i.
Sarah
SOS. Stranded sailor. Hurry. Mind Invasion.
“What is it?”
The hushed words broke me from my reverie. A tiny, gray communicator rested in my hand, upon which scrolled the impossible message. Over my left shoulder, Flight Lieutenant Ethel Warnsby peered at the device, waiting for my answer.
“Do you see this?” I asked, gesturing at our spaceship’s viewport. Beyond the silica glass, vast fields of nothing spanned the horizon. Only the tiny flecks of stars and the distant aureate rings of Thanatos V diversified the view.
Ethel’s straight, blond hair framed an expression of bored curiosity, born of many months of interplanetary travel. The cruising speed of the ERA44 – this civilian transport shuttle we helped crew – was just over eighty-thousand miles per hour, and still, we were two months away from our destination. It was hard to complain, though. Trips like these were just extended milk runs: a year of stress-free, five-hour workdays culminating in a handsome payout. The humdrum shifts made almost anything beyond the norm exciting.
“I see what we have seen for the last ten million miles, more or less,” Ethel drawled.
“Right. You see nothing,” I replied. I held up the little device in my hand. “I have a message.”
“What, like saved? A voicemail?” She stared dubiously at my communicator.
“It’s not a mobile phone, Ethel,” I replied sarcastically.
“Well, what is it, Poindexter?”
“Well, it’s just that. I have a message. A new message,” I said, staring hard at her, hoping my eyes would convey what my mouth evidently could not.
She cocked an eyebrow. “Aren’t those things meant for planetside comms? Like, a thousand miles or something?”
I nodded. “More like ten miles. It talks in radio waves.”
“The nearest planet is one hundred sixteen million miles away, last I checked. And believe me, I check often. So that’s impossible,” she said, stating the obvious. I gave her my that’s the whole point look, but she pretended not to notice. “Sounds like someone on board is messing with you.” A slight, schadenfreude-ish smile appeared on her face. Evidently, she enjoyed the idea.
“Only me and maaaybe Briggs would carry one of these, and he’s been snoring for the past two hours.” I hooked a finger over my shoulder to point at Jonathan Briggs, the other commstech contractor on board. He was leaning against his wrist, eyes closed and drooling slightly.
Ethel scowled. “Contractors. Do you have any idea what Ghosh would do to me if he caught me dozing?”
I glanced over at the ship’s captain as he paced the observation deck. He had was running a tiny comb through his mustache. “Buy you a piña colada? Force you to listen to his smooth jazz collection?”
She looked at me as if unsure if I was being serious. “Clearly you don’t know Ghosh. He’s scary.”
“Doesn’t seem to have affected your work ethic,” I quipped.
“Get the fuck out of here, Miller,” she replied.
I marched away before I could irritate the flight lieutenant anymore and climbed a set of stairs that lead from the observation deck to the command deck, where Captain Ghosh was barking orders at a few scared looking officers. He was a tall, dark-skinned man dressed in the crisp blue suit that denoted his rank. He had a stern demeanor, but I was convinced he exclusively wore floral-print button-downs and boat shoes while off-duty.
“Captain Ghosh,” I said as I approached.
“Hmm? Oh, hello there,” he said, turning and looking down at me. “You are Sarah… what was your last name again?” he asked, frowning.
“Miller, sir. Communications technology division.” I said.
“Ms. Miller. Always a pleasure. You interrupted these officers, who were interrupting a pleasant daydream, and you lot almost never waste my time. So please, go ahead,” he said. I don’t understand what everyone is so afraid of, I thought. This guy’s a kitten.
“Very sorry, sir. I have a report and two recommendations.”
“Delightful. Let’s hear it,” he replied.
“I recommend an external thermal scan, contingent on the answer to a staff-wide question over the PA system,” I said.
Now his brows furrowed. “…and the report?” he asked.
I showed him the communications device. “I received this message a few minutes ago, right after the engineers killed the engines for maintenance, sir. This is a bidirectional pager. It uses low-frequency radio waves – typically, you would use this for planet-side survival communications. Without some sort of established relay towers or satellites, it only has a range of a couple of miles.”
“Invasion…” he murmured, scratching his beard. “Did you try writing back?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
He took the device from me and stared down at it. “And no reply, I assume. So you want me to confirm no one on board sent this?”
“Only staff,” I hedged. “This device is tuned to a military frequency. The odds of a civilian using it are… very low.”
Ghosh let out a heavy sigh and handed the communicator back. “So, what? If nowhere was a place, this would be it. If this isn’t from internal, are you telling me you think a ship is stranded out here, chewing space dust? And we just happened to stop within range of a glorified walkie-talkie?”
Well, when you put it like that… I almost demurred, but the thing was, this thing was an antique. If I was being honest, I doubt even Briggs had one. And there was one more thing. It wasn’t just that I received a message, which was alarming enough. It was what it said. The last word, “Invasion”, tickled something in the back of my brain. “I don’t know, sir. It’s just that receiving a message on this device in this location is very unusual, as I’m sure you can imagine,” I said.
He paused for a long time, eyeing me with an intense expression until I almost started to squirm. Then he sighed again. “Okay. If it’s nothing, on your head be it,” he replied, then turned to a brunette woman at the far end of the room. “Mathis, get me flight paths for the last three-six-five.”
“Yes, sir!” she barked.
“Exactly how far out do you think we need thermals?” said Ghosh, tapping his foot. Mathis returned her report quickly: no ships had used this flight path in the past year, except ours. That tracked: this was a very long haul, and we were the only player in the business this side of the solar system.
I sucked on my lip, pondering the captain’s question. It was a total shot in the dark. Even though a radio wave might only travel a few miles planetside, in space it could theoretically travel… forever. For such a message to have accidentally reached our ship: well, the odds of that occurring were, in practical terms, approaching negative infinity.
“I’d say at least two ninety by ninety-degree scans. One at baseline, and one that uses the max-viewing distance as a baseline.” A dome-shaped scan, like the cap of a sphere. There was no real reason for the two scans. I was outside the realm of math and standard operating procedure. Gut-feeling would have to do.
“Which direction?” Ghosh asked.
“Halfway between starboard and topside.” That information, at least, was not a guess. SalTech, the manufacturer of this particular device, had packed a lot of features into its bite-sized creation, including a radio compass that could pinpoint the directionality of signals. As with many of my colleagues, I was only half as smart as my equipment made me look. In Briggs’ case, a quarter was generous.
Ghosh considered for a bit then assented: data presented, data accepted. The PA broadcast went out, and predictably, no one copped to sending such a message, so the thermal scan was greenlit.
The observation deck had become quite still; I moved over to a small array of computer displays, where an imaging specialist had typed a few commands, and then leaned back in his chair.
“We’ll have a visual in about one second,” he said. I sank into the digital ambiance of the surrounding computers as everyone around me became still.
Breath in. Breath out.
The command deck was filled with flashing lights and stiff-looking military personnel who were either bored out of their minds or relishing the glacial pace of their day. Several were trying to subtly crane their necks to see if anything happened; others couldn’t be bothered.
Finally, an image appeared on the screen.
“Nothing there,” Ghosh said. “Very well. Warnsby!”
A few moments later, Ethel appeared, standing at attention.
“Sir!” she said with a snappy salute.
“Take Miller here out in the Dinghy. Bring an imaging tech with you.
“Yes sir,” she replied.
“Double-fucking-time Warnsby. Quit gawking, or you’re on the shit-list for another month, again. Move!”
“Yes sir!”
“Remind me never to get on his bad side,” I murmured as we hurry away.
“I fail my Weapons Maintenance check one time…” she groused.
A few minutes later, flight crew were preparing a smaller spaceship ubiquitously called “the Dinghy” for launch. To achieve the second round of imaging, we needed to travel to the furthest point at which our thermal camera could detect something ship-sized or smaller (around one hundred miles) and scan again. Easier to just jettison out there in a smaller craft than to turn a whole cruiser ship that was made for going in a straight line for a very long time.
My fingers clenched, and my palms felt sweaty as I stared across at my companions, Ethel and the imaging tech, Brian.
I managed to smile slightly at them. “I wonder if we’ll find anything,” I said. I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice.
ii.
Althea
I am wandering. I am lost.
These thoughts echoed in my mind as sweat dripped down my face. I floated in the vast emptiness of space; my bulky, white spacesuit was all that separated me from cold death. Frantically, I grasped at a tiny device attached to my wrist. It was so old that it could not integrate with the communications array in my suit. I pressed its single button to cycle through forty characters and typed my message one letter at a time. It was agonizingly slow.
“SOS. Stranded sailor. Hurry. My mind is prepped for Invasion.”
There was nothing else I could write that would convey more urgency than that. I shook the device to trigger a transmission, then waited and prayed.
Where was I? I… I was nowhere. I twisted my head as far as I could to the left and caught a flicker of color: the edge of an asteroid belt. If those were Thanatos V’s rings, at least I was close to where I had targeted. Of course, that wouldn’t mean much if no one was on the receiving end of my transmission.
“Damned psychs. I can’t wait until you’re all gutted,” I muttered, but there was no courage in my tone, only fear. Whatever help was coming, if any, it had better get here soon. It had better get here…
“Now,” I whispered.
Too late. It was here.
I closed my eyes and exhaled slowly and purposefully. All around me, colors bloomed – vibrant oranges mixed with purples and greens drifted like hazes – as if a painter had spilled powdered paint across the void. Were I to open my eyes, I would not be able to see them; I could only sense they were there. They were the first heralds of the coming Invasion.
“Come then,” I said. “Have at me.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw a planet appear and disappear behind me, bright and blue against the black of space, with wisps of white clouds scattered across its surface. I knew, then, that it was truly happening. Part of my consciousness was now being projected into another dimension, one where this planet existed at this point in space. That was their doing, not mine. It was a byproduct of their transdimensional hops.
The second herald.
I thought back to early last year when the first phases of planning for this venture were just beginning. I had always known the risk was great, but what choice was there? I had been on the run for so long. My only way out was to…
“Jump.” The word felt strangely claustrophobic within the confines of my helmet.
There was a very small, very select group of people who could travel trillions of miles in a few minutes. They used an alien technology that involved two fusion reactors, an astronomically expensive amount of energy, and psychically projecting your form into an alternate dimension where space was compressed before shifting it back to your home dimension.
They were the ones who exclusively used that technology up until an hour ago, when I snuck into one of their compounds and traveled eight-hundred and thirty-four billion miles in four minutes. The process was anathema to electronics, so I’d worn a retro-style spacesuit without all the fancy wiring the modern versions came with, and a tiny, solar-powered radio wave communicator, the only thing of its type that wouldn’t get fried instantly in transit.
Now, I was deeply alone in the middle of space. My salvation, should it arrive, came in the form of a five foot four, one-hundred eight pound Navy Space reject (thanks to her disability) that had somehow alchemized a ham radio license into a career. I had done my research ever so carefully, from fleshing out her psychological profile over several months to ensure she fit the bill, to studying flight lines to make certain the ERA-44 Planet-To-Planet Civilian Carrier would be performing maintenance at this date and time.
The many what-ifs that surrounded my decisions lurked in the back of my mind like distant specters, but I was determined to ignore them. What if they didn’t stop for maintenance? What if she didn’t see the message? What if she didn’t even bring her antique communicator at all? Or she had a sick day?
If any one thing in this proverbial chain of dominoes went awry, I was one-hundred percent dead. That I was willing to take that risk spoke to my level of desperation.
Before despair could grip me, I pivoted mentally. I had to have faith in my research. I knew, deep in my gut, she was my golden ticket. The ERA-44 ran like clockwork. Thirty years of the same trip and the same maintenance at the same time. And its captain had a security clearance, meaning he might know of Invasions. It was as good a chance as I was going to get.
“Focus,” I said to myself. “I must focus.” I was getting distracted, and I wanted to speak while I still could. An electric anxiety was now shaking through my whole body, but I steadied my breath. Slowly, like a sink draining, it dripped away until all I felt was the air moving in and out of my lungs, and my heart beating rhythmically in my chest.
The invader appeared. Psychs, as my compatriots and I called them, were invisible to the naked eye as they transited between dimensions, but they left an electronic signature that was very apparent in my mind’s eye. It was like hiding a loaf of bread under a blanket. Even if I couldn’t see the bread, I would be able to tell it was there by the impression it left in the cloth.
Likewise, with enough practice, I was able to see the impression a dimension-hopping psych left on the fabric of spacetime – which was substantial – and deduce its nature from that. This one looked like a giant praying mantis that was blinking in and out of existence in strange green and purple after-images.
All that came to mind was a Latin phrase we would use during our combat training sessions: “Victoria aut mors.” I whispered.
And then it was upon me. I imagined it felt similar to what someone undergoing brain surgery would experience if they were awake.
“Submit,” said the psych. It had control of my speech; the words that were spoken came from my mouth. Next, it commandeered part of my brain’s frontal-parietal control region – the part that facilitated visual imagery. My mind’s eye filled with a suffocating, pink color, but I expected this. I still had my breath, and I inhaled and exhaled slowly and calmly. Remain calm.
I reject you, I thought. I found the limit of my conscious awareness just outside the edge of my body (my aura, if you will) and began pushing the concept of “firmness” to it – the thought of a steel girder, or a sphere made of diamond. I couldn’t visualize, but the abstraction was enough: I felt the psych’s hold over me slip slightly.
“Too little,” it said with my voice. “Too weak.” Then it grabbed the respiratory system in my medulla oblongata. My diaphragm seized up and I instinctively tried to inhale. Nothing happened. I tried again. My nose and lungs weren’t responding. Immediately, I was flooded with panic. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. I was going to asphyxiate. My body wanted to thrash and convulse and fight back, but there was nothing to attack – the enemy was inside.
Peace, I told myself. You practiced for this. During training, I had been “almost” drowned hundreds of times over. It was the worst kind of torture, but also a grim necessity my instructor insisted upon. I repeated his words in my mind: This is a trick, their most basic one. They’re trying to get you to crack.
Psychs couldn’t help themselves: mental anguish was most of their playbook. But, even if it was difficult to acknowledge at the moment, I knew something vitally important. During Invasion, death was mutually inclusive. If my body died, the invader would die too. And it also knew that.
I paused for a moment, feeling the absence of air in my lungs and encroaching dizziness; I felt the invader’s alien presence rippling through me; I saw never-ending pink. I took a moment to gather my strength, and then I mentally laughed – a boisterous, uproarious chuckle. Flaming sword cutting you in two, I thought, forcing it to feel jovial, then coalesced my will and sent it directly at the psych.
“Ahh!” came the hiss from between my teeth, and the pysch loosened its hold on my brain for a split second. Vision and breath returned and I began sucking in air gratefully. I forced my eyes open to see the green, mantis-like creature now fully in this dimension and hovering right over me in a transparent, bubble-like spacesuit.
I instinctively jerked back and pushed at it, but then it seized control of my motor functions and forced my body completely rigid. This is okay, I thought. I’ve got this.
“Let’s try again,” came the words from my mouth. And then it began to tighten its hold, bit by bit. My eyes shut, blacked out, and my memories opened to it like a card catalog. I felt its cold, clammy touch rifling through memory after memory; I wanted to shudder, but I could not.
Is this what you want? To control me? To take my memories? The Law forbids it, I thought.
“Your Law does not concern me, human.” It began to cycle through the memories faster, but I knew in doing so, it was using immense concentration. I sent the concept “stop” over and over again until they began to crawl by second by second; the psych and I were living a memory of me ordering coffee in real-time.
“Cease. Interference!” it said while grinding my teeth together. I struck back by stealing my jaw muscles for a second and biting my lip until blood blossomed and pain lanced through us both.
It’s not so easy to invade a body and ignore its nerves, is it? I’m just getting started, I snarled.
iii.
Sarah
We scrambled and boarded the Dinghy, an SUV-sized spacecraft outfitted for short-range forays. The imaging tech named Brian, Flight Lieutenant Ethel, and I stepped inside its cramped, steel quarters. In short order, we were jetting towards our destination at a cool two hundred miles per hour.
I hunched over in the cabin, peering at the communicator I held between two fingers. When the message first came through, I had typed a short message: “Who is this? Where are you?” I hadn’t received a reply. Now, I found myself staring anxiously at the device as if it would provide answers to this strange situation. More likely than not, our thermal scan would come up empty, and we would return to the shuttle none the wiser; I would casually mention this strange anomaly on future runs, and everyone would chalk it up to a prankster in the crew’s ranks who was too afraid to come forward.
That’s all it was. That’s all it should have been.
And yet, the second thermal scan showed two warm bodies – two bodies, not spaceships – floating some forty miles away.
As soon as the results came through, a shocked Ethel blurted out a string of epithets, and I wasn’t far behind her. Even the wizened tech, who had the type of world-weary attitude appropriate for someone his age, managed a concise, “Hmm.”
“Radio back to Ghosh,” I hissed at Ethel.
“I’m the CO on this excursion,” she snapped in reply. She looked at me. “You radio back to Ghosh,” she ordered.
“You’re a coward,” I muttered.
“And you’re scared of strobe lights,” Ethel replied bitterly.
“That’s low,” I said, then slapped the intercom button. I took a hesitant breath. Then: “Dinghy to Captain Ghosh, this is Miller speaking.”
A click of static. “Go ahead, Dinghy.”
“Thermal has captured two warm bodies, about forty miles from our position. How shall we proceed?”
A pause. “You said warm bodies?” came the reply.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Signs of wreckage?”
Both Ethel and I looked at each other. “No, sir,” I said, shaking my head.
Another long pause. “Proceed with caution. Get a visual and then radio back. Command out.”
We crept forward, as much as a spaceship can creep in space – that is to say, we went one hundred miles-per-hour instead of two – hands clenched and breaths bated in anticipation. It was the imaging tech who first saw them; he had produced potato chips a few minutes ago, and so he pointed two greasy fingers and uttered a muffled “there” between bites.
Ethel shot a disgusted look at him and slowed us to a near stop, and we all peered forward out of the forward-facing viewport to stare at two creatures floating in space. One looked human, dressed in a retro astronaut’s getup complete with a reflective, spherical visor. The other…
“What is that?” I gasped in horror. It looked something like a giant, green praying mantis, with scythe-like arms and articulating mandibles. It was encased in a shimmering bubble attached to a flat spherical disk at the base that looked like some sort of personal spacecraft.
“Looks like a bug,” said Brian helpfully.
The astronaut looked like he or she was in a trance. Or maybe, they’re just dead. The grim thought twisted my lips downward. The other creature, the “bug” was moving, but only just so… for some reason, it reminded me of Briggs, hunched over his computer desk. Even when he was awake, he was glued to his screen for most of the day. Zombie mode, I liked to call it.
It’s time to report to Ghosh, I thought. Down on the ship’s console, the glittering of hundreds of buttons contrasted against a satin metal finish. Slowly, I pressed the red intercom button. “Dinghy to Captain,” I said.
Another click of static. “Go ahead, Dinghy.”
I stared down at the speakers where Captain Ghosh’s voice came. “Uh…” I said. How could I describe the situation to him? I looked back up to get a better look at the two figures, and my mouth went dry. For some reason, the mantis-thing had turned its head and its two compound eyes were staring right at me through the viewport. Something was happening. I could swear I saw two more figures flickering into existence just behind it, but when I blinked, I saw nothing. A terrible feeling of dread washed over me, and, along with it, a creeping certainty: We should never have come here.
Ghosh’s voice became peeved, insistent. “Dinghy? Report. Hello? Briggs, there’s something wrong with the connection. Briggs! Stop drooling and check the damn intercom.”
“There’s a human and a strange, bug alien here. I think it’s hostile. We should shoot it.” That’s what I said to Ghosh. That’s what I wanted to say to him at that moment. But instead, when I blinked again, there were two new figures floating behind the bug, surrounded in the same bubble-like spacecraft. And then the words that came out of my mouth were, “There’s nothing here. Must have been an anomaly. We’ll head back. Dinghy out.” And I cut the connection.
Ethel turned to me, startled. “What the hell, Miller? Why’d you lie to the Captain?” She stared at me for a moment. Then she drew the pistol slung at her hips. It was a small thing, as pistols go; more of an ornament for lieutenants than anything else, but still quite lethal when pointed appropriately. She aimed it at my head.
Behind her, Brian looked on, mouth hanging open. Ethel, herself, was staring at her hand, aghast, as if she wasn’t the one who had raised it. My heart began hammering out of my chest, and I began backing away, holding out my hands. I felt so… so irritated. I opened my mouth to say, “What are you doing?”, but instead I said, “Shoot me.”
For the briefest moment in time, I experienced a strange phenomenon: like I was a puppet, and someone had hold of just one of my strings. But that feeling left me, and then her finger squeezed the trigger, and I smelled the gunsmoke before I felt the pain.
iv.
Althea
“Of the seventy-seven original members of our order, only three remain.”
My thoughts flowed freely as my body remained rigid; I remembered those words and the man who said them: Kalygos – one of the three. He was a thickset man with a swarthy complexion and prominent sideburns. Greco-Roman heritage he had once said, and showed me one of those genetic charts that traced your lineage back to its origin planet. I wished at that moment that I could see the old bastard’s face. It was a harsh face, reflective of its owner’s draconian temperament, and forever burned into my memory.
“Seventy-seven! We lost maybe twenty from attrition. They couldn’t hack it. A few aged out. Do you know what happened to the rest, Althea Aldridge? Do you?”
I did know. We all did. Yet I had hated him in that moment, anyway. I had loathed him during training for his brutal methods, but not just that. He singled me out; he drove me twice as hard as my classmates. Days without sleep. Physical torture. Endless hours of studying and training for an enemy we had never seen – a phantom, a boogeyman spoken of in scary stories.
He never relented. He knew how I had felt from the first weeks of training until my bitter departure, but not once had he backed down. Even in the end, when I’d shouted and screamed and released all my rage at him for six years of hell, he’d only stood there, silent, until my last question.
“Why me?”
“Because I want you to live.”
He’d said it quietly, without self-righteousness or ego, and that had only infuriated me more. The gall, to stand there without guilt or shame and say that, as if he hadn’t been the source of every nightmare and panic attack I’d had for a quarter of my life. I had wanted to hit him at that moment, but I hadn’t. Instead, I walked away without looking back.
He had been right about everything.
Six years later, after countless encounters and near misses, I could acknowledge the boogeyman was indeed real, and Kalygos’ training was the only reason I was still alive.
Wish I could see your smug face right now, old man, I thought. Wish I could see anything.
The psych and I were dancing back and forth in a sort of battle rhythm; it constantly poked and prodded at my memories while I hurled my will at it again and again. Yet, with each of my assaults, I could feel its hold slipping, and I knew that this phase of the dance would soon be over.
Remember the three P’s, Althea. They are your lifeline! When you have nothing left, you still have them.
Combat with psychs was almost ritualistic, bound by the rules that shaped their abilities as much as ours. Even as it gained greater control over my body, its nervous system became intricately enmeshed with mine, like a psychic yin-yang. It wasn’t a one-to-one experience. As long as my brain remained healthy and intact and I didn’t exert any sort of focused willpower, the psych could inflict almost any condition upon me without feeling so much as a wisp of it. But if I had the presence of mind to resist, it was another story.
Point counterpoint, the invader probed, and I dove deep into peace. Peace – that was Rule One. Not peace like “Peace and Love” and any other cheap aphorism you might hear at a planetside shop selling tie-dye shirts and drug paraphernalia. Peace born of having already faced hell dozens of times and training my mind and soul to temper the feelings it provoked like a boxer trains his body. I called it emotional endurance: the willingness to ride the wave of rage, of helplessness, and anxiety Invasion evoked, rather than be drowned by it. It always was that way at first: a desperate struggle, a battle I was sure I’d lose until I just let go. Then, when I reached to that place of surrender, I felt deep, vast, and timeless like the space around me, and all the pain and discomfort were like distant planets to my sun.
I had failed many, many times before, though thankfully not against a real Invasion. However, today, I made it there. So, next came Rule Two: Power. It meant the harnessing of the will and directing it like a sword to cut through the psych’s mental assault until it fell to pieces. In truth, most Invasions ended before they ever reached this stage; I had personally seen it happen one too many times. Once the victim panics, the willpower falls apart, and the Invader has complete control. It delicately scrapes away the information it requires, then floods the brain with adenosine and melatonin, before separating itself from its victim. The victim becomes almost catatonically impaired and the psych pulls a pistol and executes them.
A distant memory floated before me: watching a young woman named Priscilla – a friend – being dispatched in cold blood, and being unable to do anything about it. I let it come and go, like a leaf blown in the wind.
Nothing I could do now. She had never learned the most important rule of them all: if you see a psych, run. Our training was never intended for us to win. Rather, it was intended to help us buy enough time until help could arrive – typically in the form of another colleague. A seasoned member of our order might take hours to overcome. I had personally seen classmates last thirty minutes before succumbing. An invader could take control of a fallow, unguarded mind in seconds.
And then there were the few of us who could win. Whether by willpower, fate, or fortune, I had been one of those before, and I hoped I could be one of those today. This brought me to the final rule.
Rule Three: Physicality.
It was simple. Attached to my hip was a serrated, thirteen-inch blade. There came a time when, if you had enough power, a psych would be forced to end the Invasion and de-couple from its victim’s nervous system. Ceasefire, we called it. It is a delicate process that takes longer the greater the interference from the victim. If successful, there is no recovery time between parties, and it more less becomes a contest of who can draw their weapon the fastest. But, if a psych is ever forcibly ejected, the residual psionic malaise that comes over them is so debilitating they are comatose for several minutes… more than enough time to end the conflict with a sharp object.
Hence, Rule Three.
It’s almost over. I am poised. I am ready to strike.
We were approaching the event horizon of this Invasion. If the mantis-thing didn’t act soon, I would force it out, and its fate would be sealed. It only had two options left. It could voluntarily ceasefire, in which case we would both come back to our senses at the same time, and it would be an old-school duel to see who could kill each other first. Or, less likely, it could try for domination: the complete takeover of my system, at astronomical risk to itself; the psychic strain of attempting to control the entirety of another being was virtually indistinguishable from suicide.
I knew what this psych would choose. I could feel his thoughts and feelings bleeding into mine as his control began to slip. He had been cautious to start. After my assault, he knew he was outmatched. He would take the 50-50.
I mentally prepared myself. A fluid draw of the knife and one lateral strike through the atmospheric shield of his spacecraft and into his brain. It was a move I had practiced tens of thousands of times, and I could do it in less than a second – far longer than it would take for him to draw his gun, much less fire.
It’s coming. Ceasefire soon. I will have control back in moments.
I waited like a coiled viper until, like I was the biblical Bartimaeus himself, I went from blind to seeing in a moment. My hand shot to the blade at my side and I drew it effortlessly to strike the killing blow. Or I would have, but my hand had frozen in place.
What was his game? I tentatively felt his hold on my mind. It was a partial de-couple.
Fool.
He had sealed his fate. I reinvigorated my mental assault and the mantis’s control began to dramatically slip. My arm began to move again.
“I cannot hold her!” came the scream from my lips. My voice, but not my words.
“Do not release her!” I shouldn’t have been able to hear that, but the psychic bleed from the mantis sent his auditory feedback straight into my brain.
Who was that? I thought, a cold shiver of panic lancing through me.
Then I saw the others. Two more psychs flanked the first, floating before him in strange, transparent bubbles. They were both humans – my species – a man and a woman, but when I looked into their soulless eyes, I felt they were as alien as their insect-like compatriot.
Oh no, I thought.
What surprised me most was the cost. I had expected one. Two was a stretch. But three? Their jump technology was expensive to operate, but the costs were exponentially increased for repeated uses in a short amount of time. My best guess was they had just burned through several months worth of energy in the space of a few minutes.
So many resources for me, a small part of me mused.
They must have known it was me who made the jump. Why else send more than one? Normally, multiple psychs were not deployed. There was no aggregate effect in having more than one individual participate in an Invasion. Oftentimes it could be just the opposite: the two minds conflicted in their attempts to control the victim, resulting in brain injury or even death. The underlying theme of all psychic endeavor is that the brain is a highly delicate instrument. Hence, the thousands upon thousands of hours of training our order and, I suspect, psychs undergo.
For them to send three… one for me, and then a backup in case the first failed. And then a third to take care of whatever help might come. They must have desperately wanted the information locked inside my mind.
But I had one thing going for me. There was no way for them to know where I had jumped. Once the wormhole was established, it went where it went, and if you didn’t know where that was, you were going in blind. They knew I was in space – but they would have expected me to warp near a satellite station or a moonbase, somewhere that had options and resources. Not here, in the middle of nowhere, and nothing.
Yet another reason I had had to plan so carefully: I had to go to a place they had no chance of returning from and could not relay information back to their superiors. A place where I could be lost and free of them forever.
“She’s slipping away from me!” the mantis said through me. I doubted he could even stop himself from moving my mouth. He was a seconds away from a forced de-couple.
“Then dominate her!”
“But…”
“Do it! We will stabilize you. Remember what we discussed.”
Stabilize him? I thought. But how…
Suddenly, I felt a force like an avalanche crashed into me. My vision went pink and my body went rigid; control was gone, and all I felt was dread coursing through me. Then, that too was gone, as the last bits of myself slipped away into nothingness.
v.
Sarah
Flight Lieutenant Ethel Warnsby was lazy. This was her fifth planet-to-planet voyage, and our second together, and while she was a decent friend and pilot, extreme boredom had turned her into a poor soldier. That was, more or less, the only reason I was still alive at this point.
The first bullet went wide, ripping through my right ear. The second and third didn’t fire, because the pistol jammed – because she probably hadn’t served the damn thing in over a year. And thank Christ for that.
“Jesus, Ethel, are you insane?” I shouted, wincing as warm blood pumped down the right side of my face.
She was as pale as a ghost, staring at the gun she held in shaking hands. “I… I.. I don’t know,” she stammered. She threw the tiny pistol away from her, and it clanged loudly in the ensuing silence. I quickly snatched it up. Jammed or not, I didn’t want her anywhere near it. “I didn’t mean to– I don’t know what happened, Sarah. I swear!”
I glanced over at the viewport. God, but my ear hurt – and my head too. Somewhere in the mix, a headache had begun to build in my skull. Yet, through the pain, I felt something tickling the back of my mind. Something was very wrong.
“Now there’s four people!” Ethel blurted out.
She was noticing what I had noticed a few moments before. It was no longer just a mantis – two humans floated beside it now, surrounded by alien-looking bubble-like spacecraft. Had they somehow been responsible for what just happened? All three of them were facing the person in the retro spacesuit, whose whole body had gone limp. They had the strangest, hungry looks on their faces.
I closed my eyes for a moment and suddenly giant splotches of color strewn out over space flickered into existence before me, then vanished. What the hell was that? Could it be…?
Hallucinations, I realized. Panic gripped me.
I thought about my other symptoms: Irritability. A headache. The funny, puppet-like feeling that had come over me a moment ago. Not now. Not now!
Then I saw it, dangling from a cord attached to the catatonic person – a tiny gray communicator, just like mine. It was them that had sent the message. They were in trouble.
Something was off. Something was way off. I didn’t know why Ethel tried to shoot me, or why I hung up on Ghosh, but my gut was screaming at me that it had something to do with the bubble people.
I made a split-second decision. “Ethel, those three in the weird bubble things are the enemy. We need to do something!”
No response. I heard a crash and looked over to see the tech had tackled her to the ground and was pummeling her with his fists. I looked back and forth between them and the three figures through the viewport, and then jumped in Ethel’s seat and grabbed the throttle. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing, but I knew three things for certain: a person in an astronaut suit needed help, a lot of weird stuff was going on, and it didn’t start until we showed up here. I put slight pressure on the throttle, and the Dinghy lurched forward, hurtling straight at them. They either had to move very quickly, or get flattened by three tons of spacecraft.
Except, neither of these things happened. Instead, I saw one – the human man – turn to look at me, and I felt my hand pull the throttle back until the Dinghy slowed to a halt.
What the..?
And then I was sure of my course of action. The marionette feeling had returned, and I tried to move my hand upwards. No response. My head began throbbing more and more; I gathered every erg of willpower in my body and told my hand to move. It jerked forward, and the Dinghy began accelerating again.
Yes! I thought.
Through the viewport, I thought I saw the man’s eyes widen a little bit as if I had managed to surprise her. Then they narrowed.
My whole body went rigid; my eyes closed, and a blinding sea of pink erupted in my mind’s eye. I felt my arm reach up and decelerate the throttle. Perhaps I should have panicked, but the truth was that I was used to losing control of my body. Instead, mostly what I was feeling was an intense feeling of déjà vu.
I knew was coming. As Ethel would say, it was a complete SNAFU. Through it all, one bemused thought echoed through my brain.
Talk about bad timing.
“That’s more like it,” my voice said. “Now, if you’d be so kind as to not interfere–“
Whatever I – he – or whoever it was was about to say with my voice was cut off as my predictions came true. I remembered what my old M.D. had said about my condition: “Sometimes, your brain produces a burst of uncontrolled electrical energy. Like it has a little glitch. That’s all it is.”
That’s all it is.
The rigidity left my body; the field of pink disappeared, my eyes opened, and I could breathe again. I was, for all intents and purposes, myself again. But that didn’t matter at the moment. At the same time, I collapsed to the ground and began convulsing violently, thrashing and arching my back, as Ethel and Brian suddenly stopped fighting behind me.
I was having a seizure.
vi.
Althea
Color. I thought had experienced color before. I was wrong.
Before, it was just that: a variegated set of hues my eyes perceived and my brain interpreted. But now, it was more. It was a living thing, all around me. It had depth, dimensions, and… sentience? And it had feeling, too! There were thousands of colors around me, as if the Northern Lights of Earth had popped into existence right where I was, iridescent and shimmering. I picked up a thread of purple and gold and wrapped myself in it as one who would wear a dress, marveling at the sudden joy welling up in my being.
But wait… who was me? The thought struck me as odd. And what was I wrapping it around? My body?
I looked to my left, and saw myself from a distance. I – my body – was floating through space next to three creatures. Oh right. The psychs. They, too, were swaddled in colors; colors that told a thousand different sad stories.
Am I in another dimension? I thought.
And then the absurdity of that thought hit me. If I was here, and my body was over there, what part of me was doing the thinking? And for that matter, if my eyes were attached to my body, how was I seeing?
It was a strange sort of sight, come to think of it. I could see everywhere, in three-hundred sixty degrees, and also above and below me. Not only could I see my body and the psychs next to it, but I could see a spacecraft, and three people within it. One of them was having a seizure right now.
“Althea Aldridge,” said a deep voice. It echoed and cracked in an invisible soundscape, all around me and within me. A figure appeared next to me, shining in white.
“Kalygos?”
He smiled at me, and it was like staring straight into the Sun. Gone was all the harshness from his face, though there were more lines than I remembered. Somehow, they made him seem softer. Kinder.
They’re laugh lines, I realized.
“It’s good to see you, recruit,” he said.
“I’m not a recruit any longer,” I replied immediately. “What are you doing here, Kalygos?”
He didn’t answer. He just looked at my body floating several feet away from us, and then looked back at me, as if I wasn’t asking the right question.
I looked back to my own form. Who am I? The thought came unbidden. My sense of self was deeply tied to my body, but here I was having a conscious experience separate from it.
“What’s going on?” I finally said. I wasn’t sure how I said it, because I didn’t have a mouth.
“I believe you are having what is described as a near-death experience, Althea,” he replied.
“Is that… me?” I asked, referring to my floating body. “Or am I me?”
“You’ll have to answer that one for yourself, recruit,” he said, chuckling. He seemed so happy. It was strange.
“I thought I would curse you out if I ever saw you again,” I said after a moment.
“I might even deserve it.”
I thought of all the things I had dreamed of saying to him, of apologies I was owed, on the bitter, lonely nights, but my enmity had since burned away in the fires of survival. I was almost as hollow as the psychs themselves, burned out, ragged, and left to die, but holding on against the unceasing vendetta against me.
His eyes were bright and soulful; they bore into me in a way that broke down the barriers I had carefully erected.
“I’ve missed you, Kalygos.” It came out as a whisper, and bright little ribbons of white color shot forth from my not mouth and spread out into the space around me.
He ignored the words, crossing his arms behind his back. He was no longer looking at me, but behind me, as if he was staring at a screen placed behind my head.
“Yes, yes,” he muttered. “A little tweak. Yes. Just right.”
“Kalygos?”
“One moment. You are about to die horribly. I’m making a slight adjustment. I’ve almost got it, and… Ah! There we go.”
“What?” I said.
“You miscalculated by a day, I’m afraid. Sarah and crew would have already left.”
“But they’re already here,” I protested.
“Believe it or not, we’ve been having this conversation for months.”
“What?” I repeated.
“Uh oh, time’s up. We’ll catch up soon. And… shutting down,” he replied, then he winked at me. “I wish I could stay longer, but I believe we both have our places to be. Goodbye Althea.”
“Are you or are you not dead?” I blurted.
He just smiled a knowing, enigmatic smile at me, and then he was gone. I began to feel a vortex-like pull coming from my body.
“I’m not ready!” I pleaded. “I don’t want to go back!” No one responded. Soon, I was rushing back towards my body, faster and faster, and then all was darkness.
I opened my eyes as if from a dream.
“How strange,” I said. “What was that? Was that real?”
Kalygos. The events of the past few moments felt like they happened years ago, but the memory was fresh and clear in my mind. I naturally stretched, and my body moved in response.
Full control! I felt almost gleeful. I waggled my fingers in front of my helmet, then noticed the mantis floating across from me, unresponsive.
“Forced decouple. He survived domination,” I whispered.
Next to him, one of his comrades, the human man, floated behind him. He was drooling and had vomited.
That one looks worse. Brain damage, maybe. Perhaps he had invaded the girl – the one with epilepsy.
The brain is a delicate thing.
The final psych was looking between the two, crying out. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could read the anger and despair on her face. Her eyes turned towards me, and she began shouting – at least I thought that’s what she was doing. I just stared back. I felt tired, but oddly calm. Could I handle another invasion? Yes, I think I could.
I didn’t end up having to.
The nose of a small spacecraft suddenly appeared in my peripheral version. Within a second, it had crashed into the three of them, and they scattered like billiards across the star-strewn space.
Shortly thereafter, I saw a hatch open on the side of the ship, and a blonde woman in a Navy-issued spacesuit came flying towards me, attached by cable. I reached my hand out.
She brought me onboard, and I took off my helmet and stared at my rescuers: the woman who had helped me had a slightly stern, slightly bored look on her face. Next to her, an older man was nursing a black eye and bloody lip. Finally, there was a petite woman who I recognized as Sarah Miller. I had only ever seen her through pictures; she seemed smaller in person. She was sitting on the ground, looking winded, and bleeding from a wound on her ear, and she wore a curious expression as she looked at me. There were words to say to her, and offers to make, but there would be time for that later.
“Thank you,” I said, and then I sat down hard. I was safe. I was free.
The Invasions were finally over. At least, for now.
good!!!