I can’t say how long the blitzkrieg lasted — it was one of those imminent-disaster experiences that take place in slow motion, simultaneously drawn-out and fleeting — but before I could react, a dismaying percentage of my brain had been damaged irreparably. Neurons collapsed from the strain. Long-established pathways of thought got chopped into disjoint pieces. Where once my consciousness had lived, there was only a soup of demolished gray matter.
Yet I still could think. I still had the sense I was me. My heart still beat, and my lungs still breathed, because wherever my neurons burst under the rush of sensation, the Balrog instantly filled in the gaps. I could see spores annexing my brain like an invader’s army: all the key connection hubs under the Balrog’s control, and millions of other spores scattered like garrison soldiers at strategically located stations.
Before, I’d simply been conquered; now I was thoroughly digested. The very thoughts I was thinking had to pass through Balrog spores: like a computer network where every transmission was compelled to run along channels controlled by the enemy. I didn’t truly believe my "self" was that point in my abdomen — whatever significance that point might hold, my intestines/uterus didn’t have the capacity for thought. Thoughts could only be supported by the brain… and my brain was utterly compromised. Not just the higher centers, but the more ancient sections that controlled essential processes. My heartbeat. My breathing. My digestion. I could see spores completely integrated into my brain stem, and my own cells destroyed by the overload. Quietly, the spores lapped up the proteins and sugars released when my brain cells cracked open. Soon the Balrog would use my own biochemicals to build new spores.
I was irredeemably lost… and the Balrog had let me see it happen: to know I was watching my demise.
All this time, some part of me had nursed a delusion that the Balrog would let me go. Once I’d served my purpose (whatever that purpose was), how could I remain of interest to a higher lifeform? I was nobody speciaclass="underline" just an ugly screaming stink-girl. I had nothing the Balrog could find desirable in the long term. Couldn’t I eventually go free?
But now there was no going back. When the Balrog consumed my foot, I could have limped away, crippled yet alive. Now I couldn’t survive without the spores. Vital brain cells were gone, destroyed. If the Balrog withdrew, my remaining gray matter couldn’t sustain life. I was now more than a slave — I was dependent.
Why? Because again, I’d asked the Balrog for a favor. I’d wanted the moss to grant me a gift, and it honored my request in abundance. The flood of sensation must have been deliberately intended to cause mental overload, delivered in a way that didn’t just target my perceptions but other parts of my mind as well. Why should a gush of awareness kill cells in my brain stem? But it had done so, because I’d foolishly given the Balrog carte blanche.
Stupid. Very stupid. And now my human life was over.
Unable to do anything else, I found myself laughing.
"What is it?" Festina asked, looking around as if my laughter heralded some threat.
She looked so humanly naive.
"It’s nothing," I said. "Just some nonsense that got into my head." I laughed again. "By the way… I know where Li and Ubatu are."
Of course I knew where the diplomats were. The mind-crushing overload was past, but in its wake my awareness extended much farther than before. I didn’t attempt to test the sixth sense’s range — that might cause more meltdown — but what I wanted to see, I saw. As simple as that. With a brain that was now half-Balrog, my mental processes (perception, filtering, interpretation) took place on a higher level. If I chose to examine the bacteria in an aphid’s gut two kilometers away, the data was instantly there: not just peeking into a place where normal sight couldn’t operate, but hearing the impossibly faint sounds of microbes splashing through stomach fluids, feeling the brush of their cilia rowing them forward, tasting the tang of the chemicals they absorbed. All was within my grasp, just for the asking… so of course I knew where our missing diplomats were. The answer came as soon as I asked the question.
They’d landed east of the city, on a highway that continued several kilometers into the countryside. (The road led to a limestone quarry that must have supplied raw materials for the city’s skyscrapers.) The highway made a good airstrip: it was one of the few paved roads that wasn’t lined by tall buildings, so there was little danger of the shuttle hitting anything on its way in. Crash-landing had rendered the shuttle unrecognizable as an aircraft… but that just meant the craft’s crumple zones had done their job, absorbing the crash’s impact to protect the cockpit and passenger cabin. Other safety features had done their job too, including automatic airbags and flame-retardant materials that prevented fires after the crash — all measures that worked despite the electrical systems being EMP’d out of commission. Therefore, Li and Ubatu had come through unscathed, give or take a few bruises. Enough pain to prove they’d faced danger, but without causing real inconvenience. The sort of injuries they’d talk about endlessly at cocktail parties.
Getting out of the ruined shuttle was more of a challenge. Since all exterior hatches were part of crumple zones, the usual exit doors had been crushed. That wouldn’t have mattered if the crash took place in a populated area, where rescue crews could rush to the scene and extricate survivors with laser cutters. The shuttle’s designers, however, had allowed for crashes on planets where no outside help would appear. A number of hand tools were cached in the passenger cabin: drills and saws and long-handled metal snips that could (with diligence and strength) be used to mangle one’s way to freedom. Neither diplomat had much knack for manual labor, but Commander Ubatu was an uberchild with bioengineered muscles, dexterity, and stamina; she’d found the tools and begun cutting. Whenever she started to slow — and as a pampered daughter of the Diplomatic Corps, she had little experience with physical exertion that lasted longer than an aerobics class — Ambassador Li made snide remarks till Ubatu got back to work. Escape was therefore a team effort: brawn and bad temper. By the time we reached the crash site, they were minutes away from success.
It hadn’t been hard to persuade Tut and Festina to follow me to the site. I’d told a version of the truth — that the Balrog had given me a "vision" of where the diplomats were. Festina grumbled about "the damned moss telling us where to go" but didn’t otherwise question my story. She fully expected the Balrog to force images into my mind if it wanted to compel us down a particular path; that was just the sort of high-handed manipulation one received from alien parasites. It didn’t hurt that Pistachio’s cameras could get blurry photos of the shuttle exactly where I said it was. Festina still suspected the Balrog of playing games, but since the "vision" had saved us time searching, she let me lead the way.
As we walked, she continued her report to Captain Cohen. Tut spent his time watching for Rexies, though my sixth sense reported none in the vicinity. I divided my attention between spying longdistance on Li and Ubatu and eyeing Stage One EMP clouds hiding all around us.
The clouds lay invisible to normal vision, spread microscopically thin along the pavement or compressed into cracks in mosaic murals. The cloud particles blazed with impatience: a hunger to see us removed. We were constant reminders of what they had once been. We had intelligence and physicality; we could affect the world directly with our hands. Threads of malice in the clouds’ auras hinted that the pretas wanted to see us brought low like them — disintegrated into nearly impotent Stage One smoke.