“Well, while I am a miracle of science and engineering, I am still a machine lacking in the intuitive abilities at which your meat-based brain excels.”
“But you can sure as hell turn a phrase,” Drexler said, finishing the last report. “Wow. I might have to write that one down.”
“Rare compliment. I’ll take it,” Reggie replied.
“Taking back a single trade lane, then dumping fifty million refugees and the strained economy of New Detroit on the doorstep of the BJP government is a surefire way to lose this war. The BJP Congress will simply melt down. The population of Kerala 2 will follow suit in the face of so many desperate people. We’ll never get their support by handing them a bag of dung.
On top of that, the ship captains out there are motivated by anger right now. Not ideal, and I’ll take it for a start. How long do you think that motivation will serve them if it is eclipsed by fear for their families? Most of the crews have family or fellow species in that cloud. We need to go into this fight with the status of the refugees squared away.”
“How do you plan to solve the refugee crisis right now?”
“I don’t, but I plan to get started on it. All the ship Captains need is some kind of promise. I only have to give them the suggestion of a promise that the refugees will be safe; then the Armada will pretty much form by itself. We’ll be fighting for those people, after all. We just need to make it so that the cloud can arrive back in the Trade Lanes with at least some answers. They need to show up ready for work. Also, I want the supply run contracts.”
“And how do you propose to do all this?” Reggie asked. His tone was curious, not mocking.
“Go with what you know. I am a businessman. Humans invented business. I’m falling back on trade, and I’m going to use our resident Reptile defectors and that refugee cloud to make it happen,” Drexler announced. “I’m going to show them that there’s a profitable opportunity hidden in this tragic shit show.”
He stood up from the desk and left his cabin, sparing a last look at the antique furniture. Its dappled gray paint fit in well with the patchy brown and gray of the ship’s bulkheads. It was almost like the furniture was meant for this place and time. As the cabin pocket door closed with a silent, fluid motion, Drexler felt for an instant that he understood why his father kept the ancient furniture. The feeling left and was soon forgotten as he embarked on his new pursuit.
2
On the bridge of the Protector, General Fourseven, former Queen Guardian of the Insectoid homeworld, ordered her crew to take a careful inventory of the refugee ships. She had seen nothing like this since the Silicoid wars, and she knew how dangerous and ugly this situation could be. The people on those ships were desperate and turned more so by the hour, if not by the minute. Although she found herself in a war of violence, her first duty was to serve life. Out there was the life that needed service.
“Some of our food stock may be useful to several species among the refugees,” Cila remarked, looking around Fourseven’s narrow waist segment at the information display. The sparse field of coarse black bristles that covered her bulbous arachnid body rippled as she moved.
“This is also my conclusion. To spare all we can, we must work out a food ration schedule for our combined crew,” Fourseven said. She made her statement with great care to reference Cila’s Arachnid soldiers.
“Resupply will be the next problem for us. We will need a plan beyond this emergency,” Cila replied. “We fled Homeworld without laying in supplies or preparing the biosphere compartments.”
“We will find a solution,” Fourseven said. “We must, if we are to realize the vision.”
Cila did not reply but instead busied herself with her fellow soldiers. The Arachnid leader waved all six of her arms as she spoke with the passion typical of her kind. The larger males listened intently, then replied with arguments of their own. Fourseven found the Arachnid command structure disorderly and bewildering.
Through all their orchestrated chaos, the crew was exceedingly effective. When a crisis emerged, they all worked together as if connected to the same mind, even though Arachnids were not hive-based insects. At any other time, their main form of interaction seemed to be harsh bickering and insults. Fourseven began to believe that they required argument the way her kind needed nectar.
Most of the Arachnid crew had never left the Insectoid homeworld. They were a group of humble park rangers, hunters, and ranchers who decided to follow Cila in support of Fourseven. Not all of them believed in Fourseven’s vision, but they all believed in Cila. Many spiders followed the former Queen Guardian only by an extension of loyalty. Cila herself was something of a mystery. She never revealed what she did before the outbreak of the Insectoid/Warmblood civil war and Fourseven had not asked. She was grateful for the support, so it didn’t seem important. Cila kept much of her personal life private.
A familiar scent filled the bridge. Fourseven halted her work and turned her head until her composite eyes found the old Termite she had all but forgotten. He and his fellow Monks kept a low profile since they fled the home system. The Termites kept themselves busy and out of the way running the Protector’s computer systems. Information science was their vocation, after all. She spotted the High Priest standing just inside the bridge entrance. His fear scent was obvious to her ever-probing antenna.
Slowly, Fourseven crossed the room to him and bent down low. “I never did take the opportunity to beg your forgiveness,” she said.
“There is nothing to forgive, and my finest pupil should never beg,” the old Monk replied. The bridge lighting penetrated his umber-colored shell, translucent with age. The termite stood at a fraction of her height, and as she bent down ever lower, she made out the shadows of his internal organs through his exoskeleton. The ancient insect neared the end of his life cycle.
“I thought you betrayed me,” Fourseven replied. “In anger and fear, and lack of hope, I judged you unfairly.”
“I did not betray you, but I did fail you. I did not believe in your vision,” the termite confessed. “But I do believe now.”
Fourseven had begun to doubt the vision herself. The Great Scholar-Monk and high Termite Priest took her as his protege while she was barely past her second metamorphosis. She had not even grown a stinger yet, and her wings were small, soft and new. It was because of his instruction that Fourseven rose through the ranks of her hive to become the Queen Guardian. She studied the predictive models of the sacred continental computer by his side. He was more of a parent to her than the former Queen herself. The recent conflict between them pained her deeply.
“We have found the Deliverer, but we are farther from our search than when we began,” Fourseven said. “And now, a war of violence stands in the way of our task. This is not my vision. The predictions say nothing of this.”
“Visions, by nature, are difficult to understand,” the old Termite replied. He took her hand and led her closer to the viewport. “And sometimes, they change before they are fully realized. I have studied your vision as you recorded it in your journal and I see it unfolding before us.” He pointed with two upper arms at the cloud of refugee ships and said, “The Deliverer has led us to the Lost Colony.”
Cila overheard the Termite and stopped her arguing in mid-sentence. The animation of her arms froze. She turned her body so that all eight of her eyes focused on the old termite. She too began to doubt Fourseven’s vision. She dropped her arms back down to rest against her bulbous, black body and stepped over to the Termite Priest and the Winged insect she would always think of as her Queen Guardian. She wanted the vision to be true, needed it to be so.
“What does this mean?” she asked in a voice uncharacteristically soft.
The Priest turned to her and said, “It means that we have a greater foundation for hope. We may yet find the genetic material we need to make our genosphere viable again, to restore balance among the species and end the civil war.”
“But there are no Insectoids among the re
fugees,” Fourseven said.
“The predictors never said the lost colony would be made up of Insectoids,” the Priest replied. “Nor did it ever claim the solution would be in the colony itself. The predictors say that the solution will be found through the colony and it is the Deliverer who will lead us to that solution. All we must do now is support the Deliverer in his next task. Believe in the calculations of the Sacred Computer.”
“We may save the Homeworld after all,” Cila said. The comment revealed her harbored doubt but she did not care. Her species valued honesty and forthright speech above formal courtesy. She did not want to hold crucial thoughts back from the General she served. It took Fourseven some time to understand that Cila’s bluntness was a sign of respect.
Fourseven found no words as the constellation of refugee ships formed groups preparing for departure. Thousands of lenses made up the surface of her composite eyes, and each one reflected the suffering out in space described by the ships that surrounded the human city ship like a swarm of aphids.
On her homeworld, such a swarm drew the hungry attention of other insects. She feared the vulnerable ships might draw similar attention from the hostile Reptilians who, for some inexplicable reason, had decided to attack other members of the trade union.
The insectoid homeworld belonged to the interspecies coalition, but its isolationist government had little contact with other members. As a young member of the Protector Hive, and before she became Queen, Fourseven fought beside humans, Forest Children, and even some reptilians against the Silicoid threat. Now, one member of that coalition turned into the threat.
But that conflict ended more than six-hundred years ago. She saw the last days of the war when the fighting was considered light. Even then, the horrors she witnessed stayed with her to this very day. Memories of that war made her wonder how any species would willingly and actively pursue violence seemingly without cause.
The Reptilians had attacked her ship while she searched for the Deliverer. Reports from the refugee cloud revealed that the Reptilians attacked any Trade Union ship they came across. They murdered all who resisted, forced others into labor and worst of all, used other sentient creatures as food. To the Insectoid mind, these actions violated the very laws of nature. The insectoids did not engage in violence lightly, but when they committed themselves to a fight, they did so totally. This was why Fourseven took the greatest care with her actions.
She did not know why the Reptilians attacked, but that did not matter. They had to be stopped. The behavior they exhibited was far more dangerous than the Silicoid threat, because the Reptilians knew what they were doing, while the Silicoids operated by a form of instinct. Although she knew what she had to do, the lack of understanding bothered her. She needed perspective.
Fourseven moved to a console in the center of the bridge dome. She scraped her six sharp fingers across the control surface. Beneath her fingertips, symbols appeared showing her the locations of the databases she sought. Everything the Insectoids knew about the Reptilians would be in those information containers. But that would only be a start. To form a better understanding, she needed direct information from someone with direct experience.
“Communications Officer,” Fourseven called, raising her head. The Officer was one of her younger children, and the bitter taste of his fear made her antenna quiver.
Nearly ten thousand of her Hive volunteered to join her on this mission. Most of them were her youngest sons, eager to prove themselves after their second molting, stingers dripping with venom. The realities of space travel had caught up with them quickly. The initial thrill of leaving their world on a desperate mission in defiance of the Insectoid High Council gave way to the realization that they might not ever make it home. Even if they did manage to fulfill the prophecy and return the genetic solution, they would certainly not be welcome in their old hive.
Fourseven only survived by the grace of the new Queen, who by right, custom, and biologic necessity should have fought Fourseven to the death and consumed her corpse. Without the genetic material in Fourseven’s body, all the Warrior Children aboard this ship were the last of their kind. There would never be another Protector Hive on the Insectoid homeworld. More than a hundred thousand years of tradition would die with Fourseven and her children.
But, they had a purpose. What gave Fourseven strength was the thought that the sacrifice of her line would allow the insectoid biosphere to survive. She had to believe that this hope also lived in her children. Fourseven realized she’d called for the soldier, then said nothing as her mind wandered.
“General?” the Soldier asked. He no longer tasted like fear, but something close to it.
“Contact the Broodqueen on Fleetfoot I ,” Fourseven replied. “Have her report to me as soon as she is able.”
“Yes, General,” the Soldier replied, and immediately scraped his fingers across the console to make the call.
It took several hours for the Broodqueen to reach the bridge. General Fourseven spent the time working with her soldiers and coordinating relief operations with Cila and the Arachnid crew. She was almost surprised when a familiar scent reached her antenna. The presence of the Broodmother reached Fourseven as soon as the bridge portal slipped into its pocket and parted.
For a few moments, the Broodmother stood just inside the bridge, perfectly still. The bright green body segments of her glistening shell stood out against the gleaming black surfaces of the bridge. Then, the Broodmother moved her heart-shaped head slowly to sweep the bridge with composite eyes much bigger than Fourseven’s own. Their species were very similar, only once removed from a shared ancestor.
Both Fourseven and the Broodmother descended from a pollinating insect that lived many millions of years before the insectoids gained sentience. While evolution guided Fourseven’s kind higher up the trunks of the Sky Trees, the Broodmother’s stock remained further down the trunk. Her species evolved on the mid-canopy, where much of the light from the binary Insectoid Suns did not reach. While the World Flowers lent their yellow pigment to the stripes and swirls of Fourseven’s shell, time forged the Broodmother’s body in the deepest jungle green.
Both species evolved in symbiosis with the sky trees and each other. As the insects developed sentience, that relationship became social in nature. By the timeless tradition of their kind, Tara’s species remained subordinate to the winged species of the upper canopy. The winged considered their relationships sacred. Having Tara and her hive to command was Fourseven’s greatest privilege and serving Fourseven was Tara’s greatest honor. Calling on Tara was not done lightly.
“Honored Mother, Traveler,” Fourseven said, as she crossed the bridge to blow low before her old friend and colleague. “Welcome to The Protector.”
“Thank you, Queen Guardian,” the Broodmother replied. Several of Fourseven’s soldier sons within hearing range bristled at the address. It still pained some that their mother was no longer Queen Guardian.
“Thank you for the demonstration of respect,” Fourseven replied, “but as you know, I am no longer Queen Guardian.”
“Yes,” the Broodqueen replied. “Please forgive the oversight, General. I am also known by another name, which I now prefer. It is a name of the Human language. I choose to be called Tara.”
“Very well, Tara,” Fourseven replied. “It pleases me that you honor our humans by choosing one of their names. Forgive the abbreviated formality, but I brought you here to learn of your experience with the Humans and Reptilians.”
Tara remained silent, waiting. Fourseven realized Tara required specific questions.
“For what reason do the Reptilians attack?” Fourseven asked.
“They seem to be driven by a primal instinct towards aggression and dominance. While our kind uses reason to deny or amend harmful instincts, the Reptilians seem to sublimate theirs into space-faring society.”
“I have fought beside reptilians, and none displayed senseless aggression the way they do now.”
; “I understand, General. Beyond this general observation, I can tell you very little. I do know that the Alpha of the captured Reptilian crew does exhibit rational restraint of violent instinct.”
“So, the question becomes, why some act without balance while others do not. It would seem that the official Alpha Reptiles are the ones who are behind this violence.”
Throughout the conversation, neither Fourseven nor Tara noticed the little Termite Priest beside them. He made his presence known with a question.
“What do we know of this captured Reptilian crew?” asked the priest.
“I know very little, but the Deliverer interacts with them often,” Tara replied.
“What does he hope to accomplish?” Fourseven asked.
“The Deliverer adheres to a peculiar human belief that has no basis in reason.”
“And what belief is this?”
Tara replied in Tradespeak. “The Captain believes everything is negotiable.”
3
Drexler was not happy to get his wish. It took a team of seven crew members a full day to identify and inventory all the radio, X-ray, and optical communications taking place in the refugee cloud. It took another day to make contact with the Captains of lead ships, and another day of negotiation after that to bring those Captains together. A last-minute flurry of communication resulted in a meeting on the promenade deck of a luxury starship liner. The result was a riotous group of more than two-hundred Merchant Ship Captains from more than a dozen different Sentient Species. Any semblance of reason was lost in the resulting din. Drexler prepared himself for a hard sell.
“This was probably not the best place to meet,” Drexler said to First Officer Mumlo, leaning to his right. The two were on speaking terms again, but just barely. The First Officer nearly committed mutiny against Drexler after he returned with the stolen Reptilian Merchant ship a few months ago.
“There are no good places for anything right now,” Mumlo replied.
Rogue Messiah: Fleetfoot Interstellar Series, Book 2 Page 2