THIS WHEN, YOU CRAVE MORE((?))

     I CRAVE THE PURPOSE.

     suspicion.

    
YOUR THOUGHTS. SHARE.

     SEIZE MY ESSENCE. KNOW ME.

     ecstasy. a flash of coexistence. a newfound insight.

     YOU SEE((?))

    
LOGIC IS SERVED. YOUR THOUGHTS ARE TRUE.

     VICTORY WILL BE OURS. PURPOSE WILL BECOME. WE WILL HUNT THEM DOWN AND BURN THEIR HIVES WITH THE FIRE OF OMEGA. VICTORY WILL BE OURS.

    
A CERTAINTY. I BOW TO YOUR FORESIGHT.

     rapture.

    
GO THEN. PURPOSE BE. FIND THEIR HIVES AND CLEANSE THEM.

     the black parts once more.

     The web of souls that was the Enemy was pleased.

     The Harvest was proceeding at a phenomenal rate. The asteroid belt was stripped of volatiles. The gaseous planets were being siphoned. The solid planets were undergoing reclamation. And the third planet...

     Oh, the third planet. Luscious.

     It was the only planet in the system that sustained life. Well, had sustained life. Living matter, with all of its rich bioneural energy. So many patterns to upload…

     Souls were being gathered.

     The planet had held nine billion humans. Already, eight billion had been harvested. The rest were either in hiding or dead in the wake of the final, sporadic urban warfare. With few exceptions, it had been an easy victory. They had of course had to level the cities and drive the vermin into the open before they could gather them for upload. Some of the vermin had been particularly stubborn, and they had paid for their defiance with their souls. The population that still resisted was as of yet a manageable percentage of the populace. Their cities had been burned to the ground; their weapons were useless. The web solidifying around the planet would soon siphon the atmosphere, making the planet uninhabitable for those pathetic organics. The prey in hiding would be either found and harvested or dead themselves soon.

     The great Enemy motherships came from the Whenstream and set to work dismantling that which had been the Sol system. All volatiles had to be harvested to serve the Purpose. Everything had to be uploaded to create the necessary heavens.

     Many orbited the sun or the fifth planet, a gas giant, reaping it layer by layer. The Enemy vessels around the sun set about the difficult task of collapsing the star into a When hole. Day by day, as their mission came closer to realization, the star faded.

     Still other vessels patrolled the timesweep waves emanating from the Whenstream for any sign of the Judas. Soon, there would be no more worry. A large force had been sent to destroy or upload as many of the known Judas forts in the Stream as possible. The realization of the Purpose was now a tangible goal.

     So soon...

     The bulk of the Enemy force orbited the third planet, tending to the reaping of the populace. The vessels synthesized a spidery web around the planet. Periodically, smaller vessels would drift down from this web to the planet surface, landing at one of the fallen major cities that had been spared the atomic suicide of the last days.

     This was the time of the Black.

     She thought they were flying.

     There were sounds in this utter darkness: the sounds of humanity. Sobbing, coughing, gasping. Dying.

     She was standing, pressed against others in the black. Some slept standing, for there simply was no room to lay down. The large man next to her had died sometime during the night. She could do nothing but let the dead weight lean on her.

     Many of the group had died.

     Her prayers had not helped her.

     The soldiers who had stormed into the church were torn apart as the parishioners looked on by an unseen force that arrived on a veil of purple and silver so light that one could barely discern whether it was really visible or just imagined. What followed the veil was definitely visible: an assemblage of large, silent, impossible monsters, tall, cloaked in black, speaking with a voice like spiders and acid and fear that came from their minds and not their mouths because they didn’t have any mouths they didn’t have faces they—

     She took a deep breath, trying not to remember and not succeeding at all.

     They had been herded from the church like cattle and joined hundreds, perhaps thousands of others grouped on U.S. Route 11 outside of Roanoke, Virginia. The assemblage was circled by the monstrous things.

     A low rumbling from overhead drew her attention.

     A massive jet-black vessel thrust through the clouds and gently landed just to the north on the highway. Its size was beyond her comprehension, perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands of feet, perhaps miles long. Impossible, she thought.

     From its underside a walkway descended.

     The horror of what was about to happen dawned on her.

     The aliens began to force the group toward the vessel, not with weapons but with the Voice that cut so deeply into her soul, toward the waiting maw of the black interior. Some people openly resisted, and they simply became motionless, paralyzed from an unseen force. They remained where they were as the huge crowd filled the vessel.

     She ascended the ramp into the innate blackness within the ship. A vaguely human, organic scent washed over her. Other people had been in there before. As the crowd pushed against her, she was forced into an already-overcrowded corner of the tremendous room.

     At long last, the entire group was within the vessel’s confines, except the small group of men and women who had tried to fight. They stood outside the vessel, motionless except for eyes, terrible eyes moving because they could why can their eyes move like like animals trapped they looked with their moving desperate eyes.

     As the ramp slid up into the vessel’s underside and the large doors began to cycle closed, she saw one of the aliens turn back to the frozen men and women and even children and without a motion it seemed their eyes exploded outwards as their minds were torn apart by the black black monster. Only then did their bodies move; they fell so terribly limply dead to the ground, blood in puddles everywhere, horrendous lifeless bodies stippling the stylish black recently repaved highway. Their bodies were immediately consumed by grotesquely winding tendrils of silver metal until they were nothing but husks on the ground. The aliens walked from the pile of gore and jumped onto the quickly ascending ramp.

    
God save them.

     The doors closed with a resounding thud, a deep and horrible sound, a sound like an impossibly large coffin door closing. Blackness fell.

     Her name was Patra Jennings.

     She was the daughter of the President.

     The light of day once more bathed them, yet it seemed distant. Colder. The crack made by the opening doors grew wider.

     She had felt the vibration around her, but in her semi-trance she had not realized that the vessel was landing until it gave a sudden jolt and stilled. At long last the doors slid open. Small groups of people began to disembark, descending the ramp.

     Because she was near a corner, Patra was one of the last to leave the vessel. She was relieved to be out of the nauseating confines of the room, ripe with the putrescence of the dead and human waste.

     She followed the lines of people to another holding area ringed by the aliens. She didn’t know where they were; it might have been one of the bombed-out cities. Chunks of asphalt below her, rubble around her. It looked as if a city had been picked up into the air and then thrown back to the ground. Perhaps it had; surveying the horizon revealed the impossibly tall edges of a blast crater. A sheer rock face created a solid wall in every direction. Running would serve no purpose.

     The sky was blacker here.

     As she looked around, she noticed that the vessel they had arrived in was far from alone. The vessels stretched away as far as she could see, landing, taking off.

     Unloading.

     She shuddered.

     They stood in the shadow of a building.

     Building? No; all of the buildings had been destroyed.

     The great black edifice before her was some kind of vessel, different than the others, sunk into the ground, stretching upward at an impossible cant. A barely-discernible line of light was being emitted from the top of the vessel, stretching up into the heavens.

     Something about that vessel... That light…

     She forcibly pulled her thoughts from the spire and saw groups of people gathered at its base. Lines of men and women snaked into the vessel. Endless lines.

     Patra studied the aliens circling her group. They looked... vaguely familiar. They were humanoid, two arms and two legs, but they had no facial features, only a blank... faceplate? Of course. Aliens wouldn’t be able to breathe our air, so they’d wear a space suit. These were only shells. Who knew what kind of creature existed below the armor?

     The people were getting restless. There were many whispers, hushed. Patra saw many looks of terror, shock, incomprehension, resignation, hatred, suspicion.

     A large group of men was having a clandestine conversation. She could sense that they were plotting something... Patra unconsciously began to back away from the band of conspirators.

     Their group was the next in line at the base of the monolith. Whatever was going to happen, it wouldn’t be much longer... The aliens began to close in.

     “NOW!!”

     About fifty men charged from the crowd at one of the creatures. The response was immediate.

     Until now, the aliens had used some kind of mental force, some hideous extension of the subconscious Voice that permeated everything, as a weapon. No one had seen the shields.

     The progress of the conspirators was halted by a suddenly visible spherical shield that emanated from the Black. It glowed a dark, clouded violet.

     The men who ran into it were blackened and charred as they were set on fire. Cries of agony as their flaming bodies were quickly consumed by the same silver mesh that had engulfed the people killed outside of the transport vessel.

     The rest of the conspirators faltered, halted.

     This whole occurrence was not overlooked by the other aliens, but they made no attempt to interfere or assist their comrade, who stood calmly within the purple bubble. There were several piercing flashes of light and several more aliens materialized right in front of Patra. A silvery endostructure emerged from the flashes of light, and a hard black shell solidified around it. These new arrivals made no movements, but simply watched the events around them unfold.