Arach

by C. M. Simpson

  I was going to get a blaster, wasn’t I?

  I looked around and discovered her Majesty, queen of the wasps, holding out a set of goggles.

  “Put these on, before you stand up,” she said, “and hold on,” which was when I realized I could feel the wind pulling at the hair on top of my head. “Vespis flitters were not built with humans in mind.”

  Figured.

  I reached up to take the goggles, and felt the strength of the air racing past my fingertips. I got a good hold on the goggles, and put them on before looking around for something to hold on to. There was a rail, about a meter behind me, so I slid back to it and grabbed on, twisting around so I could peer over the small partition that held it.

  It came as a shock to see I was sitting at the very front of a short-nosed craft with a very open top. The queen was operating the console in front of what I’d thought was a partition, using her foremost pair of legs, while she hung on with her second set. Her hindmost pair was braced against the back of the craft, and her wings were tucked tight to her back.

  Askavor, for his part, was crouched as low as he could go, lower, now that I wasn’t underneath him. He too, had a set of hands operating controls, and a set of hands hanging on. That left him with two sets to spare to brace with—no wonder he’d been tasked with babysitting me. Which didn’t mean I had to like it… or approve.

  “Focus!” the queen commanded. “I’m sure you can find something useful to do.”

  As a reminder to pay attention to what was going on, it was as good as a slap in the face. I ducked back down, and tried to pull everything I’d learned into a nice, straight line… or some semblance of order. Okay, well, I guess I’d settle for a tangle that made a little bit of sense. Yeah, that would do.

  First thing that needed to happen was that I needed to work out where the drop-ship was, and if I could hack my way into its controls using the link Tens had given me. I looped my arm through the rail over my head, and sank into my implant, searching for the link. If I was very, very lucky the arach hadn’t done anything to the programming on the ship, and I’d be able to slip in unnoticed.

  “Brace.” The queen’s voice drifted over me.

  I heard it, but I really didn’t register what she’d said. I’d found the link I needed, and landed in the shuttle’s nav-com. Oh, good. It didn’t take long for me to make sure the control coding was exactly as I remembered it. With a higher level of manual control than I’d remembered. That couldn’t be right.

  The floor tilted beneath me, and I began to slide. I reached up and grabbed hold of the rail with my other hand—and then the tilt worsened, and I found it hard to concentrate on the shuttle’s progress, as I slid further. This time, I didn’t mind it when Askavor laid a clawed foot across my stomach, and pushed me up against the console.

  “Spin the shuttle code,” he said. “I will keep you safe.”

  Safe. Not a word I associated with arach.

  “We are K’Kavoran,” Askavor said, “humans, vespis, mantid, and us.”

  Us, huh. I wondered why he didn’t refer to his kind as weavers, or arach, or some other spidery name.

  “Because weavers are but one race, and ‘arach’ is the term all use for the swarms.”

  Swarms. Now that wasn’t a term I’d heard used for them. I wondered why it was a good alternative. A shudder rippled through Askavor’s mental presence.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Focus! Shuttle!” the queen snapped, her mind-voice dagger sharp.

  Askavor and I winced, but he said nothing, and I returned to the other shuttle’s nav-com. It was on course, and I fed its progress to the ara…weaver lurking in my head—and then I looked for something else that might be useful.

  Locking the drop-ship’s weapons in place seemed like a good idea, but also a bad one. If they tried to move them to intimidate the population—or to take out their communications—they’d know they’d been spotted. Likewise, if there was someone in the ship doing overwatch on the scans, who saw the shuttle making an intercept course.

  Hmmm. I decided to deal with that, but, first, I wanted to see exactly how many arach had come down in the drop-ship. I knew they could shape shift, which meant their form would affect exactly how many they had on board. Tens’ estimate could be off.

  Twenty arach would fill the drop ship, in spider form. They’d be able to fit more than that, if they shifted to human form, and used the pods. It made sense they’d use more numbers on the initial strike. Twenty didn’t sound like enough to subdue a good-sized population.

  I thought about skimming through the K’Kavoran net, grateful I had the vespis code language stuck in my head, but then it occurred to me that there might be some other way to find it. I dug through the on-board files, trying to find one that had been recently added.

  “Stop!” Askavor’s presence pulled me back to the implant. “Any files they have will be in arach. You don’t have it, and they will be defended. Here is the data on the settlement.”

  Stars help them, I thought, going over the statistics, and I surfaced to ask.

  “Did the second shuttle launch?”

  Askavor did not shift.

  “I will check,” he said.

  “And I need to do a head count on what’s in that shuttle.”

  That caught the queen’s attention.

  “You think there could be more than twenty?”

  “Yes. They need to take the settlement on the first strike. Twenty arach is not enough for a town of three thousand—not if they want to keep them alive for feeding.”

  “Askavor, take the controls.”

  I watched Askavor’s forelimbs move, and then the spider replied.

  “I have them.”

  “Change of plans. You are to steal the shuttle, and get to the ship. I will bring a force to deal with the arach on the ground.” She tilted one multi-faceted eye towards me. “You need to jam the drop-ship’s communications. If there are two, you need to jam both. I will activate broader jamming once the shuttle takes off, to take out any other communications they might have.”

  “But the settlers…” one of the other vespis began, and the queen clattered her mandibles.

  He subsided.

  “I will be as swift as I can, but twenty would have been a challenge. More is not a battle we can win.”

  I was mortified, because I hadn’t confirmed the numbers, and she wasn’t waiting. Even as I opened my mouth the say something, she flared her wings and let go of the grab rail.

  “Your majesty!” I protested, but she did not come back, Lifting out of the flitter’s slip-stream, and banking sharply away. She answered me nonetheless.

  “There are two shuttles. You need to get to the ship.”

  By shuttle, I knew she meant drop-ships, which meant they’d either dropped at the same time, or Tens had been too far gone to warn me of the second one—that, and I might have locked him out of my skull before he could. Yeah… Whatever. There were two, and the vespis couldn’t take them both, so we were going to land out of sight of the township, and steal the drop-ship once the arach had started their attack.

  Part of me wanted to protest the action, to say just how very wrong that was, but the other part of me grabbed it by the throat and told it we could cry later. If Mack and the crew were to survive, we had to get to the ship, before the raid was done. Whether we tried to stop the attack or not, would make no difference. Two drop-ships, forty arach—not something the small force of vespis and weaver were able to take. Heading to the ship was better than adding to the casualty list.

  I slipped into the drop-ship’s computer, once more, but this time, beyond checking the thing was still on course, my only goal was to take a look at how many of their people they’d squeezed inside it. Infiltrating the security feed wasn’t a problem, but my heart almost stopped when I saw exactly how many they’d brought with them.

  “That’s about half the force they
would have brought aboard the ship,” Askavor whispered, and he sounded as mortified as any spider I’d ever heard.

  Not hard, really—given he was the only non-arach spider that had ever really talked to me.

  I thought about checking the numbers in the other shuttle, if only so the queen had some idea of just how many warriors she would need to bring, but Askavor’s voice brought me back to the flitter.

  “We’re almost there. Get ready.”

  I surfaced in time to feel the flitter descending. As though reading my mind, Askavor lifted his foot off my midriff so I could turn myself around. Who was I kidding? The damn spider was in my head. Of course, he could read my mind. Damnit!

  I pulled myself up off the floor, and was just in time to absorb the light jolt of landing through my feet. It was the first time I’d been able to see the whole craft I’d been riding on. I’d been right; it was a flitter of some kind.

  Askavor’s bulk had stopped me from seeing how the console had tapered into a low wall furnished with a grab rail to which two more wasps clung. The queen had also blocked the sight of another three wasps. Behind me, beyond the low partition I had noticed, were another four wasps, although I got the impression there’d been at least two more.

  “Our queen never flies alone,” said a new voice, and I wondered just how many of the creatures around me had access to my mind.

  “All of us,” came as an unwelcome chorus.

  Well, fuck me!

  And several of them started back in surprise.

  Askavor sounded very much like he was laughing as he explained.

  “It’s a profanity,” he said. “A profanity, not a suggestion. Most certainly not an invitation.”

  I buried my face in my hands, and felt my skin blaze with embarrassment.

  Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn.

  Damn.

  “Are you done?” The same, new, voice, and it didn’t sound amused.

  I nodded, took a deep breath, and took my hands away from my face.

  “Let’s do this.”

  9—Boarding the Marie

  Now that I was out of it and could see it properly, the vespis flitter looked more like an open hover-sled, which made sense, when you considered their wings. The sled was fairly light, too, because the half dozen vespis remaining with us, lifted it by the grab rails, and concealed it in a thicket of bushes, beneath the forest canopy.

  It didn’t take them long, but I figured that was more due to practice than how simple the task was. They worked as a team, making it look easy, before flicking their wings, and landing in front of me.

  Their leader clicked and chattered at me, and I heard his voice in my head.

  “Our names are not easy for human tongues. You will call me Tek. Your guide is Tovy. These others are Vrav, Kek, Nik, Zarav, Vran, Keriv, and Tok. You can tell them apart by the pattern on their shells.”

  I stared at him, not able to tell him that I wasn’t going to remember more than Tek, Tok and Tovy. I would try, though… I stared at the colors patterning the vespis skins. When I had more time, I was sure as shit going to try to memorize who was who.

  “That is all we ask. Come,” he said, flipping an antenna at me and the waiting weaver, before leading the way between the trees and up a slight rise.

  Not a big bug for words, are you? I thought, and he stopped.

  Fuck.

  I watched as he turned, and looked me up and down, in a way that reminded me of Mack at his most pissed off. Well, double the fuck. Maybe that commander thing wasn’t species specific.

  “No. Now, follow.” He turned and moved off. “Quickly.”

  Like I needed to be told, pace he was setting!

  I jogged, double-time, in his wake, almost envious of the speed at which the commander, Askavor, and the other vespis moved. I tried to suppress the thought that there were advantages in having more than one pair of legs, and didn’t quite succeed. Nor did I succeed in keeping up.

  I tried to up the pace, but the ground was too uneven for sprinting. That didn’t stop me from working at it, though. I watched as they moved further ahead of me, almost losing sight of them as the slope grew steeper. The thought of asking them to wait crossed my mind, but then I decided I’d be damned before I slowed down the mission… or asked for special consideration.

  We were supposed to be a team, right? Well, if these goddamn bugs had worked with humans, before, they knew their limitations, and I was not going to beg. They either needed me, or not.

  Which didn’t mean I wasn’t going to push myself to catch up, rough terrain, or no. Because I needed them, too.

  I moved as fast as I could, trying to balance the need for speed against the need to not cripple myself by rolling an ankle. This hill couldn’t last forever, right? And they’d have to stop when they got to the top, if only to make sure the arach had left the drop-ship. Whatevs, a girl can dream.

  I kept moving, only to dive for cover when a shadow passed over me. It took me a moment to register that it was smaller than a shuttle, and accompanied by a low buzzing sound. Well, that made me feel more stupid than usual. Last time I checked, spiders didn’t fly.

  The vespis that responded to that was not one I’d had in my head before—and I got the impression that it was mocking me with mimicry.

  “Last time I checked”, it said, “we had encountered only one species of spider-kin that could get airborne—and they flew at the mercy of the wind.”

  Fuck.

  “You must stop saying that, or you will attract the attention of the more adventurous of my species.”

  Well, f…damned if that wasn’t embarrassing!

  “An interesting alternative,” the vespis said, touching down a little behind me, “but at least it is one we are familiar with. Please start running up the hill, again.”

  I wondered why it would want me to do that.

  “I have been asked to help you catch up.”

  By making me run in front? I thought. Some help! But I didn’t bother arguing with it, just started to run. I heard the whirr of its wings as it took off behind me, and the sound sent a shiver through me. I grabbed hold of panic as the whirr grew to a loud buzz. I knew it wasn’t hunting me—knew that for a fact.

  Clung to the hope it was true.

  “The queen would have me for an incubator,” only confirmed it, but the part of me that was linked to my survival instincts was having trouble believing it.

  I ran, and adrenaline coursed through me when the buzzing filled the air around my head and beat against my skin. I barely suppressed a yelp of fright, when I felt it bite hard on the back of the combat jacket I’d been wearing when I’d woken up. I hadn’t been ready for that—and I was definitely still not ready to be lifted above the ground.

  I suppressed another shout, and gritted my teeth. There was no way I wanted to alert the arach to our presence, something my vespis companion should have considered. A little bit of warning would have been nice!

  To my surprise, the vespis didn’t respond, but carried me to a point where the trees and bushes thinned, and grass and rocks took their place. The wasp let me go as soon as my feet had touched the ground, and then settled to the ground beside me.

  “Crouch,” it advised, wiping its mandibles, as though I’d left a nasty taste in its mouth. “You do not want to be silhouetted against the sky. The others are over there.”

  This time, I caught the flick of antenna that gave me the direction, and looked up the hill. The other vespis were lying along the ridgeline, using the grass and clumps of rock to conceal them. I headed up to join the end of the line, only to hear Tek’s voice.

  “Looks like the last arach has left the shuttle. There were around forty. We will give them thirty seconds more to get clear, and then head down. Check to make sure they didn’t leave a guard.”

  A guard, huh? Well, it’s what I would have done…

  “Me, too.”

  I didn’t bo
ther answering, just linked in and took a look around. The drop-ship was clear—and I didn’t know whether to be relieved or outraged that humans were discounted so easily.

  “They would have done the same at a vespis colony,” Tek said. “We are not star-borne, and can be disregarded. See?”

  Again, I followed the antenna flip, and saw what happened when the arach caught up with the humans that had tried to outrun them over the fields. Some of the spiders brought them down by leaping onto their backs and riding them into the ground, and others overran them, snagging a clawed foot around the runner’s ankles, and ripping their feet out from under them. Regardless of how they dropped their humans, their final moves were the same: they all sank their fangs into their catches in a brief, but powerful, bite.

  And they moved fast. They didn’t stop to make sure their venom worked; they just bit and ran, leaving a trail of struggling bodies in their wake. It didn’t take me long to see why. No matter how much the bitten human seemed to be moving after the bite, they soon shuddered to stillness.

  “They’ll stay that way for hours,” said the vespis who’d come to catch me up.

  It had moved to lie at the end of the line, and was watching the arach dispatch the colonists. I wished I could read its face, but I couldn’t. Vespis carapaces were not flexible like human skins. They had other ways to show their feelings. I stared at it, trying to remember its name.

  “Tovy,” it said, and I blushed.

  Well, color me dumber than usual. Of course, it was my assigned keeper. Tovy didn’t respond to that, and I went back to watching the arach’s progress.

  “As soon as they’re amongst the buildings, we move.”

  Tek’s order caused a ripple of movement down the line, as we all edged closer to the ridge in order to watch the arach progress. Across the fields below us, the settlers stopped moving. I wanted to say we couldn’t leave them, but I knew we must. That hurt, and I vowed I’d make amends as soon as I was able.