And yet . . .
And yet.
Something happened.
Milo seemed to pass through the Huntsman.
No. Not through him.
Into him.
It happened all at once, and it was instantly and completely bizarre.
A thousand strange and inexplicable images flashed through Milo’s mind. They felt like memories, but they weren’t his. He remembered touching things that he had never touched. The handle of a whip. The controls of a flying machine. The edge of a blade. The . . .
Milo’s internal vocabulary failed him as the images became more exotic, and they overlapped with things his eyes had never seen but that his mind now “remembered.” It was as if he was suddenly thinking the Huntsman’s thoughts. Or remembering his memories. It was like peeking into someone’s diary. All of those secrets opened to his eyes.
The images came in waves, and Milo was sure that the first wave was not those of the Huntsman. Not really. They were borrowed by him in some way. These images were of the broken and barren wastelands of alien worlds. Devastated mountains of silver and gold. Burning volcanoes rising through the melting streets of crystal cities. Rivers running black with pollution and flowing down to oceans devoid of all life, even to the smallest bacteria. Moons strip-mined and blown apart, hanging like debris above dying worlds. Valleys filled with bones that could never be assembled into shapes Milo would recognize.
There were views from windows. A final assault on a green planet that loomed close as great ships hurtled toward it. The aching feel of a hunger that could never be satisfied as that world was devoured. Races of apelike creatures and others that looked like evolved otters were hunted down, enslaved, and then consumed. Milo saw vast deserts of skeletons. He saw the last desperate survivors as viewed through the crosshairs of targeting mechanisms and then the harsh glow of blue pulses of destructive force. And just when Milo thought no more harm could be done to this world, the Dissosterin aimed their biggest guns yet into the deepest valleys and into holes they’d dug. The pulse cannons hammered at the bedrock, cracked the crust, shattered the mantle, and split the planet open to expose the white-hot core of molten metal. As the world exploded, the incalculable energies released were sucked into the hyperdrive engines of the hive ships. Absorbed, stored, ready to power their fleet for the centuries-long flights across the stars. Toward new stars and new worlds.
Between each conquest there was a dreaming time. A dying time as the drones and the shocktroopers and all of the workers grew old and shriveled into dusty husks. Leaving only a few slumbering queens who, even in their sleep, laid millions of new eggs for another swarm that would hatch when the hive ships found another world to plunder.
Then Milo saw Earth.
He saw it from space. A blue speck on a tapestry of diamonds and black velvet. Growing, growing, taking on the shape of a small world with green lands and brown deserts and sparkling oceans.
Earth.
This world.
His home.
Milo saw the hive ships cleave through the atmosphere, firing massive antigrav engines, releasing their scout and attack ships. Attacking the planet. Turning off the power. Shattering the cities. Wiping out so many people.
Beginning the process of consuming everything.
Everything.
Milo wanted this to end. He wanted to not see these things. They were too close to the horrible visions in his nightmares.
And for a moment the images did, indeed, stop.
Only for a moment.
It was as if he stood in a lightless place and then a hand swept across a row of switches and turned the power back on.
Milo was no longer looking down at the destruction the Dissosterin had caused.
Now it was as if he were awakening inside the hive ship.
A familiar voice spoke in his mind.
See this, child of the sun. See and understand.
He wanted to ask, “Am I dead?”
Maybe he did. The witch answered him.
You are between worlds. Neither life nor death has claim on you.
If Milo still had a mouth, he’d have screamed.
Instead, he floated. And he saw so many things.
He was inside a great dark shell of metal. Functional in structure but ugly, without the slightest thought to elegance or beauty. A massive central column to which hundreds of thousands of leathery sacs were attached. Each sac twitched and throbbed as things within them moved, jostling with others for space, for food, for air. Long strands of gleaming metal wire that Milo knew were webs spun from some fantastic creature that was like a nightmare version of a spider. A dozen hairy legs and bodies swollen with venom and undigested food. And all around, clinging to the walls of the ship, were smaller hives of a hundred different kinds. Creatures like insects crawled around them and over them and over one another. There wasn’t just one kind of alien here, but many. Not one dominant species, but a collective governed by a single, cold intelligence. A hive mind.
This is what came from the stars, murmured the Witch of the World. And it is terrible enough. Witness now something even more terrible.
He wanted to tell her no, to refuse to watch, or see, or know.
A ghost does not have the luxury of closing its eyes.
As if a page were turned in this strange diary of memories, Milo felt everything change. The mind became less insect and more human. Milo saw glimpses of a childhood that was not his. Growing up on a series of military bases here on Earth. Guam, South Korea, Germany, several places in America. Each new memory was seen from a slightly different height, as if witnessed by a child, then a teen, then a young man, and finally a grown man. Then there were memories of basic training, of specialized combat drills, of real combat in places Milo didn’t know—deserts and windswept mountains, caves and coastal towns. Milo watched through the eyes of this man as he fought and killed, over and over again. He also felt what this man felt. Milo knew many soldiers, but he prayed he did not know anyone like this. This man loved the combat. The fighting. The killing. He was not an ordinary soldier. This man was born for war, and he embraced his destiny with a red glee.
The Huntsman was not an alien. Not born as one anyway. Milo had suspected it before, but now, knowing for certain, filled him with horror.
He’s really human, gasped Milo.
Human, perhaps, said the witch, but his mind was always a furnace.
And then those memories were overlaid with those of witnessing the arrival of the hive ships. Of the Swarm. Of battles with shocktroopers. Of killing shocktroopers with guns, bombs, knives. And once even with his bare hands. Milo goggled. He didn’t think that was possible. Everyone said that one-on-one, a shocktrooper was unbeatable. And yet these memories told a different tale. They told the truth because these were memories, not stories being told by someone who wanted to brag.
It both excited and appalled him.
To know that the shocktroopers could be defeated by ordinary people was huge.
To know that someone enjoyed it, though, was disgusting.
It was as bad as what the Dissosterin had done. Or maybe worse. The Bugs were not evil. They seemed to have no specific emotions. They were pure drive, pure instinct. But this man was different. He was corrupt. His deep joy in slaughter was warped before this war began.
Then there were other memories. More confused, muddied by shock and pain and horror as this man was ambushed by the Bugs, captured, drugged, studied, probed, operated on, and ultimately changed into something that was even worse than either a war-happy violent man or a dispassionate insect alien.
As if it were happening to his own body, Milo could feel leather straps restraining quivering arms and legs. He could see different kinds of insects bending over him. Not the mindless drones or the brutal shocktroopers. These were more intelligent. Six-foot-tall locusts. These, he suddenly knew, were the scientists, the medical elite. Cold minds, though. All of that knowledge and no feelings to go with it. He cou
ld feel the stab of needles, the icy heat of surgical blades cutting into him. He screamed along with the person whose memories these were.
The pain went on and on, but it changed as drugs were pumped into veins and implants drilled into his skull and brain. Milo could feel the process of human mind changing to become closer to an insect mind. It was not a compatible fit. There were no similarities in thought, no shared point of reference to allow for compatibility.
It should have driven the man mad. It should have shredded his sanity.
Except Milo understood that this man was never sane.
He is the monster that monsters fear, said the Witch.
But then something happened, and Milo felt a deep chill sweep through his mind. As the hive consciousness was forced into the soldier’s mind, all of the rage and hate and bloodlust he felt, those dark emotions that defined him, were somehow transferred into the hive’s shared mind.
It was like a collision of suns. Fiery, mutually destructive, and yet . . .
And yet.
Afterward the man—the Huntsman—was changed. He was more powerful than any human. More powerful than any shocktrooper. Milo knew that this was a surprise to the Dissosterin. This had never happened.
However, the change didn’t stop there.
The Swarm was changed. It was polluted by the towering, murderous anger of this man.
This evil man.
That’s what he was, Milo knew. He understood that. This was true evil.
Where other men join the military to fight for their families or their countries, this man joined because he wanted to fight. To hurt. To kill.
It’s what fed him. Like some kind of emotional vampire, he devoured the pain of others. Milo had read about people called serial killers. That’s what this man was. But he was one who hid his hungers inside his job of a soldier. This is what the Dissosterin had captured and surgically enhanced to be their slave.
Only he was not a slave.
He was part of them now.
The witch—that unrelenting voice from his dreams—spoke horrors to him.
Witness now why the Swarm came to our world, she said. Understand why the universe trembles now at this man’s footfalls.
There, inside the mind in which he was an accidental and unwelcome passenger, he saw the memory that explained so much.
Too much.
It was the Huntsman’s memory of why he existed. Of why the Dissosterin had trapped him instead of killed him. Him, specifically. This evil man.
They were not evil. They were cold and logical and destructive, but not evil. However, they understood that evil existed.
They understood its power.
There were fragments of memories there. Of evil encountered on other worlds. Of the Swarm’s attempts to understand it. Of the hive’s desire to embrace it because of its power. They were a stale race. The same, unchanging, for millions of years. Now they wanted to grow. To become more powerful. To become something more than they could ever be if their growth was left to evolution.
They wanted to force their own evolution. To take on emotions. Not love and compassion. But the emotions of the conquerors. Hate and greed and other emotions so dark that they had no name. Not even to humans like the Huntsman.
They wanted to become that.
They sought out the most evil man they could find and they joined with him.
But even that was not enough for them.
No, because that man had more than a psychologically damaged mind, more than a sociopath.
He believed in evil.
He believed in darkness.
He believed in darkness as something real and magical.
Milo understood now what he wanted. He understood what the Huntsman had shared with the hive.
Even without the witch telling him, Milo understood what the hive wanted to do.
And it was the most terrible thing that had ever or could ever happen.
Ever.
Ever.
Ever.
FROM MILO’S DREAM DIARY
I dreamed I was with Dad. He looked the way he did before the Bugs came. He was smiling, and he didn’t have scars on his face.
He asked me if I liked who I was.
I didn’t know how to answer that. It’s a really hard question.
Then he asked me if I was afraid of the dark.
I said I was, kind of.
He looked really sad. When I asked him why, he said, “Because the dark is coming, Milo.”
“You’ll be there if I get scared,” I said.
But he just shook his head.
That was the dream I had before Dad went on the patrol and never came back.
As the dreadful awareness grew in Milo’s mind, it somehow triggered a similar realization of his accidental occupancy to the rightful owner of those memories.
With a jerk and a growl, the Huntsman became instantly aware that he was not alone with his own thoughts. He howled his outrage and turned toward the corpse on the ground. Once more he drew back his fist and struck with savage force.
Milo felt a huge burst of pain as that fist struck him in the chest.
Not in his floating bodiless nothing of a spirit.
He felt it in his actual body.
The corpse was not a corpse at all.
A split second later, Milo’s body arched upward and Milo let out a scream of pain and confusion. He was immediately torn from the mind of the Huntsman and felt himself dropping an impossible distance down, down, down, as if he were falling a million miles.
He slammed back into his own flesh. Every fiber of muscle, every bone, every atom in his body seemed to scream out in pain as spirit and flesh collided. There were two huge points of pain from where the Huntsman had punched him. Milo coughed and sputtered, choked and gagged.
He opened his eyes.
The Huntsman stood above him, powerful and deadly against this lurid skyscape, and far overhead, the hive ship glowed like a drop of blood in the light of the dying sun.
An armor-plated hand reached down, knotted itself in the fabric of Milo’s T-shirt, and plucked him off the ground like so much boneless meat. The Huntsman pulled him close, so close Milo could smell the slaughterhouse stink of the creature’s breath and see the burning lights in his eyes. Those eyes were so weird—multifaceted like an insect, but with hundreds of tiny human eyes compressed together to make up each of the mutant’s large two eyes.
Milo screamed.
The Huntsman listened to his scream.
And laughed.
Then he shook Milo until the screams stopped, until Milo was jolted to a teeth-clenching silence. The Huntsman studied him, searching Milo’s boy eyes with his own monster eyes. The creature’s mandibles clicked and clacked, and its human lips moved as if trying to speak.
It did.
But the words it spoke were badly misshapen by that hideous mouth. They came out broken and wrong, as if this were the first time he’d tried to speak since his transformation.
“How . . . ?” whispered the Huntsman. “How . . . did you . . . do . . . that?”
“I—I d-don’t know,” stammered Milo. It was the truth. The entire experience was a million miles beyond anything he could begin to understand. “It . . . just happened.”
Hot drool swung from the Huntsman’s lips and splashed onto Milo’s face. He winced and gagged, trying to twist away.
“The . . . black jewel,” whispered the Huntsman, and already he was speaking more normally, though his voice was still horrible to hear. “I see it in your mind. The pyramid. You were there. The wolf. The girl. You were there.”
“I . . . I . . .”
The Huntsman touched a small pouch attached to a strap on his harness. The pouch had a bulge about the size of a robin’s egg. “This stone. You know what it does, don’t you, boy?”
It took a moment for Milo’s terrified brain to make sense of the question, but the answer was there. As the Huntsman touched the pouch, his memories flared
brighter for Milo to see. There was a fractured image of a broken tower of stones and an armored hand reaching out to tear something small and dark from the center. The thing was round and faceted like a diamond. It glittered as the Huntsman turned it over to examine it. The Huntsman put it into the pouch he now touched. Milo relived that memory as if it were his own.
A black jewel taken from the shrine.
The Heart of Darkness.
That’s what this was about.
That’s what all of this was about. The Dissosterin had the Heart and they wanted to know what it was. What it did. And because the Huntsman had seen Milo’s memories—or some of them, at least—he’d seen the boy at the pyramid only yesterday.
“What is it?” demanded the Huntsman in a voice like a graveyard wind. Low and cold. “Tell me what it does and I will kill you quickly. Without pain. Lie to me and you will spend years screaming.”
Be strong, cried the witch. Be the hero and not the dreamer.
He tried to tell her that he was just a boy. No hero. No dreamer. Just a boy who should never have been a part of this. A boy who had no idea at all what the Heart of Darkness actually was. How could she not know that?
It did not even occur to him that she was only the product of his dreams, that she was not real at all.
“Tell me!” The Huntsman shook him like a rag doll.
I beg you, child of the sun, the witch pleaded. The world begs you. Speak and the Swarm will conquer all of space, all of time, and all the worlds between. Universes will fall.
Universes. Not universe.
Milo had read about that. About how there might be an infinite number of universes instead of the one he knew. About how there could be worlds where anything was possible. Worlds in which even magic was real.
Worlds that, at the moment, were closed to the unending appetites of the Swarm.
“Tell me, boy,” growled the Huntsman. “Tell me, or I will tear the life from you.”
If Milo knew, he might have told this creature everything. Anything. He was that terrified. He was eleven. Small, skinny, not any kind of hero. And this thing was the most awful monster Milo could even imagine. How could he not tell him whatever he wanted to know?