I understood then how she could reach so far and to so many places. How Nix’s severed arm could become three. The thing below me wasn’t just Sillith, but all of them. Something, some haan technology, forced us to see what they wanted. We saw something harmless, something symmetrical and familiar. We saw something delicate, and even beautiful, but it was a lie. It was an illusion, and for whatever reason that illusion had just broken down, if only for a moment.
Her body sprang apart, strands bursting free from the mound, forming groups, and then parting again as they carried her body with an ease and grace that reminded me of a machine. She lunged for me, and the flashlight fell, spinning end over end before plunging through the gate. I scrambled back to get away from her as the tunnel filled with a low, eerie rasp, overlapping whispers that hissed over a mechanical clicking sound. Light flickered from above then, and shadows moved across the bedding in front of me as electronics began to power back up. The graviton plating hummed back to life, and I rolled off the bed to land in a crouch as the tunnel wall became the floor again.
“…I will eat him,” Sillith said, her voice burbling up out of the fading clicks and rasps, “and I will make you watch.”
“Sam, move away from her,” a second voice called. It was Nix.
A shadow moved across the tunnel wall as he came toward us, a creeping, undulating mass that was already beginning to change. In seconds, the wriggling mound condensed into a form that was recognizable, understandable, and comforting. By the time I turned, the drapes of Nix’s suit were flowing behind him like a cape, and his face looked the way it had always, handsome and familiar.
I know what haan look like, I thought desperately. I know what they look like, and feel like. I know —
“Sam, move away,” he called again.
Something whipped around my ankle and jerked my leg out from under me so that I fell hard on my back. The grip around my ankle squeezed like a steel band, and I cried out as I was dragged down the tunnel toward Sillith. I skidded across the floor, groping for something to grab on to. My fingers closed around the edge of one of the bed frames, but were wrenched loose just as fast as Sillith hauled me down the tunnel, where I crashed onto my chest.
I pushed myself up, standing, as Sillith limped toward me, one arm hanging at her side like deadweight and the other dragging Vamp. The dead arm flickered and two were displayed there for a second, merging again as she closed the distance between us. Blood flowed freely from somewhere I couldn’t see, and left a wet crimson trail behind her as she came.
She hurled Vamp aside, then lunged and I ducked as her fist struck the tunnel wall, sending shards of shattered plating over my head. I stumbled away, back toward Nix, and her hand clamped down on one of the bed frames as I ducked behind it. Metal groaned as she wrenched the frame free from the wall and hurled it away.
My heel struck a ridge in the fractured plating and I fell back onto the floor. I looked up just in time to see Sillith’s balled fist bearing down on me like a piston, and I rolled. She struck the floor as I pushed myself up and stumbled away, out of her reach.
“Sillith,” I said, backing away, “wait…”
Nix removed his tablet from inside his jacket as he sped past me, but before he could reach her she grabbed him by the throat and bore down on him. The tablet fell from his hand, spinning across the floor, as she slammed him down in a spray of shattered tiles. Blood spattered from the spot where his head struck, and the wound cast a pattern of dots across the wall as she hurled him back the way he’d come. He rolled to a stop in a heap and didn’t move.
“Nix!”
The mites lit up and I staggered, as if she’d somehow found the strings that made me move and had taken control of them. She was dying, delirious. The room around me flickered as the incoming signals found their way into my visual cortex, and I fell back, the tunnel dissolving away under a flood of alien images.
I saw cities, great cities, greater than anything we’d ever even dreamed of. They were so huge, so vast, and yet so perfect and clean that they made Hangfei look like nothing but campfires scattered in the dark, and above them, in a sea of scattered stars, hung the bright, shining ball of Fangwenzhe.
I understood then. The star hadn’t always been there. It had never been there. The others might look the same, but no matter what we were told, Fangwenzhe hadn’t been a star in our sky. Not until the haan came.
“Where are we?” I asked her. I sensed Sillith move closer, until she loomed over me.
“You cry about the Impact,” she croaked, “but you don’t know what pain is. All of our history and all of our accomplishments were wiped away in an instant, and replaced with this.”
She said it with disgust, but the signals she radiated were of despair. For a moment all I could feel was her fatigue, and suffering, and as strange as it was I found myself feeling sorry for her.
“How?”
“We never left our planet,” she said. “We were looking for another habitable world, a way to sustain multiple instances of our planet in dynamically created universes, unoccupied but habitable, when we found you.”
“You didn’t crash….”
“No,” she said. “The opportunity to meet another race was too tempting. We tried to travel to your world, but the gate imploded. Our dimensions overlapped, and then merged, collapsing your universe.”
“Our universe…?”
“Was destroyed.”
I stared, struggling to grasp what she was saying.
“After the collapse the field surrounding our world broke down, and in your universe’s last moments, your planet’s instance was pulled through to replace ours. It began at the opposite side of the planet and circled the globe in hours. In our last minutes we managed to establish a field around the facility, to stop the collapse there, but by then it was too late. All that was left is what you call Shiliuyuán, the facility where the experiment took place.”
“Our universe…?”
“Your universe is gone,” she said. “It died with my world.” Her voice was a little softer, and I could feel that she meant it, but then the moment passed, and the despair shifted back toward resolve. Anger. Violence.
“Wait,” I said. She swung again and I just managed to launch off one leg to leap out of the way. My hip struck the floor as her heel came down on the spot where I’d been, fracturing the concrete there with a heavy thud.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter why. My species is perfected. It deserves to survive. There is a moral imperative to ensure that it survives, even at the expense of yours.”
She went for me, and I ducked, but she got hold of my arm and when I tried to twist loose, her grip closed and pain shot up all the way to my shoulder. She forced me down and my back slammed onto the floor of the tunnel, knocking the wind out of me.
I looked for something, anything to knock her off with, but it was no use. She was too big, too heavy, and too strong. Even after the hit she took from the rail gun, she could still squash me like a bug and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her. A few more gunshots went off as my reaching fingers found the edge of something hard.
Looking over, I saw Nix’s tablet. Straining as hard as I could, I managed to hook my nails over the edge and pull it just close enough to grab. My other hand was still free. If I could just…
I managed to get the tablet in front of me and place the finger of my other hand on the screen. Carefully, I traced the hanzi strokes. The screen dissolved, and the honeycomb storage cells appeared under the gate. There were items sitting in the different pockets that I didn’t recognize, but none of them were what I was looking for. I swiped the field, and the cells began to scroll past.