Hero Born: Project Solaris (20 page)

My concentration shattered, slivers of pain shooting up every nerve. Fire surged through my brain, though my eyes, through my pores. The grey man sifted through the substance of my mind, rifling through my memories and thoughts. With each passing moment, I was less myself, unraveling into nothingness. Panic streaked through my mind as I realized I was about to die, and with my death would come the deaths of Jillian and Kali.

Jillian. If the pain-induced clarity did anything for me, it helped me realize how I felt about her. It wasn't love, not yet. But it could be if I let it, if I had a chance to see where things could go between us. Now I was going to let her die without ever having a chance to tell her how I felt. Worse, after this thing killed us, it would move on to the entire human race. It would devour their minds the same way it was devouring mine.

Chapter 32- Venting

A desperate plan formed.
 
This thing didn't use emotion in the same way we did, and that cold logic probably offered a lot of advantages. But it also had no idea how potent fury could be. I thought about my mother, not just her possible death but her life, and I summoned every bit of anger and outrage I could.

She'd been ridiculed and ostracized. Called a freak, and much worse. All because this thing had kidnapped her and performed horrific tests that had scarred her both mentally and physically. It had taken her life from her, stolen any chance she'd had at being happy. Doing so had rippled across my entire life. It had taught me to be ashamed. How many countless others had this thing killed? How many lives had it damaged? Now it had casually dismissed me, assuming I was an insect it could crush. Yet Usir had told me that anyone with my ability had disappeared, so clearly I was somehow a threat. I had some ability I hadn't tapped into, and it was time to harness it.

I reached past the pain, past the unraveling of my own mind. I sought anything I could hold onto, and to my shock I found something: I could feel minds. Jillian's signature was distinct from Kali's, which was distinct from Usir's. All three were distinct from the fourth presence that crouched near the control crystal, invisible to the naked eye but not to me.
 

Summers.
I thought, reaching for her mind.
You're all right. How?

Whatever that bastard did was temporary
. She thought back.
You've finally manifested telepathy, about damn time.

Listen, we have to be quick. I interfaced with the control crystal, and there's an entity here. Their leader. It's unravelling my mind, and I haven't got much longer.
I allowed the very real panic to infuse my thoughts.

What the hell do you want me to do about it?

Anything I can do, you can do. I want you to interface with the crystal. It will be disorienting, but go with the flow of the data. Look for the pool at the center. When you arrive, I want you to attack the creature you find there. Can you do that?
I asked. I knew how desperate I sounded. My mind was eroding around me like sand in the tide.

I'll do what I can
. She thought back, though she didn't feel very confident.

I couldn't afford to wait any longer. I pushed the panic down and focused on the anger again. I envisioned mom's face: her kind smile, and her pained expression whenever people whispered to each other as we walked by.

Then I looked up at the giant consciousness hovering over mine, and I attacked. I went in swinging, uncertain of precisely what I was doing. The attack seemed to catch the thing off guard, and I plunged into its mind in the same way it had entered mine. I saw its thoughts in the same way it was pilfering my own.

If my mind was the solar system, then this thing was an entire galaxy. It had lived for millions of years, and was one of the first servants created by the Builders. It had gone with them when they'd left earth in the early Pleistocene. I saw snatches of its time there, of the building of a new civilization, of a strange, larger world. It was alien, and too fleeting for me to hold onto anything specific. Its mind was just so vast. Navigating anywhere took precious seconds, and I couldn't readily orient myself toward anything. I was stumbling around, spotting tidbits purely by accident.

Then I saw something relevant, a recent memory, or relatively recent, given the thing's enormous life span. It had been sent ahead with a dozen large ships, a tiny fleet compared to the vast armada at the disposal of the Builders. The grey men were merely here to pave the way for the eventual return of their masters. Only there was a serious problem: The Progeny of the Builders had returned expecting to re-occupy the Arks their masters had created. Those Arks were occupied. Their new owners, humans, had locked them. This left the grey men unable to communicate with their masters. They couldn't send a message home, and in their panic they'd decided to use us to accomplish what they couldn't.

All of that lined up with what I already knew. What didn't, what chilled me to the core, were the plans for re-colonization. I saw the other side of the testing, the very testing that had just been performed on Kali. Her eyes were black, because they'd begun turning her into a grey man. That was the plan, and had been all along. Convert humanity into vessels--vessels that could be occupied by the returning Builders. They weren't making soldiers. They were making bodies to house their returning minds. Everything until now was a small scale test, but in the grey man's mind I saw all of humanity converted into empty husks, waiting for its people to occupy.

Your temerity is incalculable.
The creature thundered, and flung me backwards. We returned to the construct created by the control crystal, and now stood on opposite sides of the data pool, staring at each other. Where the hell was Summers? I needed help, and I needed it now.

That's right.
I shot back, trying to keep its attention focused on me.
You're not as invincible as you claim.
Do you know what I think? Maybe you made your human pets a little more powerful than you intended, and now you're paying the price.

Now I was positive this thing was angry. Its eyes narrowed and the high-pitched ringing began again.

We have a saying.
I continued, battling through the pain.
The best defense is a good offense.

I attacked, summoning all the anger, all the desperation. The ringing stopped and the grey went on the defensive. It casually swatted aside my attempts to enter its mind, but that meant it wasn't able to attack me.

Flail away, little insect.
The thing taunted.
Your strength abates. Soon you will grow too weak to continue and I will unravel your mind. Then I will visit the same fate upon your entire species.

The strain of constant attacks was beginning to wear on me, and I understood now what the creature had meant. My psychic batteries, for lack of a better term, were running dry at an alarming pace.

I finally missed a step, failing to launch an attack quickly enough. The grey sprung into action, slipping past my defenses and into my mind. Intense pressure beset me from all sides, and the pain was immense. I wanted to run away and hide, but there was nowhere to go.

Nor could I escape by attacking. I couldn't concentrate. Every time a thought began to form, a fresh spike of pain shattered it. I'd come close, but in the end I'd failed. Not just failed myself, not just Mom and Jillian, but the entire human race. If futile defiance was the last thing I was capable of, I'd give it all I was worth. I tried to attack, and was batted aside. I tried again with the same result.

Then the pressure abruptly ceased. I was returned to the data pool, mind reeling from the damage the grey had caused. It took several moments to fight through the fog and understand what had happened.

Summers was there, attacking the grey. I could feel her anger, her loss. She was consumed by the rage of Marcus's death, unleashing all of it on the grey. Like me, she was untrained, but she was also fresh. She hadn't endured any of the psychic damage, and she'd also caught the grey off guard.

I focused on the data pool, sifting through it until I located the beacon. It existed on all ships simultaneously, each containing a secondary control crystal created solely for that purpose.

I studied the structure of the one on this ship carefully, looking for weakness. A prolonged burst of energy in the right spot would cause it to shatter. Where could I find that energy? I searched the ship and remembered it was all around us. I
could
trigger a focused burst.

More, I could cause all the other ships to generate a similar burst. They were all linked, all overseen by the consciousness Summers was battling. With it distracted, I could attack them all at once, and there was no one to stop me. In that lay the Builders' greatest weakness. They functioned like a collective, and with their leader occupied they were utterly defenseless.

I closed my eyes and focused, mentally coding the routine that would do what I needed. I pulled together bits of data, existing routines floating through the alien landscape. Above and behind me I heard a pained scream, and the grey man landed its first blow against Summers. I risked a glance, and saw her on the defensive. It wouldn't be long before the thing finished her and came for me.

I turned back to my code, cobbling bits together like LEGOs. It was more difficult than it should have been, slower after the catastrophic damage my mind had suffered. An eternity later I slammed the last bit into place, hazarding another glance at the battle above. Summers had stopped moving.

 
I willed my completed program to propagate through all the ships, praying I was fast enough. It replicated to each primary control crystal in the grey man fleet, all ready to fire off the same signal at the same instant.

Your companion's mind has been destroyed. Her body is nothing but an empty vessel.
Came the grey's smug voice. I was dimly aware of Summers' presence fading. It had finished unraveling her mind, and was about to do the same to me.

I executed the program, then focused on the data pool. Each ship was linked through a sort of antenna at the top. The very tip of the pyramid. If I could disable that it would break the link between this ship and rest of the fleet.

The grey's immense consciousness burst into my mind in a shower of pain and fire, but I didn't try to stop it. I focused everything I had on the antenna, willing the ship to overload it.

Sun-bright agony split my consciousness, but I was dimly aware of two explosions. The first was the antenna, which burned out in a fiery explosion of stone and gold. The second was the beacon shattering into a lethal spray of crystalline shards.

The pressure on my mind vanished, and I could no longer sense the grey. I shook my head to clear it, and took stock of the situation. We were no longer connected to the rest of the fleet, and, if my program had gone undetected, the beacons on all the other ships had been destroyed. The one on this ship certainly had been. I had no way to verify the rest, but I certainly hoped they were toast.

I shifted my attention to the energy field I'd erected around the central crystal. Usir, Jillian, and Kali all stood with their backs to the crystal, waiting behind the protective field. My own body was there as well, slumped against the crystal.

Bursts of green energy slammed into the shield, sending out colorful ripples as the shield weakened.
 

"We only have moments before the field goes down," Usir said, kneeling next to the control crystal. He slid the top of the cane off, revealing a slender blade.

"David is weakening," Jillian said, rushing to my side.
 

Usir intercepted her. "No! Touching him while he's engaged with the crystal could destroy you both."

"What do we do if the grey men get through the shield?" Kali asked, shifting nervously from foot to foot. She looked so odd with that bald head, and those flat, black eyes.

"I suppose we die," Usir said, just a hint of sadness infusing his tone.

I had to save them. There had to be a solution, but I needed to calm down and find it. I focused on our surroundings, considering. How could I remove all the grey men, without hurting my friends? I began studying the capabilities of the craft, searching desperately for anything that might help.

"Hmm, this is interesting," I murmured.

Each of the four smaller craft we'd seen when we arrived could exit the pyramid through one of the main walls. That gave me an idea.
 

I willed the mothership skyward, away from Mohn's San Francisco headquarters. We shot up with immense speed, and within moments had broken free of the Earth's atmosphere. We hovered in space, three thousand miles above the Earth's surface, in a complete vacuum.
 

More green blasts weakened the field protecting my friends, but it held. It would have to do. I ordered all four walls to open. Normally a protective membrane of energy would form over each hole, to prevent explosive decompression--but explosive decompression was exactly what I was hoping to use. I suppressed the fields, allowing the four massive openings to vent the ship to space.

There was a huge
whump
as the atmosphere vented. The grey men firing at my friends were hurled into the air, sucked through the openings along with anything that hadn't been secured. Bits of stone and their technology followed their path, and all were ejected into space.

The four smaller ships were anchored, thank god. I hadn't had time to check that and it could have done serious damage.
 

A quick scan showed that the energy field around my friends was still active, and that it had maintained the atmosphere within. So far as I could tell, they were fine.
 

I willed the openings to close, and set the life support on overdrive so it would replenish our oxygen. Then I returned to my body, slumping to the ground in exhaustion.
 

We'd won.

Chapter 33- Project Solaris

I awoke to find Jillian hovering over me, eyes wide with concern. Her lips were slightly parted, and I didn't think she'd ever looked so beautiful. Behind her stood an anxious looking Kali, her strange new appearance reminding me of the grey men's true goals for colonization. I didn't let it faze me. This was a victory, even if there'd been a high cost.