Alien Days Anthology

by P P Corcoran

  We are too few to survive if the bounty hunters succeed in penetrating deep into the warren. Our strength is in hardened carapaces and overwhelming numbers, pincers that can snap a limb in two and sharpened forelegs with which to decapitate an enemy. We are the masters of close-combat; but we have no weapons for fighting at a distance, as the humans do.

  And so, we lie in wait, like patient predators, for them to come to us.

  We have been told that the bounty hunters want us to hand over the Synths, which is something we will not do. Our warren-brother, Elliot Gar, has been lost to us already, his lifeless body carried away by the invaders; with no memory molecules to pass his knowledge to the members of the warren, his loss fills us with a profound sadness. Kara Jem and Loren Kol are missing, and we can only hope that they and the greens that were with them have found shelter far from this warren, for we cannot protect them.

  Our warren-sisters, Jessica Lim and Brianna Rei, we sent to the Queens, deep in the warren, where the bounty hunters cannot reach them. Or such is our hope. We think and we plan, and we strategise, but we have also seen the odds, and know that our success is by no means certain.

  And then we hear the crunch of heavy boots on the rocky path, see the flicker of the artificial lamps the bounty hunters carry. The Synths had carried similar lamps when they first came to the warren, before they learned that the glare was uncomfortable for our multi-faceted eyes and abandoned them in favor of the softer glow of phosphorescent plants to light their way. But we expected no such courtesy from the bounty hunters and are not surprised by this.

  The smoky scent of our fallen warren-brothers filters to us now, ahead of the bounty hunters, and we are enraged, fighting against all instincts that cry out for us to jump out early and alert them to our presence. We wait, long, agonizing moments, for our prey.

  They come closer.

  They enter the warren.

  They are cautious, which is wise, shining their lamps down the passage and along the walls, moving forward slowly, not thinking to look above them, not seeing their light reflected in our eyes as we watch them advance.

  They fill the corridor, from entry to the first bend, one bounty hunter for each pair of us, more pressing in from the mouth of the warren.

  As one, we drop from the ceiling, slicing off heads and piercing through their soft, shell-less bodies faster than they can react, then turn to take on their companions, counting on the advantage of close-combat and sharp pincers.

  But they have other weapons we do not expect them to use here – small projectiles pepper our bodies, piercing our shells, gouts of flame wash over us, melting our chitin.

  We fight as long as we can, reducing their numbers by more than half, but it is a losing battle, and soon they have finished us, crushing the last light from our eyes as their boots stomp over us and they move deeper into the warren.

  #

  I am a thousand thousand greens. We are each no larger than the head of one of the human attackers, and by our caste more suited to running errands and delivering messages than fighting battles, yet we will die before we allow them to harm our Queens.

  We swarm, filling the tunnels of the warren and covering the invaders, slicing with sharp forelegs, cutting with pincers, biting with small but powerful mandibles. We drop on them from above, climb the tunnel walls and leap on them as they pass us, pour upward under their feet as they step across downward-branching passages. They peel us from their bodies and throw us into clusters of our kin, stomp on us, cracking our carapaces, smash us into the earth under their heavy boots, and still we come.

  We will defend our warren.

  Other humans come with different weapons, small rock-like objects that explode moments after being thrown into our midst, shattering our shells and blowing our bodies apart, killing many of us in an instant.

  “Just give us the Synths!” the humans cry. They say other things, too, but not in any language we understand.

  But the Synths are our warren-brothers, our sister-friends. Our Queens have named them members of our warren, and it is not our way to give our own over to bounty-hunters.

  We continue to swarm, brushing antennae as we climb over the shattered shells of our fallen. We know the pain of their deaths before we experience the pain of our own.

  #

  I am a Queen of the Callibrini – and I am five Queens and all Queens, from the youngest of our Council to the eldest. I am Val’en and Le’tar and Mi’rel and D’lor.

  And I am Y’reui.

  We stand together on the Council dais, receiving the memories of the greens who have come to us, and experience the flight of the cultivators, the pain of the warriors, the cunning of the golds, and the bravery of the greens who are now all that stand between us and the bounty hunters.

  We know, too, why they are here – that they want the two warren-sisters who stand before us, Jessica Lim and Brianna Rei, and that they are destroying our warren to reach them.

  “Had they come to us in peace,” said Val’en, staring down at Jessica and Brianna, “I might have given you to them, even though you are our sister-friends, for matters that extend beyond the bounds of the warren are of little consequence to me.”

  She paused, rustling her antennae and tapping a razor-clawed foot on the ground.

  “Instead, they chose to kill all in their path, never thinking of what they might have had simply for the asking. And that I will not tolerate.”

  “We cannot drive them out,” said D’lor clicking her pincers nervously as she spoke. I was the youngest of the Queens, but D’lor was a mere decade older. “The fire they carry with them is too powerful.”

  “Then we put it out,” I said. The others turned to me. “We know where they are in the warrens, and can collapse the tunnels on them from above, with no risk of being burned by their flames.”

  Val’en nodded. “It is a good plan.”

  “Until others come,” said D’lor anxiously. “How much of the warren will we collapse?”

  “All of it, if it comes to that,” said Val’en. “We will stop them. And then we will build a new warren.”

  “How can we help?” asked Brianna.

  We all looked at her in surprise. No one ever interrupted the Queens when we were in Council.

  “The bounty hunters are here because of us,” said Brianna. “How can we help you drive them away?”

  “Brianna Rei, you will go with Y’reui,” Val’en said. “Take the smaller tunnels that we cannot and leave the warren from the east.” She held up her foreleg to prevent further interruption. “Jessica Lim, you will go with D’lor, and leave the warren from the north.”

  She turned her attention the two young Queens she had named.

  “You are young, and if you escape, will outlive us all. One of these golds will accompany each of you, together with a dozen greens and browns. If you find any warriors or cultivators, take them with you as well. Establish new warrens, far from this place.”

  Then Val’en came to us and laid the great fronds of her antennae over our own, strands winding around each other, binding us to her.

  Unlike the warren-brothers, who share all their memories whenever their slim, segmented antennae connect, we Queens can choose what memories we wish to share.

  Val’en chose to share everything.

  My legs buckled under the onslaught as hundreds of seasons of memories flooded into my mind – both her own, and the memories passed on to her from previous Queens – together with the wisdom and experience they carried with them.

  Then another brush of antennae, as Le’tar and Mi’rel linked their fronds to ours, adding their memories to those Val’en shared.

  The memories pressed into me, blurring my vision, and I cried out, a single, keening wail. The note rose, twining with Val’en’s and D’lor’s own cries, harmonizing with Le’tar’s and Mi’rel’s as the five of us saw through each other’s eyes, knew everything the others knew, felt all the others felt.

  Where our expe
riences would take us, what choices we would make from that moment forward would mold us, change us, again separate us into unique individuals. But in that single moment, we five were one mind, one Queen, holding the knowledge and memories of our entire warren from its very beginning.

  And then Val’en released us.

  “Go,” she said, moving away, her steps faulty. “Go now.”

  A low rumble shook the cavern, dust raining down on us from the ceiling.

  “There is no more time, my sisters” said Val’en. “Go!”

  D’lor, Jessica, and a group of warren-brothers headed toward the northern exit. I reached out to Val’en, briefly clasped her forearm, then turned away, unable to look long into the gently whirring eyes of Le’tar and Mi’rel, the sister-Queens I was leaving behind, as we gently brushed antennae in farewell.

  “Come with me,” I said, nodding to Brianna, Satish, and a cluster of greens and browns that stood nearby.

  Not waiting to see if they followed me, I left the dais, taking the tunnel that would lead to the eastern exit, while Le’tar and Mi’rel collapsed the passage behind us.

  #

  We fled through the darkness.

  With no light to guide her footsteps, I carried Brianna on my own back, the warren-brothers with us being too small to carry a human. She clung to me, gripping my carapace with her knees, her arms wrapped around my upper thorax, just below my forelimbs.

  “Y’reui, we can’t just leave,” she whispered.

  “What would you have us do?” I asked.

  “Save the other Queens,” she replied. “You said you knew where the invaders were – we should follow your plan and collapse the tunnels on them now, before they reach the Great Cavern.”

  I paused, then made my decision, turning down a side path that led away from the east exit and toward the invaders.

  “But Val’en commanded—” began Satish.

  “I am Val’en,” I said, cutting him off. “I am all Queens of this warren. And this is my command.”

  #

  Racing now against time, we sped toward the place where we last knew the invaders to have reached, staying in the upper tunnels. From time to time, we felt the ground shake from their explosive devices, and I would pause, spreading the fronds of my antennae across the walls of the tunnels to sense the direction of the tremors, and adjusting our course to guide us through the labyrinth toward them.

  At last I felt the rhythmic tromping of their heavy boots. “There are seven,” I said. “Ahead of us, one level below, moving forward. Many greens still delay their progress.”

  Again I reached out, trusting the sensitivity of my antennae, aware not only the vibration of the bounty hunters heading our way and tremors deeper in the caverns that I couldn’t identify, but feeling for the tiny fissures in the tunnel floor and walls, the places where we should dig to collapse the tunnel completely on the invaders.

  “Here,” I called out, pointing to several locations both above and below. The browns and greens with us immediately set themselves to the task at the points along the tunnel floor, pincers put to work scooping great gouges in the dirt, while Satish began to demolish the ceiling.

  “Where do I dig?” asked Brianna, sliding off my back. “I can’t see.”

  I pressed her soft hands against a point on the tunnel wall that would require little strength. “Here,” I said, moving to assist Satish in his labors on the ceiling.

  If we timed our efforts right, the collapsing ceiling would fall into the weakened floor and carry it down, crushing the invaders as they passed through the level below. Some of the greens that harried them would perish, but most would be able to dig themselves out unharmed.

  I kept one antenna pressed against the tunnel wall and felt the ground beneath our feet weakening as the invaders approached. I was reaching out to pull Brianna out of the way when one of their explosive devices went off directly below us.

  At the same moment, the plan Val’en, Le’tar, and Mi’rel had put in motion also reached its peak, and I suddenly understood the deeper tremors I had felt beneath us. The Queens had destroyed the pillars supporting the Great Cavern and everything above it.

  The tunnel floor collapsed, and we fell.

  #

  I awake to weak sunlight , and a small swarm of greens digging the rubble away from my body. Each breath feels like a pincer slicing through me, and I cannot feel two of my legs.

  I am afraid to move and do little more than blink in recognition of the greens, but they take note of the motion. One of them approaches and cautiously dips a broken antenna toward my dusty blue fronds, the memories he shares filling me with grief.

  Satish is dead, his shattered carapace lying half excavated from the debris a short way from me. I can see him without moving my head.

  Val’en and my sister-Queens, Le’tar and Mi’rel, who remained with her have not been found, nor will they ever be, entombed under tons of earth and rock when the Great Cavern collapsed.

  D’lor had been found, as well, and Jessica Lim, their broken bodies peppered with the fragments thrown by the bounty hunter’s explosive devices. Of her warren-brothers who accompanied them, only the single gold survived, though his injuries were severe.

  The bounty hunters, themselves, are no more; the bodies of six of their seven have been found. The seventh was seen, limping through the field, carrying another human to their ship, and I fear it was Brianna Rei that he took away with him, as we have found no trace of her. I grieve for her loss – but the ship no longer sits in the burned and blackened amaranth field, and for that at least, we are grateful.

  The greens continue to excavate the debris covering me as other survivors gather, more greens and browns tunneling their way to the surface, a handful of speckled cultivators who had survived the massacre in the fields, and a single, charred, black-shelled warrior. One by one, they come to me and touch their segmented antennae to the feathery blue fronds of my own.

  I am Y’reui. I am their Queen.

  #

  In the weeks that followed, we gathered our dead, collecting their antennae into a single mound and plowing their burned and broken bodies deep into the ground, in the hopes that one day this place of so much death and destruction might again be filled with life.

  But before grinding the mountain of antennae to dust and scattering it on the wind, as is the way of the Callibrini, I gently brushed each broken antenna with my own, experiencing both the lives and the deaths of all the warren-brothers we had lost and making their memories mine.

  And then we left this place and its memories and went east.

  - THE END -

  About Leigh Saunders

  Leigh Saunders grew up as a "military brat." And while she's long-since settled in her Rocky Mountain home (with her husband and a pair of feuding cats that vie for her attention), her life-long wanderlust regularly inspires her to write about the people and places that spark her imagination. When not writing speculative fiction for a living (her day job is writing computer software manuals), Leigh enjoys writing “social science fiction” – stories that focus on people (or “things” that are also people) in distant places, and how futuristic events or advances in technology impact their lives.

  A 1993 Writers of the Future finalist, her recent short fiction can be found in multiple Fiction River anthologies.

  Connect with Leigh here:

  www.castrumpress.com/authors/leigh-saunders

  Ambassador T

  by Quincy J Allen

  Part 1 - Investigation

  January 17th, 2098 – Ross 128 b

  “I wonder what happened to them,” Commander Ramirez said, his voice filled with awe. A dark-haired native of North Carolina and geologist by training, he barely filled his environment suit with a tall, thin frame built for teaching at University. He’d always believed his acceptance into the space program had been a miracle, even more so when they assigned him to be the lead landing party commander.

  He stared up at
a monolithic sculpture made of something his scans identified as titanium bonded to a polymer unknown to human science, and he still couldn’t believe his eyes. The structure—he assumed it was as sculpture—rose nearly a hundred meters into the air, was riddled with holes, and gave off a chorus of lyrical moaning whistles as the alien breeze passed through it. Contrasted against a deeply azure sky, it reminded him of the Washington Monument in his hometown of D.C. back on Earth, but this one was octagonal, silver, and had a much wider base in proportion to the apex, making it look more like an elaborate pyramid than a phallus. He glanced over his shoulder at their resident doctor, Lieutenant Cohen.

  “Disease, maybe?” she suggested from where she stood atop a parked vehicle across the street. It had a rounded top, spherical wheels set into the undercarriage, and seats built for an occupant half the size of a human. They hadn’t found any remains whatsoever, and some of the vehicles looked like they’d stopped in the middle of the street. Cohen believed the people of that world would have been bipedal and, based upon the controls of the vehicle, possessed of more than two arms. She was the landing party’s medical doctor, and one of three assigned to the mission. “A global plague?” Like the rest of the 30-person crew of Patrocles, she’d opted for a buzz-cut, which made her look like she had a black skull cap inside the poly glass helmet of her environment suit. She was short, trim, and looked completely natural in her suit, a feat Ramirez had always been jealous of.

  “I don’t know....” Ramirez said slowly, shaking his head. “Maybe?” He felt a slight headache coming on. He tried to scratch the back of his neck and remembered—for the fourth time—that he was in an environment suit. There wasn’t enough oxygen and too much helium in the atmosphere for them to move around without them. “Dammit,” he grumbled under his breath. He’d told the techs back at Luna 5 that something on the neck ring poked him. Apparently, they hadn’t believed him. “And you’re sure the scans haven’t picked up any fauna other than the insects and the beasties?” he asked, looking at Lieutenant Sparks.