“Stop this. I’ve seen enough,” Zildiz said with difficulty. She tried to sound decisive but her words came out like she was pleading, and perhaps she was.

  Something in the learning module’s program must have heard her, because the illusion came to a jittery halt, the sounds looping over themselves and fading into the background.

  “My uncle Kryptus always suspected the Vitalus was keeping things from us,” Neroth said, his small face scrunched up in thought, “This would explain why.”

  “Now who’s the traitor?” Zildiz bared her teeth at him, “Is that all takes to get a Leaper to switch sides? Hearsay and some cheap neural tricks? It’s a sophisticated trick, I’ll give you that,” she told Rene, “But I’ve seen its like before in the Dawning Chambers. Helixeers use a similar virtual reality system to test out recombination.”

  “If it’s all lies, then you have nothing to fear from seeing the rest of it,” Rene said rather slyly, “Or is your version of events so shaky that it can’t hold up to scrutiny?”

  It has to be fake, she told herself. Everyone knew that the Vitalus had created the symbionts as a desperate final measure, to save the faithful as the world burned from the wrath of the Betrayers. In other words, they were an incidental step up the escalation ladder. For someone to wield a working exomorph before the War of Creation had even begun, why, that upset the entire chronology of her people’s history.

  The only reason the exomorphs had become a necessary facet of life on Arachnea was because the Betrayers had so thoroughly damaged the fledgling biosphere in their attempts to kill the Vitalus. Even now, thousands of years later, the god was doing Its level best to heal the wounds of the deep past and regain the ideal equilibrium that the Ceytians had intended.

  But the warrior woman Tr?n had demolished that notion with a single offhand remark: according to the Exodian scientists the Vitalus was capable of completely revitalizing a dead planet in less than decade. And if that was true, then why…

  Why did my son have to die? Zildiz thought with sudden, undeniable clarity.

  For a while she said nothing, lost in thought as Rene instructed the learning module to continue.

  The engram files resumed. They were looking into a cold and sterile room, men and women in creaking full-body gloves bustling around a steel table. Strapped to this was a dried cadaver turned inside out with surgical precision, every major organ laid open and drained. Alphas in the stiff uniforms from earlier stood watching the dissection through a tinted screen, jotting down notes on their pads.

  “What the hell is that thing?” the puffy man said in disgust.

  “We captured this specimen underneath the great western caldera,” someone said, “One of Doolan’s T.O.R.U.’s unearthed a whole colony of these buggers while they were looking for uranium. These things are completely blind, eusocial, cannibalistic, immune to pain, and one hundred percent of human stock. Oh right, and they spit acid, too.”

  “Great. First we get our mysterious mothman saboteur on Cloister. Now it’s giant, flesh-eating naked mole rat people. As if this freakshow couldn’t get any worse. How’d you learn about the part about their pain tolerance?”

  “This one took a drill bit through the chest and still managed to smash a control panel to bits before dying of narcosis. They can’t handle the atmo we’re mixing on the surface.”

  “Neither can we, thank God. Otherwise, we’d have settlements on the surface by now and our indentured employees would be picnicking with these beauties. Why didn’t the probes spot these sonsabitches before we decided to make this world our playground? I thought the seed ships failed to propagate here!”

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  “Like I said, they live kilometres underground. You know how seed ships are—you never know which path directed evolution will take. We’re just lucky these cosmophages hit a genetic cull-de-sac. Dumb as bricks, all of them. Strong though.”

  “I’m more worried about the ones we signed a treaty with. They’re still denying that they had anything to do with our dome getting popped. Do the Ceytians know about these cave dwellers?”

  “Maybe. You-know-who certainly does. We took soil samples and came up with spores.”

  “Spores?” the Director’s voice shook.

  “Yes, of the same genus as the neurocilial fungal colonies that it uses to store data. Do you remember how you-know-who made that estuary ecosystem just last year?

  “It had those lungfishes sprinting on dry land in months,” the Director nodded.

  “Well, if it tampers with the code of these cave dwellers, increases their intelligence quotient, makes their cardiovascular systems capable of adapting to the surface again…”

  The man’s voice trailed off, but his meaning was clear. The Director’s jaw tightened, his molars grinding loudly together.

  “Jesus wept. We’ve got no choice now, we have to shut down the gaian intelligence. Never mind if the pod people think it’s murder.”

  “The shareholders won’t be happy. Vita-Luxe was going to be our bestselling rtf system.”

  “Never mind them. It’s the continued existence of the human race that concerns me. Call the iron bitch. Make it happen.”

  “You know, director...” the other man paused, pursing his lips, “I can’t help but shake that feeling that something secret steers us to the point of no return.”

  “If you’re right, then whoever they are, they’ve succeeded,” the Director hung his head in shame, “Another cosmophage crisis in our lifetime. God save us all.”

  #

  They were on the sleek command deck of a starship. The helmsmen in control of the vessel wired into their crash couches, eyes glazed over in the trance of cryofugue. Their mouths didn’t move, but their speech-thoughts flashed like thunder, echoing through Zildiz’s mind as if she too was linked to their mental séance.

  “Ceytian mothership requesting permission to enter Van Allen belt. Weapons online...”

  “…negative, instruct the Rang Laud pod fleet to stand down. If ignored fire a warning salvo over their bow with antimatter tubes 4 through 6...”

  “…firing solutions and evasive actions plotted. 1:2.4 KD ratio projected.”

  Zildiz felt a rush of cold, fatalistic satisfaction pass through the crew at that last shared thought. If they were going to die here, they would at least take more of the enemy with them than vice versa. Then a spark of recognition entered the séance, followed by a black dread that spread through the synced minds like a droplet of ink.

  “…unidentified vessel five degrees off the starboard bow moving on a direct collision course, 4 seconds to impact…”

  “Hard to port, full power to adjustment thrusters! Cut the chatter , I need clean comms.”

  Winking red targeting reticules caught sight of the ambushing vessel and locked onto them, enlarging the distant pixel until it seemed the enemy was right on top of them.

  Zildiz knew that hammerhead wedge of a cranium, those sleek ribbed plates. The ancient hollowore gunned forward on ion jets, its body crawling with long tubular creatures with clusters of eyes on the tips of their heads, which were shaped like nosecones. The living warheads detached from the hollowore rode its momentum, spreading out in an unavoidable scatter pattern that caught the Exodian vessel amidships as it tried to roll out of the way.

  “……”

  The end came, swift and merciful. At the moment of impact, the learning module shunted Zildiz’s consciousnesses into that of an observer on the surface of Arachnea, watching in terror as new stars in the night sky appeared and vanished with frightening rapidity. The entire fleet action was over within seconds, leaving them with nothing to look up upon but the empty night.

  “So that’s it then,” the observer said, voice tight with pain, “Well, alright then.”

  The man stood there for a long time, stood until his breathing grew haggard and he swayed on his feet. Then he turned on his heels, and there was no sound for miles around but the gravel shifting at his feet as he walked away.

  Towards the grey T.O.R.U. looming over the horizon, silent witness to the bitter end.