You are not worthy! their eyes said. They expelled a stench, a signal to usher him along.
Belowgen walked away in a huff.
You will beg me to fertilize your eggs once I'm heralded as the slayer of humans!
He walked onward, leaving the haughty females behind. Finally he reached the Great Henge.
A ring of iron shards rose on a hilltop like a jagged crown. Centuries ago, the shards had fallen from the sky, but they had never rusted, not even in the swamp. The ancient marshcrabs had believed them the blades of gods. They had dug the relics from the mud and arranged them into a henge, forming a holy place for the elders to gather.
Today marshcrabs had seen space, understood technology, and even built starships of their own from parts they purchased from other species. Today marshcrabs recognized these fallen shards as debris from an ancient space battle. And yet the Great Henge was still holy, and the elders of the swamps still gathered here.
Belowgen walked between two of the towering iron shards, pieces of an ancient hull. Within the henge, he saw the elders.
They stood in a ring, each marshcrab with his back to a relic shard. They were towering crabs, wise and powerful, mighty breeders who had fertilized many eggs. Their shells were not rusty-red like Belowgen's. As elders, they had shed their red exoskeletons, and their new shells were deep brown mottled with black warts. To this day, every female offered them her eggs, and their offspring crawled across the swamps.
"Walk forth, young Belowgen," said an elder, his white barbels fluttering over his mouth. "Your news has concerned the council. Come tell us more."
Belowgen stiffened his joints, steeling himself. He had never stepped into the Great Henge before. This was an honor! He only wished he could come with better tidings.
He walked into the center of the henge. The mud was soft and rich here, deeply aromatic, filled with oozing rot. The finest animals were brought to decay here, to fill the henge with their nutrients. The elders stood around Belowgen, staring from every side. He wanted to cringe under their stare, to drown in the mud, but forced himself to stay standing.
Someday I vow to become an elder myself, he thought. To stand in this henge and feed from this mud. To fertilize any eggs I desire.
"Tell us your tidings," said an elder. "Tell us of . . . the humans."
The other elders hissed and clacked their mandibles.
"Pests!" they said. "Vermin! Crawling evil!"
Belowgen nodded. "They are indeed pests, wise elders. And they are evil. And they have infested Paradise Lost."
He spent a while telling the tale. How the human named Rowan had crawled into the ducts, evading every exterminator. How she had been breeding in the walls. How he had hired the bonecrawlers, the most expensive exterminators in the galaxy, yet even they had failed. How the humans were breeding again, had multiplied to three, would soon become three hundred, then three millions.
"They will overwhelm Paradise Lost!" Belowgen said. "And they will reach even Akraba and spread. They will dry up our swamps, and disperse our fog, and cut down our trees. They will ruin this world. They are an ancient evil, one we cannot defeat alone."
The elders looked at one another, huffing. For a long while, they muttered amongst themselves, voices too low for Belowgen to hear. Insects buzzed around them, and slugs sloshed through the mud. The sun reached its zenith, a splotch behind the fog and clouds, heating the rancid air into a thick stew.
Finally one of the marshcrabs, the eldest with the thickest shell, clattered forward. He cleared his throat and spoke with a raspy voice, barbells fluttering.
"Our path is clear. The humans are too much of a danger. We cannot let them spread." The elder huffed. "The only race that can exterminate the humans is the Skra-Shen, the great scorpions, masters of the Hierarchy. Their claws are sharp. Their shells are thick. They are arachnids like we are, yet even mightier. We will call the scorpions. We will join them. We will summon their armies here. Akraba will withdraw from the Concord, this weak alliance that cannot protect us shelled creatures, and join the Hierarchy!"
"Hail the Hierarchy!" cried the other elders. "Hail the Hierarchy!"
"Hail the Hierarchy!" Belowgen called with them.
His barbels fluttered with excitement, and he huffed and grunted with joy. Yet as Belowgen was flying back to Paradise Lost, leaving his homeworld below, he gazed across the border into the darkness, and his legs clattered with fear.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Emet entered the bridge of the ISS Cagayan de Oro, sat at the helm, and turned to look at Rowan.
"Ready, Private Emery?" he said.
Rowan hesitated at the doorway, wearing her new Inheritor uniform, her pistol at her side. She nodded, lips tight, and saluted.
"Ready, sir."
She took her seat beside him, and Emet nodded.
"Then let's go," he said, smiling at her.
Rowan wiped tears from her eyes. "Let's go," she whispered.
Emet started the engines and began taxiing the starship across the hangar, heading toward the exit. Beyond the force field, the stars shone. Emet knew what this moment meant for Rowan.
For fourteen years, she hid in this wretched space station, he thought. Nearly all her life. For the first time, she'll have freedom. She'll fly among the stars.
He looked at the girl. She was staring ahead, eyes shining. There was goodness to the child. There was courage and strength and honor.
She looks so much like her father, he thought.
His heart twisted.
You broke my heart, David, he thought. But I still love you. And I promise you, I will do whatever I can to keep your daughter safe.
He looked out to space and his heart felt heavy.
Of course, Rowan had a sister too. A sister named Jade. And that one was, perhaps, beyond his help.
Jade. The girl who—
Pain stabbed Emet's chest like an ice pick.
Not now. He would not let that old memory surface.
He tightened his lips, pushed down on the throttle, and the Cagayan de Oro flew out into space.
The space station grew smaller behind. Soon it was just a sparkling cylinder in space, glowing with a neon halo.
All around the Cagayan de Oro, this small corvette-class warship, spread space. Akraba, a greenish-brown planet, hovered in the distance. Terminus Wormhole shimmered above. A spiral arm of the Milky Way spread like a path before them. The stars shone.
Rowan rose from her seat, walked toward the viewport, and gaped.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Emet said.
Tears filled the girl's eyes. "I've never seen so many stars. There must be hundreds of them!"
Emet smiled. "A bit more than hundreds."
The starlight filled her eyes, and she smiled sadly. "Back in Paradise Lost, you could never see anything through the windows. Too many neon lights. But sometimes I would climb the ducts to the very top of the space station, near the antennas, and peer through a little porthole the size of my hand. I could see two or three stars sometimes. That's the most I ever saw. I used to imagine that one of them was Sol. Earth's star. Our star." She spun toward Emet, eyes wide. "Can we see Sol from here?"
"I'm afraid not, Rowan," he said. "We don't know exactly where Sol is. But we've come up with good estimates. We think it's all the way across the galaxy, too far to see from here. Everything that you see here—all this splendor outside the viewport—is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the stars in the Milky Way. The galaxy is vast, filled with billions of stars and thousands of alien civilizations."