“Oh, my God.” There was a truth to this story that resonated. It felt more true than any Sunday sermon she’d ever been forced to attend by her pious grandparents.
“Many believed Terra was a myth—that the Cunabula intended us to search for you, in order to expand our boundaries and search for alliances, rather than be complacent or accept the inevitable. There have been Sectilius searching for you for all of recorded time. Now we have found you and still we have failed.”
“But what did the Sectilius intend to do?”
“Bring you into the Alliance.”
“But how? Are there Sectilius on Earth now?”
“Alas, no. We were implementing the early stages—learning about your culture, gathering specimens—”
“What kind of specimens?”
“Humans, of course. A necessary step. It was decided that a group of Sectilius would be surgically altered to pass among you, to infiltrate your governmental-militaristic-industrial complexes, to gain trust before revealing their origins and goals. Specimens were needed to study certain features of human anatomy and physiology. We did not harm them. They were returned.” He sounded affronted in the face of her revulsion.
“The universe is insane. The shuttle—the crashed shuttle in New Mexico—that was Sectilius too?”
“Indeed. The inhabitants were en route to Terra when….”
“Oh. I see.”
“Yes. It led you here, however. Perhaps all will be well, Dr. Jane Holloway.” Hope surged in him again.
Jane felt dazed. She struggled to make sense of everything she’d just been told. “We were meant to be this way. Not to fight the worst aspects of our nature, but to embrace them.”
“Just so. To exploit your inherent qualities, in the service of others. It is the belief of many that they hoped to create a warrior class that would turn the tide, yet leave their brethren to live in peace. To respect the diversity and protect it.”
“But they abandoned us. They didn’t follow through.”
“A mystery, true.”
“It’s too much to ask. They poisoned us. We’re not…happy.”
“Many suffer. Many exceed these limitations. Be grateful it is the Sectilius that found your world first. Not the Swarm.”
Jane gasped. She inhabited the memory of a young Sectilius woman, fighting to squeeze herself and her children into an escape vessel. A fearful mob crushed them, bruising skin, cracking bones, in the desperate struggle to survive. Shielding one child in her arms, another clinging to her waist, she could smell the coppery scent of blood. She could hear the clamor of the anguished, the plaintive. And over that, a deafening, ominous roar.
The sky darkened and lowered, pressing down, a blanket of flashing, metallic bodies streaming over every living thing like locusts. The hatch closed, severing limbs, and the vessel was away, sluggish, overburdened by a mass of frail, living mankind. Children cried. Men and women keened. She watched through the small portal in the hatch as her world disappeared forever under the gnashing jaws of the Swarm.
“No!” she cried out, involuntarily—an outraged denial—and she wasn’t sure whom it came from—the woman who had lost too much—or from herself. She could not unsee the violence she had witnessed. She could not unknow the pain or terror.
She curled into herself, ineffectually trying to protect herself from the horror.
“Dr. Jane Holloway,” Ei’Brai purred, buoying her into a warm embrace, tendrils of soothing thoughts flowing over her and through her mind. She began to breathe again, in strangled, gasping sobs as the tightness in her chest slowly subsided.
She choked out, “Why would you show that to me?”
“I could not allow you to trivialize the need. This is what we face.”
Images continued to trickle through the connection with Ei’Brai, gentler now, more like a documentary than first-hand experience. They seemed less immediately threatening. Her pulse slowed.
Immense insectile creatures sunned themselves on a hillside. The scale was astonishing. The group of arthropods, all the size of elephants, roused themselves, lifting armored carapaces and unfolding monstrous leathery wings. They took flight, hunting a herd of a deer-like mammal. The deer didn’t stand a chance. It was over in moments.
“The Swarm is a formidable foe. They developed first as you see here, large-scale, flying insects, dominating their home world, carnivorous and ruthless, with little to keep them in check. Their population reached unsustainable, peak levels, their food supply over-hunted to extinction. It might have meant the end of their species, or merely a chance for another species to rise to dominance. Then a single individual was born with a mutation that allowed it to seek prey under the surface of water.”
A graphic formed behind her eyes—a 3-D, transparent depiction of the insect’s anatomy, highlighting some kind of swim-bladder. “That individual survived to procreate, to create a new lineage that was more versatile. They ravaged their home world eon upon eon, populations rising and falling, multiple adaptations allowing them to consume more and more of their world, until the day came that that world could no longer sustain them.”
There was a large group of them diving in concert, scooping up sea-life, then basking on a sandy shore. The sequence changed smoothly from image to image showing the gradual changes in the insect’s evolving morphology. Words like ‘hydrolysis,’ ‘storage organ,’ and ‘organic fission reaction’ were highlighted along with various parts of the arthropodal anatomy, now very much changed from its original form.
Ei’Brai showed her a sandy ocean floor. A school of large fish swam into view. The sea-floor lifted as one. As far as the eye could see, streamlined aquatic insects rose from under the sand to devour every fish in sight.
“They move in concert, like hive insects,” Jane murmured.
“Indeed.”
The insects rose to the surface in formation and soared into the sky, higher and higher into the clouds, leaving thin, white jet-trails behind them. As they gained altitude, their numbers became fewer as those who could not sustain the velocity needed to escape gravity dropped off. Only a few broke free of the atmosphere. The viewpoint zoomed in to reveal one of them was female with a fully mature egg-sack attached.
They drifted through space, homing in on another blue-green sphere, the moon of another planet in the habitable zone of that solar system, also rife with life. One individual survived the heat and stress of reentry. A male. He found the dead female, fertilized her eggs, then began to hunt.
“A new species was born, their unique adaptations allowing them to eventually move between stars—to consume a world’s resources and lay eggs for the next generation of devastation to begin. They do not give themselves a name, do not communicate with their prey, never acknowledge sentience in another species. It is unknown if they have language or culture. The Sentients have given them the name, the Swarm.”
Jane shuddered.
“Your kind considers outsiders to be alien. The Swarm is truly alien, without conscience or soul. There is no other consideration for them, beyond sating hunger.”
The lesson was over. The shadowy darkness returned.
“You knew that woman? The one in the memory?” Even as she spoke, she knew the answer.
“She was the Quasador Dux of this vessel. She gave her life to find your world.”
“After surviving that…she…. I don’t know what to do with this. What am I supposed to do now?”