Ascent

They stood there quietly, watching as the Earth grew smaller and smaller beneath them. Soon, it was the size of a watermelon, then a baseball, then a marble against the night sky.

Kevin turned and looked at the mother ship. He hadn’t realized quite how big the alien world was before, and it was only as the craft turned and shifted in space that he got a real sense of how large it was.

“It’s an actual world,” Kevin said, unable to keep the awe out of his voice.

“We knew that,” Chloe said. “It’s been up in the sky.”

“But an actual world…”

There was a big difference between seeing something far off and being there. Like the moon, Kevin could have covered up the world ship with the palm of his hand from Earth, but now that they were here, it stretched out as far as he could see in every direction. There were structures on the surface, although most of it looked barren and empty, with only giant towers sticking up from it like the spines of a sea urchin. There were also mouthlike apertures, big enough that even a ship like the one they were on could fit into them without touching the sides. Kevin couldn’t imagine what might have carved gaps like that into a world, but right then they had bigger things to think about.

“I think we’re going into it,” Kevin said. Not just to a world, but inside it, down past the outer shell of its surface.

Chloe didn’t look happy about that. “We’re going to be trapped. We’ll never find our way out.”

“We will,” Kevin reassured her.

He had to believe that. The alternative was that they were heading down to their deaths as the ship that carried them descended into the surface of the world…

…and through it.

Kevin stared. The entire interior of the world ship was like a hollow shell, and inside it there was everything Kevin might have expected on the surface of a planet. There were oceans and landmasses, vehicles moving back and forth, and cities so huge they seemed to take up almost every scrap of available land, turning the whole great ship into one giant hive of activity. Spires stood out from different spots on the vast city, golden and gleaming, looking like palaces set against the rest. A great reddish-gold orb pulsed at the heart of the planet, giving off heat and light.

Kevin thought he could see figures down below, but they were too distant to make out the details yet.

“Aliens,” Chloe said, staring down. “Not people controlled by them, not messages, not their voices… aliens.”

Kevin knew what she meant. All this time, they’d had only hints of the aliens, seen only the effects of what they could do. Now, here they were on the aliens’ world, and there was so much of it.

They felt the clunk as the ship that carried them locked into place on the world, steadying their view of a city beyond in which creatures of every impossible shape and size walked at strange angles, seemingly held in place sideways and upside down in defiance of gravity, or maybe they just had control of the gravity, so that any direction could be “down.”

This time, the door opened for real. Kevin could feel the slight breeze on his face, warm and balmy, smelling unlike anything he’d ever experienced.

What surprised him the most, though, was what lay waiting on the other side.

A trio of figures stood there, waiting to greet them.

They were almost identical, which in this place seemed like an impossibility to Kevin. They were tall and hairless, pale-skinned, with eyes that reminded Kevin of a wasp’s, except that they were a pure, milky white. They wore long robes over pale jumpsuits, and each seemed to have an assortment of metal, and occasionally fleshy, devices set around its body.

The one standing at the heart of the trio spoke. Its words came out in English from a translator on its arm, but Kevin didn’t need it to translate the flat monotone. His brain did that for him.

“Welcome, Kevin McKenzie. We have been waiting for you.”

CHAPTER TWO

Kevin stared at the alien who had spoken, horror flooding through him.

The alien stared back at him with those large pale eyes, and it spoke again while the two others beside it stood silent, the words translating in Kevin’s head before the device it held could do it.

“This one is Purest Xan of the Hive,” the alien said. “The two beside this one are Purest Ix and Purest Ull. And you are Chloe Baxter and Kevin McKenzie, ape things of the planet Earth.”

Kevin was stunned. It took him several moments to collect his thoughts.

“We’re humans,” Kevin said, wanting to correct them, to talk to them, even to persuade them. After all, they were talking to him in a way that they hadn’t bothered talking to anybody else.

“As I said,” Purest Xan replied, “ape things. Lesser things, but perhaps things worth learning from.”

There was no emotion to the way the alien said it, but there was something about the way it talked about learning from them that sent a shiver down Kevin’s spine.

“What do you mean?” Kevin demanded. “What are you going to do to us?”

“Our world ships travel to gather resources,” Purest Xan said. “Technology, minerals, minds, bodies we can reshape. We will test you and understand you until you prove worthless. Then we will discard you.”

Kevin saw Chloe’s face turn pale, and he could share that fear. The thought of being ripped apart for study and then discarded was terrifying.

“We aren’t afraid of you,” Chloe said, struggling to put a defiant note in her voice.

“Yes, you are,” Purest Xan said. “You are a lesser being, with fears and needs, weaknesses and flaws. You are not of the Hive. You are not of the Purest. We have no such weaknesses, only the improvements of our flesh shapers.”

“You think you’re perfect?” Chloe demanded. “You think looking like that, you’re perfect?”

“Not yet,” Purest Xan said. “But we will be. Enough speaking to lesser orders.”

The alien turned to the others with it, and Kevin knew that the next thing it would say was grab them.

“Run!” he yelled to Chloe, and they spun away from the aliens, starting to sprint as fast as they could from the square. Kevin ran as hard as his body would let him, ignoring the pain and effort, ignoring the way his illness tried to drag him down with every step and hoping that, if he and Chloe could make enough ground, they might be able to lose Purest Xan and the others with it in the chaos of the world ship.

“Where are we going?” Chloe demanded.

“I don’t know,” Kevin said. He had no plan right then, no idea what they were going to do next.

He kept running, risking a quick look back to see if the aliens were chasing them. They just stood there, apparently concentrating. One of them touched something on its arm.

Without warning, the world felt heavier. It felt as though heavy weights were pressing down on top of Kevin, too solid to lift. He struggled to keep standing, and saw Chloe doing the same, pushing up against it as if she could lift the sky above her. It wasn’t the air, though; it felt as though Kevin’s own bones and muscles were too heavy, gravity dragging him down toward the floor many times harder than it should have.

“It’s the stuff that lets them stick to the walls,” Kevin called out, thinking of the way the aliens had been able to walk sideways and upside down through the interior of their world ship. If they could control gravity well enough to do that, of course they would.

Chloe shouted back, “It’s dragging me down. We’re trapped!”

She sounded on the verge of panic, just as she’d been back in the spaceship.

The gravity pulled him down to his knees, the pressure making it hard to breathe. He fell forward, feeling the weight of his own body pinning him down to the floor.

A scream of frustration from Chloe told him that the same thing must have happened to her. It took everything Kevin had just to be able to roll over onto his back and look across to where she lay, pinned in the same way.

“No, let me go! Let me go!” she screamed. Kevin could see her crying as she tried to thrash her way clear of the force holding her in place.

The three aliens were there then, and they must have sent some signal to others, because two hulking creatures with carapaces like armor walked out from the golden spire carrying what looked like two large metal frames. They set them down near Kevin and Chloe, standing them upright so that Kevin could see the glasslike sheets set inside them, making them look like two windows standing up on their own.