Color

It was negligible to bone garden the aliens attacking me; their biosuits were tough enough to contain their bones, but their helmets weren't; they exploded outward with bones and blood and viscera that immediately evaporated in deep space.

My eyes were at their limit; four thousand feet and they still hadn't punched through the alien hull.

I'd have to go through one of the ports in the side then.

The harvesters had come through the nearest port, and I blinked there. The door was closing, but I got a glimpse inside, and I jumped there.

Lasers began flashing at me; I inventoried my suit and I blinked as far down the passage as I could see. The passage stretched for miles.

It was the perfect defense against my eyes; they could have simply closed all their doors and holed up, and with no knowledge of the inside I'd have been stuck outside.

-10 POINTS.

YOU HAVE GAINED 1% LASER RESISTANCE.

Right.

I was dealing with lasers.

While I probably could have destroyed the laser turrets, there was no point. If my mission was successful, the whole ship would be damaged at least, and if it wasn't, it didn't matter anyway.

A massive door was closing at the other end of the passage. It was so large that I could see it even though it had to be at least ten miles away.

I blinked there, and blinked through a moment before the door closed.

If anything, the interior was even more alien than the destroyers had been. However, my tinker skills gave me an idea of where to start.

There was atmosphere in here, and I took a deep breath. They had to have used some sort of force field at the entrance to hold the air in. It would have the additional effect of making it harder to send a missile inside the ship at the kinds of speeds attainable in space.

I blinked toward a landing area, and I bone gardened a pair of technicians.

As a hive mind, they weren't necessarily technicians all the time. They were just the ones who happened to be near the equipment that the technicians used.

They were at a computer port, and I brought my inventoried Apple computer with its improvised connection. It was ridiculously slow and with capabilities that made even my old home computer look blazing fast by comparison.

However, it was good enough for me to get schematics of the ship. They were probably there because even a hive mind couldn't commit every single thing about a ship to memory; there had to be quintillions of different parts in a ship like this. Also, with limited ranges to their telepathy, the hive minds had to communicate with each other about needed parts and upgrades; using computers would have been more efficient.

Downloading as much as I could, I felt aliens with hand weapons approaching.

I uploaded as many viruses into their system as I could. It was possible that they'd already found solutions to some of them, but I was hoping that at least some of them would still work.

I angled my body between the approaching aliens and the computer. I wasn't sure I'd be able to remember everything on the map to a moon sized ship.

"Bone Garden," I said.

As soon as the download was finished, I inventoried the whole thing. The map had taken up much of the memory in the computer; there wouldn't be a lot more that I could do with it.

This ship was three hundred seventy miles long by three hundred forty miles wide. There was no way I could bone garden my way through it; it would take so long that they'd likely hit me with nuclear weapons or just evacuate the places I was going.

I needed to get to the center of the ship. The landing area was a large, open space, which meant that I could teleport as far as I could see. The problem was that it was so large that I was having trouble with perspective and making out details.

Maybe I should have tried killing an eagle or something.

A pair of binoculars might have helped as well.

I blinked a quarter of the way through the space, and I saw space fighters coming for me.

"Bone Garden," I said.

Nothing happened; they continued coming. They were operating them remotely; apparently, they had figured out that I could kill the pilots through their shields.

Blinking on top of one of the fighters, I waited until the others fired to blink to the next. They were apparently capable of getting through their own shields.

The fact that I'd been able to dodge them meant that they were being controlled by the hive instead of by computer.

I knew the design of these fighters by heart after having sifted through numerous fighters on the ground. I blinked into the cockpit of the next one, and I ripped out the one piece of equipment that I didn't recognize.

It had been a while since I'd gotten to use Squealer's piloting skill, but I hadn't forgotten how. Their controls were counterintuitive for the human mindset, but I'd already looked through them and knew that.

Spinning, I avoided several of the ships fire, even as I fired at one of the others.

Presumably they were able to fire through their own force shields in case of enemies taking over their own ships. I was able to fire and hit one ship, knocking it into another.

They were fast, though, and I had more trouble hitting them after that.

I jumped to a control panel on the opposite end of the abyss we were fighting in; more and more fighters were surrounding my ship, and I didn't really need to be playing around as a jet jockey when I had things to do.

I dropped a body from my inventory into the ship; it was one of the female Nazis. I used fire breath on the body; not only would it leave it blackened and unrecognizable; it would give it a heat signature.

Of course, fire breath inside a closed cockpit wasn't the smartest thing in the world.

As the ship exploded around me, I blinked to an empty control panel on the opposite side of the abyss. I ducked down behind it, and then I blinked down a hallway behind the panel.

With any luck, they'd find a body, and it would take them a little while to realize that I wasn't actually in the ship.

Even if it didn't work, it hadn't cost me anything, and the idea of using a Nazi corpse to save a world was appealing.

My eyes spread out, moving across ceilings with only their irises sticking out. That would leave them almost invisible unless someone noticed movement along the ceiling.

They could only move seventy miles an hour, so it would have taken them hours to get all the way across the ship.

I found a hydroponics bay nearly ten miles across and ten miles high. It was filled with plants, each level separated by five feet. That would be the equivalent of one million square miles or 640 million acres of food. That would be more than a quarter of the acreage planted on Earth.

I had a couple of extra nuclear weapons; I hid one behind some industrial sized water filtration units. If I failed in my task, the bomb would destroy a lot of their food supply, and it would irradiate the rest.

That would weaken them in the long run and make them more likely to be defeated.

I checked my laptop, even as my eyes spread out before me. At least a third of the hallways had aliens at any particular time, and I had to blink quickly a couple of times to avoid any onlookers.

Even blinking forward and redeploying my eyes, progress was painfully slow. I'd hidden the bomb behind me well enough, and I'd have to blink between all of the bombs to set off the three-minute timer.

I didn't want to be hasty and only do cosmetic damage to the ship.

I needed access either to the power source or the propulsion system. Either of them would be enough to damage the ship beyond repair.

Blink and move, blink and move. As far as I could tell, they hadn't detected my deception yet. It was possible that they were good actors, but I doubted that a species like the Harvesters had ever even bothered with deception.

When you were powerful enough to take what you wanted, people tended to pretend to believe you.

In a way, I dreaded going back to Earth Bet.

How much had people just been humoring me because I had a metaphorical gun to their head?

Did anyone actually like me, or were they just using me for their own designs?

Intuitive Empathy told me their secrets and gave me levers to motivate or taunt them. It didn't necessarily tell me everything.

I dropped another bomb off, this time inside the shell of a fighter plane under construction. The shell hadn't been placed on the mechanical parts, so there was plenty of room, and it would at least destroy at least one of their cargo bays.

It was constructed inside the ship and there was a long hallway leading to one of the outer hangars.

Blink, blink, blink.

It was getting harder and harder avoid detection; the closer to the core I got, the more heavily traveled the hallways were. It was takin too long; sooner or later one of the bombs were going to be discovered whenever they resumed normal operations.

"WHY DO YOU FIGHT US?"

I felt the message inside my mind. There was something else to it, an attempt to overcome my will, but Gamer's Mind stopped that.

It meant that they knew I was here.

Blink. Bone Garden.

Blink. Bone Garden.

Blink. Bone Garden, drop bomb.

"THIS IS NOT EVEN YOUR WORLD," the Queen said in my mind.

"These are my people," I said. "You can get everything you need from lifeless planets."

"WE MUST DENY THE SHARD BEARERS SUSTENANCE," the voice said.

I continued my actions, barely listening. What kind of justification could they possibly have for omnicidal genocide?

An image appeared in my mind.

Creatures the size of a continent composed of smaller pieces, each the size of an island. They'd appeared on the Harvester homeworld, landing in an empty universe adjacent to the Harvesters.

"THERE ARE THREE UNIVERSES," the Queen said. "AND THE SHARD BEARERS HID IN AN EMPTY ONE…OR ONE THEY MADE EMPTY. IT APPEARED TO US AS A GOLDEN GOD AND HIS CONSORT."

That sounded familiar for some reason.

"THEY GRANTED OUR PEOPLE POWERS FROM LEGEND…AND THEY BATTLED AMONG THEMSELVES."

An uneasy feeling came over me.

"YOU MUST BE ONE THEY HAVE EMPOWERED. THEY DEVOURED OUR WORLD AND THE TWO OTHERS THAT WE KNOW OF."

"How did you survive?" I asked, despite myself. I dropped another bomb.

"A SECRET COLONY," The Queen said. "ONE EVEN THEY DID NOT KNOW ABOUT."

"This sounds like a lie," I said, even though it didn't. "Your drone didn't know about any of this."

"THE QUEENS DECIDED TO CONCEAL IT FROM THE REST OF THE HIVE MIND. FEAR CLOUDED THE MINDS OF THE DRONES, MADE THEM INEFFICIENT IN THE GREAT WORK."

"And how long has it been since you encountered such a creature?"

"ONE THOUSAND GENERATIONS."

"How long is your generation?"

Her reply was a little confusing, but seemed to be about ten years.

"Maybe they are all dead," I said. I dropped another bomb.

"YOU HAVE POWERS," It said. "THE SHARD BEARER IS HERE."

"I personally think that it was caused by a virus in rats," I said. "Because that would explain why Brockton Bay has so many parahumans."

"WE WILL DENY THEM SUSTENANCE- IN ALL THREE UNIVERSES."

"Uh… there's more than three universes," I said. "I've been to them."

"IMPOSSIBLE!" it said. "THREE UNIVERSES ARE ALL THAT THERE CAN BE."

"Nope, I've been to like five or six," I said. "And I'm betting there is a lot more."

The creature had kept trying to pry into my brain, but I was able to prevent it from hearing anything I didn't want it to hear. However, I was unable to push forward to find out the one thing that I needed to find… the location of the Queen.

I wanted her power, and I needed to find the biological core of this ship. Those were powers that I wanted.

"You should have tried working with other races instead of eating them," I said. "Maybe you could have fought them together instead of dying on some small planet in the back end of nowhere."

There.

The biological core of their propulsion system. It wasn't anything like what I'd expected.

It didn't have any bones, and so I said, "Blade storm."

For once, all the blades were targeted at a single thing, a wall of flesh that was pulsating and began to bleed the moment that we began digging a tunnel through the drive.

"LESSER CREATURES ARE PREY FOR THE SHARD BEARERS," the queen said. "ONLY WE HAVE SURVIVED, AND PREVAILED. WE SHALL INHEIRIT THE UNIVERSE WHEN WE HAVE STARVED THE SHARDBEARERS AND WE ARE ALL THAT REMAINS."

"You survived by running away," I said. "And then by cannibalizing the rest of the world. I've met people and monsters like you, and it never works out well."

The ship was moving, even though it was putting a lot of strain on the system. I caught a glimpse of the Queen's intention; they would use their wormhole drive to put a hole in the planet and deny the shardbearer sustenance.

I dropped the bomb, and I quickly typed in the code.

7497.

Blink, code, blink, code, blink, code.

I grabbed a worker, and I plunged my mind into its mind. It struggled, but it didn't have the power of the queen.

I caught a glimpse of her chamber, and I teleported there.

"We'll be coming after you," I said as she stared up at me. She was larger than the others, nearly nine feet tall.

I punched at her skull, but my blow bounced off. She had her own personal protective force shield.

"Bone garden," I said. I saw her jerk as bones pierced her skin, cracking against the inside of the force field.

I was acutely aware of the time passing, and so I simply inventoried her force field and everything inside it.

I could sense the confusion of the drones. Apparently I had been wrong; the warrior class was different than the others in that they had to be able to work outside the effects of the hive mind while the others had never been outside of the influence unless they were being transported from one ship to another, which I imagined happened rarely.

Attempting to blink back outside failed. It took me a moment to understand; we'd already moved past my maximum range for the place I'd been to before.

I blinked to the outside of the ship, and I saw that we'd moved past the moon, and we were moving away from the Earth. Was there a minimum distance for the wormhole to take effect?

I replaced my space suit, and then I started blinking away.

The damage I'd done to the interior of the propulsion system was being made worse by the power being pushed through it.

I could see the field taking form, and I tried to count back how long it had been since I had set the bombs.

It would be ironic if the bombs detonated only after the Earth was destroyed.

I didn't have any space warping powers. I had a lot of powers, but none of them would let me warp space.

Maybe Vista should have been the one here, in a child sized space suit.

Fuck.

I began blinking back to the ship. I couldn't risk it. I'd have to destroy the propulsion system myself, even if I died due to the bomb.

If I thought it would have worked, I'd have stood in between the Earth and the ship. But whatever was forming would have just flowed around me and continued on its destructive path.

If I'd been infinitely stronger than Alexandria, I'd have turned the ship so that it missed the Earth, and hit something useless, like Pluto.

I blinked back inside the ship.

They hadn't given me the codes to deactivate the bomb; there had been some fear that the Harvester Queen would have been able to get the information from my head.

I inventoried the bomb and then I screamed, "PHANTOM WEAPON-BLADE STORM!"

I still had two minutes left on the bomb, and the propulsion system was still spooling up.

I had no idea how long it would take, but clearly less than two minutes.

Dropping my spacesuit, I began to tear at the flesh around me with my bare hands, even as my blades turned into a blender on the inside of the ship.

BLINK HAS INCREASED BY FIVE LEVELS!

YOU CAN NOW TELEPORT 1,016,800 MILES!

Everything was shaking around me. The vortex that had been forming was going out of control. At my current level of understanding, I didn't know what that meant, but I figured that it couldn't be good.

I blinked directly back to the entrance to Area 51.

People had gathered around the entrance, in vans and motor homes, in cars and trucks. They were refugees from Los Angeles and other people.

The President was standing outside, and there were cameras on him.

It was one in the morning on July fourth, and he was about to give a speech.

The entire sky exploded into a thousand colors, an explosion that had to be seen by everyone in this hemisphere.

The President saw me standing there, and I nodded to him.