Darkest Before The Dawn

by H. M. Reynolds

Epilogue:

  When you are next aware of time and space and of existing within it, you awaken in a hospital ward, full of the many victims of the war. Two weeks have passed of which you have no recollection. The doctor tells you that you were found, stumbling and naked, staggering through the city, carrying only the black dagger, bearing your dried blood upon it like a vampire. Your hand is swollen from an infected cut, but you are otherwise physically unharmed.

  They treat you gently, knowing that you are mentally fragile. When you will not rest, the doctor tells you the mission is over – the column has been moved from the woods by the enemy, so there is nothing more to be done.

  Later White comes to visit you, but you are not the same person who knew him a few days earlier and he seems like a visitor from a dream.

  It will be months before you are recovered enough to return to the war. But somewhere within you there is still the faint, spluttering candle of hope, urging you to fight on when others would lie down and die. Maybe one day the war can still be won.

  Desolation / The Umbrekka Extinction:

  “The Umbrekka people are dying I fear, I see their spiny corpses everywhere, their loose skin flapping in the wind like cloaks,” he cried out his sorrow in poetry.

  He spoke the words aloud, because his people had long ago lost the ability to write, at the beginning of the age of Commune - but there was nobody to hear; no voices but the wind.

  A mist of rain blew into his face, damped his hair. He stood there by the roadside, isolated and alone in a way in which a man could not have been for many years.

  He smelled the air with his modified scent organs, but there was nothing to lead him, just the same two-week old pheromones, signalling death. The broken corpses of the Umbrekkas awaited collection by drones that would never come.

  Closing his eyes, he pressed his hands to his forehead and fought back tears. He had to retain control. Since birth he had been a member of the Commune. He wondered how mankind had ever coped before. Perhaps they would have to relearn the way; the only other option was extinction, the fate of the Umbrekkas.

  Around him stretched the abandonment, earthern-crystal composite towers, visible sign of the warrens below, unmanned. He caught a brief glimpse of an ambling human, wandering lost between two such structures. It was the only sign of life he had seen for two hours.

  He had spent the last day and a half searching for living Umbrekkas. First he had found only the insane, stubbornly performing the same repeated task, often pointless now the Commune’s mind had succumbed to the plague, then later only the dead. Had none of the people survived? The implications of this thought welled up in him, and for a moment he thought he must scream or fracture from holding it in, but then he somehow managed to regain his composure. He was a leader in his caste and they would depend on him now. He must find the inner strength to function without co-ordination as his forefathers had suffered.

  The human caste fitted into the Swarm as an unspecialised creature, unlike most of the Swarm which had very specific functions - for instance there were giant bugs the Umbrekka milked for a mild acid they stored in their bellies, a defence on the world of last origin. The acid could then be smeared on walls or the toughened armour plates of the soldier caste, acting in turn as a defence for the Swarm and its citadels

  There were home-citadels nearby, places he knew he could venture to find food, fungus gardens and unfertilised worker pods. He recognised however, that even feeding himself alone, this would prove a limited supply, and that soon he might have to breach a site barring him by its scent.

  Reviewing the past thirty-six hours, he realised that he had been caught in a loop, traversing the same places before returning home to the citadel. There were plainly no answers to be had where he had been so far. No Umbrekkas were going to return home to guide him, as he had previously held out hope. If he was to survive, he would have to break his programming.

  When his biological father had lived, in the nest-citadel they then occupied, he recalled the oral tradition tales, of the time before the Umbrekkas came. The Commune had come from the stars, it had been told, bringing the bliss of integration to the people of Earth. No more would they fight amongst each other, struggle for food or places to live. The Commune would work to keep all its members well. He remembered too, with a recalled sense of intrigue that his father had hinted that there were those who had not wanted the comfort of the Commune. What had happened to them? He had often wondered. And how could they reject something so natural as the Commune?

  The only record that remained of before the Commune was within the Commune itself, perhaps now also lost to the plague that had taken the Umbrekkas. In the stories of the Swarm itself, the people of the Commune, these dissenters had no place. It was as though they never existed. Still, he supposed, with a sense of apprehension, he would find out the truth of isolation if he survived this horror.

  A sense of unreality hung over him. He felt reluctant to stray from this place, even to seek shelter inside from the cold rain, in case his waking back to the world of the Commune, the world of the Umbrekkas and the Swarm, was delayed.

  He remembered one day in particular now. Nearing the end of the day’s work, he had followed the march of the Swarm as it swept back across the land like a living river, workers like himself and his father in the centre, with Umbrekka scouts scattered along the edges. Hulking soldier Umbrekka marched up and down the line, keeping their senses open for trouble. A myriad of different castes mingled in the traffic, along with more opportunist symbionts, like stray dogs, absorbed into the whole as a form of guard, like a swifter, but more vulnerable version of the soldiers.

  As usual, at the end of the raid, they had gathered underground in one of the citadels, in the warm, deoxygenated earth, the smells of pheromones recent and past concentrated in the still air. Umbrekka wandered the tunnels, groomed, or just stood in the middle of passages, idly awaiting their next task in service to the Swarm. Already the next raid had departed, to gather food and building materials for the greater organism of which they were a part.

  The creatures who had lived on Earth before the Umbrekka had needed long hours of sleep, and it was a weakness the rest of the Swarm was unable to overcome for them. In the system of the last origin, there had been no such thing; it seemed this need to sleep was new to them.

  He remembered the evenings with nostalgia. When a member of the human caste was young they accompanied their parents on the raids, but did not bear as much of a responsibility for workload, as they were younger and more frail. The freedom from responsibility was something he now relished in memory. How much worse had the dilemmas of life been before the Umbrekka, how much worse would they be in future if humanity had to suffer without them?

  In the twilight of the citadel it was just pleasantly warm and the ground soft, comfortable like a return to the womb. His father had sat him on his knee, telling him tales of the old times to send him to sleep, to quieten his racing mind at the end of the day. He remembered looking up into his father’s eyes, blue turned to grey by the dim phosphorescence of the fungus that was woven into the walls by the Umbrekka worker castes.

  He recalled a story his father had told on one such occasion: “Once, man made his own rules. Before the time of the Swarm, before the Umbrekka castes came from the world of last origin, man ruled himself, using organisations called parliaments; but he ruled imperfectly. Man managed his resources inefficiently, giving large shares to some and smaller shares to others without justification for the work they had performed for society. Man polluted his environment, destroyed valuable mineral resources, hunted the animals of the land, not for food but for wasteful pleasure.

  Since the Umbrekka came things have been different. With the Umbrekka, the human caste finally learned to regulate their urges, their destructive courses.”

  This he remembered, but also he remembered with a mixture of nostalgia and confusion other times when he and his Father had been alone. His Father would glan
ce about him furtively, as if about to tell him a secret or say something that it was not politic to say. Then he would lean close and whisper: “But things weren’t all bad in the old days. True, life has improved since the coming of the Swarm from the world of last origin, but there are things mankind have lost too - once, man had the ability to plan his own destiny, how he would work, what he would try to achieve with his life. In many ways, how we live today is simpler, and in tune with this there is a simple satisfaction in achieving the things we do for the greater good. But in the old days, there was a great expectation. Young men - like yourself - made plans of who and what they wanted to be. Although they would not always achieve their desires, they always had the freedom to dream their own destinies.”

  Now, thinking back, he wished he had more experience of those management skills the old people must have known. Soon the others of the caste might look to him for guidance in his seniority.

  In his memory, this time of more recent events, there was also a recollection of the first moment of recognition that something was terribly wrong with the Swarm, that there was a threat for which the Umbrekka were unprepared. When he awoke that day, not four days earlier, his first sense was of a dark form half-blocking the entrance to the citadel chamber in which he had lain down for the night. He thought perhaps it was resting, but then, almost immediately after the notion had registered, he caught the scent of death emitted from its tissues. He leaned closer in the dim light; there in the phosphorescence he could just make out the blotchy pigmentation that signified the plague that he would soon learn had been sweeping through the Swarm. Instinctively he lifted his own arms before the luminance of the walls, yet fortunately he did not display the symptoms that the Umbrekka castes themselves soon began to. He supposed if he had been susceptible to the infection he would already be dead. Still he worried a little, although it was with the health of his extended family that the greatest share of his concern lay.

  He rose to the entrance, feet slipping a little on the fluids that had spilled from the carcass of the dead creature, leaving its removal to a more hardy member of the Swarm. There were others of the human caste still lying in the chamber where he had been resting, but he left them to their sleep, concerning himself instead with information gathering.

  In the near-dark of the citadel tunnels, he closed his eyes, to concentrate better on the ambient scents with his enhanced nasal organs. There was a confusion of signals, brought from the distress of afflicted Umbrekka, the turmoil of others who had been too set in their ways to understand the meaning of the recent deviations from the norm. The poignancy was so sharp it bought a tear to the corner of his eye. Some more recent signals indicated ordinary activity, which bred within him some hope that the worst might be over.

  He opened his eyes again to navigate the tunnels. Scent and touch might have sufficed, but humans had a traditional reliance on sight to gauge movement. There was little light, but he knew where he was going from the scent trails. He only needed his eyes to orientate his position and move safely down the passages he chose.

  He picked a corridor on instinct, following its stronger pheromone traces, and it brought him to a small anti-chamber that was familiar to him, a junction of four other tunnels, two leading deeper, two closer toward the surface.

  There in the central meeting point of the tunnels a worker lingered. His first notion was that it was conserving its energy, but its motions conveyed confusion not idleness. It emitted a signal to him of minor distress. He responded with his own scent gland and reached toward it, making another signal through contact with its antennae and spines. This brought him to shiver involuntarily, for the bones of the creature felt weak, its skin slick and weathered. This one was sick too, he realised. He felt a sense of bad things to come in the pit of his stomach.

  He faced into the daylight at last, blinking as the light hurt his eyes. The scene before him was like a ghost town. Any other time in the past where he had emerged from the citadel there would had been a bustle of activity, or in the rare pauses, at least a couple of hulking soldiers patrolling the courtyard just outside. Even by night there was usually plenty going on, sounds and scents as vibrant as in the day: chirps, grunts, whistles, screeches; but now the absence of sound was eerie.

  The ground was sodden from rain the night before, his chitin shoes sinking into the red mud. Sliding a little and having to make an effort to just stay in place, he took a look around him. Nothing alive was in sight, nothing of the Swarm anyway; he watched as a bird swept by overhead.

  He scrambled over the rise, pausing briefly beside a stiff Umbrekka groomer, its prickly brush-like legs locked in rigor mortis. There was no sign of whatever creature it had been attending, perhaps that creature had fallen to the plague earlier. A handful of ants, Earth’s own Swarm, were investigating the corpse. He left them to it. Waste not want not, as his ancestors had once said; if the Swarm couldn’t recycle the waste of the dead, then he was happy for any other creature that wanted to try.

  A teenage boy, separated from whatever raiding party he had been with, came wandering aimlessly toward the citadels. His eyes were full of tears and fear as he stumbled in a zigzag across the plain. The boy looked to him for guidance. He turned away, seeking some appropriate thing to say. Misinterpreting this signal as some kind of rejection, the boy began to move away, but he caught the youth’s shoulder. “Go back to the citadel. There are others of our caste in the sleeping areas.”

  The boy nodded, wiping some tears from his eyes. When they cleared, before the boy turned to head off, he thought he saw within them the dawning of some hope. He himself had no-one to turn to for support. It was likely that the caste would look to him for answers and where was he to find them? The wise and resourceful Umbrekka, who he had once depended upon seemed to be all gone, wiped off the face of the planet by the plague.

  He watched as the teenager wandered away in the direction from which he himself had come, disappearing into one of the citadel entrances. Then, taking a deep breath, he wondered which direction he should choose. Decisions were hard now there were no scent trails to guide him; no scout had prepared the way ahead for him.

  Assuming the general bearing from which the youth had come was a clue to the direction in which the remains of his raiding party lay, he made off in that direction.

  Where the raiding party had fallen was like an unearthed graveyard, rigid limbs poking into the air at all angles, leathery skin flapping in the wind, creating a dim illusion of life. For a moment he thought he was seeing the scene from outside of himself, that what was before him was nothing more than a collection of objects, but then the full emotion of it, the full tragedy struck him. These were his swarm-brethren.

  It began to rain lightly again at that point, but he did not budge from where he was stood. He felt it necessary to endure the small suffering of the cold and wet, if only to honour the dead.

  Round the corner, a sick worker still crawled in desperate feebleness, as though through strength of will it might still get about its daily tasks in service of the greater whole. He sat with it for two hours until it died.

 

  When he left the remains of the raiding party, he felt as though his soul had been scoured empty, as though the icy wind were cutting straight through him to his deepest depths. He hurried back to the citadel, passing gratefully within its warm interior. Though he felt no remote conception of hunger, he recognised he must eat, and so made his way down the steeper tunnels to the base of the citadel, to the fungus gardens.

  Other people were there too, and he exchanged warm greetings with them, hugs and smiles, the bonding of survivors. Few words were said though, in unspoken unity to mourn the passing of their fellows.

  Chewing on some of the crisp fungus, he wandered his immediate proximity, then slightly further afield, trying to gather all the information he could about the state of the citadel. In one of the deeper chambers he found some of the living honey pots that grew from the ceiling; to his sur
prise they were still unblighted by the plague. He tested their sweetness, scooping a handful of the sugary syrup to his lips. It ignited a sudden hunger in him and he gorged himself on it until he felt bloated.

  Afterward, he sat down, feeling a little over-full, and with the sense that he had forgotten his duties. It seemed there was something he should have been doing. It itched at him, and he could not rest completely for wondering. He supposed it must be some part of his biological clock telling him it was time for his raiding party to go out, or something like that.

  When this occupation had finally left him, he began to wonder once more what might be left of the colony. Above him the honeypots groaned in discomfort - they had not been milked enough in the last few hours and their bellies were growing distended.

  There was, he realised one way to find out if the extent of the damage was as severe as he feared, if he was brave enough to face the inherent possibility. He stood stiffly, rubbing his joints to get his circulation going again, then he set off to visit the Queen.

  With no little trepidation, he edged down the wide tunnel to the Queen’s chambers, realising he was dragging his feet a little. Part of him did not want to face the truth he feared. Fifteen feet down the central passage of the citadel, he had to scramble over the massive body of one of the royal guard. The chitin and leathery skin rustled under his feet as he climbed, then he squeezed through a gap between the body and the ceiling, before sliding down the other side. He landed with a bump in darkness, for a moment disorientated before his sense of smell caught up with his change in location.

  As he adjusted he rediscovered the comforting, awe inspiring scent of the Queen’s lair. A small, confused worker ran up to him briefly, touching him with its antennae, before running off in circles, back and forth between the blockage in the corridor and the chamber beyond.

  The Queen’s chamber, most massive in the citadel, was in nearly complete darkness. With his eyes he could see only grey shadows of shapes. There was no movement, but he could dimly make out the gigantic shape of the Queen, so large she would not have fitted down the corridors out of the room; it was a space she never left.

  With reverence, he approached her with a sense of impending horror. There was no sign that his fears could now be prevented from realisation. The pheromones in the air were hours old. In last desperation, he walked right up to her still form, head still slightly bowed with humility.

  That was when he saw there was no hope - the Queen was dead, taken by the same plague that had killed the others. Even if she had not yet suffered the predations of animals and the elements, she was still dead. He stood staring at the still form for a few minutes more. It was eerie; any moment he expected her to move, he could not believe the head of the colony had been severed. There were other colonies on Earth, other queens, but he could not now believe they would escape the same fate.

  The downfall had begun slowly.

  The commune was like one massive organism. Like individual cells, a few of its members could fall without great damage to the whole. They would be replaced in the next batch of worker eggs. Even its human component could be regenerated, albeit at a slower rate.

  Perhaps that was why they had not noticed until the plague began in earnest. A few had fallen at first, nothing to impair the whole.

  The Umbrekka had brought with them a parasite from the homehive, a creature they called the Borer. It was a fly, the size of one of Earth’s prehistoric dragonflies, which laid its eggs on the hides of the uncaring Umbrekka, hatching to bore their way inside and eat the unfortunate from the inside out. Deaths were rare though. The plague had been no worse in impact than the Borer when it began. The trouble was, it had not remained that way. In a matter of days its growth had risen exponentially, scouring through the ranks of the commune, leaving only the humans untouched, so far as he knew. Abruptly the numbers had thinned; then here he was now, on this desolate plain with nothing but the dead, stranded in the stagnant past. The Umbrekka knew how to handle disease, but not epidemics. Humans had once known, he thought, but human knowledge had been superseded by the superior know-how of the Commune.

  He allowed himself this moment of despair, then his instincts reasserted and he resumed his new role. Once more he reminded himself that others might be relying on him; and that perhaps Umbrekka still lived elsewhere, ready to return when the outbreak faded away, after the carriers of the blight had passed on.

  First, he must gather a unit of the human caste, to take the bodies to a burial room, where they might decompose without infecting any of the Swarm that still lived.

  Once more, he realised the enormity of the task ahead. There would be no Umbrekka workers to help excavate and build the burial site. The humans under his guidance would have to do it alone.

  Already weary before he began, he trudged off to find them, to a new beginning. As individuals or as the children of a new Commune colony, the humans would have to start rebuilding their civilisation.

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  Also by H M Reynolds:

  Emergency Protocol Nine

  A collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror short stories.

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