I shut my six eyes briefly, recalling the recent scene on the bridge, while the other half of my mind took my body northward, navigating instinctively. My north eyes’ memory viewed the brown and purple planet, mostly concealed by mushbug remains, while my south eyes’ memory saw the human, the Captain, looking quite disappointed.
This was his first mission. New ship. New crew. New location. What did some humans say? Throw them in at the deep end and see if they sink or swim?
I believe the Captain has been sinking and hasn’t started swimming yet. Though, if he had tried to swim in the sulfuric acid rivers on my world, dissolving would be the more correct word.
For many years now I have been studying humans and have learnt some of their body language. Their emotions and ours have some similarity, which is why many of us have been chosen to lead security detachments on the human ships. Though, I understand it is our massive bulk that tends to put fear into the hearts of many beings.
Usually males, in my experience. Most females I’ve met have been very impressed. I get offers from human females all the time, as it happens. Apparently, they like my really big tongue. I have no idea what they’d want to do with it though. Have a bath?
I’m not xeno though so it really doesn’t appeal to me. And I’m really not into smooth skin. There’s something really unappealing about a creature without thick hair on their bodies. Almost like touching their veins. Brr. And I must admit to finding some of the gorillas on Earth more attractive than the humans.
In any case, I’m rambling. The binary star system has been making it a bit more difficult for me to focus lately, and I’m very worried that I might make the wrong decision. But I must remain professional, so while we stopped in space and waited for the ship’s nanites to complete collecting the mushbug queen’s cells from the outside, with the captain’s permission I flashed down to investigate the nuclear war evidence, and find some way to confirm or reject the idea that the mushroom bugs were still actively war-like.
My excuse was that I wanted to be sure of my vote for their inclusion. My reason was simply to stretch my legs and give the other half of my mind some exercise. The Center might be tall enough for me to be there, but all exits are just a few clicks of my legs away. I make jokes to keep half my mind off it, but the Center being similar in size to a second brain punishment egg on my world does disturb me.
I had chosen to flash to the island where Leafy had previously attempted to reseed the world. For reference, we later found that Leafy had been dating a Floran male who had somehow convinced her that creating a Floran outpost here was a good idea. I assume the binary suns had also affected her thinking as she took over the ship and tried to launch seeds, with the plan to convert the entire star system into a Floran colony.
It took quite a while for the nanites to restore everything to how things were before, and the result of that was a massively detailed record of the island, created from the nanite network.
I put away my memories and reopened my eyes, pulling in the scenes around me.
My legs had taken me to the center of the island. Boulders, dirt, sand and rubble with occasional reflections off the patches of fused silica. A wasteland. Of course, beneath the surface there were billions of bacteria, teeming and converting various minerals into various other minerals. There were also some amoeba and a few insect-like creatures. So, the place wasn’t as dead as it looked. Still, there wasn’t anything there for me.
I pulled up the map on my nanite suit’s HUD and located what I was looking for. A buried conical building not far away, almost invisible save for a point that stuck out of the ground. It didn’t take me long to get there.
Glassy sand and rock-like segments of welded mushbugs littered the surface, broken only by pieces of building structures reaching upwards, as though struggling to take their last breath before the end.
Whatever they were made of, a nuclear bomb was enough to kill them. Though there weren’t that many remains further away from the flashpoint, so perhaps they survived anything other than a direct hit.
I shifted away a few boulders, then put my mouth down on top of the conical building and bit through the porous rock, removing the roof and spitting it to my east.
Inside was what I came to find, but like most places, humans tended to investigate, I couldn’t enter.
I had brought a small drone with me, strapped to my back, and I released it and sent it inside to record what it found.
The drone lowered itself into the conical building and turned slowly, shining a bright light on the walls, and revealing the scratches that had been left there, sending the image directly to my HUD.
A map of the base with a plan of attack, with arrows…
I looked at it in surprise. That can’t be right.
The arrows were pointing at the structure, not away from it.
Had I misinterpreted?
The drone continued its search, and I knew I was correct. There definitely had been a nuclear attack, but not one that anyone would have expected. It was an inside job, with systems set up to attract the weapons to this position, to destroy whatever was there.
They had deliberately wiped themselves out.
Not at any point in the history of my world had any of us wanted to kill each other to such a degree. If what the AI had discovered was true, then a queen had made it here to prepare, before another queen had landed. Perhaps the first had sacrificed herself to destroy whatever civilization already existed to make space for the next mushbug family.
I checked the radiation readings. The attack had happened over a hundred years ago. The previous mushbug race would have been erased, and the new mushbugs taken over, bringing their culture and customs with them.
I retrieved the drone, picked up the roof with my mouth, and replaced it, sadly. Then I flashed back to the ship and submitted my report to the AI, returning to my station on the Center.
Unfortunately, discovering that the mushbugs had committed terrorist acts against members of their own race, and sacrificed themselves for it, has meant I’ve decided to withdraw my vote for them joining the I.C.
I just hope that the others would find a more compelling reason to offer membership.
Chapter 12
Geo’s Metrics
My eye flap was shifted by the nanite suit to ‘open’ when it grew the spherical protection shield around me. I always found this disconcerting as I did not have the eyelids that some humans had, and the suit wasn’t able to compensate by integrating with my other senses. For humans it would be like having something attached to their head that kept their eyelids open for several hours.
My eyes didn’t require the constant remoisturizing that humans eyes did. Even so, I disliked this loss of control, and looked forward to when we could return to using force suits.
A further discomfort was the restriction on my usual method of movement. I used the various flaps on my body, or teardrops as Heartness liked to call them, to guide myself when I flew, floated or spun. I was equally comfortable flying in gas clouds, floating in ammonia seas, or rolling down a diamond incline, with my unencumbered physiognomy. But with the nanite suit I could only roll left or right. Rolling forward would cause some pain to my eye flap, requiring me to rely more on relocating by flashing.
It may be needless to put this in my report but the humans require completion, and Jorjarar may find my story relevant.
In any case I had been tasked with answering a question.
We had still not discovered whether the schools were military installations or not, and we hadn’t had the chance to really investigate. Now that we were on the offensive, and we knew the mushbugs could see us anyway, Hogart thought that I would be the best person for the job. I could flash into and out of buildings quickly, checking scratch boards and translating conversations, instantly sending what I had found, and disappearing before being discovered. If I was discovered I would be quite quick at rolling away.
I decided to start with the conical building that had fea
tured the scratch board with the Stellar Flash.
Of course, I thought it best not to enter that particular room again, considering what had recently happened to my colleagues, so flashed outside the bottom room first.
I was pleased to sense that no mushbugs were inside, and as the sky began to darken as the world turned to night, I hoped that they wouldn’t be back again until morning.
I carefully rolled into the room, a slight crackling of my suit touching the hard ground the only sound I made.
This room contained many more rectangular resting pads than the others, was a lot wider, and the scratchboard filled a lot more space on the wall. In fact, there were several of them. And here, I could see that the information on the board was a lot more complicated. There were symbols that were small on one side of the board and larger on the other which suggested some kind of progression or mathematics.
As I’d been designated an astrophysicist by the humans I felt that I had the knowledge to be able to easily interrupt any mathematical construct, no matter what the language. My translator would soon have it worked out.
I quickly found that, without even the slightest similarity in mathematical symbols, there was no way I could understand the scratches in front of me.
I went to the next board and reached out my senses, not only detecting the scratches that were on the board now, but the ones that had been there before and had been erased or written over.
On the surface, the second board contained nothing of interest. A few more scratches describing geographical features of the planet. It was what was underneath that was more interesting.
Erased just a few days previously were scratches of the star system, and I was surprised to sense that the mushroom bugs actually knew a lot more about the planets in the area than we had learnt from our orbs.
The hidden diagram showed thirty planets aligned along the elliptic. This was amazing in itself as the one the furthest away was trillions of kilometers distant. How could they have known that?
But what really struck me as strange was that each of the planets was larger than the last – slowly increasing in size until the secondary binary star. There almost seemed to be a natural progression. The increments between the size of the planets were even. Not only that, but the gaps in orbit followed the humans’ Titius-Bode rule, of spaces between subsequent planets’ orbits to continue to double, the further out you go.
Of course, there was no way that the scratch board could include all 30 planets to scale, but I was able to reinterpret a bent-shaped symbol to indicate repeated sections of missing space.
Was there some kind of cultural significance in the increasing size of the planets, perhaps symbolizing that they were closer, or were they really equally larger than each other?
I quickly discounted the first theory when I discovered that the planet that was two away from the first star was marked with a symbol where the others weren’t. As this was the one that we were on, and the next planet was still larger, it suggested there really was a progression in size.
I realized I was becoming distracted by this drawing. The astrophysicist in me could roll back and forth for hours, applying various mathematical formula from around the universe to understand the scratching. Forcing myself away, I sent the enhanced image to the ship, then carefully rolled to my left and out of the empty room.
As I rolled up the ramp to the next section I wondered why, even though school was over, there weren’t mushbugs guarding the area. Were they just slaves to the queen? With the main queen gone, would they simply forget their allegiance, and then forge a new one, following new rules and regulations with the new queen? I really couldn’t understand this idea of aliens simply accepting a change in the way society was ordered, just like that. Perhaps I could compare it to something completely alien and incomprehensible, like letting a government of representatives run your life for you rather than running your life yourself. I couldn’t imagine a society like that.
It is possible that my inquiries would be for naught as, even if this had been a general education school, the new queen may change it into a military one anyway.
I rolled into the next room and was once again surprised by what I found. Scratches of the ring of carbon dioxide volcanoes, accompanied by lines in arcs from the volcanoes to the sky.
Were they teaching the mushbugs how to enter orbit using volcanoes? I quickly calculated the launch velocity needed. Even though this planet had low gravity, and a mushbug shell was quite strong, the internal pressure and release of carbon dioxide would not be enough thrust for low orbit, let alone set them on a suitable trajectory for another planet.
Our recent translation of the queens’ conversation suggested this possibility, but to know that they were actually teaching this idea to the younger mushbugs suggested it wasn’t a rare act.
It was then that I realized exactly what they were teaching them here. Information about the star system. Information about how to escape it and go elsewhere. It was a classic case.
I knew now what the conical building and, in fact the school as a whole, was for. There was no need for me to investigate the other buildings. I’m sure they would all be the same. I activated my flash band and returned to the ship.
#
“Immigration?” asked Hogart incredulously, once Geo had given his report. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m sorry, Captain, I have not learnt that particular skill from Puppy as yet. I have begun taking lessons from him but…”
“Sorry Geo. It’s just an expression. I can’t believe it.”
“Everything matches, sir,” said Puppy. “I guess the third room is probably for contingency measures, risks or potential threats.”
“But, why teach the black and brown ones? I’m pretty sure that they’re almost like slaves here. They can’t go anywhere.”
“Why teach all your humans how to do mathematics when most of them don’t use algebra after the age of 19?” asked Amy.
“Good point,” said Hogart. “But, I thought only the queen was capable of migrating to the other planets. The other mushbugs don’t have telekinesis, so they wouldn’t be able to guide themselves anywhere.”
“Well, we don’t know that for certain, so there’s every possibility that there are different levels of mushbugs we don’t know about.”
Hogart thought about this for a moment. Mushbugs that might have the skills of the queen but weren’t gold-colored. It’s amazing they lasted this long with a queen in charge. If they had her skills and realized it, there’d be an overthrow at some point. Hogart wondered why the queen didn’t simply abdicate and give the world to the mushbugs. If she did that, they could develop in their own way and push society further forward.
“Thank you for your report Geo,” Hogart said. “We’ve got our question answered. Not an education school, not a military school, but a school that enables mushbugs to either help plan for, or be involved in, an escape to a new planet.”
Just then the AI appeared. “Sir, the collection process is almost complete. Set course?”
“Let me think about that,” said Hogart. “I’d like to go and look at her remains a bit more closely. Pay my last respects, and all that. I can’t believe she came all this way to just be mashed against our screens. Not with her telekinetic abilities.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hogart looked about the room. Going and seeing the queen’s remains wasn’t the most exciting job, but he best take someone along that can at least distract him a little. He really should take his astrobiologist with him.
“Amy, join me when you’re done.”
She flicked a watery arm to confirm, and continued finalizing her report. He had tasked her with working out the next best planet to visit. She’d know soon enough.
And then, perhaps, they’d finally get a First Contact situation happening for this star system.
If the death of the queen didn’t cause the entire mission to come crashing down around him first.
&nb
sp; Chapter 13
Murder on the Stellar Flash
The nanite cleaning system had collected all the remaining pieces of the mushroom queen and had stored them in the Stella Flash’s quarantine area.
Two vats full of a grayish fleshy liquid sat in one part of the room, with another vat full of gold-colored chitinous pieces.
Hogart looked through the window at the vats in dismay. Things had not quite gone to plan. And now, here he was, with the dead body of the queen of a world that he’d planned to forge a First Contact pact with.
From what he remembered, this queen was desperate to go elsewhere, and give her world to her children. The new queen, however, just wanted to take over everything. Could she be trusted? Could he start again with the new queen?
He was glad that with his advanced recycling systems he only had to eat once a day. If he would have had to have eaten something now, that vat of slimy-gray, soupy, mucus-like corpse would have turned him off his lunch.
He heard a squelching sound, and Amy slid up to form a slightly feminine shape beside him. Even though she was a glutinous blob that he could see through, she knew the exact curve to use to excite even the most reticent and conservative straight male human. Momentarily distracted, Hogart looked her up and down, then turned back to the quarantine screen. He couldn’t do anything right now.
“You look a little stressed, Captain,” said Amy. “I’ve been trained in human massage techniques. Perhaps I can help you, in your cabin.”
Hogart turned to her and raised an eyebrow. “Well, Amy, I’m very flattered, but I read the AI’s medical reports of the team. It confirms what we all suspected, that you’re all being affected by the binary suns’ electromagnetic spectrum. You, in particular are, shall we say, feeling a bit more, you know…”
Amy twisted in her translucent puddle body, attempting to use coy body language. “Whatever do you mean, captain?” then she squelched down and back up again, becoming a pole of goo. “You’re right. With my form, no one can resist, so I’m used to taking it anytime I want it, which has only been when I want it. Now I’m wanting it when I don’t usually want it, so you’re right to reject me.”
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