The Orphan Army (22 page)

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.

I
t 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 could 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.

A
s 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.