by Rob J Meijer
Chapter 4
*Depths*
What do you mean 'transplanting a small sea to Woldera'? We are dealing with delicate ecosystems! With all due respect, have you considered all the potential problems that could create for both ecosystems? This was the kind of response Raphaël had gotten used to in his many years as climate engineer in the bioengineering guild. Climate engineers were looked upon as trouble makers by much of the guild. Some even suggested openly that climate engineers had no place calling themselves bioengineering guild members. No one would dare make such a statement in the presence of a guild master like himself, but when he was still only a mere member, he heard them often.
Aldrich was a respected level 3 guild member that had the misfortune of completing his promotional mission at a bad time. In other times Aldrich would have long been assigned to a master post on Uhm. If only it hadn't been for the quarantine. Relations between the bioengineering guild and the mining guild had grown to be rather delicate since the bio engineering guild had been forced to cease ant-monkey production. Aldrich, while being one of the smartest and most respected bioscientists in the guild, had been known for being less than diplomatic at times. A trait that at this point in time kept him stuck on this watery moon and kept him from a well-deserved master of the guild title. Aldrich wasn't the kind of person to be pressed by the delay. In fact, he had gotten so attached to this watery rock and its rich marine life that he wasn't even sure if he was ready to return to civilization.
Mara was a relatively big sea-moon for a mid-sized, class B planet like the forest planet Orus-3. There wasn't any land mass anywhere on Mara. The science base on Mara was a medium-sized standard sea-dome that housed four guild members, Aldrich being the most senior. Mara had a relatively rich variety of sea-life for a sea-moon. It had exotic forms of most well-known sea fauna categories. There was even a large family of predatory fish unlike any species on any of the four famous Agma system sea planets. Aldrich was proud of his Mara. He had singlehandedly categorized the genomes of all of the ten thousand sea species on Mara before the Council sent him 3 assistants to help with the paperwork.
While all was on short notice, Raphaël had prepared well for his visit to Mara. Maarsoly was dying and Woldera held too few large bodies of water to sustain many of Maarsoly's species, most importantly the pre-civ species. If the guild allowed a pre-civ species to go extinct, there would be political consequences that would dwarf the Lilith incident in its impact. The guild might lose all of its seats in the Senate. A guild without Senate seats, now that would be a blow from which the guild might never recover.
Mara was the only viable option. Although Raphaël outranked Aldrich, Aldrich’s rank was due only to the current political circumstances. Aldrich had the respect of many on the guild’s main council and if the RELI-gene research paid off, Aldrich would likely be a member of the Council long before Raphaël could even hope to become eligible for such a post. Thus the situation demanded respect and patience.
Mara and its marine life were precious to Aldrich, They would all have to be preserved, if not on Mara than on Woldera. If on Woldera, than the transplanted sea would need to be bigger than what he planned for initially. And worse, its salinity levels would have to be maintained. Bioengineering wasn't an option here. Woldera had some nasty freshwater fish and reptiles that would gladly eat most of Aldrich’s precious ecosystem for breakfast. No, Woldera would need a saltwater sea of ample proportions, as some of Mara's ecosystem would need to be relocated there. “How can we work that in with the other plans?”
"We will be combining 3 eco systems."
“Madness!” Aldrich exclaimed.
“There is much to think about indeed. Many factors to consider. I shall be needing your extensive expertise on the Mara ecosystem on this one. It will be a hard nut to crack, but with your expertise and that of the scientists on Woldera, we must find a way to do it. A planet is dying and with it a whole ecosystem.”
“No need to remind me of that,” Aldrich responded. “I'm fully aware of the urgency of the matter.”
Chapter 5
*Panic*
Gabriëlla had been working twenty-hour shifts at the Lot hospital for six days now and there seemed no end to the constant stream of seriously injured refugees from South Uhm City. While some had wounds inflicted by Attame, most major injuries were the result of ERC collisions and ERC landing failures. Every Orussian knew how to create a basic and safe evacuation and rescue capsule in about one standard hour using nothing but a base computing unit, a few guild capes, and some parts that were available in any propulsion-based transportation device. But what a difference it makes if an ERC needs to be constructed with dozens of crazed Attames roaming the streets chanting "Death to the false gods, hail to our goddess, Queen Father Attame!'
While Attames were all only in the developmental stages of children and adolescents, and while an average adult ant-monkey would have only half the stature of an adult Orussian, Orussians were a peaceful species and remembrance of the Lilith incident had Orussians opting for fleeing rather than fighting. There were reports and rumors of ant-monkey attacks on schools and power plants that had supposedly left thousands of Orussians dead. These reports and rumors contributed gravely to the state of general panic within the dammed South Uhm City.
Where ant-monkeys had probably killed tens of thousands, the confirmed death count due to poorly constructed ERCs had already well exceeded a million. Combined with over two hundred thousand mid-air collisions between capsules due to bad trajectory or sensor settings brought the total death count to almost 1.5 million.
About ten percent of that number had had come through one of Lot’s 3 small hospitals before dying.
Each day, ten thousand new patients were being brought in to a little hospital built to house only a few thousand patients. Those who made it to the next day would most probably survive, but more than half did not make it to then. Lot was a relatively small town when compared to South Uhm City—twenty thousand full-time inhabitants and two million seasonal inhabitants who came to escape the hot South Pole summer.
So far fifty million had made the ERC jump from the South Pole to the North Pole peninsula. Rations were running scarce fast. Gabriëlla had some trouble distinguishing facts from rumors, but by working twenty-hour shifts at the hospital she had picked up enough to distinguish the general idea of what must have happened. A pet ant-monkey male named Attame owned by a merchant guild master had disappeared into a section of the Great Dam a few years ago. Around that same time there had been reports of other missing pet ant-monkey males but all of these showed up again after a few days. Seemingly unrelated rumors about a queen’s nest in the outer dam came from Dammons, the outcast dam dwellers. Officially Dammons did not exist, so reports about unexplained disappearances of Dammons and sightings of an ant-monkey queen had received the same status as the many other urban legends about the Great Dam. One such persistent urban legend was that Dammons breathed sulfur rather than oxygen, a myth probably based in the fact that Dammons were used as relatively cheap labor by the mining guild before the commercial exploitation of ant-monkey workers in the carbon and sulfur mines.
This time as it turned out, the reality was worse than the myth. There was indeed a queen’s nest in a section of the dam, but a very different kind of queen’s nest than those that were exploited in the Scayune breeding colonies. This queen wasn't just a queen, and her children weren't the regular workers and the occasional male. No, the runaway ant-monkey male was apparently gendermorphic and had transmorphed into a queen ant-monkey. Attame had mated with several pet ant-monkey males and had subsequently turned into a queen, creating an ant-monkey colony. And to make matters worse, all of her offspring had re-imprinted on her just as had happened in the Lilith breeding colony many years before. Attame himself was hatched during the quarantine before the queen killings were ordered by the interstellar senate. Now Attame, who as a male had never mated, had transmutated into a female.
Somehow ant-monkeys refused the inevitable: "extinction".
Reports in the media from Ga were confirming what Gabriëlla already suspected based on what she had heard at the hospital and seen during surgeries at the mining guild’s veterinary station: The ant-monkeys’ Maarsolian ape DNA had its own timetable. It took six months for an ant-monkey to develop from its larval stage to the equivalent of an eight year-old Orussian child, one year for males to develop to breeding stage. Workers hardly ever survived the carbon mines for more than a year, let alone to the age of five standard years, when Maarsolian apes started puberty. You'd be hard pressed to find more than a handful of workers who had managed to live to the age of three standard years.
It now had been four years since the quarantine forced the mining guild to implement measures which brought down the high death toll in their mines. Conditions in the mines were still unhealthy, but that was where Gabriëlla’s guild master came in. She had devised a set of medical guidelines that would allow injured ant-monkeys to live and continue being productive at a minimum cost.
Gabriëlla sometimes managed to acquire batches of leftover spirits from a good friend who worked at the Lot casino. They weren’t as good as regular anesthetics, but at least they seemed to give the ant-monkeys some relief during surgery. Some of the older ant-monkeys were now at the age where Maarsolian apes would reach to sexual maturity. Five standard years. While ant-monkeys, like their Wolderian ant lineage, didn't have fur, and Maarsolian apes being mostly furless apart from parts of their skulls, Maarsolian apes reaching sexual maturity were known to develop small furry patches in their genital area and under their upper extremities. Gabriëlla had seen such patches of fur during her time at the veterinary station. Some older ant-monkeys also seemed to develop distinct small bulges of fatty tissue on their upper torsos, a feature visually akin to the pictures she had seen of Maarsolian apes.
It was all starting to come together in her mind now. Ant-monkey DNA was flawed in more ways than one. Not only was the RELI-gene defective, the supposedly dormant Maarsolian ape genes responsible for gender and sexual maturity were in fact active. The Ga nests proved this theory. In summertime Ga was completely abandoned but for a small workforce of worker ant-monkeys. Apparently some of the Ga workers with active Maarsolian ape gender genes reached ape puberty, and in the absence of any Orussian overseers, started exploring their new found sexual identity instead of tending to their responsibilities.
Gabriëlla chuckled at the idea of Sato, the pompous level 8 mining guild master in charge of all Ga mining activities and ultimately responsible for the minimal medical budgets she and her guild master had to work with, arriving by luxury evacuation hopper at his mare condo only to find the condo occupied by an adolescent queen and her thousands of first generation eggs. Ga was reportedly a very beautiful place. The landmass at the North Pole at its very most northern point featured a deep freshwater lake which filled the massive crater of what used to be the first carbon mine. This moor, by virtue of its depth and northern position, was the source of a constant cool moor breeze. Only the very top of Uhm's elite could afford a condo on Ga's moor. Most of that elite made its fortune by exploiting ant-monkeys or Dammons.
“All too fitting,” Gabrielle thought, “that the adolescent queens would choose this very condo for their nesting-grounds.” Attame she was not quite sure of.
There had been male ant-monkeys before who had reached the ripe old age that coincides with Maarsolian ape puberty, and none had ever shown any signs which she now recognized as belonging to Maarsolian ape puberty. For now her best guess was that the act of mating with a queen triggered hormonal changes that kept Maarsolian ape puberty from occurring.
One thing was clear though, the Interstellar Senate was going to intervene in matters in the Orus system. They had appointed a local Cherubian priestess as representative and had transferred the power of the top councils of all seven guilds to her. Many trades could be ascribed to Cherubians, but subtlety or willingness to compromise were never among them. Gabriëlla didn't know much about Anaiis, but the fact that she was Cherubian could only mean one thing: The Senate wanted the current ant-monkey crisis dealt with swiftly and decisively.
Chapter 6
*Paradise*
The ant-monkey revolt in South Uhm City was exactly the opportunity that Lucius had been preparing for. Lucius knew he himself wouldn't have long to enjoy it; he was getting up there in years, but in addition that, like many Dammons, he was old way beyond his years. For years he had slaved for the mining guild in their dreaded carbon mines before being replaced by ant-monkeys. Unlike many other Dammons, Lucius was too proud to beg for scraps. He was a thief, and a damn good one at that. Better to steal and be proud than to beg and abandon his pride. Lucius was a Cherubian and proud of it. Before becoming a Dammon, Lucius was a level 7 trading guild master. For a short moment even Lucius was a senate representative. But politics are a dangerous mistress indeed. Lucius had been granted full settlement powers by the Senate, so when they asked him to take care of the South Uhm housing problem, Lucius created a bold plan which ended up destroying him.
Against interstellar guidelines, Lucius decreed a new settlement on Orus-3. A big mistake indeed. He underestimated the bioengineering guild’s influence in the Senate. The Bio's had laid claim to the forest planet Orus-3 and were using all their political influence to maintain this stronghold. Being a true Cherubian, Lucius remained loyal to his principles. South Uhm was built to house 10 million settlers, no more. Building new houses closer to the dam wasn't an option. The surface temperature near the dam rose to unacceptable levels, especially in the boiling-sea periods during high summer. No way would he subject even a single Orussian to such circumstances.
But things didn't go as Lucius had decreed. Not only did those horrid Bio's manage to have his Senate mandate revoked, they even managed to get his fellow guild members to disband him and his entire clan from the trading guild. Lucius had fallen from the very top of the food-chain to the very bottom. And now, not only had the city expanded so much that buildings were now built against the dam, outcasts like himself had to live inside the boiling hot dam structure. At least working in the dangerous carbon mines got the Dammons access to thermo suits. After ant-monkey introduction however, Dammons were no longer needed in the mines, and after all these decades, many of the thermo suits were starting to malfunction. If such a malfunction happened while asleep, a Dammon would die of dehydration within one standard hour.
Something had to be done for the Dammons, and this ant-monkey uprising provided just the opportunity. In fact, Lucius had a big hand in the uprising. He had discovered the nest when the first generation were only just eggs. He had kept Attame alive in her hostile dam housing, feeding her stolen apples, and he had educated her offspring in the art of pickpocketing.
Lucius could not believe his luck when he discovered that, just as in the Lilith incident, Attame's offspring had imprinted on its queen. Lucius had set himself up as Attame's high priest, preparing the young pickpocketing ant-monkeys for a holy war against the false gods of Uhm. Lucius was not expecting his plan to commence until next year when many more generations would be functionally mature.
To his surprise however, the younglings were so eager for a sign from their goddess father that they had triggered prematurely. Fortunately Lucius was a prudent planner so most preparations had been in place; though unfortunately there were only four trade ships docked to the trading guild’s docking station instead of the maximum capacity of seven that Lucius had planned for. Four trade ships, each capable of housing ten thousand Dammons and everything needed for creating a settlement on Orus-3. Lucius was about to exact his revenge on all the guilds that had wronged him. And he and his clan, together over thirty thousand other Dammons, were about to start a new settlement on what, compared to the Great Dam, was nothing less than paradise.
Chapter 7
*Omega & Alpha*
Gabriëlla had arrived on Mar
a four days ago, welcomed by Aldrich and his crew. For the first few days until Uriëlla and Raphaël joined them, Aldrich had been expressing his discontent with the fact that she, a child in his eyes and a member of an inferior guild, was appointed as a member of the Archan Council by Anaiis, while he with all his knowledge about Mara was not. Yesterday Uriëlla and Raphaël had arrived, and now all were watching in anticipation the vessel of the military attaché docking in the surface docking station.
It would be one more standard hour before Michael’s pod would reach the underwater science station dome. Michael’s reputation preceded him. Michael was to be the fourth and final member of the Archan Council appointed directly by Anaiis herself. The Archan Council was appointed for one reason: dealing with the ant-monkey infestation on Orus-3.
As Gabriëlla had predicted, Anaiis had dealt decisively with the ant-monkey crisis on Orus-2. More decisively, though, than even she could have ever imagined. The Interstellar Senate had decreed that all ant-monkeys be disposed of. Ant-monkeys had first brought down a breeding colony, and next had brought a large metropolis to its knees. And last, but for some senate members who still owned one of the condos on the Ga Moor shoreline probably not least, ant-monkeys had massively destroyed property values in Ga.