Harvester

I was in Washington D.C. if the Lincoln Monument in front of me meant anything. It was possible that it had been moved to a different city, but sending eyes up in every direction showed that there were all the familiar landmarks.

I didn't see any giant walls or signs of significant damage, although I could hear the sounds of gunshots in the distance. Apparently, this version of Washington D.C. was a lot like my own.

Federal lands were immune from taxation, which meant that the city government was starved of tax revenue, meaning they struggled with city services, including a police force.

I didn't take to the air; if this was another world without parahumans, I didn't want to draw that much attention, especially if this was a world that was peaceful.

I needed a place where I could retire with Dad.

Using the money from the Slaughterhouse kills, I could buy gold or whatever I needed, and I could use that to get fake ID's. We'd be limited in what we could do just with cash; I'd heard that in Earth Aleph there were reporting requirements for anything over $10,000 purchased with cash.

We didn't have anything like that, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was more common than not.

I might have to find a country that was less picky about that kind of thing.

Or maybe I'd get lucky and this wasn't that kind of place.

The time was different here than back home. It had been mid-morning back home, and it looked like the sun had barely come up here.

I looked around to see if anyone was looking at me; when it looked like the coast was clear, I blinked to the top of the nearest building.

The first place to go in places like this was to the nearest library. That'd give me an idea of how different this place was from back home, as well as how suitable it would be for eventual settlement.

I wasn't sure where the nearest library was. I could just blink around the city, but that might take a long time, and I wasn't that patient.

Blinking from rooftop to rooftop, I noticed an old-fashioned newspaper machine. There were people everywhere, many of them wearing business suits, despite the heat.

I found an alley, blinked behind a dumpster and set out.

Slipping a couple of coins from my inventory, I opened the machine and pulled out a paper. I could have pulled all the papers, but I guess no one thought anyone would bother stealing multiple copies of the same thing.

According to the paper, it was July 2nd​, 1997. The president was different than it had been back home. I'd never even heard of Thomas J. Whitmore, although it sounded like he was pretty popular.

There was a Russian Republic and a lot of the US Military was out of the country, deployed in a conflict I knew nothing about.

It seemed like a weird, funhouse mirror of my own world. There was no mention of parahumans at all, and there likely would have been, even if they'd only had as many as Earth Aleph.

If it was 1997, they likely had an internet, and I'd probably be able to access it from the library. I could probably rig something up from some trash and my cell phone to access the internet from a telephone line, but it'd be easier just to go to the library.

The sky above me went dark.

Was there a storm coming?

I froze as the people around me stopped moving and began staring up at the sky. The last time that had happened hadn't ended very well, at least not for the people around me.

Looking up, I saw an unbelievably large craft in the sky. It was hard to get an idea of just how large it was; it blotted out the entire sky as it slowly moved into place over the city.

There wasn't even room for me to blink above the ship; if it was this large, I might accidentally blink inside and start an interstellar war.

My mind raced.

My space exploration tinker skills were at a mid-interplanetary level. That meant that they were of a level of a civilization that had colonized its inner solar system.

I could have designed a space station that size, but only because it was in space. An object this large should have fallen apart under its own weight in Earth's gravity, unless they had materials that were unbelievably durable or they had control over gravity or other fundamental forces of the universe.

That meant that this was likely an interstellar craft, which meat aliens.

It was saucer shaped.

Flying up to the ship was out of the question; I didn't want to start something that might hurt the citizens of yet another world.

I blinked to the top of a building, and then I began blinking to the horizon until I got outside of the city.

When I got far enough into the country, I blinked up into the clouds. I had no fear that people would notice me; it was hard to see a human sized figure from a distance, and the people would be focused on the ship itself, the same as I was.

It was about twenty-five kilometers wide and three or four kilometers thick. From what I had seen, there seemed to be a large opening at the bottom that was probably it's primary weapon array. There were places in the sides that seemed likely designed to release fighters.

I was learning new things just from looking at the outside of the ship, which didn't show a lot of details.

Seeing the insides would teach me so much more. While my knowledge was currently limited, that didn't mean that I couldn't learn.

It seemed suspicious to me that the ship was aligning its primary weapons array directly over the white house.

However, it just hung there in the sky, so maybe it was trying to negotiate from a position of strength.

There was only so much I could learn from the outside. I had a four-thousand-foot range on my eyes; it was likely best to hover that distance above the ship and see if I could get a look inside.

I blinked above the ship, and I hovered as my eyes spread out and headed downwards.

They stopped. There was something between them and the ship that was as impervious to them as a wall would have been to a regular person.

They had a force shield.

I had some primitive force shield designs in my head, but they all required massive amounts of power, and wouldn't have stopped my eyes.

The question was how thick the force field was. I suspected I would be able to teleport through it, but if I teleported inside the force field, would it be like teleporting inside a wall, and would I survive that?

Would they detect me, and would they consider it a provocation and attack Washington DC before I could stop them?

It was better to wait. I only had suspicions that they weren't friendly, and I had no evidence that this was the only ship involved.

It seemed likely, given the amount of resources that had to have gone into building this thing, but I couldn't risk it.

I blinked away to the horizon.

I'd only been there for a couple of seconds; hopefully if they detected that they'd assume that it was an anomaly.

The thing that I needed was to see what the news had to say about all this. I hadn't seen anything in the paper to indicate that this was something that had been anticipated.

Teleporting northeast, I found myself in Bethesda Maryland.

I needed a place where there was a television, and I couldn't depend on finding a sports bar. Did they even have those here?

Eventually I settled on a dingy motel at the edge of town. I listened from the roof, and when I found an unoccupied room, I peered through the window and I teleported inside.

Closing the curtains more tightly, I switched on the television.

Like the rest of the world, I spent the next several hours as multiple ships settled into place over thirty-six of the world capitals.

Some people hailed them as saviors, and others as conquerors.

I fell asleep eventually; I still needed about three hours a day to feel good. I had strange dreams that day, and I woke up at the sound of a key in the door.

I'd fallen asleep on top of the covers with the television on, and I instantly blinked into the sky above the hotel.

It was now four thirty in the afternoon, at least going by the position of the sun in the sky, and I wasn't sure what to do.

The fact that the ships were moving into position suggested to me that they planned either an attack or a demand for surrender. However, I didn't know what I could do considering that there were more than eighty ships in places I'd never been and therefore couldn't visualize.

If I'd had stranger powers, I could have infiltrated the ships and at least scouted around.

If there were only a few aliens inside, I could kill them, and I could probably pilot the ships using squealer's powers.

I could maybe run one ship into another, except that as they were hanging directly over the cities of this planet, they'd drop and crush innumerable people.

Maybe that was part of the point; destroy us and we'll destroy you.

What would the T-virus do to the aliens? I didn't have enough tainted air that I could destroy a twenty-five-kilometer-wide ship, especially if it was mostly hollow.

I had a design for an invisibility addition to a vehicle in Squealer's inventory. I couldn't scale it down into a suit of glass armor, but I could use it in a vehicle as small as Trainwreck's armor.

His armor would take too long to build; I had a feeling I had hours instead of days to do whatever I was going to do.

Would the aliens be able to detect intruders inside? It'd be easy to have scans that detected non-alien life. However, their force shields should be enough to keep most life forms at bay.

They likely weren't expecting boarders, not with a species as primitive as humanity.

I blinked back to my previous location, and then I blinked to the surface of the ship, leaving myself lying flat. I grimaced in anticipation of having half my body sheered in half, but there was nothing.

Cautiously, I rose, and I stood up. Checking showed that the force field began thirteen feet away from the surface. They'd probably left a gap so that technicians could make repairs to the outside of the ship without having to lower the shields.

My eyes were deployed, ad they sank through the surface of the ship. I spread them out, each four thousand feet away from me in a wide radius so that I could get as wide a look at the technology as I could.

My eyes were less likely to be caught than I was. Being intangible, they'd be immune to things like radar and they didn't project any heat. They were visible, but they were small enough that at least some systems would think they were glitches, and I could keep them close to the ceilings unless I had something I wanted to get a closer look at.

The inside of the ship was alien. Everything was lit up with blue lights, which probably meant that the aliens saw things in a slightly different spectrum than we did.

I couldn't tell if the atmosphere was different inside than out; one would think that invaders would want a compatible planet, but that depended on what they were looking for.

My mind raced as I saw various pieces of technology built into the walls. I'd need a much closer look to really understand what I was seeing, but it seemed to me that some of it was almost familiar, while other things were beyond my comprehension.

It made sense that a ship would be made of a combination of older and newer technologies.

My first view of an alien was as it came around a corner. It was short, around four feet tall, and it was unnaturally slender and bluish gray. It only had two digits on its hands and feet; that should have made it more difficult to manipulate items.

It was observant, though.

Its head snapped up at the first hint of motion from my eye.

Immediately I blinked next to it, and I smashed it in the lobe at the back of its head. It collapsed to the floor, and I grabbed it, healed it and inventoried it in three quick movements, before standing still and listening for any sign of an alarm.

NEW POWER CREATED!

TOUCH TELEPATHY!

YOU HAVE A 100% CHANCE TO READ MINDS LESS ANY RESISTANCES THE TARGET MAY POSSESS. YOU MAY ALSO CONTROL THE MINDS OF OTHERS BY TOUCH WITH A 10% CHANCE LESS ANY RESISTANCES PER LEVEL!

NOW YOU CAN RUIN ANY SURPRISE BIRTHDAY PARTIES WITH EASE!

LEVEL ONE.

PLANAR AFFINITY!

YOU HAVE GAINED AN ADDITIONAL 10 PERCENT PLANAR AFFINITY TO HARVESTER EARTH. LEVEL ONE!

That was…incredibly useful.

I blinked away, returning to Bethesda. There wasn't much of a chance of returning the alien to his ship, but this was my chance to find out the aliens' motivations, and if they were benevolent, I'd be able to make my apologies and maybe serve as a liaison between them and Earth.

Random warehouses were a lot less common in Bethesda than in Brockton Bay, so I chose a church that seemed to be empty based on my empathy abilities.

I brought the alien back in a vestibule with a tiled floor; hopefully any alien blood would clean off easily and not be acidic.

I could feel the aliens' confusion and fear, and a moment later, I grabbed it by the head.

An intuitive understanding of how to use my new power let me force my way into the alien's mindscape.

The alien was both an individual and a part of a greater hive mind. I closed the aliens' mind off as quickly as I could from the hive, hoping to convince them that the alien was asleep on the job.

I then plunged brutally into the aliens' mind. It reached it's hands up and grabbed my head, and I could feel it trying to take control.

The battle was one sided, although I wasn't sure that would be true if it was backed by the entire collective.

They called themselves the Harvesters, and they were like locusts, moving from one civilization to the next, devouring everything and then moving onto the next.

They'd destroyed countless worlds and they had no limits on their desire to always spread, to always expand their territory.

They didn't consider other races to be quite real; as far as they were concerned, all alien species were cattle to be devoured.

This wasn't their largest ship

There were thirty-six destroyer class ships, and a mothership in orbit. It was much larger than any of these. The alien measurement system didn't make much sense to me, but it was incredibly larger.

There were even larger ships out in interstellar space. They hadn't sent the best of the best to Earth; it was considered an easy target.

They were arrogant as a race; they'd fought races with superior technology in the past, and they'd assimilated it. That was why their force shields were so much better than their other weapons.

Their main weapons were good enough to destroy an Earth city, but there were a lot of tinkers who could make better weapons that required a lot less space and a lot less energy to get the same effect.

The statistics of their fighter ships were unimpressive other than their force field capacity. They were more representative of their general tech level, which was probably medium interstellar at best instead of high interstellar.

If all their tech had been at the level of the force fields, they'd have simply been able to rain nanomachines down on the planet that would eat the pesky inhabitants leaving everything ready to harvest.

Actually, at that level they wouldn't have needed to harvest planets with people; there were a lot more planets that were uninhabited that had everything that people needed.

However, part of the reason that they harvested inhabited planets was to crush potential competitors before they got any stronger.

I felt growing pressure from the collective hive mind. An individual couldn't block the hive for long and neither could I.

Pushing as hard as I could, I looked for flaws in their technology.

I could probably deliver nuclear weapons to the ships, assuming that I could create or acquire them in time, but I needed something that the people of this planet could use.

There.

The mothership provided most of the power for the destroyers. Their power generation required an incredible amount of space, and the destroyers would have had to use a lot more material to be able to propel themselves.

The ships had to open a hole in their force field to fire their primary weapon.

Before I could find anything else out, the pressure began to grow to the point that I was straining to keep the hive mind out.

I smashed the head of the alien, crushing it, and spreading its alien blood across the tile. I inventoried it, and then inventoried its blood.

Humanity was waiting for contact from the aliens; the first response was going to be fire and fury. I needed to get in contact with the human military, and I had to make them believe me.

I had to talk to the President.

Getting in would be the easy part. Convincing him, his staff, the Pentagon and the governments of Russia, China, Germany and France and all the others, all within the next sixteen hours was going to be the hard part.

I was going to be facing the one thing that even I could not overcome.

Bureaucracy.