This is too much, thought Menash in a rare moment of resentfulness. Oh, but this is really asking too much of me.
He stared into the Leaper’s smug face and suppressed the urge to cave it in with his clawed fist. The orange-spotted female was gliding on her woven aerofoils alongside him with their wingtips close enough to touch, though Menash struggled to keep level with his slow-flying counterpart, constantly buffeted as they were by powerful headwinds. In fact, Menash was certain that she was stalling on purpose just to irritate him.
Thousands of meters below them the feeder towers of the Amit megastructures speared upwards like the venomed barbs of sea urchins. There were three Amit colonies in this quadrant alone, the occupants of which numbered in the tens of millions. By this time tomorrow the Vitalus expected every single one of them to be relocated fifteen kilometres northeast, herded and driven into the mounds of the neighbouring quadrant.
It was a colossal undertaking to say the least. So extensive that the Vitalus had summoned all the kindreds native to this continent and coerced them all into working together on pain of total erasure from the gene pool for any who dared violate the truce.
What this amounted to was a temporary suspension of the Great Game, an awkward interlude of peaceful cooperation the like of which had not been seen since the spinning of the Spool. This female was Menash’s assigned liaison, the representative of the Weeping Vipers, one of the largest and most powerful tribes of that misbegotten race.
She was called Fiuria. Menash found it a strangely pleasant name for such an odious personage. Liaison. Hah! Spy, more like it. As if the Leapers weren’t using this opportunity to learn everything they could about Gallivant command and control procedures.
Menash’s uncles had been on the cislunar program, doomed to a slow and torturous death when the Leaper betrayal had marooned them on the surface of Cloister.
Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice…
He looked deep into Fiuria’s kaleidoscopic eyes as if by the heat of his gaze alone he could burn away her deceitful mask of compliance.
Fiuria was the first to look away, showing no outward discomfort and refusing to even acknowledge the tension between them.
“Alpha Menash, our warbands signal their readiness,” she said in clipped, neutral tones over the shared frequency, “At your command, we may commence conservation efforts.”
“Took you people long enough,” Menash said with disdain, “My airwing has been stuck in their holding patterns for hours now. You know, I wasn’t expecting much from Kryptus’ rabble, but somehow you’ve managed to disappoint me all the same. Where is that genetic throwback of yours, anyhow? Hiding behind the Night Weaver’s fat arse again?”
“A thousand pardons, Alpha Menash,” Fiuria tactfully replied, “Kryptus has been unavoidably detained at the Loom repairing the damage caused by the Engine’s rampage. Rest assured that I will do my utmost to live up to your lofty opinion of us Leapers in his stead.”
Within the privacy of his helm Menash found himself grinning at the barb she had coyly aimed at him just now. She knew the score just as well as he did. A frank and mutual mistrust was the best way forward for everyone concerned.
“See that you do,” Menash said, “Rodhagan, are your cohorts in position?”
“Give us a mountain, and we shall move it,” came the gruff baritone of the Cataphract leader, his transmission crackling at the edge from interference.
Menash activated his biochemical afterburners as he executed a pitchback turn that left Fiuria to choke on the exhaust in his wake. He was pleased to hear her coughing over the magnetosynaptic link and slowed to give her enough time to catch up. As they reached the southernmost edge of the continent’s exclusion zone, the Vitalus’ automated warning message bleeped in his right ear:
“Kindred. You are leaving the designated exclusion zone assigned to your subspecies. Turn back now or be considered an invasive element, subject to immediate termination. You have ten seconds to comply.”
A visualization of the exclusion zone appeared in Menash’s helm feed as a flickering red walls of an enclosure whose surface he had come within centimetres of skimming. They were operating right up against the legal boundaries. Poke a toenail outside of the zone and a Hollowore would be birthed from inside the nearest Dawning Chamber, a creature specifically engineered to hunt down and exterminate members of a particular subspecies. Flying at supersonic velocities, it would track down the fugitive with the help of an entire biome’s worth of sensory inputs, with every living being from a trumpeting ultrapod to the most inoffensive shrub becoming a potential informant for the Vitalus.
If the Vitalus had dedicated a fraction of its omniscience towards finding Zildiz then she would have been found within days if not hours of her disappearance. But now Menash was forced to place all his hopes in Racek, trusting that somehow the wheedling weakling could infiltrate Leaper territory.
He was putting his entire lineage in jeopardy over some woman who refused to even let him see his own children. The whole thing was almost as insane as the task which had been set out for him today.
It was not his place to question the reasoning of a god. All the same, why the urgent need to evacuate these Amits? Menash set his sights on the cyclopean mass of grey metal which still stood amid the gutted ruins of the mound which it had levelled over a week ago. It had been the single largest Amit colony in this biome, and the Engine had erased it in a matter of minutes. The cursed thing hadn’t budged since then; it was as if an erupting volcano had swallowed back up its spew of fire and brimstone, having decided that things had gotten rather out of hand.
The Vitalus had taken full advantage of the Engine’s inexplicable inertness—its domed head and body were covered in a dense shroud of crisscrossing mooring lines. Dilating the lenses of his helm, Menash magnified the image until he could clearly make out the Leapers crawling over the Engine’s torso, weaving as they went. The Vitalus had set nearly all of the tribes to work creating a set of cables made from carbon nanotubes much like the ones they had once woven for the Spool. The fact that an entire subspecies had been dedicated to restraining the Engine betrayed the magnitude of the threat which it presented even now in its dormant state. No less than seven—seven! —Hollowores were being kept on perpetual standby in case the Engine woke up again. Dozens were being restructured and refitted in the bowels of the Dawning Chamber near Cthonis. Thus far, the Vitalus hadn’t even tried to damage the Engine with Its own vessels, which in itself could be construed as an admission of Its helplessness.
Sacrilege, Menash chided himself. But even so, Menash could not help but wonder: just what exactly was the plan here?
“The plan?” Fiuria was perplexed, “Haven’t we discussed this at length? You go high and we go low. Simple enough, wasn’t it?”
Menash realized with a jolt of embarrassment that he had spoken his question aloud. Mercifully the magnetsynaptic link hadn’t been on, so nobody but Fiuria had heard him.
“Yes, of course,” he said, reactivating the link while assertively clearing his throat, “On my mark then. Three, two, one. Mark.”
There came a rumbling from below as of successive avalanches cascading one after another. A line of hulking crimson centurions rolled out from under the shadow of the trees, their pronged heads uprooting saplings and ploughing furrows into the high grass of the veldt.
When they tripped the line of spores that ringed the mounds the Amit reaction was instantaneous: mobs of warrior-brood burst up from carefully concealed assault trenches and rushed to meet the intruders, but faltered as soon as they saw what they were up against.
Each Cataphract was the size of a small hillock, a trundling mass of articulated plate armour that moved with the ponderous inertia of a glacier. It was not so much that the Amits were powerless to stop them—to the Cataphracts it was as if they were not even there. The giants simply walked right over them, incidentally crushing countless Amits to death even as their stone axes chipped and smashed uselessly against the Cataphracts’ scabrous hides. It was only when the Amits tried to spit acid into their eyes that Rodhagan’s centurions became slightly annoyed. They tucked their nozzled ends of their abdomens under their bellies, the hypergolic compounds stored in their glandular tanks mixing in the vestibule organ, producing long plumes of azure flame.
Menash heard Radhogan’s centurions chuckling over the common frequency as the remaining Amits were roasted to a crisp. They were glad for the excuse to vent their frustrations after their own unsuccessful attempt to cut a hole into the Divine Engine’s skin. Just as the Cataphracts were impervious to the chert blades of the Amits, the exomorphs were powerless against the Engine’s mysterious alloys.
Cataphracts advanced at an unhurried pace, burning and bulldozing a path to the sides of the mounds where they began collapsing the ground-level entrances with sweeps of their powerful legs. Other centurions propped themselves up on their two pairs of rear limbs, angling their bodies skyward as their rectums gurgled and trembled with pent-up gases. With a noise like a series of thunderclaps they took off, the propellant hurling them through the air in clumsy parabolic arcs, aided by the rudimentary wings that extended from their backs.
These living rockets smote the sides of the mound feeder towers head-first. Those that didn’t immediately collapse beneath the metric tons of meat and muscle were dismantled by the Cataphracts in short order. Within a matter of minutes all the chimneys and their tributaries had collapsed in on themselves, with sole exception of the central ventilation shaft. Likewise, the Cataphracts on the ground demolished all the surface entrances except for the ones which pointed north.
“Blade-Wings, commence fumigation,” Menash said.
“Strafing,” came the terse reply of Vezda, the airwing commander, “All squadrons, attack formation kappa. Anyone who misses their target will have to answer directly to me."
The fiery female was exulting in her new role as alpha, Menash thought with regret. Her squadrons plummeted from the heavens in a steep attack vector, each one of the Gallivants grafted to a wobbling cyst-sack strapped to their bellies, pink bags of flesh that bulged with their pressurized contents. The Gallivants cut the delivery systems loose with their blade arms right as they reached the lip of the central shaft, their payloads plunging into the limitless darkness within.
“Pheromone bombs delivered,” said Vezda with eager relish, “Stand by for the exodus.”
It didn’t take long for the complex cocktail of pheromones to take effect. Cataphracts climbed up to the rim of the shaft and flapped their clumsy wings to help waft it deeper into the mound. Menash couldn’t see it from up here, but he could well imagine the heavy fumes coiling their way into the guts of the colony, a barrage of olfactory messages that spoke of enemies breaching the mound and plague and the sudden extinction of the fungal farms.
Chemical lies, all of them, fabricated by the Vitalus in bubbling enzyme vats. But Amit were gullible like that. They began deserting the mound—first in a trickle, then a stream, then a pulsing flood of pale bodies that cringed at the light of the suns. Leaper warbands glided out of the hills to meet them with the Gallivant airwing only seconds behind them. Together the two rival kindreds nipped and bit at the horde’s flanks, looping back around to harass the stragglers, goading the primitive troglodytes north towards the intended resettlement area.
He flew closer until he could tell apart the individual castes of Amit. Here were the worker-broods with their pronounced stoop and spaded digging claws, the muscled warriors glaring hatefully up at him through their more complex sets of eyes meant for tracking prey on the surface world. The latter were thronging around the reproductive castes and shielding them with their own bodies.
Stolen story; please report.
Corpulent harem-brood with their flopping sets of honeydew glands, waddled along as fast as their gouty, malformed legs could take them, flanked by their brutish bulls who shouldered their way through the crowd with casual strength. This ghastly royal court was trailed by skinny nursemaids laden with woven reed baskets stuffed to the brim with as many Amit grubs as they could carry, most of them still asleep in foetal position.
Menash ignored them all and focused solely on the largest bull he could find. His frustration and anxiety had been building up all week, and here was the perfect chance to cut loose.
“Alpha Menash, may I remind you that we have command and control here,” Fiuria objected even as she strained to keep up with him, “We should let the wranglers do the work.”
“What’s the matter, Fiuria? Afraid to get your claws dirty with the zetas? Come on, woman—I’ll go high and you’ll go low. Just like we planned.”
Menash zipped ahead before she could raise any more objections. The heat of battle and death was upon him, a primordial instinct to conquer that would not be denied. The bull smelled him coming. It turned, brandished a carven tree trunk, gauging the distance with its beady eyes. It took the oversized club in both hands and raising it behind its head in anticipation of his arrival.
Laughable. As if its reflexes could come anywhere near to matching his own. Menash could not supress a smirk as he dove within arm’s reach, abruptly folding his wings to perform a lazy barrel roll. He felt the warclub swish and miss as it came within mere centimetres of grazing him. With a casual flick of his pincer hand he snipped off the end of one of its antennae. As the bull clutched at its mutilated face Menash fluttered closer with both hands kept tauntingly behind his back. Eyes glittering with hatred, the bull lunged for him again, but before Menash enjoy the rest of his sport Fiuria circled behind and tangled the giant’s legs with a bola of silk. The bull tripped and fell over, the Leaper landing nimbly on its back to deliver a bite to the base of its neck that sent it into immediate convulsions. It tried desperately to buck her off, but Fiuria was almost as large as her prey, and expertly immobilized its limbs with rope as the paralyzing venom took hold.
The other Amits nearby swarmed in with axes and bamboo spears. Annoyed by Fiuria’s interference, Menash tore a spiteful path of destruction through them, his pincer hand pulping heads and amputating limbs as he danced circles around the primitives, wings dripping with their yellow blood.
When about a score of them lay slaughtered at his feet the rest of the warrior-brood backed away in fear, the selflessness of their eusocial nature overcome by a latent need for self-preservation. Despite their being a neutered caste of slaves, Menash supposed that some vestige of the selfish, individualistic instinct to breed and survive still remained rooted in the Amit subconscious.
You and I are not so far removed from the seed ships of old, Menash mulled, gazing thoughtfully into the Amit’s dull, uncomprehending eyes. It was amazing what directed evolution and rapid terraformation could accomplish in a few thousand years; though Amits and Kindreds shared a common ancestor, the two resultant species could not have been more different.
“A little assistance right about now would be appreciated, alpha,” Fiuria said breathlessly as she held the bull down with her clawed feet.
Menash grunted, unsheathing his blade arm and punching it into the bull’s shoulder. The point of his weapon had been fitted with a modified ovipositor that now injected a slew of Amit hormones. These would compel the bull to avoid inbreeding with members of its own colony and instead seek out females from other mounds, avoiding the spread of deleterious genes.
The Amits were the original settlers of the planet, that much he understood from the legends passed down by the scriveners on their reams of parchment. For generations the Vitalus had remoulded the Amits into a vital component of Arachnea’s carbon cycle—by boring into the calcareous formations of the mounds with their acidic spit, the Amits unknowingly released millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the system every year. Eventually these emissions would bring the atmospheric composition on the surface in line with that of old Terra, allowing the Kindreds to breathe without the assistance of exomorphs. Or at least that was the dream they all shared, anyway.
Resentment curdled in Menash’s heart. Sometimes he wondered if preserving the Amit species was the Vitalus’ ultimate goal here on Arachnea. With that thought came the awful suspicion that the True Kindreds were merely tools created to further that objective.
Withdrawing his blade arm, Menash used its edge to carve some writing into the bull’s broad back, tagging it with a number and detailing where and when it had been captured and marked. Fiuria let the bull go and together they flew back up to survey the rest of the resettlement effort. All across the land other teams of kindreds were dragging down Amit bulls and doing the same thing, Leapers and Gallivants working seamlessly to enact the will of their god.
By this time tomorrow tens of millions of Amits would be resettled. There would be a brief and violent power struggle between the reproductive castes of the refugees and the resident colonies, but once that was over with the huge influx of newcomers would be absorbed into the existing communities either as slaves or conquerors.
It was remarkable what the kindreds could achieve when they could set aside their differences and take up a common cause.
Shame we can’t get along like this all the time, Menash thought. There’s nothing we can't do if we set our minds to it—the Spool was proof of that. Ah, well.
“One down,” Fiuria commented on his work.
“Only a thousand more to go,” Menash snarkily replied, “Simply fucking splendid.”
Fiuria coughed and turned her face away, yet Menash somehow got the sense that she was hiding a smile. No doubt the Leapers also felt that this was a waste of their time. To his amazement Menash found his lips own twitching as he held back a commiserating chuckle.
Their momentary indiscretion passed and the pair of them flew together in awkward silence, unsure of how to proceed.
“Incoming transmission, alpha,” Fiuria announced suddenly, “It’s urgent.”
“Who’s it from?”
“A Sword Saint on the periphery. He’s been attacked. The damage to his exomorph is catastrophic.”
"Patch me through.”
At the beginning of the crisis the Vitalus had set the Sword Saints prowling on the edge of the exclusion zone. Since then there had been nothing from them but radio silence. Which was unsurprising, given that Saints were a proud and secretive race whose individuals who wandered the world alone, each a formidable opponent that every other kindred treated with a healthy dose of respect. It was well known that the Saints enjoyed the confidence of the Vitalus.
Had someone broken the truce by attacking one of these solitary predators?
Likely it was some fool of a Leaper that had done it. Menash hated to think of the repercussions this would bring if another war broke out under his watch. He listened in on the two-way conversation that Fiuria was tapping into.
“…say again, Saint Jeoshin. Are you still in danger?” Vezda was saying.
“We are all in danger,” came the agonized gasps of the Sword Saint, “They are coming.”
“What are you talking about? Who did this to you?” Vezda demanded.
“Never mind that right now. Jeoshin, what is your location?” Menash quickly overriding her, his mind already focused on damage control. He had to nip this in the bud before the faction began trading accusations and suspicions. Menash registered the Saint’s location blip as an oily stain in his helm feed in the veldt just beyond the boundary.
“You,” he pointed a blood-soaked claw at Fiuria, “You’re coming with me.”
Looking past her, Menash saw that the kindreds around them had stopped working and were hovering in the air above the Amit exodus, staring at each one another with barely disguised apprehension.
“What are you all staring at? Nobody told you to stop!” he bellowed at them over the shared frequency, “I want all these beasts resettled before the night cycle! Get back to work!”
“What do you need me for? Where are we going?” Fiuria asked, noticeably perplexed.
“Turn around,” Menash told her.
“Why?” Fiuria’s fangs clicked together suspiciously.
“Just do it.”
“You do know that I have eyes on the back of my head, don’t you?”
“Will you relax? I’m not about to harm you. I need to carry you, that’s all. All due respect, but you Leapers fly too slowly for my liking. We need to get over there as soon as practicable. This matter concerns us all.”
“For all I know you people were behind this whole thing,” she said bluntly, “This could be a ploy to lure me out all by my lonesome. You're probably hoping to disrupt our chain of command before your main assault.”
“Oh, please,” Menash snorted derisively, “Neither of us are that important. Otherwise we wouldn’t be out here doing all the dirty work for our betters. Look, I just want to get to the bottom of this before anyone else does. I’m going now. You can come along, but I won’t wait around for you to catch up.”
With great reluctance the Leaper did as she was bid. Gently he took her under the arms and activated his biochemical afterburners on his back, the Leaper’s glider flaring out from under him as they headed south at maximum speed.
Menash felt an odd reassurance at her presence. Perhaps there was still a chance they could salvage the situation together. Perhaps this peace, however imperfect, could last just a while longer.
In that, he was very much mistaken.
#
They found what was left of the Sword Saint in the veldt, soaking the tall grass in a welter of his own gore. Through the rents in his armour they final see the shredded sinews of the symbiote bunching and flexing in useless obedience to the final nerve impulses of its host’s biointerface, the mind refusing the fate to which the failing body had consigned it.
Menash and Fiuria were the first on the scene. The pair of them landing clumsily beside the stricken Saint and stared, both struck speechless by the extent of his wounds.
The damage was like nothing Menash had ever seen before. Hundreds of tiny holes perforated the creature’s thorax and shield-tibia. Misshapen flakes of charred, twisting metal riddled the creature’s back, the largest of which stuck out of the Saint’s prothorax, a crooked scythe that had sheared right through the protective layers and into the amniotic cockpit which held the living host, curled up in a foetal position. By some grim stroke of irony the same span of metal which had dealt the killing blow was now the only thing keeping Jeoshin’s intestines from spilling out like a tangle of wet ropes.
Menash found himself looking into the bare face of Jeoshin’s innards. Through the matted locks of ratty grey hair a middle-aged man stared back at the Gallivant, his mild almond eyes already beginning to cloud over in death.
“Jeoshin…who did thish to you?” Fiuria finally asked, her voice muffled by her helm and the lack of a lower jaw, “Which kindred did they belong to?”
She had turned off her magentosynaptic organ and was speaking via audible range only. Fiuria reached into the sordid mess with her claws and gently tore out Jeoshin’s audio input graft so his reply could not be overheard on the air.
Clever girl, Menash thought. It seemed she wanted to mitigate this disaster as much as he did. That or she was feigning ignorance, protecting her fellow Leapers who had done the deed.
Jeoshin uncurled a bit to speak, moaning as the metal span lodged in his guts shifted.
“All of them,” he managed to cough through a lungful of his own blood, “All, and none. Their helix contains the primal template, yet they do not don the armour of our faith. They walk this earth naked and unashamed. Strange creatures. They use tools of bright iron in defiance of our god’s edicts. For this we thought them weak, and gorged upon them. How wrong we were. They spoke in tongues of fire and lightning, conjured storms of steel and howling death. With a word they unmade us—we could not hold them back.”
Menash bit back a surge of frustration. Saints loved nothing more than to speak in riddles and contradictions. This fool was about to die and leave them all grasping for answers.
And Menash had many, many questions. Judging from the kilometres-long trail of hemolymphic slime and flattened grass that pointed southward, the Saint had dragged himself here from out beyond the main river system, the entirety of which lay outside the zone of exclusion.
“What were you doing operating out of bounds?” Menash pressed him, “Do you realize that you’ve violated the will of the Vitalus?”
Jeoshin shook his head feebly, said: “It was the Vitalus which bade us venture into the biomes beyond. We were told to hold them in, prevent them from spilling out of the reservations that were assigned to them and the Amits. Theirs is the blessed oscillation between predator and prey, a swinging balance that has held since time immemorial. Only now that balance lies broken—the Engine’s rampage has swung the pendulum too far the other way. Now the roles are reversed. The monsters are loose. They are coming.”
Jeoshin’s eyelids fluttered and he slumped over, insensible. Menash grabbed his face with his vicelike claw and squeezed till the dying man snapped awake for one last time.
“For the love of all creation, help me to understand,” he asked, “Who are they?”
“They are the sins of our fathers made flesh, the Betrayers born again,” Jeoshin groaned, “A scourge from god that shall test the faithful.”
“Alpha, you may want to look at this,” Fiuria interrupted, tugging at Menash’s arm.
“Not right now,” he snarled.
“Alpha,” Fiuria insisted, a strange note in her voice. Menash turned to shut her up, but then caught a glimpse of the sky, and for a moment believed that he’d taken leave of his sanity.
Inside their helm feed the walls of the exclusion zone were expanding, the boundary swelling up like a bladder filling up with air as it began stretching south till it met the horizon and went further than their eyes could see.
A high-pitched buzzing in ears told them of an incoming all-frequency transmission.
“Children of Arachnea,” came the voice of their god, speaking directly to every kindred in broadcasting range, “As a reward for your obedience in these times of uncertainty, it is Our will that the area of your domains shall be expanded to include the entire subcontinent of Novyrok. Henceforth the south is open to the kindreds. After the resettlement effort is concluded We invite you to divide up the new lands among yourselves in whatever manner you see fit. Go forth and multiply, and may the strong prosper how they may.”
And just like that, the Vitalus signed off, leaving them all to grapple with the enormity of the announcement It had just made.
“What the hell was that?” Fiuria finally said.
“Nothing good,” Menash muttered. Already he could see what the fallout of this would be. He knew the same thoughts had to be revolving in Fiuria’s head: the peace was going to unravel in the blink of an eye, the kindreds turning on each other in an all-out struggle to carve out their new territories. In all likelihood they wouldn’t even wait for the resettlement to be over—all they needed now was an excuse to kick things off.
An excuse that Jeoshin would momentarily provide.
Suddenly the Saint’s exomorph heaved itself upright, standing on trembling legs. Menash and Fiuria backed away as Jeoshin brandished one of his swords.
“What are you doing, Jeoshin?”
“We failed to uphold the will of the god,” the Saint patiently explained, “Our fate is sealed. Honour demands it.”
“No, don’t—” Menash started to say, but before he could finish Jeoshin drove the point of his sword into his innards, killing himself along with any hope of upholding the truce.