A familiar throat was cleared to my rear.
I turned to Adanaho, who’s expression told me I was erring without knowing it. Behind her sat the general—staring hard.
“Sorry sir,” I said, then nodded knowingly to the Professor, and walked quickly to a seat that was offered to me. The captain sat down at my side, and after the general gave me one last lingering look, he ordered the doors closed, leaving us alone with our guests.
I checked my PDA. The captain and I were as early as we’d planned to be. Yet it appeared things were already well in motion.
Not good.
“Well,” the general said, “he’s here now. Since nothing me or my staff say seems to be worth anything to you, maybe you’ll listen to him.”
The old mantis behind the Professor floated forward.
“Padre,” it said to me, its vocoded speaker-box voice coming from the grill on the front of its disc. The creature’s beak did not move. The translator was tied directly into the mantis’s nervous system.
“That is what some call me,” I said. “May I ask who you are?”
“This is the Queen Mother,” said the Professor, his manner deferential as he introduced her. “She is the highest of the Select who rule our people. Her voice carries supreme authority within the Quorum of the Select.”
“She is your sovereign,” I said.
“Yes and no,” said the Professor. “She is elected, but she also shares a tremendous lineage, biologically. Her genetics run through countless mantes, over many of your generations.”
In other words, she was fecund, in addition to being old.
I sat up a little straighter.
“Ma’am,” I said to the Queen Mother, “of what service can I be to you?”
The Queen Mother floated forward a bit more, while the Professor floated back.
“Your name is spoken in my Quorum,” she said. “It is the only human name that has ever reached such height. When the one you call the Professor first came before me, many of our cycles ago, and petitioned for us to halt our Fourth Expansion, I considered him obtuse. Your superstition is of no consequence to me, nor do I have any use for it. And yet, the Professor had convinced a good many of his contemporaries that the elimination of your species—of your numerous modes of religion—would be detrimental to the advancement of mantes knowledge. And his colleagues had convinced many on the Quorum. Rather than force a contentious vote on the issue, I acquiesced, believing that the merit of the Professor’s proposed observation and research would become obvious in time. Even if I could see no value in it in the moment.”
She let a tiny silence hang in the air.
“I no longer feel the need for such forbearance.”
The room was dead silent, but the Queen Mother’s words had hit me like a thunderclap. It was one thing to hear the captain talk about a possible end to the peace. It was quite another to have the nominal leader of the enemy in front of me declaring that she was going to drop the hammer. I felt a slithering surety in my stomach: the Queen Mother would not bluff.
I cleared my throat experimentally, trying to shake off the dread I felt. The eyes of the officers behind me began to drill virtual holes in my back as I left my seat. The Queen Mother remained where she was.
“I have to think,” I said, voice shaking just a bit, “that your mind isn’t entirely made up. Otherwise why agree to this meeting at all? You could just as easily declare the ceasefire dead, launch your war armada, and have done with it.”
“There are still some,” she said, her triangular insect’s head tilting back in the Professor’s direction, “who petition me for further amity. I am not a hasty being. I listen to my intellectuals. If they say there is additional merit in long-term conciliation between our races, I am habitually obliged to entertain the notion—whether I agree with it or not. So rather than send a delegate, I came here myself. To meet the one human who has managed to alter the inevitable course of my empire. I had expected someone more impressive.”
“My apologies,” I said, “if my presence does not meet that expectation. As for what I can say or do to change your mind, I am not sure I can offer you much more than what I’ve already been able to offer to the Professor and his students. I am the chaplain’s assistant. I’ve counseled the Professor that he’d do well to seek out a bona fide chaplain. Or, if a military man is not in order, then there are the finest theologians, scholars, religious teachers, and clergymen Earth has to offer. If I have failed to provide enlightenment, surely someone else might be better suited.”
“Enlightenment,” the Queen Mother said, her mouth hinged open and her serrated, vicious teeth vibrating—the mantis display of annoyance. “This is a phrase that I find utterly preposterous. I have studied what little of your planet’s history is available to me and determined that we mantes were building starships when humans were still scuttling about in caves. Enlightenment. Ridiculous. Does the larva enlighten the adult?”
I’d learned from the Professor that the mantes had two stages in their life cycle. Upon hatching from their eggs, they were mindless herbivores, consuming vegetable matter over a period of months until entering their transformative pupa stage. Only upon emergence from the chrysalis did a newly-carnivorous mantis achieve actual sapience. Prior to that, the larval mantis was about as intelligent as a box of rocks.
“Nobody questions your technological prowess,” I said, choosing my words carefully. I looked quickly behind the Queen Mother to see the Professor floating dead still, his gaze locked on her.
“When the Professor and I first met, it was shocking to discover that you mantes cared anything at all about how or what a human believed. I didn’t think it was possible. I’d only ever seen your people maiming and killing my people. And yet, the Professor showed me you are a complex race. Old and powerful, but also with a history of patient curiosity. Such that on prior occasions—when you’ve let your thirst for expansion overrule your prudence—you’ve genuinely regretted those choices.”
“Some of us have,” said the Queen Mother, her beak snapping shut. “But not all.”
“What would be gained,” I said, “by throwing away the armistice? It’s been a long time since humans shed mantes blood, and vice versa. I think the ceasefire is pretty good evidence that our two societies can learn to share the galaxy. Sometimes, we may even share the same planet, if after a fashion.”
Purgatory was still technically mantis property. Myself and the few hundred humans who’d stuck around after the return of the Earth ships, had more or less managed to stay out from under mantes feet. It wasn’t an equal partnership. More like, keep the noise down so the landlords don’t show up with artillery. But it was a persistent peace, and the more time I’d spent around the Professor—and later, his students—the more I’d become convinced that humans and the mantes had more in common than either they or we suspected.
I waited while the Queen Mother’s antennae wove a thoughtful pattern in the air.
“You are dangerous to us,” she said. “Or is the squadron of warships that greeted my delegation your idea of a friendly gesture?”
I looked behind me: at the general, and the captain.
“She has a point, sir, and ma’am,” I said.
“I’m not a fool,” Sakumora retorted sourly. He looked past me to the Queen Mother, and his tone got sharper when next he spoke. “Who is more threatening to whom? What are my staff and I supposed to think about those battle exercises your ships have been conducting? For the first time in several years, eh? What have you got to say about that?”
The Professor seemed to visibly shrink in on himself.
I guessed that even the mantes never spoke that way to their leader. Much less a human. The Queen Mother’s posture was erect, and motionless. For an instant I recalled visceral memories of mantis troops striking with lightning lethality, carving into human flesh. I raised my hands instinctively in the air between the two leaders, trying to physically damp down the mood, which had gro
wn dangerously electric.
“You both asked me to come here,” I said, swiveling my head from one party to the next, and back again. “But if both of you are determined to see evil in the actions of the other, no matter what I say, there really isn’t anything I can do. A new war is inevitable.”
“A war we would absolutely win,” the Queen Mother said.
“Are you that sure?” the general replied.
“Stupid human, you would do no better against us than you did the first time.”
Now it was Sakumora who remained motionless. He seemed to be deciding something. I stared at him, feeling altogether uncomfortable. Before I could shout for him to stop, his left hand reached out and tapped a single button on the keyboard in front of him. The lights in the chamber dimmed, and went orange, battle klaxons suddenly ringing through the space.
Outside the doors, automatic gunfire roared. I knew the sound. It wasn’t the sound of mantis weaponry.
“What have you done?” I said to the general.
Both he and his staff—all save the captain, who simply sat with her mouth half open—stood up and removed overly-large pistols from under the table. Pistols, hell, they looked like sawed-off shotguns, with magazines attached. Sakumora and his people aimed their weapons at the Professor and the Queen Mother.
“We weren’t ready for you the first time,” Sakumora said, his demeanor become icily calm now that he no longer teetered on the knife edge of an uneasy truce. “Part of me hoped this wouldn’t be necessary. But part of me also knew that things couldn’t end any other way.”
The Queen Mother’s wings unfolded and fluttered loudly.
Extreme amusement.
I’d also learned enough about mantis body language to know that the Professor’s mood was utterly crushed. He shrank back from all of us, his floating disc nearly bumping the far bulkhead.
“You’ve made it too easy,” said the Queen Mother.
The pitch of the frigate’s ambient engine noise shifted upward, just prior to the room being rocked by what sounded like rolling thunder.
“I’ve signaled my subordinates to destroy your entire squadron,” said the Queen Mother. “This ship and everyone on it will be the first to fall. The Fourth Expansion begins today!”
She looked triumphant.
I stared at the Professor, who appeared ill.
The room rocked again—with more loud rumbling.
The general tapped the large green communications key. “Damage report?” he said.
“The deflection system is holding,” replied a young voice through a small speaker on the desk.
Sakumora smiled wickedly, his pistol aimed squarely at the Queen Mother’s bug-eyed head.
“We adapt and learn quickly,” said the general. “I don’t think we’ll be the pushovers that you were expecting. Though I have to admit I admire your willingness to sacrifice yourself in order to commit your people to the battle. Had our positions been reversed, I think I might have done the same.”
The Queen Mother’s body language had changed. Like that of the Professor, she began to slowly shrink in on herself. I guessed that she’d not expected to survive past this point. Had the general and his Fleet engineers not found the secret to The Wall, it’s probable we’d have all been atomized already.
“So it’s war,” I said. “Only now neither side wins?”
“Shut up, Chief,” said the general in irritation. “Your job here is done. Unless you’re ready to pick up a weapon for humanity, you’re not much use to us.”
I looked from the general’s face—set in an expression of grim and determined calculation—to the captain’s. Adanaho’s mouth still hung half open and her eyes were wide, the whites like bright circles of ivory. She closed her mouth and swallowed once, then stood up and faced the general.
“Why didn’t you tell me your plan?” she said, the rasp of accusation in her tone.
“It was my decision, according to Fleet Command edict,” Sakumora said. “And I didn’t feel like sharing it with junior officers who didn’t have a need to know. Like I said to your superstitious friend, if you’re not going to pick up a weapon for humanity, you’re not much good to us.”
A small mechanical sound alerted me to our danger, but only just in time.
While the Professor’s disc had never been armed—armament being unseemly for a scholar—there’d been no thought given to the Queen Mother. Weapons, previously hidden within her disc, suddenly bristled.
I tackled Adanaho to the deck as the shooting started.
Chapter 4
Guns blazed. Human guns. Mantis guns.
The room rocked again from the concussion of enemy fire outside the frigate.
My ears were ringing when the captain and I both looked up to see the general and all of his people sprawled bloodily across their side of the room. The Queen Mother had pepper-sprayed them with projectiles, their bodies pulped and grotesque. Though it seemed the Queen Mother had fared little better. She was down. Or, rather, her disc was down. Sparks spat from numerous holes in the disc’s armored surface. Sabot rounds, I thought. The Queen Mother’s forelimbs scraped and scratched futilely at the deck, her triangular head cocked in my direction and her mouth half open, the teeth looking wicked and deadly.
Her mandibles chattered ferociously, but the disc made no sound. Its translator was rendered useless, along with its weapons.
The Professor—unharmed—floated forward from his previous spot near the far wall, then stopped as the doors were cast open and armed marines flooded in. The instant they saw the general lying dead, they raised their rifles to fire—having previously dispatched the Queen’s guards, per Sakumora’s plan.
Seeing this, Captain Adanaho shrugged me off of her and stood up, shouting, “Stop!”
The marines hesitated.
“That’s a direct order,” she said for emphasis.
The room rolled with concussive grumbling.
Lights flickered.
“General Sakumora, sir,” said an alarmed voice through the speaker on the general’s table, “there’s a feedback loop in the deflection matrix. We’re absorbing hits, but we can’t say for how much longer.”
The captain stared at me for an instant, then she looked to the Professor, whose forelimbs dangled dejectedly in front of him.
“I’m assuming you didn’t know the Queen Mother’s plan either,” she said.
“That is correct,” said the Professor. “Though I knew as well as you that the situation was unstable. Had I known the Queen Mother intended to incite conflict, to force us to war, I’d never have come.”
More thunder, more flickering lights.
“Then it seems you’re destined to die with the rest of us,” I said, feeling the cold, dull ache of certain doom closing around my heart. I instantly rued the day Adanaho had entered my chapel.
But then again, was it better to die on Purgatory, alone, or on a Fleet warship among my own kind? Was either of these options preferable to the other? I tried to remember what the Chaplain had once told me, about keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of death, and discovered I couldn’t quite remember his exact words.
The Queen Mother continued to scrape and scratch frantically at the deck, her disc become worthless. It seemed suddenly that the mantes—even this, the greatest of her kind—weren’t all that terrible once you took away their technological advantage. Without the disc, she was as mortal as any man. With the frigate bucking beneath us and the captain and I struggling to keep our feet, I almost laughed as I watched the supreme leader of the enemy struggle helplessly.
Now you know how we felt!
I wasn’t sure if I’d merely thought it, or shouted it.
The captain and every other human were looking at me.
That’s when true disaster struck.
Kakraooooummmmmmm!
The lights vanished entirely as the room tilted 90 degrees and hurled us to the port bulkhead, then back across the space to the starboard bulkhea
d, before leaving us floating free. Orange emergency lamps snapped on and I fought a savagely instinctual desire to vomit—zero gee proving to be every bit as terrible in the bowels of the Calysta as it had been onboard the shuttle.
Marines flailed and then lapsed into their microgravity training. It had been too long for me, so I kept flailing, eventually feeling Adanaho’s grip on my left ankle. She levered herself up into my face and shouted, “The deflection matrix is falling apart! We’ve got to get to a lifeboat!”
“How?” I said, almost spewing my last meal into her face.
She turned her head, seeing that the marines were way ahead of her. They’d instinctually latched onto and levered each other like extension ladders, until one of them could get a grip on something solid, thus bringing them all into contact with the walls or floor or ceiling.
“We just need to get outside!” she said loudly.
Almost at once, the Professor was there.
His disc moved effortlessly, seemingly unaffected by microgravity.
“Grab on,” he said, a forelimb stretched in our direction. I reached for it and took it, while Adanaho stayed attached to me, and the Queen Mother stayed attached to the Professor’s other forelimb. Her disc trailed drops of mechanical fluid as the Professor began to tow all of us for the nearest open exit. If the marines desired to fire, nobody pulled a trigger. Perhaps because there was no way to shoot without killing both the captain and myself? Fratricide being frowned upon, especially when superior officers are involved.
We emerged into the corridor beyond. The gore of dead mantes was everywhere. The marines had done their work well. I suddenly felt embarrassed and mournful. The Queen’s guards had saluted me as I entered, then paid with their lives for that trust. I gaped at the nearest of them, his young face split in two and his insect’s brain oozing out.
That did it.
I faced away from Adanaho and emptied the contents of my stomach, which spluttered away from us in a thick, chunky stream.
“Where?” the Professor said sharply to the captain.
Emergency bells were chiming, and an automated vocal warning was issuing from every speaker.
Lights in the Deep Page 21