Yort awoke reluctantly, but he knew exit time approached. The dream-maker’s grip gradually loosened, an automatic feature he was deliberately unable to control. Balanced between the worlds of sleep and waking, he watched the chronometer count down toward the moment when his mothership and eleven others would burst forth and take, and take, and take.
Not for the first time he thought how unfortunate it was that nothing could be done in the dead time of null space. How much more useful it would be if the Race could appear fully ready, every infant awake and instantly leaping to begin exterminating the pests that always seemed to infest their rightful territory.
Sometimes the infestations were stubborn. Occasionally one even defeated the first wave of motherships, and required a second application of pesticidal warfare. Yort fervently hoped this place was not one of those; for Archons to die was anathema of the highest order. Even contemplating such a thing threatened to enrage him enough to fully awaken, risking the null space madness.
Yort controlled himself, and waited, though his was not a patient nature.
Even if the first wave were driven back, most if not all of the motherships would escape, Archons intact, though shamed and diminished. The Race would prevail. It always had, ever since it escaped from the gravity well of the Home Nest barely ahead of its own extinction due to exhausting the planet of all competing life forms. Fortunately, other worlds with life had been located, and sublight colony ships with sleeping Archons and fertile eggs had launched themselves toward the stars in hopes of spreading the Race.
The ancient records said those colonies spawned more colonies, and their territory grew at a snail’s pace, limited by the speed of light and conventional physics. Until, that is, the Race consumed a system with knowledge of how to access null space, speeding from star to star. With this technology, all their goals seemed within reach, to fill this galaxy, and the next, and onward to the billion billions waiting.
Ah, the glory of it, Yort thought. All we have to do is be bold enough to seize it.