No Hero Read Online Free PDF Page B

This thing in the sky, that is the sky. It is death pure and implacable. For it is hunger and I, even small insignificant I, am food, and I must be consumed. I must be. I must fill the vast void of its hunger. Everything must. Even the heat of this place has been consumed. It is death and it comes on.
    I barely realize I am on my hands and knees. I barely realize the paper is retreating, blowing away, rearranging itself neatly, page after page lying down to rest between leather covers.
    Shaw closes the book. Tears and snot dribble from my face. They puddle on the bare concrete floor beneath me.
    “They are called the Feeders,” Shaw says. “The Progeny are their children, and they are bringing them here.”

4
    Shaw helps me back into my wheelchair. I feel like a puppy someone just kicked. Shaky in a way I haven’t been since I was four and couldn’t find my mother in a department store.
    “Others have done worse,” she tells me. And there’s a kindness in that, but it’s going to take significantly more to reassure me everything’s all right on the Western Front.
    Because everything isn’t all right. That’s the whole point of this, I begin to realize. You don’t have secret military intelligence departments to look after things that are just peachy on their own. They put things together because—
    “The Feeders are coming.” Shaw repeats the fact. “It’s important you understand that.”
    Understand? I can barely comprehend. She’s trying to expand my mind, but I think my mind’s rubber might have perished. It won’t stretch that far.
    “The Feeders are the other reason for Fermi’s paradox. Just as we know of the multiple realities, so have other races known. But those other races are gone. Are dead. They have been consumed. The Feeders have consumed everyone and everything capable of communicating with us. And they intend to do the same here.”
    “Why?” I ask. “Why here?”
    Shaw shakes her head. “There is no why that we’d understand, Detective. They are aliens. Their thoughts, motives, are alien. We are simply a place where their spawn, the Progeny, landed. They send them out like spores. At least that’s how we understand it. Blast them out into new realities without thought or reason. The Progeny that landed here found Earth fertile ground. Now they seek to draw their parents to them. To feed us all to them.”
    Oh God. Oh bollocks. That’s enough. Staring into the future is like staring at that unrelenting paperscape sky.
    “However,” Shaw says, “that does not mean we intend to go down without a fight.”
    There’s steel in her voice. Flint and iron. A little bit of bombast to be sure, but to be honest I could use a little jingoism right here, right now. Fighting back. Making a stand. That feels like the right response, like what should be done. I attempt to make my jaw as steely as possible, but I fear all I’ve done is give myself an underbite.
    “The Progeny are here for a reason, Detective.” Shaw talks with the same sense of efficiency, the same economy of words as she has since picking me up at the hospital. “The Feeders have not sent their children here simply as a homing beacon.
    “The barriers between realities are not as easily broken as suggested by the book. One does not simply fumble through, like a child wandering into a magical wardrobe. It is a difficult process. We are on one side of a locked door, the Feeders upon the other. The Progeny are here to pick the lock. We, MI37, are here to stop them.”
    I nod. This is the hard sell, part of me knows that, but still... what am I supposed to do? Shrug and say it’s not my problem?
    “Stopping them sounds good,” I say.
    Suddenly Shaw smiles. Something warm and wide, and unexpected. “Yes,” she says, “Yes it does. Now, come with me, Detective. There are a few more things I want to show you.”
    She grips the back of my wheelchair and we head out of the small bare room with its opulent horrors. I’m