SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Clones?” Tahi asked. “I saw one once, one of the free-range ones before the Mihari took over their maturation-farms.”

“They didn’t start that way,” she replied. “And sometimes, once a generation or so, the process doesn’t work.”

The chimes signifying the start of lunch rang, melodic and calming. Rheia rose and the students waited a moment before following. For most, the discussion had just been a fantastical one, a thought experiment. Sandis headed to the library and went looking for answers in the archives.

Sandis sat at one of the booths by the reading windows, with a view of the gardens and enough of a breeze to rival even the carefully temperature-controlled stacks. He had books and a terminal linked to the medical, historical and general archives, as well as records dating back to An’she and Elys, one of the first to swim deep into the star-filled sea.

Even amongst the Union, whose territory is the smallest but most stable of the carved up Milky Way galaxy, knowledge regarding the Chiitai Conglomeration was scarce.

The Chiitai kept to their own worlds for a reason; initially it was because of their culture and the order of their hives. At one time they had apparently wandered the universe but at some point decided to keep to their own worlds. However, it was known that, before the Union’s formation, they became embroiled in a territorial dispute recorded as ‘the War of Bloodied Fields’. Though that conflict was now, by all accounts, concluded, the Chiitai retained their isolationist stance—to rebuild their worlds, too focused on that to pay attention to anything other than their own affairs.

The records didn’t go into specifics about the cause or the ending of the war. Sandis checked scholars’ accounts, rumours jotted down by passing ships, annotated musical maps of the explored universe—but for naught.

Sandis laid out a sketch done based on An’she and Elys’ recollections, of a glorious city of spun sugar and domes of glass hives which caught and channeled the sunlight, of rooftop gardens and arching foundation vines. The city had survived for a single reason, the same one which gave the war its name: because it was fought in the endless fields of the Chiitai homeworld, in trenches and pits so that the highest caste of queens needn’t see the violence or hear the cries of the dying, the fallen gutted in their names.

Were they still out there? Why did Rheia mention them in class? What did their feud have to do with zombies anyway?

The rains battered the triage tent where Muzzac, warrior of the Gefaia Hive, lay resting after his brush with death on the front lines. His mandible had been crushed and it still pained him, even bound and splinted up. The scurrying nurses and medics had more seriously wounded to worry about, and so he bore his pain stoically.

The injury meant his days on the battlefield were over and he was almost glad. While lying injured on the field, surrounded by the dead and dying, he had had an epiphany: If this war did not end, then the Conglomeration and every Chiitai within would be consumed. Their species would fight until no one was left. Such an ignominious end for such an old and mighty civilisation.

The females, the Jiha Queens would live on. War-making was for the warrior classes, the drones. He imagined hives of spun sugar and sweetglass on other worlds after all the lower rungs had been trampled in the mud. For a moment he almost saw a new empire, not a conglomeration but something different, a place where the Queens ruled with impunity, controlling a select number of worlds and billions, be they Chiitai, mammal or others entirely.

Their burden would be the fallout from this endless, bitter war.

“Ah, you live!” Velok, second-in-command, slipped under the tent flap, exo-armour scraping together as he ducked in, the scent of ash, blood and smoke washing in behind him as he searched for his commander and old friend.

“Velok! Come, and let us talk strategy.” Muzzac beckoned him over, his chittering notes and pheromones garbled slightly by the weather and by the lingering scents of pain and death.

“We must finish this.” Muzzac said, his remaining mandibles translating a mournful song, not only his thoughts but the depth behind them. “Or this entire quadrant of space, our territory and those of the others will all suffer for it.”

“You mean the Demons’ Empire and the mammals, that biped Queen’s coalition of worlds?”

“I do.” He propped himself up, comfort still eluding him. “This war, it has no end, not unless we finish it. We need to take control.”

“And how do you suggest we do that?” Velok asked, entertaining his commander in what he was sure must be the trauma of his injury.

“We alter a batch of drones and then we seize power.”

The movements, the noise Velok made betrayed his shock. “A coup d’etat against the Jiha Queens? Against the Conglomeration itself?”

“A necessary evil. If we take their minds, control them, we control the hives and the Conglomeration.”

“For what?”

“To end this war.”

“And afterwards?”

“We bury this and move on. Drones have short lifespans; we send them in, we take control, they die off and we begin writing a new chapter in our history. Once we put this stupid war behind us, we can move and grow.” Muzzac was suddenly reflective. “Do you even remember how it started, old friend? Who exactly stepped over the lines and into another’s land?”

“Only the stories, and those feel more like myths than fact. Did nearly dying do this to you?”

“It clarified things somewhat, yes. We only get one life, after all.”

“Almost dying will do that,” he agreed. “The Queens…if they knew, they would unite against us.”

“We do this amongst ourselves, the warrior caste. The Jiha are figureheads. They control the hives but the power has always lain with us, the defenders of the hives. The drones are the foot soldiers and we are the strategists, the brute force.”

It was another year, five seasons and much healing, before Muzzac could put his plan into action, but war can be a slow thing, and warriors the most patient souls ever born.

The time away from the front line allowed Muzzac to prepare: drones came with the winter moons, destined to die before the same moons rose again the following year. They would steal a generation and win the war.

Altering the drones was simple. A change in the genome, modifying the chemistry of the jelly used to mature them. Rather than a Jiha Queen’s genome, Muzzac instead replaced it with a substitute based on his own. Drones would be born loyal to him, not to the Hive Queen.

And so the end of the War of the Bloodied Fields began.

The Jiha’s attention was normally focused on birthing and grooming their heirs, that one embryonic Chiitai in a billion who was literally born to lead. Rather than a golden daughter with wings the colour of the sky and the shifting green seas, a Jiha Queen was born to Muzzac’s own Gefaia hive with a body black as the warrior’s own. She was his daughter and the Jiha realised too late that control had fallen from their grasp.

The civil war was easier in some ways, less bloody and quicker. It was over in days rather than generations, with a minimum of causalities. The drones died quickly but the Black Queen remained and a new hive, the Hedrim, was created to ensure that the War of Bloodied Fields would never be repeated. The Chiitai would learn to police themselves with a hive that was part mediator, part peacekeeper, with a queen who did not sit with the Jiha but instead watched from the sidelines.