Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach by Eric Brown

screen showed a succession of creatures: some were humanoid, empurpled and featureless – like unfinished clay models of the human form – while others were vast, bloated, and vaguely whale-like. Some were thin and gargoylish, and others as squat and repulsive as giant toads.
    “And they’re all the Weird?” she asked.
    “All,” he said. “They go through stages, change from one form to the next as they... individually evolve.”
    She looked at him. “So where are they from? Which planet? As I see it, we go in, bomb the fuck out of their world, and job done.”
    “That’s just the problem, Janaker. They’re from no single planet.”
    “I don’t get it. They have to be. Where the hell else can they be from?”
    “They’re from the realm, the dimension, that underpins our reality...”
    “The void? You’re saying that these ugly bastards inhabit the void ?”
    She was about to ask why humanity had never come across them before, but Gorley forestalled her.
    “Not the void,” he said. “They’re from beyond the void.”
    She sat back and stared at him. “This all sounds kind of screwy to me, Gorley. How do you know all this?”
    “Because, six months ago I ventured with a team of marines through Vetch space to the Devil’s Nebula. We discovered the world where these creatures first manifested themselves. They... they erupted into our reality through a manufactured portal and enslaved a human colony there.”
    “I didn’t know there was a human colony in the Devil’s Nebula.”
    “Well, you learn something every day, Janaker. I saw these creatures at first hand. I saw their portal... and I saw the human beings they’d enslaved.”
    “But if the portal is all the way across Vetch territory...” she began.
    “Janaker,” he said, “it appears that they now have the ability, the wherewithal, to open portals at random across the Expansion.”
    “So we find where they’ve opened these portals and blast the holy shit out of them.”
    His steely stare was all the more intimidating because it was accompanied by a withering silence. “What the fuck, to employ your favoured vernacular, do you think we’ve been trying to do on Rocastle, Woczjar and Cassandra?”
    She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came to mind.
    “We’ve thrown everything at these portals – neutron bombs, hydrogen missiles... Between you and me, we’ve reduced Rocastle to rubble – it’s nothing more than an asteroid a tenth the size of what it was, and the portal is still functioning.”
    “And the... Weird?”
    “They are still sending through their... creatures, which have the ability to exist perfectly well in the vacuum of deep space. We’re hard pressed to destroy these as they emerge.”
    She thought about it. “So... these Weird... what is it exactly they want from us? Territory, presumably?”
    “They want us , Janaker. They want to absorb us, our knowledge, our culture. They aren’t an enemy in the accepted sense of the world. They aren’t... evil, exactly, because to be evil they must have some understanding of us as creatures in our own right.”
    Her throat was dry. “And they don’t?”
    “The Weird are... is ... a hive mind. They do not see us as sentient individuals. Rather, they see the human race – and the Vetch race, too – as the sum total of our intellectual culture. It’s this that they want to assimilate, absorb, understand. And to do this they ingest us as individuals and see no wrong in doing so.”
    “You paint,” she said, “a charming picture of these creatures.”
    “I can assure you my words are nothing compared to the reality of the Weird I witnessed in the Devil’s Nebula.”
    She was about to ask where she featured in all of this, but Gorley went on, “However, their portals are not the immediate danger.”
    “They’re not?”
    He told her that a century ago the Weird enslaved an alien race in the Devil’s Nebula – it was from this race that they learned how