A tremendous wave of light burst from the terraformer, illuminating every surface in the chamber with a strange flatness. Despite the brilliancy, Carrick was not at all blinded. He turned in wonder and saw that flaps had opened all over the Blue Shrike's body, and that what appeared to be camera lenses underneath the flaps were the only dark and unlit objects in the chamber.

A sound like a choir rang from the terraformer, which was rapidly shifting between different three-dimensional shapes—pyramids, dodecahedrons, many-pointed stars—as it rotated rapidly. Though the faces of the terraformer seemed to be solid, not showing the presence of objects behind them, a brilliant sphere of green light pulsed in its center, visible through the faces as though through glass.

Carrick stared at this light once it caught his eye, feeling as though it were trying to speak to him. It was a bizarre and familiar sensation, though he could not remember where he had felt it before. The thing blinked rapidly, as though trying to communicate in code.

Then the flat and all-present light dissipated.

Carrick blinked. Soft grass now covered the entire floor, the walls of the cavern which reached far, far above, and the crumbled ruins of stone buildings where the first strain of humanity had lived upon this planet.

The grass was dull at first, but then slowly began to glow and to drift in a wind Carrick could not feel upon his skin.

The entire chamber had filled with glowing ghostblade.

Carrick took a shaky step forward. The light vanished as he stepped, a ring of darkness pulsing from around his foot like ripples on a pond, before the blades glowed again. These ripples continued as he made his hesitant way toward the Blue Shrike, which had not been covered with the ghostblade as the floor and walls around them had.

The Blue Shrike no longer plumed vapor upward, and all the flaps on its body had collapsed.

Angers gripped the steering apparatus of the craft, his eyes flitting over readings on the display. “I can't believe it,” he muttered. He laughed. “I can't believe it worked. My localspace fuel is full.”

He glanced down toward Carrick. “This is incredible. I’ve never… I didn't realize…”

Though Angers had mentioned he’d dealt with terraformers before, it was clear to Carrick at that moment that Angers was just as in awe of what he’d witnessed as the humble bumpkin of the colony world of Dirt. That was unsettling. Angers wasn’t really as transcendentally civilized as he’d let on.

Carrick tried to speak, but the sudden rush of high-speed aircraft and the blaring sound of a loudspeaker far above drowned his words.

“Get on the ground!” it roared. “Put your hands behind your head! Surrender! You are surrounded!”

At the orders, Angers went rigid and began to shake. Carrick’s heart skipped a beat as he thought Angers was having a seizure.

But then Angers suddenly slammed his fist into something inside the cockpit. The canopy began to close, and as it did, Carrick heard him muttering, “No, no, no, you're not taking it… It's ours now, you're not taking it… You're not hurting me… We saved it, you're not taking our work!” The Blue Shrike rose off the ground on what were clearly antigrav thrusters, ones far more silent and powerful than those Carrick had seen in his life.

The Blue Shrike seemed to have regained all of its power, having drawn it somehow from the terraformer. The craft pivoted, then turned and knifed through the air, back to the surface through the hole which it had created upon entry.

Carrick stayed behind on the ground, looking breathlessly up above. He had to crank his head back all the way, and even then saw only a single helicopter through the gap in the ceiling. He knew there would be other craft, though he could not hear how many over the roar of a thundering jet and the thumping of the chopper.

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What exactly did they expect was here? They gave the order over the speaker as though they expected someone to hear and to understand them, unless they gave it simply for the sake of volume, hoping to scare whomever was there into submission.

The shattering noise of machine gun fire and military-grade plasma torpedoes exploding against something came from above, and though it was what seemed to be mid-morning outside, the unmistakable blue flash of plasma detonation altered the color of the clouds Carrick could only barely see.

The helicopter exploded, and Carrick instinctively crouched as debris came falling toward the hole. Only a bit came through, and Carrick was able to scramble out of the way as part of a blade tore down and fell close to where he had been standing. Carrick took a deep breath, watching ripples of impact spread out in dark rings from the ghostblade.

The grass pulsed again, and now Carrick remembered where he had felt the strange sense of communication the first time. Lines of darkness darted through the ghostblade from Carrick toward the location where the terraformer hovered, and Carrick turned to look up at it.

It was only a cube again, but it had turned one of its faces directly to face Carrick. The green sphere was visible again through it, though once again, the ghostblade and the walls behind the device were invisible.

Well, hello, Carrick thought.

He started. He hadn't thought those words. It was the voice of his own inner self, but the words had come unbidden to him as though they were intrusive thoughts, as though they were the unwelcome and sinister part of the mind that tells a person, when he stands on the edge of a bridge, to jump off, before it is suppressed and shoved away.

Yes, he thought, it's me. I'm the grass; I'm the cube. I'm the light inside it, and now I'm a part of the craft up there. I could be a part of you, too, as I'm already a part of the lieutenant.

“What are you?” Carrick asked. “Angers told me you were a piece of the computer that guided humans in space. He said you can reprogram entire planets. If you can talk to me, and you can talk to him, it can't be true what Angers said that you couldn't communicate with the scientists who caused the Accident. He said you could feel pain, but that you couldn't tell them about it.” His words rang out as a challenge. His head swirled with fear. He was being invaded by a presence far more alien than Angers.

In contrast, the thoughts of the terraformer had no emotion to them. I couldn't talk with them, it said. They weren't the right kind of creature. They hadn't been transformed yet. They hadn't been adapted. My father has adapted the lieutenant. His ancestors were nudged into union with one another to create the strand of humanity most receptive to his whims. He bred them like rats, though his machinations were imperceptible to them. He has created a dark and a twisted strand of humanity, one that cannot withstand my touch without breaking and falling into insanity. You saw it just now. It saddens me. I was not aware of it until I had already touched him.

Carrick could not think while the voice spoke to him. It took over his own thoughts. They felt like his own thoughts, as though they were things he himself believed, though he did not understand their implications or from whence the thoughts had sprung. He shook his head. “Please,” he whispered, “get out of my head. Can't you speak aloud in a normal voice? This isn't right. I'm not you.”

I can't do that, said the terraformer. I don't have a mouth. I am thought, and that is the only way I can communicate. Don't worry, Carrick. As we do this more, you will become much better at discerning which thoughts are yours and which thoughts are me.

There came from above a thunderous noise like nothing Carrick had ever heard. Moments later, the ground shook as titanic impacts rocked the surrounding stone.

You, Carrick, you were shaped into a form capable of receiving me. I did not actively shape your ancestors, but it was inescapable due to the very nature of my being. I transformed this once-desolate ball of death into a bountiful Eden for the sustenance of humanity, and with every passing generation, your ancestors through their eating and drinking and breathing and excrement and mating, through the basic activity of their metabolism and through forming new life from the transmuted fruit of my labor, created the strains of humanity built upon my foundation.

This culminated when those who sought to probe the secrets of their god were transfixed by my anger, changed into the grass which you call ghostblade. These wretches have stood watch and served as my nervous system for many years now, and by taking their bodies into your own, you have primed yourself for my presence.

Terror gripped Carrick’s mind. The scientists who had died in the Accident, aside from those few withered corpses which Carrick had seen previously, had been turned into ghostblade. That was why the plants only appeared in the Wasteland?

And he had made tea out of it.

You must listen carefully, said the terraformer. Angers carries in his ship a virus which seeks to consume me. He is mad, and I believe is already infected with the virus.

You must kill him, Carrick. Kill him and destroy his craft and become god of this world, setting all things right.