Queen of Jarilo

<COME.>

A pheromone from Fig, the Bug was growing impatient, and he had learned that resisting her was pointless. He followed her down this new tunnel, winding deeper into the hive as he trailed behind her. He was learning to navigate by smell now, mapping these tunnels in his head, and he sniffed the air in an attempt to ascertain where they might be going.

There was a trail here, yellow in hue, somewhat sweet. Yes, he recognized it, he had smelled this scent before! It was the one emitted by the Repletes, the pheromone trail in this tunnel marked the way towards food.

Was Fig going to try to make him eat again? He hoped not, but he hadn't eaten for a good while, and he was certainly starting to feel the pangs of hunger now. He needed to return to his cell, he had enough food there for a good week if he rationed it. Water was another, more dangerous problem that he would have to address soon. These Bugs might drink from underground streams or wells, or perhaps the honey created by the Repletes contained all of the moisture that they needed. It was a liquid after all, so the water content must be pretty high.

If only he could communicate, but his understanding of their strange, pheromone-based language was still rudimentary. He knew now that he could emit such pheromones as well as reading them. Perhaps with time, he would be able to speak as they did. But if he didn't get some water in the next forty-eight hours, it wouldn't matter because he'd be dead.

The smell of honey grew steadily stronger as they neared their destination. There was something else too, it almost smelled like foliage. Eventually, they emerged from the winding tunnels into a large chamber. It resembled all of the others in outward appearance, a rough dome carved out of the dirt and sealed with the thick saliva that the Workers secreted, lit by clusters of luminescent moss that clung to the curved ceiling. Only the scent served to differentiate it from the other rooms in the colony.

This one was populated by Repletes, some of them lounging as they cradled their bloated bellies, others trim and flat as they gorged themselves in order to replenish their stock. The floor was piled with plant matter, everything from the fern leaves that he had seen in Jarilo's expansive forests to the branches of the coniferous trees. The Repletes looked like panda bears, sitting on the floor as they ate slowly and methodically, using the specialized blades that protruded from the wrists of their upper limbs to strip away the pine needles from their branches and to cut up their food into manageable chunks.

Where the Workers had mandibles that almost seemed vestigial, these were razor sharp and packed with powerful muscle, designed to shred and break. The Repletes might well be the only caste that ate anything solid, acting as the mouths of the colony as they passed on the nutrition that they gleaned from their food to the other castes.

Fig led him into the room, and one of the Repletes rose to its feet, this one sporting a more modest belly and a pair of breasts that were more comparable in size to those of a portly human woman. It seemed to have only recently started eating, its subtle paunch a cloudy orange in color, the liquid visible through the near transparent skin of its pouches. It approached the newcomers, a head taller than Walker, and the two aliens exchanged a series of scents. Walker concentrated hard, trying to pick up the individual words, using context to determine their meaning.

<GIVE.>

<RECEIVE.>

<CARE.>

<FIND.>

The emotions associated with the words gave him clues as to their intent. Fig was presenting the Replete with something, and the Replete was expected to use it to find the answer to some question.

Fig turned and promptly left the way she had come, Walker watching her go as a mild panic rose in his chest. Was she leaving him in the custody of this Replete? Was Walker the thing that was to be given? When would he be allowed back to his cell? Suddenly he felt like a lost child in a shopping mall, out of sight of his mother.

"Hey, wait! Where are you-"

The towering Replete reached out a hand and gripped his arm, assertive, but Walker sensed no malice in her. She released a pheromone that conveyed possession, an almost maternal care. Perhaps she too could sense the emotions that he was feeling? Was he emitting them without thought, as he had done when he had slept with the Workers? It was a form of communication at least, however unrefined.

She guided him towards the center of the room, foliage crunching beneath his boots, and then she sat on the dirt with her legs crossed. She released an expectant pheromone along with a new, more complex scent, and patted the ground beside her with one of her lower arms. It was a word, sit, that much was obvious from the context.

He sat down beside her, waiting for more instructions. Every day that he spent in the company of these insects was stranger than the last. It was best to just play along and do what they wanted. It was easier than trying to fight them on everything.

This Replete had a cherry-red, iridescent shell, and a single horn that resembled the stem of a fruit. He would refer to her henceforth as Cherry. If she was to be his new ward, then Fig must have run out of Worker-related tasks for him to accomplish. Based on what she had told Cherry, find, he felt pretty confident in the assumption that they were trying to figure out what kind of work he was suited to. These Bugs were so specialized, it might not even occur to them that humans didn't have jobs, not in the way that a Betelgeusian did. These creatures were engineered to perform specific roles, either through natural selection or genetic manipulation, while humans were versatile and could perform thousands of different tasks with varying degrees of efficiency.

He might not have limbs evolved for digging, but give him a shovel, and he'd do a fair enough job of it. He didn't have saliva that could be used as glue or sealant, but with some...glue and sealant, he'd get by. He wondered what the Repletes would have him do, surely they could tell at a glance that he couldn't process raw material into nutrient paste?

Cherry reached down and picked up a long branch from one Jarilo's titanic trees, bringing it up towards her mandibles and beginning to strip it bare. He watched with fascination as her mouthparts moved mechanically, cutting away every green pine needle, moving along the branch like a hedge trimmer. She was fast, efficient, and she rapidly stripped the foliage away in a matter of seconds. When she was done, she started on the bark. She dug into the wood with her serrated mandibles, chewing away anything that might have nutritional value, aided by the blades on her wrists.

He looked around the room, seeing that the rest of the Repletes were doing the same, some taking handfuls of loose leaves and cramming them into their maws as others gnawed at gnarled branches. Were they herbivorous? It didn't seem likely, the species of ant that they so resembled were all omnivores opportunists.

He examined Cherry's growing belly, peering into the swirling amber fluid, trying to see what was inside. It was not her stomach, he realized. He could see no organs. Her digestive system must be contained somewhere inside her body, and this translucent sack was merely where the end result of that digestive process ended up. Her belly was about the size of a beach ball right now, the armored plates that lined her torso slowly splaying apart as she consumed more matter. Her breasts were of average size right now, comparable to those of a human woman, their shape and firmness surprisingly similar...

He banished the intrusive thoughts from his mind. He had already succumbed to the advances of the Workers, he needed to keep his dick in his damned pants this time.

Cherry crushed a handful of fern leaves down into a ball in her hand and pressed it into her mouth. She lacked the jaws that were common to more evolved forms of life, but her mandibles were doing an impressive job none the less. Her mouth was like a damned wood chipper, her set of four mandibles moving mechanically as they crushed and shredded her food before moving the resulting pulp into her oral opening.

There were maybe fifty Repletes packed into the room, and they were all engaged in eating, not even pausing between mouthfuls as they hoovered up the plant matter that carpeted the ground. Where had it come from? Had the Workers collected it above ground and then brought it down into the tunnels? It seemed likely, in this society nobody expended energy on a task that wasn't completely necessary.

Cherry glanced down at him, seeing that he wasn't eating, and rummaged through the pile of leaves. She picked out a suitably sized branch with her lower arms, not even pausing as she continued to eat with her upper pair, and thrust the stick into his hands. He stared at it, looking up at her as she loosed a cloud of expectant pheromones.

"I appreciate the thought, but I'm on a strict no-branches diet. Don't suppose you have anything with a little less...fiber?"

She waited, confused, and then suddenly reached towards his face with one of her hands. He drew back reflexively, but she caught his cheeks between her fingers, leaning in to examine him more closely as she chewed on some kind of coniferous cone.

He felt her squeeze his face, surprised by the elasticity of his flesh perhaps, her large eyes scanning him as she tried to figure out his alien anatomy. He had no mandibles and so she must be wondering how he ate.

He opened his jaw, and she blinked with surprise, pushing a long finger into his mouth to explore it. This was a little more personal than he liked, but she had a firm grip on him, her chitinous fingers digging into his skin. She felt his teeth, running her hard digit across them, then pressed it against his inner cheeks and the roof of his mouth. His tongue struggled around her finger, and she prodded it curiously. She pushed deeper, glancing the back of his throat, then withdrew in alarm as he gagged. She released him, cocking her head, and Walker didn't need to smell her pheromones to know that she was puzzled.

"I'll show you," he said, selecting an inoffensive fern leaf from the floor and placing it in his mouth. He opened wide to demonstrate how he ate, crushing the leaf between his teeth and rolling it around with his tongue. She watched the muscles of his jaw as they expanded and contracted, her curiosity palpable, and then he spat out the green paste rather than swallow it.

"I don't eat leaves," he tried to explain, but she couldn't understand him.

She picked up another leaf and pushed it against his lips in an attempt to feed him, but he shook his head and pushed her away. She sensed that his reaction was negative and relented, resuming her prior activities and leaving Walker to his own devices.

He waited for what must have been a half hour, becoming impatient. Did they just expect him to sit around and watch these Repletes as they ate? What was the point of this?

They were working their way through the food alarmingly quickly. What had been a carpet of plant matter when he had arrived was now mostly bare earth. He remarked that their lower limbs were bulky and reinforced, the more bloated of the Repletes using them to aid in locomotion and to support their massive weight as they crossed the room in search of more food, becoming quadrupeds when necessary. Their distended bellies hung below them as they marched along, their liquid contents shifting and wobbling. It was mesmerizing. They looked like they were carrying around giant water balloons. They moved with such caution, and Walker found himself wondering how fragile these creatures were. If he were to prod one with a stick, would the transparent material of the sack split and disgorge its contents all over the floor? It couldn't be very prone to breaking, because the skin was remarkably flexible. To be able to expand to such an inflated size and then shrink back down again was beyond the capacity of any organic materials that Walker was aware of.

He heard something coming down one of the tunnels, turning his head to see a group of maybe twenty Workers making their way towards the chamber. Their arms were full of greenery, and they deposited their cargo on the ground, some of the Repletes lumbering over to start on the fresh pile. Walker smelled blood, tasted copper on the air, and he watched as one of the Workers deposited a dead animal on the dirt floor.

It was one of the therapsid creatures from the surface, about the size of a large dog. It looked like a cross between a mammal and a reptile. It was lying limp on the dirt with an ugly tear in its side that was no doubt the cause of its demise. This one seemed to be herbivorous, it had a beak and two tusk-like teeth that must have been evolved for digging up roots. Its body was covered in tough scales and a layer of sparse fur that might have been used for warmth, or perhaps as camouflage. It was very much dead, and the sight of it confirmed Walker's suspicions about the abrupt disappearance of the animals in the valley. The Bugs were not gentle plant eaters after all.

One of the Repletes was very interested in this new morsel and made her way over to it, her considerable belly hanging beneath her body as she used her reinforced lower arms to walk almost like a gorilla would. When she reached the dead animal, her upper pair of arms came down to examine it, probing its flesh and sizing it up. Walker watched her with a mixture of awe and disgust as she lifted it off the ground, bringing the dangling creature towards her mouth, and started to eat.

Her mandibles opened wider than he would have thought possible, her oral orifice splaying open like a snake distending its jaw, so large that she was able to encompass the creature's head entirely. He half expected her to swallow it whole, but her mandibles closed around its neck and began to move. Her chewing was so mechanical and ponderous, he could see the bulky muscles that powered them swelling and flexing between the breaks in her colorful shell, the serrated points of her mandibles cutting through its tough hide and the flesh beneath with the efficiency of butcher's knives.

It was like watching a giant centipede eating a mouse, and before long he heard the crunch of bone. She had reached its spine. The dead animal's head came off, and it was apparently small enough for her to swallow whole. He watched her throat bulge as her muscles dragged it down into her digestive system, skull and all. She didn't miss a beat, taking one of its forelegs into her mouth this time and starting the process over again, going through bone and muscle like it was butter.

Nature was red in tooth and claw, inherently violent and often cruel, but something about seeing her devour the beast turned Walker's stomach. It was so brutally efficient, they didn't even take the time to strip flesh from bone or to remove the less palatable organs. The goal was to get as much of the prey animal inside them as rapidly as possible. The mandibles did not seem to be for chewing the food, but rather for shearing off huge chunks that they could then swallow. Their digestive systems must be just as efficient, breaking down everything from bone to scales and converting it into nutrient paste. That would explain where they got all of their proteins and sugars from.

The Replete was almost done, the body of the native animal was now nothing more than a limbless, headless torso. It was too large for her to get her mouth around, and so she began to use the blades on her upper arms to carve it up into smaller chunks.

Walker looked away from the macabre scene, turning towards Cherry as she sat beside him. She looked so serene as she munched on her pine branches. He had been suspicious, many species of social insects back on Earth were carnivorous. Now he had confirmation.

What did they eat? Would they eat a human? The list might be shorter if it was comprised only of the things that they didn't consume. Their diet might consist of plants, animals, perhaps anything that the foraging Workers came across.

He began to consider the ecological impact that it must be having on the local ecosystem, then he remembered that the Thermopylae had bombarded vast swathes of forest from orbit in order to clear away space for the bases, leaving a cratered hellscape in her wake. War was not good for nature any more than it was good for civilizations. They had crossed the gulf of space to reach this veritable garden of Eden, and their first act upon arriving had been to deforest it with railgun fire.

As somewhat of a naturalist himself, Walker worried about such things. Logic dictated that once the war was over, more care would be taken to preserve the wealth of natural beauty on planets like Jarilo, but there was no end in sight.

He glanced over at Cherry, remarking that she was swelling before his eyes. Her stomach pouch had gone from roughly the size and firmness of a beach ball to a sagging roll that looked large enough for him to have fit inside. Her breasts were following suit, going from shapely and appropriate to far heavier sacks about the size of a large watermelon.

The fluid that was rushing to fill them was not a result of what she had just been eating and was still chewing on as he watched, but logically from prior meals that her body was now done processing. They seemed to behave like many large mammals on Earth, grazing in perpetuity to keep up the constant stream of nourishment, like a panda or a lowland gorilla.

She set down the branch that she had been chewing on, seemingly done eating, and rose to her feet with some difficulty. Like the others, she used her lower limbs to walk on all fours as she stooped over, thick and with reinforced joints to bear the extra weight. She began to lumber towards one of the tunnels that led out of the room, moving with a slow determination, and she released a pheromone to indicate that Walker should follow.

He walked behind her at a leisurely pace. The Workers waddled about on their little legs like they were always late for something, but these Repletes took their sweet time. He didn't blame them, her body weight must have doubled by this point. Without the extra stability that her four-legged gait provided she could be in danger of suffering a nasty fall.

He noticed that a handful of the other Repletes were walking behind them, also loaded up with fresh batches of honey. They must be transporting the food to a new location.

The heat was getting more intense as they followed the tunnels deeper into the earth, the air becoming thick and soupy, such that the sweat that coated his brow could no longer evaporate and clung to him in a sticky sheen. He didn't want to go any further down this passage, he felt like he was walking into the mouth of hell, but Cherry was insistent. She noticed his apprehension, taking him by the hand, both to reassure him and to keep him on track.

Some of the chambers that he had visited had been humid, but this was ridiculous. It was like trekking through a swamp in the middle of summer. There were strange smells on the air, unidentifiable, like nothing he had experienced before. His brain had no parallels to draw, no way to process the new scents. The atmosphere down here was exacerbating his growing thirst too, it was starting to get distracting, and that wasn't a good sign. He might have to swallow his pride soon, along with something that might be considerably harder to stomach.

The tunnel before them grew and expanded until it became a large room, carved out of the ground in a style that was typical for the Bugs, perhaps the length and breadth of an average-sized barn. It was packed full of what looked like pale, plastic sacks, stacked against the walls in piles that almost reached the ceiling.