2

The cold desert starlight was just enough to make out the black stain seeping through Ben’s pant leg.

He was now sure it was blood leaking down his calf, soaking his jeans and squishing in his sock. Whatever. No stopping now. Just 30 feet to the summit. The voice had piped down. Apparently even his demons were exhausted.

The plan had been to just go halfway up the hill tonight, a small cigar to celebrate, and then back down. Build gradually, the docs had said. In fact, they’d recommended he stay at the rehab facility for another month. Let the nurses and physical therapists do their jobs. Screw that. The truth was, he couldn’t stand to be around people anymore, much less someone trying to serve or help him. He hadn’t done anything to deserve that. So he’d put in his retirement papers and checked himself out. A few weeks later, he was here in the desert, grinding. Tonight, he was going all the way to the top of this godforsaken hill. Or maybe it was morning now. Whatever. He’d smoke his stubby cigar at the top either way.

Progress was measured in inches. His strength was depleted, but his reservoir of patience was still dark and deep. With each step, his weak leg struggled more. Soon, it was step, drag, step, drag.

His right foot caught in a hidden crack in the dirt. It twisted and Ben bellowed. He crashed down, his foot popped loose, his leg ripped open, and a supernova of white agony filled his brain and pushed aside everything else.

A small avalanche of loose gravel, dirt, and rocks big enough to break bones carried his heavy frame in a wave down the way he had come over the last hour. It was like being in a storm at sea. At high enough speed, dirt and rock behaved like water, sloshing and rolling like whitewater rapids. He tumbled to a stop, instinctively feeling for the pistol and knife strapped to his hips even as he hovered on the brink of passing out.

After several minutes, the wildfire of pain in his leg faded to a smolder. Ben propped himself up on his left elbow. Sweat cooled, then chilled. He shivered and sat up. The dark, wet line of blood coating his right leg was cooling, turning clammy, and he let out a trembling sigh and brushed his hands. They were also scratched and bloody from his tumble down the slope. Ben leaned back on the palms of both hands, winced, and inhaled deeply, preparing to stand and bracing for the pain. He was going up that hill tonight if he had to pull himself by his teeth.

This had always been rough country but, in a way, it was also home.

The Comanche had once called this stretch of the southwest not just their land, but their empire. The most savage warriors of all the Native American tribes, the Comanche had, for a brief while before the American flood westward, controlled hundreds of thousands of square miles across Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. For most of Native American history, the Comanche had been a small, primitive band, hunters and wanderers, rootless and powerless. Then the Spanish had come from the south. They brought horses. Originally bred for the arid deserts and steppes of Asia, these creatures were ideally suited to western edge of the New World. The Comanche, by some quirk of fate, were suited to the horses.

In raids and trades, the Comanche had acquired hundreds, then thousands of the beasts, adapting to this new technology at a lightning pace. By the late seventeenth century, a once modest tribe had transformed itself into the most effective light cavalry in the world. They rode to battle and, unlike their contemporaries, rode in battle, firing arrows and throwing spears from horseback.

It was a revolution in warfare, and they were as vicious as they were competent. They mercilessly slaughtered every man, while women and children were killed or abducted and forcibly assimilated into Comanche tribes. One of these captives, hauled across New Mexico on horseback in the dead of night on a September in 1841, had been Ben’s great-great-great-grandmother.

A detachment of Texas Rangers had eventually rescued her, but not before she gave birth to a son from her Comanche captor. That son eventually moved to New York, far from the blood-soaked plains and canyons of his birth. But the blood in his veins could not be escaped. Indeed, that blood was now dripping out from Ben’s hands and leg, back into his ancestral soil.

Whatever ancient connection he had to this place, it had no memory of him. In a way, the places you lived and toiled eventually became part of you. The house you grew up in, even the barracks and apartments where you lived for a few months or years, the events that occurred within those spaces gave those places meaning—for good or bad. You defined yourself, remembered yourself, as much for where you were as for what you’d done. And all the old familiar places had memories Ben wanted no part of. Out here, where he’d never been, there were no ghosts waiting for him. There were only the ones he brought with him.

He paused, staring at the stars, noticing them for the first time that night. Here in New Mexico, far from any city lights, far from everything, the panorama was overwhelming.

Every star in the galaxy seemed to be dumped overhead, a vast horde of glittering diamonds scattered across a royal cloak of purple and black. They twinkled and winked as their light bent through the atmosphere. It had been years since he’d been out at night with no job to do, no mission to accomplish. The night was like a black ocean, deep overhead, impenetrable and implacable.

For nearly his entire adult life, the night had been a cloak, a camouflage. Special Operations worked almost exclusively in the dark, relying on technology and training to hunt while their enemies slept; to be the thing that goes bump in the night.

He was comfortable when miserable. Most of his transitory girlfriends had noticed, too, and eventually left, even the ones Ben had hoped would stay. Crawling through sand and mud and leeches and snakes was the only time he felt, if not happy, at least fulfilling his purpose, doing what he thought he was meant to do. He’d camped immobile for 36 hours, sprawled over a sniper rifle, waiting for his target to make an inevitable split-second mistake. You could deal with physical discomfort and pain. This, here, now, in the desert, was worse. Helplessness. That was the word. Crippled and diminished. A lifetime spent sharpening body and mind, a blade on a whetstone. He felt chipped and dull now—physically and spiritually beyond repair.

So be it. The physical pain he could deal with. It meant he’d survived, if not won. What he regretted was the pain others had suffered on his behalf. That ache would always linger. He couldn’t ask for that sacrifice, couldn’t inflict that sacrifice, any longer. Time for someone else to lead the fight.

Still, the training embedded in his body wouldn’t let him stop fighting. He punished himself in this oblivious expanse because he knew nothing else. There was no quit. There was also no desire to go back. There was just here. Even if the leg someday healed, became more than a useless stump, Ben couldn’t stomach the thought of riding into war again with his countrymen, his brothers, beside him. No one else would ever die for him, because of him.

Ben picked up a small stone and flung it at the sky.

As it arced back down to the ground, he noticed a blue star that seemed to be blinking faster than its companions. Almost immediately, the blinking light grew in size as a steadier yellow pinpoint accompanied it.

These couldn’t be stars. Satellites traveling overheard, maybe, or airplanes with collision-warning lights. In seconds, though, the lights had grown so fierce that Ben knew they had to be crashing. Maybe it was a meteor shower?

Idle curiosity turned sharper as the lights expanded, sinking toward Ben and now accompanied by what sounded like rolling thunder. What’s more, each large light seemed to be ejecting separate trails of light, spraying beads of illumination. When the strings intersected, a boom shook the sky.

The two objects now plummeted toward Ben and his hill, a tangle of light and sound more wrenching than anything Ben had ever seen or heard over the skies of Iraq or Afghanistan. The lead object, the blue thing, was smoking and burning. It was being chased by the yellow thing. Is that a . . . ship? Ben had time to wonder as he tried to scoot backward from the looming crash.

At the last moment, the two lights screamed overheard, a cascade of fire and fury as the ground itself felt like it was about to split open. The shockwave threw Ben onto his back. He rolled over to watch the twin streaks as they crested the hill down which he had rolled just a few minutes before. One last explosion shook the night and then the light show was extinguished. Echoes rolled back and forth across the peaks for a few seconds, and then faded as well. In the silence and calm, the afterimages floating in his vision were Ben’s only evidence of what had just happened.

He struggled to his feet, almost completely oblivious to his tortured leg. Hobbling the few feet to his battered blue Chevy, Ben wrenched the door open and hopped in. The key turned, the engine fired, and he stomped the gas, fishtailing briefly and then accelerating around the hill. A crown of fresh sweat had formed on his forehead. Before he had completely rounded the mound, he could already see a new glow, something burning. The crash site, where the two meteors had hit the ground. But as he made the last twist around a giant jutting rock, Ben saw there had been only one crash and slammed the brakes.

About a hundred yards or so out in a shallow gulch, the blue object had belly-flopped and split apart, leaving a deep furrow in the dirt. No way was this a meteorite. Tangled scraps of metallic debris were jumbled in the gulch and splashed up and over the sides. The fire was loud, as were the arcs of electricity stabbing out from fragments of what had to have been a hull. What had caused Ben to stomp the brakes, pushing through the yelp of protest from his damaged leg, was the perfect silver dart hovering a few feet above the rough shrubs and dirt of the New Mexican desert.

It was the size of tractor trailer, but coiled like a sports car. Faint wisps of yellow smoke or vapor drifted from the reflective surface and wandered off into the night sky. The flames from the crash reflected off the bottom of the silver ship, dancing with the mirrored starlight from above.

It was definitely a ship. An alien ship. There was nothing in the human arsenal, not even in the experimental programs Ben had occasionally observed, that could do what this huge machine was doing, hovering silently in midair.

Ben’s mind, trained to react to anything, struggled to respond. He killed the engine, eased open the door, and slipped out of his truck. Maybe he was still lying in the sand at the foot of the hill, hallucinating through his pain. Or perhaps he had simply lost his mind. That seemed unlikely. His senses seemed to be working normally. His leg was still in tearing, burning agony. His nose detected the bitter scent of the fire. That couldn’t be how insanity worked, could it? Did a psychotic break have a smell?

At some point, you just had to trust what your body was telling you. Whatever was unfolding right now in this quadrant of nowhere must be real, or else nothing was. He’d deal with the impossibility of it all later.

Instinctively, Ben edged toward a shadow behind a boulder a few feet to his left, his right hand drifting down to the SIG P226 pistol strapped to his thigh. He sensed, though, that if this were to turn into a shooting match, he was probably outgunned.

Seconds passed. A minute.

No frame of reference for how to act. No training exercise had prepared him. This felt like a surreal video game, but with no indicators pointing to the next objective. He was hiding behind a rock, looking at a machine from another planet, and had no idea what to do next.

Just as he was about to inch out, the silver ship hissed and a door opened. Or, rather, it melted out of the hull of the ship, like mercury, changing shape, flowing into the form of a ramp. A moment later, a figure emerged. Ben stretched to see. The flames on the other side of the craft made it hard to make out details, but the creature looked human enough, with two arms, legs, and a head. It moved lightly, with a glowing cable or stripe of some kind extending down its left arm from roughly the elbow to the hand. In its hand, attached to the glowing cable, the creature held a device about the size of a small flashlight.

Gun.

Ben leaned back into the shadow, only his left eye exposed. A tingle of familiarity coursed through his body. A gun was something he could understand, even if nothing else here made sense.

The figure either didn’t notice or didn’t care that Ben was there. It turned right toward the crash site, hopped off the side of the ramp the last foot or so to the ground, and climbed down into the gully where the first ship had died. The creature disappeared into the maelstrom.

Ben breathed.

Rocks crunched behind him.

He spun, pistol in hand.

Another creature lay sprawled against the stone. It was nothing like the first. This seven-foot figure was, by all appearances, a grasshopper that had drunk the growth potion from Alice in Wonderland. A sprawl of legs and arms covered in a green-brown exoskeleton, each ending in talons and hooks. A long torso, or thorax, at the top of which was a small head with bulbous eyes, two antennas, and a pair of clicking mandibles for a mouth. Whatever flimsy grasp on the situation Ben had started to develop instantly came loose.

The creature was clearly dying. Two of its four legs had been torn off at the “knees,” and two gaping holes in its side pumped out green fluid. The creature wheezed. A raspy, rattling sound clattered from its mouth.

Ben held his gun and his gaze steady on the crumpled figure. The creature attempted to rise. The arms and legs fought for purchase, yet failed, collapsing back. It stared up at Ben. The mandibles opened as if to speak, but made only an unintelligible snapping sound and spat out more of the green ooze.

One skeletal arm lifted off the ground and beckoned Ben forward. Hesitating, he clenched his weapon, feeling the sweat running again down his body, the heat from the crash fire mingling with the frosty air.

There was no other human within at least 30 miles. That’s why he was here. It was a place to settle his thoughts and rebuild his shattered body. He hadn’t spoken to another human in weeks, living out of a tent, catching small prey, learning to shoot again, and trying not to think of a future beyond the next dawn. The wandering coyote had been his closest thing to a companion. Under the sun and the moon, Ben had left behind the rest of the world and it had been happy to return the favor. He’d brought a cellphone with a solar charger, but it was kept off and he’d quickly forgotten about the device. All had collapsed down into a black hole, the solitary man slipping over the event horizon, the gnawing pain in his leg the only tether to the past.

But for all that had been lost, Ben had gained some clarity. He thought he might spend the rest of his life in this desert, a prophet without a gospel. There was life here. It was hard land, but not barren. There was water in the rocks if you knew how to call it forth, and food if you knew how to hunt. Ben had given enough to the world. He had bled on almost every continent, sometimes nearly to death. Certainly many of his friends, too many, had bled out on those alien, enemy wastelands.

Out here, though, now, on this frigid patch of dirt that had been ancient when humans were learning to walk, this shattered creature on the ground was going to be a problem that could not be ignored. Ben sensed that everything was about to change, for everyone, regardless of whether he lived through the next few seconds. He tensed, then relaxed.

“Aw, hell,” he whispered, and bent forward.

The wounded creature struck with impossible speed, a last gasp that was almost imperceptible to the human eye. One claw slapped the gun from Ben’s hand, snapping several bones in his wrist like toothpicks, while another drove a spike into his right thigh. Ben looked down, stunned at the lightning attack. His right hand flopped uselessly, but that was the least of his concerns. The object jutting from his leg was the bigger issue.

About the size of a test tube, the silver cylinder was buried so deep that it had scraped bone. The exposed end of the object sank down. It was apparently some sort of plunger on a syringe, and Ben felt a liquid injection course through his leg muscle. The pain came like flood water breaking the banks, quickly followed by a second surge of rage.

Ben ripped the object from his leg with his left hand and hurled it into the darkness—along with a stream of his own blood—and with a single motion pulled his knife from the scabbard. The six-inch blade slammed down. No need. Even as the knife crunched into the chest of the insect creature, Ben could tell it was already dead or unconscious. The blow to his leg had been its last act.

Ben sagged against the boulder, knife abandoned and the devastation in his right leg now impossible to ignore. The light was fading as the fire seemed to be subsiding, concealing the wound, but the leg was all but useless. Raw agony was spreading slowly from the site, enough to make Ben gasp. Tendrils of flame seemed to be licking his nerves, radiating out.

The ravaged muscles quivered, then spasmed. He fell to the desert floor, his breath shoved from his lungs as he landed on his back.

The first creature walked around the boulder. It still had the gun.

Up close, Ben could see it was about six feet tall, with gray skin, a hairless head, and wide, thin eyes, but was otherwise remarkably human-looking. It wore black pants and a long-sleeve shirt, with a glimmer of silver lines running diagonally across the right breast. The silver lines blinked at a regular pace.

Not glancing at Ben, the humanoid creature aimed and fired its weapon at the insect creature. A burst of gold light flashed from the barrel and the insect creature’s head disintegrated. A cremated puff floated away on a slight breeze. Now the humanoid creature turned toward Ben.

Bleeding, paralyzed, defeated, Ben couldn’t move. He was back on the beach near Karachi. In a daze, he looked around for his shattered friends, and for a moment he thought he saw them, looking silently into his eyes. Then the vision passed and the dead disappeared.

The creature bent down, grabbed Ben by the neck with its free right hand, and lifted him to his feet as casually as a child picking a dandelion. The cold grasp was almost a relief against the fever flooding Ben’s body. The creature, the alien, stared into his face, turning it this way and that, peering into his eyes. The creature then glanced around, down at the ground, searching. Whatever it was looking for, it didn’t find it. The creature looked back at Ben and flicked his 210-pound body 30 feet through the air.

The alien was already heading off into the darkness as Ben crashed into a pile of rocks. The edge of a large stone met his head, and a cascade of stars swarmed his vision, blocking out their real-life counterparts overhead.

No matter. The sensation migrating from the injection site in his leg now commanded all of Ben’s attention. The pain had transformed into something much more foreign. It felt like spiders were crawling up his veins, not just under his skin but deep inside his body. A snippet of a childhood nursery rhyme flitted through his brain: It wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

An odd stretching and pulling sensation spread from inside the muscle, like knitting. Ben writhed, the foreign substance unfurling across his body. Convulsions ripped through him, and the muscles thrummed like guitar strings tuned to their breaking point. Whatever had been in the syringe, it was now seeping through his arteries and capillaries, like liquid metal, down into his cells and DNA. His arms and legs thrashed and his back arched off the desert floor.

Pinpoints of light exploded across Ben’s vision, like fireworks in his brain. Green and blue, the scattered illumination quickly settled on the profiles of the rocks and mountains and flickering flames in his field of view. The lights coalesced into sharp outlines, perfectly marking the shapes and locations and features of landmarks that had moments ago been obscured in darkness. Then the contours were filled in and the rocks became fully visible, the starlight amplified a thousandfold.

He could see in the dark. Some 400 feet away, a striped scorpion scuttled out of its hole, and Ben could see the ridges running down the length of its back, even the coarse hairs coating its body and stinger. He could see them in the night, from a distance that even during the noonday sun would have required powerful binoculars and an inhumanly steady hand.

More than that, the digital outlines began spitting out odd, indecipherable text . . . alien script, which in moments resolved into English. There was data, reams of information about everything from the composition of the smoke drifting into the night—carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride, an anarchist’s cookbook of chemicals—to the weight and height of the rocks and shrubs that stretched out into the desert, to the distance of the stars and galaxies in the sky. The scorpion was a Hadrurus arizonensis. The data rushed in, an avalanche of information that no human mind could have wrestled down in the brief seconds in which it flashed across his vision.

As the deluge mounted, Ben could feel his mind expanding. The data vanished from before his eyes almost as quickly as it appeared, shuttled off to new warehouses in his brain. The perceptive explosion filled his brain and threatened to overflow. All his senses were flooded. He could hear the coyote running, now more than a mile distant, and he could almost taste the dirt rubbing against his palms and the blood drying on his brow.

The wounds on his body were closing, binding, healing, expunging grit and pebbles when necessary. He watched as the shrapnel in his arm, his Pakistani souvenir, poked up through the skin on his bicep, popped out, and fell to the ground. It left no exit wound. His leg, his mangled, doomed right leg, was healing, binding itself together at a supernatural rate, while the freshly broken bones in his wrist were pulled back in place and mended. The pain lessened, then stopped. With control returning to his limbs, Ben sat up and yanked up his pant leg. The feeble light from the fire didn’t illuminate much of anything, so his new eyes found other sources. Starlight and moonlight was amplified. Now it looked like late afternoon. And what he could see was a miracle.

The deeply scarred and gouged flesh running down his calf was now coated in a lattice of what looked to be thick ropes of silver, almost like silk from a gargantuan spider. The quarter-inch-thick tendrils glistened and pulsed. They spread across the wound, welding together new muscle and ligaments and skin. The silver strings now spread across Ben’s body, like chain mail. The lines then dissolved into a single sheen and melted down into the skin. The material didn’t disappear completely, though, leaving the skin a vague shade of gray. Ben stood up, leaning gingerly on his right leg. No pain.

Not only was the pain gone, but he had an almost literal spring in his step. He bounced easily off the desert grit.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

He clenched and unclenched his hands, then turned them over, outlined in the firelight. A vague awareness of his new capabilities flickered across his mind. With a quick thought, his hands vanished, and he could now see the flames clearly through the space where his flesh had once been. The sleeves still hung in the air, but the hand was almost invisible, revealing just the faintest silhouette.

Whatever technology the insect alien had injected let him bend light around his body, rather than block and reflect it. Ben clasped his invisible hands together to feel the physical sensation and assure himself they were actually still there. Despite his heightened sense, it was hard to believe any of this was real.

With a second thought, Ben turned his entire body invisible. Another mental command and he could see in infrared, his body’s heat signature exposed in the desert chill, a small blob against the hotter fire of the crash off in the gulch. One last command, and Ben felt his body grow cold, his pulse slow. He disappeared from his own infrared eyes, an invisible iceman.

He snapped back, his vision returning to the visible spectrum, deactivating the light bend system. Whatever was now inside his body driving these changes must be some form of nanotechnology, computers and machines at a molecular scale, paired intimately with his nerves and cells.

Ben wasn’t an engineer, but he knew that no one on earth was close to creating the technology now embedded in his flesh. Hell, he thought, I might be the most valuable thing on the planet right now. He looked down at the dead insect creature. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been attacking him. It had been upgrading him, arming him. Arming him against . . .

A soft step in the sand jarred Ben from his thoughts.

The other one was still out there.

His new senses tingled with the slight but steady stream of radio signals that fell even in places as remote as the New Mexican desert. Television and communication satellites orbiting the Earth, a commercial jet cruising at 32,000 feet. A much more intense storm of data swirled around the other alien, an encrypted cloud some 100 feet distant that was wirelessly tethered to the creature’s ship. And the creature was coming back.

Ben wondered if he’d become a wireless beacon himself, if the humanoid creature had sensed his transformation and was returning for the kill. It must have been looking for the alien’s exotic serum, hoping to find it still in the syringe. It probably hadn’t taken long to find the empty vial, though. And if Ben’s body was now blasting radio signals out into the night, it would be obvious where the contents had gone.

Ben’s pistol was lost in the jumble of rocks and scrubs, the cold metal invisible even to his enhanced vision. His knife was still buried in the chest of the insect alien, but he left it there. This was about to turn into a shootout, and a blade would be about as effective as harsh language. If he was a warrior again, he needed a real weapon.

The other ship.

Ben spun and sprinted. The silver dart was about 50 meters away. Before the leg injury, he guessed he could probably have covered that distance in seven or eight seconds. Not world record speed, but faster than the average bear.

He felt his new muscles tense and explode. His feet flew, nanomachines in his blood delivering oxygen with inhuman efficiency, the reinforced tendons and ligaments and muscles unleashing torque that would have shredded any other man’s body. He covered the distance in less than two seconds. Stunned at his own speed, he nearly sprinted past the gleaming craft, skidding to a stop.

Up the ramp, into the gloomy interior. The perfect dark was momentarily disorienting . . . until his electronic eyes came to life, automatically searching for a connection to the ship’s network. Three horizontal blue lights appeared, and it took him a moment to realize they were only digital projections on his eyeballs, a sort of virtual reality display. The three lines were answered by three dots that appeared on the wall of the ship, real lights illuminating the interior of the vessel. Then the entire ship awoke in a symphony of light, instrument panels firing up and a seat rising up from the floor. A display resolved into a 360-degree exterior view of the desert. Ben sensed that, given just a minute or two, he could connect to all the ship’s system and take full control. But he had seconds, not minutes. The alien, a few hundred meters away, was now sprinting in his direction.

In a blink, Ben searched the ship’s inventory, and a panel slid open by the entrance ramp to reveal a weapon locker. One slot was empty, presumably missing the gun the alien had taken when he exited the craft. The second slot held a small black pistol that seemed to be only a grip and a barrel, without an obvious trigger. Ben grabbed the device. It, too, automatically activated, lighting up as three tentacles extended from the barrel, back over his right arm. They snaked around his forearm, clamped down, and dozens of small needles punctured his skin, anchoring the gun and establishing a physical connection with his high-tech body.

Ben swung around, mentally scanning the available options on the gun before selecting a large explosive charge. He burst back down the ramp, leaping sideways as he emerged, turning in midair and firing at the feet of the alien as it rounded a jumble of rocks at full sprint. The alien fired at the same time, a thin stream of targeted energy that grazed Ben’s left arm as he tumbled backward. Ben’s shot struck the ground a few feet to the right of the attacker and exploded. The creature was swatted backward in mid-stride, and the shock wave catapulted Ben into the gulch where the other ship had crashed.

His new reflexes saved him from smashing into the rocks, and he landed in a tense crouch, his weapon raised. The wound on his arm was already zippering shut.

The enemy had disappeared into the night. The cloud of radio signals had vanished, apparently shut down. Infrared scanning turned up nothing. Ben leaped a dozen feet out of the bottom of the gulch, landing lightly on a chunk of rock, his hands and feet finding almost invisible purchase. He bounded to another rock, searching the area just beyond the silver ship where his shot had landed. A smoking crater about six feet across was glazed in sand that had melted into glass.

The smoke shimmered for a fraction of a second. Without a thought, he jumped backward as a bolt of energy streaked through the air and destroyed the rock to which he’d been clinging. He came up firing, his gun and eyes communicating directly without interference from his brain. The tiny fractions of a second it took for electrical impulses to travel from retinas to brain to hand would simply have been too slow to survive this encounter.

He was something more than human now. While he had trained for years to make his instincts override conscious thought, biology was still a hard limit. That was no longer the case. The nanomachines buzzing through his cells and nerves had cut Ben’s conscious brain out of the decision loop. A computer in the gun had taken over direct control of his nervous system, creating a priority data flow that left his brain a mere spectator.

I’m not a warrior, I’m a weapon . . . or maybe I’m both.

Ben sensed he could shut down the direct link and forcibly retake control of his body. He wouldn’t survive five seconds in this firefight, but he had the option. Instead, he watched almost from a distance as his body became a self-guided missile. He dodged and spun and fired with the preternatural foresight of a fly sensing a swatter.

The other creature was just as gifted. The two fighters attacked and counterattacked across the desert. Fireballs rose in the night, pencil-thin beams of lethal energy snapped across the landscape, and booms echoed and rolled across the wasteland. The strobe light of battle flickered across the sand and rocks.

Everything was unfolding so quickly that Ben’s thinking, conscious brain could barely keep up. Through the blur he could tell that he was slowly being boxed into a shallow canyon, too deep to jump out of—even with his new athleticism. He had explored this place some days before, dragging his throbbing leg through the narrow path out of sheer bull-headedness, determined not to turn around until he’d reached the impassable end. As painful as that return journey had been, he was currently in a much tougher spot. Having cornered his query in a cul de sac, the other creature could simply lob volleys of high-explosive rounds and either obliterate Ben or bury him under an avalanche of boulders.

In a brief lull, Ben disengaged the gun interface, retaking manual control of his body. He ripped his clothes off, threw them behind a jumble of rocks, dropped on his back, and went cold and invisible. The nanomachines in his body obeyed instantly, throwing his bodily functions into a near comatose state. His field of vision narrowed and darkened. He felt dizzy as blood flow in his body slowed to a trickle. He lay sprawled, his weapon extended, but now as lifeless as the dirt on which it rested. The data stream that had been flowing across his vision for the last 20 minutes dwindled to nothing, a small blinking red light indicating standby mode.

Two explosive rounds streaked over Ben’s head, pummeling the tightening passageway that led into the back of the canyon. Dust and small rubble spattered on his naked body, but he didn’t flinch. His nearly hibernating body wouldn’t allow it.

For a few moments, there was nothing. Silence. Then the creature bounded into view, jumping from rock to rock—an impossible target. It landed a dozen feet in front of Ben, scanning the passage ahead. Wait. Not yet. Move now and not even his new body could save him.

The creature glanced around and seemed to stare directly at Ben.

Then it took two steps forward. Three. Four. It was now parallel with Ben. Six, seven paces . . . past his almost lifeless, invisible body.

The alien raised its arm to fire again into the canyon. Just as it fired, Ben sprang to life, his body and mind roaring into action as his eyes and gun reconnected like iron to a magnet. The creature sensed its mistake and began to turn, its weapon already spraying a wide purple beam.

Damn, it’s fast. But so am I.

Ben fired a shotgun-like blast of incendiary pellets. They streaked outward at twelve times the speed of sound, zigzagging through the air, a cone of destruction that swallowed up the alien even as it shrieked one last radio signal back to its ship. The alien was torn apart, its body nearly vaporized. The boom of the final blast echoed down the canyon and washed back out to the desert like a sonic flash flood.

Ben stood up, surveying the wreckage. Only bits and pieces of the alien remained. Its gun was still intact, though, and still attached to the creature’s severed arm. Ben picked it up, and the tentacles uncoiled from the arm and the gun went dark. He collected his tattered, bloodstained clothes.

A hundred yards away, the silver ship still gleamed in the moonlight, undisturbed by the recent battle.

Clutching the guns and severed arm, Ben headed back toward the landing site. In his mind, he tried to decipher the encoded transmission the alien had sent back to its ship in its last moment. Ben’s upgraded brain had automatically recorded the stream and stored it for analysis even as his body was fighting for its life. Exactly how much of his body was still under his control? Was he a soldier or a puppet? Did he have full control of his own body or was he now some kind of . . . drone? Or a vessel for delivering a payload he couldn’t understand? Ben could sense new clouds of data hovering at the back of his mind, alien information encoded bit by bit in the robotic dust inside his body. A problem for later, though.

For now, he felt the billions of tiny computers embedded in his body tune their combined processing power to unraveling the encryption on his enemy’s last transmission. He continued back toward the ship and was now about 50 yards away. The ship had forwarded the transmission on to an unknown destination. Back home, presumably. The ship was now waiting for a reply. A small, spiky antenna had sprouted from the spine of the ship, and Ben’s new internal radio detected an open channel. A squirming feeling in his gut, a familiar feeling in this unfamiliar body, a vague intuition of danger, made him stop.

Several things happened all at once.

Ben’s network of nanobots cracked the encryption on the outgoing message—//Mission failed. Voyager destroyed but payload delivered. Human integration complete.//—Just as a reply arrived. //Self-destruct. We are coming.//

Tendrils of electricity thrust out into the night from the silver vessel, snapping and cracking like Lucifer’s lash. The writhing bolts extended a hundred feet in every direction, then folded back in on themselves, forming a dazzling white cocoon around the ship. An electric hum filled the air, and rose to a whine. The sound and vibration seeped into Ben’s body.

The ground and air, in a circle around the craft, were sucked inwards, as if the machine had become a black hole, but of the fiercest white. Ben, too, was tugged toward the roiling energy. The tug became a yank and his heels cut furrows in the dirt. He clutched a jagged boulder, the edges digging deep into his new skin. He felt the rock begin to vibrate, answering the screaming call of whatever it was that now coursed around the ship. He felt as if every cell was being summoned to the fury. Smaller rocks and other debris flew toward the pulsing ball and vaporized on contact. Just when Ben thought his anchor would be ripped from the ground and catapult him into the howling vortex, the ship exploded.

It was a massive, angry detonation, and it briefly lit up the valley with a midnight sunrise. The shockwave expanded, lifting Ben off his feet and hurtling him hundreds of feet back into the desert. Again, his new reflexes saved him from splattering against the ground. He dodged a storm of debris, boulders, while being pelted with smaller pebbles and rocks. He looked up just in time to avoid one last projectile, the mangled engine block of his own pickup truck, as it plummeted from the sky and crashed to the ground, disintegrating in a cloud of rust.

Ben stood up, wiping the grime from his brow as the last echoes reverberated and faded into the darkness. The desert was scraped clean 200 meters in every direction from ground zero of the explosion. Nothing remained of the ships, aliens, or battlefield to indicate what had happened.

Nothing but the two silver guns and the severed arm in Ben’s hand.

“Well, and me,” he said out loud. He looked from horizon to horizon with his new eyes. He was still alone. So he’d be walking back to the world, but now with two good legs.

He dug in his pocket and fished out his battered cigar. The click of a Zippo. He chewed the cigar around his mouth, savoring the smell, noting absently how his new nano companions eliminated the toxic elements from his lungs as soon as they arrived, and he wondered what the hell he’d gotten himself into. Prophet or not, he now had his gospel.

Time to head back to civilization and preach. So he started walking.