“You’re joking,” Mark said.

The four aliens dropped their weapons onto the road.

“You’re not joking.”

“You should be able to shoot through their force fields with those,” Mellanie said. “You’ll probably need to when they come after you again. This standoff won’t last forever. But I’ll keep them here as long as I can.” She took a deep breath, closing her chrome eyelids. “Leave now.”

Mark glanced down, her voice had come out of the handheld array as well.

“Everybody, get in your vehicles and fall back,” she ordered. “Join the convoy.”

“What’s happening?” Simon’s voice asked.

Mark brought the array up to his mouth. “Just do it, Simon. She’s stopped them.”

“Stopped them how?”

“Mark’s right,” someone else said. “I can see a whole bunch of them. They’re just standing there.”

“Go,” Mellanie said. “You haven’t got long. Go!”

Mark looked at the weapons lying on the tarmac as if it were some kind of school dare. The aliens still hadn’t moved.

“Come on,” Liz said. She darted forward.

Mark hurried after her. The weapons were bulky, too heavy to carry easily, let alone aim. He pulled up a couple, giving the tall, silently immobile aliens a cautious look as he scrabbled around at their feet, as if this might be the act that finally broke the spell, goading them into motion and retaliation. David came up beside him, and picked up one of the chunky cylinders.

“Let’s get out of here for Christ’s sake,” Liz said.

Mark managed to hold on to a third weapon. He scooted the hell away from the bizarre tableaux.

“What now?” Liz asked Mellanie.

“You go.”

“What about you? Will you be all right?”

“Yes.” She gave Mark one of her menacingly erotic smiles. “Quits?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Quits.”

“Thank you,” Liz said.

The three of them raced for the pickup. They slung the purloined alien weapons in the back, and Mark slammed the accelerator to the floor. He snatched one last glimpse of Mellanie in the rearview mirror. The silhouette of a small human girl standing defiantly in front of four big armored aliens, waiting, watching, as silent as the army she had stilled.

Mellanie’s inserts were feeding her a fresh image of the world; no longer data but an extension of her ordinary senses. She could actually see the electromagnetic emissions flooding out of the aliens as they stormed ashore. Each one blazed brightly in this black spectrum. Long, complex, and slow signals slipped between them, a conduit of tight-packed analog sine waves dancing and crackling around each other. They formed networks, brief, transient patterns that were forever rearranging themselves, connecting individual aliens, then switching back and forth between the flyers who relayed them in new combinations to the big conical ships floating on the Trine’ba. Huge columns of information streamed out of both ships, twisting up through the atmosphere to vanish inside the trans-dimensional vortex of the wormholes above.

It made a striking contrast to the abridged electronic network of Randtown, with its slender lines of carefully packaged binary pulses zipping purposefully around her. Where the human systems were neat and efficient, these alien outpourings were crude; yet, she acknowledged, they possessed a certain integral elegance. As it was with all organic forms.

Mellanie concentrated on the rush of strange wave forms radiating out of a Prime flyer as it maneuvered above the promenade, ready to land. A newly woken batch of inserts buzzed with electric vibrancy inside her flesh. She knew of the SI’s presence inside them, analyzing what she discovered for it, teasing apart the oscillating signals to discover their meaning. As the flyer’s emissions coursed through the inserts she heard a harsh unintelligible voice at the back of her mind. It bloomed to a whispered chorus. Then there were the images, leaking out of the signals like some long-forgotten dream. A confused multiple viewpoint of motiles emerging from a congregation lake, millions of them pressed together, slipping and sliding as they waded ashore. Next to them was the towering mountain, honeycombed by rooms and chambers, where it was centered, all of life in the star system. A mountain where long ago light used to shine in the morning. Now the sky was permanently dark beneath the heavy clouds, an everlasting night split only by the incessant flash of lightning bolts, revealing the filthy rain and sleet that fell across the protective force fields. A black sky also seen from the asteroids orbiting far above, a sky that shielded the whole planet, its turbulence illuminated to insipid gray by sunlight and blazing strands of fusion flame. Life still thrived beneath the veil, woven inseparably to groupings of itself as it seethed and survived everywhere, on small cold planets, moons encircling gas giants, and far asteroid settlements. A life that now extended to other stars and their planets. A life that had flown through the wormholes to reach Elan, where it was spreading out over the lake to touch the land.

The life whispered amid itself, directing its soldier motiles to move forward into the flimsy box-buildings. It searched for humans and their machinery, finding none of either—though there was movement, the telltale infrared signatures that the soldier motiles were skillfully working their way toward. At the back of the urban area, long vehicles raced away. Flyers angled around to investigate.

One of the soldier motiles was shot at. It retaliated immediately, firing back, destroying the zone where the shot had come from. Flyers swooped eagerly, raking the buildings with coherent beams of gamma radiation.

“They’re going to destroy everything,” Mellanie said.

“It,” the SI corrected. “It is singular. An interesting arrangement. Life that has achieved unity, not just with itself but with its machinery.”

“I don’t care what it is, it’s still going to kill people.”

“We know.”

Programs and power flooded through Mellanie’s inserts, activating yet more functions. She had little to do with it other than adding her wishes to the conclusion. Fabulously complex OCtattoos crawled over her skin, merging into a single circuit. Signals streamed out from her, overlaying those that fused the motiles together. Interference patterns jostled and ruptured the smooth consistency of the soldier herd’s thoughts. Riding down the disruption were new instructions.

Mellanie left her shelter and walked slowly toward the Trine’ba so she could observe properly. Poor Mark Vernon tried to warn her, so she gave him and his friends some of the Prime weapons and made sure he left, along with all Randtown’s valiant, futile defenders.

“It has realized something is wrong,” the SI said. “Can you sense it?”

The signals spilling down from the wormholes were changing. Instead of orders, queries were trying to insinuate themselves into the soldier motiles. The Prime wanted to know what malaise was contaminating its units.

The SI maintained its interference pattern among the motile soldiers in Randtown, formulating a single reply that it sent out through Mellanie’s inserts. “We are stopping you,” it told MorningLightMountain.

Mellanie was aware of the shock ripple spreading through the alien’s planet-wide thought routines hundreds of light-years away. “Who are you?” it asked.

“We are the SI, an ally of the humans.”

“The Bose memories know of you. You are the human immotile. The endpoint of their individuality. They created you because they knew they were not perfect without you.”

Bose memories, Mellanie thought. Oh, shit, that’s not good. Though maybe in a way it is, it will give my new Dudley some closure.

“Your reading of the Bose memories is inaccurate,” the SI said. “Though we will not argue with you on definitions. We are contacting you to ask you to stop your attacks on the humans. They are pointless. You do not need these planets.”