Vice Admiral Charles Hughes walked as steadily as his instincts would allow. His subconscious mind was merely human, for now, and what it sensed around him was decidedly not. It was the endless abyss-like shadow that seemed to permeate everything around him. It was like a visible stench. It infused every shape and caused the ground to chill his bones even through his uniform boots.

The air around him felt heavy, as if carrying a presence he couldn’t sense or see, but still knew was there. The humidity was stuffy and oppressive, even though the temperature was close to freezing.

Changes were gradually taking place in the Admiral’s physical appearance. What he once thought were simple pigments for his face turned out to be powerful chemical markers. They were infecting his body, burrowing deeper and deeper through the very protoplasm of his cells. Changing him. Altering his thinking. Twisting his thoughts and amplifying them with raw, uncontrollable power.

The path he followed along the Ithis membrane resembled a towering, shadow-infused intestine. Gargantuan oval-shaped structures soared above, outraging the Admiral’s sense of size and physics. They pierced the murky cloud-blemished sky overhead like primitive weapons. The oval structures were arranged in a long tunnel that seemed to go on for miles in both directions. He was but a speck against the path he was following.

Then there was the seethe. It was the only word Hughes could come up with for it. Every quarter-hour or so, there would be a subsonic release of energy across the entire membrane. It was very much like a muscle spasm, if muscles were the size of a small city. Hughes suspected everything around him was somehow alive, and that he was little more than a parasite allowed to crawl about inside it.

The insect-like creatures around him seemed to draw great pleasure and energy from each spasm. Even the humanoids serving the Ithis claimed it was at those times they could get a better sense of things. For the Admiral, it was like being injected with dangerous levels of adrenaline. His heart would race. He would break out in alternately hot and cold sweats. His fingers would ache. It made him crave a release of the sudden energy. The one and only time it happened with a female humanoid nearby ended with Hughes barely stopping himself from attacking her with his teeth. That was the last time he remembered having a clearly rational thought.

For days after that, he hid himself away and trembled in the wet putrid organic sack where he slept unclothed. The savagery he saved the young female from experiencing at his hands turned inward, slashing and cutting.

Alien minds were invading his, and they were gradually turning him into a ruthless killing machine.

A killing machine with a new enemy.

Something drew him forward. He had long since lost track of time measured by human standards. The crude idea of a planet orbiting a star being used as a measure of anything seemed like a child’s toy. The heights to which his mind could now reach were unimaginable to mankind. There were concepts at work nearby he knew would so overwhelm his relatively tiny capacity for understanding his body would simply burn out like an overloaded fuse. He avoided reaching that far with his imagination in much the same way feral animals avoided fire.

Communicating with Jason Hunter had been a chore. By now, his new instincts should have driven him to simply deliver cold ultimatums and then execute them. But his confrontation with Hunter was before, when he still recognized his mind. For all he knew, he had been walking for days. He no longer ate because his body rejected food. It was beginning to absorb water from the air around him. The pain of the endless hunger made him feel like his blood was on fire.

And still he somehow had the energy to walk. Somewhere in the distance, perhaps at the end of the membrane, if there was such a thing, he could feel an enigmatic presence. He knew it was there he would find the overmind responsible for the millions of voices only he could hear. He knew crushing the last of his humanity would be nothing to them.

He also knew they would inform him now was the time to attack.