Queen of Jarilo

Now that the two types of Bug were standing side by side, their differences became even more apparent. The Workers were a clear foot shorter than the Drones, stockier, with wider shoulders. Their upper arms were thicker and heavier set, with a lower pair that were atrophied and small, while the Drones had two sets of arms that were very similar in size. The legs of the Drones were more slender, the hips flared to give them an almost feminine silhouette, the torso longer and slimmer than that of their counterparts. Besides that, their physiology was remarkably similar, the two having clearly evolved from a common ancestor. Were they different races? Perhaps they were castes of one species, like many social insects on Earth. Ants for example had Warriors and Drones, Foragers and Queens, perhaps the Betelgeusian social structure was similar.

Walker had expected the Drones to bring order to the Workers through violence, perhaps cracking whips to keep them under control, but the opposite was happening. The Drones were calming the shorter Bugs, rapping their hard fingers on their shells almost as if they were petting them, releasing soothing bursts of pheromones in shades of cool blue that tasted sweet and pleasant. Empathy, compassion, emotions that Walker would never have ascribed to these armored killing machines.

Gradually the calming pheromones did their work, the upset and distress that lingered in the air like an evil cloud fading, the Workers resuming their tasks once more. Walker started to feel a little guilty. Perhaps he had taken things a little too far, but at least he had learned a lot about how they communicated. He was able to identify a fairly wide range of emotions now, the basis of a language, and if he could do that then perhaps he could do a lot more with practice.

He half expected the Drones to cart him away and throw him back into his cell, but once they had succeeded in calming the Workers, they simply left. He watched them round the corner at the far end of the tunnel, walking out of sight, leaving him in the company of his handler. The colorful diggers were carrying on as if nothing had happened, hollowing out more of the tunnel with their shovel-like hands and smearing resin on the walls, building piles as if they had forgotten their fear of theft. The Bug that had fled the tunnel crept back around the corner. It was cowering like a frightened animal, but once it sensed the placating pheromones, it happily returned to its duties.

Walker was left feeling rather deflated, sitting on his own as his handler watched him, wide-eyed and curious. After a minute or two it gestured to the wall again, loosing more pheromones to urge him on, as if to ask will you resume your work now?

He rose to his feet reluctantly, gesturing for the Bug to follow him, and it waddled behind him as he sank his fingers into the dirt. He pulled out a handful, showing it to the Bug.

"I'm not good at digging," he said, knowing that the creature couldn't understand him but making an attempt to communicate none the less. "My hands are too small, see?"

He took his handler's large, wide hand in his, comparing their size. It had two thick fingers and a thumb that were covered in hard exoskeleton save for the joints, pointed at the tip like dull claws. It was the first time that he had touched a Bug for any length of time, at least a live one. He had dragged many a dead Drone to mass graves on battlefields across known space. Its shell was hard, yet oddly flexible. There was some subtle give to it that wouldn't have been present on a crab or a beetle. If it was an intelligent creature, then surely it would understand what he was trying to convey? Its odd mouthparts waved, like four jointed fingers, its tongue snaking out to lick his arm. It was warm and slimy, leaving a trail of thick saliva, Walker pulling away in disgust and wiping the slime on his fatigues.

"What the hell was that? No, look at the sizes of our hands, you dumb Bug."

He could practically see the gears turning in its insectoid head, its expressive eyes examining his hand as it reached out to take it, prodding at his soft flesh with its firm digits. It was studying him, much as he had studied them, running its chitinous fingers over his palm. Everything about the Betelgeusians seemed sharp and hard. The Drones fought with the callous indifference of an unthinking insect, but now he was seeing a tender side to them that he could never have anticipated. This Bug was being gentle, careful, it was aware of him as another living being. That meant that they were a lot smarter than he had given them credit for, more social.

Walker wasn't sure if it had grasped the point that he was trying to get across, or if it had merely accepted that he was bad at digging, but it released a pheromone that conveyed a sort of calm resignation and indicated for him to follow. He felt his feet moving before he was even aware of having decided to comply. Some of the more basic pheromones carried strong impulses, he would have to be aware of their suggestive power in the future.

CHAPTER 8: PERSEVERANCE

Kaz stumbled through the jungle, dark blood seeping from the knife wounds that peppered her body, soaking into her tattered clothes. The Bugs were expert knife fighters, they knew exactly where to strike in order to avoid the ceramic plates and pierce the Kevlar, some of the blows had gone pretty deep. She clutched her side where one of the ceramic blades had pushed between two ribs and punctured a lung, her straw-colored fur stained crimson. She had stuck an adhesive patch over it, leaving one of the four sides unglued so that air could escape. But the blood was sticking it to her skin, and she had to keep pulling it open with her claw.

Most of the injuries weren't too bad, she was Borealan after all, it took a lot to kill her kind. Most were merely more scars for the collection, but this chest wound was more serious, it might do her in if she didn't make it back to Charlie in time. She could move a lot faster without Walker, clumsy little human that he was, but she was starting to get short of breath now. That wasn't a good sign.

The Bugs had taken Walker, they had attempted to take her too. Why? What could Bugs want with live captives? They had taken Walker by surprise, hit him with some kind of dart that had knocked him out before she could react, and they had tried to do the same to her. Kaz didn't go down without a fight, however. Her Borealan metabolism had fought off the toxin, and she had shown those roaches why the humans called her people Mad Cats.

Once they had realized that she wasn't going down, they had tried to kill her instead. Emphasis on tried. She had butchered each and every one of them, they weren't the only ones who knew how to use a knife. Her prized Bowie had finally broken off at the hilt when she had embedded it in the chest cavity of one of the Drones, and so she had resorted to using her claws and teeth. They were near half her height and a fraction of her weight, her blows had shattered carapace, and her curved claws had rent their limbs from their bodies.

She had been too late to save Walker, however. They had carried him away, to where and for what reason she could not fathom. She had wanted to go after them, but she was too hurt, her only chance was to get back to the FOB and bring reinforcements. Whatever jamming technology the Bugs had used seemed to blanket the whole valley, her calls for help would not go through.

Kaz was beginning to get dizzy, tripping on roots, fatigue weakening her muscles. There was a powerful urge to lie down, to sleep. But she knew that if her eyes closed, then they would never open again.

The sun stung her eyes as she emerged from the treeline, feeling mud beneath her padded feet, seeing the grey walls of base Charlie in the distance. She was close now, she could hear muffled shouts, the sound of someone calling for a medic. She fell to her knees, but someone was there to catch her, the smell of a human filling her nose.

"I got you," he grunted, a second Marine rushing in to help prop her up. "What happened?"

"Ambush," she wheezed, "they took Walker."

"They took someone? What do you mean?"

"Let's get her patched up first," the other human said. "She's lost a lot of blood, and her lung has collapsed. We need to get her to the field hospital pronto, she can give a full report when we've got her stable. Get one of the Krell down here, I can't lift her."

"They took him," she coughed, tasting copper on her tongue.

"Don't try to speak, save your strength. You're one tough son of a bitch to make it back here in this state, we're gonna get you cleaned up."

She felt relief for herself, but she still ached for Walker. He was her packmate, her responsibility, her friend. The instinct to keep her pack safe ran deep, coursing through her veins, but her body was failing her.

She felt strong arms lift her off the ground, muscle that dwarfed even that of a Borealan bulging beneath rough scales. A Krell was carrying her. She was going to be okay, they'd be able to fix her, but every minute that she spent in a hospital bed was a minute that Walker might not have.

***

Walker's handler led him down more snaking tunnels, the hive was massive, it was like walking through the inside of a giant ant farm. There were intersections carved into the planet's soil that branched off in five, six or even seven directions, slanting up and down at angles that made them difficult for a human to tackle. The Bugs dropped down onto six limbs to crawl up the almost vertical passages, Walker having to dig his fingers and the toes of his boots into the dirt for purchase.

He wondered where the Bug might be taking him next. They weren't going back to his cell, he was beginning to recognize the different pheromone trails, and these tunnels didn't smell the same. Scent was the only way to navigate, everything looked the same, endless tubes of dirt lit by that odd moss that clung to the ceiling and glowed with a dull light.

Walker smelled more Bugs, and something else too, like hot plastic. They emerged into a large chamber, a huge dome the size of a factory floor that had been hollowed out from bedrock, that strange luminescent moss clustering at the apex of the rounded ceiling to create a far brighter source of light. He could see the sedimentary layers in the walls, lines of colorful rock that gradually gave way to soil as it neared the roof. They must be deep indeed, and yet the temperature remained constant. They must be able to regulate it.

He looked out over the room, shocked by the sight. There must have been a few hundred Workers milling about the expansive chamber. There were tables and work surfaces made from resin, the same kind that the bars of his cell door had been made of, the Bugs clustering around them. They were making things, assembling weapons from what looked like printed parts, tempering metal in comparatively primitive forges that appeared to be made of clay and glowed orange with heat.

This was their production facility, he realized. Far from bringing all of their gear with them on their hive ships, they were making everything on-site, the insects hauling around raw materials that they must have gathered on the planet as their companions toiled.

The contrasts were remarkable. There were forges heated by wood and coal that looked like something from the iron age, yet not ten feet away there were Bugs building magnetic coils from copper wires to use on their plasma rifles.

His guide led him forward, Walker turning his head to stare at the sights, passing by a table where several Worker Bugs were building shield projectors. Their stocky upper arms hung by their sides as they used their smaller, more dexterous lower pair to fiddle with the intricate circuitry, licking their fingers with their long tongues and using their saliva as a kind of glue. Walker didn't know enough about electronics and technology to guess how the devices functioned, but he knew that a human engineer would have needed a magnifying visor and a soldering iron to perform the same tasks.

Others were fitting armor on a Drone who was sitting in a humorously human styled chair made from resin, the Workers bending sheets of what looked like colored plastic to fit its body. They seemed to have matched the material to its iridescent shell, the armor catching the light to shine in hues of gold and orange in exactly the same way that the Drone's exoskeleton did. The soldier turned its head to watch Walker pass as a Worker tested the fit of a shoulder pad.

So that was how they made their armor. It had never really been clear if the supplemental plating had been the result of some natural phenomena, or whether it was artificial in nature.

Walker bristled as he saw a Warrior lumber into the dome through one of the many entrances, stopping to stare at it from across the room, his handler seeming to sense his fear as it turned to look back at him. Its eyes begged a question, but it followed his gaze, seeing that he was fixated on the massive beast. There wasn't much that still frightened Walker, he had fought on a dozen planets and killing Bugs had become as routine as brushing his teeth, yet the sight of a Warrior filled him with a kind of primal dread. Images flashed in his mind of what the one that had breached the door at Charlie had done to that Borealan, pinning him to the ground and carving him up like hamburger meat.

They were berserkers, like feral animals unleashed upon the enemy, fighting with the fury and relentlessness of an enraged bull. He had always imaged that they had to be kept in cages, perhaps restrained until their shackles were removed and they were pointed towards their foe. This one walked peacefully amongst the smaller Bugs, however. Its enormous claws hung idle, half a dozen Workers trailing behind it.

There were recesses along the far wall, Warrior-shaped, he realized. It backed up into one of them, guided by the Workers. Once it was resting snugly in the hole, the little aliens began to affix flexible cables to its lobster-like body. They didn't look strong enough to restrain it, and the Warrior just kind of hung there, waiting for the Workers to complete their task.

Walker's eyes widened as he watched the Warrior split down the middle, its face breaking open into two halves, as if someone was running an invisible blade from the top of its head to its groin. Its chest broke in two like the shell of a walnut, its lower body following suit, strands of thick fluid breaking to fall to the dirt floor as it gaped. Something was birthed from the carcass, clear liquid spilling forth as it dropped out of the Warrior, tall and lithe.

It was somewhere between a human and a Borealan in height, perhaps seven feet if you didn't include the ornate horn, with a slim body and long limbs. It was a Bug, some new variety that Walker had never seen before. It looked like somebody had stretched out a Drone as if it had been made of silly putty. It rose to its feet, scraping away some of the goo that clung to it with its four hands, its fingers long and spindly like the legs of a spider. Its torso was abnormally elongated in proportion to the rest of its body, and the Workers reached up to pull what looked like umbilical cords from its long spine that connected it to the Warrior's husk. The fearsome beast was slumped against the cables, lifeless, and Walker concluded that this new form of Betelgeusian was its pilot.

Remarkable, the Warriors were not a caste in and of themselves, then. They seemed to be some kind of organic vehicle. A battle suit made of flesh, a mindless symbiote perhaps? The husk now seemed listless, there was no sign of movement from it, and yet they bled when they were shot. Perhaps it had no brain of its own, inanimate until the lanky Pilot climbed into it.

Everything was wet and slimy, organic, and it turned Walker's stomach to glimpse the cavity inside the Warrior's body. The cables that must somehow link it to the operator dangled like severed entrails, slime dripping from the split in its carapace. As he watched, the Pilot turned to examine its vehicle.

Betelgeusians were insects, they had no endoskeletons, their muscles were anchored to the inside of their hard shells to give them surprising strength and leverage. This specimen, however, had a line of what looked like brain tissue running down its back about where a spine would have been on a human. It protruded from beneath the protective carapace, exposed to the air, with a series of small holes that must accommodate those limp tendrils. Did the Pilot hook its own nervous system directly into the Warrior?

His handler urged him on until they stopped beside one of the resin tables, its surface scattered with tiny electronic components. It placed him on the production line between two colorful Workers who were engaged in assembling whatever the devices were.

They looked like battery packs, but Walker was no engineer, and so he could not be sure. They were small and blocky, contained within a resin or plastic casing, their innards a mess of wires and circuits. His guide released that same pheromone that he had become so accustomed to, expectation. So if he sucked at digging, maybe he was better at factory work, was that their logic? He turned to his handler, ready to complain, but it took his wrists in its larger forelimbs and placed its lower pair on top of his hands in order to compare their size. His hands were slightly larger than the alien's, but they were more comparable in size and shape than its bigger, shovel-like set of digging implements.

Little by little Walker was beginning to see things from their point of view, to understand their strange thought processes. He had compared their hands in the tunnel in an attempt to demonstrate that he was ill-suited to digging, but the Bug might have interpreted that gesture differently. Just as his brain was processing his new sense through a familiar filter, drawing parallels the only way that it knew how, so too did this Betelgeusian draw from its own experiences in an attempt to understand him. If he did not have large hands, then he had small hands, and what were small hands for? Factory work, apparently.

Walker rolled his eyes and turned to the table, sighing in exasperation as he sifted through the scattered parts. Excavation was one thing, nobody needed training or instruction in order to dig a ditch, but how did the aliens expect him to assemble complex electronics without so much as an instruction manual? Even building block sets that were designed for children came with a guide.

His handler made no attempt to instruct him, as if it expected the task to be self-explanatory, and so he looked to his immediate neighbors for inspiration. They were carefully placing the components into their plastic housing, their fingers as deft and as precise as a pair of tweezers, their fleshy tongues shooting forth to dampen their digits with a sticky resin that they used as an adhesive.

There seemed to be no method to their madness, they worked like lightning, so quickly that Walker could scarcely make sense of what they were doing. Their lower arms darted back and forth, picking out new components and slotting them into place with no pause for thought, as if the blueprint that they were following was programmed into them like a mechanical arm assembling cars.

It didn't look as if anyone was going to help him, and so he took a handful of the loose wires and carelessly crammed them into one of the cases. His handler leaned in to examine his handiwork, chittering as it loosed a frustrated scent. He was making its life very difficult.

He needed a name for the damned thing, he couldn't keep referring to it as his handler, perhaps something to do with its blue-green shell or its decorative horn. Though each of the Bugs had a unique smell that would serve to identify them as individuals, Walker had not yet seen two of them with the same configuration of horns and hues, which made the insects visually distinct in a way that was surprisingly convenient for a human who was still grappling with his sixth sense.