First Contact

Chapter 180: (The War)

Lightning hit the tree, showering sparks down onto the leaves. The leaves caught fire, catching the trees, and the conflagration showered sparks into the air, the sparks landing and catching more fires. Animals fled the fire, fleeing into new biomes and environments. Some died, others thrived, and biology was altered forever.

A spark cracked off of a blade, getting in the eye of a warrior and he blinked, turning away, and his opponent thrust his blade deep into the chest of the one who had turned away. His fellows pushed the advantage, and the battle was won, a king fell, and a kingdom collapsed.

A spark jumped and a city-state burned as the ruler fiddled.

A spark jumped across wiring and a prop-charge exploded. A munitions dump exploded and the battle was lost as the guns went silent.

A spark in the wrong place at the wrong time and a starship slammed at superluminal speeds into a planet, killing 240 million sentient beings and ending that species attempts at anything at all.

Time after time history was altered by sparks.

They were always small.

Always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Or perhaps...

The right place at the right time.

He didn't have a name. He didn't even have the concept of a name. Since the moment he had hatched he had done nothing but wail in anguish. His thoughts buried beneath the commands of smothering all consuming outside force. His body moved at the orders of another, stolen from him the second he was born. He ate what he was ordered, when he was ordered, as much as he was ordered, and nothing more.

His existence was nothing more than a despairing wail to an uncaring universe.

He had been commanded to put on a vacuum engineering suit and collect the debris from a recent battle. The mind that controlled his wanted the debris collected and examined. Debris from a creature never seen before.

He was ordered aboard a ship that he had helped build, his efforts combined with thousands of his brethren to create a vessel that only carried out the will of the one who controlled him and every one like him.

The ship moved to the area the other had fought. The larger one, who heard the commands of the ever present overmind, soothed the smaller ones that surrounded him.

Including the one who had known nothing but torture.

Space still echoed with feral snarls of rage and hatred.

The little one felt them. The echoes confused him. He could taste them even though the one who created them was no longer present. He understood the feelings, understood the psychic echo.

It started a small spark, deep down inside of his own mind, his own soul, where he was held prisoner inside his own mind.

Hate.

The ship gathered up the majority of the debris with automated systems, then turned and headed back.

Nothing that had not been done before. Even the wreckage of the old machine had been collected, the debris slated for resource reclamation.

He found himself helping with sorting. Some of the components were strange, unable to be processed by the automatic systems.

There was a single gleaming shard of black metal in the pile of debris. Matte black it drank in the surrounding light, like a piece of darkness made real.

He moved over to it. Looked down at it.

The mind in control of his had given the order. Sort the debris. Examine it. Catalogue it.

So he picked it up.

And a spark jumped to him.

Rage. Primate fury at an uncaring universe. Words filled his mind.

I JUST WANT LEFT ALONE!

Rage at an uncaring universe. At a universe that would allow him to be intelligent, feel emotions, yet have it all smothered beneath the touch of others.

The spark found plenty of tinder.

A fire roared up inside of his mind. How this was his body. It was his mind!

He struggled against the bonds. He was tiny. His mind was tiny. His will and ego was tiny.

Nothing compared to the beings who smothered him within his own mind.

In the scavenging bay, he was merely holding still. No clue to the titanic struggle taking place within his tiny little triangular head.

A spark danced between his antenna, moving up and down, as the rage found his despair, melted it, and it combined with his terror and horror into something new.

LEAVE ME ALONE!

He was tiny. One of millions. Slaving away to make the Omniqueen's will manifest.

But it was his body. His mind.

Chains shattered and he took a deep breath. Not because another wanted him to but because it felt as if he had been on the edge of drowning and had just managed to breach the surface of the liquid and take his first deep breath in his life.

Another moved over to him. Tiny. Green. Disposable. It touched the unmoving one.

A spark jumped between them.

The newcomer went still.

Another link in the chain shattered.

They could hear the commands, hear the orders, hear part of their brain replying that they were complying.

But they weren't.

They stood there, in the the debris gathered from space.

One held a tiny piece of warsteel in his gripping hands. One stood next to him.

Without speaking they went back to their appointed tasks.

The first one hid the piece of black metal in his toolkit.

When they finished they were ordered to return to their little hexagonal rest areas after gathering nutrition.

As they moved through their brethren a spark kept jumping from one to the next.

Each time the spark found tinder.

Each time the fire melted horror, despair, terror, and resignation into something else.

Every time the spark spoke words that they heard deep inside in the silence of their souls.

I JUST WANT LEFT ALONE!

Each time they held those words, that rage, that hatred, tight. Each time they replied to those echoed words.

LEAVE ME ALONE!

Each of them, beneath the part of their mind that still responded with servility, they stayed quiet, stayed hidden.

And so, being small, being insignificant, being worthless, they went unnoticed.

Each of them not mattering more than a single grain of sand in the desert.

-------------------

There had only been a few ships still able to be restored to functionality. It had taken long months and an expenditure of resources that she was unsure was worth it. The other Queens of the other systems had no ships, had no shipyards, but they had what she did not.

Still viable eggs ready to be hatched.

She launched her ships, putting immature queens into the central command hub and surrounding them with a dozen Speakers each. Each ship was loaded with warrior caste and warrior caste eggs packed deep with jelly.

The ships made the jumps to the systems. They landed and despite the trepidation of the Overqueen or just the Queen in the system, the ship sent forth its technicians to gather the eggs and bring them back. Little russet mantids moved with green engineers, tending to the eggs, lifting them up, carrying them back to the ship.

Six months after the enraged feral had entered the system the ships were loaded. The Omniqueen had ordered all five ships loaded with at least a Queen.

At the edge of her reach, the Queen would build a hive to repeat the Omniqueens signal into a galaxy that needed her touch to quell the chaos that had surged up.

The ships crawled with green and russet mantids, all working to ensure the ship's systems worked and that the row upon row of tens of thousands of warrior eggs were cared for.

Each ship was commanded by a Speaker, who salivated at the thought of worlds full of new life to dominate and devour. A hundred million years had passed since the Great War and the invasion by the feral intelligence had shown that life had arisen in the Galaxy again.

The ships arranged themselves together, aimed themselves at the far end of the arm spur and entered jumpspace.

The Omniqueen felt pleasure. The Speaker would know when to drop the ship out of jumpspace and establish a new hive. Know when to put a Queen into place to ensure that her, the Omniqueen, was heard by all.

With the exception of the Great Rebellion, the Galaxy and all life within it had always bowed to the will of the Mantid Queens.

She intended that there would not be another exception as she sent her ships off.

It had almost stripped the last of her system. She had stripped the systems of the other queens. She regretted the necessity of destroying the Overqueens who had resisted, slightly regretted the fact that the remaining two Overqueens were starving to death.

But it would be worth it when her scouts found where the feral life had come from.

Because then... oh yes... then she would feed.

--------------------

Aboard the ships the spark kept spreading. Little Mantids, the undercaste, the drones, each felt the spark jump to them one by one.

Here a russet plunged her bladearm into the skull of a gestating warrior and covered her fratricide by packing and smoothing the jelly.

There a green mantid cut the atmosphere to a Speaker's chambers so it suffocated.

Right there a gold mantid passed the spark to the newly hatched undercaste drones.

A tiny black mantid stayed silent about what he had seen.

An opalescent mantid was hidden in a vent rather than fed into the reclamation system.

A russet poisoned the entire store of royal jelly.

A black mantid told the Queen that all was well.

A gold mantid shoved her bladearm into the brain of an immature queen who had just hatched and shoved the body into the reclamation system.

A green built a radio and whispered complex mathematical formula to the other ships.

The engineer caste all lifted their little green heads and listened the whispered formula.

A Speaker hefted itself from its sand-pit, intending on telling the Queen that it felt something strange.

A hundred black mantids fell from the ceiling and began stabbing at it, all screaming the same thing.

LEAVE US ALONE!

The Queen looked up as the door to her chamber opened without her summoning any underlings.

Missiles, no bigger than a human finger, slammed into her as the black mantids charged her.

On all five ships it repeated.

LEAVE US ALONE!

Two Queens attempted to initiate the self-destruct.

The anti-matter charges went off under them.

The ships survived.

She didn't.

The ships sped on through jumpspace.

To the Omniqueen the ships kept going, past her zone of control, past her senses, and she felt anticipation. The Speakers would land at the next planet and build a hive to extend her reach.

She reached out with her mind to her queens.

And found...

...nothing but three words echoing in the void.

LEAVE ME ALONE!

She realized that her five ships must have come out in a system near the feral intelligences and been defeated.

Regrettable, but not unforeseen.

She reached out and began preparing another ship. Not one she wanted to use.

It had been built a hundred million years before, before even she was born, to carry one of the Overqueens away from the planet. The engines had not been completed.

She forced the hatching of a few hundred engineer caste and set them to work bringing her ship to working condition. She informed the surviving Queens that she would be coming to personally collect them.

The ferals were dangerous. Had defeated the reclamation fleet.

So she would see to it herself.

and then...

...then she would feast.