by Barry Kirwan
At last the hatch clunked into place. She sat with her back against it, her chest heaving, and checked herself over: ears ringing from the decompression, all exposed flesh seared with frostbite, lungs raw. Good enough. The air was thin and cold, so she took a few long breaths, then got to her feet. She stared down at her new Q’Roth claw; it had been meant as a temporary replacement, though it had probably just saved her life.
She ran along the corridor, but as she reached the next hatch two Q’Roth warriors emerged and barred her way, towering a metre above her.
“You killed our captain. We watched you on the monitors.”
She stood her ground. “He put me in charge, you heard that, too.”
Their eye-slits pulsed a brighter shade of red. “We heard, though we do not know why.”
She took a deep breath. “We’re foundering in Quickspace. The ship will be catastrophically breached in sixteen minutes. I know what is attacking us and how to stop it.”
They said nothing, but she knew Q’Roth psychology: she had to give them more or they’d kill her, and one of them would become captain, though not for long.
“All remaining crew must assemble in the battle bridge in the aft section,” she said.
Still they barred her way. “And where are you going?”
“To my two ships, in your hold. That’s where the problem is. If I don’t join you in fourteen minutes, void them into space and fire on them. Destroy them and everyone on board.”
They let her through. Louise sprinted down the corridor leading to her two Raptors, knowing that the Q’Roth wouldn’t wait fourteen minutes.
Louise stopped at the first Raptor holding thirty human captives from the raid on Esperia, all perfectly still, frozen in stasis. She’d been away from her fellow Alicians for so long, and had known nothing of the Plight: genetically-upgraded Alicians had barely been able to breed since Earth’s demise, and needed a steady influx of DNA from their human predecessors. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Louise. Alicians had twice tried to wipe out their genetically outdated cousins, only to discover that without them they would perish within a generation.
The unmoving humans were huddled together like a pack of frightened goats. Like Sister Esma before her, she’d prefer to be rid of them. Humanity had squandered its chances, and as far as she and other Alicians were concerned, had long ago forfeited the right to exist. But for now – and the next fifty years – a few would be kept alive in order to replenish Alician society. Qorall’s armada sweeping across the galaxy would eliminate the rest of humanity back on Esperia.
Her gaze settled on two of the women at the front: Antonia and Sandy. She reckoned their leader, Micah – responsible for Sister Esma’s death and her own missing arm – still cared about these two. Good; he’d come to Savange on a fool’s errand to rescue them, and she would finally be able to kill him. She hated long goodbyes.
Could these humans have stopped a Q’Roth Battlestar dead in Transpace? No. She exited the first Raptor and walked quickly to the identical short-haul transporter next door.
Twelve minutes.
Inside the second storage cell a single large black Spider hung upside down, its four legs clamped to the ceiling. Wires and tubes smeared with blue blood hung in loops from the Spider’s flattened cylinder body, and fed into a console. One of the two remaining Alicians, a tall male of fair complexion – Jura, she recalled – manned the console and pored over the latest readouts. Jura didn’t know what was happening to the rest of the ship, and Louise wasn’t about to distract him from his task.
“No change,” he said. “We still can’t scan it. It disrupts any form of electromagnetic wave. We can only see where we penetrate its flesh, and then not much that makes any sense.”
His baritone voice soothed her. She’d missed Alician contact. Eighteen years away from her people, most of it spent with alien species who bore no resemblance to her own kind; aliens often stank, were visually repulsive or else grated on her ears.
A human corpse was strapped to a nearby chair, the deceased woman’s face streaked with sweat and tears.
“What did you get from the human?”
Jura turned from his displays to Louise, his eyes steady. “Not much. The current batch of Spiders hatched on Esperia sixteen years ago, but they have lived apart from the humans. What the human subject knew was mainly myth and supposition.”
“Indulge me.”
He cleared his throat. “The human subject – we picked her at random and pulled her out of stasis – believed the Spiders were originally raised by the Level Nineteen Kalarash being known as Kalaran, though she didn’t know why. Apparently no one does.”
Louise thought while Jura talked. Qorall wanted one of these Spiders at all costs. He, like his Kalarash enemies, was from another galaxy. Qorall was currently winning the war, but what if the Spiders were also from another galaxy, a secret weapon brought here by the Kalarash aeons ago? Evidently these Spiders could influence space and Transpace without technological aid. That was unique as far as she knew. But she wanted to know more before she handed over this prize to Qorall.
“… the Spiders communicate via the coloured band around their bodies. Otherwise, they appear to be deaf and mute. They are also non-violent. They’ve never been known to kill anything, even when provoked. I’m afraid we’ve learned as much as we are likely to.” He glanced at the corpse. “She died under the interrogation. Their hearts are so fragile.”
Louise ignored the dead woman and stared at the Spider. The Q’Roth believed they had eradicated the Spiders centuries ago, yet now they flourished again on Esperia, sharing that dustbowl planet with humanity. They looked docile, but no one except the Kalarash knew their purpose and their capability, and now one of them had stranded a Q’Roth Battlestar in Transpace. The most important currency in the galaxy had always been information. But she was running out of time.
Eight minutes.
“Send in borers,” she said.
Jura’s brow creased. “It will die.”
Louise said nothing. It had to die anyway, she was convinced of it, to free the Battlestar. But this was her last chance to understand this species, and a dead but intact Spider would still be of considerable value to Qorall. Jura nodded, and went to fetch the burrowing micro-cameras.
Kaarin, a female Alician who had been quietly listening, spoke up, her eyes sharp. “If it dies while we are in Transpace, what will happen to us? And why are we conscious in Transpace anyway? We always believed Transpatial travel was instantaneous. What did you see on the Bridge?”
“I saw nothing,” Louise lied. “This is an anomaly, nothing more. When it ends we will wake up on arrival at Savange.” She spoke with complete conviction; Alician leadership required overt self-assurance. Yet Kaarin was right; all species experienced Transpatial travel as instantaneous. That didn’t mean it was. The Spider didn’t want to be taken to Qorall, and had somehow snagged them in mid-flight – there were no stars outside – and had opened up a vortex that would kill them all. They would disappear without any trace.
Seven minutes. At four she’d have to kill it.
Jura returned and injected the Spider with six borers at equidistant locations around its body: they would navigate their way through it, chart the Spider’s anatomy and neural activity, and then invade its brain. The Spider’s legs tensed, then began to shiver. Blue blood spattered onto the metal floor, like the first heavy drops of rain in a brewing storm.
Jura returned to his console. Louise joined him, looking over his shoulder, his face reflected in the screen where numbers and curves scrolled past. Suddenly his eyes went wide.
“Well I’ll be dam –”
Louise felt the familiar chill – like a sudden ice breeze – of entering Transpace. Every surface, every line on Jura’s face, every hair, turned silver and froze, as did everything else Louise could see, including her own hand resting on his shoulder. She could no longer move. This was all expected when travelling through
Transpace, except she should have been unconscious. She guessed the Spider was dying, but not yet dead. She wondered if Jura and Kaarin were conscious too, but she had no way of knowing.
She heard a thud as the Spider dropped to the floor amidst the sounds of wires and tubes ripping from its flesh. It hobbled over and stood next to her, its soft fur brushing against her thigh. Its communication band, dark until now, lit up, and a focused beam of amber light swept over the console. When the beam shut off, all the complex analyses and data had disappeared from the screen.
The Spider leant against Louise, then tilted its body, and one of its legs kicked with ferocious speed at Jura’s head. Louise heard his neck snap. She would have gasped if she’d been able. From all she knew, what she’d just witnessed was unheard of. The Spiders had always been peaceful, not even defending themselves when the Q’Roth had culled them. Had the Spiders recently changed in some fundamental way? She doubted it; species rarely changed that much, even over millennia. No, they had been waiting, biding their time, until Qorall arrived. Somehow they were a real threat to him. Louise was glad she hadn’t seen what Jura had gleaned from the data: the price of such information was clearly too high. But the intel that the Spiders could manipulate Transpace, and were capable of extreme violence, would be highly valuable to Qorall.
The Spider sagged next to her, heavier than she’d imagined. Something pricked her calf, cold seeping into her veins. The display screen was now silver like everything else, and Louise watched as the Spider staggered away a couple of paces before its legs buckled and it collapsed, its body twitching on the floor in a spreading pool of blood. Good, it was dying, which meant the ship and all aboard would be saved. But what had it injected her with? Even as she thought about what she had just witnessed, and the need to tell Qorall as soon as they arrived at Savange, her mind began to fog. She struggled to hold onto the past few minutes’ events, but they slipped from her memory’s grasp. Louise heard a gurgling sound she presumed to be the Spider’s death rattle, and slipped into unconsciousness.
Blake had never trusted aliens. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them. It was just that when it came down to it, there weren’t that many habitable worlds in the galaxy. Viable planets in the so-called Goldilocks Zones were few and far between. Pierre had said one in a thousand worlds was capable of evolving and sustaining intelligent life. Given the size of the galaxy, the statistics should have made it easy pickings once Transpace travel had been discovered. But there were plenty of races out there. Once you subtracted all the planets destroyed in countless wars over the aeons, even if you added in those rare terraforming successes, prime real estate was still a rarity. Each race looked out for its own; altruism wasn’t a winning trait when it came to galactic survival. But there was one species he trusted, who his wife had given her life for, and he would too: the Spiders.
Blake stood on Hazzards Ridge with two of them. They each had four sturdy legs and a fat round body that also served as a head. When they’d first hatched, growing to full size within a year, the tops of their furry bodies barely reached Blake’s elbow. He’d joked to Glenda that they looked like walking charcoaled hamburgers, which wasn’t such a smart idea around a hungry human population. She’d scolded him, rightly so. Now, laying a hand on the top of the one he considered his best friend, he stroked the soft velvety fur. The Spiders didn’t speak or utter any sound, they communicated with colours via a jagged three-sixty band around their bodies, and right now his friend – he’d never named any of them, out of respect for their own way of life – emanated a waxy, shimmering purple. It signified concern. Blake wondered how the Spiders could read him better than his own kind.
He and Glenda had raised the Spiders on Esperia as soon as the eggs, stored in deep caves, had hatched, bringing them back to the small town where their ancestors had been slaughtered by the Q’Roth a millennium ago. The two of them built pens so the puppy-sized fur-balls didn’t go wandering off into the desert, or come into contact with humans, most of whom couldn’t handle cohabitation with an alien species. He and his wife led the young to the underground feeding stations, where the infant Spiders waited patiently in silent queues for hours till all of them had fed. Together with the rapidly-maturing and fast-growing Spiders, Blake and Glenda tried to work out how the homes and other buildings in Shimsha, the Spiders’ ancestral home, functioned.
The task had brought him and his wife closer. After they’d lost their son in WWIII three decades earlier, their love had turned platonic. Blake had accepted it, and never once looked elsewhere, even though Glenda had even pushed him towards the idea once or twice. But the energy of the Spiders, their exuberance when at play, had rekindled fires in both of them.
The Spiders became family. He smiled, recalling happier times with Glenda when they’d got it all wrong, the most embarrassing case when they watched what they thought was some kind of athletic display, only to realise it was an annual group mating. But what had amazed him was how fast the Spiders learned; he only had to show a single Spider anything once, and it would transmit to the others, until the whole society knew it as if they’d been shown first-hand. Glenda taught them to lip-read human speech – something he’d never told Micah, and in return they had taught Blake and Glenda how to read their colour language. He and Glenda could have left at any time and gone back to the nearby town of Esperantia to re-integrate into human society, but they didn’t. Instead they watched the Spider society grow and flourish.
In the mornings the Spiders farmed the land, producing a single crop, a bitter sorghum that could be pulped into an oily yellow residue, bland but nutritious. In the afternoons most Spiders met in groups of nine – never less or more – for several hours, usually out in the open in the ubiquitous broad plazas. Blake had tried to attend such meetings, but the way they flashed colours to each other was too fast and complex; they were Level Four, after all, more advanced than most humans, him included. Once or twice he had been gently ushered out of such discussions. At first he’d thought nothing of it, assuming it was maybe something more personal to them, but as Qorall’s armies neared Esperia, the frequency of such events increased, and since Kalaran had come back, many more secret meetings occurred all over town, less in the plazas and more behind closed doors. Good for you, he thought. He knew they were fundamentally pacifist, but he hoped the Spiders might put up some kind of fight when the time came.
At night they painted the sky with fluorescent displays, sometimes abstract, other times evoking battle scenes from forgotten wars. He had no idea how they knew anything about history, but occasionally a few Ossyrians had come to watch, and they would tell Blake and Glenda about wars in distant times. When he’d asked them how the Spiders knew, the Ossyrians didn’t answer. Recently, the Spiders had constructed six towers around Shimsha’s perimeter to create new night-time displays; one of the few remaining things he’d been looking forward to.
After Glenda passed away, he stayed in Shimsha; they’d shared too many memories for him to ever leave this place. Besides, the Spiders were so at ease with each other, and with him. Whenever he visited his own kind, he quickly tired of the complex social interactions, tensions, and egos. Humanity was fatally self-obsessed.
Blake had been feeling increasingly burned out – not in a bad way, he’d just had a very full life. He missed Glenda every day; the passing of time made no difference. And the Spiders; well, he had the feeling their time was coming, and they didn’t need him anymore. They would look after him in his old age, if it came to that. But he’d never wanted to be a burden. And in his heart, despite all this time in a pacifist society, he was still a soldier. Blake wanted to die on his feet.
Emerging out of his reverie, he noticed his friend’s jagged band was now a warm green. But the other Spider shimmered red, reminding Blake it was almost time. He gazed upwards.
The noon sky above Esperia was criss-crossed with a chaotic web of milky lines. Filaments left by the Shrell stretched all the way out to the edge of Esper
ia’s system, preventing any normal ships – and Qorall’s dark worms – from entering. Looking up, Blake saw a single ship, ten kilometres long and shaped like an elongated crossbow, with an arrowhead for the cockpit. Its hull rippled scarlet and emerald, shapes emerging then disappearing into the general flow of colour. It suddenly struck him that it wasn’t for decoration – it was talking, perhaps to the Spiders, perhaps to someone or something else.
The ship hung silently in low orbit above the two towns of humanity’s refuge planet: Esperantia, the human one whose roofs glittered in the sunlight – zinc being the one metal found in thick, accessible veins inside caves nestling in the Acarian Mountains – and alabaster Shimsha, or as Micah had once dubbed it, Spider Central. The ship belonged to Kalaran. Blake didn’t trust him, even though the legendary Level Nineteen being had protected the Spiders for half a million years, and now preserved humanity. Blake reckoned Kalaran had his reasons, was playing the long game, and that in his case altruism was a ‘nice-to-have’ characteristic that could easily be sacrificed if needed.
Blake’s friend nudged him, as if sensing his slipping back into a sombre mood. Blake patted it, then used the light glove on his left hand to flicker a message to both of them: “Okay, I’ll make an effort.”
No sooner had he said it than his skin prickled and his vision turned first grainy, then black, as if he’d blinked, and he found himself on the ship he’d been looking at. He felt dizzy for a moment, as if the outside world was whirling around him, and then it felt more as if he was spinning on the inside, behind his eyes, the merry-go-round sensation accompanied by a rushing noise, the sound of his own blood coursing through his veins. He blinked hard and the visual and auditory after-effects vanished. Blake felt a shiver as the tingling dissipated, and shook himself. Whisking. He’d heard that very few ships could teleport, none below Level Fifteen, and that it used up a tremendous amount of energy, and even then only worked at short range and in line-of-sight. He wondered why Kalaran had expended such resources on him.
