John Adams - Federations

Quillin, by contrast, looked awfully close now—and that blade awfully sharp.

“So the wasps woke,” I said, damned if she wasn’t going to hear the whole story. “And that got some people scared. So much, some of them got to attacking the wasps. Some of their shots went wide, because within a day the whole system was one big shooting match. Not just humans against wasps—but humans against humans.” Less than fifty meters now, across much smoother ground than we’d so far traversed. “Things just escalated. Ten days after Solar War Three began, only a few ships and habitats were still transmitting. They didn’t last long.”

“Crap,” Quillin said—but she sounded less cocksure than she had a few moments before. “There was a war back then, but it never escalated into a full-blown Solar War.”

“No. It went the whole hog. From then on every signal we ever got from GE was concocted by wasps. They dared not break the news to us—at least not immediately. We’ve only been allowed to find out because we’re never going home. Guilt, Wendigo called it. They couldn’t let it happen again.”

“What about our wasps?”

“Isn’t it obvious? A while later the wasps here made the same jump to sentience—presumably because they’d been shown the right moves by the others. Difference was, ours kept it quiet. Can’t exactly blame them, can you?”

There was nothing from Quillin for a while, both of us concentrating on the last patch of ice before Wendigo’s ship.

“I suppose you have an explanation for this, too,” she said eventually, swiping her tail against the ground. “C’mon, blow my mind.”

So I told her what I knew. “They’re bringing life to the Swirl. Sooner than you think, too. Once this charade of a war is done, the wasps breed in earnest. Trillions out there now, but in a few decades it’ll be billions of trillions. They’ll outweigh a good-sized planet. In a way the Swirl will have become sentient. It’ll be directing its own evolution.”

I spared Quillin the details—how the wasps would arrest the existing processes of planetary formation so that they could begin anew, only this time according to a plan. Left to its own devices, the Swirl would contract down to a solar system comprised solely of small, rocky planets—but such a system could never support life over billions of years. Instead, the wasps would exploit the system’s innate chaos to tip it toward a state where it would give rise to at least two much larger worlds—planets as massive as Jupiter or Saturn, capable of shepherding leftover rubble into tidy, world-avoiding orbits. Mass extinctions had no place in the Splinterqueens’ vision of future life.

But I guessed Quillin probably didn’t care.

“Why are you hurrying, Spirey?” she asked between harsh grunts as she propelled herself forward. “The ship isn’t going anywhere.”

The edge of the open airlock was a meter above the ice. My fingers probed over the rim, followed by the crest of my battered helmet. Just lifting myself into the lock’s lit interior seemed to require all the energy I’d already expended in the crawl. Somehow I managed to get half my body length into the lock.

Which is when Quillin reached me.

There wasn’t much pain when she dug the bayonet into my ankle, just a form of cold I hadn’t imagined before, even lying on the ice. Quillin jerked the embedded blade to and fro, and the knot of cold seemed to reach out little feelers into my foot and lower leg. I sensed she wanted to retract the blade for another stab, but my suit armor was gripping it tight.

The bayonet taking her weight, Quillin pulled herself up to the rim of the lock. I tried kicking her away, but the skewered leg no longer felt a part of me.

“You’re dead,” she whispered.

“News to me.”

Her eyes rolled wide, then locked on me with renewed venom. She gave the bayonet a violent twist. “So tell me one thing. That story—bullshit, or what?”

“I’ll tell you,” I said. “But first consider this.” Before she could react I reached out and palmed a glowing panel set in the lock wall. The panel whisked aside, revealing a mushroom-shaped red button. “You know that story they told about Wendigo, how she lost her arms?”

“You weren’t meant to swallow that hero guff, Spirey.”

“No? Well, get a load of this, Quillin. My hand’s on the emergency pressurization control. When I hit it, the outer door’s going to slide down quicker than you can blink.”

She looked at my hand, then down at her wrist, still attached to my ankle via the jammed bayonet. Slowly the situation sank in. “Close the door, Spirey, and you’ll be a leg short.”

“And you an arm, Quillin.”

“Stalemate, then.”

“Not quite. See, which of us is more likely to survive? Me inside, with all the medical systems aboard this ship, or you all on your lonesome outside? Frankly, I don’t think it’s any contest.”

Her eyes opened wider. Quillin gave a shriek of anger and entered one final, furious wrestling match with the bayonet.

I managed to laugh. “As for your question, it’s true, every word of it.” Then, with all the calm I could muster, I thumbed the control. “Pisser, isn’t it.”

I made it, of course.

Several minutes after the closing of the door, demons had lathered a protective cocoon around the stump and stomach wound. They allowed me no pain—only a fuzzy sense of detachment. Enough of my mind remained sharp to think about my escape—problematic given that the ship still wasn’t fixed.

Eventually I remembered the evac pods.

They were made to kick away from the ship fast, if some quackdrive system went on the fritz. They had thrusters for that—nothing fancy, but here they’d serve another purpose. They’d boost me from the splinter, punch me out of its grav well.

So I did it.

Snuggled into a pod and blew out of the wreck, feeling the gee-load even within the thick. It didn’t last long. On the evac pod’s cam I watched the splinter drop away until it was pebble-sized. The main body of the kinetic attack was hitting it by then, impacts every ten or so seconds. After a minute of that the splinter just came apart. Afterward, there was only a sooty veil where it had been, and then only the Swirl.

I hoped the Queen had made it. I guess it was within her power to transmit what counted of herself out to sisters in the halo. If so, there was a chance for Yarrow as well. I’d find out eventually. Then I used the pod’s remaining fuel to inject me into a slow, elliptical orbit, one that would graze the halo in a mere fifty or sixty years.

That didn’t bother me. I wanted to close my eyes and let the thick nurse me whole again—and sleep an awfully long time.

Alan Dean Foster is the bestselling author of several dozen novels, and is perhaps most famous for his Commonwealth series, which began in 1975 with the novel Midworld . The most recent in that series, Quofum , was published in 2008, and a new Commonwealth book featuring the popular characters Pip and Flinx— Flinx Transcendent —should be out around the same time as this anthology. Also forthcoming is The Human Blend , the first book of a new SF trilogy for Del Rey. Foster’s short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , Analog , and Jim Baen’s Universe . A new collection, Exceptions to Reality , came out in 2008.

Like the forthcoming Flinx Transcendent , this story takes place in Foster’s Commonwealth milieu. Foster said it was inspired by the idea that there are various ways to conquer. “Sometimes simply persuading an opponent that your way is better can achieve the desired end,” he said. “I always thought killing an opponent was a poor way of convincing him of the rightness of your argument.”