Kevin Anderson - The Ashes of Worlds

“Our work here is done, then.” Lanyan raked a self-satisfied gaze across the glowering Roamers in the operations center. “We’ll be back when the time is right. I’m sure Chairman Wenceslas will want to manage this in his own particular way.”

The innocent-eyed lieutenant burst into the ops center, looking flushed. “There you are, General! We’ve picked up the tracer signal on one of the cargo escorts we tagged. We can follow it to another Roamer depot or industrial facility, if you like.”

“I would like that very much. Tell theGoliath to prepare for immediate departure.” Snapping orders for his crew to finish up, he left Fitzpatrick and Zhett standing together in the operations center.

Before long the EDF raiders departed in a ponderous group, like bumblebees overloaded with pollen.

15

Margaret Colicos

Trapped on Llaro and surrounded by Klikiss, Margaret wondered if all those escaped colonists had been only a dream. Orli Covitz, Hud Steinman, Tasia Tamblyn, Robb Brindle. She no longer even had her faithful compy DD. Yes, they had gotten away. Margaret was completely alone. except for the monsters.

But shehad helped those people escape. If she were going to become delusional, she could have done so long ago. After years of living at the bare edge of survival, knowing that the incomprehensible hive mind might kill her on a whim, Margaret had used the Klikiss behavior against them. She had made it possible for the doomed colonists to slip away before the insects could slaughter them. Nearly a hundred people had fled from Llaro. Including dear DD.

But the breedex refused to let her leave. While the others escaped, a group of Klikiss warriors had singled her out and captured her again. The hive mind wantedher, but she had no idea why. As an ambassador? A sounding board? A pet human being?

She shouted at the milling insects. “Why did you capture me if you don’t want me to do anything?”

But the new breedex chose not to answer through them. She threw a rock at a mottled brown digger, but the stone merely bounced off the chitin armor. The insects went about their bloodthirsty business, continuing the relentless assaults on other subhives, massacring countless rival Klikiss.

And ignoring her.

Her head pounded with the sound of their chittering. The smell of caustic powder, decay, and bitter insect pheromones caught in Margaret’s throat and nose. The tans and browns of the desolate landscape seemed harsher now, the edges sharper, even under pastel skies. Her eyes ached, as did her heart. She was stranded here.

Again, she cursed the Klikiss for holding her prisoner. It had felt so good to be among humans again. She missed DD. She missed Orli. She missed her son, Anton, whom she hadn’t seen in years. She still didn’t know what had happened to Davlin Lotze, though she assumed he was dead.

And, because the Klikiss had ceased communicating with her, she could get no answers to her questions. Though she walked among the hulking insects, pushing her way into their ranks, the creatures treated her as if she were no more than a tree or a rock to avoid. “Tell me why you want me here.”

In their constant chittering and humming, she heard no discernible reply.

Margaret made her way to the boundary of what had been a thriving human colony, which was now only ruins. The cultivated land had been completely subsumed by Klikiss structures. Insect warriors moved about, intent on urgent, incomprehensible missions. Builders slathered polymer resin cement on frameworks, erecting new towers to house even more Klikiss, expanding the subhive in preparation for further conquests.

The insects never ceased moving, never stopped pushing forward. Since their return from the Great Swarming, the warring subhives wanted toannihilate everything — all other breedexes, the hated black robots, and any human colonies that happened to get in the way. The Klikiss wouldn’t stop until it was all finished, until only one breedex remained.

Shortly after the few Llaro colonists had escaped, after the breedex had fissioned again and expanded its armies, the new-generation hive mind had thrown its warlike creatures into a bloody, almost maniacal wave of offensives, ripping apart one rival after another.

Always before, the different breedexes had attacked each other, striving for dominance and assimilating their conquered rivals into larger and larger forces. It was the way of their species. But the new Llaro breedex exhibited a berserker’s frenzy of violence, turning engineer sub-breeds loose to develop new weapons thatannihilated rather than incorporated most of the defeated insect hordes. Only a few representative members of the crushed subhives were taken into the hall of the breedex to be used in the next fissioning; with their own breedex dead, the rest were sent out as expendable shock troops in an assault wave against the next subhive. Each time the Llaro subhive obliterated another breedex, it moved one step closer to being the sole hive mind of the species.

Margaret looked up, sensing a change in the air. Unified by some silent call, the Klikiss gathered around the trapezoidal wall in the middle of their city. The stone face shimmered, and figures took shape within, an entire army of the Llaro breedex’s warriors marching back through the doorway. Many of them were battered, their carapaces cracked and oozing globs of clotting ichor after a terrific battle, but the Klikiss warriors carried the spiny heads of the rival subhive’s domates. They had torn the other hive apart.

Another victory. The annihilation of another breedex.

Margaret felt sickened at the thought that the monstrous Llaro hive mind might actually win the struggle for species domination and control all of the Klikiss.

16

Captain Branson Roberts

On the day he got his rebuilt ship back from the Osquivel shipyards, BeBob hoped for a certain amount of fanfare. At the very least, he would have liked a small crowd to admire the newBlind Faith, wish him well, and offer a toast for the old ship, which the EDF had blown up.

Instead, no one came for the christening. In this damned unending war, a new crisis seemed to appear every single day. Tasia Tamblyn and her group had come back from Llaro, clamoring about the Klikiss invasion, and then the green priest had raised the alarm about the faeros attacking Theroc. Just that morning, Jess Tamblyn and Cesca Peroni had arrived at the shipyards in their wental ship, asking for help against the fiery elementals, and thenthey had rushed off.

Always an emergency. BeBob felt left out.

Like a proud parent he walked around the vessel. The paint was perfect and unscuffed, with no corrosions from cosmic radiation, no scratches or pits from micrometeoroids. And the Roamers had finished building the ship ahead of schedule!

During the reassembly he had hovered near the construction site every day. He had watched the frame put into place, the hull panels riveted on, extra armor layered over standard reinforcement alloys. The attitude-control thrusters, the in-system engines, and the stardrive had been tested on racks, then installed and tested again in situ. The modified computer systems and the full range of defensive weapons checked out. The oldFaith had never sported projectile launchers or jazers, but in times like these, no ship could afford to be without them.

The newBlind Faith was seven meters longer than the original, with an expanded cargo bay and more compact engines, which yielded a twenty percent increase in carrying capacity; according to the specs, she was faster, too. BeBob couldn’t wait to see what the ship could do.

He particularly would have liked Rlinda Kett to fly with him on the maiden voyage, but he wasn’t going to wait around for her to come back from Earth. Long ago, she had helped him inspect the originalBlind Faith, back when he had joined her shipping company. And then there had been their ill-advised marriage. but all that was so much gas down a black hole. Now the EDF had a death warrant out for him and probably one for Rlinda, too.