Lights in the Deep (34 page)

My hand finally hit something soft.

I knotted my fist into the fabric of the captain’s uniform and began to beat back towards the shore.

When I came out, my chest heaved for air.

I dragged the captain’s limp body onto the sand at the river’s edge.

Turning her over, I observed the bloody hole in the front of her uniform. A liver shot? Warm blackness flooded from the wound and the captain’s eyes blinked furiously as she tried to draw breath. Whispered gasps were all she could manage.

“Oh God no,” I said, wishing madly for one of the med kits in our packs. Which were who knew how far away. The current had taken us down river too quickly for me to correctly reckon where camp might be. And there was still shooting happening, though from whom and towards whom I could not be certain. Lacking a better idea, I pressed my hand hard on the wound and willed the bleeding to stop.

The captain groaned loudly and clutched at my arm with both hands. Her eyes were wide and she stared up at me.

“Chief,” she spat. I read her lips more than I heard her.

“Ma’am,” I said, trying to sound calm, “you’re hurt bad, and I have to stop the bleeding.”

“Chief,” she said again, our eyes locked. I quickly lowered my ear to her face. Her voice rasped and sputtered.

“The Queen Mother,” Adanaho said, “you’ve got to protect her. She is the key, Chief. She has been…chosen. Like you. Padre….”

I started to blubber my incomprehension, then looked up to see the Professor hovering almost directly above us. The Queen Mother slid off the front of his disc and came to Adanaho’s side—her forelimbs framed Adanaho’s young face as the captain fought to draw additional breath, but could not.

I pressed harder, to combat the gushing blood, but felt in my heart that it was no use.

“We must flee!” The Professor commanded. “Caught in the crossfire, we will all die.”

“We can’t move the captain!” I hollered, looking up at my friend with a sense of panicked helplessness ripping me up inside.

A trail of bullets spattered across the sand near us.

The Professor spun on his vertical axis to face the four marines who advanced with rifles up. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them splashing through the river shallows. Automatic fire stuttered and suddenly I was flattened across Adanaho’s body as the Professor lowered his disc right down on top of us: me, the captain, and the Queen Mother.

“My friend,” the Professor said, “I regret to inform you that—”

He never finished his sentence. Bullets
pinged
and
panged
off his disc. Some tore through chitin, slicing mantis organs and soft tissue. The Professor’s disc moved forward three meters, then gouged its bow into the wet sand—the disc proper tilting up like a shield. I looked up to see the silhouette of his thorax and limbs flailing around the discs’s black edge, bits and pieces of him coming off and mantis blood splattering.

Then I put my head down as a concentrated series of bursts from the advancing marines shredded the Professor’s disc completely.

It split in two and burst into flame, sparks and electrical arcing lighting up the horrific scene of the Professor’s dismantled body.

The sky howled.

Mantis fighters. Overhead. Making a third sweep of the canyon.

The marines in the shallows vanished in a blinding display of pinpoint antipersonnel rocketry.

I flattened across Adanaho’s body.

Long moments of silence followed.

The Professor’s disc slowly smoldered, so close I could smell the cooking flesh. I turned my eyes back to Adanaho’s face. She stared up at me unblinking, her mouth half open but not drawing breath.

I began to hurl obscenities at the cosmos. Towards any deity or deities that would listen. I damned the Professor. I damned the Queen Mother, and the mantes, and the marines, and the awful stupidity of precious lives cut short. I damned Earth. I damned the Fleet. I even damned Adanaho for being young and idealistic and coming to me as if I had some power over circumstances; enough to alter the course of history. Such idealism had gotten her killed, and all I could do was sit there, soaked and cold and clutching the captain’s lifeless hand in my own.

A slow build of tortured sobs burst out of me as I lowered my forehead to Adanaho’s chest and shook with grief. For her. For my alien friend. For the fate of two species apparently committed to annihilation.

After a few moments I heard the Queen Mother suddenly rise up, her wings unfolding and extending to maximum width. I opened my eyes and looked. Enough light was coming down into the Canyon now that I could see her clearly. She watched the sky.

Loud, thunderous, mechanized whining to my rear me told me that the drop pods had finally come. Multiple buzzing sounds told me the shock troops—their armored discs studded with a variety of lethal weapons—were on top of us.

Perhaps it was for the best. To end things in this manner.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to live to see the mantis war machine slowly grind the planets of human space to powder. Instead of a quick termination, now there would be a long, drawn out, dreadful fist fight as the Fleet contracted and toughened its defensive circle. World after world would be “cleansed” of humanity. Until at last Earth would fall under mantis crosshairs.

The final stand.

And then…humanity would join the handful of other extinct races in the mantis archives. A dead people, wiped from the face of the galaxy by a species determined to have the stars to itself.

I kept my eyes closed and held the captain’s hand tight.

The buzzing was loud now. They had to be just meters away.

A sharp hissing cut through the mechanized sound. It was a shrill, painful sound, almost like fingernails on a chalk board. I reflexively looked up to see the source, and saw the Queen Mother hovering over myself and Adanaho, her wings fluttering and beating the air ferociously. Her mouth was open as wide as possible and her tractor teeth were vibrating so quickly they were a blur. It must have taken an astounding effort for her manage the display, but it had gotten the attention of her subordinates.

Several dozen mantis soldiers surrounded us, looking unsure of what to do. Those in the front rank were recoiling at the sight of the Queen Mother, a mantis without her carriage, unchained, feral, her insect eyes adamant.

Her hiss slowly died in her throat, followed by a rapid series of clicks and clacks as she spoke to her people in their own language. I couldn’t be sure what she was saying, but their reaction was immediate. A path opened through the mass of soldiers allowing four other mantes to maneuver forward. I didn’t see weapons on their discs. In fact, their discs seemed like the Professor’s.

Were these medics?

I could only guess.

Two of them converged on the remains of the Professor. The other two on the Queen Mother herself, who settled onto her small lower legs and began to instruct the lot of them, her forelimbs waving and pointing with the distinct authority of one bred to rule.

None of them touched me. Nor the body of the captain.

The troops moved back, then began to disperse.

Securing the area, no doubt.

I slowly sat up, tears and mucus down the front of my wet uniform, and glared at the Queen Mother. She sat on the sand, her wings folded tightly and her beak shut. She glared right back, her eyes alien but her posture erect and dignified.

Eventually the medics returned with what appeared to be a small disc—a carriage without an owner. Though I guessed by size that it was only temporary, for the Queen Mother’s benefit.

She looked at me for a long while, not saying anything, and me not saying anything to her. Then she slowly climbed aboard the disc and settled into the saddle. A series of squeaking and mechanical snapping sounds told me she was being re-integrated. She shuddered once and her mouth opened in irritation, then she settled down and the disc rose off the ground.

Hovering over to myself and the body of the captain, the Queen mother announced, “Pick up your captain. There is a transport waiting for us. I have a truce to call!”

Chapter 14

Thirteen weeks later, I was in orbit around Earth.

It had taken a long time for the Queen Mother to regain full control of her forces. And longer than that to convince Fleet that the Queen Mother’s overtures of peace were sincere. Several human planets had been destroyed. Along with several mantis worlds too. For the first time, the fight had not been one-way. And though the weaponry of humanity had been more primitive, it had proven to be just as effective.

Millions were dead. Mantis and human.

Past a certain point, body count ceased to matter.

What mattered now was that the Queen Mother and her top officers were getting ready to meet with Fleet Command and its top officers with the intention of signing, not just a cease fire, but a permanent treaty of non-aggression.

My uniform had been cleaned and prepared for the occasion by my mantis aides—assigned to me by the Queen Mother herself. They’d managed to get almost all of captain Adanaho’s blood out of the fabric, save for a vague discoloring of some of the lighter piping.

The captain herself rested in a stasis casket.

The mantes had spared no effort preparing the body.

The transparent lid of the casket showed Adanaho in a flowing one-piece gown woven from traditional mantis silks. I’d told them how to go about it. They’d wanted her presented to Fleet Command with as much dignity as could be mustered—a token of their good will, and also in honor of Adanaho’s act of sacrifice in defense of the Queen Mother.

I stood staring at Adanaho’s face while our mantis shuttle maneuvered through Earth orbit in order to dock with the Fleet space station on the far side of the world. Thankfully there was gravity. Something I hoped human engineers would replicate soon.

The Queen Mother stood next to me. No disc. A small package of electronics had instead been attached to her thorax with flexible straps: a translator box and speaker grill for communications.

The mantis guards at the hatches did have discs, polished and bright. The guards themselves were rigid with respect.

“She was too young,” I said sadly, not daring to touch the captain’s casket. Adanaho looked pristine now. Immaculate. I didn’t want to disrespect what she’d accomplished by treating the casket like mere furniture. I had decided it was a kind of monument, both to the horrible bloodshed which had taken place, and to the new shoots of possibility which had sprouted amidst the ashes.

“And I am too old,” said the Queen Mother. “Age has made me cynical. I had thought the one you called Professor to be an eccentric. I humored him just long enough to achieve my own ends. And now I find my universe transformed beyond reckoning.”

“Do you miss your carriage?” I asked.

“Oh yes, all the time,” she said. “But after our recovery from the planet’s surface, it became apparent to me that there could be no going back. Not for me. Your captain was correct. Our carriages have come to define us in ways we neither understand nor suspect. It took having mine ripped away from me to make me see what we mantes have lost in the long time since we first achieved sapience.”

“And what is it you think you’re regaining?”

The Queen Mother considered my question for a moment, then she said, “Illumination.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Oh?”

“If I understand the human use of the term, it means an emergence into a state of deeper understanding—of the universe, of the self, of the meaning of both.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I said. “What will you do now?”

“Once the treaty is signed and reparations meted out, I will call the Quorum of the Select together and a new Queen Mother will be chosen.”

“You’re quitting?” I said, surprised.

“I must. Already I am an oddity among my people. They need someone who can lead them during this transition, and it cannot be me.”

“But the treaty is
your
idea,” I said. “What if the new Queen Mother decides to throw it away and re-start the war?”

“We do not behave so rashly, despite what you may think, Padre. It took us a long time to reach the conclusion that war must be renewed. It would take an even longer time for us to reach the conclusion that the new peace must be destroyed. There is an additional human name circulating in the Quorum now. The heroism of Captain Adanaho—for me, for the reclamation of the cease-fire—will live eternally in the memories of the mantes.”

I bowed my head, eyes closed, remembering the captain’s last words to me. They’d hit me in a place so deep I’d not even known it existed. And whether she knew it or not, the captain had bound me to this alien who now stood at my side—the matriarch of all I’d once feared.

I also remembered the Professor. The one who’d originally sought me out of curiosity, and upon whom so much had depended in the long run. That he’d died trying to protect the three of us—Adanaho, the Queen Mother, and myself—only seemed to cement the unspoken pact. Blood for blood. The life of a mantis hero for the life of a human heroine, each given freely so that there might be a future for both races.

If I had anything to say about it, the Professor’s prominence in human lore would be every bit as great as Adanaho’s was becoming among the aliens.

Aliens.
I smiled slightly and shook my head. Time to get that word out of my system. The mantes had proven to be every bit as
human
as any woman or man I’d ever known. To include their capacity for regret, and a longing for redemption.

“And once you’re free of responsibility,” I said to the Queen Mother, “where will you go? Home?”

“No,” she said. “I will need time to properly dwell upon what has happened; what
is
happening. I do not yet fully comprehend what it is I am becoming without the carriage. I cannot say I am regressing, nor am I standing still. I feel as if I am pupating all over again. Only this time it’s happening inside of me. In my mind. In my…soul?”

I arched an eyebrow at her use of the word. But said nothing.