Two
Nine days before the last nife commander on Garm was reduced to glowing slag along with his Parent and her brown resin throne, he had sent out a battery of messages. A specialized life form had been grown for this purpose, a life form with a single significant organ. Like the translation mouth that had adhered to the roof of the nest so that the Parents might converse with captured food-creatures, this transmitter organ subsisted upon the secretions of the nest itself. The organ was simply an enlarged version of the communications organ built into all Imperium life forms. The only difference was the power of this one’s transmitter, which was capable of beaming a signal to the stars themselves.
The creation of the nest organ and its subsequent usage to relay after-action reports had all been part of the standard genetic coding. It was all quite routine, actually, and bored the nife intensely. But, being a product of intensive genetic specialization himself, he had followed his compulsions and made the reports anyway, despite the fact there was no one out there to receive them. Having no known friendly base to inform of their progress, the reports had instead been transmitted on tight beam patterns toward the nearest twelve star systems.
Right up to and during the moment of his incineration, the commander believed his reports to have been an utter waste of time. However, his reports did reach a receiver capable of interpreting their stealth encoding, three years after the extermination of all Imperium forces on Garm. The receiver in question was a lifepod. The lifepod, grown in roughly the shape of a walnut—albeit a walnut the size of a grav-tractor—was awakened from a very deep, very long slumber by the signal. A tiny portion of its sub-brain, which was by any definition tiny to begin with, felt tickled by the persistent beaming signal.
The sub-brain itself wasn’t capable of operating anything more complex than a grasshopper. Wisely, it decided to ignore the signal for a thousand hours or so. But, in the manner of a sleeping human being tormented by a whining mosquito, the sub-brain could not stay dormant forever. Each tickling, buzzing transmission awakened it fractionally, until it was alert.
The occupants of the lifepod, which had floated between the stars for many centuries, had effectively died long ago. Detecting no possible source of rescue, the tiny ship had doused its occupants liberally with anti-freeze agents and placed them in cyro-suspension for an indefinite period. And the duration of their aimless floating in space amongst the ice chunks that served the local star system as an Oort cloud had indeed turned out to be indefinite.
They might have never woken up at all until eventually, a billion years after their original escape from a losing battle with the Tulk, their lifepod was incinerated by a supernova. Or crushed via collision with a trundling ice-comet. Or, if they had survived all such dangers, then left to float forever in the darkening, expanding cosmos.
But the signal interrupted all that, buzzing and poking until the sub-brain awakened the primary brain and requested that it decipher the source and meaning of the transmission. The primary brain drew delicately on glucose reserves, and was soon thawed enough to function. It quickly determined the source of the transmissions to be military, and definitely of Imperium origin. This was significant, if only because it might indicate a possible source of rescue.
The primary brain was not capable of deciphering the details of the signal from Garm, it simply didn’t have the neuron-count nor the experience for such operations. Accordingly, the lifepod’s primary brain followed its dictates. Protocol demanded one of the occupants be unthawed. There were no parents handy, unfortunately. Instead, there was an unusual type aboard, a Savant. Calculating the chain of command carefully, the lifepod decided the Savant had the best command capacity.
Long-dry arteries gurgled into life as the ship began revival procedures. Happily, the lifepod chugged body fluids into the Savant and threw in a healthy dose of its limited glucose supplies. It would be best to get the new commander’s mind unfogged and fully functional as quickly as possible. There was nothing the lifepod wanted more than to turn over operations to its frozen occupants. Passing on all responsibilities to the awakened Savant would be a huge relief. After all, it was only a ship, and a tiny, lost, foggy-minded ship at that.
#
The Savant, once she had been revived fully enough to think, sucked a whistling gulp of space-cold air into her single, quivering lung. She hadn’t taken such a breath in a thousand years. A painful coughing spasm sprayed the compartment with protoplasms. She fumbled with the lifepod life-support controls, squeezing nodules to warm the pod’s cramped interior. Her tentacles writhed with pain. They were still half-frozen. What kind of awakening was this? If an underling were responsible, there would be sensory punishments applied, she promised herself.
Although ancient chronologically, the Savant had spent the vast majority of her existence hibernating. Mentally, she was quite young. She had only just been hatched from her cocoon when disaster had struck the cruiser she had been born upon. Never, in her short life, had she experienced even the simplest pleasures, such as the tug of planetary gravity or the wriggling of live prey. And so it was with a wave of self-pity that she surveyed her situation.
The pod was secure and undamaged, but that was a small consolation. They had lost the battle and the war, apparently, or she would have been picked up by now. In fact, she wondered if there had been some kind of malfunction. Why had the lifepod awakened her at all? She would have preferred to float for eternity, never having experienced this sad, painful moment of realization.
Then she managed to process the data that the lifepod’s ignorant primary brain was attempting to transmit to her. She allowed the input, and coiled her tentacles thoughtfully. A military signal? But from so far away. The primary brain was a fool. This signal meant nothing. The source was lightyears distant. No one would be coming to rescue them. If she signaled back, she might well give away her position to the enemy.
At least, she allowed, the signal did prove she wasn’t alone in the universe. The struggle went onward. Her species would persevere elsewhere. Eagerly, she reviewed all the messages, one after another, in sequence. She fluttered her mandibles as she read of the great struggle on Garm, learning of humanity. They seemed like the perfect opponent. They struggled enough to give one a thrill, but clearly were doomed from the start of the campaign. What’s more, according to the reports, they tasted quite good. Her foodtube dribbled digestive juices as she contemplated a planet full of weak, slow, tasty aliens. She had, in her short waking life, never tasted a food-creature. Bland ship’s rations of syrup and protein slurries had kept her alive throughout her existence.
She skipped ahead toward the end of the transmissions, which mysteriously had cut out about a week earlier. She quivered in disbelief as she reviewed the final reports. The humans had overcome the invasion forces. It didn’t seem possible, but there it was. This absurd species had defeated the Imperium. She read the final analysis the nife commander had transmitted years earlier with growing dismay. These simpletons had a broad empire of colonized worlds. They had spread, so far as the nife could tell, to hundreds of systems, infesting every rocky water-world they could locate.
After ruminating over the report for some time, she turned her young orbs toward the nearest system. It was far. There was little there that looked encouraging. But according to stolen intelligence from the failed Garm Campaign, the humans had a colony here somewhere, probably on one of the rocky inner planets.
She coerced the lifepod’s crusty engine into life and applied steady thrust, taking her closer to the star system.
When she was in range, she studied each planet with the feeble sensory equipment the lifepod provided. She fantasized about going back to sleep, but her genetics simply wouldn’t allow such nonsense. Unlike the combat varieties of her species, she would not die young, either. She had a very long lifespan. It had been determined that research methodologies, the specialty of savants, took a long time to come to fruition even with the best genetically attuned mind.
Suicide wasn’t even an option, unless she were about to be captured by an enemy judged capable of learning useful intelligence from her. She knew that as a captive she could provide them little information. They would not understand her language and there wasn’t much to be learned from her, not even by dissecting her corpse. They had already done plenty of that to her fallen comrades, she was certain. But none of these ruminations mattered to her lower cortex, where compulsions toward duty and self-sacrifice emanated. She would have to do anything and everything she could to survive and overcome all odds.
There would be no more sleeping for the Savant. Nor could there be a quick clean death. She had to do the impossible. She had to take this world for the Imperium, which was by all accounts an even tougher world than the last one. According to intelligence, this system was more capable and populated than Garm had been. She would have to be cautious and avoid underestimating her opponents. After all, a trained Parent with a well-equipped seedship had already failed to conquer them.
She weighed her options, which were few and depressing. Heading directly toward the inner planets seemed like a suicidal strategy. The aliens would detect her, and certainly by now they had learned of the fate of their sister world. Their own radio signals were no doubt streaming in at the speed of light, warning the aliens of the danger represented by small organic ships like hers. She would be blown from the skies before planetfall could even be achieved.
So she studied the system in detail. It was an odd one. There was only a single star, an orange K-class. Unlike most K-class stars, this one wasn’t an ancient giant, but rather a young, smaller star approximately a billion years old. Providing a relatively safe environment for planetary formation, the system had four major worlds in stable orbits. Three rocky planets swung in close to the K-class, while the system boasted only a single gas giant world which trundled along in a far-flung, elliptical path. The relative lack of gas giants to clean up the system, and the youth of it, had left a good deal of floating debris. All of the planets had at least a dozen moons of various sizes, along with dusty rings. In addition, there were two asteroid belts that no doubt represented the residue of past planets, ground down into a river of rocky chunks by collisions at some point in history. The Oort cloud, too, was crowded with comets. Disastrous celestial events were probably common in this system.
Looking more closely, she strained her orbs and the lifepod’s pathetic passive radiation sensors to locate signs of technological activity. She was surprised to find a cacophony of transmissions. These aliens, just as the military reports had shown, threw about signals without shielding, without focusing tight beams. There was no hint of security concerns in their actions.
The Savant felt some stress-relief as her pleasure centers produced the proper, hopeful sensations. Even though the humans must have been recently warned, they showed no signs of having altered their behavioral patterns into a more defensive posture. In fact, they showed no signs of alertness to attack at all. Ships buzzed everywhere around the system. There was a baffling lack of consistency to it all. In an Imperium system, optimal paths would have long since been established. Clearly demarked trails would be followed by one and all. Instead, in the Kale system every vessel operated like a scout. They wandered about with individual direction, almost aimlessly. One asteroid was mined while the richer one next to it orbited unmolested, ignored. If these creatures even possessed a central hive control, it must be running with the hind-brain in charge and damaged at the stem!
She gave up wondering about her baffling prey and focused instead on finding an appropriate target. After a long internal debate, she decided to head toward the gas giant. There were ships there, but not a great number of them. There seemed to be some transportation going on between the nearest habitats and moon bases. The ships in the region traveled to the outer asteroid belts occasionally, or drank gases from their massive planet below, or even sent off haulers for ice to the Oort cloud. But only rarely did they have any direct interaction with the more thickly inhabited rocky planets of the inner system.
Isolated and weak. That was a description that gave her a chance. She would make her move there. She would land and she would dominate—or she would die.
Defeat was unthinkable, she chided herself. She would dominate.
She applied what gentle thrust the lifepod was capable of and directed it into a one-way course toward the gas giant. Tiny and almost undetectable, the lifepod accelerated obediently. She used all the power she could, reserving only enough for deceleration and landing maneuvers. Even so, it would take precious months to arrive.