There was a blaze in her eyes. He was her brother, her only sibling. Right now she did not see him as a genetic tether, but as a source of tremendous frustration. This morning all patience seemed to have deserted her.
She did not strike him. She tapped at the tablet in her hand and shoved it at him. He glanced down at it.
“There is a pod of the Swarm gathering to feed on SetaNu Four. We will…”
He was on his feet, the chair tipping backward and crashing behind him unheeded, shock and confusion roaring through him. He grabbed the tablet from her. “What?”
On the screen was a live feed of an endless stream of dim shapes that barely reflected enough starlight to be visible at all, like a dull, grainy river of corruption flowing through the vacuum of space. It was a migratory pod of giant Swarm beetles.
He choked on his own spittle and staggered a little. He tapped the image and the coordinates came up. The monsters were indeed en route to SetaNu Four.
Pyona’s brows drew together. Her voice was sharp. “You didn’t know about this?”
Tarn set down the tablet absently. This changed everything. Now he understood her intensity. This wasn’t about sibling rivalry. She had come to him for help.
He was her only hope to save their people.
Tarn slipped off his haptic mitts and carefully set them on his desk, the motion warping the floating magnified image of the minute machine he’d been working on refining. “Sister, I know nothing beyond the walls of this laboratory,” he said slowly.
Dismayed, he looked at his beloved semi-circular desk, arranged very nearly like a bird’s nest. It was stacked with books, erratically piled sheaves of writeflat, and data sticks scattered around the computer console at its core.
Then his eyes moved to the floor-to-ceiling window behind the desk. Just outside, green and blue mottled foliage spread across the warm turquoise sky, throwing shade over the hot pink flowers he prized so much as they pressed against the glass.
The lush beauty of O’Sep. He would have to leave it, at least for a while. That would be hard.
He turned to take in the silent activity of his team in the expanse of the room behind him. Some of them sat at computer stations refining software. Mili, a leading specialist in the order Coleoptera, was hunched over and had her arms deep in the decaying carcass of a giant Swarm beetle. A few of her best students were at the vivaria, taking data from various ongoing beetle experiments. All were working diligently.
His mind started to race. Not only would all of this research be disrupted, he and his staff would be uprooted and forced to race against the clock to prepare. The sheer scope of it was overwhelming.
He mumbled, “I’ll need time to relocate the lab to a ship.”
Pyona lifted her chin. “I’ve already assigned fifty people to pack your lab and transport it up to the Percedus. They will stay to supplement your staff onboard. Get them up to speed quickly.”
He looked at her blankly and nodded. She’d already arranged it all. Of course she had.
She sighed and her expression softened. She glanced around, found a seat within reach, and drew it up, gesturing toward his fallen seat where it lay. “Sit down, Tarn. It’s time to stop yelling and listen to each other.”
Tarn stood on the bridge of the Percedus, watching SetaNu Four slowly darken. The planet took on a flickering, swirling, writhing appearance as the Swarm-pod slowly spread out into a single layer in the planet’s upper atmosphere. He’d been staring at the viewscreen so long that when he closed his eyes a reverse image had burned itself into his retinas.
There was no sentient life on SetaNu Four. The biosphere was limited to small pockets of flora and fauna between vast wastelands. The few sheltered valleys and moist hollows wouldn’t occupy this pod of the Swarm for long.
How easily this plague could fall on their own home. How quickly it probably would, if his sister’s plan didn’t work, if his own life’s work failed. The seventh, youngest, and most far-flung sectilian colony world, Olonus Septua, affectionately called O’Sep, was lush and brimming with life from pole to pole. It would nourish the Swarm for decades.
O’Sep was the nearest habitable planet, its star just over half a light year away. If the Swarm chose to move in that direction, it would probably take this pod only a year, maybe two, to migrate to O’Sep from here.
A chill skittered down his spine. It was too easy to imagine.
It was unfair that the Swarm was pushing him into this before he was ready. He needed at least a decade more of research. If only he had recruited more entomologists or software specialists sooner. It had been astonishing that his peers had found his ideas exciting, had so readily seen their potential, but so few had had any interest in actually moving to a remote colony to pursue the work.
If they only knew how beautiful O’Sep was. How pristine. How untouched. How absolutely full to the brim with diverse life in a variety of ecosystems. The Cunabula, the wise race that had long ago seeded sentience across the galaxy, had valued genetic diversity above all else; O’Sep was the epitome of the Cunabulist ideal.
Tarn couldn’t understand why people would choose to live on planets plagued with severe weather, volcanic activity, water shortages—and nepatrox!—when one of their own colonies was a planet like O’Sep. By comparison to the sectilian home worlds, O’Sep was paradise.
He should have taken Pyona’s suggestion and presented it as if it was a vacation opportunity. He had argued that the scientific opportunity would be enough. For him, it would have been enough. Why did she have to be right? he thought. Regret wracked him.
He was but one man. One man against a hive of monstrous insects that devoured civilizations without compunction.
One man with an idea.
He reminded himself again that the black-blood beetle trials had been more than promising. Close cousins to the giant Swarm beetles genetically, the far smaller terrestrial beetles from LoMia Five shared ninety-seven-point-six percent of the same DNA.
Oddly, sectilians themselves shared eighty-five percent of their DNA with the Swarm. Large portions of DNA were often shared among a variety of species—even when those species were the fruit of entirely separate evolutionary trees separated by thousands of light years. It was a byproduct of the Cunabula’s work combined with strange mathematical confluences. Planets with similar ecosystems evolved life along predictable lines from single-celled organisms, and often, but not always, produced analogous species. It was a fascinating line of science, categorizing and comparing genetic variance.
Sectilians shared the most DNA with other bipedal ape-derived hominids from various worlds—often as much as ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent. They shared upwards of seventy percent with various star-scattered rodents. With the innumerable examples of the bovine form, they shared as much as eighty percent or more.
Tarn looked down at his own muscular hand, as different from a paw or pincer or hoof as it could possibly be. Outwardly, none of these species resembled each other, but there was almost a mysticism in the expression of intron and exon, not to mention epigenetics. It made research unpredictable.
Regardless, the results from the beetles of LoMia Five should translate. The Swarm should be weakened enough to give the battleships that had been summoned from Sectilius a fighting chance to defend O’Sep.
A hand tugged at his elbow, abruptly pulling him from his musing. He turned to see that the attention of the entire staff of the bridge was concentrated on him.
Pyona’s gaze was heavy with purpose from the central command seat. “Strap in, Tarn. It’s beginning.”
He retreated to his designated seat, out of the way. When he had secured himself with the unfamiliar restraints and looked up, the surface of SetaNu Four was appreciably lighter in color than it had been. This was expected. The feeding behavior of the Swarm was well documented. The adults had begun to descend to the surface to hunt, leaving mostly juveniles in high orbit until any large predators on the surface were dealt w
ith. Then the juveniles would join them to feed. This made timing critical.
The bridge was silent except for the tapping and clicking of consoles. Outwardly it appeared that each person on the bridge worked utterly oblivious to the others, with only the occasional absent mumble, when in fact Tarn was the only individual not immersed in a sea of constant communication, the only one who needed to be spoken to aloud.
He wasn’t linked into the mental Anipraxic network that the kuboderan navigator created for instantaneous communication between officers. Pyona had offered to introduce him to Anipraxia, to help him navigate it, but he had declined; he hadn’t wanted to distract her from her other duties. That decision, like so many others, might have been a mistake.
Before Pyona had become the Gistraedor Dux of O’Sep, she had commanded a ship like this for six decades. She had told him that it felt good to be back on the bridge. She had missed the ever-present company of a kuboderan in her mind, and she liked the one installed on this ship. She’d said she was contemplating stepping down as Gis’dux and appointing herself as permanent Qua’dux of the Percedus.
He imagined he felt the ship surge forward, but he knew it was probably a simple visual illusion as the Percedus slipped out of its hiding place behind the tiny moon and rocketed toward SetaNu Four.
The ship had been retrofitted with dozens of additional thrusters for both speed and braking, as well as inertial dampeners in order to make this sort of operation plausible and not a suicide mission. They would have to get in and out quickly if they were going to survive this encounter and successfully carry out the experiment.
Tarn felt a swelling of affection for Pyona. Her angular face radiated power and ferocity. Her limbs were taut with tension. Her hand-picked bridge crew of twenty four all shared the same intense, determined look. He began to believe that perhaps Pyona could make this mission succeed just by force of will.
The planet grew in size until he began to make out individual motes in the dark churning fog of black bodies that surrounded it. Reflected light glinted faintly on their hard carapaces. His skin crawled. These beasts were so unnatural. No other known species had adapted to all three realms of air, sea, and vacuum. They were the most successful species in galactic history. And the most deadly.
If the people of O’Sep could have run, they would have. The cataclysm, if it came to pass, would be a year away at minimum. But there was no way to transport every O’Septan to a system beyond the Swarm’s reach in time. There weren’t enough ships in this sparsely inhabited part of the galaxy to carry them all. This was the only way.
It was time to take a stand. This would be the most ambitious preemptive strike ever attempted to protect a world’s inhabitants. If it worked, Tarn’s name would be immortal.
The Percedus took up orbit and began scanning the population for the best subjects for the experiment. Tarn’s station lit up with multicolored infofeeds within moments.
The pestilent roil slid by below them. So far they were passing just above them, unnoticed—apparently not perceived as a threat by the insects. In past encounters, sectilian ships had usually been ignored unless they committed an aggression against an individual insect.
Tarn began to sweat. Everything hinged on the next few hours.
New data spilled onto his console. He forgot his anxiety as he pored over the information about the juveniles in orbit below. He had to work quickly. He identified thirty specimens that were ideal in the sector they were scanning. When he looked up, the main viewscreen had highlighted those individuals and either the kuboderan or the ship’s computer had mapped out several alternate intercept routes between them. Pyona must have selected one of the routes, because all but one disappeared and the ship changed course.
Time crawled by. The ship glided just above the plane that the insects occupied.
Shuttles were deployed to herd the selected juvenile podlings into open cargo bays on one side of the ship. They moved in and among the insects with incredible grace. Tarn had expected to see violence and injured insects thrown into the cargo bay in haste. Instead, he watched as the juveniles barely twitched in response to the gentle taps of the shuttles. These pilots were incredibly well trained. His respect for Pyona and her crew grew by another level.
None of the insects appeared to be alarmed by what was happening. Of course sound wouldn’t travel in vacuum, but if the podlings were signaling in some way for help from the adults, they weren’t doing so until after the cargo bay doors had closed on them.
A voice spoke into the hushed silence, startling Tarn out of his stunned reverie. “Choose a few more in the immediate vicinity, Tarn. We need to go. Some of the adults are getting curious and heading this way.”
He looked down at the data and selected five more podlings that were nearby. These were bigger than he’d hoped to get under ideal conditions, but he wasn’t going to second-guess his sister at this point.
When he’d finished he looked up to see one of the larger insects closing in on them. Every child in the galaxy knew this bogeyman, but few actually saw it with this kind of detail and lived to tell about it. This species inspired a kind of primal fear unlike any other, and Tarn was grateful that he managed to keep his pants unsullied as the adult—a female, he saw—filled the viewscreen, her mandibles twitching and her compound eyes reflecting the ship in a million mirrors.
Pyona barked, probably for Tarn’s benefit, “No time for more. Recall the shuttles. We’re done. We’ve got nine. That’ll have to be enough.”
There was a flurry of silent activity as the crew carried out her orders. The shuttles looped out of view. Once the final shuttle was aboard, the Percedus changed attitude and increased thrust to achieve escape velocity.
Tarn’s heart pounded in his chest as he waited to see if any of the insects would follow. The female that had just been curiously examining them had glanced off the hull as the ship moved off, but it didn’t pursue them. The Percedus was accelerating away from the planet at full power.
They had put several vastuumet between the ship and SetaNu Four before Tarn was able to breathe more easily. They took up orbit in the cold distant fringe of the SetaNu system.
Tarn stood and made eye contact with Pyona. She nodded. Phase One was complete. He left the bridge for his lab near the cargo bays.
His team awaited him there. Immediately they removed the barriers between the cargo bays and lured seven of the nine podlings into one section with a heap of vegetation. Then they closed off the sections again so that the test group of seven was confined to a single space, separate from the two control individuals.
It was important to keep them relatively calm. Even juveniles could do damage to the ship and each other if they started spewing star-hot plasma around. Tarn and his assistants were prepared to prod them into place if necessary, armed with poles hastily made from deck-tubing, but, praise the genius of the Cunabula, the creatures docilely performed as they’d hoped.
Bile rose in Tarn’s throat as he observed the test group on the monitors in his lab. They were crawling over each other as well as the walls, floors, and ceiling. They were so unnatural. Insects shouldn’t be able to get that large. Even the smallest of these podlings was easily larger than a heavy-set sectilian.
Normally with insects the weight of the exoskeleton was a limiting factor for size, but this species had evolved with a honeycomb chitin structure which allowed its exoskeleton to be lightweight and extremely durable no matter the size of the individual.
They scanned the podlings for hours to set down a baseline before they began the experiment. It was tedious, but necessary. If the squillae didn’t perform as he hoped they would, he would need as much data as possible to determine why—so that they could quickly amend the code and try again.
Before the Swarm hovered above O’Sep’s gem-like skies.
Tarn grimaced and turned to his assistant, Mili. “Inoculate them.”
“Yes, Master Tarn.” Mili tapped at the control that had alread
y been set and ready on her tablet.
On the screens, nozzles emerged from three of the four walls. They emitted a short blast of a sticky gel containing a concentrated suspension of Tarn’s tiny machines. It coated the entire chamber, including the podlings.
He had named the microscopic machines “squillae” a long time before, when he was a younger man and in a lighthearted mood. He should have named them something that sounded stronger, more powerful.
They were powerful. And other civilizations used them to great effect. It was a benefit of the prosperity of the sectilian race that they were finally able to turn their engineering sights to the micro rather than the macro, to learn to solve problems in new ways.
Naming the squillae after his favorite minuscule seafood perhaps hadn’t been his best idea. Maybe he would have been taken more seriously. These had seemed such small sins at the time. Now every one of his sins loomed large.
Not only would the squillae rewrite portions of the podlings’ DNA, a small subset were tasked with monitoring the life signs of the subjects. Still others would track and relay the podlings’ locations once they were released again on SetaNu Four.
He wanted his self-replicating machines to spread throughout not only this pod, but every pod that these individuals came in physical contact with. To achieve this dissemination, he couldn’t do more to any single individual than slightly handicap it. So the squillae were designed to neuter each individual, to cap and then reverse population growth.
In addition, a secondary mechanism would work to slow their metabolism, so that they wouldn’t feed nearly as much and their response times would be more sluggish. The squillae’s code instructed the machines to transfer to new individuals with only the slightest tactile brush between Swarm beetle individuals. The squillae should spread through the pod like wildfire.
The immediate effects would be small. In the long term, if the squillae performed as desired, it would eradicate the galactic Swarm threat within three decades, and would make the infected much easier to fight with conventional weapons almost immediately.
The Z Chronicles Page 8
