And the World Changes - A M Kirk (books to read fiction txt) 📗

our telepathic link remains. It gets stronger as we approach each other. Their agony is becoming our agony.”
“Why not wait until they reached Earth?”
“Because,” Striped Arm explained, “to do so would be fatal, for us and for your people. Once on Earth, these monsters would enter any and every organism. They could take refuge in the smallest insect, or transform the largest mammal into something unrecognisable. We could not stop them. The human race, for all its imagination, could not stop them. It would be the end of all life for us both.
“So we must face them here, in space, and we hope you are the weapon which will defeat them. And if not, at least we may destroy the ship. Our weapons are formidable, although of no use against these beings. But though we may die ourselves, we might give the planet a little time. Without light speed it would take many years for these things to reach Earth from here.”
“This was not your first intention. What was your first intention?” Mark demanded.
Striped Arm appeared to give what, in a human, would be a sigh. “Some of us thought that … another plan … a different plan would work. I have no amusement in telling you this now. For years we have been experimenting on human brains. Some of our scientists developed a machine, a kind of robot, only more organic – carbon-based – and we have the capability to transplant a human brain into it, without damaging the brain in any way.”
“You have already done this! Haven’t you? You’ve already created robots with human brains.”
“Yes,” admitted Striped Arm. “We have. We had to. In doing so we came to a full understanding of how the human brain works. Don’t you see? Our experiments, gruesome as they seem to you, were necessary in order for you to become what you are. Our experiments were not completely successful.”
“But you have not put me into one of these machines!”
“No, no.”
“When one of you said ‘Take what we want now’ – he meant ‘take my brain’, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t. You could have, but you didn’t. Why not?” Then it dawned on him. “You!”
Striped Arm bowed his head humbly.
“You prevented them. Why?” asked Mark.
“I saw that in you we had done what we set out to do. We made you angry, we made you afraid, and the natural chemicals in your brain stimulated by those powerful human emotions did the rest for us. We tricked you and made you cautious, we duped you and made you wise.
“You have no need of machines now, Mark Daniels. You have no need of Soros robots. Your power is only limited by your imagination – and that could be virtually limitless. You can – “
Pain, agony, terror suddenly ripped and crashed through Striped Arm’s mind and Mark, with the close telepathic link, felt it just as much. And behind this initial shock wave came wave after wave, pulse after pulse of horror. Like Striped Arm, he was linked with the Soros on the second ship, and through them he saw what Striped Arm dreaded so much. He glimpsed the Enemy. The Soros had been right to be afraid.
Monsters beyond reason, beyond control, beyond the furthest reaches of the most depraved human imagination.
The two giant ships, at light speed, hurtled towards each other through the blackness of space.
On the approaching ship, the Enemy reached out some tendril of rational impulse. It caressed the minds of the creatures who had once been Soros whose corrupted shapes occupied the positions that controlled the helm. Their mis-shaped limbs twitched at the controls. Both ships began to slow.
Striped Arm fought for control of his own thoughts. All the Soros on the mother ship were fighting for control of their reason. All were mortally afraid.
“Mark Daniels – the Enemy are using the telepathic link. They are already crossing the gulf between us… Trying to take control of our ship. “
Striped Arm’s three clawed hand closed on a control switch.
Mark understood exactly what he had to do.
The clamps holding the escape pod blew with explosive force. A door in the side of the mother ship swung open and the pod was ejected into space. Immediately Mark formed a force-field about himself and the pod.
He stretched out his power and stopped the motion of the pod, bringing it parallel to the Soros ship. The straps and bolts holding his wrists and ankles dropped away and he stood up shakily. A viewscreen flicked on. He stared across the gulf at the two giant space craft. They were only a couple of kilometers apart, facing each other like protagonists in some ancient duel. And the Soros’ intention was for him to be the ambush.
He sensed what the Enemy was doing. Because he was human, and they had never encountered a human before, they were not attuned to his presence. It would not take them long to sense him, though, and when they did they would lose no time in moving across space to invade and occupy and corrupt his mind. For the moment they were using the telepathic link to cross to the mother ship. Mark could almost see their shapes, hideous and loathsome.
He reached out, into the second ship, found a Soros that had been twisted and warped into a travesty of a living creature. This creature was crouched over a helm control. He sensed the Enemy presence within. He wrapped his force around the enemy, a series of impulses interconnecting on a sub-atomic level.
That is how they move through matter, realised Mark. They are like sub-atomic cancers. But they can’t move through this!
He tightened the force around the enemy presence and contracted it, like a bubble shrinking, but a bubble of steel collapsing in on itself in a microsecond. The sub-atomic impulses that created the presence were instantly dissipated. No scream, no drama, no puff of smoke, just annihilation pure and simple.
The Soros host for the enemy presence, its mind free at last from its vile control, expressed confusion, then relief, then gladness. But its body could no longer support life, and it slumped lifeless over the helm controls.
But now his presence had been detected. As chaos now reigned on the Soros ship, the Enemy ship seemed to turn towards the pod, its attitude shifting slightly. Enormous weapons were trained on the little pod. The Enemy, working through the twisted remains of the crew, opened fire.
A bolt of energy flashed across the blackness. The pod was engulfed. Nothing material could have withstood that force for long. But the magnetic force-field parted the energy waves effortlessly, channeling them around and away. The bolt could have destroyed a small city. The pod, when the first attack was over, was unharmed.
But Mark was shaken. For the first time it had occurred to him with absolute clarity, that he could die out here.
He saw in his mind Striped Arm. Striped Arm’s head seemed to be changing shape, bulging and rolling, cells mutating, fusing, becoming utterly alien, and his hand was trembling as he fought not to press the weapons control panel. Striped Arm was facing the inevitability of his own death.
The Enemy were trying to turn the weapons of both ships on the pod. Striped Arm, fighting for his life, was trying to give Mark Daniels time.
Mark reached into Striped Arm’s alien mind. He enveloped the enemy presence. He closed his steel trap around it and extinguished it, like fingers on a candle flame. Mark felt the tension go out of Striped Arm and then his link was cut. The Soros leader was dead. But this time, other presences pressed and crowded upon him. He withdrew from the ship but they had latched on to him now. They wanted his power.
If Mark had been afraid before, this was a thousand times worse. The Soros, for all their strangeness, had at least been of Earth. But these entities, they were so alien, so terrifying. Death was not the worst thing that could happen to him out here.
The controls of the ship were designed for Soros hands.
“What the hell do I do?” Panic seized him. He began to tremble uncontrollably.
Now both Soros ships had angled towards him and their weapons locked on to the pod. They fired. But once more the force-field withstood the attack.
Fear had driven Mark’s reason out of his mind. Wide-eyed, almost paralysed with panic he stared at the controls in front of him. His imagination was conjuring up unbidden images of the horrors the Enemy would perform on him. They were trying to penetrate the force-field even now. Some of them had crossed the vacuum of space and sought for a way to enter the pod, like vampires tapping at a window, insistent.
“Oh God! Think! Think! What can I do?”
He sensed the entities outside of the force-field, incomprehensible as moths round a candle. He imagined a fist in his mind, then the fist opened, stretched out… snapped up the sub-atomic patterns of the entities and it utterly crushed them.
He stretched out again… and swatted the second Soros ship. The five-kilometer craft flew spinning through space as if it was no more than a child’s frisbee. Mark’s panic began to recede and he was able to grapple with the controls of the pod. The enemy entities struggled to understand what had happened.
Putting out his mind again, he scanned Striped Arm’s ship. It was infested with the alien presences. He threw his force like a net around them, and pulled it tight. Next moment, they were extinguished.
The second Soros ship was regaining control itself. The Enemy on board felt no familiar emotions: there was no anger, or surprise, or anything that Mark could recognise as feeling. Nor was there any concept of mercy or even of simple giving up.
Mark had walked through walls before, and could understand how that could be done. Now it came to him that he could open doors through space. He stepped forward towards the viewscreen of the pod –
- and stepped forward to rest a hand on Striped Arm’s command chair on the bridge of the mother ship.
This gave Mark confidence now. If he could cross distances like that, what could he not do? Could he get himself back to Earth without a Soros ship?
The second ship was opening fire.
Mark instantly put up a shield to deflect the blast, then, like an alchemist putting a stopper in a magic bottle, he blocked the second ship’s weapons system. The effect was like spiking a cannon. The energy, with no outlet, doubled back on itself. The ship expanded like a softly inflated balloon, but the explosion was immense. The gigantic ship seemed to puff up, then collapse in on itelf, and finally it blew apart in a billion pieces.
Mark watched with a mixture of elation and stupefaction. He had always associated explosions with noise, but this was like