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She walked barefoot through the long grass, letting the soft rain wash her face and gradually drench her hair. The wind was moving through the branches high above her, making the trees whisper in the quiet evening. Somewhere off to her left a stream murmured to itself, the gentle movement of water on stone almost below the threshold of hearing.
This was her place; she knew this forest like the back of her hand. This was the famous stand of white pine, planted at the time of Landing. Five seedlings were all that had been saved from the wreck of the Unity; now their number had been swelled, by their offspring and by new arrivals. Every new tree planted bore a small golden plaque; each one represented a Gaian achievement. Here was the tree celebrating Deirdre’s election as planetary governor, gnarled with great age; over here was the slender sapling, planted to commemorate the building of Deirdre’s personal gravship, the Skye One, just over a year ago.
And here, she thought to herself, bending down and pressing her hands against the newly-dug earth, is where the last of all shall stand.
It would be planted tomorrow, in a formal ceremony, before Skye One left to begin a new chapter in humanity’s history.
Deirdre took a deep breath, savouring the moment - the rich, dark smell of the wet earth, the crisp scent of pine needles - and then stopped dead as her eye caught one of the older trees, the plaque gleaming softly in the evening twilight.
Lindly...
If she lived for a thousand years she would never forget the day they brought her Lindly’s body, shrouded in planetcloth, burnt almost beyond recognition.
"How did this happen?" Gruffly, not allowing the distress to creep into her voice.
"Cooked by a flame gun. Yang’s men. Tried to surrender but they flamed her anyway. Don't like those worms, those Hivers."
"I see."
Her most loyal servant, butchered by the Hive. And only then did she realise that, subconsciously, she had been grooming Lindly as her heir apparent, the student who would one day replace her as master.
She rested her head against the tree’s rough bark, remembering the day it had been planted. The first ever bonding of human and mind worm into a mutualistic whole, an incredible achievement, the first sign that these ravening predators could be directed and controlled. An experiment that, her scientists had assured her, was worth a human life.
They were wrong.
Who is Deirdre Skye?
So wondered Datatech Sinder Roze, idly tapping the datapad in front of her with a stylus. The display showed the history of humanity’s existence upon Planet in the form of a graph. Each faction’s achievements, in technological advancement, population, wealth, military power and territory controlled, were collated and reduced to a single line for each of the twelve factions. Every line told the story of a faction, its highs and lows, successes and failures.
Ten of the lines wavered upward, slowly but steadily, before plummeting abruptly to flatline at the bottom of the screen. Ten factions eliminated, destroyed by each other or by the ruthless might of the Gaian army, their military units smashed, their bases looted and appropriated by the conqueror. One by one they fell - some quickly like the Morganites, whose wealth could not save them from extinction; others more recently like the Cult of Planet, whose fervour had kept them fighting till the bitter, bitter end. Five devastated by the Gaian machine; the others decimated by bickering and infighting, each believing themselves invulnerable, each reduced to grovelling surrender before the Gaian army.
Of the other two lines one, coloured deep purple, spiked upward in the early years before following a stable upward course. However, it was eclipsed by its green counterpart which, after a faltering start, exploded upward as the first elimination took place.
Datatech Roze sighed. The two lines represented the only two factions still existing upon Planet - her own Angels, and the Stepdaughters of Gaia. Those stepdaughters had been responsible for the elimination of five of the ten other factions, and might soon be responsible for hers as well. Even now Gaian troops threw themselves at the defences of Roze’s perimeter bases, fighting doggedly as defenders fell one by one.
She shook her head, dismissing such fatalistic thoughts, and turned again to her screen. She was pondering the mysteries of the Gaians’ enigmatic leader, Lady Deirdre Skye. Skye had been chief botanist aboard the Unity, subordinate to Chief of Science Prokhor Zakharov - an irony, since the latter was now confined to a punishment sphere in the depths of Gaia’s Landing. Born in Free Scotland in 2025, Skye had quickly achieved Bachelors, Masters and a PhD in the field of biology, and then gone on to literally work in the field, doing research for Bionex. When she tired of that, she had transferred to the United Nations Disaster Relief Fund, engineering wheat and apple hybrids to survive in the irradiated soils of contaminated areas. It was from this job that she had been plucked by the Unity Mission Committee and appointed Chief Botanist & Xenobiologist.
The picture so far was clear - Skye’s quick mind and intuitive grasp of biology had won her high acclaim, and eventually a coveted position on the Unity. But post-Planetfall the details were sketchier - the Gaian pod had come down on a remote island shared only with the Morganites, and for years there had been no contact with either. Only after the elimination of the Morganites and the Gaian construction of the Empath Guild had Deirdre come to prominence, using her newly ‘discovered’ commlink frequencies to announce her presence to all Planet. At that time factional rivalries were already burning, and Deirdre had won the first ever planetary governorship elections as a neutral candidate, siding with none. She had been seen as too distant and too weak to be a threat to any of the other factions, with a small population, a tiny military and virtually no economic presence. Only in technology did she and her followers have an edge, especially after the round of tech-trading that had followed that first opening of the commlinks.
From these humble beginnings, the Gaian Federation had spread and grown - first peacefully as transports carried Gaian colonists across the oceans, then in a more sinister manner as Deirdre had sent her troops into battle against her old commander, Prokhor Zakharov, in response to his demands for ‘free access’ to her technology. Zakharov had scoffed, detaching barely a handful of his troops from the Spartan border to deal with the ‘Gaian bean sprouts’, as he termed them - and had watched in horror as the well-fed, well-equipped Gaians had decimated his forces despite their inferior training. He had quickly sent his best forces against them, but they had already taken three of his bases by the time those troops arrived, exhausted and poorly supplied, to meet an impenetrable wall of Gaian resistance.
After dealing with Zakharov, Deirdre had found herself confronted by the hostile Spartan federation, convinced that her scientific research was a smokescreen for covert weapons research. When Santiago, finally incensed beyond bearing, declared war, Deirdre proved her right - Gaian troops, despite being outnumbered and outclassed, had prevailed thanks to superior weaponry.
The tale was repeated over and over again - a powerful faction picking an argument with the Gaians, sometimes over something as trivial as a fungal bloom triggered during a visit by Gaian ecoinspectors; sometimes the cause was more overt, the Believers executing a ‘heathen Planet-worshipper’ or the murder of a high-ranking scientist by Hive operatives. The faction, confident of success, would consistently underestimate the Gaians, with disastrous consequences. Often bases were left lightly defended, borders all but unguarded, as other, more pressing rivalries were pursued; by the time the true threat was realised, it was often far too late.
Against this storm of war and conquest, only the Angels had survived, thanks to skilful diplomacy, constant vigilance and a healthy fear of the near-fanatical Gaians.
However, none of this answered Roze’s original question - who was Deirdre Skye? Despite being Planetary Governor and one of the best-known faces on the newsvids, Skye had otherwise managed to keep out of the limelight - very little was known about her. Her Prime Minister, a fresh-faced centenarian, dealt with most domestic matters of state; her foreign minister dealt with any and all day-to-day diplomatic matters. Only the other faction leaders themselves had seen her face-to-face, in Council, bilateral conferences, or direct diplomatic contact.
Along with most of the Unity crew, Roze herself had met Deirdre on a few occasions – first during the selection process, then later during training, and finally aboard the starship itself. Most of those meetings had been trivial, a passing nod or a word exchanged, but in the chaos on the Unity after the catastrophic meteor impact, Roze had seen a very different woman emerge. No longer the quiet, diffident botanist, pottering harmlessly in the hydroponics bay; Skye had transformed under pressure, like carbon into diamond. Taking the initiative so often denied her by Zakharov’s stringent regulations, Skye had run every diagnostic algorithm (including some Roze had designed herself) twice through before ever the order was given. She had taken immediate stock of the situation, organised the doomed repair attempt that became a salvage operation, and helped coordinate the evacuation with cool competence.
Roze tapped a control and another sequence of graphs opened up - Skye’s psychological profile, taken before the Unity left Earth. Her operatives had had to work long and hard to extract this information from the planetary datalinks.
“Relies on deep intuitive sense combined with scientific knowledge for determination of future actions. Powerful mind and will combined with broad base of knowledge leads her to excel in chosen area of expertise.” True enough, but Roze was more interested in the next paragraph. She highlighted it with a flick of her stylus.
“Sense of isolation from childhood events (e.g. divorce of parents) and pre-launch events reinforces strong tendency to introversion.”
This was the problem. Her probe teams could hack past the hunter-seeker algorithm all they wanted, but they could never penetrate the mind of the Gaian leader. Despite the democratic nature of Gaian politics, Deirdre Skye still had the final word on relations with other factions, and she kept her military advisors very close, retaining a near-stranglehold on all major military tactics. And despite the Angels’ constant attempts to infiltrate the upper echelons of the Gaian bureaucracy, they had so far not succeeded in placing anyone within a mile of Deirdre Skye. Without access to the woman who plotted her downfall, Roze had to rely on her military to protect her - and with the might of the entire Gaian empire ranged against her, her long-run chances were slim to none.
Unless...
Flicking programs on her datapad, Roze smiled at the screen. The final chance, the last-ditch attempt to win herself reprieve from extinction at the hands of the Gaian forces.
She walked barefoot through the knee-high fungus, feeling the rough tendrils brush against her bare legs. Alone of all the faction leaders, she had taken the time to study and understand this alien life - and what dividends it had paid. Her people could now harvest more nutrients, extract more energy and synthesise more minerals from the fungus than any other substance on Planet. Even her beloved hybrid forests could not provide such abundance. Alien lifeforms danced to the songs of her psi trainers, demon mindworm boils slipping through the fungus as quickly and easily as travelling a magtube.
Ahead, the massive dais of the inception platform rose from the crimson fungus, an island of artificial materials in a sea of natural life. She had chosen this place for a reason, a small landmass just off the main Gaian continent, unsettled because of its thick coating of uninhabitable xenofungus - fungus that would provide the perfect conduit for her entrance into the Planetmind. Nicknamed the Isle of Worms because of the proliferation of native life, this island would be the setting for the next step of human evolution.
Aides rushed towards her as she ascended the dais, but she waved them away. This was her moment; she would lead humanity’s greatest effort alone.
Alone, of course, but for her six most trusted, most talented empathi. They were already in their places, swaying in perfect synchrony, as befitted people who knew each other’s minds almost better than they knew their own. For a moment, as she always did, she envied them their abilities - what closeness, what companionship they must feel. Not for them the solitude, the enforced aloofness that came with being a faction leader.
They turned as she climbed the stairs to her own platform, raised high above the dais, and inclined their heads. She returned the gesture, feeling their presences surrounding her, comforting her. Empathic probes reached for her, folding her into their circle of shared minds. Together, the six of them would provide the boost necessary for her to cross the threshold and enter the Planetmind’s neural net; then, once she had established her personality and was secure, they would follow, the first humans ever to truly fuse with Planet. Many transcendi had plumbed the depths, but she would be the first to dive in.
Around her, final preparations were being made. She had isolated herself from most of them, preferring instead to meditate and prepare herself for unity with the planetary consciousness. She had spoken with Voice many times - frequently not by choice - but would only now have the experience of direct contact with the mind behind the Voice. The thought exhilarated and scared her equally; a mind truly the size of a planet, a mind that had existed long before these human insects crawled blindly across its surface. Every faction had its horror stories of the mind worms, the gut-wrenching terror of nightmares writ in searing ink across the inner eye. Whole bases had fallen and been subsumed beneath tsunamis of native life; the final transmissions of Assassin’s Redoubt had been filled with shouting, dying screams, and the shrieking gibbers of a comm officer, his sanity shattered beyond repair, groping for comfort in the words of a nursery rhyme.
Mary had a little lamb
Little lamb, little lamb
Mary had a little lamb
Whose fleece was white as snow...
Deirdre shook herself, but could not throw off the intense feeling of smallness, of helplessness in the face of immense power. Those events, horrific as they had been, had been the actions of a disorganised planetmind, immature and scared, the tantrums of a frightened child. If Voice ever came to full maturity unchecked, a flood of worms would sweep humanity from Planet’s surface, to drown in their own nightmares and choke on their hubris in believing themselves stronger than the sheer brute force of Nature.
That cannot be allowed to happen. Humanity was a scheming blight, she knew this; Planet was a mindless storm, and she knew this too. Only with guidance, only with temperance could the two be brought together and made to work in harmony. Her guidance, whispered her ego. Not for nothing was she the leader of the most successful civilisation in human history. She had arrived on Planet with only a few hybrid plants, some meagre supplies, and some of the more junior members of the science corps; now she ruled nine-tenths of Planet’s surface, her satellites filled the skies, and her former colleagues had been punished for their treachery.
Only Roze remained, lurking like one of her insidious viruses, and with the same stubborn tenacity. Still, in less than an hour’s time that would not matter. None of it would matter. This life, this human coil, would fall away, and she would be reborn beyond all imagining.
Smiling quietly to herself, she went to make the final preparations.
The final preparations were complete. Plans that had been years in the making were finally coming to fruition. They would make their last stand in less than an hour.
Probe teams slipped silently amongst the trunks of mighty forests, barely the slightest sound betraying their presence. Their cloaking devices wove mantles of darkness around them and the delicate, intricate, deadly equipment they carried. Solar storms provided cover, disrupting satellite and ground-sensor surveillance.
The planets aligned, thought Roze wryly, watching her operatives swarm the hills above her enemy’s stronghold. The sheer audacity of the plan still took her breath away – an assault on the heart of the Gaian hegemony, the very seat of Deirdre’s power. Once no more than a landing pod and a handful of pressure tents, Gaia’s Landing now sent its towers soaring into the sky, a beautiful, austere metropolis of life.
And she the harbinger. She felt no remorse, no compunction for the horror she was about to unleash. Her people had been hounded like vermin, chased from base after base, hunted down and mercilessly killed. Every day Deirdre claimed more lives, her precious defenders slaughtered by Gaian troops, wiped out by Gaian missiles and Gaian guns. Civilians and soldiers alike cowered behind tachyon fields, living in constant fear that the next bolt would breach the wall. Every day she wondered, could she hold the balance? For years she and her people had lived like this, knowing that every breath was bought with another life, every mouthful with another death.
No more. Her stylus fell from heedless fingers. They must succeed. With these few hundred lives, her last and best and brightest, her strongest probes, she would buy her life. Hers, and millions more besides. They must succeed.
They, and the others...
She hardly dared to think about the others, the second team of operatives; Deirdre’s spies were everywhere, satellites and sensors, turncoats and traitors. Even the operatives themselves did not know why they had been sent, nor would they know their target, until it loomed up before them from the fungus.
More audacity, and greater. She would not let herself believe that they could succeed. Diversion only, then; disruption, to increase the confusion.
But if they succeed...
This was her place; she knew this forest like the back of her hand. This was the famous stand of white pine, planted at the time of Landing. Five seedlings were all that had been saved from the wreck of the Unity; now their number had been swelled, by their offspring and by new arrivals. Every new tree planted bore a small golden plaque; each one represented a Gaian achievement. Here was the tree celebrating Deirdre’s election as planetary governor, gnarled with great age; over here was the slender sapling, planted to commemorate the building of Deirdre’s personal gravship, the Skye One, just over a year ago.
And here, she thought to herself, bending down and pressing her hands against the newly-dug earth, is where the last of all shall stand.
It would be planted tomorrow, in a formal ceremony, before Skye One left to begin a new chapter in humanity’s history.
Deirdre took a deep breath, savouring the moment - the rich, dark smell of the wet earth, the crisp scent of pine needles - and then stopped dead as her eye caught one of the older trees, the plaque gleaming softly in the evening twilight.
Lindly...
If she lived for a thousand years she would never forget the day they brought her Lindly’s body, shrouded in planetcloth, burnt almost beyond recognition.
"How did this happen?" Gruffly, not allowing the distress to creep into her voice.
"Cooked by a flame gun. Yang’s men. Tried to surrender but they flamed her anyway. Don't like those worms, those Hivers."
"I see."
Her most loyal servant, butchered by the Hive. And only then did she realise that, subconsciously, she had been grooming Lindly as her heir apparent, the student who would one day replace her as master.
She rested her head against the tree’s rough bark, remembering the day it had been planted. The first ever bonding of human and mind worm into a mutualistic whole, an incredible achievement, the first sign that these ravening predators could be directed and controlled. An experiment that, her scientists had assured her, was worth a human life.
They were wrong.
Who is Deirdre Skye?
So wondered Datatech Sinder Roze, idly tapping the datapad in front of her with a stylus. The display showed the history of humanity’s existence upon Planet in the form of a graph. Each faction’s achievements, in technological advancement, population, wealth, military power and territory controlled, were collated and reduced to a single line for each of the twelve factions. Every line told the story of a faction, its highs and lows, successes and failures.
Ten of the lines wavered upward, slowly but steadily, before plummeting abruptly to flatline at the bottom of the screen. Ten factions eliminated, destroyed by each other or by the ruthless might of the Gaian army, their military units smashed, their bases looted and appropriated by the conqueror. One by one they fell - some quickly like the Morganites, whose wealth could not save them from extinction; others more recently like the Cult of Planet, whose fervour had kept them fighting till the bitter, bitter end. Five devastated by the Gaian machine; the others decimated by bickering and infighting, each believing themselves invulnerable, each reduced to grovelling surrender before the Gaian army.
Of the other two lines one, coloured deep purple, spiked upward in the early years before following a stable upward course. However, it was eclipsed by its green counterpart which, after a faltering start, exploded upward as the first elimination took place.
Datatech Roze sighed. The two lines represented the only two factions still existing upon Planet - her own Angels, and the Stepdaughters of Gaia. Those stepdaughters had been responsible for the elimination of five of the ten other factions, and might soon be responsible for hers as well. Even now Gaian troops threw themselves at the defences of Roze’s perimeter bases, fighting doggedly as defenders fell one by one.
She shook her head, dismissing such fatalistic thoughts, and turned again to her screen. She was pondering the mysteries of the Gaians’ enigmatic leader, Lady Deirdre Skye. Skye had been chief botanist aboard the Unity, subordinate to Chief of Science Prokhor Zakharov - an irony, since the latter was now confined to a punishment sphere in the depths of Gaia’s Landing. Born in Free Scotland in 2025, Skye had quickly achieved Bachelors, Masters and a PhD in the field of biology, and then gone on to literally work in the field, doing research for Bionex. When she tired of that, she had transferred to the United Nations Disaster Relief Fund, engineering wheat and apple hybrids to survive in the irradiated soils of contaminated areas. It was from this job that she had been plucked by the Unity Mission Committee and appointed Chief Botanist & Xenobiologist.
The picture so far was clear - Skye’s quick mind and intuitive grasp of biology had won her high acclaim, and eventually a coveted position on the Unity. But post-Planetfall the details were sketchier - the Gaian pod had come down on a remote island shared only with the Morganites, and for years there had been no contact with either. Only after the elimination of the Morganites and the Gaian construction of the Empath Guild had Deirdre come to prominence, using her newly ‘discovered’ commlink frequencies to announce her presence to all Planet. At that time factional rivalries were already burning, and Deirdre had won the first ever planetary governorship elections as a neutral candidate, siding with none. She had been seen as too distant and too weak to be a threat to any of the other factions, with a small population, a tiny military and virtually no economic presence. Only in technology did she and her followers have an edge, especially after the round of tech-trading that had followed that first opening of the commlinks.
From these humble beginnings, the Gaian Federation had spread and grown - first peacefully as transports carried Gaian colonists across the oceans, then in a more sinister manner as Deirdre had sent her troops into battle against her old commander, Prokhor Zakharov, in response to his demands for ‘free access’ to her technology. Zakharov had scoffed, detaching barely a handful of his troops from the Spartan border to deal with the ‘Gaian bean sprouts’, as he termed them - and had watched in horror as the well-fed, well-equipped Gaians had decimated his forces despite their inferior training. He had quickly sent his best forces against them, but they had already taken three of his bases by the time those troops arrived, exhausted and poorly supplied, to meet an impenetrable wall of Gaian resistance.
After dealing with Zakharov, Deirdre had found herself confronted by the hostile Spartan federation, convinced that her scientific research was a smokescreen for covert weapons research. When Santiago, finally incensed beyond bearing, declared war, Deirdre proved her right - Gaian troops, despite being outnumbered and outclassed, had prevailed thanks to superior weaponry.
The tale was repeated over and over again - a powerful faction picking an argument with the Gaians, sometimes over something as trivial as a fungal bloom triggered during a visit by Gaian ecoinspectors; sometimes the cause was more overt, the Believers executing a ‘heathen Planet-worshipper’ or the murder of a high-ranking scientist by Hive operatives. The faction, confident of success, would consistently underestimate the Gaians, with disastrous consequences. Often bases were left lightly defended, borders all but unguarded, as other, more pressing rivalries were pursued; by the time the true threat was realised, it was often far too late.
Against this storm of war and conquest, only the Angels had survived, thanks to skilful diplomacy, constant vigilance and a healthy fear of the near-fanatical Gaians.
However, none of this answered Roze’s original question - who was Deirdre Skye? Despite being Planetary Governor and one of the best-known faces on the newsvids, Skye had otherwise managed to keep out of the limelight - very little was known about her. Her Prime Minister, a fresh-faced centenarian, dealt with most domestic matters of state; her foreign minister dealt with any and all day-to-day diplomatic matters. Only the other faction leaders themselves had seen her face-to-face, in Council, bilateral conferences, or direct diplomatic contact.
Along with most of the Unity crew, Roze herself had met Deirdre on a few occasions – first during the selection process, then later during training, and finally aboard the starship itself. Most of those meetings had been trivial, a passing nod or a word exchanged, but in the chaos on the Unity after the catastrophic meteor impact, Roze had seen a very different woman emerge. No longer the quiet, diffident botanist, pottering harmlessly in the hydroponics bay; Skye had transformed under pressure, like carbon into diamond. Taking the initiative so often denied her by Zakharov’s stringent regulations, Skye had run every diagnostic algorithm (including some Roze had designed herself) twice through before ever the order was given. She had taken immediate stock of the situation, organised the doomed repair attempt that became a salvage operation, and helped coordinate the evacuation with cool competence.
Roze tapped a control and another sequence of graphs opened up - Skye’s psychological profile, taken before the Unity left Earth. Her operatives had had to work long and hard to extract this information from the planetary datalinks.
“Relies on deep intuitive sense combined with scientific knowledge for determination of future actions. Powerful mind and will combined with broad base of knowledge leads her to excel in chosen area of expertise.” True enough, but Roze was more interested in the next paragraph. She highlighted it with a flick of her stylus.
“Sense of isolation from childhood events (e.g. divorce of parents) and pre-launch events reinforces strong tendency to introversion.”
This was the problem. Her probe teams could hack past the hunter-seeker algorithm all they wanted, but they could never penetrate the mind of the Gaian leader. Despite the democratic nature of Gaian politics, Deirdre Skye still had the final word on relations with other factions, and she kept her military advisors very close, retaining a near-stranglehold on all major military tactics. And despite the Angels’ constant attempts to infiltrate the upper echelons of the Gaian bureaucracy, they had so far not succeeded in placing anyone within a mile of Deirdre Skye. Without access to the woman who plotted her downfall, Roze had to rely on her military to protect her - and with the might of the entire Gaian empire ranged against her, her long-run chances were slim to none.
Unless...
Flicking programs on her datapad, Roze smiled at the screen. The final chance, the last-ditch attempt to win herself reprieve from extinction at the hands of the Gaian forces.
She walked barefoot through the knee-high fungus, feeling the rough tendrils brush against her bare legs. Alone of all the faction leaders, she had taken the time to study and understand this alien life - and what dividends it had paid. Her people could now harvest more nutrients, extract more energy and synthesise more minerals from the fungus than any other substance on Planet. Even her beloved hybrid forests could not provide such abundance. Alien lifeforms danced to the songs of her psi trainers, demon mindworm boils slipping through the fungus as quickly and easily as travelling a magtube.
Ahead, the massive dais of the inception platform rose from the crimson fungus, an island of artificial materials in a sea of natural life. She had chosen this place for a reason, a small landmass just off the main Gaian continent, unsettled because of its thick coating of uninhabitable xenofungus - fungus that would provide the perfect conduit for her entrance into the Planetmind. Nicknamed the Isle of Worms because of the proliferation of native life, this island would be the setting for the next step of human evolution.
Aides rushed towards her as she ascended the dais, but she waved them away. This was her moment; she would lead humanity’s greatest effort alone.
Alone, of course, but for her six most trusted, most talented empathi. They were already in their places, swaying in perfect synchrony, as befitted people who knew each other’s minds almost better than they knew their own. For a moment, as she always did, she envied them their abilities - what closeness, what companionship they must feel. Not for them the solitude, the enforced aloofness that came with being a faction leader.
They turned as she climbed the stairs to her own platform, raised high above the dais, and inclined their heads. She returned the gesture, feeling their presences surrounding her, comforting her. Empathic probes reached for her, folding her into their circle of shared minds. Together, the six of them would provide the boost necessary for her to cross the threshold and enter the Planetmind’s neural net; then, once she had established her personality and was secure, they would follow, the first humans ever to truly fuse with Planet. Many transcendi had plumbed the depths, but she would be the first to dive in.
Around her, final preparations were being made. She had isolated herself from most of them, preferring instead to meditate and prepare herself for unity with the planetary consciousness. She had spoken with Voice many times - frequently not by choice - but would only now have the experience of direct contact with the mind behind the Voice. The thought exhilarated and scared her equally; a mind truly the size of a planet, a mind that had existed long before these human insects crawled blindly across its surface. Every faction had its horror stories of the mind worms, the gut-wrenching terror of nightmares writ in searing ink across the inner eye. Whole bases had fallen and been subsumed beneath tsunamis of native life; the final transmissions of Assassin’s Redoubt had been filled with shouting, dying screams, and the shrieking gibbers of a comm officer, his sanity shattered beyond repair, groping for comfort in the words of a nursery rhyme.
Mary had a little lamb
Little lamb, little lamb
Mary had a little lamb
Whose fleece was white as snow...
Deirdre shook herself, but could not throw off the intense feeling of smallness, of helplessness in the face of immense power. Those events, horrific as they had been, had been the actions of a disorganised planetmind, immature and scared, the tantrums of a frightened child. If Voice ever came to full maturity unchecked, a flood of worms would sweep humanity from Planet’s surface, to drown in their own nightmares and choke on their hubris in believing themselves stronger than the sheer brute force of Nature.
That cannot be allowed to happen. Humanity was a scheming blight, she knew this; Planet was a mindless storm, and she knew this too. Only with guidance, only with temperance could the two be brought together and made to work in harmony. Her guidance, whispered her ego. Not for nothing was she the leader of the most successful civilisation in human history. She had arrived on Planet with only a few hybrid plants, some meagre supplies, and some of the more junior members of the science corps; now she ruled nine-tenths of Planet’s surface, her satellites filled the skies, and her former colleagues had been punished for their treachery.
Only Roze remained, lurking like one of her insidious viruses, and with the same stubborn tenacity. Still, in less than an hour’s time that would not matter. None of it would matter. This life, this human coil, would fall away, and she would be reborn beyond all imagining.
Smiling quietly to herself, she went to make the final preparations.
The final preparations were complete. Plans that had been years in the making were finally coming to fruition. They would make their last stand in less than an hour.
Probe teams slipped silently amongst the trunks of mighty forests, barely the slightest sound betraying their presence. Their cloaking devices wove mantles of darkness around them and the delicate, intricate, deadly equipment they carried. Solar storms provided cover, disrupting satellite and ground-sensor surveillance.
The planets aligned, thought Roze wryly, watching her operatives swarm the hills above her enemy’s stronghold. The sheer audacity of the plan still took her breath away – an assault on the heart of the Gaian hegemony, the very seat of Deirdre’s power. Once no more than a landing pod and a handful of pressure tents, Gaia’s Landing now sent its towers soaring into the sky, a beautiful, austere metropolis of life.
And she the harbinger. She felt no remorse, no compunction for the horror she was about to unleash. Her people had been hounded like vermin, chased from base after base, hunted down and mercilessly killed. Every day Deirdre claimed more lives, her precious defenders slaughtered by Gaian troops, wiped out by Gaian missiles and Gaian guns. Civilians and soldiers alike cowered behind tachyon fields, living in constant fear that the next bolt would breach the wall. Every day she wondered, could she hold the balance? For years she and her people had lived like this, knowing that every breath was bought with another life, every mouthful with another death.
No more. Her stylus fell from heedless fingers. They must succeed. With these few hundred lives, her last and best and brightest, her strongest probes, she would buy her life. Hers, and millions more besides. They must succeed.
They, and the others...
She hardly dared to think about the others, the second team of operatives; Deirdre’s spies were everywhere, satellites and sensors, turncoats and traitors. Even the operatives themselves did not know why they had been sent, nor would they know their target, until it loomed up before them from the fungus.
More audacity, and greater. She would not let herself believe that they could succeed. Diversion only, then; disruption, to increase the confusion.
But if they succeed...
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