“What’s up?” David asked as he reached Simon.

“That,” Simon pointed. “Can you make it out?”

David wriggled around Simon, and zoomed in on the torrent of dark liquid. “Wrong color to be crude oil. In any case why transport crude oil all this way, then dump it into the water? My guess would be something biological. Some kind of algae they eat, maybe?”

“What do you mean, transport?”

“That big machine it’s coming out of; it’s got to be a wormhole gateway. The liquid is coming straight from their home planet.”

Simon frowned, and looked at the machine again. David was probably right, he conceded. “It’ll wreck the Trine’ba,” he said. “Permanently.”

“I know.” David pressed a hand on Simon’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know how much this place meant to you. I loved it as well.”

Simon stared grimly at the alien pollution. “I cannot let them get away with that. They have to know it’s wrong.”

“It’ll be tough trying to stop them. We can’t get to the gateway; it’s too well protected by the force field. And even if we did mount some kind of attack, those flyers of theirs are always on patrol. We know how lethal they are.”

“Yes, we do, don’t we. Very well, let’s inform the others about this latest development. Perhaps they can think of what our response should be.”

***

The Prime motile emerged through the gateway during the night, several hours before MorningLightMountain switched it to pumping in fluid saturated with base cells. It waddled its four legs along the broken street of enzyme-bonded concrete, observing the flattened foundations on both sides that were all that was left of the human buildings at the center of the conquered town. Fragments of glass twinkled dully from every crack while flakes of ash swirled aimlessly in the gusts of fast-moving vehicles. There were large areas of the street’s remaining surface that were stained a curious dark color. Eventually, the motile realized that it was human blood that tarnished the concrete. There must have been an awful lot of it washing down the slope toward the lake for the discoloration to be so widespread.

One of the flattened human buildings, a store, was covered by squashed boxes. As the motile walked past it saw several company logos and product names printed on the crumpled cardboard. It was the first human writing the motile had seen with its four eyes, and it was pleased it could read them.

The original layout of the town was almost obscured now. MorningLightMountain was busy establishing its outpost on this world. The little communications device attached to one of the motile’s nerve receptor stalks was discharging a torrent of information and instructions to all the local motiles. Somewhere amid the stream of data was this world’s human designation: Elan, and the outpost’s position: Randtown. When the motile’s sensor stalks peered up at the night sky beyond the force field, the thoughts of Dudley Bose identified the constellations that included the prominent Zemplar cross formation, which could only be seen from the planet’s southern hemisphere. A further confirmation that his personality survived relatively intact.

The Dudley Bose that had hijacked the motile body knew he didn’t have all his old memories, that pieces of his earlier self were missing. That his new personality wasn’t the same as the old went without question. He accepted that without a qualm, for in this strange way, he continued to exist. For an individual, that was really all that mattered.

His escape had been ridiculously easy. MorningLightMountain, for all its massive mental power, really couldn’t understand concepts that weren’t its own; in fact, it rejected and hated the very notion. That refutation was the core of its Prime personality. In that respect, Dudley considered it to be a proper little Nazi, obsessed with its own purity.

That lack of understanding had been simple to exploit. When MorningLightMountain had downloaded Dudley’s memories into an isolated immotile unit for analysis, it had placed safeguards into the communications links with itself to prevent what it considered contamination leaking back out into the main group cluster of immotiles. What it had never envisaged, because the concept was completely outside its intellectual grasp, was that Dudley could utilize a motile. As nature on Dyson Alpha had ordained that immotiles could command motiles through the use of their more sophisticated thought routines, the notion of a disobedient motile was impossible. It simply was not part of the order of things. Motiles were subservient subsidiary organisms, receptacles for the greater Prime intellect. Nothing could change that.

Human thoughts, however, came from a brain that was, at most, fractionally smaller than a motile’s. And human minds were all completely independent, to a degree that MorningLightMountain could never truly appreciate.

Sitting alone in his damp, cozy chamber in the gigantic building that housed the rest of MorningLightMountain’s main group cluster, the immotile that contained Dudley’s thoughts was served food by motiles in the same way as all the other immotiles. Out of its twelve nerve receptor stalks, only four were fitted with communications interface devices to link it to the main thought routines of MorningLightMountain. All Dudley had to do was wait until he was visited by a motile bringing food, and bend one of the unused nerve receptor stalks to make contact with the equivalent stalk on the motile.

Dudley’s mind slipped along the joined stalks into the motile’s brain, duplicating his memories and thoughts within the new neuron structure. Resting inside his fresh host, he felt the general pressure of MorningLightMountain’s orders and directives press against his personality as they issued out of the communications device. He simply ignored them. He could do that because he wanted to. That was the difference between him and a motile’s “personality.” It had no self-determination. Dudley, as a fully self-aware and thoroughly pissed-off human mind, had a ton of it.

For months he had wandered around the valley that was MorningLightMountain’s original home. He ate the sloppy food pap from troughs like all the other motiles, bided his time, and gathered what information and understanding he could. In that respect, the communications device that gave him access to MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines was an unparalleled source of information. He felt like a small child peering out of a hidden room into an adult’s life.

Although it didn’t have the reasoning to foresee Dudley’s method of escape, MorningLightMountain was a terrifyingly formidable intelligence. One that from a human perspective was warped to a deadly degree.

Dudley’s quiet roving mind listened in to MorningLightMountain formulating its plans, perceived the universal genocide it wanted to commit against the Commonwealth and all the other non-Prime aliens that his, Dudley’s own, memories had told it about. And there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He couldn’t drop even the tiniest monkey wrench in the works.

Emotions were one of the more human aspects that didn’t seem to function particularly well in his stolen Prime motile brain. He knew the principle, knew what he should be feeling, without actually experiencing the feeling itself, a failure that he wrote off to a very different neurochemistry. So he watched impassively as the wormholes opened within the Commonwealth, knowing he should be weeping and screaming, clenching his quad pincers and batting his four curving one-piece arms against his chest as the destruction began. In actuality he spent the day walking along the side of a congregation lake, keeping out of the way of the troop of motiles who assisted the newly formed to walk out of the water.

Then several hours into the invasion, MorningLightMountain encountered the SI. It was a fascinating interlude, actually hearing the great artificial intelligence talking directly to its foe. For a while Dudley felt something close to cheer as the SI promised MorningLightMountain it would never succeed. Somehow the SI was blocking a herd of motiles on Elan, which was where the encounter originated. Then MorningLightMountain issued a batch of generalized attack instructions to its soldier motiles in the vicinity and the interference ended.