“Well, something is controlling it,” Natesa said. “We arrived in the system to find a dead commsat, two crashed ships on the surface, a mere handful of survivors. It looks like Theron’s grand project has ended the same way as mine. Except that I survived.”
She tossed the commlink aside, flicking her wrist sharply to eject it through her e-shield barrier. Then she gave a quick signal to the merc holding Edie to release her.
“Take Pris back to the ship,” Natesa told him.
“Let them all leave,” Edie said. “If you care about them at all, don’t let them see this.”
Natesa considered for a moment. “Very well. Take them.”
The merc looked from one child to another, as if deciding how best to round them up. He assessed Galeon as the difficult one and went for him. Galeon was having none of it. He dodged the merc with a furious squall, but there was nowhere to run. The merc captured him easily.
“Galeon, it’s okay. Go with him,” Edie said, trying to sound reassuring. “All of you.”
“We don’t want to leave Macky,” Pris said. “We just fixed everything and now we have to go?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. But it’s not safe in here.”
The younger girls traipsed out ahead of the merc, who carried a struggling Galeon, defiant to the last. Pris went along, too. Miserably.
Edie faced Natesa across the chamber, hope drained. “Why all the drama? You could’ve killed Finn an hour ago from orbit.”
“I wanted the satisfaction of watching him die. As far as
I’m concerned, he should’ve been executed as a traitor when he was first captured. He’s been on borrowed time for five years, and in that time he’s caused immeasurable damage. He’s turned you against me, against everything I taught you. If I dig deep enough, I’m sure I’ll find his hand guiding you to sabotage Prisca using that module you hijacked.”
She was wrong in every respect. Edie had started turning away long before she met Finn, and it was she who’d persuaded him to join her cause and help the Fringers. But Edie couldn’t explain that now, didn’t know what she could say to calm Natesa down and save Finn when the woman was so determined to carry out the sentence she thought he deserved.
Edie’s gaze was glued to the detonator in Natesa’s hand, the hand that she raised higher with each irate word, as if building to a climax. Edie watched helplessly, every instinct telling her to pounce.
“You disappoint me.” Natesa’s voice shook with emotion. “You threw away everything, and I will never understand why.”
Edie gave in to her instinct, her last remaining hope for Finn. She launched herself at Natesa, fixated on Natesa’s left hand. A sharp pain lanced through her injured forearm. The force of her attack knocked Natesa backward. Her hands closed around Natesa’s wrist, slippery and staticky because of the e-shield. She slammed Natesa’s arm on the ground as they both fell, flinging the detonator from her hand. It skittered away a few meters.
Edie scampered after it on hands and knees, kicking out at Natesa’s attempt to grab her legs. Something was wrong with her arm. It buckled beneath her, spurting blood. Her mind backtracked a few seconds and she realized she’d heard a shot. She glanced back to see the remaining merc pointing a spur at her, a deadly rifle held in his other hand. He had aimed to wound, not to kill.
But now he would pay for firing his weapon. A tremor swept through the cavern, and the curtains of sap quivered.
The ground vibrated and ruptured, and thick leathery stalks studded with bulbous nodules rose up from the crevices. Edie was thrown onto her back. Her arm throbbed with pain.
The shimmying, swaying stalactites broke apart in places to send flailing braids through the air. The merc fired repeatedly into the gummy resin, his explosive rifle bullets splattering it everywhere. The subterranean stalks snaked toward him, the fronds at their tips curling into speckled fingers. The stalks, riddled with nodules, had glowing veins that supported and moved them. Now black fluid pumped through the veins and the nodules erupted into serrated spikes.
Natesa was yelling something but the merc’s screams and weaponsfire drowned her out. The coiled, grasping fingers tangled around the merc’s legs and pulled him down, twisting his body into grotesque postures as he struggled. With a hiss, his e-shield was knocked out.
The spikes buried themselves in exposed flesh and spurted milky sap that mingled with blood in pink streaks. The merc spasmed, gasping for breath as the spikes plunged into his body. Neuroxin…those spikes were poisoning him. Encased and immobilized, the merc was swallowed up by the ground.
To Edie’s horror, in the chaos, the column of vines holding Finn started to wilt and collapse.
Pain from her reopened wound overwhelmed her and she feared blacking out. She struggled to her knees, only to be thrown onto her belly as shuddering waves rocked the cavern. She focused on the detonator. A hand reached to grab it—it took her another second to realize it wasn’t her hand. Natesa had got there first.
But Natesa could not escape the reaction rippling across the floor. The gashes that cracked open the ground spread toward her, and more prehensile stalks unfolded from within. Natesa held up the detonator in what might have been a triumphant gesture, but from the look on her face she knew the merc’s fate would soon be hers.
Edie expected a threat. Instead, she got a plea.
“Save me. Tell it to stop.”
Edie managed to get to her knees, one hand clutching her forearm to stem the flow of blood. She couldn’t make it stop, but she had to make Natesa stop.
“Throw me the detonator and I’ll try,” she bluffed.
Sticky claws clamped around Natesa’s boots and slithered up her legs. The e-shield, for as long as it lasted, would prevent her from feeling much, but seeing herself being devoured was quite enough to terrify her.
Edie held her breath, hoping beyond reason that Natesa would show Finn mercy in her final moments.
Natesa pressed the trigger.
At the sound of the muffled explosion, Edie whirled around, her eyes seeking out Finn in the tangled nest of vines that had collapsed into a mushy heap. The few remaining vines encasing him unraveled and spilled him out in a puddle of milky fluid. He lay curled up on the ground, fine tendrils still buried in his flesh. A bloody patch extended from his temple all the way around one side of his scalp.
Edie ran to him and fell to her knees beside his body, pressed her palms to his chest, refusing to believe, numb to the truth. She heard Natesa’s strangled gasps, smelled the sharp earthy scent from the crushed vines, felt the stinging fire in her arm…
Finn’s heart thumped under her hands.
Edie opened her senses to hope. To the singe of burned vegetation amid the ruined vines where the bomb had exploded, the living tendrils pulsing under Finn’s flesh, and, finally, the slow rise and fall of his chest. Haller had removed the bomb in time and it had detonated nearby. She pressed her ear to Finn’s chest to reassure herself of his heartbeat. It was slow but steady. His skin was cool and damp and smeared with sap.
The thrashing and churning calmed down. The fissures in the ground pressed together. Natesa was gone.
Edie retrieved the biocyph commlink, clipped it to her belt, and jacked in.
—He will live.
“Thank you.”
—The children taught me a great deal.
“Such as?”
—
The way they work together, that diamond formation that funnels and controls the datastream…I have never seen anything so elegant and powerful, and so I copied its structure. Imagine how I might multiply my processing power by joining with other worlds using this formation!
Edie didn’t want to ask why he would want to multiply his processing power. As she wiped blood from Finn’s face, the tips of the tendrils withdrew from his skin with popping noises. He stirred, barely conscious.
“Haller, I’m going to help Finn out of here and then I’ll come back and merge with you, like I promised. Don’t send out that blast until I get back.”
—Hurry. I can’t wait long.
She added impatience to the growing list of Haller’s personality flaws. This was not the kind of all-powerful entity that humanity could count on. With no possibility of destroying the commsat any time soon, merging with Haller in order to destroy him was Edie’s only option.
Her mind focused only on the immediate task—get Finn to safety—so she wouldn’t have to think about what was to come afterward.
She leaned over Finn again and gently shook his shoulders. “Wake up. We’re leaving.”
His eyes flickered open and he groaned.
“You’re alive, Finn. You’re free.”
Finn was coming around slowly. Too slowly. As Edie was wondering how she was going to get him out, she heard someone running through the tunnel. Cat appeared at the chamber’s entrance. She looked around quickly, as if expecting danger.
“Where’s Natesa? What happened?”
“She’s dead. Help me with Finn.”
Cat came over, giving the chamber another once-over as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.
“The bomb?” she asked.
“It’s gone.”
“Sorry I missed the show. Got here as fast as I could. Sprinted all the way. Seems those monsters weren’t hungry today. Are you okay?” She squatted and turned over Edie’s injured arm. “What’s that stuff?”
Edie’s arm hurt a lot less than before. Tendrils had invaded the wound, bubbling beneath the flesh.
“It’s healing me.”
“We have med-teck for that. Is he okay?” Cat nodded at Finn.
“He will be.”
“Then let’s go. I’ve got a fancy ship waiting outside for you, and four frightened kids.”
Edie’s heart leapt. “You have Natesa’s ship?”
“Yup. Can’t wait to fly that beauty.”
“Where’s the merc?”
“Locked in the cargo hold.” Cat grinned. “He had his hands full with Galeon and wasn’t paying attention.”
“Haller cured their neuroxin dependence. We can save them after all.”
“Fantastic. We just have to collect Corinth from the habitat and we’re all saved.”
All but Edie.
She didn’t tell Cat what she intended until they’d helped Finn all the way out and had him resting on a bunk on the ship and pumped full of pain meds.
“You’re going
back
?” was Cat’s incredulous response.
“Haller is still in there, and I have to destroy him.”
“Can’t we just bomb the site or something?”
“He’s in every BRAT on the planet. We don’t have a thousand bombs. We don’t even have one. And we don’t have time.”
“So you’re going to—what did you call it?
Merge
with the planet? What the hell does that mean, anyway?”
“You don’t want to know.” That was suddenly the hardest part of all—that Finn would know what she’d suffered. Unlike Cat, he’d seen exactly what had happened to Haller when Scarabaeus had taken him.
“What am I supposed to tell Finn?” Cat asked.
Edie would tell him a thousand things if she could. “Tell him…Tell him I went to complete the mission.”
“And you’re sure this is the only way?”
“Yes.”
“How about I tell him you love him?”
Edie nodded and tried to smile as she pulled Cat into a quick embrace.
“Jezus, he’s going to kill me when he wakes up and finds out I let you go,” Cat said.
“Just get out of here before the Crib arrives. Do me a favor—a big one. Find good homes for the children.” She couldn’t bring herself to say goodbye to them.
“I will.”
“And stay out of trouble.”
“Can’t promise that.”
Edie pressed her lips to Finn’s one last time before she left.
She returned to the central chamber, her heart thumping in fear of what was to come. She couldn’t shake the image of Haller strung up in the jungle, his body in shreds as he was slowly digested alive. Would that happen to her, too?
There was just enough room to sit comfortably at the foot of the BRAT and jack in with a hardlink. She knew she wouldn’t be comfortable for long.
The datastream flowed through her splinter. First the familiar refrains of Scarabaeus, the song she knew well. Then came the complex, tangled beat of Haller’s overlaid intelligence. The song pressed against her, but her mind resisted. The vines moved around her and tickled her skin.
—The transition was painful and terrifying for me. Unlike you, I didn’t understand what was happening. I was in shock for many weeks afterward.
“Let me get used to it,” Edie said. “Take it slow.”
—Clear your mind. It will go easier for you. Let go of the past. You have a glorious future now.
“This isn’t easy.”
—You have to trust me.
John Haller was not a man she trusted. She was here now, doing this, because she didn’t trust him—neither the man nor the planetary intelligence.
She filed through the security protocols in her splinter, the walls of code that kept outsiders safely out. Pris had managed to break through that barrier to jolt Finn. Haller didn’t have the skills for it, and Scarabaeus wouldn’t do it by force. She had to make the decision.
She shut them down.
Her right arm twitched as tendrils burrowed into her flesh again. They weren’t just healing now. They had found the
path of least resistance to her splinter. They sent microscopic extensions into the implanted biocyph wires that extended from her fingertips to her spine and from there to the wet-teck interface in her cerebral cortex. The biocyph of the planet was hooked into her now. She didn’t know if the hardlink was still in place—it was no longer necessary.
The organic material surrounding her had physically hooked into her, too. Her limbs were trapped by vines, her body encased. She opened her eyes to a squirming nightmarish cocoon—a brief look was all she could stand.
Something slick and warm wrapped around her throat. Unable to move, she was helpless to fight it. Panic set in as she imagined suffocating. She didn’t want it this way. She wanted to disconnect from her body before Scarabaeus devoured it.
The skin of her throat prickled. It wasn’t painful, not yet. But she’d seen Haller’s fate. She knew what was to come. Tendrils had already invaded her wounded arm, and now she felt them gain entry above her sternum. They were drawn to the beetle inlay, she realized. Like the cryptoglyph, it was something else she’d taken from Scarabaeus, and the planet recognized it. The DNA in the dried husk was the only pure thing from this planet that was untouched by the Crib’s biocyph or by Haller’s meddling.