Return

“Don’t you need to… I don’t know,” he said, “be in charge of the ship?”

“As if my ship would let me tell it what to do,” she said. “We work with our AIs. We do not enslave them. That is Hive thinking.”

“Kevin and Ro aren’t the Hive,” Chloe said, hotly, maybe a little too hotly.

“I never said they were,” General s’Lara said. She seemed to be watching Kevin and Ro carefully though.

Kevin thought he understood. “You’re trying to learn more about the Hive, aren’t you?”

The general hesitated, listening in that way that said she was in communication with her AI again.

“Yes,” she admitted. “You and Purest… sorry, Ro here have been a part of it. You’ve had access to everything that it is. You can help us to understand it better. You might actually be able to help us beat them.”

“I’m not sure they can be beaten,” Ro said. “I’m sorry. I feel… hopeless.”

“But you managed to break free,” General s’Lara said.

“With Chloe’s help,” Ro replied.

Kevin nodded. Without Chloe, none of them would have been able to escape.

“I still want to know as much as you can tell us,” the general said. “What is it like being a part of the Hive?”

Kevin wasn’t sure that he had the words to explain it. Even so, he wanted to try. “It’s like… there’s this web of connections, and every one is a living thing. It’s being a part of something bigger, and feeling that nothing matters but that whole.”

“It’s beautiful,” Ro added. “But we have no way to feel that beauty. We feel nothing. No conscience, no happiness. The Hive is everything.”

“Well, that means negotiating is out of the question,” General s’Lara said. “Still, maybe there will be something. We’ll be there soon.”

“Where?” Kevin asked. He had no idea where they were heading; hadn’t even considered that they had to be going somewhere.

She gestured, and one of the walls shifted, providing an image of a planet. It seemed small on the screen, but was a bright point of color in an otherwise black and white view of space. It was largely green, in a way that seemed strange compared to the blue of Earth.

“This is Xarath,” the general said, by way of explanation. “Most of its water is underground, but the plant life comes up to the surface. We have a small base there. It was never intended to be a home for all of us, but we will have to make it one. I’m told that it is beautiful.”

“How long until we reach it?” Kevin asked. He had no real sense of how fast the ship was moving. Was it as fast as the Hive ships? Faster?

“A few more minutes. We have been folding space to get closer for a while now, but most of the delay has been to try to lose the Hive forces tracking us. We will need to be some of the first onto the surface. Come with me, we should get to one of the landers.”

For the second time, the general started to lead them through the inner workings of the ship. People turned to stare at them as they passed, and while some of them seemed to be waiting for orders from the general, others were definitely staring at Kevin, Chloe, and Ro. Not all of them seemed friendly.

“Looks like not everyone agrees with the trial,” Chloe said. She sounded to Kevin as though she was ready to fight off anyone who looked at them for too long, or in the wrong way. He could see her altered hand clenching as if ready to punch someone.

“People get to disagree,” General s’Lara said. “We are not the Hive, where everyone must obey. They can think what they like, but we have made a decision the fairest way we can, and I doubt anyone will act against it.”

She didn’t seem entirely certain to Kevin, but then, he thought, how could she? She was right. Unless they controlled every mind there like the Hive, there would be no perfect harmony. Kevin would rather have people giving him odd looks than have to live without his own thoughts, his own choices.

He and the others followed the general to a hangar where a number of smaller ships sat, looking like darts waiting to be spat out by the giant mouth of the ship. General s’Lara led the way to one that was partly blackened by fire.

“Here. My own craft. I’ll show you the planet. Come on.”

The inside of the ship was stranger than the outside. It looked as though it had been patched and rebuilt so many times that there was hardly anything of the original left.

“I worked on this one myself,” General s’Lara said, and then did the glancing away thing again. “Yes, all right. We worked on it. Take a seat and we’ll fly down.”

There were chairs that looked more like armchairs than the kind of benches or flight seats that Kevin would have expected from a military craft. It seemed strange to have such comfort in a general’s ship.

“What’s it like being linked to an artificial intelligence?” he asked.

“It’s like being two halves of a whole,” the general replied. “They can provide more information, react faster, and work things out that I never could, but we provide the emotion and the intuition. It works.”

Kevin tried to imagine it, and couldn’t. The closest he could get was the connection to the Hive, and that had been nothing like the way General s’Lara described. It sounded more like a kind of perfect friendship, the way he’d had with Luna back on Earth, each of them filling in for the other’s weaknesses, each of them looking out for the other without question.

He missed Luna so much right then that it hurt.

“Hold on,” General s’Lara said, but in truth, the movement of the ship was perfectly smooth as it exited the larger vessel that held it, sliding down toward the surface.

As they descended toward the world below, Kevin could see the greenery ahead of them, so great that it seemed to encompass everything. For the first few seconds, it was just one giant wash of green, but then he started to make out different shades and textures within it. There were areas that appeared to be open grassland, and far more that seemed like nearly endless forests. There were patches of dark green similar to firs, and others that looked like tropical palms.

As they got still lower, Kevin started to get a sense of the scale of them. Many of the trees seemed to be normal sizes, but there were others that were as tall as cathedrals, and whose canopies spread out to cover huge swaths of land, so that the ground beneath seemed almost like an afterthought.

“It’s a beautiful place,” General s’Lara said. “So much lives here, but it was never intended to be a world for us. It is too wild, and too many of any species will upset its balance.”

She took her ship down low, and Kevin could see buildings now, nestled amongst the trees, disguised so well that for a few seconds it was hard to pick them out from among the foliage. They hung like great fruit, or balanced in the branches, so beautifully constructed that they might have been a natural part of the forest.

“How many people do you have here?” Kevin asked.

“A few thousand. Not enough for a true civilization,” the general replied. “Even with all the people we’ve brought with us… we’re a shadow of what we were.”

Vehicles shot between the trees, moving rapidly, high above the ground. More moved slowly at ground level, disguised by shifting fields of color that changed as they caught the light.

“Do you have weapons here?” Kevin asked. He had to hope that they would have something that might destroy the Hive.

“Some,” General s’Lara said. “We like to be able to defend the places where we have bases, but the main defense we have is secrecy. This was always supposed to be a hidden place.”

“But we’re coming here now,” Chloe pointed out.

“We’re desperate,” General s’Lara said. “We’re out of people, out of places, out of everything except this. We’ll hide here for as long as we can.”

“And if the Hive finds us?” Kevin asked.

General s’Lara shook her head. “We lost them when we started to bend space. Even they can’t track us at those speeds. Unless you know something we don’t?”

There wasn’t any note of suspicion there, but even so, Kevin felt as though he wasn’t entirely trusted. He looked over at Ro, who shook his head.

“The Hive has stolen many technologies before, but they cannot track the Ilari. It was why they required you, to trace their signals. Without you…”

“Without me, they would never have been able to destroy the world they ran to,” Kevin said.