Arach

by C. M. Simpson

  “Who chose pink?” I asked, sitting up, and watched Doc’s neckline color. “You did, Doc?”

  He glared at me.

  “Well, you are a girl, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Geez, Cutter. Don’t you ever stop bitching?”

  Mack was in fine form, too.

  I took a look around the room, and realized I wasn’t in the med bay. I was back in my own quarters. Alrighty, then. I guess I knew what I had to do next.

  I slipped out of bed, and padded over to the closet, ignoring Doc and Mack as I went. Underwear, combat suit…. I guessed I’d have to get the armor from Steppy—and he’d better have charged it. I wasn’t dropping back down to K’Kavor without… I stopped, the reality all too clear.

  My heart sped up.

  “Where are we?” Because we sure as shit weren’t on the ship.

  Sure, the room was laid out exactly like the one I had on the Shady, but it wasn’t the same. It had just taken me a few minutes to work it out. Doc held out his hand.

  “Told you it would be less than five,” and Mack dug into his pocket.

  They’d been betting on when I’d notice?

  “Remember those tanks you helped Delight deliver?”

  Oh. Yup. Guess they’d delivered the stasis pod, too, then.

  “They did when I laid out the plan.”

  “Thanks, Mack.”

  “What for?”

  “For setting me up to get the shit kicked out of me, again.”

  He looked hurt.

  “You were supposed to gear up the minute you got on that stage. I didn’t know you’d be so slow!”

  “Girl needs to know when you’re going to use her as bait.”

  “Girl so does not. Girl just needs to keep her weapons to hand like any other combat operative.”

  “Yeah, Mack? Guess what? I’m not a combat operative. I’m a fucking retrieval specialist! We don’t tool up the minute we get out of bed, and we don’t sleep with our Blazers!” I took a breath, and then added, “unlike some.”

  Mack curled his fists, and took a step towards me, only to be intercepted by Doc.

  “Out!” Doc said, stepping between us, and looking at Mack. “I still need to clear her for operations.”

  “I think she needs more time in the tank!”

  Well, at least he wasn’t ordering me to the mats…

  “Now, Mack!” Doc ordered, pointing at the door.

  I carried my clothes over to the bed, and turned back to collect my boots and a pair of socks.

  “And you,” Doc said, as I heard the door close, “stand your ass over here, and let me take a look at you.”

  I went where he was pointing, putting my boots on the bed as I passed. Doc was already pissed off, and I didn’t want to piss him off any more.

  “Strip,” he said. “I need to check your ribs.”

  Fine.

  I stripped, and he checked, but he didn’t stop at my ribs. He went over my spine, my shoulders, and my wrists, as well, and then he checked my hips, legs, ankles, and abdomen, although not in that order.

  “What the—”

  “Shut it, Cutter. I’m not sure there wasn’t anything that critter missed… except your attitude. That’s as nasty as it ever was.”

  “Hey!”

  “You’re fine. Get dressed, and go do whatever it is Mack tells you to. You do know how to do that, don’t you?”

  And the man said I had an attitude. Had he checked in the mirror lately?

  “Get dressed,” and Doc packed up his kit, and stalked to the door, “and try not to piss Mack off any more than you usually do. Man’s had a rough time of it.”

  Mack had had a rough time of it? What, as opposed to growing things back in a tank because some asshole had used you as bait to draw out an arach infiltrator, and hadn’t bothered telling you? And what the fuck had it been with the welcoming committee?

  “I had to make sure the arach had enough cover to take its shot. They were going for the queen. We needed something to draw it out before she hit the podium.”

  Mack had returned, but I wasn’t angry anymore; I was just tired. I pulled on the underwear, and the combat suit, and wondered where the fuck my gear had disappeared to, this time.

  “Your gear’s back in the colony armory. We figured it was the safest place.”

  I wanted to argue with that, but it made sense—and, at least it had meant everything had been returned.

  “Why?” I asked, and we both knew I wasn’t asking about my gear. I sat on the chair beside my bed, and pulled on my boots.

  Mack came all the way into the room, letting the door shut behind him. He stopped a few steps in front of the chair, and looked down at me.

  “Because he was disguised as one of the settlement’s pilots, and we ran into an ambush at the last site. We needed to smoke him out before we went out, again.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “We gave you eighteen hours. Doc wanted to take two weeks, but the queen wanted you on the next run, and Odyssey need the inter-species interaction to go smoothly. Things are…delicate.”

  “You hit me with nans, again?”

  “And some high-speed rejuvenation shit that Odyssey have been keeping to themselves.”

  “Cool.”

  “Not really. You’re going right back in the tank when this assignment is over. Doc’s orders.”

  Doc gave orders?

  “Not often, but, when he does, I tend to listen. Way he calls it, and I quote: you’re running on ‘a time-limited self-rejuvenating stim pack made of nans, and Odyssey should keep that shit locked up and out of reach of more civilized folk, who either can’t say no, or don’t have the sense to’.”

  Wow. I stared at him. Doc had said all that, and said Mack had no sense?

  “Doc was just a little bit pissed off at the time, so I let it slide.”

  I snickered. He let it slide? Sure he did.

  “Shut it, Cutter.”

  I glared at him, and he raised an eyebrow, smirked, and headed for the door. I figured I should probably follow. For someone revved up on nans, I didn’t feel particularly hyped.

  “Where are we head…ed?”

  Well, I hadn’t been expecting that.

  Mack stopped, and looked back—and, for once, he hadn’t said a thing.

  My room was in the colony, all right… just not exactly where in the colony I’d thought it was.

  “I thought we’d be in Taraquil.”

  “We are in Taraquil.”

  I walked to the edge of the corridor, and took a look out the window.

  “We’re so high up.”

  “Vespis prefer to fly.” He started walking along the corridor, letting me follow and adjust to the idea of being inside a vespis building.

  My heart gave an extra thump, and the world around me sharpened. I tried to channel the sudden surge of alertness into satisfying my curiosity.

  “How did they put it up so fast?”

  “You never heard of pre-fabs?”

  Well, yeah, I had… but wasps? And prefabricated wasp nests? My mind batted the idea around a bit, as Mack answered the question.

  “Don’t knock it, girl. I’m kinda liking the set-up.”

  “How does it work for integration?”

  “Slowly, girl. It works slowly.”

  He sighed. I sensed a world of politics behind that sigh, and figured we were well enough out of it.

  “You wish.”

  “What?”

  “You, girl, are right in the middle of it.”

  I was? And how the fuck had I managed that?

  Again, my heart quickened and my mind started to spin.

  And, of course, that was the comment Mack chose not to explain.

  “Queen’s waiting,” he said. “We’re heading back out to the river, checking on the weaver settlements. It’s two pronged: first, we’re making
sure they’re okay, and then giving them assistance, if they need it; and, second, we’re introducing the human elements they can contact, if they want to accept human settlers.”

  “That’s quick.”

  “The arach are coming. Reunion needs to expedited, if K’Kavor is to have a chance at survival.”

  “What does Odyssey think?”

  We wound round the inside of a central column, and then back out, and I felt energy shimmer across my skin. This time the views showed links to the second and third floors of human habitations, with more walkways being built.

  “They’re serious about integration,” Mack said, “but they’re careful, too.”

  He pointed.

  “That building is Odyssey’s, and that one belongs to the new repair company, Iron Hands.”

  His hand swung to indicate a third building in the arc, one still under construction.

  “That’s the first building of the new academy. Security will be tight, but not even this area will be exclusive to the vespis. The queen has commanded it—and the vespis have been planning Reunion for a very long time.”

  Mack stopped outside a door not far from the corridor junction.

  “We’re here.”

  29—Poster Girl

  I learnt a lot more about Reunion and how the vespis intended to integrate the human, weaver and vespis settlements into a single planetary identity than I’d ever wanted to know. I also learnt more about their history than I’d ever thought I’d need to know. Given it had been the humans who had tried turning the vespis into cattle when they arrived, and then persisted in the attempt even when they’d learnt the wasps were sentient, I didn’t know how they’d been given a chance.

  “Because they were divided,” the queen said, picking that thought out of my head—and I remembered the vespis were psi, and that I was pretty much an open book.

  Damn.

  “Be glad,” she said, and then returned to the question. “Many of the colonists refused to go along with the plan to domesticate us. They helped us prevail when the arach attacked, and that is why we let them stay, when they would have been prosecuted for colonizing a sentient world. The price was that they helped us interact with the non-arach star-farers of the universe.”

  “But you kept them separate,” I said… and stopped as I saw the expressions on the faces of the other humans at the table.

  Mack, Tens, and Delight were sitting across from me, but they were wearing the same looks they reserved for when I was being particularly argumentative. I stopped, and felt myself blush.

  “No offence, intended, your Majesty.”

  She flicked her antennae in the vespis equivalent of a human shrug.

  “At least you asked. There are others here who are curious, but did not.”

  Tens blushed, and I wondered why he hadn’t stepped forward, given he wasn’t that shy. The queen continued despite my curiosity.

  “Both sides suffered casualties, and it was felt full integration was not conducive to a healing environment. History has shown that this might have been a mistake, and we have learned.”

  I remembered T’Kit talking about housing the most troubled settlers in weaver settlements until their phobias faded, or facilities where their survival appeared to depend on being cared for by weavers, and wasn’t sure that was the best approach, either.

  “You humans call it Stockholm syndrome,” the queen said. “We do not see why that human tendency cannot be made to work in the favor of all. We will use varying degrees of proximity saturation to ease the transition for all our peoples.”

  From the way she said it, humans weren’t the only ones with phobias.

  “Indeed, not,” she said, “which brings us to the next mission. We have delayed long enough, and reports from the area are disturbing.”

  My mind shivered with impatience as I wondered why she had delayed, at all, and every face turned towards me. The vespis, of their own accord, and the humans because they were following the vespis interest. The queen’s reply was embarrassing enough, without knowing it was being broadcast to every mind in the room.

  “You are the promise that humans can work with us all. We could not go without you. You make it permissible for humans to be given the chance to work with the other races of this world—but you must be seen. At least, at first.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Hearing Delight and Tens laughing in my head did not help at all, and I tried to calm the rush of nerves across my skin.

  “But why?” I asked. “I’m nothing special. I’m just as human as the rest of them. I…”

  I stopped, not at all sure how to carry on. Energy transferred into a shifting nausea, a restlessness that rolled my stomach, and made my limbs ache. The queen didn’t appear to notice.

  “You are the only human to have taken on an arach and humans in public defense of a weaver, the only one to have led vespis warriors into battle.”

  She followed that statement with a series of images: me telling Odyssey not to shoot the spider, me shooting at the arach charging across the airfield with the vespis flying in my wake, me facing down an arach warrior with nothing more than a chair…

  “But, how do they even know?”

  The queen cocked her head.

  “We are psi. Such images spread quickly from one mind to another.”

  “But I wasn’t the only one…” I began, and the look on Mack’s face checked me.

  Oh. Yeah. I pretty much had been the only one in those scenes.

  Damn.

  I wanted nothing more than to walk out of the room, and I knew I couldn’t, so I hid the only way I knew how. I folded my arms on the table, and rested my head on them. Mack cleared his throat, his orders clear in the implant.

  “Sit up.”

  I didn’t want to. Being singled out like this was bad enough, but… really? I lifted my head from my arms and then rested it against the table, propping my elbows either side, and using my forearms as a barricade, while I gave him a single-digit salute with both hands.

  “Cutter!”

  “Fine.”

  I sat up, but I didn’t look at any of them.

  “Just tell me what I have to do,” I said, scrubbing my face with my hands, and pushing down the urge to wave my arms and shout.

  My cheeks felt like they were on fire, and I knew I had turned a lovely shade of scarlet. Trying to ignore that, I fought to get my shit under control, and to box the emotion and embarrassment as far from the rest of me as I could. This was not about me. This was about saving a world.

  “Now that we have that out of the way,” the queen said, drawing attention back to the top of the conference room. “This is how we are approaching the problem.”

  I tried to relax. It was a relief to sit through the rest of the briefing, without a single eye on me. I might be their poster-girl for Operation Reunion, but that was all I was. I only had to be there, doing whatever it was I did, when I was doing as I was told. I let my gaze travel over them, studying the room and the corridor beyond, noticing every change of expression, hearing every word with time enough to repeat it in my head. I missed nothing.

  Mack started smirking, and I resisted the urge to stick out my tongue.

  I was sure that, once the other humans started doing their thing to look after the other people on the planet, I’d be redundant in pretty quick fashion, local heroes and all that.

  “You better hope so,” Tens whispered in my head, and I had the sudden, horrible realization that I might be asked to stay… permanently. Whether I wanted to stay, or not.

  My heart started to race at the thought of Mack leaving me behind, that I might be stuck on one world, and only ever able to see the stars in a night sky—the same night sky…over and over, again.

  “Would that be so bad?” the queen asked, and I realized I’d been staring out at Tens, could only imagine the expression on my face.

  “Your Majesty…” I started,
and then stopped. “Your Majesty, I…”

  “I meant no disrespect,” I said, and pushed my chair back. “I… If you will excuse me, I need some air.”

  I wasn’t asking for permission; I was just leaving. I was just trying to do that as politely as I could without permission, and without being made to stay. I didn’t even wait for her reply as I turned for the door.

  I did manage not to run.

  I managed to walk across the room, and through the door, aware of being watched by every creature present. Once I hit the walkway, I began to run. I don’t know why. I only knew that this was what I needed to do. I didn’t even know where I was going.

  It was easy to take the first off-ramp leading to a human building. I bolted through the checkpoint at the other end, and raced down a corridor until I saw a sign indicating a set of stairs. Yanking the door open, I headed into the stair well. Three flights down, and the surging restlessness rolling through my muscles hadn’t abated.

  What the Hell!

  “Of all the puke-bucketed shit sticks!” I muttered, not sure who I was referring to, but feeling better for the cussing. I hit the bottom of the stairs, and pulled open the door. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen. The door remained locked, and did not move an inch.

  “Fuck!” I slammed it with a flat-palm strike, and wished I’d stayed long enough to find out where my weapons were stashed. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  After punctuating each word with a hand slap, I tried the door, again. It still did not budge. I rested my forehead against it, resisting the desire to bang my head on the frame, and tried to work out what I was going to do next. The voice from the other side came as a surprise.

  “Who’s in there?”

  “Never you fucking mind,” I said. “Just get me out of here.”

  “Cutter?”

  “And who are you?”

  I’d been about to say something a lot less polite, but I remembered what the queen had said about me being a poster-girl for Reunion, and figured I’d better start living up to it. The door handle rattled, and I took several steps back, checking the walls and stairs above me. I reached for where the Blazer usually hung, and found it gone, checked for the Zakrava, Glazer and Brahms, and then remembered they were still in the armory…or lost, in the case of the Zak.