And then we were gone.
We sped toward the surface for the next few minutes, waiting for the impact of the next kinetic. When it hit, the train’s cushioned ride smothered the concussion. For a moment I thought we’d made it, then the machine began to decelerate slowly to a dead halt. Wendigo convened with the Queen, and told me the line was blocked. We disembarked into vacuum.
Ahead, the tunnel ended in a wall of jumbled ice.
After a few minutes we found a way through the obstruction, Wendigo wrenching aside boulders larger than either of us. “We’re only half a klick from the surface,” she said, as we emerged into the unblocked tunnel beyond. She pointed ahead, to what might have been a scotoma of absolute blackness against the milky darkness of the tunnel. “After that, a klick overland to the wreck.” She paused. “Realize we can’t go home, Spirey. Now more than ever.”
“Not exactly spoiled for choice, are we.”
“No. It has to be the halo, of course. It’s where the splinter’s headed anyway; just means we’ll get there ahead of schedule. There are other Splinterqueens out there, and at the very least they’ll want to keep us alive. Possibly other humans as well—others who made the same discovery as us, and knew there was no going home.”
“Not to mention Royalists.”
“That troubles you, doesn’t it?”
“I’ll deal with it,” I said, pushing forward.
The tunnel was nearly horizontal, and with the splinter’s weak gravity it was easy to make the distance to the surface. Emerging, Fomalhaut glared down at us, a white-cored, bloodshot eye surrounded by the wrinkle-like dust lanes of the inner Swirl. Limned in red, wasp corpses marred the landscape.
“I don’t see the ship.”
Wendigo pointed to a piece of blank caramel-colored horizon. “Curvature’s too great. We won’t see it until we’re almost on top of it.”
“Hope you’re right.”
“Trust me. I know this place like, well . . . ” Wendigo regarded one of her limbs. “Like the back of my hand.”
“Encourage me, why don’t you.”
Three or four hundred meters later we crested a scallop-shaped rise of ice, and halted. We could see the ship now. It didn’t look in much better shape than when Yarrow and I had scoped it from Mouser.
“I don’t see any wasps.”
“Too dangerous for them to stay on the surface,” Wendigo said.
“That’s cheering. I hope the remaining damage is cosmetic,” I said. “Because if it isn’t—”
Suddenly I wasn’t talking to anyone.
Wendigo was gone. After a moment I saw her, lying in a crumpled heap at the foot of the hillock. Her guts stretched away like a rusty comet-tail, halfway to the next promontory.
Quillin was fifty meters ahead, having risen from the concealment of a chondrite boulder.
When Wendigo had mentioned her, I’d put her out of my mind as any kind of threat. How could she pose any danger beyond the inside of a thickship, when she’d traded her legs for a tail and fluke, just like Yarrow? On dry land, she’d be no more mobile than a seal pup. Well, that was how I’d figured things.
But I’d reckoned without Quillin’s suit.
Unlike Yarrow’s—unlike any siren suit I’d ever seen—it sprouted legs. Mechanized, they emerged from the hip, making no concessions to human anatomy. The legs were long enough to lift Quillin’s tail completely free of the ice. My gaze tracked up her body, registering the crossbow which she held in a double-handed grip.
“I’m sorry,” Quillin’s deep voice boomed in my skull. “Check-in’s closed.”
“Wendigo said you might be a problem.”
“Wise up. It was staged from the moment we reached the Royalist stronghold.” Still keeping the bow on me, she began to lurch across the ice. “The ferals were actors, playing dumb. The wasps were programmed to feed us bullshit.”
“It isn’t a Royalist trick, Quillin.”
“Shit. See I’m gonna have to kill you as well.”
The ground jarred, more violently than before. A nimbus of white light puffed above the horizon, evidence of an impact on the splinter’s far side. Quillin stumbled, but her legs corrected the misstep before it tripped her forward.
“I don’t know if you’re keeping up with current events,” I said. “But that’s our own side.”
“Maybe you didn’t think hard enough. Why did wasps in the Swirl get smart before the trillions of wasps back in Sol system? Should have been the other way round.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course, Spirey. GE’s wasps had a massive head start.” She shrugged, but the bow stayed rigidly pointed. “Okay, war sped up wasp evolution here. But that shouldn’t have made so much difference. That’s where the story breaks down.”
“Not quite.”
“What?”
“Something Wendigo told me. About what she called the second imperative. I guess it wasn’t something she found out until she went underground.”
“Yeah? Astonish me.”
Well, something astonished Quillin at that point—but I was only marginally less surprised by it myself. An explosion of ice, and a mass of swiftly moving metal erupting from the ground around her. The wasp corpses were partially dismembered, blasted, and half-melted—but they still managed to drag Quillin to the ground. For a moment she thrashed, kicking up plumes of frost. Then the whole mass lay deathly still, and it was just me, the ice, and a lot of metal and blood.
The Queen must have coaxed activity out of a few of the wasp corpses, ordering them to use their last reserves of power to take out Quillin.
Thanks, Queen.
But no cigar. Quillin hadn’t necessarily meant to shoot me at that point, but—bless her—she had anyway. The bolt had transected me with the precision of one of the Queen’s theorems, somewhere below my sternum. Gut-shot. The blood on the ice was my own.
I tried moving.
A couple of light-years away I saw my body undergo a frail little shiver. It didn’t hurt, but there was nothing in the way of proprioceptive feedback to indicate I’d actually managed to twitch any part of my body.
Quillin was moving, too. Wriggling, that is, since her suit’s legs had been cleanly ripped away by the wasps. Other than that she didn’t look seriously injured. Ten or so meters from me, she flopped around like a maggot and groped for her bow. What remained of it anyway.
Chalk one to the good guys.
By which time I was moving, executing a marginally quicker version of Quillin’s slug crawl. I couldn’t stand up—there are limits to what pilot physiology can cope with—but my legs gave me leverage she lacked.
“Give up, Spirey. You have a head start on me, and right now you’re a little faster—but that ship’s still a long way off.” Quillin took a moment to catch her breath. “Think you can sustain that pace? Gonna need to, if you don’t want me catching up.”
“Plan on rolling over me until I suffocate?”
“That’s an option. If this doesn’t kill you first.”
Enough of her remained in my field-of-view to see what she meant. Something sharp and bladelike had sprung from her wrist, a bayonet projecting half a meter ahead of her hand. It looked like a nasty little toy—but I did my best to push it out of mind and get on with the job of crawling toward the ship. It was no more than two hundred meters away now—what little of it protruded above the ice. The external airlock was already open, ready to clamp shut as soon as I wriggled inside—
“You never finished telling me, Spirey.”
“Telling you what?”
“About this—what did you call it? The second imperative?”
“Oh, that.” I halted and snatched breath. “Before I go on, I want you to know I’m only telling you this to piss you off.”
“Whatever bakes your cake.”
“All right,” I said. “Then I’ll begin by saying you were right. Greater Earth’s wasps should have made the jump to sentience long before those in the Swirl, simply b
ecause they’d had longer to evolve. And that’s what happened.”
Quillin coughed, like gravel in a bucket. “Pardon?”
“They beat us to it. About a century and a half ago. Across Sol system, within just a few hours, every single wasp woke up and announced its intelligence to the nearest human being it could find. Like babies reaching for the first thing they see.” I stopped, sucking in deep lungfuls. The wreck had to be closer now—but it hardly looked it.
Quillin, by contrast, looked awfully close now—and that blade awfully sharp.
“So the wasps woke,” I said, damned if she wasn’t going to hear the whole story. “And that got some people scared. So much, some of them got to attacking the wasps. Some of their shots went wide, because within a day the whole system was one big shooting match. Not just humans against wasps—but humans against humans.” Less than fifty meters now, across much smoother ground than we’d so far traversed. “Things just escalated. Ten days after Solar War Three began, only a few ships and habitats were still transmitting. They didn’t last long.”
“Crap,” Quillin said—but she sounded less cocksure than she had a few moments before. “There was a war back then, but it never escalated into a full-blown Solar War.”
“No. It went the whole hog. From then on every signal we ever got from GE was concocted by wasps. They dared not break the news to us—at least not immediately. We’ve only been allowed to find out because we’re never going home. Guilt, Wendigo called it. They couldn’t let it happen again.”
“What about our wasps?”
“Isn’t it obvious? A while later the wasps here made the same jump to sentience—presumably because they’d been shown the right moves by the others. Difference was, ours kept it quiet. Can’t exactly blame them, can you?”
There was nothing from Quillin for a while, both of us concentrating on the last patch of ice before Wendigo’s ship.
“I suppose you have an explanation for this, too,” she said eventually, swiping her tail against the ground. “C’mon, blow my mind.”
So I told her what I knew. “They’re bringing life to the Swirl. Sooner than you think, too. Once this charade of a war is done, the wasps breed in earnest. Trillions out there now, but in a few decades it’ll be billions of trillions. They’ll outweigh a good-sized planet. In a way the Swirl will have become sentient. It’ll be directing its own evolution.”
I spared Quillin the details—how the wasps would arrest the existing processes of planetary formation so that they could begin anew, only this time according to a plan. Left to its own devices, the Swirl would contract down to a solar system comprised solely of small, rocky planets—but such a system could never support life over billions of years. Instead, the wasps would exploit the system’s innate chaos to tip it toward a state where it would give rise to at least two much larger worlds—planets as massive as Jupiter or Saturn, capable of shepherding leftover rubble into tidy, world-avoiding orbits. Mass extinctions had no place in the Splinterqueens’ vision of future life.
But I guessed Quillin probably didn’t care.
“Why are you hurrying, Spirey?” she asked between harsh grunts as she propelled herself forward. “The ship isn’t going anywhere.”
The edge of the open airlock was a meter above the ice. My fingers probed over the rim, followed by the crest of my battered helmet. Just lifting myself into the lock’s lit interior seemed to require all the energy I’d already expended in the crawl. Somehow I managed to get half my body length into the lock.
Which is when Quillin reached me.
There wasn’t much pain when she dug the bayonet into my ankle, just a form of cold I hadn’t imagined before, even lying on the ice. Quillin jerked the embedded blade to and fro, and the knot of cold seemed to reach out little feelers into my foot and lower leg. I sensed she wanted to retract the blade for another stab, but my suit armor was gripping it tight.
The bayonet taking her weight, Quillin pulled herself up to the rim of the lock. I tried kicking her away, but the skewered leg no longer felt a part of me.
“You’re dead,” she whispered.
“News to me.”
Her eyes rolled wide, then locked on me with renewed venom. She gave the bayonet a violent twist. “So tell me one thing. That story—bullshit, or what?”
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “But first consider this.” Before she could react I reached out and palmed a glowing panel set in the lock wall. The panel whisked aside, revealing a mushroom-shaped red button. “You know that story they told about Wendigo, how she lost her arms?”
“You weren’t meant to swallow that hero guff, Spirey.”
“No? Well, get a load of this, Quillin. My hand’s on the emergency pressurization control. When I hit it, the outer door’s going to slide down quicker than you can blink.”
She looked at my hand, then down at her wrist, still attached to my ankle via the jammed bayonet. Slowly the situation sank in. “Close the door, Spirey, and you’ll be a leg short.”
“And you an arm, Quillin.”
“Stalemate, then.”
“Not quite. See, which of us is more likely to survive? Me inside, with all the medical systems aboard this ship, or you all on your lonesome outside? Frankly, I don’t think it’s any contest.”
Her eyes opened wider. Quillin gave a shriek of anger and entered one final, furious wrestling match with the bayonet.
I managed to laugh. “As for your question, it’s true, every word of it.” Then, with all the calm I could muster, I thumbed the control. “Pisser, isn’t it.”
I made it, of course.
Several minutes after the closing of the door, demons had lathered a protective cocoon around the stump and stomach wound. They allowed me no pain—only a fuzzy sense of detachment. Enough of my mind remained sharp to think about my escape—problematic given that the ship still wasn’t fixed.
Eventually I remembered the evac pods.
They were made to kick away from the ship fast, if some quackdrive system went on the fritz. They had thrusters for that—nothing fancy, but here they’d serve another purpose. They’d boost me from the splinter, punch me out of its grav well.
So I did it.
Snuggled into a pod and blew out of the wreck, feeling the gee-load even within the thick. It didn’t last long. On the evac pod’s cam I watched the splinter drop away until it was pebble-sized. The main body of the kinetic attack was hitting it by then, impacts every ten or so seconds. After a minute of that the splinter just came apart. Afterward, there was only a sooty veil where it had been, and then only the Swirl.
I hoped the Queen had made it. I guess it was within her power to transmit what counted of herself out to sisters in the halo. If so, there was a chance for Yarrow as well. I’d find out eventually. Then I used the pod’s remaining fuel to inject me into a slow, elliptical orbit, one that would graze the halo in a mere fifty or sixty years.
That didn’t bother me. I wanted to close my eyes and let the thick nurse me whole again—and sleep an awfully long time.
PARDON OUR CONQUEST
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
Alan Dean Foster is the bestselling author of several dozen novels, and is perhaps most famous for his Commonwealth series, which began in 1975 with the novel Midworld. The most recent in that series, Quofum, was published in 2008, and a new Commonwealth book featuring the popular characters Pip and Flinx—Flinx Transcendent—should be out around the same time as this anthology. Also forthcoming is The Human Blend, the first book of a new SF trilogy for Del Rey. Foster’s short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, and Jim Baen’s Universe. A new collection, Exceptions to Reality, came out in 2008.
Like the forthcoming Flinx Transcendent, this story takes place in Foster’s Commonwealth milieu. Foster said it was inspired by the idea that there are various ways to conquer. “Sometimes simply persuading an opponent that your way is better can ach
ieve the desired end,” he said. “I always thought killing an opponent was a poor way of convincing him of the rightness of your argument.”
Admiral Gorelkii shifted his seat on the meter-thick, jewel-encrusted, ceremonial golden cushion that rose behind the sweeping transparent arc of the solid crystal crescent moon, and fumed. His substantial pale gray bulk was draped in a bloom of multihued embroidered standards, each one representing one of the ancient Great Hordes that together comprised the Empire of the Three Suns. They weighed on him physically as well as historically. The wearing of the standards was a great honor accorded to a select few only on the most extraordinary occasions.
Unfortunately for him, today’s extraordinary occasion was one of surrender.
His courage and willingness in accepting the responsibility for heading the disagreeable negotiations was recognized on all five inhabited worlds of the three systems that comprised the Empire. That did not mean he looked forward to the impending ceremony. What the exact details would consist of he did not know. What specific protocol was to be followed he did not know.
No doubt the conquerors of the Empire would be enlightening him in due course.
The Falan had never been a species to hesitate. Imbued with the heady wine of discovery and an assurance of their own superiority, they had looked forward to the steady expansion of their Empire in the direction of the arm of the galaxy that held a greater density of star systems than their own immediate vicinity. Following initial exploration they had discovered, explored, charted, and engaged in the successful colonization of two new habitable systems.
Then they had found Drax IV.
So it was called by the short, multi-legged, hard-carapaced creatures who inhabited the cities and towns they had excavated beneath its jungles and forests. Mild in temperament, absurd in appearance, they claimed to be part of a vast interstellar dominion called the Commonwealth. Vast, small, or imaginary, their polite insistence did nothing to deter the aggressive Falan. It was announced that the system of Drax would be incorporated into the Empire forthwith, and any foolish resistance met with fire and destruction on a planetary scale. Declaring war, the Falan proceeded to open hostilities by unleashing a small example of their firepower on a little-populated corner of the planet.
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