Page 28 of Overgrowth

The tendrils set me and Jeff side by side on the rim of the pit before untangling themselves and retracting back toward the unseen bulk of the scout ship. Despite having been held inside it for some unknown length of time, I still had no idea what it looked like—or what the larger ships of the armada looked like, for that matter. We had dreamt ourselves inside them, dreamt ourselves surrounded by our own species. That didn’t mean we’d been dreaming the truth. We had no control over the pollen, or over whatever mechanism had allowed Second and the Swift to connect us to the gestalt, which seemed like a greater, more refined version of our forest. They could have shown us anything.

Deep down, though, I knew it was truer than it was false. They had no reason to lie to us, especially not now, when their ships were close enough to slingshot scouts across the void. The invasion was underway. We, their information-gathering children, had been nothing more than the advance scouts, and now that they were here, we weren’t essential anymore. They didn’t need to buy our loyalty with lies. Not when they were about to block out the stars.

The tendril that had been covering my mouth and nose withdrew, taking the taste of alien pollen with it. The strange berry flavor still lingered on the back of my tongue. I tried to step forward, away from the pit, and wobbled as my legs refused to fully obey my commands. I began to fall. Jeff grabbed for me, only to collapse in turn, unable to keep his balance any better than I could.

This is it, I thought. We’re going to fall back into the pit, and this time, nothing’s going to catch us. This is it.

Someone grabbed my arm before I could hit the ground. I raised my eyes to the familiar face of Tahlia, beaming at me, as radiant as a woman who had just seen evidence of the divine. I glanced to the side. The senator was holding Jeff, smiling just as broadly. I had never seen either of them look so happy. It was unnerving.

“We need to move away from the pit,” I said.

“Why?” The senator’s expression turned mulish. He cast another glance at the depths, covetous this time, before turning to me. “What did you see that you don’t want to share?”

“Gravity,” I said. “Falling sucks. And I think you’re going to see plenty in a minute.”

As if in answer, the ground under our feet gave a lurch, small rocks and bits of gravel beginning to shake and dance. The sand was still soft with spilled blood; it slid, threatening to take us with it down into the depths. I pulled against Tahlia’s hands, and was relieved when she came with me, moving away from the edge.

The Swift and Second—and even First, strange and terrifying as she had been—had been kind. They had answered our questions, mine about what we were and how we’d gotten here, Jeff’s about how the ships worked and how our people could cross the gulf of space. They had been excited for the harvest, and about the potential of this planet. But us?

They hadn’t been excited about us as individuals. We were sprouts from the same seeds, and while they might delight in the idea of new brothers and sisters, they weren’t here for us. We were a bonus. If we fell into the hole and died, they weren’t going to mourn longer than it took to find someone else to act as their guides to this bright new garden.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I’d always assumed when my people came for me, they would come for me —after all, what was the point of being a spacefaring race solely for the sake of divesting planets of their resources? There were cheaper, easier ways to synthesize almost everything a world could need. Clearly, the spies mattered. But there were so many more of us than I’d ever expected, and we didn’t matter individually. They could afford to lose a few. They’d still be able to win their war.

The ground continued to shake as Tahlia and I moved away from the edge of the pit. Jeff swore softly under his breath and followed, hauling the senator along with him. Even having started moving as quickly as we had, we were barely clear when the pit’s edge crumbled, falling down into the crater. My foot hit a rock and twisted, sending me toppling, taking Tahlia down with me.

I rolled onto my back, watching in awe as the scout ship pulled free. It was roughly spherical, more like a tumbleweed or a thorn briar than a ball bearing: it looked organic and impenetrable at the same time, like it could stand up to anything. Long, woody vines extended from points all over the exterior, creating a web of tendrils that it used to move. As I watched, it flipped over, reorienting itself. The number and distribution of the tendrils meant it could never be knocked over or off-balance.

There were large, circular patches of material that looked like the dragonfly-wing petals of the breeding flowers distributed around the exterior, each one flanked by a pair of tendrils, sometimes more. They glittered, shifting as they focused on us.

“My God,” breathed the senator. He staggered unsteadily to his feet, eyes locked on the sphere hovering above us. “It’s alive.”

“All of their technology is alive,” said Jeff. He sounded as awed as the senator. This was the moment he’d been dreaming of all his life. This was when they came to get us, to take us home to a world where we would make sense. Where we wouldn’t be outcasts because of the things we couldn’t stop ourselves from saying.

I was starting to question why, if our people loved us and wanted us so much, they had dropped us here with a compulsion in our heads that was almost guaranteed to turn us into freaks by the local standards, whether those standards were set on Earth or on whatever strange jungle had sprouted Second. Why, if they could make us blend in so well with the locals, they would announce their approach with a signal that would only serve to isolate us further, shucking our defenses away and turning us into targets.

Targets. That was what they had been grooming us to be all along. The only question now was why.

But even that question paled as the bulk of the scout ship—tiny compared to what we’d seen in our pollen haze—hoisted itself above us, looking at us with those segmented dragonfly-wing “eyes.” One of the tendrils reached down to caress the skin on the senator’s face with surprising gentleness, and he laughed, delight and relief and honest, childlike wonder in his eyes.

He was still laughing when the bullet took his right eye away, blowing it onto the ground along with a horrible spray of blood and bone and brain matter. It was all green and gold, the color of the trees, and so for a moment, my mind refused to acknowledge it for what it was. The cultural literacy I’d been sent here to acquire told me carnage was red, red, the color of rubies, the color of blood. It wasn’t green. Not here, not on Earth.

The senator, who may have been a good man—who had, for all that he had always been a spy for an oncoming alien invasion, done his best to serve his constituents well, and had never lied to them, which was more than could be said for most of the men in Washington—wobbled. His remaining eye was filled with a hurt confusion, like he couldn’t understand what had happened, or how it had even been possible. Hadn’t we won? Wasn’t the invasion finally here?

Then his knees buckled and he fell, first to the ground and then, as gravity took control, over the edge into the waiting pit. He never made a sound. One second, he was there, and the next, he wasn’t.

Jeff shouted, shoving me out of the way as a bullet ploughed into the ground where I had been. I whipped around, staring at the rise. A line of people had formed there, rendered faceless and featureless by the floodlights shining from behind them. Someone had broken out the siege gear.

“Run!” shouted Tahlia. She grabbed my hand, hauling me to my feet. I grabbed for Jeff, pulling him along with me, and the three of us raced along the pit’s edge, staying as close to it as we could without falling. The scout ship was a blotch on the sky above us, its tentacles whipping in all directions as it arrowed in on the source of the shots.

We had no weapons. We had no armor. We had nothing but each other, and even that number was dwindling, because we were leaving the senator behind. There was nothing we could have done to save him; all we could do now was try to save ourselves. So we ran, rocks and thorns digging into our feet, hands slick with sweat as we tried to hold onto each other. If one of us tripped, if one of us fell, that would be the end of it, and so we held fast, trying to stave off the inevitable.

“This way!” I yelled, pointing left before dragging the others to the right. It was a small, stupid distraction, but if it could buy us even half a second, it would be worth it. The guns were still firing behind us. We didn’t seem to be the primary targets anymore. That honor was reserved for the scout ship, which was closing on our attackers with chilling speed, its tendrils whipping out ahead of it and snatching at their weapons. Our time in the pollen haze had done one thing: it had taught our people human anatomy. A glance back told me the tendrils were targeting hands and heads, those parts of our attackers without which the attack would almost certainly end.

Tahlia cried out as we crested the ridge, but she didn’t fall, and so I kept running, kept dragging her and Jeff in my wake.

There were no people waiting to ambush us on the other side. We slipped and skidded down to a small frontage road, and were starting to run along it when a pair of headlights flared to life. I stumbled to a stop, catching Tahlia before she could fall. Jeff, to his credit, tried to push in front of us, shielding us.

“Well?” demanded Graham’s voice from out of the darkness. “Are you going to get in, or what?”