SPACE OPERA1, by Michael R. Collings

“Ah, when once we breach the boundaries of known space, what Works, what Wonders, we will achieve!”

—Torq, Farewell Address to the Koleic

Most numbers would have at least muttered a vituperation, if not an outright blasphemy when the klaxons sounded.

Most, perhaps. But not Torq.

Without a pause, his eyen split, half to the left, half to the right, while his first hands were already reaching for the buttons that would simultaneously silence the klaxon; perform an infinitesimal shift in the ship’s course that would make collision with the asteroid ahead impossible; and, the danger avoided, restore the ship to course and trim.

His second hands never once left the complex screencaps of their destination—the point at which the flash drive would take over and, for the moment, at least, the entire vessel and all of its contents would cease to exist within known realities.

His first hands slapped at the buttons. The klaxon ceased, and sudden, almost unbroken silence reigned once more on the command deck.

Almost unbroken silence.

Torq swiveled one eyes. Several stations to his left, one of the crew-hammocks was empty. The screen above it buzzed slightly, as if indicating its irritation at the disruption of its function.

Beneath the hammock, one of the crew—a seven, Torq noted wryly—had curled almost completely, now resembling more a glistening brown ball than anything else. A thin mewling rose from within the ball, and a dribble of something pungent and black already stained the otherwise pristine floor.

It would be a seven. Figures.

The asteroid emergency safely averted, Torq swiveled to face the crew.

He did not speak. He did not have to. Everyone present knew what had just happened—that a feckless seven had failed in the number-one priority for command deck: Absolute Trust in the Name at the helm… The Chaptain is always right. The first lesson instilled in every number that emerged from the pupal crèches at the academy.

Most had probably heard tales of failure. Few had ever seen it happen, however, given the evidence Torq saw reflected in their eyen. Part of each focused on the inert seven, communicating enough of its anguish that every crew member felt an insistent yank on its own nervous system, the ages-old clash-or-curl instinct each knew and dreaded.

The other part focused on Torq. The lenses glittered in the diffuse light, a thousand sparks of fear and determination.

He waited.

Gradually, the split eyen joined, and all of the compounds were trained on him.

As they should be!

Without a word, he withdrew a thin metal rod from his carapace pouch.

A sudden susurration, almost but not quite inaudible, swept the deck, then ceased as Torq raised one of his second hands, pointed directly at the miserable ball of chitin just visible beneath the hammock, did something with his tarsi than none could quite distinguish, and lowered the tube.

There was another moment of silence before the unconscious seven tightened even further, so much that the faint crackle of bruised and broken chitin filled the deck as the thing—no longer one of them but merely so much tissue and ichor—compressed beyond the limits of possibility and finally, soundlessly, fractured into a mass of brown fluid.

“Clean that up.” Not waiting to see that the order would be carried out, Torq turned back to his consoles and continued to manipulate data on the dozen or so screens.

“We won’t flash for some sleeps yet,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “Decant another seven.”

His voice had not died out before three sixes were attending to the unfortunate seven, and an eight jumped to send a comm to the Hatchery.

* * * *

Coming out of the flash was the same as it had been described by the techs, the same as it had been the previous three times: first, absolute nothingness; then an instant—too short to be counted by any time measurements—in which there was the faintest awareness of constituent molecules re-joining into muscle and tissue; and finally the almost overwhelming effect of life-experiences reconstituting themselves as memory.

Torq stretched. Nothing felt quite as good as a post-flash stretch, he decided, wondering how many times he would be blessed by the God to relive such moments.

The God.

She would be re-constituting as well, perhaps already resuming her never-ending calling of providing new Koleic for new worlds. Torq felt as if he could commune with her mentally, imagining her stretching her vast length—fully one-quarter the length of the ship itself—then consuming the tens that would have appeared as if by magic by her side. She would need the nutrients to begin laying eggs.

Torq depressed a switch on his control module. If there were anything wrong—Gods forbid—in the Hatchery, he would be notified immediately.

For the moment, though, command deck was empty. As with all of the seeding ships in all of their flashes, the crew would not appear for some short while, enough for the commanding name—Torq bristled slightly with pride, perhaps his only vice—to be assured that all was functioning normally.

As it should be!

His eyen scanned multiple monitors simultaneously, his tarsi seeming to fly over the command board as he checked and re-checked readings from the flash.

All normal.

He relaxed slightly. For the moment, he was alone, truly alone in ways that almost none of the Koleic ever experienced. Alone with himself and with his thoughts.

His eidetic memory flashed pictures almost as rapidly as the drive had transported the ship through the emptiness of space to an unknown sun-system, where another planet orbited, waiting for its new overlords.

The first world. Desert. Sand, although of a curiously odd brown, quite unlike the emerald sands of the Koleic home. Very little moisture, but that meant nothing; that would change once the apparatus got under way to create a more congenial atmosphere. Otherwise, the seeding proceeded as outlined, no problems at all. In fact, slightly boring.

Then the second flash…and the awakening.

The second world was different. Almost all water, deep and scarlet, tinged by some unknown microscopic creatures barely more complex than the fringes of plant life that surrounded the scattered islands. Again, though, the task was completed with little difficulty. The apparatus settled securely on one of the islands, the egg cases prepared for the moment when the environment would awaken sensors and the grubs would emerge, followed shortly thereafter by the newborn God, already prepared to multiply and fill her world.

The third flash…and the awakening.

The third world…ah, that was a memory that would have made Torq smile had his physiology allowed such a contortion of the vocal mechanisms. As it was, it was sufficient to generate a repetitive tingling along his ventral plates, a vibration almost—almost—as pleasant as what he had experiences that once and only time as he and his God shared essences during their brief mating flight.

He consciously pulled his mind away from that premier moment in his life, never to be repeated, and concentrated on something nearly as wondrous.

There had been living beings on the third world. Strange, multi-limbed creatures that resembled nothing Torq had ever seen or imagined. But they were intelligent, sentient, builders on a vast scale that had dwarfed even the greatest Koleic nests.

As far as the eyen could see, structures, above-ground structures, into and out of which the creatures had scuttled when the lander first cleared the atmosphere. They seemed not to have known of the ship hovering above them, even though the most rudimentary of equipment would have alerted them…but apparently they had had no interest in such things. After the cleansing, nothing resembling the needed machinery was found amid the rubble.

But the first sight of the new world was not what had brought Torq such pleasure.

No, it had been the smell and the sound. Torq had never experienced such things, never imagined such pleasures.

The smell—the piquant scent of flesh, alien though it was and disgusting to look upon, as it was consumed by the meticulously aimed bursts of energy from the ship. Everywhere, every transpiration…ambrosial, although in truth the God lacked the senses to enjoy it even had she been planet-side during the aftermath.

And the sounds—first the screams, full-bodied screams ripped from hot-blooded throats as the bursts struck buildings and creatures alike, the echoes of terror as the alien beings dashed mindlessly around, more often than not running headlong into another wall of flame. That was pleasant.

But even better, the slight crackle of roasted tissue as Torq and his numbers strode triumphantly across the blackened landscape, treading on the remains of the now-vanished people.

His ventral plates quivered rhythmically.

What a blessed memory.

And now, the fourth world drew near.

* * * *

As he had stood at his console, reliving his conquests—and his God’s slight nod of acquiescence as he had reported to her of the three successful seedings—the numbers had appeared at their terminals, silently, already seeing to the millions of minor tasks that the ship required.

They did not speak.

They knew their jobs.

And they knew that Torq would handle everything exterior to the ship that might.…

“My lord.”

For an instant, Torq could not quite comprehend what had happened.

“My lord.”

He turned his left eyes toward the bank of terminals.

A five was staring at him, quivering (although, thankfully, not retreating into insentience as had the pre-flash seven). Its compounds were all trained on Torq.

That was enough to let him know that something truly unanticipated had occurred. The rule-of-tarsus was that at least one-half of one eyes should remain trained on the monitor.

Unless the name required full attention.

This time, though, the number had initiated the communication.

Now it was trembling in every limb, first and second arms nearly useless even had it tried to perform some small bit of business.

Torq waved a first leg. Permission to speak granted.

“My lord, there is…there is…something…unusual about this system.…” The number stuttered to a halt.

Torq chose not to help it out. He waited in silence.

“My lord, there is a…I feel a terrible…disturbance…in the forces…the charges that.…”

“Feel?”

“My lord, yes, my lord. Nothing…certain.… It is as if there is…something both…there…and not there.”

Torq felt his ventral plates quiver. “Like the old witticism about the twelve in the closed box? Neither dead nor alive, but both?”

Wisely, the five did not respond.

Keeping a good three quarters of his eyes on his own consoles, Torq scanned the command deck.

“Other reports?”

No responses.

“Anomalies?”

Again, silence.

He turned his attention back to the five. It sill quivered violently but showed no other signs of retreating, in spite of the intense distress it had to be feeling.

“One last attempt. What have you to report?”

The five waved its second arms meaninglessly as its firsts raised helplessly above its head.

“My lord, I…the scans…sometimes they…and then.…”

Soundlessly, Torq removed the thin metal rod.

A moment later, he said flatly: “Dispose of that.”

Then: “Decant another five.”

* * * *

It was more than unusual for his God to demand that he attend upon her personally. This would, in fact, be the first time he had seen her since his farewell address in the portico near the ship, where she had lain in silent grandeur on a long, drapery bedecked structure, built specifically for her body to recline upon during the ceremonials. It had been burned the moment she had left it, lest some lesser Koleic deign to touch it, much less rest upon it.

Such was standard for all of the seeding ships and their Gods.

Torq, in spite of being the Chaptain of the ship, had never expected to see her face-to-face again.

One did not see one’s God face-to-face…and live.

Just ask the tens that attended upon her.

No wait. There would be no answer. They were—eventually, to be sure, but invariably—dead.

Now Torq stood within the Hatchery for the first time since the ship was completed. Then it had been little more than a huge, empty chamber, lined front, back, and both sides with narrow shelves into which eggs would be inserted and sealed.

When the time was right, when the ship had reached a promising world, the correct number would be decanted—although the official term for these eggs was released—along with a pre-pubescent God, and placed in special containers until planetary conditions were optimum for their survival.

If they survived.

Torq had no way of knowing how many seeding ships had actually succeeded, how many worlds might even now harbor nascent communities of Koleic. But neither had he any interest in knowing.

He merely guided this ship and served his God.

As she commanded.

“My God.” He said no more, merely stood waiting for her to acknowledge his presence. She did so with a flicker of a handful of her eyes, the rest remaining focused on some unseeable spot on the ceiling…or perhaps into the future, or the past.

The Gods only knew.

He took the flicker as permission to speak.

“My God, I have come as you have requested.” One never spoke to the Gods about commands; to do so reeked of insolence.

The flicker returned, rested on him momentarily, then drifted away again.

“My God, how may I please you?”

The flicker returned once more, but this time the compounds remained trained on Torq. He could feel her wisdom surrounding him. It made him immensely uncomfortable.

“I…have…heard…” she said finally, taking deep breaths between each word, “of the seven…and the…five.… Why?”

“My God, the first curl—, withdrew into itself until nothing more remained of it. I performed a mercy.”

There was a long, nearly painful passage of time, as if she were considering each of his words for every possible level of meaning. Suddenly, Torq found himself almost empathizing with the unfortunate seven. He almost wanted to curl himself.

He stood straighter.

“Accept…ed.”

He waited a moment, then: “The five. That was more troublesome. It appeared to have…broken…in some unaccountable way. There are no records from other ships of such behavior.”

“I…have…seen…and heard.…” A long release of breath. “It…troubles….”

“The five…” Torq said, then stopped.

She had turned fully half of her eyes to him.

“Not…the…five…. They live…to serve. If…broken?…they die.”

“Then what?”

“The…other.”

“The oth—. My God, there was no other. Only the broken five reported—felt—anything. All other monitors read clear. I warrant this to you.”

“So…be…it.…” She remained silent for a long time, too long for Torq to feel anything approaching comfortable. The only sounds in the huge chamber—now fully half full of sealed eggs awaiting planetfall—were her labored breathing.

And something more.

Something tiny, insignificant almost.

A soft, wet, plop just before each exhalation.

Every time.

It took Torq—name though he was, and Chaplain of this ship—a long while to figure out the sound.

And when he did, his chitin quivered with embarrassment, even though logically, he should have known, should have anticipated.…

She was laying eggs.

The mysterious rite only the Gods could perform and that few—outside of the munchable tens—would ever see.

He swallowed convulsively.

Something like an infinity later, he was about to ask permission to withdraw, when she spoke again. Now that he understood more, each of her harsh respirations left him feeling.…

But she spoke: “About…this…world.”

He recognized the intent of her words.

“My God, this is the most nearly habitable we have found yet. Investigations suggest that air, water, land are all suitable for seeding.”

She may have nodded. At this point Torq wasn’t certain that he could trust his eyen.

“In…hab…it…ants.”

“My God, yes. Two legs. First arms only. Soft-bodied. Telemetry can only tell us so much.”

Another long silence.

Plop.

Plop.

Plop.

“Per…haps.…”

When he was convinced that she had said all that she wished to, he responded: “My God, what do you wish?”

“Com…mun…i…cate.”

“The trans-comm? I mean, the translation-communicator? We haven’t used it yet. There were no inhabitants capable of speech on the first two worlds; and on the third, somehow the aboriginals seemed not to need language.”

“Not…?”

“My God, what remains we…found…indicated no organs of speech or hearing. That we could identify as such. And nothing suggesting writing. Nothing except huge buildings, bare and empty when we came, barren ash when we left.”

In spite of himself, Torq was particularly pleased with his answer. He almost preened.

“No…speech…?”

“No, my God. None.”

Plop.

Plop.

Plop.

“This…world.… Try.…” The final word tapered off into a breathy sibilant.

“But why…I mean, so be it.”

The compounds had flickered back. Now both eyen, and all of the faceted eyes within each, stared toward the ceiling. Toward the past. The future. Infinity.

Torq backed out of the Hatchery. He heard the door iris behind him but even then did not tear his glaze from the God.

He had spoken to her.

She had answered him.

All was well with ship.

With his world.

* * * *

“Report.” Torq’s voice sounded throughout the command deck, restored to perfect placidity after his meeting with God. He hadn’t expected the meeting, much less the way…well, the way things might affect him. His eyes, however, skittered back and forth in a wholly uncharacteristic display, almost as if he had lost command of his compounds.

Even so, the crew knew immediately what was needed.

“My lord, approach is flawless.”

He had expected nothing less.

“My lord, except for.…”

A thin voice from the far side of the deck struggled against the speaker’s natural impulse to silence.

Torq turned one full eyen toward the speaker, a six, who should have known better than to interrupt the Chaptain’s thoughts.

“Well?”

“My lord, something…unusual.” Torq wasn’t certain, but it did seem for an instant that the five flickered more than a few compounds toward the station where the previous five had been seated. The newly decanted five seemed not to notice.

But Torq did.

And that small movement disquieted him more than the stuttering voice.

“More.”

“My lord, it may be a problem with the investigators, but there seems to be a…a shell of some sort.”

“Where?”

“My lord, surrounding the planet.”

Torq fell silent, unwilling to share his sudden apprehensions.

“Around the entire planet?”

“My lord, yes.”

“My lord.…” This time the voice came from the other side of the deck. “I too…my monitors show…something I…they cannot explain.

“My lord, and mine.”

By now, half a dozen of the numbers were nodding slightly or waving second arms to indicate agreement.

“Silence!”

Perfect silence reigned.

“You, four, explain!”

“My lord, I can’t.…”

“As best you can, then,” Torq said. His chitin quivered with exasperation. Truth be told, his tarsi flexed and involuntarily twitched toward his pouch, where the thin tube still rested, but he restrained himself. If this many numbers dared to speak, there must be something.

“My lord, my monitor, and, I assume, the others, show nothing.”

Torq started to interrupt but the four continued, speaking rapidly to get to its point.

“Nothing physical…at least nothing tangible. But it also reports that there is some kind of interconnected…field?…that begins at the atmosphere terminus. And it extends entirely around the world.”

“How soon?”

There was a distinctly awkward silence, even with the faintest shuffling of scales against hammocks.

“How soon?”

“Any momen—”

The ship lurched, hung motionless, then lurched in the reverse direction. Lights overhead wavered in intensity; then first singly, then in sections, glowrods burst, showering the deck with glittering bits of crystal. Sparks flew everywhere, some igniting the material of several hammocks, which threw the nearby numbers into mindless panic. Three of them curled instantly, and before the sparks had died, black ichor had begun oozing through carapaces.

Half a dozen monitors winked black, flared with static, then resumed their normal purple. The ship twisted once again.

A single bulb on Torq’s terminal blinked on, accompanied by the sound of a different klaxon, one which no one on the ship had ever actually heard activated before.

The Hatchery.

The God was calling.

And Torq did not know what he could tell her.

He started to depress a switch with his tarsi and…the ship righted itself. What lights were still intact shimmered, grew brighter, dimmer, then settled at normal illumination. Most of the remaining black terminals came on again.

Most…but not all.

And overriding all was the unending whine of the klaxon, disquieting the numbers perhaps even more than the shipquake had.

Torq punched the button savagely, hoping against hope that nothing in his voice would betray his agitation.

“My God, I listen.”

The control room went quiet, except for the faint drip, drip, drip of ichor against metal. Two more numbers had curled. Several looked unsteady.

“Chaptain Torq.”

“My God, I am here.”

“What?”

Torq hesitated, then: “An…anomaly, my God. An atmospheric anomaly encountered when the ship entered.…”

“Now?”

Torq glanced around the command deck. All seemed under control, except, of course, the dozen or so curlers. Lights were stable. Monitors flickered with messages and normal data. No fires. And the remaining numbers’ eyen were split as they should be, one eyes watching their duty station, the other—all compounds active—focused on Torq.

None of them spoke.

“My God, all is now as it should be.”

There was no answer, but the comm light blinked out. She had returned to her eternal round of creating new life. She was satisfied.

Torq was not.

There had been…something indefinable there. It had momentarily derailed the ship from its planet-fall course. The fact that the ship was now on course and apparently unharmed did nothing to placate him. His ventral plates quivered, not with pleasure this time but with apprehension.

What was going on?

* * * *

The Crwth chittered, oblivious to the accompaniment of the clumsy trans-comm taking up a fair amount of the space just before the dais upon which it—she, Torq reminded himself—stood alone.

Even before her words rustled from the device, however, Torq recognized the short complex of whistles, breaths, and musical tones.

He should.

He had heard it often enough since that moment half-a-day (current planet-time) past when the lander had set down and he, followed by his minion of numbers, had set foot on the fourth world.

It had been an eerie experience. The first three times, the planets had been dead, either as they were originally, or as they became after the blasts from the ship. On the third world, everything had been black and twisted. And there had been the sounds…and the smells.

Here, nothing had been touched. Almost, almost, Torq found himself doubting the wisdom of trying to communicate with this alien, this sub-Koleic species.

The trans-comm began its own twittering, but Torq did not need to listen. He had heard that same complex of sounds often enough since he had arrived in this great, empty, drapery-hung hall to confront the single creature that awaited them.

“So be it.”

Torq sighed, feeling the fluttering movement of transpiration along his plates. His first and second hands each flexed, contracted, flexed again. He grimaced inwardly at his own unease.

The creature before him stood as pliantly as ever, as pliantly and acquiescent as melting wax. The two of them had long since dispensed with cool formalities. For the past while, Torq had been addressing the alien as conqueror to the conquered.

And she had simply replied with her unchanging, infernally undeviating chittering: “So be it.”

Torq stared with one eyes at the Crwth’s silhouette, then through one of the seven oppressively narrow windows in the huge heptagonal chamber. Beyond, he could see only cloudless skies, even though he knew that the ship hung, tiny but visible, somewhere above them.

He shivered. The angles in the room were wrong. He was used to angles, of course. The square, the triangle, even the hexagon. But the unnecessary asymmetry of this room bothered him.

He forced himself to ignore his unease and return to his duty.

“You understand our demands, then?”

Again the whirr of the trans-comm filled the room. As he finished speaking the translator broke out in a volley of inarticulate sounds, random sounds to Torq but apparently intelligible to the Crwth.

Crwth.

Even the name echoed abominably in Torq’s mind, almost rattling loose segments of his exoskeleton. Cwrth. An impossible collation of sounds equally impossible to speak or to understand. Still, it was good an approximation as any for the particular set of sounds that came through the trans-comm as “untranslatable.” It was what she had first called herself, but there was no cognate for it.

So. Cwrth.

Well, it would soon make little difference. The enclave would cease to exist as an independent community soon, and whatever names they chose to give themselves would become irrelevant.

But enough linguistics. Torq understood enough of the technicalities of translation to know that he didn’t know enough. And besides, a ten by any other name was still a ten.

Cwrth was sufficient.

Now, however, for the business at hand.

She was listening patiently—eternally patient, damnably patient. Her horrible dual eyes—compound-less, fixed in bony sockets and therefore unable to split and take in more than what stood directly before her—her eyes turned slightly away from him, as if she found his form unpleasant.

Her tall, fragile-looking, soft-fleshed body—naked in spite of its filmy covering of some sort of glistening cloth—towered over him. Folds of the scintillant white material as still as columns of opaque crystal fell to her feet.

Her feet.

Another abomination. She had only two hands, apparently firsts. Where the seconds should be, there was only smooth, vulnerable-looking tissue.

Then those two clumsy, flat appendages, altogether too broad and short for substantial support as they were, without dividing into even smaller, less efficient-seeming minor appendages at the ventral end.

He shuddered.

On her breast, a single faceted stone sparkled coldly.

He did not know what the stone was called. He did not care. But in the broad central facet, he could see himself in small…a compact, dark, impenetrable body, designed for gravitational forces many times that of this small clot of dirt. His image gleamed dully.

The trans-comm clattered into silence.

The Cwrth remained silent for a moment.

She was apparently considering what the trans-comm had just said.

Then, as she had done so often before, she repeated the incessant pattern that Torq had grown to despise.

“So be it.”

He moved. He paced slowly around the single visible bit of ornamentation in the room, a wooden pillar just over his height, polished until it shone, and surmounted by a piece of hideously carved stone of some sort.

Just glancing at the carving with a handful of his compounds made his blood heat. It was as loathsome as everything else here, even though it bore no resemblance at all to the tall, attenuated lines of the Cwrth. It was lumped, awkward, barely more than the suggestion of something that seemed implicitly ancient and terrible.

At least that was how it affected Torq.

In passing, he reached out one of his second hands and dug deeply, mercilessly into the wood, gouging up long splinters of red-grained wood.

The Cwrth flinched…Torq was pleased. That was the first sign of perturbation she had shown during their interchanges.

Just as a matter of principle, he flicked with pillar with a first hand, causing it to rock perceptibly. The carving seemed to slide a bit, then stop, as if there were come low barrier he couldn’t see that kept it from crashing to the stone floor.

This time she held herself in check. She was again unflappable, calm.

He continued: “This is our final requirement. Before sunfall, you will surrender to us—that is to say, to me—all armaments and other implements that might be used against the Koleic. You will acknowledge us as overlords, without reservation, and you will accept your condition as tributary, permanently and without question. You will turn over such materials—metals and minerals—as we require, as well as any fuel elements adaptable to our needs.

“You—and here I include all of your people—will do these things without complaint or rebellion. Otherwise, and this I promise, I will destroy your world. Koleic do not threaten. They do. We destroy what we cannot subjugate.”

He paused. The trans-comm began its task of morphing his clear, precise words, his meticulous diction, into meaningless streams of unintelligible sounds. It whistled and screeched, enough to drive even a name mad…had he not been standing there to fulfill the commission of his God.

He allowed his eyen to gaze around the room. The Cwrth’s servants—no more than a dozen when he had arrived—had all withdrawn from the chamber, leaving it even emptier than it had been when he first strode in. His numbers had stationed themselves around the walls, standing a few tarsi-lengths from the ubiquitous drapery that obscured everything except the central window in each wall.

He twitched. The room still felt…wrong. Bad?

He wasn’t certain that he wanted to attach moral value to mere architectural curiosity—this was an alien world, after all, unused to the higher refinements and beauties of the Koleic.

The Cwrth straightened slightly, making her form look even more drawn, more vulnerable.

He liked that.

She opened her mouth to speak.

Would she?

She did.

“So be it.”

He started to respond, when she turned to face him directly.

He was shocked anew by the awfulness of those dual eyes, soft, colored, fluid-filled spheres without compounds, without the familiar flash of faceted black. Flaps of tissue dropped down over them from time to time, even though in battle, those ridiculous flaps would clearly provide no protection from blasts or thrusts.

And more.

Her already impossibly fragile body was especially marred by one grotesquery that the draped fabric half-hid when she was turned away but now opened slightly to reveal in all of its odious detail.

Just above the jointure of her lower limbs, her body was swollen. The body covering—that was the word the trans-comm devised for what was obviously not exoskeleton but somehow performed many of the same functions—the body covering was tight, taught, bulging enough to nearly double her girth and to throw the rest of her body out of symmetry.

He had never seen such an abomination before…and had been even more horrified, shocked almost beyond words, to discover early in their interchanges that she was…that is, the she would…that she was in the process of bearing young!

His tarsi clicked faintly, disapprovingly.

His God was one thing. She performed her function discretely, almost silently, and none were there to observe except the chosen tens…excepting, of course, that single emergency that had brought Torq before here.

And even then, he had seen nothing except her upper carapace; the rest of her long body had been covered, as tradition demanded, by sumptuous cloth.

There had been nothing to indicate, to suggest, that.…

Well, truthfully, there had been something:

Plop.

Plop.

Plop.

But this, this public posturing.

It was bad enough to have to treat with an admitted female, but this was not even an egg-layer. No, she was bringing something alive from within her body.

He tried not to look at the shiny, stretched tissue, or notice that it occasionally rippled, almost heaved, as if something inside were struggling to escape its imprisonment.

And something was.

He had no idea what a Cwrth-grub would look like. And he had no interest in finding out. This creature, this…thing had no business even appearing in public in such a state, let alone accepting the conditions that would permanently subjugate herself and everything like her on this world.

She should have long since retired to the sanctity and the privacy of a Hatchery.

Or whatever she called a place where she could.…

The trans-comm interrupted his thoughts with a short burst—damnably familiar—then a slightly longer staccato of sounds.

“So be it.… Thus it is to call outward in, spew inward out.”

This was different.

The trans-comm faltered slightly on the final phrases, as if unsure of the translation. When it did repeat them in Koleic, there was still a hesitancy, along with a certain feeling of ritualism.

The tone itself grated on Torq. He crossed the room to stand before one of the seven windows and stared at meticulously tended fields fanning out between the convergence of two rivers.

In fact, the richness of the enclave—large as it was, expanding southward well beyond the limits of vision—had startled Torq when he had first arrived.

From space, the ship had transmitted crisp images of most of the planetary surface. Anomalous clouds had seemed to hover over a few specific areas, never moving, as far as the ship’s instruments had reported. They seemed lower than clouds should be, almost but not quite touching the land, and within them the instruments reported frequent flashes. Torq might have passed the phenomena off as lightning—or this planet’s equivalent—except that the instruments also indicated that the flashes consisted not only of light but of color. It some way the instruments could not define, it was physical color. Torq did not understand.

When Torq ordered several numbers to test further, he received an even more anomalous response.

Yes, there were definitely colors associated with the flashes.

But no, they do not fit into the spectrum of light as we understand it.

One of the numbers had allowed its carapace to curve slightly when Torq questioned further but had ultimately remained standing.

Still, there was something about those flashes that had startled, upset, and frightened—or terrified­—the numbers.

In addition to the clouds there had been huge patches of grey spreading over whole quadrants of the surface, looking like the horrible fungoid growth that occasionally tormented the oldest and weakest of the Koleic. Tests had confirmed that these vast expanses were covered with dust, ash, something of that sort. But even there, there were suggestions of the indescribable color. Much of the planet was already afflicted by the devastation. From all indications, it was spreading.

And then, nestled among them, surrounded by an unbroken chain of mountains and glittering with colors that felt normal to Torq’s eyen, lay the enclave. In itself, it was huge, covering perhaps an eighth of the planet’s visible surface, but compared with the clouds and the dust bowls, it seemed fragile, vulnerable.

Torq turned slightly.

To his left, the squat outline of his lander shimmered in the late afternoon light. It seemed…wrong, he suddenly realized, out-of-place, alien.

He shifted his compounds, then focused back on the lander, and saw it as he had always seen it. For an instant, he decided, he had been so overwhelmed by the incongruous angles and surfaces of the enclave that he had almost perceived it as the Cwrth might have.

His ventral plates rippled.

The idea was absurd.

He stepped back two paces but spoke without turning to face the Cwrth.

“This place, this community, is rich. It is fertile. It has extensive reserves of minerals and elements that will be useful to use. Even the waste lands surrounding you are rich, although no longer capable of growing crops.”

He stopped and allowed the trans-comm to repeat what he had said.

The Cwrth did not respond. She did not even allow the eyes-flaps to flutter down but stared at him disconcertingly with her dual orbs. They were, he noted, almost the same color as the sky outside the windows…blue but tinged with the fire of sunfall.

He waited a moment.

She did not speak.

He continued: “You have told me that you have no armies, no government. That you yourself are merely a…I have forgotten.”

He turned to the trans-comm and entered a search-memory command, then waited until it replied.

“Ah, yes. You are a ‘distal-appendage/female-that-has-not-yet-given-birth.’ You claim you hold no office other than Cwrth—‘talker’—yet it is with you that I must deal.

“Who governs you? To whom do you take conflicts? Who monitors wealth to ascertain that all have sufficient according to their station?”

Again he paused and waited for the trans-comm.

This time, when it had completed its litany of whistles, gurgles, wheezes, and crackles, the Cwrth began to speak.

And this time he did not hear the repetitious sounds that signified, “So be it.”

Line by line, the trans-comm iterated her alien thoughts in Torq’s own speech.

“We of the enclave are content. You are correct…and you are incorrect. We have no one to take our conflicts to because we have no conflicts. We have no armies because we have no one to fight. We have no riches because we all have what we need. We use our world as we require not as we wish. We live well.”

The trans-comm fell silent.

“No conflicts? No enemies? And the Koleic are the first to come upon you?”

A moment later: “No. No, we have no conflicts. No, we have no enemies. And no, you”—here the term was not Koleic but something untranslatable, although the trans-comm indicated that at the base of the Cwrth word were undertones of disgust, revulsion, aversion, and dislike of something that scuttled upon the earth—“And no, you are not the first to come upon us. We have received visitors”—invaders, attackers—“before. We have received demands before. We have been warned, threatened, intimidated. But each time, the visitors have failed.

“We have been succored.”

Torq tensed as he heard her tone alter. Absolute certainty radiated from her even before her words filtered through the trans-comm. He dreaded what he would hear next. Sufficient reports had come back to the home world from earlier seeding missions for him to recognize the pattern, as little as he had expected it on this world. There had been none of the obvious signs, no panoply, no paraphernalia, no ceremonials. Yet her words were inevitable, invariable in sense if not in form. They had been heard by other Chaptains on other worlds—and the Koleic had invariably, systematically destroyed the unspoken hope implicit in them.

“Our God stands with us. He will suffice. Surely.”

She had spoken.

A religious cult.

In spite of his certain knowledge that he was following the God’s commands by being here and, eventually it now seemed, destroying this world—and in spite of his attempts over and again to educate her about his God—she had held onto some secret soteriology.

No wonder she had been so calm.

And no need to waste time on any more questions.

He didn’t care which of the infinite permutations of belief her god might take. He didn’t care what natural, physical manifestations the Cwrth had misunderstood as miraculous, magical, mystical. He didn’t care to debate with her.

His God was waiting.

He has seen her, had spoken to her.

For Her Sake, he had mated with her on that single never-to-be-forgotten flight.

His knowledge was absolute.

He did not care to hear the minutiae of this…this creature’s faith.

He shifted into command mode. He was after all, the Chaptain, the possessor of all power on this world, the single individual who would decide whether this creature should live or die, whether her entire world would be allowed to exist or would become what parts of it already were—lifeless, dust-and-ash-ridden wastes.

“I have power you cannot understand. My ship sits within the sky. I can order it to incinerate you, yours, everything you hold dear. I could incinerate the planet if I so chose, reduce it to a glowing ball of cinder.”

He stopped. The trans-comm chittered away, although Torq thought he heard more rigidity, more authority in the sounds that emerged from it.

The Cwrth did not change her position, her mien. Nor did she answer.

“My numbers—my warriors—carry weapons you cannot imagine. We are many, almost infinite; you are few and fragile. You cannot withstand us. Do not oppose us.

“Do not place hope in an impossibility.

“I have already shattered worlds.” As he spoke those words, he realized that he had made up his mind. He knew how his God would want him to act. “I shall shatter yours as well.”

* * * *

As the trans-comm stuttered out Torq’s warning, he stared without moving out the window.

Silent, impervious, unassailable—the epitome of the Koleic.

His gaze rover over the impossibly slender spires of the enclave, often canted at angles that made his head seem to ache, as if at any instant they might shiver into fragments, and then—perhaps even before the fragments struck the ground—into dust.

He stared at the stark, barren mountains. They surrounded the plain where the enclave was situated, he knew, but were much closer here than further south. He could see their lofty ramparts, their razor-like ridges. As far as he could tell there were no cuts in the chain of peaks, no exit from here into the wastes that were the rest of the world.

From there he looked into the sky. His element now. His universe. His memory flickered through the planets he had visited…and conquered…and destroyed.

As was his Destiny!

The Cwrth began humming in her typical, monotonous way.

He turned to watch her now, instead of the landscape.

Her mouth was…was twisted. Elongated somehow. The ends where the two mouth-flaps joined were slightly raised. Vertical creases deformed her face there and elsewhere. It was hideous, the way their boneless flesh manipulated itself. Never had Torq felt prouder of…or so protected by…his unmoving ventral plates, his glossy chitin, even the thin, barbed lengths of his tarsi. Everything about him, about the Koleic, was immeasurably superior to this…this.…

Her voice stopped, and the machine began.

“We have heard this before.” Even through the metallic translator, Torq thought he could detect the thrumming of strong emotion, something the Cwrth had not yet shown. She had always remained patient, gentle, even resolved to her obvious fate. And the fate of her people.

She repeated the first phrase, perhaps for emphasis, perhaps for clarification: “We have heard this before. Not often. Twice. Perhaps three times in our long, long history. None alive remember such things, even though we also live long, long lives. But the stories have been handed down.”

The machine pause, sputtered meaningless hisses and gurgles, almost as if it were sentient and did not want to say the next few lines.

“Such invaders”—she had apparently used a different word than ‘visitors’ and in doing so made her attitudes toward the Koleic clear for the first time—“such invaders did not succeed. They died. As will you. Our God will succor us. He will suffice.”

Torq clicked his tarsi. He had tried to prepare himself for such a moment, given the reports of earlier Chaptains. He had never had to speak the words; the first worlds he had conquered had not risen to the sophistication of religions, even such a patently absurd one as was practiced here.

Stand up to the might of the Koleic, indeed!

Yet in spite of his preparations, he felt…unquiet. Even numbers died for reasons. They might forget themselves and curl. They might disobey a name. They might even have been born to supply nutriment to the Gods who even now were questing through the depths of space, scattering their seed far and wide.

But to die for an imaginary guardian.

Still, the needs—the requirements—of the Koleic came first. No one could circumvent Destiny.

He spoke a harsh command. The three stationed at the exit to the chamber hastened forward, its carapace glistening and burnished in the evening light. It carried a comm in one first hand. The second was outstretched toward Torq.

“Report.” Torq’s voice was rougher than usual, not because of anything the three had done but because of his frustration with the Cwrth…the one standing stock-still before him and all of them on this pitiable ball of dust.

The three clicked nervously, chitin against chitin.

“Report!”

“My lord!” Several of its compounds just might have flickered toward the pouch where Torq carried the thin metal rod. But it said nothing more.

“Report, I said.” And this time the anger in his voice—in his whole demeanor—was indeed directed at the three.

“My lord, they have…they have…disappeared.”

“What? Who?”

“My lord, scanners onboard the lander indicate that virtually all life forms in this enclave have…have…disappeared?” It was as if the guard had searched for a different word, a better word, and finally gave up in defeat.

“But when we landed, there were hundreds, thousands clustered around this building.”

“My lord, yes. But as the time has passed, and no order being given from you to the contrary, they…withdrew, yes, withdrew into their domiciles. Guards posted outside reported that we were being watched, observed, but none of the creatures made any gestures or overtures that we could read as threats. And.…” The three stopped abruptly, as if it were afraid of the consequences of what it had already stated and was terrified to continue.

“And!”

“My lord, when we checked a few breaths ago, guards discovered.… Well, my lord, they discovered that the habitations seem cluttered with mounds of combustibles. Several thought they saw movement in the deepest shadows within the domiciles, but none of”—it gestured toward the Cwrth with a movement of the tarsi that in any level of polite society would have been…not polite—“none of them were visible.”

Torq stared. The guard—even though a three—showed imminent signs of curling, so after a moment, Torq relented enough to return to an earlier part of the report.

“No ord—! No orders from me! But didn’t you think to.…”

No, they hadn’t thought. The numbers outside were mostly eights. They did not think. They followed orders explicitly. Or died.

With a gesture suspiciously like drawing a tarsus across a vulnerable ventral plate, Torq dismissed the three.

He scuttled heavily toward the center of the chamber, where the Cwrth stood silently. She seemed sad, her angles canted slightly earthward, her dorsal surface curved just as slightly in what in a Koleic would have been interpreted as the first signs of curling.

Yet something in her orbs—those loathsome twin balls of moisture—told him that she was not in fact defeated. She might be sad, although he could not understand why. But she was still not defeated.

“What has happened? Where are your people?”

He cursed the delay as the machine translated each sound he had made.

She spoke, and there was another delay.

“They are gone. Into the mountains, following trails known only to us. And you”—Torq shuddered at the venom in the word—“you will not destroy this place. We will. It is ours, and we will destroy it, if our God requires our sacrifice.”

“You will die.…”

She began that eerie, eldritch twisting of the mouth-flaps even before the trans-comm had begun. It was as if she already understood what Torq would say next and was ready to respond.

The trans-comm chittered and whistled at her, however; and she chittered and whistled back.

“Of course I shall die. That is why I am here. I am the least, the”—the trans-comm nearly ground to a halt before spitting out a long sequence of words—“the one-who-sheds-ichor-willingly-in-order-that-all-others-may-survive. I am the distal-appendage/female-that-has-not-yet-given-birth. Through me my people will survive.

“If my God wills it.”

“I do not so will,” Torq screamed. “I do not so will! I am your God! And she”—here he gestured toward where the ship had just become visible through the top of the tallest window—“she is my God!”

The trans-comm struggled but it had not been designed to communicate such intensities of emotion. Gears ground in the effort, and whiffs of smoke appeared around the speaker. The chittering and twittering and musical tones sounded distorted, gravelly and harsh.

Even before the trans-comm fell silent, he snapped a gesture toward the nearest guard.

“Order the ship to prepare all force beams. As soon as the lander rises, destroy this place!”

“My lord, yes!” The three clicked a sharp salute.

Torq glared at the Cwrth…or rather, at the place where she had stood an instant before. During his outburst, even as the trans-comm had begun translating his command, the Cwrth had silently moved to stand immediately next to the wooden column. One of her hands touched the surface of the hideous carving, caressing it as if it were the most gorgeous thing in existence. The facet stone at her breast shone with its own internal light.

And she was speaking, whispering in a tone so low that through all of his screaming, Torq had not heard a thing.

He started to moved closer to her, infusing his bodily stance with all of the subtle signals of hatred for her stubborn, presumptuous species that he could—tarsi fully extended, as if he would rip her body covering from whatever structures supported it; carapace divided just enough to reveal the ichor-green of his wings; mouthparts quivering with suppressed rage; eyen glistening as his compounds flared toward her.

He almost began to speak.

Then he stopped.

There was something about her voice, about the words she was obviously uttering. He concentrated.

This was not the language she had been speaking to him!

Her words now contained almost none of the flighty high-pitched twittering, none of the rhythmical whistles that he had become accustomed to hearing and that at times he almost felt he could understand on his own. No, these sounds were harsh, guttural, her mouth-flaps quivering in tight little movements, up-down, up-down, nearly faster than his eyen could follow.

And she had altered physically.

The thin stalk that divided her head from her thorax stiffened. Thick ropes of tissue swelled from within, moving up along each side and pulsating as if with a life of their own.

The twin lumps of flaccid tissue on her thorax—Torq could imagine no possible use for such protrusions—tightened, the cone-shaped tips rising slightly in defiance of even the weak gravity.

She had spread her two body-supports until they were farther apart than the widest part of her body. In doing so, she had revealed even more of the unsightly swelling just below the tissue-lumps. The covering was visibly tighter, shining and beginning to turn a faint red. The earlier random movements within the swelling had become rhythmical, repetitive, as if a dozen tarsi were probing the tissues from within. He nearly retched at the sight.

Painfully he brought his eyen up to concentrate on her upper features; what was happening below was horrendous beyond all words.

She was still caressing the horrible carving, but now her tarsi were flitting so rapidly over the surface of the stone that it seemed as if the stone itself were moving, shrugging pleasurably beneath her touch.

And her voice dropped even lower, rumbled almost, as it reached depths that would have ripped at a Koleic’s speaking organs with their throbbing, ragged intensity.

The words became more rapid, running into each other until they became a litany of horror unbroken by breath.

Torq strained to recognize something—anything—in the confusion of deranged sounds but could not. His first hand dropped to his carapace pouch.

The monstrous carving seemed to wriggle obscenely beneath the Cwrth’s hands.

Her swelling expanded, contracted, expanded again, and Torq realized with horror that its movements were somehow connected with—controlled by—the rhythms of her unknowable, unspeakable words.

His tarsus touched the thin metal rod and began to withdraw it.

“My lord!”

The voice of the three—strained and dismayed as it was—calmed Torq for an instant. It was familiar; its rhythms were of his species, within his experience. Then he registered what the three was saying. Screaming.

“My lord! Something…a…it comes!” And with a final shriek that Torq would have thought beyond the capacity of a Koleic to utter, the three curled!

Torq glanced back at the Cwrth.

She had not left her place near the pillar. She was still stroking the stone creature, still muttering in that strange, uncanny tongue.

He turned and approached the window at the farthest side of the chamber.

And stopped. Stunned.

Beyond the distant mountains, a cloudy mass—billowing, roiling, lit from within by preternatural flashes of unnamable hues—a cloudy mass, such as had been charted elsewhere on the planet, descended, grazed shadowed heights, undulating across fields as if it were alive, and hungry, and angry.

As it approached the buildings of the enclave, it spread murkily, thinning but in the process becoming opaque and—if such a thing were possible—even more threatening as its lower surfaces bubbled and boiled, touching and shattering the thin spires, hiding the horrible angles of building after building.

The unnamable colors increased, joined with others familiar to Torq’s eyen—red, yellow, bile-green.

Part of his mind dissociated instantly. It began dispassionately, and entirely irrationally, to consider the curious modifications in wave lengths as the lights—the colors—filtered through the crystal panes.

Another part of his mind registered amazement and horror at his objectivity at such a moment.

This cloud, this…thing…could not possibly exist.

But it did.

It approached rapidly.

And stopped.

It contracted, compressed itself into a mist, a fog…thick, impenetrable but still motile. It now approached slowly. Frighteningly slowly.

Within the grey-blue fog—still lit, though less brilliantly—by the flashes of abominable color—lay a central core of absolute blackness that even Torq’s numberless compounds could not penetrate.

* * * *

The Cwrth’s voice patterns had changed again. Though the sounds were still those of the strange language—and to Torq it felt immeasurably ancient—they were slower, more distinct.

They now held notes of command.

The first wisps of mist settled lower outside the chamber.

Torq watched with horrified amazement as the tendrils solidified, became tentacle-like, then solid, questing tentacles that stretched and expanded—even though the central core of darkness remained stationary.

The twisted in and over each other, curled and straightened as if they were feeling their strength for the first time, then dropped.

In an instant, they had encircled the lander.

Torq had just time enough to notice that the ground between the building in which he stood and the lander was littered—was covered by a chaos of small black nodules. It took him a breath to figure out what they were.

His entire squadron had curled.

Threes, fives, sevens, nines…all drawn tightly into themselves.

All lost.

Then, even as the magnitude of the disaster settled into his mind, the grey-now-black-now-midnight-purple clenched. Once. Convulsively.

And in a monstrous shower of flames and smoke and consumption, the lander was no more.

* * * *

Torq pulled the thin metal rod from his pouch as he swiveled away from the window.

He raised it and pointed it toward the Cwrth.

And stopped.

She suddenly seemed to catch fire, to flame and glow, her white dress transformed into a living column of opalescent majesty. Her voice shifted again, grew even more intense, as if before she had only recited but now she saw and knew.

The trans-comm made a single attempt to begin translating, the statue—just as had the lander—exploded.

Torq felt hot metal on his carapace, brushed it absently off of his first arms with his second. He felt no pain.

The Cwrth ceased her…incantations…for a brief moment, long enough to raise both of her hands high above her head and repeat one phrase over and over: Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth!

With a muffled thud, the drapes that had curtained most of the great chamber fell from their fastenings and lay in muddled heaps on the floor.

The Crwth seemed transformed, glowing even more brightly as the hidden walls were revealed as windows, wider, larger, infinitely more imposing than those that had before been visible.

Seven impossibly large windows…onto nothingness!

Each held within its crystal plane a blackness that exceeded blackness. It seemed palpable; it seemed to shout emptiness and abomination and monstrosity.

Torq felt his dorsal tissues struggling to curl.

In the deep blackness, he saw…movement.

The blackness roiled and writhed and agitated, until from the depths of each window into reaches beyond space and time, infinitesimally tiny tendrils began to form.

The Cwrth spoke, and even without the now-defunct trans-comm Torq understood that she was speaking his name as it would be pronounced in that ancient, archaic tongue.

He tore his eyen from the nothingness around him to stare at her.

She touched the carven image lightly with her appendages…and this time, Torq knew that the hideous thing had in fact moved.

From beneath its stony body, thin tentacles began to emerge.

One.

Two.

Many.

Then she directed his eyen upward and outward, toward the distant sky where his ship hung motionless, the sole remaining star in a nighttime of blackness. There were no other lights; no stars. Sunfall was complete but there were no stars.

And something formed out of the blackness.

Torq knew without knowing what he was seeing.

More tentacles, an infinity of tentacles stretching upward and outward until they seemed more elements of sky than of earth, until they twined and twisted and formed an almost impervious net over the world.

Then, in an instant, one of them dropped slightly, looped itself several times around the single source of light in the eternal calignosity that lay beyond Torq’s universe, tightened, and the ship—and everything within it—disappeared.

“My God!” he screamed.

He had no time to notice that equally spaced around the chamber, some half-hidden by the fallen drapes, lay dark spheres, oozing black distillations that the shimmering drapes seemed to absorb without any change in their own coloration.

He had no time to notice that as the Cwrth stood there in her triumph, her features twisted in pain, the grotesque swelling abruptly grew even larger, her covering more stretched, now burnished with a red deep beyond belief—that even as she stood there, a thin line formed from the jointure of her supports, questing upward with all of the determination of the universe of tentacles that now surrounded her world; questing upward and thickening until her covering split and…some thing…reached out with its own tentacles and wrapped itself around one of her supports and, still sticky and putrid with her scarlet ichor, lowered itself slowly, almost painfully, to the floor.

He had no time to notice it draw nearer and nearer where he stood, gaining in speed and power with each passing instant.

He had no time to notice any of these, because he was already galaxies away, wrapping himself in impossible memories that flooded and ebbed leaving nothing but darkness as his carapace cracked and his ventral plates folded in upon themselves.

And he curled.

The last thing he knew was the feathery touch of things icy and leathery and altogether evil invading his body through every fracture in his chitin, sucking , almost inhaling the very ichor of his being.

He did not hear the Cwrth’s words as she lowered her arms, as the long gash in her ventral plane—now flat and sagging—closed itself seamlessly, as the monstrous carving became again a moveless bit of stone…as she shut her self off to all but the ethereal music that she alone in the chamber could hear, and said, her voice full of pity, almost mournful:

“No. My God!”

1 Opus: work, composition, esp. music, from L. opus, a work, labor, exertion; from Proto-Indo-European *op—, to work, produce in abundance, originally of agriculture later extended to religious acts (cf. Sanskrit, apas—work, religious act). The plural, seldom used, is opera.