But I’d reckoned without Quillin’s suit.
Unlike Yarrow’s—unlike any siren suit I’d ever seen—it sprouted legs. Mechanized, they emerged from the hip, making no concessions to human anatomy. The legs were long enough to lift Quillin’s tail completely free of the ice. My gaze tracked up her body, registering the crossbow which she held in a double-handed grip.
“I’m sorry,” Quillin’s deep voice boomed in my skull. “Check-in’s closed.”
“Wendigo said you might be a problem.”
“Wise up. It was staged from the moment we reached the Royalist stronghold.” Still keeping the bow on me, she began to lurch across the ice. “The ferals were actors, playing dumb. The wasps were programmed to feed us bullshit.”
“It isn’t a Royalist trick, Quillin.”
“Shit. See I’m gonna have to kill you as well.”
The ground jarred, more violently than before. A nimbus of white light puffed above the horizon, evidence of an impact on the splinter’s far side. Quillin stumbled, but her legs corrected the misstep before it tripped her forward.
“I don’t know if you’re keeping up with current events,” I said. “But that’s our own side.”
“Maybe you didn’t think hard enough. Why did wasps in the Swirl get smart before the trillions of wasps back in Sol system? Should have been the other way round.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course, Spirey. GE’s wasps had a massive head start.” She shrugged, but the bow stayed rigidly pointed. “Okay, war sped up wasp evolution here. But that shouldn’t have made so much difference. That’s where the story breaks down.”
“Not quite.”
“What?”
“Something Wendigo told me. About what she called the second imperative. I guess it wasn’t something she found out until she went underground.”
“Yeah? Astonish me.”
Well, something astonished Quillin at that point—but I was only marginally less surprised by it myself. An explosion of ice, and a mass of swiftly moving metal erupting from the ground around her. The wasp corpses were partially dismembered, blasted, and half-melted—but they still managed to drag Quillin to the ground. For a moment she thrashed, kicking up plumes of frost. Then the whole mass lay deathly still, and it was just me, the ice, and a lot of metal and blood.
The Queen must have coaxed activity out of a few of the wasp corpses, ordering them to use their last reserves of power to take out Quillin.
Thanks, Queen.
But no cigar. Quillin hadn’t necessarily meant to shoot me at that point, but—bless her—she had anyway. The bolt had transected me with the precision of one of the Queen’s theorems, somewhere below my sternum. Gut-shot. The blood on the ice was my own.
I tried moving.
A couple of light-years away I saw my body undergo a frail little shiver. It didn’t hurt, but there was nothing in the way of proprioceptive feedback to indicate I’d actually managed to twitch any part of my body.
Quillin was moving, too. Wriggling, that is, since her suit’s legs had been cleanly ripped away by the wasps. Other than that she didn’t look seriously injured. Ten or so meters from me, she flopped around like a maggot and groped for her bow. What remained of it anyway.
Chalk one to the good guys.
By which time I was moving, executing a marginally quicker version of Quillin’s slug crawl. I couldn’t stand up—there are limits to what pilot physiology can cope with—but my legs gave me leverage she lacked.
“Give up, Spirey. You have a head start on me, and right now you’re a little faster—but that ship’s still a long way off.” Quillin took a moment to catch her breath. “Think you can sustain that pace? Gonna need to, if you don’t want me catching up.”
“Plan on rolling over me until I suffocate?”
“That’s an option. If this doesn’t kill you first.”
Enough of her remained in my field-of-view to see what she meant. Something sharp and bladelike had sprung from her wrist, a bayonet projecting half a meter ahead of her hand. It looked like a nasty little toy—but I did my best to push it out of mind and get on with the job of crawling toward the ship. It was no more than two hundred meters away now—what little of it protruded above the ice. The external airlock was already open, ready to clamp shut as soon as I wriggled inside—
“You never finished telling me, Spirey.”
“Telling you what?”
“About this—what did you call it? The second imperative?”
“Oh, that.” I halted and snatched breath. “Before I go on, I want you to know I’m only telling you this to piss you off.”
“Whatever bakes your cake.”
“All right,” I said. “Then I’ll begin by saying you were right. Greater Earth’s wasps should have made the jump to sentience long before those in the Swirl, simply because they’d had longer to evolve. And that’s what happened.”
Quillin coughed, like gravel in a bucket. “Pardon?”
“They beat us to it. About a century and a half ago. Across Sol system, within just a few hours, every single wasp woke up and announced its intelligence to the nearest human being it could find. Like babies reaching for the first thing they see.” I stopped, sucking in deep lungfuls. The wreck had to be closer now—but it hardly looked it.
Quillin, by contrast, looked awfully close now—and that blade awfully sharp.
“So the wasps woke,” I said, damned if she wasn’t going to hear the whole story. “And that got some people scared. So much, some of them got to attacking the wasps. Some of their shots went wide, because within a day the whole system was one big shooting match. Not just humans against wasps—but humans against humans.” Less than fifty meters now, across much smoother ground than we’d so far traversed. “Things just escalated. Ten days after Solar War Three began, only a few ships and habitats were still transmitting. They didn’t last long.”
“Crap,” Quillin said—but she sounded less cocksure than she had a few moments before. “There was a war back then, but it never escalated into a full-blown Solar War.”
“No. It went the whole hog. From then on every signal we ever got from GE was concocted by wasps. They dared not break the news to us—at least not immediately. We’ve only been allowed to find out because we’re never going home. Guilt, Wendigo called it. They couldn’t let it happen again.”
“What about our wasps?”
“Isn’t it obvious? A while later the wasps here made the same jump to sentience—presumably because they’d been shown the right moves by the others. Difference was, ours kept it quiet. Can’t exactly blame them, can you?”
There was nothing from Quillin for a while, both of us concentrating on the last patch of ice before Wendigo’s ship.
“I suppose you have an explanation for this, too,” she said eventually, swiping her tail against the ground. “C’mon, blow my mind.”
So I told her what I knew. “They’re bringing life to the Swirl. Sooner than you think, too. Once this charade of a war is done, the wasps breed in earnest. Trillions out there now, but in a few decades it’ll be billions of trillions. They’ll outweigh a good-sized planet. In a way the Swirl will have become sentient. It’ll be directing its own evolution.”
I spared Quillin the details—how the wasps would arrest the existing processes of planetary formation so that they could begin anew, only this time according to a plan. Left to its own devices, the Swirl would contract down to a solar system comprised solely of small, rocky planets—but such a system could never support life over billions of years. Instead, the wasps would exploit the system’s innate chaos to tip it toward a state where it would give rise to at least two much larger worlds—planets as massive as Jupiter or Saturn, capable of shepherding leftover rubble into tidy, world-avoiding orbits. Mass extinctions had no place in the Splinterqueens’ vision of future life.