I blushed in spite of myself, and raised a hand in return.
Was I that well known among the aliens?
We entered the conference room, and I stopped short.
There was the Professor—whom I considered a friend, and whom I’d not seen in a long time—and a larger, much older-looking mantis on whom all human eyes were focused.
The human contingent was arrayed around a half-moon table with chairs and computers and various recording devices.
The two mantes merely floated in the air, about waist high.
I smiled, and in spite of protocol, walked quickly up to the Professor.
“Hello,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to see you again.”
“You would have not, Harry,” said the Professor, “had circumstances evolved differently.”
If the Professor had a name, it was unpronounceable for humans. The skitter-scratch mandible-against-mandible language of the aliens was incomprehensible for us. And he’d always been addressed by title, even though he’d asked permission to be on a first-name basis with me.
A familiar throat was cleared to my rear.
I turned to Adanaho, whose expression told me I was erring without knowing it. Behind her sat the general—staring hard.
“Sorry, sir,” I said, then nodded knowingly to the Professor, and walked quickly to a seat that was offered to me. The captain sat down at my side, and after the general gave me one last lingering look, he ordered the doors closed, leaving us alone with our guests.
I checked my PDA. The captain and I were as early as we’d planned to be. Yet it appeared things were already well in motion.
Not good.
“Well,” the general said, “he’s here now. Since nothing I or my staff say seems to be worth anything to you, maybe you’ll listen to him.”
The old mantis behind the Professor floated forward.
“Padre,” it said to me, its vocoded speaker-box voice coming from the grill on the front of its disc. The creature’s beak did not move. The translator was tied directly into the mantis’s nervous system.
“That is what some call me,” I said. “May I ask who you are?”
“This is the Queen Mother,” said the Professor, his manner deferential as he introduced her. “She is the highest of the Select who rule our people. Her voice carries supreme authority within the Quorum of the Select.”
“She is your sovereign,” I said.
“Yes and no,” said the Professor. “She is elected, but she also shares a tremendous lineage, biologically. Her genetics run through countless mantes, over many of your generations.”
In other words, she was fecund, in addition to being old.
I sat up a little straighter.
“Ma’am,” I said to the Queen Mother, “of what service can I be to you?”
The Queen Mother floated forward a bit more, while the Professor floated back.
“Your name is spoken in my Quorum,” she said. “It is the only human name that has ever reached such height. When the one you call the Professor first came before me, many of our cycles ago, and petitioned for us to halt our Fourth Expansion, I considered him obtuse. Your superstition is of no consequence to me, nor do I have any use for it. And yet, the Professor had convinced a good many of his contemporaries that the elimination of your species—of your numerous modes of religion—would be detrimental to the advancement of mantis knowledge. And his colleagues had convinced many on the Quorum. Rather than force a contentious vote on the issue, I acquiesced, believing that the merit of the Professor’s proposed observation and research would become obvious in time. Even if I could see no value in it in the moment.”
She let a tiny silence hang in the air.
“I no longer feel the need for such forbearance.”
The room was dead silent, but the Queen Mother’s words had hit me like a thunderclap. It was one thing to hear the captain talk about a possible end to the peace. It was quite another to have the nominal leader of the enemy in front of me declaring that she was going to drop the hammer. I felt a slithering surety in my heart: the Queen Mother would not bluff.
I cleared my throat experimentally, trying to shake off the dread I felt. The eyes of the officers behind me began to drill virtual holes in my back as I left my seat. The Queen Mother remained where she was.
“I have to think,” I said, voice shaking just a bit, “that your mind isn’t entirely made up. Otherwise why agree to this meeting at all? You could just as easily declare the cease-fire dead, launch your war armada, and have done with it.”
“There are still some,” she said, her triangular insect’s head tilting back in the Professor’s direction, “who petition me for further amity. I am not a hasty being. I listen to my intellectuals. If they say there is additional merit in long-term conciliation between our races, I am habitually obliged to entertain the notion—whether I agree with it or not. So rather than send a delegate, I came here myself. To meet the one human who has managed to alter the inevitable course of my empire. I had expected someone more impressive.”
“My apologies,” I said, “if my presence does not meet that expectation. As for what I can say or do to change your mind, I am not sure I can offer you much more than what I’ve already been able to offer to the Professor and his students. I am the chaplain’s assistant. I’ve counseled the Professor that he’d do well to seek out a bona fide chaplain. Or, if a military man is not in order, then there are the finest theologians, scholars, religious teachers, and clergymen Earth has to offer. If I have failed to provide enlightenment, surely someone else might be better suited.”
“Enlightenment,” the Queen Mother said, her mouth hinged open and her serrated, vicious teeth vibrating—the mantis display of annoyance. “This is a phrase that I find utterly preposterous. I have studied what little of your planet’s history is available to me and determined that we mantes were building starships when humans were still scuttling about in caves. Enlightenment. Ridiculous. Does the larva enlighten the adult?”
I’d learned from the Professor that the mantes had two stages in their life cycle. Upon hatching from their eggs, they were mindless herbivores, consuming vegetable matter over a period of months until entering their transformative pupa stage. Only upon emergence from the chrysalis did a newly-carnivorous mantis achieve actual sapience. Prior to that, the larval mantis was about as intelligent as a box of rocks.
“Nobody questions your technological prowess,” I said, choosing my words carefully. I looked quickly behind the Queen Mother to see the Professor floating dead still, his gaze locked on her.
“When the Professor and I first met, it was shocking to discover that you mantes cared anything at all about how or what a human believed. I didn’t think it was possible. I’d only ever seen your people maiming and killing my people. And yet, the Professor showed me you are a complex race. Old and powerful, but also with a history of patient curiosity. Such that on prior occasions—when you’ve let your thirst for expansion overrule your prudence—you’ve genuinely regretted those choices.”
“Some of us have,” said the Queen Mother, her beak snapping shut. “But not all.”
“What would be gained,” I said, “by throwing away the armistice? It’s been a long time since humans shed mantis blood, and vice versa. I think the cease-fire is pretty good evidence that our two societies can learn to share the galaxy. Sometimes, we may even share the same planet, if after a fashion.”
Purgatory was still technically mantis property. Myself and the few hundred humans who’d stuck around after the return of the Earth ships, had more or less managed to stay out from under mantis feet. It wasn’t an equal partnership. More like, keep the noise down so the landlords don’t show up with artillery. But it was a persistent peace, and the more time I’d spent around the Professor—and later, his students—the more I’d become convinced that humans and the mantes had more in common than either they or we suspected.
I waited while the Q
ueen Mother’s antennae wove a thoughtful pattern in the air.
“You are dangerous to us,” she said. “Or is the squadron of warships that greeted my delegation your idea of a friendly gesture?”
I looked behind me: at the general, and the captain.
“She has a point, sir, and ma’am,” I said.
“I’m not a fool,” Sakumora retorted sourly. He looked past me to the Queen Mother, and his tone got sharper when next he spoke. “Who is more threatening to whom? What are my staff and I supposed to think about those battle exercises your ships have been conducting? For the first time in several years, eh?”
The Professor seemed to visibly shrink in on himself.
I guessed that even the mantes never spoke that way to their leader. Much less a human. The Queen Mother’s posture was erect, and motionless. For an instant I recalled visceral memories of mantis troops striking with lightning lethality, carving into human flesh. I raised my hands instinctively in the air between the two leaders, trying to physically damp down the mood, which had grown dangerously electric.
“You both asked me to come here,” I said, swiveling my head from one party to the next, and back again. “But if both of you are determined to see evil in the actions of the other, no matter what I say, there really isn’t anything I can do. A new war is inevitable.”
“A war we would absolutely win,” the Queen Mother said.
“Are you that sure?” the general replied.
“Stupid human, you would do no better against us than you did the first time.”
Now it was Sakumora who remained motionless. He seemed to be deciding something. I stared at him, feeling altogether uncomfortable. Before I could shout for him to stop, his left hand reached out and tapped a single button on the keyboard in front of him. The lights in the chamber dimmed, and went orange, battle klaxons suddenly ringing through the space.
Outside the doors, automatic gunfire roared. I knew the sound. It wasn’t the sound of mantis weaponry.
“What have you done?” I said to the general.
Both he and his staff—all save the captain, who simply sat with her mouth half open—stood up and removed overly-large pistols from under the table. Pistols, hell, they looked like sawed-off shotguns, with magazines attached. Sakumora and his people aimed their weapons at the Professor and the Queen Mother.
“We weren’t ready for you the first time,” Sakumora said, his demeanor become icily calm now that he no longer teetered on the knife edge of an uneasy truce. “Part of me hoped this wouldn’t be necessary. But part of me also knew that things couldn’t end any other way.”
The Queen Mother’s wings unfolded and fluttered loudly.
Extreme amusement.
I’d also learned enough about mantis body language to know that the Professor’s mood was utterly crushed. He shrank back from all of us, his floating disc nearly bumping the far bulkhead.
“You’ve made it too easy,” said the Queen Mother.
The pitch of the frigate’s ambient engine noise shifted upward, just prior to the room being rocked by what sounded like rolling thunder.
“I’ve signaled my subordinates to destroy your entire squadron,” said the Queen Mother. “This ship and everyone on it will be the first to fall. The Fourth Expansion begins today!”
She looked triumphant.
I stared at the Professor, who appeared ill.
The room rocked again—with more loud rumbling.
The general tapped the large green communications key. “Damage report?” he said.
“The deflection system is holding,” replied a young voice through a small speaker on the desk.
Sakumora smiled wickedly, his pistol aimed squarely at the Queen Mother’s bug-eyed head.
“We adapt and learn quickly,” said the general. “I don’t think we’ll be the pushovers that you were expecting. Though I have to admit I admire your willingness to sacrifice yourself in order to commit your people to the battle. Had our positions been reversed, I think I might have done the same.”
The Queen Mother’s body language had changed. Like that of the Professor, she began to slowly shrink in on herself. I guessed that she’d not expected to survive past this point. Had the general and his Fleet engineers not found the secret to The Wall, it’s probable we’d have all been atomized already.
“So it’s war,” I said. “Only now neither side wins?”
“Shut up, Chief,” said the general, in irritation. “Your job here is done. Unless you’re ready to pick up a weapon for humanity, you’re not much use to us.”
I looked from the general’s face—set in an expression of grim and determined calculation—to the captain’s. Adanaho’s mouth still hung half open and her eyes were wide, the whites like bright circles of ivory. She closed her mouth and swallowed once.
A small mechanical sound alerted me to our danger, but only just in time.
While the Professor’s disc had never been armed—armament being unseemly for a scholar—there’d been no thought given to the Queen Mother. Weapons, previously hidden within her disc, suddenly bristled.
I tackled Adanaho to the deck just as the shooting started.
CHAPTER 18
Earth, 2153 A.D.
THUKHAN TURNED OUT TO BE PARTIALLY RIGHT. NO NCO CAME back into the bay for over an hour. The holdovers kept themselves on one end of the bay, and us new recruits kept ourselves on the other side. I couldn’t bring myself to relax, so I explored the bay. The end opposite the head had several locked doors that were unmarked, while the head itself was populated by eight toilet stalls, eight shower stalls, and eight sinks on a bar countertop in front of a single, long mirror.
I looked again at the head. Then I went back out and did a quick headcount in the bay proper.
There were approximately ten bodies for every toilet, shower, or sink. It was going to be a fiasco churning every recruit in the bay through the head in a limited amount of time.
A rectangle of tiles in the center of the bay was a different color of ugly from the other tiles at the perimeter. The rectangle was highly polished and gleamed in the overhead fluorescents. A single locker stood by itself in the middle of the polished tile, as did a single-occupant bunk which was immaculately made. I stepped towards it and heard one of the holdovers—Gorana again—yell, “Get out of the Dead Zone, you idiot!”
“What?” I said.
“The Dead Zone,” said Gorana. “Nobody steps foot into that area.”
“Why?”
“I dunno, but they will smoke us if they see any scuffing on that wax.”
“Smoke? What does that mean?”
The holdovers just laughed, as if my question merited derision, and I had to resist the urge to tell the lot of them to eff the hell off. Could I help it if nobody had told any of us new recruits very much? I glared at Thukhan’s back, which was perpetually faced away, and wished the so-called bay sergeant would get off his ass and maybe clue the rest of us in on things like the so-called Dead Zone.
As for whatever “smoke” meant, I inferred it obviously wasn’t good.
The entire bay found that out ten minutes later when a corporal—a different corporal—wandered in and found half the room lying on their bunks, mouths gaping and drool running down their cheeks.
“GET UP! GET UP! GET UP! GET UP!” yelled the corporal, stomping around the bay. Men attempted to comply, rolling out of their beds onto the hard floor, or sitting up and pranging their foreheads on the bars of the bunks above them.
“Everyone in the front-leaning rest!” the corporal ordered.
The holdovers—perhaps sensing what was coming—were already there. We new recruits, looking at the holdovers, all quickly assumed a more or less push-up position, with arms extended and locked and bodies made as rigid as possible—which in the case of some of the softer-seeming males, wasn’t very rigid.
“An absolute disgrace,” said the corporal, who patrolled the edge of the Dead Zone like a shark. “You’r
e here not even one full day and you’re already acting like it’s time to kick back and party. Okay, fine, no problem, we can fix that. DOWN!”
The holdovers lowered their bodies until their chests brushed the floor. Myself and the other new recruits watched and mimicked.
“UP!”
The holdovers came back to an arms-rigid posture. I and the rest did as well.
“DOWN!”
Everyone back down to the floor.
“UP!”
Everyone back up.
After five repetitions, some of the other recruits were groaning.
At ten repetitions, some of our arms were shaking and a great many of us were bowed in the middle.
At fifteen repetitions half the recruits’ legs and abdomens were resting on the floor.
“Effing Lord above,” said the corporal. “What kind of garbage are the recruiters sending us these days? You all are so soft, I could put my boot through the ass of three of you and not even feel it. This is just effing beautiful.”
The corporal looked at his chronometer on his wrist.
“Bay Sergeant Thukhan, you have fifteen mikes to square these new people away. I want bunks made to standard and everything put away correctly in lockers. I am going to stand right here while you make it happen, and if it doesn’t happen, we’ll do a little more fixing until it does. MOVE!”
“Corporal, yes Corporal,” Thukhan said, and ran—not walked—down one side of the bay to one of the unmarked doors at the back. He put a palm on the print lock and it opened, revealing a large closet with shelf after shelf of pillows and sheets and fuzzy, gray blankets.
“Line up!” Thukhan yelled. We new recruits stumbled to comply.
Thukhan proceeded to hurl pillows and blankets at people, yelling at them to vacate the entry to the closet as soon as they’d received their bedding.
I looked at my wrist—a black plastic digital watch being one of the very few things I’d been allowed to keep from civilian life—and realized that it had already been five minutes. Not even half the men had been helped yet. Those that had, hauled their stuff back to their bunks and dumped it, looking about dumbly for instructions. Several of them raised their hands, looking directly at the corporal, but he just ignored them and kept his arms folded, a finger tapping his bicep while he occasionally looked down at his own watch.
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