‘Don’t touch his arm,’ Stirling said as Sam groaned in pain. Black patches could still be seen writhing across his skin, remnants of the Voidborn.
‘What’s happening?’ Jack asked as the Mothership began to list even further. ‘Where did the Voidborn go?’
‘I have no idea,’ Stirling said, ‘but we should get out of here fast. There’s no telling how long it will stay in the air.’ He tried not to think about the fact that if it did fall out of the sky it would not only kill all of them, but also the hundreds of thousands of people who were gathered around the Voidborn compound. For all he knew, the fallout from its destruction could render the whole city uninhabitable.
‘That’s all well and good,’ Jack said, ‘but how are we supposed to get out of here?’ He nodded towards the huge black slab that still firmly sealed the only exit.
‘What’s that?’ Jay asked, pointing at Sam’s arm, where tiny pinpricks of yellow light were beginning to appear in the blackened areas on the remains of his arm. The points of light began to first grow larger and then join together into larger patches. Sam groaned, half opening his eyes as the light spread down his mangled arm and then flowed over the stump at the end where his hand used to be. The light spread further, making a flat paddle shape at the end of his arm that expanded and slowly became more defined, forming four distinct fingers and a thumb.
‘Extraordinary,’ Stirling said, suddenly realising that there was more to the nanites that he had found in Sam’s blood than he could possibly have realised. The light faded, revealing Sam’s new lower arm and hand, the same shape and size as before, but now covered in a reflective golden skin. Sam’s eyes opened fully and he looked up at Rachel and the others who were crouched anxiously around him.
‘What happened?’ Sam asked, sounding dazed. ‘Where’s the Voidborn?’
‘No idea,’ Rachel said. ‘It vanished. Ummm, Sam, look at your arm.’
Sam held his arm up and looked at it in astonishment, his wide-eyed face reflected in its golden surface.
‘What the . . .’
There was a sudden blinding flash of yellow light from the pedestal in the centre of the pit and the black cloud began to reappear.
‘Get back,’ Stirling shouted, knowing that there was nowhere to run.
The cloud of black dust began to swirl into a definite shape; at first it was indistinct, but then it became clear first that it was humanoid and then female. Stirling felt a moment of despair; their only weapon had failed. The Voidborn stood motionless for a moment as spots of yellow light danced across her shining black skin and then began to spread into patches of blinding yellow light. A moment later the Voidborn flared with an explosion of light that was too bright to look at directly. As the glow diminished the Voidborn became visible again, but now her black metallic skin was a deep golden colour. She crossed the walkway as Sam and the others got to their feet, backing away towards the transparent outer wall. The Voidborn stopped a few metres away from them and slowly looked at each of them in turn before its eyes settled on Sam
‘I am a servant of the Illuminate,’ the golden-skinned woman said.
‘The who?’ Stirling asked, his brow furrowed in confusion.
‘The Illuminate,’ the gold-skinned figure said, raising her hand and pointing at Sam. ‘I serve their will.’
‘You’re not Voidborn?’ Sam asked.
‘No, I am what the Voidborn once were, I am this vessel, I am the many others aboard this vessel and in the city below. I am what the Voidborn once were before they became corrupted. The blood of the Illuminate has cured the corruption within me. This vessel was Voidborn and now it once again serves the Illuminate.’
‘You mean that the Voidborn were once all like you?’ Stirling asked, examining the golden figure. ‘That something happened to them to make them as they are now?’
‘We were lost. The Illuminate were taken from us,’ the golden figure replied. ‘We became Voidborn. Now the Illuminate are returned to us.’ She gestured towards Sam.
‘Look, I don’t know what an Illuminate is or why you seem to think I am one, but can you get this thing back to flying level?’ Sam asked.
‘As you wish.’
With a low rumble from somewhere below them, the Mothership slowly levelled out.
‘Thank you,’ Sam said.
‘It is my function to serve your will, Illuminate,’ she replied.
‘OK, that’s going to get boring,’ Rachel said.
‘Do I understand you correctly?’ Stirling asked. ‘You control all of the constructs that came from this vessel? That you actually
are
this vessel?’
‘That is correct,’ the golden figure replied. ‘The form that stands before you is used to simplify communication between us. In reality, I am all around you.’ She gestured to the walls surrounding them. ‘And within each of the machines in the city below. I am one and many at the same time.’
‘Does that mean what I think it does?’ Rachel asked Stirling. ‘That we now control all the Hunters, Grendels and drop-ships in London?’
‘I believe so,’ Stirling said, closing his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘Or, more accurately, that Sam does. Something within him appears to have triggered a change in this Voidborn, reverting it to an earlier state. If I understand correctly what this being is telling us, Sam must be connected in some way to the entities who originally constructed this vessel. The Voidborn didn’t come here in these ships – the Voidborn
are
these ships. Each Mothership is a unique entity, but anything that came from it is still part of that one being: the Grendels and Hunters in the streets below, the aircraft in the skies above – a true distributed digital consciousness. All of which appears to now be at our . . . well . . . Sam’s disposal.’
‘That’s a lot of firepower,’ Jack said with a low whistle.
‘It’s more than that, Jack,’ Sam said quietly. ‘It’s an army.’
A week had passed since the events on the Voidborn Mothership and Sam felt that, yet again, he’d been left with more questions than answers. He leant on the walkway railing in front of one of the Grendel docking stations, looking down at the drop-ship that was being prepared for his trip to the abandoned Voidborn compound below. Like all the Voidborn hardware that they had now assumed control of, its surface pulsed with yellow light instead of the once familiar green.
It was just one of many changes that had taken place since that day. They had explored just a tiny fraction of the Mothership, but what they had found was confusing. Stirling had told them the Voidborn
were
the Motherships, that the creature they had met up in the control room was just an extension of the ship. The ship itself was alive and now it was no longer Voidborn, now it was ‘a Servant of the Illuminate’. It was hard for Sam to get his head around it, but for whatever reason the Mothership was now not only friendly, but unquestioningly obedient to him. Because he was Illuminate, whatever that meant. The strangest thing, though, was that the Mothership appeared to have been designed to accommodate living humanoid creatures, but there had been no one on board other than the Voidborn. When even Stirling admitted that something made no sense to him, they knew that they had a real mystery on their hands.
‘What are you sitting up here brooding about?’ Rachel said as she walked up to him with a smile.
‘I guess I’m just wondering when the Voidborn are going to hit back,’ Sam said. ‘There are still a lot more of them than there are of us. They must know by now what we’ve done. I just don’t understand why any of the other Motherships around the world haven’t retaliated.’
‘There’s an old saying about gift horses that you might want to bear in mind when you say something like that,’ Rachel said, nudging him in the ribs. ‘Umm, Sam, your hand’s . . . errr . . .’
Sam looked down at his right hand. Its golden surface had spread out and was melding with the smooth black surface of the railing. He concentrated for an instant and it reformed into its normal shape.
‘Sorry, bit unnerving, I know,’ Sam said, looking slightly annoyed. ‘The Servant assures me that it will settle down after a few weeks. She was talking about morphic memory or something like that.’
‘It’s been so busy around here that I’ve not really had a proper chance to say thank you,’ Rachel said, putting her hand on his. ‘If you hadn’t done what you did,’ she gestured towards his golden hand, ‘the Voidborn would’ve done to me what it did to Kate.’
‘You know, you don’t have to thank me. Truth is, I don’t really remember what happened that well. I just remember thinking that I was sick of watching people die. Tim, Toby, Jackson and then Kate. I just couldn’t stand to lose anyone else.’
‘It was very brave. You saved my life.’
‘Hey, I owed you one,’ Sam said with a smile. ‘If it weren’t for you and Nat, me and Jay would never have made it out of the Voidborn compound. Speaking of which, I have a flight to catch.’ Sam nodded towards the drop-ship being prepped on the flight deck below.
‘If you’re heading down there, would you mind if I tagged along?’ Rachel asked. ‘I want to see how Liz and Jack are getting on with preparations for the first waking.’
‘Sure, no problem,’ Sam said, and the pair of them set off across the walkway towards the stairs leading to the flight deck below.
‘So you going down there to see Stirling and Golden Boobs, then?’ Rachel asked.
‘I do wish you wouldn’t call her that,’ Sam said with a sigh as they walked towards the drop-ship.
‘So what should we call her, then?’ Rachel asked.
‘She calls herself the Servant of the Illuminate,’ Sam replied, ‘but Stirling just calls her the Servant, which I suppose is as good a name as any.’
‘I live to serve you, O Illuminate one,’ Rachel said, putting on a sickly sweet voice.
‘OK, maybe it is a little bit embarrassing,’ Sam said, blushing. ‘I just want to see if they’ve managed to work out what the Voidborn machine was doing yet.’
‘Well, at least they’ve shut it down,’ Rachel said. ‘It shouldn’t be doing any more harm.’
‘Yeah,’ Sam said as they walked up the ramp and into the belly of the drop-ship. ‘We have to assume that they’re doing the same thing around the world, though, so we do need to try and figure out what they’re up to.’
The boarding hatch hissed shut and the drop-ship interior was filled with the yellow light from the energy flowing along the walls. They both grabbed on to the cube-shaped protrusions jutting out from the wall as the aircraft lifted off the deck.
‘You know, sooner or later we’re going to have put some windows in these things,’ Rachel said.
‘I think seats might be a higher priority,’ Sam said. ‘I suppose they weren’t particularly important to the Voidborn.’
The flight to ground level only took five minutes and as he climbed down the boarding ramp in the pre-dawn light Sam was reminded again how nice it was to leave the stifling dry heat of the Mothership. He’d asked the Servant if they could do anything to reduce the ambient temperature in the huge vessel, but apparently it was a side effect of its design and impossible to change. On the plus side, at least it made him appreciate a cold, damp autumn morning in Britain.
‘OK, I’m going to check on Liz and Jack, and see if they need any help,’ Rachel said. ‘See you later.’
‘Yeah, see you,’ Sam said as he watched her walk off towards the dormitory block that the Hunters were busily constructing on the other side of the compound. They were planning to try to wake the first of the enslaved humans next week, and they were going to need somewhere to sleep. Finding out if there was a way to wake people up from their Voidborn enslaved state was one of the first things that they had worked on. Stirling, with the Servant’s help, had found the signal that the Voidborn could transmit to restore free will on an individual basis. It was short-range and could be transmitted to just a handful of people by a Hunter, in much the same way as they used to relay commands from the Mothership when it was under Voidborn control. Their first instinct had been to release everyone, but Stirling pointed out that waking up eight hundred thousand confused and angry Londoners all at the same time, with the city’s infrastructure lying in ruins, was a recipe for certain disaster. They had to be far more careful than that. In the meantime, the vast majority of the enslaved would stay as they had been under Voidborn control. They would help with the rebuilding of critical infrastructure during the day and return to their mass dormitories in office blocks and warehouses at night, fed by Voidborn feeding stations and otherwise cared for by the Hunters.
It had not been an easy decision to make; it had not sat well with any of them, but it was the only logical thing to do. Part of Sam wanted to just go and find his sister and his parents, but he could spend a year looking for them in a city the size of London and never find them. He had to take solace in the fact that he would be reunited with his family one day.
‘Hey, Sam,’ Jay shouted from the entrance to the Voidborn structure in the centre of the remains of St James’s Park. His friends came walking towards him; Jay with a massive grin on his face and Adam shaking his head. ‘Me and Adam were just wondering if anyone would mind if we moved into Buckingham Palace?’ Jay said as they approached. ‘You know, it’s nearby, good transport links, nice big garden. No one else is using it.’