“You have to do it, Khadam.”

“I know. It’s just harder than I thought it would be.”

Finder was floating behind her, his face screen and the tiny cameras peeking over her shoulder. Together, they watched Khadam’s screen, where the numbers climbed into the millions.

Her hedrons were harvesting the dunes. Digging deep into the sand, feeding minerals into their extractors, synthesizing new compounds, and printing new copies of themselves. It was challenging to keep track of them all now, so she created a few control groups and used those as eyes, flying high above the rest.

The far deserts were churning with dust, as her hedrons ate at the raw resources of this nameless world. She kept a few other eyes in the atmosphere above the Gate Walker, so she could watch the Hive City that grew over it.

So far, her drones had only encountered a few Nomad scouting parties. Those insectoid people and their half-breed beasts had eaten or crushed a few hundred of her machines, but her flocks easily overwhelmed them. They attached themselves to the nomad scouts, hundreds of polygonal shapes biting into the dry exoskeletons and dissolving the pulpy flesh underneath.

At first, she felt vindicated, watching the nomads shiver and die with their bodies covered in hedrons. But after the first brutal death (the nomad had been eaten alive), Khadam wished she had a better way to do this. A cleaner way.

When the hedrons finished, there was nothing left of the scouts’ bodies. And then, the hedrons simply floated back to the sands. Burying themselves in the dunes, consuming and reproducing again and again.

“You have more than enough now,” Finder insisted. “There’s no reason to wait any longer.”

“It doesn’t feel good.”

“Is there another way?”

“There’s always another way,” Khadam said. But that would mean changing her course. Which could take days, if she was lucky.

Maybe that was fine. But the Grid was offline, and she had no idea what was going on out in the rest of the universe.

What did the other scars look like?

What systems had been torn open already? Or had it progressed to galaxies, already?

Her dreams were different than she remembered. The vision had grown more solid. More… specific, in ways she couldn’t understand. Before she had entered cryosleep, it had only been humans in her dreams. Now, when she slept, she dreamed of alien worlds, and alien peoples.

Ravaged by the change.

“You have to do it, Khadam.”

“I know.”

The protocol was waiting. And the longer she stayed on this planet, the worse her chances would become. The more likely she would be found, before she had a chance to prepare herself.

The Herald was out there, somewhere.

Maybe it was still forming. Or maybe, it had already begun its sweep across the stars. Invoking the change.

Either way, Khadam had to be strong enough to stop it. To hold it back. And, if possible, destroy it.

This had always been the plan, even before Khadam joined Rodeiro’s clan. That was why she joined Rodeiro, because he had the resources and - unlike so many others - the sheer will to try anything, no matter how insane. No matter how the rest of humanity felt.

No matter how much Humanity tore itself to pieces.

Go, Khadam, and hide. I will stay here, and try to make the way ready. I will do what I can.

So that when she awoke, there would be nothing to stand in her way.

Nothing, except escaping this damned planet.

To do that, she needed a gate, full of light. And since all the light was gone, and the Grid was offline, she would need an extraction engine. Fortunately, there was a massive and tectonically stable planet beneath her feet.

“Why do you hesitate?” Finder said over her shoulder. He had been pushing her to start the process for hours. But each time she had come close to initiating the first step, she pulled herself back.

“Because, they’re living beings,” she snapped, “An entire species! Do you understand that? You’re asking me to kill an entire species. Just like that.”

“They want to kill you, don’t they?” Finder said. “Besides, they’re going to die anyway.”

He was right. If she was going to build an extraction engine, the whole planet would become uninhabitable. And in many ways, it was already uninhabitable. What little life she had seen here was desperate.

Most likely, the nomads were an escaped clutch from some biologist’s experiment. One more of their ill-fated attempts to restore the human genome. To fix the birthing problem. Some rapid-evolving genetic material that the biologists loved to throw around, and there it grows. Evolving into a sentient species, almost capable of building a civilization.

But this planet was not made to sustain life, indefinitely. There were too many biological filters here.

Still. She could not make herself do it.

“They’re like children,” she said. “They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what I am. They don’t know anything and nobody gave them a choice.”

“It must be done!” His voice crackled with the emphasis.

He was right. Of course, he was. And before she could hesitate any longer, she impulsed the command to the millions of hedrons. Millions of them out in the deserts, stopped what they were doing.

And listened to her project one more command:

Begin.

***

The Queen of Almost Everything felt a shift in the sands. Not the normal shifting of the dunes, being pushed out into the ocean by the winds. Nor like the shifting of the waves, spitting the dunes back out.

This was different. A tremble, that began in the air.

She felt it, not in her own body buried deep beneath the ground, but through the antennae of her subjects, and the sensitive hairs on their legs.

The Queen tore her attention away from the Godshell - she had been watching it, nonstop, for weeks. Waiting for that unholy deity to re-emerge. To open the Godshell once more, so that she might send her subjects in, and rip it out.

But this shift was more pressing. The Queen flung her attention across the sands, settling her gaze in the minds of her farthest-ranging subjects.

The scouts.

Only, she could not find them.

That did not make sense. Where had they all gone?

The Queen reigned in her senses, feeling for her other subjects. Thousands of them, crawling through the hives. Tending to the larvae, to the farms and the dew collectors. Repairing patches and cracks in the spires.

The Queen selected one subject who was climbing up to the top of a spire, clutching fresh gobs of mudsand in its mouth. A builder. Its eyes were not the sharpest, but they would service for now.

She looked out upon her Queendom from the builder’s eyes. Below, the other spires and the mounds and hills. In the distance, the dunes, the coast, and the old spires that her mothers and their mothers, and all their subjects, had once inhabited.

Beyond, there was a storm approaching. Dark clouds coming along the horizon. Good, she thought. The farms need the rain. It has been too long. The farms were always in need of water, that was just the way. But as long as she controlled her subjects, and kept their numbers to a minimum, the Hive would survive. That was why she was Queen.

She held the builder’s head steady. Odd. Those storm clouds were moving fast. And low. It was starting to look more like a wall, than a storm front.

Bleak, and gray, the wall stretched from the tops of the dunes to the bottom of the sky, churning up mountains of sand as it rushed towards her hive. She had never seen a storm like this before.

The Queen of Almost Everything dug through the ancestor’s memories, to see if she could find anything similar. There had been great storms before. But they had been slow, and wide. Nothing like this.

But her walls were strong. Probably, the ones in direst need of repair would crumble. But the Hive would withstand.

Still, it was wise to recall her subjects, to push them deep underground, in case the rain lashed the mudwalls and melted the highest spires into-

It’s not rain. The builder’s eyes focused more carefully.

Rain clouds were large, and few in number. This was many things, small and countless.

Clouds were soft, sometimes white, sometimes dark. These… were all the same color. All the same shining gray texture, molded into the same, polygonal shape.

Each one, no larger than a builder’s claw.

They were perfectly spaced apart. As if they were arranged. Floating - no, flying - towards her Hive.

She sent up the alarm. Commanded all of her subjects to return underground immediately.

And just as the builder began to climb down the spire, the wall crashed upon him, smashing him against the hard-packed mudsand. Hundreds of those shapes clung to the builder, biting into his exoskeleton. They knocked it loose from the spire. The builder was dead before he hit the ground.

There was a snapping sensation as the Queen was catapulted back into her own mind. Disoriented, she spent a few seconds gathering her thoughts. Trying to understand what had just happened.

A sound, a crushing hum, was vibrating far overhead. Reaching down here, down all the way into her dark, cramped burrow. She could hear the sound as millions of those spheres swarmed over her Hive. Smashing into the walls. Into her subjects.

Destroy them! She commanded her subjects. Kill them!

She could feel the battle rage as they lashed out. Crushing one sphere, only to have fifty more takes it place. And then, she could feel their pain.

Something crumbled overhead, raining dust and sand upon her body. A brilliant slash of light blinded her, as the mud ceiling of her chamber was suddenly torn open. The light from the sun burned on her pale, milky exoskeleton. It had been decades since she’d last seen that light with her own eyes.

The Queen of Almost Everything could only scream as the humming swarm descended on her.

Devouring her alive.

***

Khadam couldn’t look away. Her arms were crossed over her chest, her mouth pressed together in a tight, grim line.

It was working, exactly as she’d hoped it would.

Then why do I feel so awful?

Her hedrons were disassembling the Hive. Chewing through the sand spires from the top, down. Cleaning away every last spec of sand and flesh. There were more nomads than she thought there would be. Tens of thousands of them, lurking underground.

And when it was done, she could not stop staring at the screen. A few of the spires had been constructed on top of the Gate Walker’s exhaust ports, and the ship’s fumes were finally released into the air.

The nomads had been feeding off of it.

“Their whole civilization existed only because of our tech,” Khadam said. “And now, it dies, because of our tech.”

“Does it hurt?” Finder asked.

She looked at Finder. What a strange question, she thought, for a machine. Who programmed his personality?

“I wish I didn’t have to kill them. I wish I could have stopped this.”

Finder rotated slowly in the air, aiming his screen directly at her. “You could have.”

Khadam frowned. “You were just telling me to do this. I thought you agreed with me, Finder.”

Finder says nothing.

“What’s wrong with you?” Khadam asked. “It’s your core, isn’t it. Come here. Let me take a look.”

“No.” he said.

“No?”

It was the second time he’d denied her, since he’d found her in the desert. She had ignored it last time, because it was so minor. But Khadam had never heard of a machine making an outright refusal…

She was about to press the issue further, when she felt something in the back of her mind.

A gentle ping sound. Bright, and beautiful.

It was coming from her clasp, the first device she had made from the printers. Khadam gave one last look at Finder, who was gently floating there. His screen, blank.

Then, she summoned the notification. A message was waiting for her.

It was from the Grid.

Her breath caught in her throat.

The old Grid, the first one that humanity had set up, before they fractured and went their separate ways.

As far as she knew, the old Grid couldn’t turn itself on. Which meant…

There’s someone else out there.

She impulsed her clasp to hook into the signal, just for a moment. And braced herself.

What if it’s another glitch? What if the clasp was printed wrong? What if-

A message popped into her mind. Glowing. Waiting for her to open it.

And when she did, a voice poured into her mind. Surprisingly young, but still undeniably human.

“If you can hear me,” he said. “My name is Poire, and I am here.”