The Genetic Imerative

by P. Joseph Cherubino

  “Then what are you waiting for?” Nina asked.

  The squad had moved before Nina finished asking her rhetorical question. The engineers reported the transmitter complete before a half hour went by. The project was already in progress before the surge to the front. Since the transmitter was too large and too risky to move to the forward, Nina wrenched herself away from the line and ran back to the lava dome. A small squad of infantry separated from the lines to escort her. She did not order them to do so. Nina didn't object.

  When she got to the dome, Nina smiled. This was clearly a highly motivated force. The bewildering contraption was a seemingly random collection of salvaged gear and, at least, one sonic cannon. If it worked, Nina wondered then what would happen if they did get back to orbital. She caught snippets of conversation over the network she was not meant to hear. Troops were angry, transmission protocol was breaking down. Private thoughts were increasingly shared.

  "Yes, this should do it. It also might blow us all up," the lead engineer announced. She was not smiling.

  "What does this thing do?" Nina asked.

  "All transmitters of the cannon are now configured to produce high-frequency energy. It will broadcast over all channels, and that does mean all of them; from radio, to microwave through x-ray, all at high power. Every communication method using every protocol.

  This will overcome any filters they have. It will also make the larger chambers resonate. Maintenance crews in the engine rooms will hear both sides of any contact that is made. You have about twenty seconds of full power and thirty seconds of receive."

  "So everyone down here will hear it too?" Nina asked.

  The answer was yes.

  "Turn it on." Nina said, gritting her teeth.

  They switched the unit on, and every soldier in sight jumped. The loud hum in Nina’s head made her dizzy. The atmosphere around the device shimmered like a mirage.

  "It's on," the engineer announced.

  "I gathered…” Nina replied, then spoke through the machine. “This is Captain Nina Gaav in command of Warsphere Alpha. Twenty-thousand survivors in need of extraction. Heavy wounded. Overwhelming resistance. We are in distress. Repeat; in distress. Request immediate extraction. If anyone can hear us, we need you now!"

  There was a sickening delay. Time was running out. The humming grew louder.

  "This is General Olthan, Orbital Command. You are in violation of comm protocol. Shut down your transmission."

  Nina's reply was instant.

  "Not possible. Send extraction. Repeat; Send extraction or we all will die."

  "Well die, then! That's what you are created for! I don't care if ― "And the transmitter went down.

  Nobody moved. All patrols stopped dead in their tracks. There was thought silence on all channels. Their busy networks seemed dead. The disbelief became a sudden paralysis. Nina didn't have to hear thoughts to know what was on every mind. They were sent down here for a single purpose. They were never meant to return. With full awareness, Orbital command sent a hundred thousand warriors to die without a chance. This was all some test. They were disposable media in an experiment. Nina wasn't shaking now. She was just cold.

  A shock wave broke her paralysis. Comm reported another wave of acid broke over the battlements. The shock wave Nina felt was a battery of sonic cannon firing. They all broke from the lava dome and rushed forward.

  The troops on the front line were alert and acted quickly. They pounded at the bases of their sonic cannon, heedless of the spore that picked off several drummers. Nina and her group dispersed quickly to reinforce the line. Nina ran hard and leaped over bodies along the way. A hand reached out and grabbed her ankle, and she slammed face first against the rocky ground. She turned to see the torso of a fallen warrior clawing at her. She kicked at it with her free foot. It was like kicking a marble statue. The Silicoid cut this warrior in two, then petrified her cells, turning her into one of its own. A passing fighter swung her staff and the arm gripping Nina shattered.

  The cannon shock waves peeled out over the crater, making ripples of flame in the wake of their beams. It was the perfect atmosphere for sonic weapons. The concentrated sound waves, bound by coherent energy, traveled much faster in the densely packed atmosphere. It was satisfying to see Silicoids shattered under cannon fire. The secondary explosions behind violent cavitation made it harder for the spore to reach them. But the drummers were getting tired, and the cannon began to fail.

  Nina reached the battlement and charged up to the top of the hill. What she saw made her heart skip a beat. Massive tendrils slowly unfurled from the canyon. They reached across the ground toward their position. The arms came from the canyon itself. This was an Alpha of a type she’d never seen. Nina swung her staff at an onrushing mirror cell that almost hit her in the face. She jumped off the battlement as an outgoing cannon beam tore through space her head recently occupied.

  "We have to move back now! Alpha spore is active!” Nina ordered

  They all knew they had to keep those cannon going to retain any hope of survival. She had never seen warriors fight so hard. More soldiers on the flank saw what was happening on the front and moved center. Nina kept screaming for them to hold. They couldn't afford to be surrounded. It was a hard order for them to obey. Nina led a squad to reinforce a flank herself.

  Heavy Infantry dragged the cannon back, and the rate of fire decreased. More spore made it over the edge of the battlement and thrashed across the ground at them. The Warriors surged forward to beat them back, then rushed back to cover the soldiers manning cannons.

  More than a few soldiers stepped in the way of a cannon beam and were thrown straight over the wall into the acid. A few of those unfortunates came back infected, and they met the staff just like Silicoids.

  They fought back wave after wave of spore that streamed over the battlements. The air grew thunderous with the sound of falling liftpods. Nina glanced over her shoulder and saw the large, bulbous shapes hovering toward them. The rescuers sent about a hundred, but they would need far less than that now.

  She was surprised to see only engineers dismount from the heavily armored liftpods and rush to reinforce their retreat. The engineers ran straight into the charging spore to set up an energy fence. They were not accustomed to direct battle. They were so intent on their job that they acted like the Silicoids were not even there. About fifty engineers were killed before the original troops fell back in to cover them. The fence was secured quickly, and Nina stayed behind with a few others to smash the remaining Silicoids that slithered over the growing pile of dead bodies.

  When she was sure the last of the troops were safely behind the energy fence, Nina finally made it to a pod. The door panels sealed seamlessly and the sudden quiet left her alone with disturbing thoughts. She could hear the spore thrashing against the thick hull as the energy fence was discharged. Nina hoped with venom that they tore themselves apart in the effort. Her head still rang with cannon reports and screams.

  Nina stood on the solid deck of the liftpod and surveyed the scene. She couldn't bring herself to power down her armor. Soldiers all around either paced back and forth still clutching weapons, or just collapsed on the deck. Some quickly stripped off their acid-soaked robes and ripped the breathers from their mouths. They stood naked save for energy sheaths and vomited breathing fluid.

  A medical engineer came by and gripped Nina's wrist. Nina hardly noticed. The medic checked Nina's eyes and ran her hands over her arms, legs, back and belly, efficiently checking for injury while accessing the logs of her comm crystal for bio-stats. Satisfied Nina was healthy; she moved on to check others.

  The fight was over. Nina stepped over wounded and exhausted soldiers to the center of the extraction pod where pilots stood at the control consoles. The senior officer, a Lieutenant, paused to meet Nina's eyes.

  "We got your message," The pilot said.

  Nina nodded slowly, then sank to the floor. She sat legs outstretched and leaned against the rear
of a pilot console.

  Chapter 6: Homesphere, Return

  Three standard months after the Battle of the Third Arm, Captain Nina Gaav sat on a polished stone bench in the Great Hall. She massaged her weary forehead with a hard, calloused hand. The coarse, crisp material of her ceremonial robe chafed her neck as she shifted. Tension hummed across her broad shoulders as she craned her neck to look straight up to the ceiling of the Great Dome, more than a hundred fifty meters above.

  Through the gauzy transparency of huge crystal panels set into soaring arches, she peered into the swirling orange sky of Homesphere. There was a low-atmosphere volcanic storm outside, carrying a light dusting of ash that fell gray against the dome and sometimes pushed across it as currents in the thick, scalding atmosphere changed shape and direction. The ash settled across the dome surface, then slid away in sheets like melting snow toward the crumbling red basalt at the dome base.

  The storm was mild in comparison to the constant rage of the upper atmosphere that allowed only twenty-five percent of the sun’s light to pass and rendered the surface in persistent tones of dull orange twilight. Occasional eruptions of horizontal lightning ripped through the storm, making the lower altitude ash clouds resemble marble walls for flickering instants. The storm at the surface merely played soldier while Nina watched the upper atmosphere fight a pitched battle with itself. There, blood-red whorls of sulfuric acid formed then merged and flew apart as they collided with rivaling spirals. The entire upper atmosphere would make more than sixty laps around the planet in a single Homesphere day.

  She relaxed her eyes, letting her vision blur as she released her focus on visible light. The storm disappeared as her eyes tuned to ultraviolet. If she relaxed enough, she might be able to make out the stars even through the thick atmosphere and the skin of the Dome. It was a trick she learned from her early teens, several years after emerging physically mature from the birthing chambers. During breaks from that punishing early training, Nina would lie beneath the dome of her personal shelter, far out on the volcanic plain, on whatever hot slab of rock they could find that was flat and far away from the training fields.

  Even then, her energy sheath would keep her cool in the face of Homesphere’s scathing brutality. Young Warriors learned first that the sheath was both armor and safety blanket. If they didn’t, they died. Extreme exhaustion taught her the vision trick. Too tired to close her eyes, she rested on the hard surface, with the staff strikes of drill officers that were not yet proper bruises, but things throbbing, twitching and pulsing in her muscles like captured animals trying to escape a drowning sack.

  Nina thought something was wrong with her eyes at first, but soon realized that she was alive and well. The training didn’t kill her. She was whole. Her eyes were too tired for focus or tears, but they worked. The trainers hadn’t yet explained to her what the stars were. They only told her that one day soon, she and her sisters would be going there to fight under command of the Queen, their mother, who was the protector of all life in the Galaxy. Nina was not yet familiar with the word ‘glory’ yet, but without knowing that word, she discovered it in a way yet unmarred by those who would later use it as a vulgar tool. Her eyes seized the higher light of stars, and it was glorious. She remembered being happy then.

  But in the here and now, the trick was not working. She tried to relax, but everything was too much. The shuffling, scratching hum of the crowd and memories of recent battle wouldn’t let her go. These things stole the trick from her and wouldn’t let her see the stars. She could only make out a fuzzy green glob set away from the lower right quadrant of a larger violet sphere. The violet sphere, of course, was the sun, but at first, she couldn’t recognize the little green smudge. It took her a while to realize the object as Earth. It was the Source Planet from which they derived the stuff of their blood and bones. The planet they used to pace their calendars and mark their time was visible in this season. She closed her eyes and leaned forward on the bench, placed her elbows on her knees and hung her head down low. Nina felt her eyes change shape beneath the lids as they adjusted to visible light again. When she opened them, there was only home. No stars, only busy masses rushing heedless to all else but duty.

  She was home again after a twenty-five-year tour. Just before and after nearly every engagement with the enemy, she had thought of this day. She longed to see the home sky and play storm field with old friends at the feet of volcanoes. They would climb high on the equatorial mountains and shelter a dozen kilometers above the surface, safe in the secret caverns hidden there by many nameless soldiers who came to those places generations before them.

  Nina wanted to hike deep below the surface, through the old, trackless tunnels to visit the vast, ancient, cathedral-like caves the first engineers mined to create the Queen’s great cruisers. The air was tropical there, and soldiers planted fragrant gardens of the most beautiful plants sampled from across the galaxy. There were mineral baths fed by pure volcanic springs and places just to enjoy what little scraps of life existed between visits to the butcher shop that was their avocation. Most of the friends from her unit who planned these things with her were now dead. She left them behind as red stains on her memory scores of light years away. She didn’t understand why, nor did she understand how she came question. Wondering “why” was unfamiliar to her.

  She leaned back again but, this time, covered her face with her palms and ran them across her forehead, coming back into her body again from the land of faraway thoughts. She continued to massage her forehead and her fingers traced along a new feature there. A thin, knotted, white sickle of a scar bisected her right eyebrow and disappeared into her unruly mane of jet-black hair. She barely remembered receiving the wound. A hundred-thousand years of civilization, she thought, and the medical engineers still didn't know anything about cosmetic surgery. She'd seen far less developed Humanoid civilizations show greater concern for preserving body aesthetics. She thought about putting in a request for surgery to remove the scar and imagined the reaction she'd get. She considered the idea further, reasoning that no punishment she might receive would be as bad as the Third Arm. She might as well do as she pleased.

  The Great Hall was a major intersection of the Warrior's everyday life. Nina sat in the middle of it all on a day that would never come again. Her life was exactly half over. While her sisters fought and died on the Third Arm of the Milky Way, she was back on the home world under the mandate of a tradition apparently more important than her duty to fight for The Design. This was The Day of the Middle for another generation of Advocate Warrior. On this day, her Generation reached middle age. It was this tradition that probably saved her. Several million Warriors on the Third Arm would not be so lucky. She witnessed the new battle just beginning there. As Nina and the survivors of the massacre departed on a single cruiser, two others emerged from blinkpoint to take its place. The Advocates were massing. More would die, and part of her wanted the chance to die with them. Another part only wanted to be safe and live.

  Some of the tension finally drained from her shoulders as she leveled her head back to the crowd. As her eyes returned to the teeming Hall, Nina was part of a dwindling number of celebrants still in view. She sat there a while longer, looking around aimlessly and began to draw furtive glances from the younger soldiers. Nina was a rare sight. At two hundred fifty years, she was young for a Captain in the much-honored Range Division and her new scar spoke to the young soldiers of hard service.

  That was always the way, she thought. The younger Warriors, still in their fifties; no longer children but barely adult, saw her there, with the honored insignia fixed to her robes, with her high rank and her scar and they longed for the experience that came with her years. As she glanced back at them, they turned away coyly. They had no idea. She wished them luck that they would not develop the ideas that now bashed around in her skull.

  Nina suddenly stood, annoyed at this adolescent attention. It bothered her that the young mistook the trappings of experience f
or the person. They just didn't know any better. The sudden resentment struck her belly hollow, and she turned her head to the glassy brown tiles of the broad boulevard. It was time to move, and she did so without direction, lost in thought.

  She wandered off the main road to avoid columns of marching soldiers and walked along one of the many narrow footpaths that wound past monuments and statues dedicated to victory and defeat, to the fallen and the liberated. Figures of Advocates in battle with the Silicoids, representations of humanoid races showing their gratitude to Advocate Liberators—each monument told an official story.

  Every monument was surrounded by planter boxes. Inside each was plant life from the planets where the campaigns took place. Some planters were fully enclosed to hold the native atmosphere. Nina noticed one of the larger monuments from a campaign early in her career. The planters were entirely enclosed, and none of the specimens could be seen through the thick methane-argon atmosphere inside. Why put them there? What was the point of that? That the plants could not be seen did not matter. All monuments must include plant life from the native planets. That was the protocol for monuments. Protocol and procedure above all else. They fought, they died, they built monuments to their honor and sacrifice. Nina rapped her knuckles on the crystal panel of the planter box and tried to peer inside. She wondered if anything in there was even alive. Was anyone checking? That campaign happened one hundred twenty-five years ago. Nina was young then, a rising star among billions of soldiers. She believed then that she was bound for glory. She wondered what happened. Where was that glory and did it even exist? The word had meaning for her once, but she couldn’t define it now.

  The young soldiers marched past these symbols of their nature and duty, but Nina was certain they had no idea what they were seeing. Nina was no longer certain herself. It was natural for the young to desire the experience they were created for, but their ignorance bothered her. They couldn't imagine what was truly in store for them. They coveted her for the trappings of experience; ogled her campaign pins and admired her wound. They assessed her and whispered among themselves, and it made Nina ill.