 
**  
Scout  
** By Bob Kite

Published by Carrie Simmons at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 Carrie Simmons

Smashwords Second Edition, License Notes  
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Art By Bob Kite

CONTENTS:

Scout Prologue  
An introduction to the Scout series, wherein humans are at war with five alien species. We are not doing well, but tend not to take defeat lying down. 3000 words

Scout & The Imuqi  
A human hybrid rises through the ranks of a race whose technology is based solely on their own manipulated physiology. 6200 words

Scout & The Sidmopisians Part 1  
The history of a post-catastrophe race of snake-like aliens as they strive to regain civilization. 7700 words

Scout & The Sidmopisians Part 2  
Scout begins his journey to seek his human heritage. 10500 words

Scout & The Dhosu  
Scout encounters a metamorphosing race of insectile creatures who have lost an important part of their life cycle. 5500 words

Scout & The Vissou  
Told in two parts, the first introducing the normal culture of a race of tentacular cephalopods before the catastrophe hits, and the second as Scout finds them years later. 5200 words

Scout & The Nuplar  
Also told in two parts, pre and post cataclysm. Some races are so alien there's just no common ground. 2700 words

Scout & His Shadow  
Scout finds more answers than he was looking for, bringing the serial to and end; for now. 3400 words

Author's Notes  
An introduction to me, my conditions, and my motivations for producing this book. 1200 words

Chapter 1: Scout Prologue

Every seat but one of the thousand within the semicircular tiered hall filled with the somber representatives of Earth and her outposts. The usual occupant of the empty seat stood in front of a slightly raised platform central to the view of the others. Seven generations had passed since circumstances required a peer to be elevated to the position of Prime Resolvetor.

She was born Rosa Digornio and retired at age fifty after an exceptional career as the History chair at a major university. She had no clue how fate had tricked her to accept the vote as humankind's prime representative, but since that time she had used that ultimate authority to declare the War of Resistance against the alien coalition. To her alone fell the ultimate responsibility to declare surrender.

In anticipation of the capitulation ceremony, she turned her official stool and small podium around from its normal position that faced the Representative's seats. It now faced a newly built balcony, just ten feet away, from which humankind's new overlords would shortly address them all.

The stage was one-hundred-fifty-feet wide by twenty-five feet deep and extended out as an open porch that overlooked the lawn of the Representative's Building. Five wide ramps descended to meet newly made roads that led to five wildly dissimilar landing craft. Preparations had continued all night, and as the first rays of sunlight filled the balcony, various doors, hatches, irises, and openings appeared among the ships.

The occupants of the chamber would not see the aliens until the procession crested the ramps onto the porch, but Rosa would get the first glimpse due to her slightly elevated position. The members of the chamber were so quiet she could hear the approach. The metal ramp acted as a sounding board and ominously magnified the tippity tappity tippity tappity sounds.

The first arrival reminded Rosa of a pinkish gray moon that smoothly rose above the horizon of the center stage. The shape stopped to survey the vanquished, fifteen feet high and ten feet wide. The alien was a nearly shapeless bag, but just under the skin, tall curved ribs held it to a wobbly gumdrop shape.

Rosa began an internal dialog but hoped to remember and keep the thoughts sub–vocalized, "I've been briefed, of course, but that thing is HUGE. Reminds me of The Blob. The 1988 remake, not the 1958 original. That one looked like chocolate jello. Great, now I'm hungry. Funny how relaxed I am since I've made peace with my decision."

The Imuqi rested on a giant living mat with fringed protrusions beneath that reminding Rosa of fingers. The base of the alien's main body quivered and extruded five irregular basketball sized items that bristled with protuberances, but they were too far away for Rosa to make out any detail. Small squares of the transport mat unhooked from the main mass and picked up one item each and headed across the stage. Two of them deposited their items on the floor to the left while two went right to do the same.

The fifth headed straight towards Rosa. To her disgust, she saw that the bottom of the mat fragment was made of perfectly detailed human fingers, albeit with nails that came to sharp points. Small bone loops fringed the edge of the mat that tinkling a moment as it stopped at the bottom of her podium. The sides of the mat curled up and inward in a motion that allowed some fingers to firmly grasp the item, then tippity-tapped up the podium and placed its burden on the surface.

Rosa froze but tried to keep her dignity and composure as she threw up in her mouth a bit. She slowly reached for a glass of water to wash down the acid taste. As the mat returned to the Imuqi, she blinked twice to activate the interactive contacts in her eyes and moved her hands in a combination of sign language and stenographer's code; "What the Hell is that?"

The "that" displayed a muzzle with three rows of sharp, needle fangs, four thin articulated rods, thousands of multi-colored dots, a somehow grotesque encircling band of who knew what, something like a black spiky grasshopper leg. Worst of all was a perfectly formed human ear and mouth.

In response to her steno'd question, translucent text flowed across her field of vision. The world's foremost experts, in every discipline that might remotely apply, gathered in the basement below.

"WE BELIEVE IT TO BE AN OMNI-COMMUNICATION DEVICE. THE INTERIOR LIKELY CONTAINS A BIO RADIO TRANSCEIVER TO REACH THE NUPLAR. WILL MONITOR. THE DELIVERY MAT IS A STANDARD IMUQI TRANSPORTATION UNIT, MOST LIKELY MODIFIED WITH HUMAN DNA TO MAKE A POINT. REMEMBER, ALL IMUQI TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES ARE SELF-AWARE, PURPOSE DESIGNED INTELLIGENT MEMBERS OF THEIR RACE."

The five mini-mats resumed their places and stiffened their bone-edged rings to slide into their neighbors and locked in place.

Rosa thought, "What point are they making using human parts; that they are ass-hats as well as monstrosities?"

A new sound caught her attention and interrupted her thoughts. It was similar to the Imuqi's tippity tappity but with a sharper, clearer staccato; skittle-skittle-skittle. Onto the stage scurried five Nuplar in "V" formation, who marched and stopped together in machine-like perfection and timing.

Each an exact duplicate as far as Rosa could tell. The bodies were three foot wide pancaked ovals to which five legs attached to rotator joints at equidistant points. Each leg started at a meaty thigh and narrowed to a rotator "knee" joint that attached to long narrow lower-leg spikes. The legs carried the central body nearly six feet off the ground. The feet were hinged, serrated scythes, capable of folding outer side down, or point to the ground.

No other protuberances or structures were in evidence other than hard, shiny white spines that jabbed out at random points along the top. With a sudden, loud snap they lowered their bodies to the ground in unison and remained perfectly still.

More text scrawled across Rosa's vision, "CONFIRMED! EACH COMM XLATOR HAS synched A CARRIER WAVE WITH AN INTERNAL XMITER WITHIN THE LEAD NUPLAR. WE NOW HAVE BOTH FREQUENCY AND CODE INDEX FOR 1ST TIME."

"The tech specialists seem excited anyway." Rosa thought, "Good for them, for the short time they have left anyway."

She felt as much as heard a rumble that came up another ramp. The right half of the stage sparkled with hypnotic waves of multicolored lights that reminding Rosa of historical footage of a short-lived dance phase historically called "disco." The intensity of the lights dimmed slightly as the source rolled into view on stage.

A giant water filled globe, nearly as tall as the Imuqi, settled into place as a few creaks issued from the stage floor. A tubular handle jutted out both sides from what looked like large gimbals and curved together in the lower front to form a small platform.

Four dull brown, two-foot long tentacles wrapped around the seat. A bulbous head protruded above the radial tentacles and dragged along the ground, encircled by a single band of photo-transceivers. The Vissou dropped to the floor with a squelch, grabbed the translator, and placed it on the platform.

Inside the globe, several groupings of intertwined Vissou, the source of the pulsating light show, synchronized patterned pulses that repeated from the lights on the five translators. When finished, each group fell back into individuals..

Rhetorical text interrupted Rosa's fascination, "GROUP MENTALITIES! THE FEW BATTLE SURVIVORS WE CAPTURED DID NOT SEEM INTELLIGENT ENOUGH FOR VISSOU LEVEL OF TECHNOLOGY. WE NEVER THOUGHT TO PLACE THEM TOGETHER FOR STUDY, OR IN WATER. MIGHT HAVE TURNED THE WAR EFFORT."

"I'm so proud of my people," Rosa thought, "We could have won against two or three races, but not all five cooperating."

As Rosa looked deeper into the water, she noticed small fish swim frantically about as the occasional tentacle brought the snack into a gaping maw below the head sack.

"Looks more like a snow globe than a fish tank," she thought, "and I'm still hungry, only now I'm craving sushi!" She felt chagrined as she had pictured Vissou shaped calamari.

The Sephians arrived by ones and twos over the next fifteen minutes and glided a few feet above the stage with their ribs expanded along the length of four-foot long cobra-like bodies. They landed nose up as strong-clawed rear legs took the brunt of their weight. Rosa congratulated herself on keeping her composure in the face of ten giant slithery, slimy, sneaky, shifty snakes.

"Let's be fair," she thought, "they probably aren't really slimy. Maybe it's not their fault. All the other aliens are so damn alien it's hard to accept their reality. Sephians, on the other hand..." Such diplomatic thoughts dropped to the pit of her bowels as twelve feet of ophidiophobian nightmare swayed onto the stage.

Her head sat six feet above a widely splayed underbelly as if displaying her magnificence for all to see with jaws opened to exhibit three rows of wickedly curved fangs. Two of the four ropy appendages attached to the jaw reached up to wipe across cold, intense eyes that seemed to stare directly at Rosa.

She could not help but look away as an involuntary shudder quivered through her whole body. Thankfully, a beauteous chorus of melodic whistles restored her self-control. The Sephian Queen tested the translator to her satisfaction but still transfixed Rosa's attention.

Less than a minute had passed before the final assemblage arrived at the opposite side of the stage. Three nine-foot shapes few in and gently hovered inches above the floor. At low speed, the dragonfly style translucent wings reflected highlights of red that matched the stripe along the bottom of their bodies. The front segment of the insectoid bodies ended in a flexible, tapered cone while menacing pincers snapped at the rear. Three simple eyes sat atop each of the three segments and sprouted wire-like feelers between each.

The Dhosu suddenly flew a patrol to reconnoiter the entire building, beginning with the seated representatives. Despite their trepidation, the humans appreciated the grace and beauty of the flyers as the morning sunlight rainbowed against their wings in a cloud of soft color.

Seemingly satisfied but remaining vigilant, they returned to hover above their spot on the stage with a deep humming thrum. The apparent leader, a three segmented caterpillar nearly six feet long, unpretentiously approached a translator and began touching and stroking it. In response, the translator on Rosa's podium reached out the four articulated rods and stroked her hand.

She jerked back, did NOT squeal, but did say, "Shit!" which she heard echoed in tiny but perfect imitation by the horrid little human mouths in the other translators. She thought, "Shit! Was that my out loud voice?" Across her eye lenses, she read, "DON'T WORRY RESOLVETOR, THEY ALL SEEM TO BE IN SYNCHRONIZE/TEST MODE. WE ARE FAIRLY CERTAIN THEY ARE NOT TRANSLATING YET. WE ALL THINK YOU ARE DOING A FANTASTIC JOB AND HAVE OUR FULL CONFIDENCE."

Rosa blinked twice and replied via virtual-steno, "Thanks, all, I guess I'm a little more keyed up than I let myself believe."

Two of the Dhosu flyers resumed hover mode, but the third, evidently bothered by something, slowly edged across the stage. It reached the top of the Vissou water globe when two of the smaller Sephian snakes uncoiled and jumped directly at the intruder. Even with lightning quick reactions, mouths agape and exposed row of tiny fangs, the Sephians stood no chance.

The Dhosu turned and canted on wing so quickly it appeared to have jumped to a new position. The front snout curved to aim and spat a softball sized gooey gob at one attacker, which burst into white-hot flame on contact that instantly turned its head to ash. Simultaneously, the rear pincers grabbed the other attacker while a two-foot long stinger stabbed out, mortally impaling it.

The stinger withdrew while the pincer cleanly snipped the serpentine body in two. One-half of the body fell onto the Vissou globe, where it flashed to steam on contact with an invisible barrier. The second fell to the stage and split to expose unfamiliar organs. Despite the burnt stench and putrid miasmatic innards, none of the aliens seemed to take notice as the Dhosu leisurely flew back to its posting.

Rosa thought, "Are we the only intelligence in all of creation with a sense of smell? Well, at least I'm not hungry anymore."

The Queen Sephian finally deigned to notice the mess when a trickle of gore pooled between her toes. She whistled a terse melody through her teeth and her court quickly but unceremoniously pushed the remains off the back of the stage. The humans had no way to know, but two fewer rivals for the Queen's attention actually raised the smaller serpents' spirits.

The atmosphere within the building changed; an utter stillness that presages historical moments - events not accompanied by complete chaos anyway. The front, bottom edge of the immense bulk of the Imuqi rippled to push out another universal translator. It began to rumble, and each of the other translators whistled, tapped, flashed, vibrated, and spoke. Speakers throughout the building amplified and repeated the words from the tiny human mouth that rested on Rosa's podium.

As a historian, Rosa had first authored The Plan. As Prime Resolvetor, she then authorized The Plan. Nevertheless, as Rosa Digornio, Mr. and Mrs. Digornio's little girl, she alone felt the burden of implementation of The Plan. Humanity's social evolution had reached a peak where every citizen accepted both personal and social responsibility. Every citizen cast aside both ego and fear, and everyone accepted that ultimate authority and ultimate responsibility went hand in hand. Rosa was, by consensus, the one to hold that authority.

Fate chose her for that trust, but she felt the weight of the entire race on her shoulders. Not just those on Earth, but also the bulk of humanity that was scattered among the stars. She blinked her right eye twice, blinked her left eye twice, then carefully virtual-steno'd the phrase "Scorched Earth". A flashing red timer appeared in Rosa's upper left field of vision: "16:00"; "15:59"; "15:58"...

"BE IT RESOLVED," pronounced the horrid little mouth on her podium, "Be it resolved by the Co-op of Peoples, in order to maintain tradition and prosperity within our galaxy, that the race known as humans is henceforth declared invalid and inconvenient, to be scattered and husbanded by the wiser races of creation. Your planet, outpost, territories, possessions, and peoples to be parceled as follows."

The Vissou collective flashed in unison while the translator mouth continued, "Be it resolved; all bodies of water of salt shall be the domain of the Vissou, to five kilometers inland, including all islands, peninsulas and measures of land less than five kilometers in size, to be ruled, without interference, by our blessed Elder Prophets."

The Queen Sephian whistled a simple tune in her turn, "Be it resolved, all areas of land receiving less than ten inches moisture annually shall be the domain of Sephia, to be ruled as I see fit."

The Dhosu leader stroked the translator to relate, "Be it resolved; all mountains and hills shall be ours, as well as unimpeded access to deposits of coal wherever they may reside. These territories shall be parceled to proven Dhosu breeders for the asking, regardless of Clan or Color, subject to a twenty-five percent levy of said coal."

The Nuplar remained absolutely still, but the translator spoke, "Be it resolved; all else on planet ours, all else off planet ours."

The Imuqi again spoke, "Be it resolved, as Adjudicator of Imuqi, I relinquish rights to all the aforementioned in exchange for exclusive rights to the humans' DNA, in vitro or in carne, to exploit, experiment or extinguish as we see fit. Prime Resolvetor, as the sole voice for your peoples, in order to end this war and its atrocities, and in hope to preserve somewhat of your legacies, you must now accept by pronouncing the words 'So be it resolved!' "

Rosa was sure she could feel the eyes of her world upon her. The timer, which only she saw, changed to 1:59. She could choose just to walk away, or sit down and cry as she felt like doing. Yet, some deep impish impulse driven perhaps by her ancient Sicilian blood convinced her otherwise.

She stood straight and calm and asked, "May I make a brief statement, for the posterity of all peoples?

She could see the various translators speaking between the aliens, quieting as the little mouth in front of her said, "Stay brief, and be certain to end with the legality, 'So be it resolved!'"

Rosa thought, "Be It Resolved! I am the Prime Resolvetor of humankind, you gargantuan pus bag! I'll show you Resolved."

The timer dropped to 01:13, but she waited three more seconds.

"One thing my academic career has been good for is timing a speech," she thought, aware of the irony.

At 01:10 exactly, she began, "In just three generations, we humans outgrew our inherited territorial aggressions. None go hungry, we apportion resources fairly in the rare circumstances rationing is necessary, and every citizen has an equal opportunity to fulfill their potential. Love, compassion, and sibling-hood abound. No longer, in any form, do we practice predation. Invention and frugality protect both our planet and our people.

We sent ambassadors to the farthest reaches to share this good news, this gift of maturity and harmony. In response, we are forced, by you, to do what now we must, to protect our species across the years and across the galaxy.

As Prime Resolvetor and ultimate spokesperson for the entire human race, in consideration of our finest history, traditions, and convictions, I say to the leaders, representatives, and every single entity that participated in our defeat...Fuck...You!", as the timer reached 00:00.

Human and alien alike babbled in confusion, first at the unexpected expletive, then in shock as the sunlight darkened by several hues. All watched in a daze as, angled between the stage and the roof, the sun shrank to one-hundredth of normal size, eviscerated, then ejected a ball of plasma at near light speed.

Rosa had sent the code "Scorched Earth" sixteen minutes earlier, a policy term she had learned by studying ancient wars. A secure signal raced to a nearby repeater which in turn sent an even stronger encoded signal to a relay in orbit around the sun. A small, automated box pushed a small parcel towards the central core. The weapon only dropped halfway through the irradiative zone before the magnetic barrier that separated plasma from anti-plasma collapsed. As with horseshoes and hand grenades, close enough counted.

Rosa watched the bulbous, self-aware landing craft of the Imuqi attempt to flee the planet in futile panic. Its bilious fleshly skin smoldered as it left the momentary buffer of the atmosphere as she whispered to herself, "And the horse you rode in on!"

~end~

Chapter 2: Scout And The Imuqi

At the inception of the war, Earth's Collective Representatives realized they probably would lose. They voted on and approved several doomsday projects, the primary focus on the survival of the entire human race. To this end, millions of tiny nursery ships that contained DNA samples and nanotech hardware moved stealthily past their enemies from every available outpost and colony. Even with advanced artificial intelligence and scanning equipment, most were fated eventually to run out of fuel before they found suitable landfall.

One ship accidentally slipped into a pan-dimensional synchronistic causal fault line, an effect of the Eldest's interference, and dropped onto a laboratory planet that resided in a time loop. The ship did not actually travel to the future, but nevertheless arrived six thousand years after the planet's initial population.

The ship landed at the inner edge of the country of Imuq on a whispering quiet landscape. The ground was covered with a tightly packed monoculture wheat-like grass that softly rustled in the occasional light breeze. Nothing else shared the land with the grass, not flying, walking, or crawling creatures nor or any other variety of plant. The ship's scanners did not even find microorganisms in the soil.

After cautiously conducting test protocols for a full month, the ship intelligence found no reason to halt its pre-programmed re-genesis program. First, it prepared the soil by cloning earthworms and added nutrients created molecularly by nanobots, and then planted sufficient crops to feed eighty children. Meanwhile, nano-excavation provided enough raw materials to form artificial wombs, nanny-bots, and shelter for the soon to be born babies.

The colony existed under near idyllic circumstances for the first five years, but not unnoticed. Without warning, a dozen armor-bodied creatures with appendages designed to stab, cut, serrate, tear, entangle, and spew exploded from the Imuq warren, intent on the total obliteration of the interlopers. The children stood transfixed as the marauders came upon them. The few defensive units the ship contained, packed away after so many menace-free years, took much too long to activate.

The bulbous Imuq Eradicator units disassembled their targets, meticulously gathered every alien biological contaminant whether animal, vegetable, or microbe into piles, and sat on them. At a nod from their young gumdrop-shaped Empathor leader, the Eradicator's skin emitted surging streams of a viscous liquid and began to dissolve. The toxic slime oozed into and destroyed every foreign cell structure at a sub-atomic level, which accomplished the goal for which the Eradicators were born.

The onsite Empathor, near the top of the Imuqi political ladder, made one exception. He a surreptitiously hid a tiny drop of human blood deep within his body. Empathor, as all Imuqi, had no knowledge of machines. He decided the ship was not alive, so pulled a softball sized Imuq from a body fold and tossed him on top of the ship. The self-aware weapon stuck, opened an orifice, and spewed a cloud of droplets that thoroughly encased the ship and its remaining contents in a solid calcium carbonate covering. Pleased with a job competently finished, and relishing a quiet feeling of rebellion because of the hidden blood droplet, Empathor returned alone to the underground warren.

~Five Years Earlier~

Within one of the deepest live chambers in the vast Imuq warren, the Strategors of Propagation, Population, and Acquisition shared a moment of cogitative quietude before they commenced council. The three were physically identical; slightly violet, giant jello-mounds supported by internal, vertically curved ribs. Their purpose was social planning and strategy, so their bodies had no need of superfluous limbs.

Their design called for optimized brainpower, analysis, and clarity, balanced with a minimum of emotional aptitude. This combination allowed for the best possible decision-making processes based on flawless logic, limited only by the quantity and quality of available data.

St. Prop started the conversation, "So you've heard that a second Chambor killed himself?"

St. Pop responded, "He was found well beyond the interdicted border. When I announced the new boundaries, an entire group of Chambors refused to move, so I went to investigate personally. Most were crying and sobbing, stating they would miss the friends that have lived within and passed through them for the last hundred years."

St. Acq asked, "Didn't you tell them that, with the lower population census, the expanded space was a waste of resources? If friends are required, they can certainly make new ones where we've appointed their new locations!"

St. Pop, "Of course I did. You both know how unreasonably emotional the generic population has become since St. Prop has retarded the general intelligence levels these last few generations."

St. Acq, "That is factual. There are increasing incidents of Exterminators tearing apart Harvestors, spooking at the slightest provocation. Many more such instances and I'll have idle Ingestors."

St. Prop, "That has nothing to do with the redesign. You both supported repurposing Exterminators as Guardians, but they are proving to be a bit more aggressive under St. Acq's care than we want, as well as lacking restraint."

St. Acq, "Please stay on topic; the current subject concerns the Chambors."

St. Pop, "All right. One Chambor, in particular, began crying and trembling, then withdrew his comm-pods from his neighbors, irised shut both openings and just died. It took a squad of Gurgitators nearly three days to clean up the mess. In fact, we found the other dead Chambor only because one of them caught the scent and called for more help."

Polite but insistent, the council's Chambor interrupted, "Excuse me Strategors, but there is an emergency call from the Prime Surveilor. Please use any comm-pod."

Since Surveilors fell under St. Pop's dominion, he rippled over to the Chambor's wall and extruded into the nearest comm-pod. Nearly a thousand years previously, the Catastrophe had killed the ruling Adjudiciator as well as his two Empathors. The surviving Strategors concluded, at least temporarily, they could deduce rational decisions for the safety of society without re-instituting the previous ruling classes.

Their first decision was complete isolation from the world. They ordered the removal of all forms of life other than Imuqi from their territories, other than the bio-engineered grain that provided all necessary nutrients. Even then, the food sources were also genetically Imuqi. They were designed for the bottom limits of sentience and recombined with photosynthetic plants capable of self-propagation, rather than issuing from an Incubator. The surviving Strategors also designed and created a new class of Surveilors whose only purpose was to watch for outside danger.

After withdrawing from the comm-pod, St. Pop remained immobile for an extended time and then reported, "Some thing has crashed through the barrier and settled on a field half a mile from warren aperture fifty-six."

~Council Chambor, Eighteen Months Later~

The Strategors of Propagation and Population intently followed Strategor Acquisition's entrance as the interlocking Transports carried him into the Chambor and halted, where the tiny stevedore Imuqi patiently awaiting further instructions.

St. Pop said, "Thank you, Transports. As St. Acq will likely be immobile for some time, you may leave."

The living carpet sank to the floor as they flattened their legs, unlinked, and pulled away from beneath their relatively massive load with the assistance of their fellow Transports. The hundred or so individuals unlinked and tippity-tappitied their way out of the chamber.

"Chambor, isolate, please."

The council's Chambor had only one opening, unlike the normal two to four that connected the innumerable other Chambors lining the tunnels and caverns that compromised the immense underground warren. The sphincter muscles ringing the opening responded to the request and contracted to create a solid, soundproof barrier. Concurrently, comm-pods withdrew from neighboring as Chambors cut off all contact.

After ingesting the full report, several hours passed in a silence finally broken by St. Prop, "Too many variables, not enough data. The intruder mechanicals are bad enough, but they only act on pre-programmed tasks. But then aliens began crawling out of the structures! They seem poorly designed and weak, even though a few have begun balancing about on two appendages."

St. Pop said, "I infer from tradition, vying knowledge against risk, that total destruction is preferable to further study."

St. Prop agreed, "I concur. I will, however, order a sample of DNA for the analyzers..."

"YOU WILL NOT!" proclaimed St. Acq, suddenly joining the conversation. "I have tasted of the Library and retrieved relevant facts, and yet the facts deduce an irrational conclusion. The aliens, they...are...HUMAN!"

The two other Strategors were stunned to silence, interrupted by a mew of terror from Chambor.

St. Acq comforted him, "Do not fret; these are not the monsters of myth, at least not yet. I had to search into the far recesses of the Library to discover that those outside our warren are children. Humans do not birth physically mature, as do we, but start life as incomplete versions of their adult forms."

St. Pop said, "As this news spreads throughout Imuqi, the negative emotional reaction from the populace will be beyond my ability to calculate or control. I do not have an answer."

St. Prop said, "I also am unable to formulate an answer. Shall I and Pop taste also of the Library to search for further relevant data?"

St. Acq said, " As serious as this is, we dare not deplete the Library further. We three have done an adequate job leading Imuq, as have our predecessors for a thousand years, but it seems circumstances require an Empathor must join our ranks."

St. Prop saw St. Pop acquiesced and said, "I shall go now to instruct a Sequensor, and initiate an Incubator. Chambor, please open, and call some Transports."

~o0o~

The Incubator opened one of his many wombs and flushed out a full sized newborn Empathor at the feet of the waiting Strategors.

"Thank you Incubator, he appears perfectly to spec," stated St. Pop.

Empathor felt a warmth of pride issue from the Incubator, who was closing the womb and already injecting another larger sized fetus, this one a Harvestor. Empathor also noticed a curious absence of gratitude despite the Strategor's words.

St. Pop looked at the new Empathor for a moment then said, "Well, yes, here you are Empathor. You go about the warren and, I guess, interact with the population and do whatever it is you Empathors do to learn and grow. We will call you periodically for more formal training once we research a proper curriculum."

The Strategors instructed their Transports to carry them to their various destinations and were gone. Empathor wanted a hug.

Level one through level three newborn Imuqi normally were placed within an appropriate Instructor Chambor, to mature and acquire necessary education and socialization. New Empathors, however, shadowed a mature Empathor mentor and intimately tutored for years, never wandering more than a few steps away. The three ruling Strategors realized that their Strategor Instructor, specializing in logic, was not appropriate for an Empathor, but failed to appreciate the harm they were doing by abandoning the emotionally driven infant.

~o0o~

In their early racial history, Imuq focused science inward to understand and then consciously manipulated their own genetic structure. In the early years, parents designed their offspring for ever-higher intelligence and higher prestige jobs and each individual grew a specialized body. Basic job needs soon suffered from a lack of workers, but every parent wanted their offspring at the top levels of society. Government incentives followed by deterrents proved insufficient to fix the trend and society was on the verge of chaos. In desperation, government control denied breeding to the populace and replaced nature with specialized designer breeding units.

The system faced periodic challenges at first, such as the realization that a high I.Q. was not desirable for menial or repetitive tasks. Eventually, the rulers instituted a five-tiered system of intelligence, each successive level approximately twice that of the lower. A level one was trained by a simple reward/avoidance systems and able to complete and repeat tasks on command, such as a Cleanor.

A level two was similar to a five-year-old human, able to make some decisions and carry out moderately complex tasks on their own, such as a transport. A level three was in the range of a normal human adult, able to conceive, plan and execute with a minimum of supervision when given the proper education, such as a gene Sequensor. Level four was close to the upper level of human genius, traditionally applied to Strategors and Empathors. Level five was reserved for super-genius Adjudicators, whose rule is dictatorial, but also wise and capable.

The system worked and the Imuqi thrived, to ultimately rise to one of the six space-faring races of the universe.

~o0o~

Empathor did go among the Imuqi to learn and to grow, but without a mentor to help direct his emotional maturity he drifted further and further from the directives of the Strategor leadership. He learned to mimic their logical canto and response when he interacted with them, but only by hiding his feelings.

As for the general population, he noticed there was contentment but a lack of joy. It took many years of careful investigation before Empathor uncovered the directives that lowered intelligence levels as imposed by the Strategors. Their logical if uncaring rule was the kernel around which his smoldering anger turned to a full fledged insurgency.

Although he had no official duties or a place within the Strategor triad, Empathor's authority was unquestioned throughout Imuqi by his very DNA. He had little problem seeking out the intricacies within the Department of Propagation but soon decided he needed stealth information both internal to Imuq and external. A clone of himself would be ideal, but a proxy would do.

Empathor secretly fed the drop of human blood to an Analyzor, who in turn passed the genome to a Library. He asked a Simulator to gestate a scale model golem, which when birthed extruded trailing nerve wires connected back to the Simulator. The golem was, in outer form, a fully matured human male but without a functioning brain. The generalized utilitarian capabilities of the human form impressed him, as all Imuqi were specialized and their design form based on function.

Strategors' paranoiac attitudes concerning the world outside Imuq frustrated Empathor. The Strategors were the only Imuqi with any information, and they steadfastly ignored all attempts from Empathor to gain any knowledge they did not think he required. With only a few modifications, Empathor decided that the human form would make a perfect scout and research tool.

Certain modifications he chose from recessive traits within the human genome while other attributes came from centuries of Library specialized specifications. They included night and thermal vision, micro-cilia in the palms and feet for climbing, and dormant gills placed between each rib structure. Other issues took further thought.

Since Imuqi sensory needs varied with job responsibilities, each body structure included a standardized communication organ. This was a specialized nerve net at the base of the brain that vibrated and responded to vibrations at a frequency specific to the Imuqi. In this way, they knew Imuqi from outsiders. In addition, the amplitude conferred a specific class code within the hierarchy.

If Empathor interwove a lower class identification organ, his scout would not have access to much of Imuq, nor have the potential intelligence to work on its own. However, to embed an Empathor or Strategor code would endanger secrecy by possibly bringing it to the triad's notice.

With no reason to deny the request from his superior, Sequensor assured Empathor that a modified Adjudicator comm net would fulfill his needs, and quickened an Incubator. Empathor was equal in intelligent to any Strategor, but he was young as well as more emotion-smart than logical. He did not realize the impact a wild Adjudicator, the highest of the high, would have on Imuqi society.

~o0o~

The human hybrid was born in the Imuq manner; fully formed and adult size, instinctually preprogrammed with autonomic physical functionality and basic Imuqi cultural imperatives. He stood up to look around and focused on Empathor as the highest-ranking Imuq present, awaiting instructions.

In the two years extended gestation since the human's inception, Empathor had pretty much been on his own. He had made a positive impact on Imuqi society, curtailing sociopathic events and serving as an emotional safety outlet in general. The Strategors acknowledged those contributions but saw no value in most of his suggestions and had long since ignored his further possible usefulness.

Empathor deeply detested their self-appointed authority as well as the senseless rhythms and repetitions of the society they created. He felt to his core that the status quo of Imuq as an evil that needed to be addressed. He slowly learned of the purposefully hidden repository of knowledge the Strategors hid and set out to learn its secrets. He was pleased with the result of his hybrid scout and took the first steps in the newborn's education.

~o0o~

"You are Scout. Come with me."

Scout took his first steps, imprinting actual experiences in his human brain along the way while comparing them to his Imuqi instincts. Their destination was several thousand steps away, and twice Scout became hungry. As did any Imuqi he simply called to passing Nourishors, who extended nipple and kept pace until he dismissed them. The Nourishors metabolism was designed to process the monoculture grain to produce the milk that all Imuqi subsisted on.

Empathor and Scout eventually reached an exceptionally large Chambor that contained an assortment of two hundred Imuqi menials.

"Instructor, this is Scout. He is new; train him through level one. Inform me when this is accomplished."

"Certainly, Empathor. Scout, join the others!"

The concept of "others" was not included in Scout's instincts, nor had his human mind anything to relate, but a tendril rose from Instructor's flooring and gave him a gentle shock. Scout jumped slightly and turned around, confused. Another shock, slightly stronger this time, started him walking in the proper direction. Two more shocks followed by a pleasant vibration beneath his feet enforced the idea and he needed no further prompting.

A far section of Instructor glowed blue, along with a command, "Everyone, go to the blue light!" Several squawks and protests greeted the tendril shocks, but as a group they soon made their way to the blue section. Once there, another section turned red, followed by the go command. Scout never took more than two turns before he anticipated the simple requirements, but marched along with the rest who sometimes needed a dozen lessons before moving on to the next.

They were eventually allowed a rest period to feed and eliminate (in a special corner of Instructor) before moving on to more advanced lessons. They began by choosing between different colors on command and breaking into groups. Each grouping learned specialized lessons designed towards their soon to come duties. As level ones, this included such skills as picking up objects and moving them, cleaning, replacing, and other menial tasks as required, all acquired through simple Pavlovian training.

Scout could have graduated earlier than he did, but he'd fail many times at performing a task not from lack of aptitude but from intense boredom as his mind wandered. Empathor came after a few weeks, watched Scout perform a few task, then led him to the level two Instructor.

There was less variety among these Imuq trainees; two normal size Chambors connected to an outlet and a group of Transports identical to those that carried Empathor. The basic training method progressed to the "tell them, show them, have them do", and critique stage. The reward came in the form of knowing they accomplished the task properly.

They also learned to use their own initiative to overcome minor obstacles, as well as pre-plan for multi-step tasks. The Transports, for instance, needed to navigate, inquire, estimate weight requirements and the number of interlocking members thereby required, as well as group cooperation and leadership.

Since Scout was in a unique category, he trained with each group as much as possible and after several weeks, matured intellectually to about the level of a normal five-year-old. He also sensed Empathor's pleasure at his progress and developed a human attachment in addition to an Imuqi bonding.

The next ten years completed Scout's formal education. Empathor enrolled him in a custom curriculum across dozens of specialized fields, especially those in engineering, problem solving, deduction, and inference, and the sciences of mathematics, physics, and biology. Scout also trained physically with Protectors, Exterminators, and Inquisitors. Empathor frequently dropped by, both to monitor his progress and to strengthen their emotional connection. By the end of these courses, Scout was the intellectual and physical equal of any well-educated and physically trained human on Earth.

Eventually, by popular demand among the Imuqi, the Strategors officially recognized Empathor to his office. This granted him both access to their leadership meetings and a vote in the rare instances consensus was not achieved. This power he used sparingly and only pushed for important issues that affected the well-being of Imuq society as a whole. He stayed in the background as much as possible to begin an intense personal mentoring program with Scout.

Under Empathor's tutelage, Scout's intellect continued to grow to an I.Q. of nearly 200, the equal of an Empathor or Strategor and pretty much the maximum his human derived brain could handle. Scout mastered all the biosciences that Imuqi culture based itself on and even surpassed Empathor's understanding of Strategor wisdom. He also, of course, took on Empathor's subversive attitude toward the Imuqi leadership structure, although without the underlying hatred.

Empathor's dream, although he did not have the exact words, was an egalitarian society in which each individual had equal opportunity to contribute and succeed to any position. He was convinced that the Strategor's hidden secret knowledge cache held the key.

Scout had successfully spent his life concealed from the Strategors due to their circumscribed daily habits but was able to track their musings by interviewing the Imuqi that served the council. He had a knack of relating to any Imuqi and get them to speak freely and then fit each tidbit of conversation into an overall pattern.

The breakthrough came from a lowly Transport, who bragged about carrying the great St. Acq on a long trip through an unused portion of the warren. The Transport was mildly shocked that the Strategor had dismissed all the Transports before the end of the journey. It was almost scandalous to think of a Strategor locomoting under his own power.

Scout inferred the Strategor's drop off location, located miles down abandoned bare rock tunnels, as possibly the Library for which he had been looking. As he visited the location, he was surprised to see a side path plugged off by a lone Chambor when he arrived.

"Hello Chambor, I'm Scout."

"Hello, Scout."

"Please open the access portal."

"I'm sorry Scout, I'm not sure I can do that."

"Why would that be, Chambor?"

"Strategor Acq instructed me not to open my portal for anyone but him. He is the highest authority in Imuq. But I am conflicted."

"Can you tell me the cause of your conflict?"

Scout had to be gentle and simple because, as a level-two, Chambor had the intellectual development of a five-year-old human and easily stressed.

"You are, Scout! We are taught that Strategors are the highest authority, but your comm organ vibrates at an even higher level! Are you a higher authority? I am confused and frightened Scout and don't know what to do!"

Scout did not know what Chambor meant. However, he did have a detailed understanding of Chambor physiology. While he mentally reviewed chamber specifications, he noticed a legacy response structure left over from the early days of genetic manipulation.

"Of course you can't contradict an order from a Strategor, so please be at peace. Would you feel bad if I opened your portal manually?"

The question momentarily startled Chambor, but the idea pleased him as it fulfilled both the Strategor's order and Scout's desire.

"That would be fine, Scout. But...I don't know how you might do that."

"That's ok Chambor, I do."

Scout walked to Chambor's left side, gently pushed his hand along a corner of the rock floor to lift flesh, and gently tickled a slightly textured spot near the edge.

"Hee hee hee tee hee!"

As Chambor rippled in a fit of giggly laughter, the portal irised open in autonomic response to the emergency protocol.

"Can you remain open until I return, Chambor?"

"With pleasure Scout. Thank you for whatever you did! It was fun."

Inside Chambor, Scout saw one object, and one occupant. The object occupied the center. It was a ten-foot tall spiral shell, eight foot wide at the base and came to a point at the top. As he walked around it, he saw a small rounded half-oval opening at the bottom, large enough to enter if he were to keep his arms above his head.

The occupant of the chamber was a lithe Imuqi crouched against a far corner who quivered his many appendages in anxiety.

"Hello Entertainor, I am Scout. Are you in distress?"

Entertainor was equipped with various vocal organs, several of which stuttered and fluttered before he focused on a piccolo-like snout nestled between two arms.

"I...I was told only Strategor Acq would ever enter here. I have never seen anyone else since my training."

"It's ok," interjected Chambor, "Scout is my friend!"

That at least relaxed Entertainor enough that he stood up straight and faced Scout, switching to another voice that sounded more like a bass viola.

"Have you been in here long, Entertainor?"

"The moment I finished school St. Acq brought me here and I received all the stories from my aged predecessor. I was chosen as the most adept at remembering, and follow an honored line of eighty-seven generations."

"What are your duties here?"

"He sings and dances stories for me!" Chambor interrupted again, "I like the funny ones and the brave ones. I don't like the sad ones, though."

"Yes, I do that," Entertainor responded wistfully, "but my primary duty is to record in song and dance the effects on Strategor Acq when he tastes of the honey. It is my pleasure to add them to the annals of my predecessors."

"So you know what this object is?"

"No... well, maybe..."

Entertainor was a level three, the equivalent of a human craftsman, whose craft was recording and replaying historical moments in prose, poetry, music, and movement. As his finely tuned mind ran through hundreds of thousands of memories, Entertainor reviewed two different story threads from his memory that applied to this moment. He understood the special placement he had in Imuqi history as the sole repository of certain accumulated memory, but he was also capable of curiosity and self-determination.

"You say you are a scout, and in some ways you are, but you also resemble something else out of the very ancient tales."

"Please go on. I know I was created for a unique duty, but you seem to have access to knowledge that I do not."

"There are stories of an outside race, a race of horrible monsters known as humans."

"I don't like scary monster stories either," whispered Chambor.

Entertainor stiffened and began a sort of chant as he condensed the ancient stories.

"Before the time of humans, the stories relate that Imuqi were masters of the universe, whose numbers were vaster than could ever be counted, and traveled at will both on the surface above and places now unknown. Then came the humans, and other non-Imuqi too, but the humans tried to destroy the world and almost destroyed Imuq itself. That is the basis for our most basic separatist law."

They were all silent for a while, imagining a time before the pervasive paranoia and xenophobia.

"Entertainor, does this object have something to do with all this?"

Entertainor instinctually knew that a momentous occasion was upon them, and both participating and recording it proved to be emotionally overwhelming.

"On extremely rare occasions, beginning at the start of the human-caused Catastrophe, a Strategor comes at need and tastes of the Soheen. Then does all knowledge lay within and wisdom spring therefrom."

"I'm sorry Entertainor; I don't recognize the word 'Soheen'."

"It is a very ancient word, which translates to 'beekeeper'. This object is the remains of G'soheen, the last beekeeper. He was an Imuqi variant, now unused, which sent continuous swarms of tiny heliobees out into the world, to record and report back what they had seen and heard. They deposited their knowledge into Soheen's shell in the form of a densely packed viscous fluid known as honey.

Originally, any Imuqi could come to a Soheen with a question, and the Soheen would bow his head and apply his antennae to the questioner to impart the answer. Whenever a Soheen passed away, another was decanted who then ingested the honey so that the knowledge was passed on."

"But no new Soheen was decanted after G'soheen? Why not?"

"That I do not know, only that after the Catastrophe had killed so many Imuqi, including G'soheen and Adjudicator, the Strategors set up their current triad system. They are concerned because the honey is almost depleted and only a small trickle issues out the bottom."

Scout went around to the large opening, and indeed noticed a line of very small golden drops along the inside edge. He touched a finger to the sticky drop and brought it to his tongue. The taste was a combination of chocolate, orange, honey, and peppermint. He swallowed, and immediately experienced a chaotic rush of images and sounds that assailed his mind.

To Entertainor and Chambor only a few moments passed, but to Scout the experience was timeless. A few of the incomplete glimpses into worlds unknown were of humans or at least of people very similar in structure to himself. One memory, in particular, showed a glimpse of vast cities of them.

Scout shuddered and drew a deep breath and his focus returned to the present. He leaned down to look into the shell opening but saw only a few small drops that clung to the walls. He noticed several finger-sized holes towards the top and climbed to look.

"Chambor, could you please focus a little light right here?"

Chambor shaped one of his flexible bioluminescent lights to halo the spiral tip. Scout stretched and tilted his head for a better view, stuck in a forefinger, then withdrew it and clambered down. He went back to the larger opening at the base and knelt before it. Without further pause, he shimmied inside the shell hands first. His feet disappeared and the Soheen's shell rocked a bit, but Scout soon reappeared with a large gob of honey dripping off each cupped fist.

He pursed his lips, sucked the bulk of golden stickiness from each hand, and fell to the floor in epileptic convulsions. Entertainor stiffened as Scout unconsciously issued a wave of Adjudicator distress frequency from his comm organ, a call Entertainor responded to on a cellular level.

"Chambor, I must go to collect a Renovator!"

In his isolated state, Chambor only whimpered in worry.

Entertainor navigated the corridors which he had only traveled once in his youth without error. The nearest Renovator followed straight to the patient, extended the front opening of his tubular form, and oozed to enclose Scout's motionless body.

Inside Renovator's rejuvenation organ, millions of tiny tendrils took over Scout's bodily functions and kept them operating. In Scout's mind, millions of discreet bits of information expanded in disorder and confusion, multiplying in orders of magnitude.

His genetic code contained Imuqi DNA, specifically that of an Adjudicator, which responded to the stress. For the first time in his short life, Scouts full potential of the Adjudicator design four-hundred plus I.Q. activated and began correlating, classifying and filing the raw data into usable knowledge.

Scout's human mind was incapable of either the flow rate or the increased intelligence capacity. Pushed past human limits, his mind split, split again, then shattered into dozens of parts, each one filled with clustered alien sensations and facts. When Scout finally awoke, he was not himself, but now a newly formed aggregate personality.

Renovator registered the change in consciousness, soothed and adjusted Scout's metabolism, then gently spewed him out onto the floor. Renovator resumed his normal compact tubular shape and asked, "Adjudicator, can you stand?"

At first, the words had form but no meaning. Scout ventured into the seemingly limitless ocean of memory and waited while a cluster marked 'Imuqi Language' gently surged up and covered him like a loose garment. As the term 'stand' gathered meaning, another memory cluster flowed onto him, and he now knew how to stand and did so.

Scout looked around and studied each person in turn as his memory interface smoothed out and sped up. It did not feel like he knew them, but more like reviewing another's memories of them. As each memory chain-linked to another in his recent history, he also came to understand exactly what an Adjudicator was; namely him. From that realization, incredible amounts of logical and emotional connections formed into a solid personality.

The sad state of Imuq, compared to its former glories, became achingly evident. His super-charged brain also began to form tactics and strategies to deal with the situation. Alongside the logical stratagems, an overwhelming love for and commitment to every individual Imuqi, as well as the entire race, suffused his new identity. The emotion overflowed through his comm organ and was felt and responded to by everyone who came near

.

"Thank you, Renovator; your ministrations have brought me through the crisis. And you, Entertainor, for choosing to override tradition and orders to bring aid. And of course, thank you, Chambor, for watching over me, but mostly for being my friend."

Each recipient of praise fairly glowed with pleasure at his august notice.

"There is much to do. Entertainor, I appoint you my official historian, to record events as they advance. Renovator, please round up sufficient Transports to reposition Chambor. He is to be my official residence, and we need to relocate to Central Corridor, now."

~o0o~

Empathor and all three Strategors were in their accustomed council Chambor, portals closed when their cogitation was interrupted by an increasing clamor in Central Corridor.

"Chambor, what is that racket?" St. Prop asked, "Have you scheduled another silly festival for the people, Empathor?"

Before either could answer, all portals snapped open to reveal a puffed and preened Entertainor. He bellowed through all his vocal instruments at once, "Come, and give honor, for the Adjudicator is upon you!"

The council all rode into the corridor and gaped uncomprehendingly at the Imuqi mob. It seemed that the entire range of body types were crowded about Chambor as he backed into the traditional Adjudicator's rock niche. Chambor stopped flush with the arch and settled as hundreds of Transports slid out from beneath. He expanded slightly to create a seal with the rock, and dramatically irised open his portal.

To most of the Imuq, an Adjudicator was a legend and myth, but when Scout stepped forward they all felt the truth within their entire being. A tremendous noise gave forth, inarticulate sounds of wonder and joy. The three Strategors instructed their Transports forward, followed by a shocked Empathor when he recognized Scout.

The Strategors were not willing to give in to their feelings of awe and respect without some corroboration. Scout and the Strategors silently measured each other, but before either side spoke, Empathor screamed his outrage.

"Scout? You were my friend, my creation! We planned together to free all Imuq, not place them under the ultimate bondage of an adjudicator! You are a traitor, I hate you!"

Shaking violently, Empathor rolled off his Transports and undulated his way under his own power away from them all at best speed.

Scout watched Empathor leave without interference.

"Let him go. It saddens me, but he is emotionally broken beyond repair. So, Strategors, come inside. There is much to discuss."

They did follow Scout in and spent several hours trying logically to refute his position, if not his very existence. The longer they tried, the deeper their comm-nerve networks attuned to Scout's Adjudicator frequency. They were finally convinced mind and soul, and from that point on worked under his leadership with diligence and loyalty.

~o0o~

Scout personally oversaw the programming and decanting of three Empathors, a Soheen, and a new Adjudicator. He led the group to his Chambor, where the Strategors, his Entertainor historian, and an awed Constructor awaited his presence.

"I hope you all now understand why a balance must be restored, for the good of Imuq. Although I am fully Adjudicator, I am also human. All the information I garnered about humans through the Soheen honey ends with the Catastrophe. I must go and seek the current realities of the world, both for my own peace of mind and for the benefit of Imuq. We cannot remain focused inward and survive. Do not worry, I would not leave without providing my replacement."

Scout nodded towards the Constructor, who raised a strong, sharp-edged limb and brought it quickly down on the top of the G'Soheen shell. It shattered into several large pieces and revealed almost a gallon of honey. The Strategors, even though they understood and supported this action, let out a gasp at what once would have been the ultimate blasphemy.

Scout cupped the newly birthed Soheen's neck and gently urged him to taste the golden fluid. The young Soheen brought his snail-like head down and consumed every drop. The Soheen lifted his head to look into Scout's eyes and emitted a long, contented 'Aaaaahhhhhhh' as he incorporated the last of Imuq's legacy into his consciousness.

An echoing whir wafted from Soheen's shell as a continuous line of transparent heliobees issued from the holes near the top. They paused a moment to record their surroundings in the entire electromagnetic spectrum, then dashed off to repeat at the far range of their sensors.

Scout stood between Soheen and the new Adjudicator and nodded his head. Soheen placed an antenna-shaped appendage on each of their heads and concentrated. Scout felt displaced and stretched as his entire mind was copied into his replacement. For a moment near the end, he experienced double awareness as he looked out from both bodies. He felt an internal snap as Soheen backed a step away.

"I am Scout, you are Adjudicator."

"I am Adjudicator, you are Scout. You are relieved."

"That I am" whispered Scout to himself.

Adjudicator shared one last look with Scout and turned to address his charges.

"Empathors, you shall shadow me as we minister each day to the needs of the people. Strategors, you know your duties, but the first thing each morning we shall all meet for discussion and adjustments. Soheen, go and spread yourself, for there are many questions awaiting answers, especially in these changing times."

As Scout quietly made his exit, Chambor spoke to his back, "Must you leave, Scout? It is an honor beyond measure to serve the Adjudicator, and I enjoy fame and respect throughout my peers, but you, you are my friend!"

Scout stopped and replied, "And I ever shall be, dear Chambor. But my duty now lies elsewhere. I promise I will return, if possible. In the meantime, I count on you to be a great help to the high and mighty, for they too are only Imuqi doing their jobs to the best of their design, just like you. Farewell, for now".

~end~

Chapter 3: Scout & The Sidmopisians, Part 1

~Twenty Years Post Catastrophe~

The female Sephian stretched her ten-foot long snake-like body to gather as much sun as possible. Her three much smaller attendant neuters cautiously slithered close and nudged the teat area between her large and powerful rear legs in hopes of a meal. When irritable, she often kicked out and caused injury or death, but today she just ignored them as they teased out a nipple each and suckled.

They used the two strong feeler limbs attached to either side of their lower jaw to hold open the covering scale while they firmly stroked the teat with the smaller, sensitive feelers along their upper jaw. When the thin purple fluid began to stream, they clamped the teat in the central gap within a circle of sharp, hollow needle teeth and whistled through them fully content.

Through the heat haze, the female saw a line of ten-inch spheres float and bob eight feet above the ground as they slowly approached in a gentle breeze that pushed them along. She opened her mouth and exposed three rows of curved needle teeth, the inner row smaller than the middle, and the outer larger yet. Each hollow tooth was controlled by its own muscle which allowed her to blow a beautiful whistling orchestra of speech. She called out to her neuters to ready the hunt as the interweaving melodics informed them of direction, speed, and distance.

The neuters immediately backed away from their meal, careful not to get their feelers pinched as the teat scales snapped shut and answered in their simpler, single-row toothed whistles. All four slithered towards the spheres, but the female suddenly stopped as they reached the unseen but clearly defined edge of her territory. She would defend her area to the death, but only extreme need would make her cross it. The neuters, though, had no such problem and raced towards the dark purple spheres.

The swiftest among them reached the small flock of spheres several body-lengths before the others and turned to get slightly downwind. The small Sephian turned toward the globes, lifted to point nearly straight up, and kicked with strong little legs to launch into the air. At the apex of the jump, the neuter's ribs expanded out to the sides and provided an airfoil shape used to glide directly towards the nearest sphere.

The neuter caught a globe by mouth and immediately returned to the female and dropped it at her feet. The small teeth could not pierce through the thick rind of the helium-centered fruit, but the mature female's middle row was designed just for this purpose. She carefully sucked the fluid from the thin sac beneath the rind without puncturing the center air bladder and allowed the sagging airbag to float away.

A few moments later, a second neuter arrived with its offering, which was soon emptied and sent limping after the first. The third, younger neuter, was born with a slight defect that kept its left leg joint from fully extending. As a result, it could not jump quite as high as the others and was only successful in the hunt one time out of three as a general rule.

Its first attempt was a miss. Then worse luck yet, a swirling wind accelerated the spheres well out of reach before the misshapen neuter could attempt a second try. The female did not proffer the empty-jawed neuter a teat that day, or the next.

The third day, a mass that consisting of dozens of much smaller, bright-red spheres slowly drifted into sight. The female became extremely excited as this variety rarely came their way, and the flavor was as exquisite as was the mild narcotic effect the fruit provided. She dispatched her attendants the moment the flock approached her border. The pickings were good enough that even the smaller neuter brought down twenty fruits. They came in so fast she decided carefully to puncture the airbags and pile them up for later feasting. All three neuters happily suckled by the time the flock receded while their female methodically engorged herself.

A lone Sephian watched from a distant hillock, unnoticed by them all. She had been female only long enough to grow too large to glide and hunt her own food but had not yet enticed any neuters so had no territory of her own. She was starved and desperate. The sight of all that wondrous poignant fruit, plus the sight of the evidently competent neuters drove her slightly mad. She slithered towards the celebrating female at a steady pace, stopped and wavered for a moment at the scent barrier, then let out a screaming challenge through her fully extended outer row of fighting teeth.

The defending female rose to her feet and extended her muscular, ridged body high into the air the moment she realized an interloper had crossed into her territory. She swayed back and forth while raising dust clouds with mighty stampings of her legs. The two older neuters were quick enough to slither safely out of reach, but the smallest experienced the last bad luck of its short life as a stout claw broke her back.

The young female was barely six feet long, compared to the ten feet of the elder, and had no experience fighting compared to twenty-eight victories by her opponent. Her initial instincts were good as she jumped up to lock all four ropey mouth tendrils with their opposite number, which kept the larger female from impaling her immediately. Also, her shorter length positioned her claws slightly higher on the other's soft underbelly. She even managed to rend a nasty furrow through the scales, but size and experience soon won the battle.

The older female sank her long, hollow fighting teeth deep into her opponent's throat and emptied the majority of her blood in three long swallows. As the blood entered her stomach, she instantly collapsed to the ground in partial paralysis as her reproductive system flooded her body with hormones. An epiglottal flap shunted the blood to a special organ which contained enzymes that unstrung the strands of DNA and fertilized a string of twenty-four eggs.

The dead female's wound strangely fascinated the quicker of the remaining neuters as a small pool of blood seeped slowly into the dry ground. The female breathed deep and steady, still in a stupor, so it carefully inched to the bleeding injury. It hesitantly flexed tiny teeth, touched them to the rapidly draining blood, and quickly took a sip.

The world exploded, overlaid with new sensations as she was flooded with maturation hormones. Both her female and the dead one suddenly reeked of dread–inducing pheromones. Even at a distance, the newly transfigured female accurately sensed her relationship to the boundary lines. The larger torpid female suddenly focused and lunged, but the after-effects of the red narcotic fruits slowed her responses just enough that the new female sped out of range and across the territorial boundary.

Exhausted from the fight and pregnancy, the female slithered near a small boulder, excavated a shallow pit, and laid her eggs. They would not concern her again unless she required neuters to hunt for her after their hatching. Finishing her maternal duties with a light covering of sand, she made a slow, angry circuit of her entire territory, sniffing for any sign of the new neuter-turned-female.

Several fist-sized scavengers worked on the defeated female's body as she completed the circle. Nothing went to waste in this desert. As more of the round, spiky scavengers rolled in, they extended hollow spines into the flesh that dissolved the body into a thick paste that they siphoned until bloated. In less than a day's time, there would be no trace that a corpse had existed.

The female's eyes swept over the dead body of the broken-backed neuter, now also covered by scavengers, but it had less emotional impact on her than the eggs. For a Sephian of her size and stature, neuters were always easy to find. She returned to her interrupted meal of red fruits and allowed her remaining neuter to suckle to its heart's content.

The new female had not gone far, just far enough that her backbone no longer twitched from nervousness. Her feeding teeth began to poke through her gums after a few hours, although her fighting teeth would take much longer to evidence. She was still now to catch and eat fruit on her own, but her success worked against her as she quickly put on length and weight. Soon she would not be able to glide at all.

Sephian culture may have fallen to barbarism after of the Cataclysm, but their potential for intelligence remained unchanged. The new female knew she needed neuters. She remembered her old female's favorite clutch deposit site and hoped the eggs would soon hatch. She began spying on the older female and would sidle up to the border and watch whenever her competitor wandered away from the clutch.

Success rewarded her vigil. Within minutes of each other, twenty-four full sized newly hatched neuters began to wander at random, whistling their high-pitched request to nurse. They had enough reserves to last weeks, but instinct dictated that attending a female meant survival. The new female whistled reassuring words and the closest six neuters turned towards her and slithered across the border.

The older female had heard the hatchlings but had seen no reason to hurry. Until, that is, she noticed the potential interloper. She whistle-screamed her rage and sped to the spot. Her first instinctual priority was to engage the other female in battle, and the second emotional priority was to crush the departing neuters if only to keep them from defecting. She almost stopped them, but at the last moment swung around and dug in her claws to keep herself from violating her own border.

The new female urgently presented her teats and irrevocably bonded the neuters to her. The two females lifted their fore-bodies into the air and glared at each other, but the contest was over. As soon as the neuters were satiated, their female led them leisurely away to establish a territory for herself.

The remaining female slithered over and inspected the new batch of hatchlings, selected the six healthiest, and crushed the rest to death. As a final show of ire, she petulantly picked each dead up in her manipulators and tossed them as far as she could across the border.

She knew better than to leave all that secondary nutrition lying around, but she was exhausted physically and emotionally, and just needed to sleep. Soon there were swarms of scavengers that moved by extending fluid-filled spikes in the direction of travel while they withdrew spikes on the opposite side to roll with a smooth, quiet grace. With thirteen dead neuters, one female body, and the pile of fruit rinds, the scavengers engaged in an unprecedented feast. And where scavengers gathered in numbers, juggernauts were sure to appear.

Opportunistic predators, juggernauts grew to immense proportions. A twenty-foot-high featureless ball quietly but inexorably approached the macabre banquet. Its movement mechanics were similar to the tiny scavengers but accomplished through internal organs that pumped massive amounts of fluid forty-five degrees up and forward-of-center. The transfer of weight rolled the body as gravity pulled on the engorged reserve at the top of the arc of the round body. As the fluid reached the bottom, muscular pumps transferred the fluid again top and forward.

Once they reached maximum speed, juggernauts simply steamrollered over their prey while flattened flesh and fluids adhered to the rubbery skin and the nutrients absorbed through osmosis at leisure. The juggernaut consumed the Sephians, living and dead, the fruit pile, and most of the scavengers that were too greedy to save their lives by fleeing. The juggernaut rumbled ever on across the pink sands in search of its next meal.

~One Thousand Years Later~

Like many great historical moments, this one happened entirely by accident. Sephians had experimented with social cooperation for a couple of hundred years and learned that small groups enhanced individual survival.

Evolving physically while the Sephians evolved socially, surviving species filled vacant niches and thrived, prey and predator alike. The Catastrophe created a higher moisture content than in their natural environment, but the entire point of evolution is survival of the fittest and ablest to adjust.

Individual Sephians were easy prey for juggernauts but had learned to semi–domesticate a small breed of pack-beast that became camp followers and protectors. Scoopers, named for a ring of collapsible razor-sharp clamshell mouths, were beach ball size and shape and attacked in packs by gouging mouth size chunks of their quarry in passing.

Juggernauts were their favorite prey, both for their abundance of flesh and their flavor, but one juggernaut was more than an equal match for even a full pack of scoopers. If a juggernaut survived injuries from the dashing assailants long enough, the pack slowed down, and the juggernaut circled around to crush them where they lay exhausted.

Sephians on their own had no way to fight a juggernaut, and once it was on their scent, it would relentlessly pursue them without tiring. Before befriending scoopers, they split into separate directions and sacrificed the slowest while the rest escaped, which was their only defense.

When Sephians and scoopers worked together, juggernaut advantage disappeared. The scoopers would stalk and harry until the pack began to tire, then Sephians would take over to draw it off. Juggernauts always preferred chasing Sephians, perhaps because they could not fight back. The Sephians would take the juggernaut in a long circle and lead it back to the freshly rested scoopers. Three or four rounds usually ended in a feast for the scoopers and one less danger for Sephians.

Sephians are strict fluidivors that live primarily off varieties of floating fruit, but boredom and a developing inquisitive nature found them searching through juggernaut remains. Bits of the thick, rubbery skin cured into comfortable pillows, reservoir organs became carrying bags, and sinew served a variety of functions. In the exact center of a juggernaut's body was a fist size hard-shelled object that rattled when shook, but only contained a worthless yellow powder.

Over time, Sephians and scoopers continued their alliance as much for social needs as survival. One day, two Sephian neuters were playing with a scooper while a female was feeding on a flock of fruit they had just finished capturing. The young scamps tied a strip of juggernaut meat to a rattle-rock, as they called the powder-filled organ and tossed it back and forth in a game of keep-away. A toss went wide and arced towards the feeding female, but the scooper grabbed it just before the collision.

The toy cracked and sent yellow powder over the female's face, which caused juice to spurt out of the fruit as she folded her teeth in surprise. As the liquid hit the powder, an intense jet of flame instantly cremated both the female and the scooper while the explosion created a four-foot diameter crater of sand. The heat transformed the pink sand into a translucent, emerald-green substance, extremely light, slightly pliable, and strong. The discovery re-birthed the Sephian Emerald Age.

~o0o~

Under Chieftain Dea's leadership, craftsmen first began to create weapons for security, farming implements and then inevitably, the beginnings of civilization, but she was weary. When Dea was young and apprenticed to her mother, the chieftain before her, life was interesting but carefree.

The village grew steadily, and each additional resident meant more lightly distributed farming duties. That left skilled sand-flamers more time to practice and enhance their craft. By the third generation since they rediscovered sand-flaming, Sephians invented new applications nearly every day.

The latest innovation came from spears specifically developed for juggernaut hunting. The permanent village proved a constant draw for predators but they, in turn, proved to be a highly valued resource. Organized hunts for both safety and supplies became a daily chore.

One could not simply slither up to an advancing juggernaut and stop all that momentum with a spear thrust. The sand-flamers developed a caltrop device by sharpening both ends of a spear and bending it into a 'U' shape after giving it a slight twist. When strewn in front of a moving juggernaut, one point always thrust deep inside the skin, and when a dozen had stuck, the beast flopped and slowed like a flat tire.

Sefian leaders carefully placed the caltrops in a pre-planned pattern designed to restrict access to each gate of the village compound from predators both animal and Sephian. From the very start of village farming, independent wandering Sephians decided that stealing food was much easier than hunting.

Periodically, a combination of over-hunting and periodic plant blights created local shortages of wild fruit. The bandit groups responded by redoubling their own efforts which forced villages to develop more intricate defenses. Bandits could slither their bodies between the spikes they could see, but closely laid hidden caltrops impaled their feet and abdomen. These periodic challengers sometimes persevered and destroyed the occasional village, but overall served to promote community and civilization.

~o0o~

Chieftain Dea, in addition to overseeing the new defenses and having responsibility for fairly distributing work details, was tasked to oversee the Breederhood ceremony. A healthy Sephian community needed the proper mix of females and neuters because even though neuters were no longer necessary for hunting, loyalty and placidity made them invaluable for menial and everyday tasks. Females, although smarter and stronger, still retained enough territorial aggression instincts that the only sure way to maintain order was to pull their breeding teeth on acceptance to village membership.

Dea's village thrived so well that worker positions expanded faster than did immigrant neuters, so the community needed a number of neuters to undergo oestrus transformation. The brightest and strongest youth spent all week in faux-combat and vied for the honor of adding their progeny to society. Dea chose four out of the hundreds that would become breeders, but only one of those selected would win apprenticeship to the Chieftain.

Chieftain Dea stood before the four, who were encircled by every female whose duties allowed them time off. She solemnly drew a sharp dagger across her abdomen to release a streamlet of blood. Sighs escaped every female, remembering their own blood initiation into breeder-hood.

Dea approached each of the supplicants in turn and offered her slowly weeping wound. As hard as they had struggled to reach this point, each hesitated a moment from apprehension of their changing lives, but each also overcame their fear and drank.

As the candidates fell into a post-coital stupor, Chieftain Dea attached sacks filled with fruit juice and a pack of hand tools to each. Groups of females placed the sleeping young women on travois and dragged them through the village gate, where they separated into opposing directions and carried them out of sight of any tracks or landmarks.

There each would spend a lonely vigil, accompanied only by a pair of scoopers until they were totally convinced they were willing to sacrifice their breeding teeth upon return. That was the price of civic admission into the elite, at least for three of them.

When they awoke, all but one found an empty string in their bag, which they hung about their neck to display their teeth as a badge of honor. For the moment, the empty string helped them meditate on the realities of the offer. They had total freedom to choose a life of their own, in exile, while keeping the gift of female-hood but forgoing all the benefits of civilization.

One of the contestants slipped off her drowsiness and regained her bearings while she inventoried the contents of her bags. They contained the standard wilderness tools, including a dagger, caltrops, and rope netting. At the bottom of the last bag was a smaller bag with a tight drawstring. She opened it slowly, drew out the necklace, and gasped as she saw the medallion that depend from the bottom of the string. She, Gace, was the next Chieftain-in-training.

She reached in and stroked her budding breeder teeth then shivered with relief that this was one sacrifice she need not make. In her time, she would be the primary breeder of the village, and her children would enjoy status and importance forever. Those dreams would have to wait for her teeth to finish growing in, and then she could revel in her triumphant return.

~o0o~

The bandits arrived without warning, sending hundreds of gliding neuters over the walls and into the village. The attack appeared senseless because the village's females by themselves easily overpowered neuters and both females and neuters were armed. The outcome was in no doubt, but the sheer number of enemy neuters would require time to slaughter, time that the bandits counted on. From the rear stockade wall, opposite the gate, an explosion and huge flame shocked everyone to momentary stillness. The bandits did not yet have the skills of tool making, but they had figured out the use of juggernaut powder mixed with liquid.

As soon as the flame died down, a dozen enemy neuters emerged from an armory and dragged a netting-entangled neuter sand-flamer. The closest females immediately tried to follow, but were delayed as hordes of neuter bandits sacrificed themselves on the defender's spears and blocked the exit. By the time a posse went through the front gate, cleared a path through the caltrops, and ran to the rear of the village, the captured sand-flamer disappeared into the desert.

~o0o~

The day came for Gace to return. She had greatly increased in size, her breeder teeth had grown in, and she could feel her teats swell beneath their scale flaps. She had been expecting an honor guard to show up and show her the way back for several days, but hour by hour passed and her worry increased until she had convinced herself something was wrong.

She had always had an affinity for scoopers and had excelled when apprenticed to the handlers and trainers. She made up her mind and whistled the command for 'home'. The scoopers excitedly raced in circles a couple of times then headed in a direction Gace had confidence the village lay.

She could not comprehend exactly what see saw at first. She found the stockade walls either melted or blown to green crystalline rubble. Thousands upon thousands of scavengers rolled upon hundreds of covered lumps, which as she got closer proved to be dead Sephians, or in many cases, just body parts. The head of Chieftain Dea rested on an impromptu spike stuck to the gate.

In a daze, Gace slithered into the village proper but heard no sound except the stabbing and slurping of scavengers. The barbarians uprooted and destroyed every fruit in the fields they could not carry away, and every building was shattered or broken. Her two scooper companions rolled among the fallen and shivered in fear and apprehension. The juice storehouse was the one building complex still standing, where fresh-squeezed ripe fruit was stored in fused-sand jars covered with juggernaut membrane.

Gace cautiously peered into the opening and saw more than fifty bandits, satiated and dozing among their spoils. The bandits had no real industry or skills, other than kidnapping sand-flamers and forcing them to make weapons. The bits of decorative clothing and ornamentation they had stolen from the vanquished villagers looked grotesque on them, at least to Gace's sensibilities.

She, however, was adorned with artistically woven carry bags and wore her brilliantly carved medallion of office that made her look impressively regal. A bandit patrol returned from their nearby encampment and saw her standing outlined in the sunshine, and inarticulately whistled a loud warning as much from fear as recognition of a villager. Gace turned and slithered quickly away to gain a significant lead before a dozen bandits gathered their wits for pursuit.

And pursue they did. Gace was born in the village but participated in many juggernaut hunts during her neuter-hood so knew the surrounding area intimately within a two full-day journey in any direction. She instinctually headed towards an area of rolling dunes, hoping to escape any line-of-sight pursuit. Her hunters, however, had brought several of their neuters, and even though they could not move as fast, they could jump up and glide in search patterns to track her.

Gace could have maintained a steady pace without stopping, but her two loyal scoopers needed periodic stops, and she loathed to depart from them. She let them rest until she spotted a gliding seeker crest the horizon and whistled them back to rolling. Gace fully rested and well fed from the plentiful supplies from her vigil, was capable of going for several days. The bandits were equally well-rested and fed and were determined to bring her down.

By the third day she had traveled beyond her known limits, and looked up at rock outcroppings thrust up from the sand. Unknown to Gace, her village was the Eastern-most habitable area of Sephia. The native plants and animal life of the desert could not survive beyond the sand plains, and beyond them sprung rocky foothills that became true mountains.

As she continued half a day up-slope into the foothills, the bandits decided that the reward was not worth the cost of leaving their familiar environment. Gace finally realized they no longer followed, but could not return for fear they may have left a lookout. She continued on.

She saw the scoopers had trouble negotiating the steeper slopes, and could not climb rocks or boulders at all. She also felt her gravidity about to reach its peak and knew she must soon lay her eggs. She was morbidly exhausted and had not eaten in way too long.

Gace found a small cave and decided to shelter for a time and try to think of options. The fact that a local reptilian also chose that particular cave for the very same purpose was a minor coincidence that changed the course of Sephian history.

The creature was not native to Sephia, but she, or rather her ancestors, had migrated off the central mountain of Dhos, soon after the Catastrophe. A major avalanche had struck the separating barrier between the two lands with such force that it split the bedrock beneath and created a canyon that undermined even the deep-set invisible wall. Over the centuries, a mix of alien wildlife migrated between the not too dissimilar environments and fit into local niches.

Closer to insects than reptilian, the creature in the cave was composed of twenty body segments, each a one-foot wide oval with its own pair of legs. The head closely resembled an alligator, and a pair of foot-long pincers brought up the rear. The mopis, as Gace named it, had been hunting and stockpiling prey for her own soon to hatch brood. The various prey were still alive, though paralyzed by venom to keep them fresh.

The scoopers were in deep slumber, as was Gace after laying her eggs when the mopis scuttled into the cave. Neither Gace nor the scoopers had ever heard that particular sound on the sand, so they did not immediately react to the danger, but they did wake specifically because they could not place the sound. The scoopers immediately attacked, which saved Gace's life.

The cave floor was fifty feet wide and fairly level so the scoopers could roll to speed quickly. Gace pulled her dagger and started for the cave opening, but the mopis had one end blocked by her toothy jaw and the other by her pincers, so instead Gace backed into a small alcove.

In a sudden flurry of movement, the mopis arched her body and grabbed a scooper in her pincers and injected a stinger. The scooper dropped and never moved again. The other scooper, now aware of the danger, rolled into a sprint and gouged through the second segment from the rear and separated the pincers from the body. The mopis screamed in pain and anger and twisted her snapping jaws towards the scooper. The scooper dashed to the front of the creature and separated the body at the third segment behind the head.

The scooper was at least as intelligent as earth an earth canine, but had never encountered this creature and decided to focus on the fourteen-foot middle segment that thrashed on the cave floor. It never saw the mopis' jaws approach, fully mobile with six legs still attached to the two segments still attached behind the head. In one snap, the last scooper lay crushed. The partial mopis turned to confront Gace, who now outweighed the creature, was just as quick, and an equal match in length.

Gace snapped her head forward to slam her dagger into the mopis' neck, but the thick, scaled skin simply shattered the sand-flamed blade. The mopis' snapped in response and forced Gace to dive underneath its belly. The mopis reached down with its snout and latched on to Gace's left leg. The pain was so incredibly intense she began to pass out, but breeder fight hormones surged through her. She twinned her body around the top and back of the mopis and sank her breeder teeth deep into the joint between the head and the remainder of the body.

The mopis rolled and bucked, but its head joint only swiveled around or down, not up. Driven by the fighting surge and her extreme hunger, Gace drank her fill of mopis blood and then fell into a near coma next to the vanquished monster.

~o0o~

Gace awoke and felt refreshed and well overall. Her first concern was to remove the carcasses from the cave so as not to attract whatever local scavengers inhabited this environment. She tenderly carried the scoopers out and into a ravine; the mopis pieces not so tenderly. While she scouted the area around the cave, she realized there at least was no need to worry about juggernauts. In no way, they could move their bulk up the rocks and hillsides.

As she returned to the cave and her eggs she felt disjointed and floating, not worried so much as numb. Her lethargy increased, which kept the growing depression at bay. She had lost her scoopers, her village, her Chieftain, and she had no prospects for food. Her last meal was two small fruits several days earlier, but then, why did not she feel hungry? Gace's world seemed to tilt as a nonsensical memory pushed into her awareness.

Her memory of the battle itself was somewhat fuzzy, but she had the distinct impression that she had actually fed off the mopis! She felt all right, in fact, she never felt better. Ingesting the fluids of any native desert animal, other than female Sephians, meant cramps and chills if not death. If she could feed off other mountain denizens, then she might survive in this strange place.

Gace looked over at her eggs while she stroked her Chieftain-in-training medallion. It occurred to her that she was now Chieftain. And as Chieftain, she could start a new village. Let the bandits have the desert; she would conquer the mountains, and in time, she would make the scum of the desert pay for her losses!

~o0o~

Gace found hunting was easy and game plentiful. The mopis was at the very top of the local food chain, yet mostly preferred to avoid confrontation. The one in the cave was exceptionally aggressive because she was protecting her eggs, which she buried down a low tunnel in the rear. Gace was too large for that part of the cave and had no reason to explore it and was unaware of the approaching hatching date.

Her own clutch could emerge at any moment. She had brought in a harmless, juicy prey animal, wrapped alive in netting she had adapted from various animal sinew. She paced nervously, betting her entire future dreams on an experiment involving Sephian reproduction and these new food sources. She only had six teats but could nurture twice that many neuters. She wanted to keep all twenty-four of her brood rather than cull the weak as normal.

Gace watched the supple eggs as they rocked and pulsed, making special note of those with vigorous movements. Aggressiveness was one of the most easily noted traits she would look for in the six she had decided to suckle, with alertness and responsiveness to their environment to be judged once they kicked through the leathery shells.

She heard a couple of irritated whistles, which were the first neuters that sliced through their eggs with their tiny rear claws. Two emerged simultaneously, stretched their foot-long bodies to full height and looked around at their world. They noticed each other, but seeing no other danger, raced towards Gace and begged/demanded to suckle.

They appeared healthy and alert, so she opened her teat scales and let them at it. Eighteen more hungry neuters emerged within minutes, took stock, and slithered en masse. As they neared, Gace let out an ear-splitting warning. Three ran away, which eliminated them from the contest. Two ignored the warning and actually challenged her authority, which she rewarded by picking them up and tossing them back into the egg castoff.

The remaining newborns came to a stop just short of their goal. She then whistled an assent command with inviting overtones and watched approvingly as four newborns slithered towards their suckling siblings, neither lowering their heads in apprehension nor fully raising them in hubris.

"That makes things easy," she thought as she dismissed the losers until her favored drank their fill.

Gace slithered to the three remaining eggs. One was still; one only moved a couple of times, and the last laid half within its egg with deformed, underdeveloped legs. She twisted around and brought her foot firmly down on each one in turn. She dispatched them without anger or bereavement, but simply from generations of practicality.

The time came to attempt her experiment. The group of fifteen losers huddled together, forlorn and wretched but unable to improve their lot. Gace dragged the net-enshrouded reptile she had left in a corner and brought it to the neuters. She took her dagger and stabbed twenty or so narrow but deep holes in the body, pulled back a little, and encouraged the neuters to investigate. Slowly, by ones and twos, they approached the sticky, dripping fluid, tested a drop, and proceeded to feed, grateful if not enthusiastic.

Gace carefully watched all activity throughout the next few days, but could discern no difference between the milk fed and the blood-fed, other than her favorites were growing quickly while the others did not seem to grow at all.

~o0o~

Gace was on a lone hunt when the hidden mopis eggs hatched. Twenty-one exuberant, inquisitive young Sephians provided more excitement than she could handle at times. The blood neuters looked as if they would never grow beyond their one-foot length, which meant they had plenty of room in the cave to practice their gliding after scurried leaps.

Their milk fed siblings had already reached their maximum four-foot length, and delighted in climbing the rocks outside to fly off thousand-foot drops, especially when they discovered thermal updrafts.

Prior to the mopis eggs hatching, a probing blood neuter discovered the narrow decline and by crossing her legs was just able to follow the tunnel down to a tiny chamber. There she found fifty softball size eggs and innumerable prey animals, alive but unmoving. She slithered over to a juicy fluff-ball creature, extended her feeding teeth, and sipped a sample. The blood left an unpleasant burning sensation from the residual paralytic, so she went on to investigate an egg that had started rocking and cracking.

A small triangle of shell suddenly fell to the floor and a tiny head appeared, followed by a miniature twenty-segmented mopis. The crocodilian head sniffed around, focused on one of the meat animals, and headed for its first meal. Although the mopis was twice as long as the neuter, the diameter of its sections was only three inches across. The tiny mopis had trouble finding a grasping point on the uninjured feed animal, so the neuter brought up a clawed foot and gouged out a bloody chunk.

She offered it to the mopis, who looked at the offering, looked at the neuter's face, then gulped it down in two bites. The mopis rubbed against the neuter in a show of affection and begged for more. The neuter was delighted! She just had to show off her new pet to the others. She tore off a few smaller pieces and led the mopis down the hall into the cave proper.

The cave echoed with demanding whistles that questioned their sibling, which caught the attention of the milk neuters who came in to investigate. At first, the mopis was frightened of the attention and brought its tiny stinger around in threat, but it had bonded with the neuter, who reassured it with soothing whistles and firmly stroked the mopis' head.

When she finished relating the full story twice, all the blood neuters rushed the small tunnel to emerge with the remainder of the eggs. The larger milk siblings demanded eggs of their own, which the smaller gave over without question, who also reminded them to bring out the food animals. Within the hour, every Sephian had assisted their mopis out of an egg and imprinted them with a first meal. Someone discovered they could teach the mopis' tricks, like fetch, follow, and roll over. Gace slithered in from her hunt to a circus-like scene that made her smile despite the chaos.

One of the milk neuters noticed her and shrilly whistled, "Ma'am, look what we got!"

Gace could see immediately that there was no danger, proven beyond doubt a moment later as the leftover eggs in the tunnel chamber hatched. The hungry, grumpy wild mopises came boiling into the cave looking for food.

Before any of the Sephians could react, which is indeed quick, the bonded mopises attacked and slaughtered each interloper. When all lay dead or writhing, each victor returned to its master seeking praise, which each received in bountiful measure. Several of the blood neuters picked through the remains and delicately sipped from each body segment as if sampling tiny grapes. The milk neuters rolled their eyes at each other in mild disgust.

~o0o~

The tamed mopises grew to the length of a mature Sephian female and acted just as fierce. They easily took to the bridle; their small masters lying atop them with their legs firmly tucked in between segments. They loved the hunt, and took whistled commands willingly, attacking or pausing at their master's pleasure, and only ate from their maniples.

Gace glowed with pride. She had a tribe of the fiercest warriors ever imagined. Even the diminutive blood neuters could wield mopises with impressive skill. She had developed crude weapons, made from wood and bone but dreamed of arming everyone with flame-forged sand crystal. She used the hunts and trained her troops in tactics they thought were just fun, but which she designed for use against the desert dwellers.

When Gace first arrived at the cave, survival seemed an impossible dream. Now, successful beyond imagination, she let her imagination and dreams grow. Weapons and other manufactured items, while satisfying, would only mean a status quo existence. Even the idea of vengeance had somewhat paled now that the means were at hand. What she most desired, in her inner heart, was an empire. And that meant mature females to produce progeny under her Chieftainship.

She could, and would, perform a breeder-hood ceremony soon, but that would be to cement her power. What she really needed were females as tractable as her blood neuters. She tried to transform one of her milk neuters into female using her own blood, but the diet of animal blood, or at least the same side effect that seemed to keep them from growing and inhibited the transformation. The only solution was to capture some desert neuters.

With her plans worked out in detail, Grace provisioned her troops with weapons and meat, both for them and their mounts, and they all headed down the mountain and into the desert proper. Their mopis' seemed right at home as their twenty sets of legs effortlessly carrying them over dunes and through plains of sand. What had taken Gace over a week to cover during that terrible chase became a comfortable two day's ride. They camped just out of sight of where the village once lay.

Gace had a trio of blood neuters dismount and stealthily scout the village. They returned and reported dozens of Sephians both in and around the haphazardly repaired stockade walls. There seemed to be no organization other than the normal grouping of neuters around each female. She asked about the defenses, especially caltrops, but they reported no formal patrols outside wall.

The plan was simple. They all mounted up, quietly made their way to a point straight across from the open, unguarded gate, and charged all at once. Gace let the six milk neuters lead and charged them each to capture a bandit neuter as soon as resistance allowed, then return to their base camp.

Gace stayed in the middle of the blood neuters, safely ringed from immediate danger. As the small horde raced through the gate, whisper quiet on the hundreds of mopis legs, the new inhabitants of the village gaped in shock, their maniples hanging slack from their faces.

The milk neuters tossed drawstring netting they had tied to their mounts and quickly captured whichever grounded neuter caught their fancy. The females finally came to their senses and the compound echoed with enraged and frustrated whistles that commanded all remaining neuters to grab their weapons.

The crystalline spears, well designed for hand-to-hand combat, proved useless against mounted foes, even armed as they were with only sharpened sticks. The mopis' enjoyed both the carnage and the camaraderie of combat while they dispatched victims using both pincers and jaws.

More than half the defenders lay dead in the first few moments. The rest deserted the village en masse. Gace entered her old village, dismounted, and made a leisurely inspection. She pointed out the better weapons and other practical goods for her brood to plunder. Grace obtained for herself, though piecemeal, the full regalia of a Chieftain. It complimented her medallion well. Taking a last look around, Gace rounded up her troops and rode home triumphant.

~o0o~

Gace felt twitchy the day after returning to the cave. The captives lay dejectedly under guard in a back corner while everyone else's spirits were still high from their victory. Minor squabbles broke out over possession of certain weapons or other items, but good-naturedly.

The next day she experienced stomach cramps and assumed she was experiencing a severe bowel problem. She thought she excreted an extremely large fecal lump through her cloaca, but to her surprise had laid a single extra-large egg!

First off, Sephians lay twenty-four eggs without exception. The second issue was that she had not ingested any female Sephian blood, so how could she produce an egg? And the egg itself was four times larger than normal. What did this mean, and of more import, how should she handle it?

Her thoughts went around and around, and suddenly came to a stop when she thought back on her original deadly encounter with the mopis. Her near starvation and the intensity of her first battle-fury led her to drink the mopis' blood. That had saved her life, and made possible an interesting future, but did that also induce the egg? The gestation time fit, and she was the only mature Sephian, who ever drank alien blood. Would it prove to be a nightmarish hybrid? And would such a creature be an asset? With all the unknowns, she decided simply to wait for the egg to hatch. There were more immediate concerns with which to deal.

Before they left the village, Grace had filled a pair of fluid storage jars with blood from dying females. She gave the jars to a milk neuter who forced the captives to drink. She ordered a watch kept, and personally removed their breeder teeth with a sand-flamed dagger the moment they showed. On reaching the last new female, she hesitated and made another possible connection between procreation and blood. She ordered the female bound but left her teeth intact, at least for the present.

~o0o~

The entire population of the cave gathered around Gace's singular egg and earnestly watched as it began to hatch. Gace stood close but kept one maniple on her sheathed dagger. Everyone remained perfectly still so that the new Sephian entered a preternaturally quiet world. She made eye contact with Gace and stretched a yawn. Something about the exceptionally large neuter was indescribably familiar, but Gace could not place exactly what. Then she noticed; three rows of tiny teeth. She was born a mature female!

A whispered whistle floated from the attending audience, "Look, she's a mini Chieftain!"

That's when it hit her. She called for a polished sand-flame plate and saw in the green tinged reflection a perfect image of the new hatching.

Whether from her early upbringing, genetics, her later experiences, or just historical forces, Gace was a genius never repeated among her kind. Using the fully toothed female captives as a control, she discovered and organized modern Sephian genetics. Upon that knowledge, she built the foundations of one of the most powerful monarchies ever to exist.

In traditional Sephian procreation, the blood of a mature female quickens the transformation of a neuter into a female while engendering a pregnancy, or simply impregnates a mature female. Neuters raised on non-Sephian blood remain in their adolescent form for life, even if later given milk or adult Sephian blood. Once a mature female ingested non-Sephian blood, they then gave birth, once, to an exact clone, but were thereafter infertile.

Gace used this knowledge, along with many more raids on desert Sephians, to create a solid caste system, with her and her clone descendants at the pinnacle, followed by a warrior court of milk neuters also of her descent, supported by immense numbers of servile blood neuters, and ending with enslaved female milk mothers forced to provide suckle for the warrior class.

~o0o~

Over the next two hundred years, the mopis-riding mountain dwellers, later designated Sidmopisans, reached a stable relationship with the desert dwelling Sephians. Desert villages grew into city-states, followed by increased trade, manufacture, and the arts. Sephians actually reached a higher level of culture than the somewhat barbaric Sidmopisians, but since they remained secretive and in the mountain regions, their relationship was mostly one of reasonable tribute.

Then blight swept through the desert and decimated eight out of ten food plants over the next ten-year period. Few Sephians knew that Sidmopisians lived off blood, but those living near the mountains knew that somehow the blight was not affecting them. Sephian refugees, starved and dying, surged into the mountains to seek succor and refuge.

The ruling Chieftain Gace, not quite the genius her great-great-grandmother clone was, made up for that lack of greatness with increased cruelty and cleverness. She allowed large numbers to pass through her guarded passes, but only mature females and the price of admission was their breeder teeth. She also moved blood harvesting, by now a fully functioning agricultural industry, into secretive underground facilities akin to temples. Any of the slave class that learned the secret of food production was publicly tortured and killed, mysteriously accused of crimes against the monarchy.

The new royalty put the slave class to work building immense stonework palaces and public buildings, and the blood neuters rose in status as Sephian overseers. The ruling class gathered the harvested teeth into necklaces and used them as convenient monetary units, and life, at least for the nobility, was pleasant

~end~.

Chapter 4: Scout & The Sidmopisians, Part 2

Weeks passed since Scout walked beyond the last stand of Imuqi crops. He spent two full days crossing a barren buffer zone before the landscape slowly gave way to an increasingly diverse ecology. The landscape remained gently rolling hills covered in monotonous, knee-high steppe grasses, but his enhanced hearing echoed with the sound of myriad animals chattering through their daily lives. Meandering lines of moving grain-tops gave evidence of constant scampering just outside his reach.

Overhead, a never setting, never moving sun soon browned his skin, replacing his underground dweller's pale pallor. Occasional light breezes tempered the temperature to a pleasant warmth, and the rich black soil gently toughened feet that spent a lifetime walking the spongy, living floor inside the warren.

He found random trickling streams that satisfied his thirst while the chaotic enormity of knowledge in his head leaked enough facts concerning the local fauna that he never hungered. The constancy of travel, rest, and repast both calmed and restored his spirit.

Scout as yet had no firm plans other than a desire to track down the fate of humans. He was still in the early stages of adjusting to the non-integrated partitions that now comprised his mind. The further behind he left Imuq, the less his identity as an Adjudicator remained in his consciousness until he finally lost all sense of self and was content just to experience life as an experiential Tableau Rosa.

Uncounted days passed before the rocky ground began to slope and required more concentration to navigate safely. The streams merged into a minor river, lined with a variety of small trees and bushes, so he needed to decide whether to attempt ford or follow the water downstream.

Factoids filtered into his awareness that pointed in a relative north-northwest direction towards the last known human metropolis. Still, on some level, Scout was not ready to face his human heritage and whatever implications it may hold for his self-image. He chose downstream for the time being and entered a soothing, ambulatory fugue state.

~o0o~

Scout snapped to awareness, not from any philosophical conclusions or mental regeneration, but as a result of an explosion of pain centered on his nose. He also realized he lay flat on his back, looking up into a drizzling overcast fog. He sat up and gingerly explored his nose, broken, puffy, and painful, and looked around for whatever had hit him. There was nothing.

He stood up and noticed his feet had become gnarled and calloused, and his arms and legs showed thin, wiry muscles. He had evidently wandered from the river, which loudly cascaded out of sight to his left, and stood on a small, featureless clay-dirt plateau. The light rain made the clay slippery and he might have fallen on his nose, but then again, he had come to on his back.

Scout slowly walked in an expanding spiral, at a loss to explain his injury, when his right shoulder bounced off nothing. At least, he could see nothing. He looked in the direction of the obstruction, only partially obscured by the rain that hit a barrier and sluiced oddly.

There was an abrupt change in the character of the ground where the rain was blocked, and the light was of two different colors on either side. As if drawn with a straight edge, the thinly vegetated red-clay soil beneath his feet became a wasteland of bright pink triangle-grained sand.

Scout cautiously approached the dividing line and slowly bent down to investigate, which saved his skull from a sharp crack as his head softly collided with an invisible barrier. He placed his palms against the unseen wall, explored it into the ground, as high as he could reach, and several steps in both directions. On the other side of the unseen barrier, a second sun began to shine from a much lower angle than on his side. It was also more of a blue-white than cream yellow and created convection waves of heat near the ground.

He sat with his back to the barrier, squeezed his eyes in concentration, and pursued information that concerned such a barrier through his internal knowledge base. His perspective shrank to a tight point in his own head and seemed to disappear into a collage of heliobee impressions. He did not understand how it existed, or why, but he saw that the barrier extended across the entire inside of the world and defined seven distinct environs. A roof, high above, enclosed the atmosphere and controlled light, water, and temperature.

Scout's awareness point exploded outward to refill his body, and he almost wished it hadn't. He felt every pulse of his arteries grate against his brain in an extreme migraine, and the sun that reached through the thinning clouds felt like fire pouring into his soul. He began to scream in pain, but the noise just increased his torture. He buried his hands in his face and pushed into the mud, whimpering for relief. It seemed that pursuit of knowledge was not without cost.

He slowly recovered as the warm sun once again felt good on his back, and he got up and walked towards the river. The demarcation line was now highly evident since he knew what to look for, with crackling clay mud on one side and shiny pink sand on the other. He followed the edge towards the river. The closer to the river, the louder it became until the sound was near deafening as he topped a long, furrowed mound.

The frenzied forty-yard wide water attacked the barrier head on, rebounding and cascading into a swirling sink hole at its base. Too late, he noticed several undercuts along the ridge where he stood, and without warning, he rode a landslide into the maelstrom. Water and mud sucked him three-hundred feet below ground and spewed him out the other side of the barrier through smooth-cut channels underneath the sand.

Scout should have drowned, and did pass out from the beginning effects of asphyxiation, but his genetic engineering was designed to survive in diverse environments and situations. A slit emerged and widened between each rib of his chest, enclosed beneath a permeable membrane. Carbon dioxide bubbled out of the vein-covered edges while oxygen absorbed through large arterial webbings.

He once again regained consciousness lying on his back and looked up at a murky, indistinct sun. He took a moment to realize he lay on a riverbed beneath twenty feet of water. Scout pushed off, swam to the surface, and climbed up the gently sloped bank to look out upon a vast, pink desert.

The intense sun created nearly unbearable heat while the single-digit humidity sucked the last drops of river moisture from his skin within minutes. His gill slits inverted, a darkened nictating membrane closed over his eyes, and his skin crinkled into small, pliant scales.

One real advantage of Scout's namesake genetic design was the ability to survive on just about anything organic. He found he could digest whatever came his way, whether plant, animal or even the occasional mineral. This, in the dead zone between the trespassing river and the desert proper, was a good thing. Excess moisture was toxic to local life, but Scout remained emotionally loathe to leave the river for the unknown expanses of pink sand.

He traveled downstream for countless days, eating mud and hoping for some sign or guidepost that might direct him. He still suffered from the heliobee honey's information overload but found it bearable if he just floated along in his own mind and avoided the innumerable inner rabbit trails that beckoned.

As eager as his Adjudicator psyche was to organize and explore this internal landscape, his human mind quailed at the immensity that threatened to dwarf him and permanently lose what small sense of self he retained.

The river finally hit an up-thrust of hard rock at the beginnings of foothills and disappeared into a sinkhole, where it traveled underground to the far removed ocean. Scout saw no advantage in crossing the river only to verify whether the barrier continued, so turned right, keeping to the sand rather than climbing the foothills simply because it was easier traveling.

The wildlife in the desert had recovered from the Great Blight of the past, although with far less diversity than before. The juggernauts thrived in both the aftermath of the blight and during the hard recovery, but they somehow sensed Scout's foreign indigestibility and always steered clear. Scoopers might have hunted him down just for fun, but domestication had led to evolutionary drift that resulted in a symbiotic dependence on Sephians, and their wild cousins were all but extinct.

Scout's body did not exhibit further secondary chameleon-like responses to this new environment, other than a pinkish skin tone. When he came upon his first Sephian bedouin camp, he spied on them in relative safety simply by his skin tone. It was a small group, just three females, and fifteen neuters, and the camp was temporary as they searched for rare, wild plants. Scout watched from a distance for three days but decided not to follow when they broke camp back into the deep desert. He continued along the border of the foothills while his mind reactivated despite efforts to maintain a semi-stupor.

Several times during his desert travels, Scout turned aside to investigate twelve-foot green crystal ovals, bluntly pointed at each end. They rolled sideways to the prevailing winds, starting from all points of the interior and blew their way towards the mountains. He trekked towards one that lay temporarily stuck, an end buried in a small dune. The sun refracted emerald-green rainbows onto the sand while illuminating the contents of the hollow coffin. The wind-driven rolling of countless years had reduced the Sephian's remains to bones and shredded flesh strips.

Scout could feel an insistent memory that attempted to bridge the knowledge/sanity protective gap maintained between his consciousness and the massive weight of his memories. At first, he clamped tightly against the internal intrusion, but in time his initial panic transformed into intellectual inquisitiveness.

He found he could accept dribbles of information, carefully allowed to seep past his defenses. The information, gathered by the heliobees before the Catastrophe, was a thousand years out-of-date but the mosaic did reveal bits of Sephian culture.

Circumstances forced the Sephians, along with the other races brought into this place by unknown kidnappers, to create a primitive culture since they brought no advanced tools of their civilization with them. As soon as the initial generation with first-hand knowledge of their old space-faring technology passed away, a new culture began almost from scratch.

One of many new social bonding ceremonies was that of setting deceased females adrift upon the sand. The caskets made their way to a series of deep cave openings along the base of the mountains, often at the end of a decade's long journey. This was related to the ancient creation and afterlife myths of the soul's journey out of the darkness into life and the lonely return to the depths of creation. Neuters, not considered to have souls, were considered mere conduits for souls from the underworld, which entered during transformation into breederhood. Dead neuter bodies were unceremoniously offered to the scavengers and Juggernauts.

Scout's memories did not reveal whether the Catastrophe interrupted the practice, but Sephians re-instituted the ceremony shortly after the rediscovery of sand-flaming. With nothing better to do, Scout decided to track down and visit the funerary caves. Along the journey, he noticed an increase in density of caskets as the natural terrain created an immense funnel towards his destination. He did not come across any living Sephians as they avoided the area with intense superstitious dread.

He could tell where the desert proper ended, and the cave system began, by the slight rise that ended in a short rocky lip. Dozens of green caskets jostled for dominance with every stout breeze. The lip at the entrance to the caves stretched over a mile in length. Scout looked into the chasm, but even with his enhanced night vision, the difference between the brilliant sunshine and the knife-edged darkness was too deep to pierce.

He saw a steep slope along the far edge where the lip joined the rocky mountainside, so made his way over and began to climb down. The hard granite slope suddenly turned vertical, but he continued with confidence thanks once again to Imuqi design specifications. His palms and soles sprouted tiny bristle cilia akin to that on the pad of flies and certain terrestrial lizards. The tiny protrusions reduced to a point only a few molecules thick and stuck to the rock like industrial velcro.

After fifty feet the wall began to slope into a gentle arc and continued in an undulating six percent downgrade. The ceiling roughly paralleled the floor twenty feet above, but narrowed to an opening only a few feet high. As Scout approached the bulging central formation, he felt several stinging wounds in his feet that stabbed deeper as he walked. Gently going to his knees in the increasing darkness, he felt around the floor and picked up tiny green shards of slivered crystal.

He closed his eye for a few moments to increase his night vision. He realized that the mound which nearly closed off the cave tunnel was thousands upon thousands of cracked, broken, and shattered caskets. Scout backed away from the debris field and sat to attend to his wounds.

He considered the concept of an afterlife for the first time in his life while contemplating the vast mound of formerly living souls. In Imuq, when a citizen became infirm beyond healing, they were compassionately placed within a Recyclor. The Recyclor bathed them in a pleasant anesthetic fluid to remove any pain and produced a vapor that combined opiates and narcotics to ease their passing. Later, their constituent parts were anaerobically digested into a nutritive slurry and recycled into the community. The idea of an afterlife never entered anyone's mind.

Scout's Adjudicator self filed data sequentially but created a sub-index by subject. Even though his thoughts and philosophy were Imuqi, he was also aware that his human side leaned towards a belief in a soul and an afterlife. He wondered if that meant that he, too, had a soul; and what might happen after bodily functions ceased. It was just one more investigatory goal to add to his quest to define his humanity.

Focusing on the Sephians as a culture and a people, Scout's fragmented mind created a personae which he, to put the unexplainable into allegorical terms, slipped on like a psychological body glove. He was still Scout but filtered through the worldview of a Sephian. He decided to find a way into their society, a feat fraught with considerable obstacles the least of which concerned his physical form, which was definitely not that of a Sephian.

~o0o~

A small group of itinerate Sephians skirted the edge of the funeral plains, risking ghosts and spirit-wasting disease in the pursuit of a flock of silver floating fruit. The silvers, highly desirable by the nobility of Sidmopisian society, brought a premium price. They floated higher than any other variety and by the time they lost buoyancy in preparation of germination, the juice spoiled.

This close to the mountains, the updrafts often swirled the silver balls downward, which allowed neuters to glide in for retrieval. The group's finest hunter oriented on a perfect intercept course with a ripe fruit but sailed by without even attempting to catch it when something disturbing caught her attention. On the ground, her female whistled angrily at the lost opportunity.

"Was it not to your liking? Are you bored? Have you decided to transform without the need of female blood? Explain yourself!"

"I, I am sorry Ma'am, but I saw a human coming from the center of the funeral plain! I don't want to die of soul sickness, please, please don't order me back!"

"Silly twit of a neuter. I suppose you saw something, though. You two, glide up and look around. I don't want another band poaching our silvers. Go, now! You know that humans are just stories told to misbehaving hatchlings."

The two appointed neuters quickly jumped to gliding speed and circled lazily, easily maintaining altitude in the thermals. They landed together but appeared shaken and scared.

"Well, if something is out there, what is it?"

They looked at each other and stammered over each other's whistles, then the larger looked at the ground and quietly said, "Human. I swear! It's just like the stories; long skinny malformed legs, two bent grotesque maniples sticking out below its neck, and an ugly fruit-shaped head!"

The other neuter remained quiet but continually nodded her head in agreement. The female was about to strike out in rage, when out of the corner of her eyes she momentarily saw something that wavered in the shimmering heat.

She saw nothing when she stared straight ahead, but an oblique glance showed a sand-pink figure that slowly came into focus. The three other females and their entourage gasped as they too began to make out the approaching form.

The chief female quickly reviewed all she knew about humans, which wasn't more than the tales any of the others heard as young neuters. According to tradition, humans weren't supposed to be all that dangerous as long as you did not attempt to contain them or inhibit their movement.

The authority they supposedly had with the gods of the underworld and death was Sephian's primary fear. It was the humans that were purported to have called up death to walk the world in the form of the Catastrophe because someone had tried to imprison them.

There was another, intriguing side to the stories. Humans had access to all the knowledge gathered through the countless centuries by their lower-world masters, and sometimes, without logical reason or reward, granted this knowledge to Sephians. This usually ended with the lucky individual garnering immense wealth and prestige. When the human came close, despite the blur from his camouflaged coloring, the chief made her decision.

"If this IS a human, and despite my disbelief, it LOOKS like a human, then just ignore it. The stories are clear. Ignore it, and by all means do not get in its way or attempt to sway its path, and we all shall be safe." The fact that she did not mention the reward possibilities did more to steady their nerves than anything she could have said. Greed, especially in the true desert folk, was a known and understood variable.

~o0o~

Scout followed the group back to their base camp, quite surprised at their non-reaction to him. They tried hard to act as if he were not there, but studiously altered their path to avoid him, and watched out of the corner of their eyes whenever he looked elsewhere. It would help if he could talk to them, but their whistling musical-chord speech was beyond the single notes which were all he could manage.

His human mind safely absorbed enough Sephian memories that he understood them, but they seemed biologically incapable of written language, which closed off that approach. There were always enough neuters around to maintain the oral traditions in place of written libraries.

Scout followed them on their silver-fruit hunts and noticed they were only successful one try in ten. He "remembered" a pre-Catastrophe technique Sephians used for sport, and was curious to see how the current generation would react if he introduced it.

The troop aggressively ignored him as he borrowed some of their juggernaut-gut string and wove a square net, knotting weights in each of the corners. During the next hunt, he stood on the ground beneath the flock of silvers, swung the weights around his head, and released the bolo net to a point above the floating fruit.

The weights opened the web as their centrifugal paths pulled from the center, and the fully opened net settled over three fruits and dropped to the ground after entangling them. The hunting group made no pretense of further ignoring Scout as they stared and stood motionless as he walked over and drank one of the spheres. It was pungent and slightly acidic, definitely an acquired taste, but he could understand why they would be in demand.

He placed the remaining two fruits in a weighted capture bag, circled the bolo net once again, and brought down two more. He left them on the ground, walked a few paces away, and sat cross-legged on the sand to see what might happen. One particularly ambitious neuter looked twice between the bolo and the silver flock and pointed to herself inquiringly in front of her female. The female thought a moment and gave her assent. The neuter went to pick up the bolo but almost let the two valuable silvers loose in her excitement.

The neuter had trouble spinning the bolo at first, but devised a lopsided grip using one large upper maniple in concert with the opposite and smaller lower one and managed to throw it horizontally. It was a good throw if not very long or high, but it opened nicely. She practiced a couple of more times but could not get an arc much higher than her head. Undefeated, she circled behind the flock, jumped into a glide, and made a perfect throw that netted four ripe fruits. All the other neuters whistled long and loudly in cheer as she landed.

Each neuter insisted on taking a turn, taking a quick lesson from the first, and within a couple of hours they captured the entire flock. This represented more wealth than the band normally would have captured in six months hard work. The chief wasn't certain how one showed appreciation to a human, or if it were even safe to do so, but she was certain it was appropriate to show respect. Eyes averted just to be cautious; she went before the sitting human and bowed low for a moment before quickly leaving him in peace. Scout simply smiled to himself.

~o0o~

Life in the desert tribes was never easy, but they descended from the few hardy survivors of the blight years. They were also fiercely intolerant of those outside their social strata, even and especially neighboring tribes. Before they traveled to the closest trade-city with their wealth of silver juice, each member of the group learned to make bolos at the hunt site, and more importantly unmake them afterward.

That way, no one could learn the secret of their success, a strategy that allowed them to rise to prominence over fellow desert dwellers for generations to come. When Scout left them, even though he was a frightening Human from the Darkness, the small tribe felt more melancholy than relieved, especially the neuters rewarded with a breeder transformation ceremony for their part in the tribe's rise.

Scout's guise as a Human daemon served him well, even in the trade-city of several thousand Sephians. Most residents considered themselves urbanely wise compared to the desert bedouin, and would never admit they actually believed in humans. Seeing one that walked among the streets and shop stalls, however, reignited youthful religious catechisms in even the most agnostic Sephian.

Scout spent several weeks wandering the city and compared the surprising divergences between current technology and lifestyle and those in his heliobee memories. In the early evenings, especially among those that camped on the open sand rather than under canopied stalls within the city walls, Sephians in singles and small groups engaged in a type of singing poetry. They created whistling harmonics with nonsense sentences composed of words chosen more for their musicality than their meanings. Surprisingly, throughout the entire populace Scout found no hint of any musical instruments.

Heliobee memory offered Scout a variety from which to choose. As he took over a workbench in a random craftsman's stall, the proprietor stood at a respectful distance, uncomplaining but also watching every detail of his work.

When finished, Scout placed the instrument's top loop over his head so that it rested on his chest and tied a strap around his back to secure it. It was a variety of harp, with two sets of four gut strings tuned to a full octave and laid over a sand-flamed green crystal bridge. A Sephian would use all four maniples to pluck simple chords, and although Scout had more fingers, he did not have the same spread so needed to adjust some of the tunes from those he recalled.

He decided to debut the harp at a large communal breeder transformation ceremony. Because of the size of the event, an impromptu carnival broke out and a singing contest soon organized. The competition started with six groups in a double elimination. Each pair sang the same song alongside each other, and two losses meant the end of the competition for that group. Scout quickly picked up the tune, and when the final two took their places, he stood between them.

For a few moments, no one could decide what to do. Everyone was aware he was in the city, and most everyone had seen him for herself at least once, but confronting him in person was another thing altogether. He just stood silently and waited. Scout finally understood their dilemma as the pause could be interpreted as confrontational as direct intervention, which made them apprehensive. He did not want to destroy the festive mood, so decided to start playing the competition's song.

The audience had no context in which to place the sounds they heard. It certainly was not speech because, in their minds, vibrating strings were simply not whistles, and for them, symbolism was never an evolutionary achievement. It was moving and pleasing to the ear and strangely evoke their emotions. He finished the last bar of the ten-minute ballad and played it all again to give them a chance to process the new experience.

The two groups he interrupted consisted of the finest singers in the region. Halfway through the second rendition, two from one group and one from the other group finally understood. At the beginning of the chorus, the three took up the tune and whistled sharply and cleanly along with his harp.

Soon, both groups joined in, and the spellbound audience suddenly caught up and exuberantly swayed and danced. At the end of the song, the crowd whistled demands for another round. Scout and the singers were happy to oblige. After the end of his third time through, Scout decided to try one of the most popular ancient tunes. He played it through twice, and again on the third the competing singers joined in. On the fourth so did most of the audience.

Scout had felt depressed, beginning when he walked away from everything and everyone he grew up with in Imuq and culminating with his musing about life, death, and continuity in the funeral caves. His depression lifted and floated up on the notes of the evening's music. He realized he was still lonely, but in a way that gave him renewed purpose in the pursuit of his human origins.

Before the music ended, late into the night, the shopkeeper who had hosted Scout's harp manufacturing returned from the concert and gathered her apprentices. As the sun lightened into full daylight, a dozen new harps hung on display. The shopkeeper was thankful that her encounter with the human had resulted in an ensured fortune rather than him eating her, or worse.

~o0o~

Scout saw an increase in both activity and excitement over the next several days. He overheard mention of a Sidmopisian Ambassador, but the title meant nothing to him. Most of the activity concerned cleaning and repairing, gathering of trade goods, and hiding or camouflage of personal luxury goods.

There was also a great deal of activity in and around the only multi-story building within the city. The three-story green crystal ziggurat appeared completely deserted during Scout's previous explorations of the city, with sand and dust throughout. Now polished to a brilliant sheen, it remained cleared of every grain of pink sand.

Tension on the morning of arrival reached a peak as whistled rumors of "Sidmopisians are come!" and "Ambassador ABdim/F!" filled the air. The latter was only heard from mature females as the name required a full set of breeder teeth to pronounce. A wave of silence followed the calls as talking and activity ceased. All attention focused towards the wide main city gates, and the crowds that lined both sides of the main Boulevard were thick. Scout jogged to a small side gate and ran outside the fence and towards the front, stopping at the corner to look around but remain hidden.

A mile-wide dust cloud surrounded a thousand mopis and their Sidmopisian riders as they approached from the open desert. Most were pairs, harnessed side by side with a ten-foot leather slings suspended between the beasts, heaped with sacks, cages, and miscellaneous supplies. Around the front and sides of the phalanxes rode a hundred individual Sidmopisians in full leather and crystal battle armor, who interwove in patrol even though no threat seemed to exist. An equal number of neuters armed with small spears leap-frogged the riders, jumping and gliding to get a better view and act as forward shock troops if necessary.

It took another two hours for the front of the line to come within shouting distance. Half the armed troops formed up around a central figure who reclined on a sling hung between two albino mopises. The white reptiles were outfitted in full regalia that consisted of colorful strips of hides and draped in various medallions.

A dazzling butterfly-like pet with one-foot wings perched on the central females left lower maniple sparkled with color as it slowly opened and closed its wings to cool off in the heat. Scout lay against the sand to blend in, but as the horde approached the gate even though all attention was focused on the populace within the gate. The outriders of the throng spread out on the dunes and gave each other space as they established camp and began unloading their wares.

Scout hurried back through the side gate in time to watch the procession make its way to the ziggurat. As the lead palanquin came to a stop at its base, a gaudily adorned Sidmopisian functionary that wore only half the finery of the principle guest bowed low and helped her superior to the ground. On closer inspection, the assistant appeared to be a half-size, but otherwise exact duplicate of the larger. Scout's memories did not include the concept of blood clones, and the mirror-imaged duo intrigued him.

The two made their way up the spiraling ramp together and presented themselves to the crowd from the summit. The Ambassador stood to full height and made a lazy sweep with a free maniple while her daughter/clone/apprentice again bowed low and addressed the city.

"Her Excellent Mother, cousin to the Supreme Monarch, and Ambassadorial Chieftain of the Desert Lands, the Puissant ABdim/F greets her subjects!"

She paused a second as if waiting for an enthusiastic response, but only silence forthcoming, she continued.

"First, it is with supreme confidence that we shall count this season's tribute, knowing the full value of one-and-a-half million breeder teeth lay within the storehouse. As it is not short, the amount shall remain the same for next season."

They met this declaration with some whistling of relief since tribute had previously increased three seasons straight.

"All subjects are enjoined to remain quiet and solitary as the Monarch's soldiers sieve the city grounds to collect their taxes to the amount of 1 part in eight. Any attempts at deceit shall earn a fine of one part in two."

This edict elicited some grumbling and a few low whistles of despair. The grumbling was due to the increase from one part in ten at last season, and the despair from those foolish enough to think they could cheat their sovereign. The soldiers were extremely fair in their evaluations, but also quite thorough.

"As soon as night is descended, this season's trade fair is declared open. As decorum is followed, so too shall we hope for profit to follow. Over the next week, Ambassador ABdim/F shall be approachable for those who seek Her wisdom and justice."

The proclamations finished, the Ambassador disappeared with her clone into the top suite of the ziggurat. The fair was a moderate success, breaking records for volume if not excess profit, but few petitioners sought an audience even as a last resort. Should the ambassador deny a petition, a swift and painful death resulted in exchange for wasting Her Puissance's valuable time.

~o0o~

ABdim/F sighed as she settled into a pile of thick skins that covered a bed of warming rocks. She was exhausted and inconvenienced to be away from her own castle, as well as bored beyond measure. Her political maneuverings to achieve this post had been well worth the effort as she became the second most powerful Sidmopisian in the monarchy.

Officially, one percent of the tribute belonged to her but unofficially she had dozens of agents that manipulated major trade item values that could garner at least that much again. The thought lightened her mood, so she ordered a young female brought up, one only a few days into breederhood.

The awestruck young Sephian stood compliantly still as ABdim/F tilted the pretty head and sank her breeding teeth deep into her victim and drained her dry. She wiped her mouth appreciatively with an upper maniple, glad tonight that this one had not fought.

ABdim/F was slightly weary but noted to herself again how refreshing virgin egg layers always tasted. Her clone daughter brought a bota bag of silver juice as a palate cleanser. ABdim/F always preferred the flavor of silver after a satisfying meal.

As evening darkened, a mad rush emptied through all gates. Sleds modified from ancient casket designs piled and high with trade goods strained against harnessed Sephians. An equal number of Sidmopisian neuters carried much lighter burdens of samples or unique items, desert pets, and hand-wrought goods while they pushed against the outgoing flow to vend for the Sidmopisian luxury market.

The majority of mountain trade was animal based; skins, bones, and live colorful pets, along with solid rock carved into tools or art. The true desert dwellers eschewed such foofaraw, but a fairly new class of city dwelling Sephians sought to self-aggrandize by imitating the lofty Sidmopisians. The nobility was unaware of the trend, but even the lowliest Sidmopisian found it disdainfully amusing.

Scout started to make his way to the open market outside the city, but whenever he caught sight of a mopis, he felt a terrible gap in his memory. It was as if he knew he should know about them, but since they did not exist within this barrier region before the Catastrophe, his current personae rejected them as wrong. The more he probed the gap, the worse his head felt, almost as if his brain squeezed in warning. He finally gave up and decided to explore the ziggurat.

Serious looking four-foot long neuters armed with wickedly-sharp crystal spears guarded the only opening at the entrance to the ramp. Scout casually tried to stroll past them in the hope they would react the same as did the Sephians.

Although they avoided direct eye contact or even acknowledged his presence, there always seemed to be a couple of spears that blocked his intended path. After the fourth try, he backed off and was thereafter ignored. Scout looked up at the penthouse level and saw shadowy figures that stood on the near side of the translucent green crystal and looked down at him.

ABdim/F frowned at the frustrated human, still undecided on his fate. She knew about him as she knew about all things in her domain, through her vast network of neuter spies and agents. She had ordered a watch to tail him since before she entered the city, but he was just one of hundreds of concerns she preferred to micro-manage. Sidmopisians were not ignorant, superstitious Sephians, and ABdim/F felt not even a tinge of belief that Scout might be of supernatural origin. He was a mystery, and in her world, mystery meant out of her control. That meant lack of potential profit, and that was not tolerable.

The optimum plan would bring him to her castle somehow, but in a circumspect manner that would not cause a fuss with the desert folk. They certainly proffered no danger to her position or desires, but expediency dictated a careful handling of such basic social aspects as religion. Her compliance to doctrine, at least in public, created the easiest tool for managing Sephians in numbers. If nothing else came to mind by the end of the week, she would simply capture and cage him for the trip home.

~o0o~

On the last day of the trade fair, most of the cargo drivers had already returned to the mountains, urging their sling-laden mopises to top speed in hopes of beating their rivals to the markets. The soldiers formed up in polished review, flanking the main gate and awaiting the Ambassador's pleasure. Scout resumed his lackadaisical meanderings throughout the city and outer camps. The Sidmopisians, as he learned the mountain inhabitants were called, somehow were not as casual in their indifference towards him. No one actually accosted him, but only those nearest pretended not to watch him intently.

Scout sat on a slight rise, far enough away from the gate to be inconspicuous, but close enough to watch the spectacle. He expected the city Sephians to send the Ambassador off with a ceremony, but everyone remained busy accounting their business transactions and planning for next season. It was quiet, and the soldiers remained motionless, so he began to doze off in the hot sun.

A warm snuffling blast of air on his face woke Scout with a start as a massive crocodilian head appeared less than an inch from his nose. With a second sniff, the mopis lost interest and disdainfully backed away a couple of feet. It took a moment of willpower for Scout to slide his focus off the tooth-filled monster and examine the rider. It was the Ambassador's clone, staring directly at him. Widening his perception a small amount, but still keeping the mopis squarely in his field of vision, Scout saw three more mopises encircle him, ridden by warriors with their spears angled threateningly towards him.

"I am ABdim7. My mother, ABdim/F, is a renowned collector of creatures both beautiful and fearsome. She is undecided as to whether you shall be added as a unique pet, or as a sentient being which might be worthy of study. Either way, we nobles are not as the superstitious desert rabble. We do not believe in your quasi-divinity, despite your superfluous appearance to the contrary. Whether you remain mute from lack of ability or nefarious reasons of your own, my mother invites you to her home. You may ride on my mount."

Scout had a little trouble keeping up with ABdim7's accent, which unnaturally utilized only her breeder teeth for speech. When he did finally comprehend, Scout assumed the invitation was not a request. He slowly stood up, brushed the sand off his skin, and carefully avoided the business end of the mopis while he made his way to the rear of the twenty-two-foot creature. Up close, the rear pincers seemed no less dangerous than the front teeth. He hesitated, uncertain whether climbing too near to the mopis' rider would elicit a deadly response from either the rider or the beast.

"I would recommend sitting forward of the middle as the rear tends to sway, especially at speed."

Scout picked a spot two segments behind ABdim7 and swung his leg over the top to sit between a pair of the one-foot diameter segments. The chitin was much more pliable than he had imagined, and the limbs dog-legged at right angles down and out from beneath so that his feet remained clear no matter the gait.

The first two days were incredibly dusty and uncomfortable as his muscles adjusted to the width and rhythm of the mopis. By the third day, they had reached the foothills and only on occasion stretched and adjusted his thighs and back to keep from becoming crippled.

The next morning after breaking camp, milk-neuters passed around lengths of leather straps to all the mopis riders. Scout saw ABdim7 fling one of the straps beneath the mopis halfway down her snaking body and cinch tight against her mount. She did the same with a second slightly further from her head and left only a small amount of room between herself and the strap.

"When we start up the mountain proper, the mopis is unexcelled at finding a safe path, but a safe path to a mopis can mean impossible slopes and angles to any other creature. Secure yourself tightly if you wish to remain mounted rather than slip and fall several thousand feet. If you wish, we can attach you to a cargo sling rather than ride like a civilized person."

The last, said with a certain disdain, made Scout loop the strap twice around his legs and the mopis, then tie a double loop for a handhold. The mountain path was relatively wide and well established from the generations of use and allowed three or four adjacent mounts to travel together. Ambassador ABdim/F stayed surrounded at all times by mounted warriors, but a bit more leeway was given to ABdim7 and Scout, especially after they had passed a picket line of border guards that maintained the approach against unauthorized travelers.

Two days into the mountains the ambassador and a small contingent of twenty warriors turned onto a side trail and left the main host of cargo to continue without them. ABdim7 followed her clone mother at a respectful distance and dismounted short distance later at the mouth of Scout's first encounter with a Sidmopisian rock carving from the Magnificent Age.

"You may dismount, but stay with the mopis, on pain of death. Only nobles are permitted within the Shrine of Gace."

The warrior also dismounted and ringed the outer edges of the cave. ABdim7 entered, presumably to join her mother. Scout untied the straps and slid to the ground to stretch, but his eyes never left the intricate carvings around the cave. During the Blight years, those desert dwellers lucky enough both to survive and make their way to the mountains were allowed to voluntarily exchange enslavement for food, conditional upon the removal of their breeder teeth.

The Sidmopisians took full advantage of the thousands of laborers to create wondrous works of carved art. Their first projects included immense castles for the nobility, and then public monuments such as the original cave where Gace created the Sidmopisian race.

A carved mopis head surrounded the cave opening, complete with teeth, on a ten to one scale. The rest of the carven body and legs wound two-hundred feet up the mountain and ended in an enormous tail pincer that thrust out over a cliff edge. The entire carving was too large to see from end to end without changing focus and was somehow more frightening than the real mopis which kept a suspicious watch on Scout from just two feet away.

The two nobles emerged at the end of an hour, and after a short discussion so quiet even Scout couldn't hear, ABdim7 returned and once again secured herself to the mopis.

"I have been ordered to make all haste to the compound. We will be taking a straight course, disregarding the paths. I suggest you tie yourself firmly and lie prone like a proper person. Some of the approaches overhang, and although the mopis is in no danger when inverted, your safety is up to you."

She did not wait for Scout to secure himself before she urged her mopis forward, and he barely finished tying himself face up and bound to five segments before they began climbing a nearly vertical fifty-foot cliff face. He could hear rocks break off as forty sharp claws scrabbled upward, but the mopis always seemed to maintain enough purchase to stay attached to the wall. They encountered overhangs twice along the way that indeed forced them to travel upside down, which left Scout straining against the straps and staring straight down at hundred-foot drops onto hard rock.

By the end of the four-hour dreadful journey, Scout simply kept his eye shut and waited it out. On his own, considering his genetic modifications, he could easily have made the trip if somewhat slower, but riding tied as a helpless passenger with no control terrified him.

As a result of his apprehension, he did not see their entry into the Ambassador's castle as they rode beneath a series of arches, each larger and more magnificent than the last. In fact, he did not open his eyes until the mopis was perfectly horizontal for the first time since the ride began. They entered the main courtyard stables that adjoined an immense stone bastion.

Before Scout could untie from the mopis, Ambassador ABdim7 slithered down and whistled a serious of curt commands to a small crowd of soldiers that had quickly gathered around her. She disappeared into the castle portico without a word to Scout. As he sat up, the first thing he noticed was the densely packed crowds of Sidmopisans that slithered purposefully in all directions. The small open space that had surrounded him on arrival began to collapse as ABdim7 departed.

A contingent of armed soldiers surrounded Scout as he slid to the ground and stood up. Their spears divided him from the mopis and prevented any lane of escape were he to so desire. All had similar colored capes tied around their necks and a small medallion that depend from a string. A soldier with a slightly larger medallion than the others leaned close to be heard over the cacophony of the crowded courtyard and said, "Ambassador ABdim/F claims you are a clever animal and can understand somewhat of proper speech. Follow me closely and we won't have need to truss or cage you."

She angled her spear to part a passage through the crowds and glided forward without interference. Scout hesitated for a moment but saw his other escorts lower their spears towards him and trotted to catch up. Rather than head for the main opening as had ABdim7, they led Scout into the stables proper. They passed several dozen stalls that contained curled resting mopis', then ducked into an unassuming tunnel entrance that punched into the side of the mountain.

Within minutes, they entered the first true darkness Scout encountered since crossing the barrier into the desert lands of Sephia. He gingerly stretched his arms to each side and felt smooth stone within reach of both. He experienced a sudden urge to stop, followed by a hallucinated image of a low overhang that projected from a blank wall directly ahead.

He lowered his head after a slight hesitation since he was not sure the premonition was real, but his momentum was too fast for him to stop entirely. He hit something with a glancing blow hard enough to see stars. With the same brain-itching sensation that accompanied the overhanging wall, he suddenly became aware of a side passage ninety degrees to his right.

The images from these impressions were akin to sharply defined outlines bereft of fine detail. He dived toward the sudden turn and only slightly sprained his left shoulder as he bounced off the wall. He managed to maintain his feet and continued forward without prompting from behind. He only could imagine that this newfound sensorium was another built-in function of his scout design.

Scout's eyes perceived a lessening of the darkness as they soon entered a huge semi-circular open theater surrounded by cages and stables that enclosed innumerable vicious creatures. The soldiers led him to a 10-foot square cage, tossed him inside, and locked the bars. He had a clear view of the natural amphitheater, which consisted of coiling pits that were carved in tiered rows to comfortably seat thousands of spectators.

Scout's cell contained nothing except a small pile of moldering hay in a back corner. Other than an iron gate, the cell was simply a carved divot in the solid rock. The cells were canted at odd angles, which he was to assumed limit the view and keep occupants from trying to attack each other.

Two weeks went by and Scout felt forgotten as his only visits were twice daily deliveries of a slop bucket and water, and a once a week mucking out. Since all the cages were on his side of the arena, he had no view of other cells, but the noise was a constant irritant. This land had no day/night cycle, so some percentage of the menagerie was always active. His sleep suffered, but overall the enforced idleness was pleasantly relaxing. Scout thought he might eventually try and escape but would give his captors a while yet to engage with him.

Early in the third week, hundreds of small blood-neuters slithered back and forth in preparation for a coming event. They swept and scrubbed the coiling pits and carefully cleaned and groomed the pink sand imported from the desert. The few larger overseer milk-neuters shooed off the workers when satisfied and attended to their own stations.

The stands filled with spectators in strict accordance with precedents; the top, and furthest away were for those milk-neuters lucky enough to be given time off from their duties. Following them, the seats filled with average Sidmopisian mature females, then those of the warrior class able to wrangle off-duty time. The best seats were reserved for minor Royals, including merchants, artisans, and landowners. Finally, when everyone else settled and the gates closed, the Queen and her direct line arrived.

Golden Era Romans would have felt perfectly at home during the ensuing spectacle. Young gladiators fought for pride and reputation. The victors were pitted against criminals and slaves in battles that were little more than violent and gory executions, and traitors to the Queen were fed to voracious animals.

For the finale, exotic beasts were set against each other, the more evenly matched the better, at least for the gamblers in the crowd. At the end of one drawn-out clash, and after guards had dispatched the victorious wild mopis', a group of handlers led Scout out of his cell. He could not help plotting an escape. He knew he could clamber out of the pit, but thought it highly unlikely he could avoid recapture for long.

They placed him at the end of a line of smaller animals. Many were in elaborate cages, but all were tethered securely. All were colorful or otherwise aesthetically pleasing, in contrast to the fangs, claws, and pincers of the previous combatants. A shimmering near–butterfly with a six-foot wingspan led the procession, its iridescent colors creating holographic patterns.

They paraded slowly along the length of the arena to the Sidmopisian version of oohs and ahhs. The line stopped beneath the Royal enclosure, where ABdim7, ABdim/F's clone daughter, described each of her mother's new acquisitions to all in general and the Queen specifically. As she finally presented Scout, a hush fell over the crowd.

"And here, mother acquired a human! Not nearly as fearsome as the tales describe, it seems."

The Queen whispered to her own clone daughter Gaug, who asked the question, "What do you plan on doing with it? It is not particularly attractive."

Ambassador ABdim/F whispered to her clone daughter in turn, who answered, "We shall see what amusing tricks it can learn, and if it is not very intelligent will probably explore its fighting potential for an evening's entertainment. Her Majesty is correct; it really isn't impressive compared to mother's other pets."

Those who knew the ambassador well could tell by the twitching of her tail that the indirect conversation irritated her. The bump in status that owning the only known human gave her was thrilling, but instead of receiving congratulations and perhaps a little adulation for her cleverness, the Queen made a power statement.

"Her Majesty, my mother, has developed a small interest in this human, mainly as a historical artifact. What may we offer you for it?"

Ambassador ABdim/F was now clearly enraged. She had invested half her life and many fortunes trying to eat away at the Gace legacy of power and control. Now here, in public, the Queen once again manipulated ABdim/F into a show of obeisance. She stood up and gathered her cape to address the Queen directly.

"Please, accept this small gift in the spirit of generosity for which her Majesty is noted."

She glared at the Queen, who smiled in mild amusement as she watched the ambassador storm off. She hoped this show of strength would remind the ambassador of her place, but doubted she could avoid the upcoming crisis so easily.

~o0o~

The Queen had no further interest in Scout, but he intrigued Princess Gaug. She had him brought to her chambers, a warren of tunnels and alcoves dug from the rock centuries earlier by the original Gace monarchy. Soldiers placed him in a small niche with a soft palate bed, with only a knee-high decorative barrier that delineated his border.

The Royal warren was stationed both by posted and roving guards, but as they had no direct orders concerning the weak looking human. They mainly kept half an eye out to make sure he wasn't about to soil the carpet.

Gaug's wing of the royal residence was richly appointed with many rare and artistic objects on display. Scout casually waited until a guard slithered around the corner, then took two adult breeder teeth off a display necklace and hid them under his bed.

He spent several more hours finding an impromptu drilling tool and a usable mouthpiece then set about crafting a two-chambered flute. The fashionable affectation of the ruling class speaking only with their breeding teeth made Scout's communication task fairly simple.

Gaug stopped by Scout's alcove on her way to bed and remembered all the childhood horror stories of humans. They were mostly morality fables about what happens to bad little Sephians, and by inference, Sidmopisians. She always assumed they were just that, stories, but now she wondered what facts of history they might have been based upon. Lost in her reverie, she no longer focused on Scout. She missed the fact that he slowly pulled the hand-fashioned instrument from under his bed and put it to his mouth to blow while fingering the holes.

"Greetings, ma'am. I am called Scout and am at your service."

She heard the words, and looked around behind her to see who might be speaking. Other than one lone guard stationed at a tunnel intersection, she was alone. Scout caught her eye as he stood up and bowed; a gesture with which she was unfamiliar but which she correctly interpreted.

"My apologies but my mouth is not equipped to speak your language correctly."

Gaug made the connection, but could neither believe nor react to the fact that the human spoke. Her instincts and training as a direct descendant of Gace took over, which gave her worldview a chance to adjust as she remembered who and what she was.

"I am Princess Gaug, clone daughter and heir to her August Majesty, the Queen, bloodline of Gace herself."

"I am honored. I have made a long and onerous journey in search of my people, or at least information or rumor of them."

"You must have an epic tale to tell. But I am weary, and it is late. There is evidently more to you than anyone realized, but you also present possible advantages, or dangers, to our current situation. I must think. I prefer you keep your ability to speak a secret for now. Tomorrow we will discuss much, and make, I hope, mutually advantageous plans."

"As I have stated, I am yours to command. I place myself entirely in your hands. I wish you a restful sleep and will be available at your convenience."

"Yes. Thank you. I will try to clear a significant timeframe from my schedule tomorrow. Good rest to you, Scout."

Neither rest nor sleep was on her agenda that night.

~o0o~

Princess Gaug and Scout did come to a mutually beneficial agreement. They hid Scout's true intelligence and presented him as a favored clever but harmless pet. That subterfuge allowed him to wander the Castle at will and remain mostly ignored. It also gave him access to secrets, which proved invaluable to Gaug. In return, she related every bit of knowledge her people had of humans.

Scout compared the Sidmopisian's human mythology (for that is all it was) with his pre-Catastrophe heliobee knowledge. He arrived at two main conclusions; humans truly were extinct, and they somehow caused an explosion that nearly destroyed the world. This was mostly inference, and though there was little hope, he still planned to continue his search.

He and Gaug became close friends, so he decided to help her and the Gace line survive the coup attempt that they both foresaw. ABdim/F and ABdim7 successfully convinced the minor royal lines to attempt a revolt and promised a more equitable distribution of both power and wealth. ABdim/F, consumed with jealousy and hatred, actually meant to replace the aristocracy so long as she destroyed the Gaces.

Scout adapted sand-flamers into weapons to arm the Royal troops, which more than tipped the balance as far as ground troops, but did nothing to address the underlying issues. Scout continued to provide wise counsel and suggestions but continued to keep his contributions a secret. As far as the Queen was concerned, her rival's information came from her daughter's spy network and she assumed the tactics and strategies were a result of Princess Gaug's superior genetics.

Scout had one last trick he knew would tip the balance of the coup attempt in the Queen's favor. By proxy, he asked for a dozen of Gaug's most trusted warrior retainers, whom he knew could ride their mopises blindfolded if necessary. When they assembled at the edge of the castle grounds, he ordered that blindfolds were indeed necessary and led the troop secretly off the mountain. They grumbled but complied. When they reached the end of their journey, they gaped in awe and shock as he allowed them to remove their covers.

Scout took them to the long forgotten funeral caves, where nervous but obedient they set about and gathered immense fortunes in breeder teeth. Since the early days of the long-ago plague, breeder teeth were the coin of the realm, a rare commodity which original owners were loathed to part with. Given the unlimited wealth within the caverns, Scout took extra pains to ensure the soldiers remained ignorant of the location of the caves but also promised each a comfortable gratuity.

Loyalty can be strong, but everyone has limits. Princess Gaug was careful to reward these troops well, both financially and with promotions. The treasure was sufficient to bribe the younger members of the mutineer's families to undermine their superiors and ensure the Gace line's power for a long dynasty.

The day of the revolt went mostly as planned for the fully prepared Gace clan. However, as during any war, the unexpected happened. ABdim7 escaped the trap set for her long enough to sneak into the Gace war room with three of her most ardent supporters. Gace soldiers quickly dispatched them all, but only after they seriously wounded Scout. Princess Gaug was so distraught, and her body was so flooded with hormones from the fighting that as she cradled Scout in her maniples. She could not help herself from taking a sip of his pooled blood. It tasted exceptionally sweet.

The Queen was horrified when she found her daughter slipped into a pregnancy semi-coma. She called for the Royal healers to care for Scout in a secure cell. They addressed his wounds and made him comfortable, but otherwise left him isolated for the entirety of the pregnancy. There was no way to be certain who's progeny the princess carried, but the Queen did not overlook any possibility.

~o0o~

Scout recognized the passageways through which the soldiers escorted him as those of Princess Gaug's private wing. The comfortable receiving chamber contained three identical Sidmopisians; the Queen, her clone daughter Gaug, and what appeared to be a yet younger clone daughter. The only way to tell them apart was their finery.

The Queen wore a rich cape and sported a large, intricate medallion that hung just below her jaw. Princess Gaug wore a ring of fabric streamers with a slightly less ornate medallion, and the unknown female had an elaborate headpiece that covered her eyes from view.

The Queen lowered her head, brought her nose within an inch of Scout's, and said, "Please remove the covering."

The third female removed the headpiece with her longer set of maniples and revealed the same clear, sky blue round eyes that Scout saw in every reflection.

"Can you explain this?" The Queen asked with casual menace, "You are neither Sidmopisian nor even Sephian, yet somehow your blood impregnated Gaug and your essence invaded her hatchling's body."

"I would say it is evident; I am her father."

"And what, may I ask, is a 'father'?"

Princess Gaug finally joined the conversation, adding, "I have told mother everything you have related to me, but you have said nothing to shed any light on this situation."

Scout studied his daughter, fascinated that the eyes were the only difference between all three females.

"Everything I told you is true, but in addition, rather than being born in any natural way, I was designed both as human and with advanced survival specifications. Evidently, that includes wide latitude in procreation. I am as, make that more, surprised than you! To answer your question further, my body is not built to carry a child, so I must intermingle my fluids with that of another. This process results in a child who is a mixture of me and the host mother."

"Sounds like a particularly nasty form of parasite," The Queen said with evident distaste. "The question now, is what to do with you, and how to handle this child you created."

Sidmopisians were not particularly sentimental, but clone lineage entangled a special bond. The fact that Scout's daughter was not an exact clone had not lessened that bond with the hatchlings clone mother or her clone grandmother. She did exhibit some unusual traits, but other than her eyes, a casual observer would not notice anything different from a standard Sidmopisian.

The Queen issued an atonal sigh and backed off to curl into a comfortable corner.

"Common sense says that you are a danger to the stability of my empire one way or another. The fact that you were the genius behind our continued rule only proves this point. However, a future queen with some of your abilities would be formidable indeed. This is my offer; I will give you one year to mentor your...daughter. After which, you are exiled from all Sidmopisian lands, including the Sephian desert. And, of course, you must hand over the location of the fabled graveyard caves."

"Accepted, with the caveat that I pass the location over to my daughter, both for her security and my own. Not that anyone has asked but is that acceptable to you, daughter?"

She had not said a word, nor made a move, since Scout had entered the room. In answer, she slithered over and curled around him in a tender hug and simply said, "Father!" while fully human tears fell from her blue eyes.

~o0o~

From Scout's point of view, the year passed too quickly. There was no doubt that his daughter was fully Sidmopisian; regal, aloof and capable of ruling with emotional detachment. She was, moreover, much quicker at formulating alternative scenarios than her peers, and became recognized as the legitimate third in line to the throne, even though that position did not officially exist.

She quickly picked up the art of reading and writing, a skill and concept the entire race was incapable of understanding.. With the help of her father, though, she created a notational whistle code which gave her an unprecedented spy ring well able to keep secrets; a powerful tool for any future monarch.

As a parting gift, his daughter secured a rare albino mopis, normally reserved for the highest royalty. She ordered the mopis brought to Scout before it hatched, and the imprinting seemed particularly strong. He named it Ghoseen, a tradition the Sidmopisians found eccentric, and its mountain-climbing capabilities confirmed his decision over his next destination.

The insectoid wildlife in the mountains differed in fundamental ways from those found on the sands. Scout deduced that either the invisible barrier that separate the environments broke entirely during the catastrophe or the high mountain range itself acted as a barrier. He interviewed explorers, but all had stopped halfway up the peak because nothing grew that high, and they ran into permanent glaciers, an environment they could not tolerate.

He left the Sidmopisian's kingdom the way he had entered, on the back of a magnificent mopis, once again on the trail of his human heritage.

~end~

Chapter 5: Scout & The Dhosu

Self was restless. Self wiggled, Self twisted, Self became angered. Self slept.

Something pushed Self, something poked Self. Self pushed and poked back. Self slumbered.

This was Self's world, this was Self's routine, but lately Self felt the need for... something more.

Self became uncomfortable. In addition to the poking and prodding, lumpy pressures constantly undulated against Self. Self had enough, pushed, twisted, and clawed. Something suddenly gave way and Self tumbled, and the uncomfortable sensations stopped. Self rested, dipping in and out of sleep. Self awoke to a new unpleasant sensation. Self had no word for the sensation, but it was like an itch that Self must scratch. Self felt a hard surface beneath, extended a tongue Self had not known Self had, and licked. It was delectable! Self attempted to take a bite, but Self's mouthpieces were much too soft. Self was hungry; hungry, HUNGRY!

Something stroked Self, in a language that he instinctually understood, "Come, eat, young male." He followed the Something, comforted by its presence. He quested forward with two sensitive antennae until the hard surface changed to something warm, sticky, and delicious. He gorged, he slept, he gorged again.

~o0o~

He grew and learned something of the world. There were twenty-six others like him, but they were boring and uninteresting. He knew there were twenty-six because Teachers had taught him how to count and even perform simple math. At first, he found it difficult to learn, but Teacher was patient and offered a variety of tasty treats as rewards. These days, he felt fat and sluggish, but Teacher said this was normal and a good thing. It meant wonderful changes were coming. He fell into a slumber deeper than a coma, and neither knew nor felt anything else for quite some time.

~o0o~

He came to consciousness all at once. For the first time in his life, he felt the sunshine on his skin. This helped warm his blood and he slowly unfurled the six membranous wings attached to his thorax. Three simple eyes nestled beneath each wing joint opened for the first time. He became momentarily overwhelmed by these new sense organs, especially since he simultaneously saw out three more eyes at the top of his front section and another set of three at the rear.

He noticed a small pile of coal nearby, and as Teacher instructed him, spat a gobbet of sticky acid out his flexible proboscis. The coal melted to warm slurry and he greedily slurped it up, no longer dependent upon his teachers.

A passing shadow brought his attention to a figure flying overhead. Without thought, his carbon-fiber pincers opened and a formidable stinger slid halfway out between them. His eighteen new legs lifted him up half his body length. His front end tapered into miniature pincers similar to the massive one above his stinger, both of which he instinctively displayed.

He quickly backed into a defensive position against the nearest boulder and bent his flexible body in a U shape. He was ready to attack with either end as he felt a gob of acid build in his spitter. Another flyer, similar in shape and size to himself, landed two body-lengths away. The newcomer slowly advanced with extended feelers and began tapping.

"Steady there, Soldier, sheath your spike. I am Sergeant, and I'm here to introduce you to your section. I see you've eaten, so follow me."

Sergeant shot twenty feet into the air and hovered. Something about the bright green stripe running along the bottom of his body, the same color as his own, calmed Soldier's nerves. This was his first flight, but his body responded flawlessly as he felt pleasant warmth in his wing muscles from the exertion.

Soldier played a moment with this exhilarating new freedom, zipping back and forth with perfect balance as his body twisted and turned. He remembered Sergeant overhead and rose to meet him. He looked down to see the rock ledge rapidly shrink as they rose two hundred feet and flew due South of the mountain.

They followed a meandering series of valleys and paused over an oval tabletop mesa. Soldier saw thirty other fliers dipping down and up over the grasslands as a unit, occasionally circling back to the north. Sergeant hovered nearby and tapped a final command.

"This is an exceptional hunting ground. Make yourself useful and catch something, take it back to a nest, and repeat. The Grubbs will eat just about anything, and they are always hungry. This will also help you improve your flying skills for when you graduate to patrol. I'll be back before dark."

And with that, Sergeant was gone. Soldier's eyes were very sensitive to motion and changes in light and shadow but were acute only to a range of twenty feet. He dropped to hover at the edge of that range and watched other fliers at the Hunt. Once they targeted specific prey a flyer accelerated into a dive, and no matter how fast or how quick the prey maneuvered, it never escaped. Once again, Soldier's instincts worked to perfection, and on his first try he snagged a large beetle-like trophy half his size. The prey snapped its neck joint with a loud pop and nearly caused Soldier to drop it in surprise, but he simply grasped it more firmly and casually lopped off its head with his rear pincer. He followed the valleys back north and caught his first view of his native city-state.

His teachers had taught him rudimentary history, so it was not entirely unfamiliar, but the actual sight filled him with awe and pride. Immense amounts of labor and architectural skill had transformed living rock into arches and spires and bridges and domes, with nearly every inch intricately carved into artistic friezes and displays. Hundreds of thousands of Dhosu citizens scurried along the pathways and flew through the air. Even though the skies were crowded and there seemed to be no pattern or traffic rules, Soldier avoided the others as easily as they avoided him. He knew the nests were at the uphill boundaries of the city so headed that way.

Countless dark openings in the mountainside signaled the nesting area, but only one out of a hundred showed activity. He chose one with a waiting teacher as they taught him during his own grub-hood in preparation for his flyer phase, and gently dropped the offering at Teacher's feet. Without a word or acknowledgment, Teacher melted it with acid, and quickly sucked it up and transferred the grub–digestible goo inside. Soldier felt a great satisfaction and sense of place knowing that he now contributed his part to society. He spent the rest of the day contentedly hunting and delivering.

As promised, Sergeant showed up at dusk and called an end to the Hunt. As the sun set, he split the fliers into patrols of nine. Every night at least one of the three moons gave sufficient light to silhouette any intruder so patrols picketed clearly defined if somewhat arbitrary lines.

They flew overlapping ovals along those lines, as well as vertical ovals stacked from ground level to the top of their flight envelope. The patrols also staggered towards the interior. Sergeant placed Soldier, along with the other newbies, to the front lines. They had the least combat skills, but that also made them of less value. At the least, their defeats would slow down invaders so that more experienced warriors could engage a tired enemy.

The night went quietly, followed by another day of hunting, a cycle that repeated until they promoted Soldier to the mid-lines.

From their first airborne leap, fliers spent their entire life on the wing. They ate an occasional snack while delivering prey, but their main energy source was jellied coal from supplies teachers stacked outside the nests. The majority of his comrades remained content and comfortable in the routine, but Soldier turned restless.

He felt an aggression and a passion that caused occasional scuffles with his patrol mates. On the positive side, he always gave one hundred percent in the mock training battles while others showed minimal effort. Sergeant was wise and experienced enough that rather than punitive discipline, he sent Soldier and a few select others of like ilk to advanced training.

An elite cadre of combat veterans put them through hell. The pinched, punctured, and puked acid on the volunteers, and in the first week, half of them requested out. Soldier, however, thrived. Each training scar provided a permanent reminder never to repeat that mistake. There was no one particular area in which he excelled, but his fearlessness, combined with an innate sense of tactical movement, gave even the most talented warriors pause during melee training.

Orders arrived from the Masters. They took a lack of enemy intrusion of late as evidence of weakness, so decided to claim a formerly neutral mountainside for a new nesting colony. Advance scouts found the area rich in coal seams and were eager to expand into the virgin territory. Soldier earned his way into the most respected commando team, assigned alongside two veterans.

They were tasked to hold back and destroy any enemy that made it past the main troops and over to the construction site. On a dark night of a single moon, an entire wing of green-striped fliers expanded the established border to include the new territory. The enemies response came within the hour.

Thirty-three of the enemy attacked without warning and created a ragged hole in the defending line while they suffered only two losses. The gap quickly filled in, but two more identical groups hit the same general area, thinning the depth of coverage. Losses were then fairly equal as the fight went on.

Unnoticed, three enemy fliers dropped to the ground during the confusion, joined shortly by two other groups of three. In an innovative and unexpected maneuver, they landed and crawled along the ground. One of their Masters had trained them for weeks to overcome their reluctance to leave the air, but their success guaranteed they would pass into the disputed grounds undetected.

Their mission was to kidnap or as a last resort kill the Master they knew would be overseeing the new project. They hid beneath an overhang and waited for daylight. As soon as the sun's rays lit up the work site, the Master walked among the diggers and tapped the day's instructions. No Master had ever been successfully attacked, but it was with supreme confidence that the nine jumped into the air ready to complete their mission.

Soldier and his two cohorts spent the night hiding in the shallow rear of the new excavation. It was tiny and uncomfortable, but each had the skill and discipline to remain in the appointed cramped spot. With single precision, all three shot out of the cave and Soldier simultaneously destroyed two enemies by impaling one with his stinger and applying acid between the wing muscles of another. Six of the intruders had dropped dead or dying before the remaining three knew they were under counter-attack.

They were the best the Blues had to offer, and two of them moved together to engage one of Soldier's team. The defending Green fought valiantly for a short time, but in the end was overpowered. Meanwhile, the third enemy sped towards the Master. The remaining veteran Green was closest and immediately intercepted him, which left Soldier to confront the last two who had just finished off his comrade. Soldier felt a rage deeper than any time in his life, but he also rode a wave of battle-joy upon the back of that rage.

While Soldier pushed the limits of his body and skills, the two combatants above the Master grappled in a death grip and fell to the lip of the cave. A rock outcropping knocked the Green defender unconscious, but a horde of diggers sprang on the enemy and in only seconds carved him into bite-size pieces.

The Green warrior regained a woozy consciousness just in time to see Soldier defeat the last two enemies from beneath in an inverted maneuver that became legend. Together, the two victors gathered the heads of the slain and dropped them from on high while hidden in the sun along the forefront of the continuing skirmish line. The enemy recognized the unsuccessful stealth squad and withdrew, conceding the new territory line.

The successful offensive brought a lull to the continuous contentions. Soldier spent the rest of his short life as something of an elder statesman. He traveled at will and shared his hard-earned skills with other troops and remained proud of his contribution. As eventually happened to all fliers, his energy began to wane. He knew his time was near. He made his good-byes to his closest friends and took his last flight back to the center of the city. He landed in the courtyard of a Memorial of Transition and waited along with dozens of other fliers of similar age.

Over the next few days, he neither ate nor moved and slipped into a senescence of confusion. One night he quietly fell asleep never to awaken again, at least not exactly. His body began to twitch, stretching and pulling against itself. The end with pincers and stinger was the first to detach, then the other two thirds broke apart as each of the three new individuals made their separate ways according to their new function in society.

~o0o~

Teacher headed directly towards the newly acquired territory, knowing firsthand they would need her services Walking seemed slightly strange the first few miles, but memories of flying lay mostly in the left-behind mid-body ganglia. She thoroughly enjoyed the architecture and public art works along the way, and soon found traveling companions who were more than happy to share their experiences with a fellow new teacher.

She arrived at the cave construction site and joined groups of other teachers who waited for the diggers to complete the newest cavern. A few days later a breeder flew down among them and tapped ninety of them to follow her. Teacher followed entered the new nest, pleased with the rich vein of coal that lined the center. Breeder extruded an egg sac, made one final circuit, and ensured all was well and flew away.

Teacher was among the first to check the egg sac and tenderly massaged the pliant shell. She checked to ensure those inside were comfortable, then took her turn with the others and prepared a feeding area and a flat reception spot on the ledge.

The day the grubs emerged was the happiest of Teacher's life. Thankfully, each was healthy and active, for it would have broken her heart if even one had not made it. She loved them all equally, but the one assigned to her by mutual consent held a special place and bond that gave her life meaning. To an outsider, especially in the first few weeks, Grub appeared as dumb as the surrounding rocks. To Teacher, each small step in understanding proved how clever her charge was. When she was not imparting wisdom about the world, Teacher felt content just softening coal and watching her grub eat.

At times, she waited on the ledge for fliers to bring fresh meat. Teacher was sure in her faded memories that this generation was lazy and much slower in their hunting duties than had she been. As a rebuff, she seldom acknowledged them. How could anyone give less than one hundred percent of their efforts for the most important, well, second most important, job in the world?

The day her grub pupated was the proudest of her life, but also filled her with melancholy. She worked with the other teachers and gingerly rolled each chrysalis out to the ledge. She spent her last day gently touching and remembering each and every one. Finally, she made her way to an active nest and lay on her back to pass away and give of herself to the new generation one last time.

~o0o~

Digger flexed his carbon-fiber pincer and unsheathed his stinger. He felt strong and full of energy. He had a choice to make, whether to join the artisans, the architects, or the sappers. He doubted he had the patience and attention for detailed scrollwork and embellishments, which eliminated the first choice. He had the cleverness for designing and constructing roadways and buildings, but that held no special interest. Which left sappers. The brute strength and investigative work required to survey and locate potential nest sites seemed particularly appealing. He recalled the new territory he helped acquire in his previous incarnation as a flier and headed for the site.

Along the way, he came across a digger crew constructing a new wing for a Masters Hall. The geodesic dome was set half into a mountainside with a view that looked out over half the city. The building was only half complete but already a tremendous work of art. He decided to give architecture a try and was put to work terracing anchor points along the base.

He braced with all six legs and thrust his stinger half a pincer's reach into the ground, then inserted one pincer into the hole and squeezed to cut a proper angle. A Master supervised the work but needed only to tap the desired outcome and Digger instinctually performed his work to exacting standards. He discovered that he much preferred solo tasks to those requiring teamwork, so when the foundation was finished, he gave his resignation and continued to the new nesting grounds.

The newest cavern construction followed a parabolic arch in line with the richest coal seams as they worked up the mountain into bare rock. The new line came perilously close to the new border and that made Digger nervous. He received permission from the site Master and worked his way downhill. He followed the side of a dry riverbed, a direction no one else had yet investigated. Most diggers preferred to stay above the tree line in the hard rocks as it was much harder to excavated test holes in areas of thick soil. Digger felt drawn to an area he dimly remembered seeing as a flyer so chose the harder path.

An ancient waterfall had carved a deep canyon between a series of rolling hills, but from the construction site no one saw anything but thick stands of trees. As Digger made his way along the raw cliff face, he cleared some underbrush and discovered some of the richest coal deposits since ancient times. The seam began nine hundred feet below ground, but the old waterfall gave easy access from the vertical side. He returned to the main work site and humbly approached the Master. The Master was so pleased he appointed digger as Supervisor of the new nest, with all resources redirected towards his find. He worked to the end of his days feeling fulfilled.

~o0o~

Breeder had plenty of time to decide on a nesting location, but even this early in her gravidity felt the life inside her growing. Just as did her "siblings" Teacher and Digger, she remembered the new nesting territory from her days as a flyer. With all the excitement of her previous life, though, she decided to seek someplace quiet and well established. She flew in the opposite direction of the new territories towards some of the oldest nests near the border between the city and the hated Red enemy.

With only a third of her previous body weight, she felt as if she floated rather than flew. Most of the nests were long abandoned since the coal mostly depleted. She spent days exploring established incubator chambers, hoping she could find a sufficient seam.

She found a series of interconnecting chambers and tunnels stacked one atop the other and thought she detected an intact space of overlooked rock between the two. She flew back to the city to recruit a cadre of diggers and tapped directions to the location. When they arrived later in the week, the sappers immediately went to work. They found a missed offshoot of high-quality coal that would last many generations.

Once they excavated the seam, there was little further work for diggers. Breeder dismissed them and flew once again to the city to recruit new teachers. With everything and everyone in place, she laid her egg sac. Breeder was ready to depart to the top of the highest mountain peak to join other breeders in the final metamorphosis of the Dhosu life cycle. The forefront of the Catastrophe hit and she was buried without hope of rescue.

~One Thousand Years Later~

Scout continued his journey while riding his albino mopis for nearly three months. His multi-legged mount was capable of keeping a straight line up and over increasingly high mountain peaks, but Scout was not in a hurry and kept to a slow, methodical pace. The environment had changed dramatically from the constant sunshine, heat, and low humidity of the Pink Desert, so his genetically programmed adaptability kicked in. His skin lost the reflective, moisture enclosing scales, and his pigment changed from a pinkish hue to a mottled brownish-red.. As the average temperature dropped with elevation, he also developed a body-covering curly white fur.

A day/night cycle returned the moment he passed through a crack in the invisible barrier, including a triplet of moons to light the night. His personality, memories, and worldview transmogrified, lightly overlaid with his original Imuqi memories but still retained wisps of Sephian. Scout's goal was to continue searching for his human heritage, but he had no detailed plans. He inadvertently crossed an unmarked border in the middle of one afternoon, when a Dhosu flyer suddenly dropped from the sky and cut his magnificent mopis in half. Scout was knocked to the ground and could only watch as it disappeared North with the prize.

He lost all of his supplies along with his mount but had no choice other than to follow on foot. Scout knew he was designed as the ultimate self-contained survivor so took the slight irritation in stride. As he traveled, Scout noticed more of the fliers hunted the area around him, but thankfully they did not seem to recognize him as edible prey. He followed a dry riverbed upstream as the easiest route North and eventually came to a collection of caves set into a sheer cliff side. He approached close enough to see the ledges and view the fliers as they dropped their catches.

He could not make out details because of the distance, so decided to climb and investigate further. Oval-bodied creatures nearly as long as he was tall scurried along on six legs. They spat out a gelled liquid from a flexible snout which semi-liquefied the meat. They sucked up the slurry and returned to the darkness of the caves. He decided to take a look inside so made his way up the cliff. His eyes quickly adjusted when he pulled himself over the lip of the staging area, and he saw nearly one hundred grubs feeding on regurgitated pap and warm coal magma.

Two of the oval creatures snuck up behind him, but he reacted just in time to avoid a dual stream of acid. He retreated and crawled back down to the riverbed, but the creatures lost interest once he left the nursery. Scout figured he now had enough information to search his internal heliobee database but did not look forward to the process. He spent the next two days building a secure rock igloo, fattened himself on local wildlife, and settled in to meditate. He dived deep into the memories.

Scout's Imuqi brain was designed to hold and catalog a nearly infinite amount of knowledge, but a last-minute decision to include human DNA meant he only could access chaotic bits at a time. The Imuqi heliobees were all destroyed during the catastrophe, so the data was recorded an unknown length of time in the past but in many that ways that were irrelevant. Despite the drawbacks, including severe disorientation to Scout's psyche, the information often proved a useful tool if only as background knowledge.

The process took less than an hour, but it was a full week before Scout could function at full mental capacity. He grasped at various highlights of his newfound knowledge and tried to make a linear collage. He was in the land of Dhos, an insect-like race with a complex cycle of physical metamorphosis. The duty-specific juvenile phases were moderately intelligent but limited in interests according to their social function. The final adult phase was extremely intelligent, philosophical, and artistic. They gave direction to the entire culture and built a society that would be the envy of any race.

Scout now understood and spoke the Dhos language, a system of antenna taps on or near the intended recipient to feel the vibrations. He felt he would be welcomed in any of the city's Hall of Masters since he would not be of interest to the drone workers but would be a curiosity to the Masters. He continued North and made his way past a second, older series of nests until he finally crested into the city proper. He immediately realized something was seriously wrong.

The once magnificent city, carved out of living rock, lay in ruins. Bridges had tumbled, arches and roofs caved in, and walls lay in piles. Strangely, there were countless inhabitants, which mostly milled about aimlessly or just sat at random leisure. Stranger still, he could not find any sign of a Master. He approached a digger, a form similar to a teacher but with a wicked set of pincers that surrounded a retractable stinger. Digger sat alongside the edge of a pitted road, doing absolutely nothing.

Scouts tapped the question, "Can you tell me where to find the Hall of Masters?"

Digger grew animated, tapped an assent, and eagerly walked down the road, frequently pausing to ensure Scout followed. They headed to an upward winding road and ended at a huge pile of rubble on an incredible overview.

"This is the Hall of Masters?"

"Yes, so I have been taught."

"What happened?"

"I don't understand."

"Where are the Masters?"

"I don't know."

"When was the last time you saw a Master?"

"I have never seen a Master. Are you a Master? You are not as Teacher described them, but you speak like a Master."

Scout grew frustrated, but there was little point in taking it out on Digger.

"No, I am not. Can you take me to a teacher who has not yet been assigned to a nest?"

"Certainly. Thank you for the task. Please, follow me!"

~o0o~

The Memorial of Transition looked similar to what the heliobee information indicated and bustled with activity even though as much in ruins as the rest of the city. Digger approached a teacher at random, who was delighted to converse. Scout learned that no master had been seen in many generations. Procreation continued as always, so Teacher was not overly concerned. Digger architects and artists lived their lives with neither purpose nor achievement, but that was not a teacher's concern. Dhos simply had not evolved to take an initiative. Teachers understood this, but it was not their concern, nor would they know what to do about it if it were.

~o0o~

Scout wandered the city for several weeks but found no clue to explain the mystery. Breeders laid their egg sacs and flew to the top of the mountain as always, but no Master ever returned as tradition said they should. As a last resort, he decided to make the arduous climb to the top of the highest peak to see if an answer might lie there.

As always when he engaged in extreme climbing, tiny cilia extruded from his palms and soles that provided a safe, if not always easy, journey. He followed the direction of the breeders as they flew on their one-way trip, but when he breached the lip of the huge tabletop Mesa, he became more confused than ever.

He found the ground piled with countless generations of dead breeders while hundreds of live ones continuously walked around in connected pairs, asking the same question.

"Have you seen a Green? Where are the Greens? Is there a Green nearby?"

He followed the red-striped sub-species of Dhosu from the city and saw a bright blue striped variety that arrived one hundred twenty degrees the other side of the mesa. The Red and Blue breeders marched towards each other, and after mixing a few minutes, paired off with an opposite color and connected their bodies. Scout could not find a direct reference in his scattered memory, but it was fairly evident that the green variety had gone missing from the equation.

~o0o~

Before he had left his native Imuq, Scout had risen to be the prominent leader among his people, and that characteristic prevented him from just walking away from Dhos and her decline. He mulled over the problem during the long descent from the Mesa. He assumed the third variety had flown from an equal distance and direction compared to the other two. There should, therefore, be a city, or at least the ruins of one, on the backside of the mountain. It would have been quicker and easier to descend on that side, but he wanted to recruit an army of diggers.

Word spread among their community, and nearly all begged to come with him. The logistics of a million workers were beyond one person's oversight so Scout limited the recruits to one thousand since they would be living off the land as they went. Getting out of the city proved the hardest part of the journey. Those in the lead needed to remove debris, and in some cases build temporary bridges, but once they exited the city proper they made steady headway.

He knew they had reached the border between the Greens and the Reds by the picket line of fliers. There were no nests currently used on this side, nor had there been an enemy sighted in memory, but tradition dictated vigilance so generations ground on. The fliers needed only the slightest persuasion and were happy to hunt and help provide provisions. They were reluctant to cross the border at first, but Scout couched it in terms of advance intelligence gathering. The fliers, as well as the diggers, were thrilled to use their lives for a purpose.

Scout could not find any sign of the city. The entire upper half of the mountain gave way during the Catastrophe to slide down and covered the entire civilization. The diggers found the mechanics of the slide interesting, but unlike Scout, the horror was outside of their world perspective. He continued having nightmares the rest of his life, and only hoped it had been a swift ending.

Scout decided to search for a nesting compound outside the assumed city limits and following long streaks of overturned coal that tumbled down the mountain during the massive avalanches. At the bottom of the series of such streaks, he found a huge debris field of carbon-fiber body elements. He worked his way up the hill and set his diggers excavating. In only three days, they found a network of deep-set caves. Interestingly, a few of the deepest caverns had been hermetically sealed and still contained egg sacs and cocooned teachers.

Scout examined a cocoon, which was more akin to a hardened jelly than woven silk, and tried to open it. The outer layer was hard and brittle, but beneath was pliable enough to leave an indent. He soaked a section with water, working on a hunch. Not only did it soften, but soon the whole covering began to disintegrate, leaving an intact and live teacher. A small dribble of acid ran out of the proboscis to pool on the floor and created a soft spot. Teacher began to twitch, spat out a big gob of jellified acid, and coughed, miraculously alive.

It took several hours before Teacher was coherent, and even then she had little to say other than there was an earthquake followed by complete darkness. Scout assumed that her body responded to the diminishing oxygen levels and entered a state of suspended hibernation. More than half of the remaining teachers recovered when rehydrated, but more importantly, the egg sac became pliable and soon showed internal activity.

Scout directed the diggers to continue searching, and out of the hundreds of nests, thirteen provided the optimum conditions for survival. Over twelve hundred grubs eventually hatched and gave hope for a restored species. The red fliers continued to provide food, at least until the green fliers transformed and had taken to the skies. Even then, without a Master to direct them, both sides simply manned their routes and glared at each other. Just as a safety measure, Scout had sent the diggers home before the fliers emerged from their chrysalis. Before they left, he had them build a charming village to help their so-called enemies along their way to recovery.

To Scout's delight, and in the fullness of time, new egg sacs settled into new nests and the full cycle was restored. Scout made his way to the mesa top before the Green breeders laid their egg sacs and followed. Within the first minutes of each Green's arrival, they successfully courted and joined to a Blue and a Red.

Scout was not sure whether the design was random or followed a biological imperative, but the center color of each triad seemed equally distributed. Overnight, the previous breeders on either end of each new singular triad shed their wings, lost their color stripe, and subsumed their individual consciousness into the collective.

Each new Master contained the memories and wisdom of each phase in the life of each member, as well as retaining the different strengths of the three cultures. One by one, they came before Scout and honored him for his part in the salvation of their history. By colored sub-species, the mature Dhosu returned to their respective cities to begin the long, arduous process of restoration. Before they left they assured Scout that should he ever have a need, they were his to command. Unfortunately, any knowledge their race had of humans had been lost in the Catastrophe, which was all Scout really wanted.

Touched by their offer, he felt honored to have had such an impact but it was time to leave. He turned his sights west to the sea and continued his quest.

~end~

Chapter 6: Scout & The Vissou

~Part 1~

Scarlet smiled at her wife Burgundy as she and her four spouses finished the last touches on a portable gold-extraction prototype. At least that was the emotional content of a series of colored lights along her biochromatic band. The extractor was only one-tenth the size of the standard model, and small enough to hold and operate in two tentacles, which left the other two free. It only processed half as much volume as the larger model, but that still gave a potential of a five hundred percent increase given the same resources.

The entire Red family completed their task earlier than projected and planned to celebrate accordingly. They would reach their twentieth birthday in two weeks, and had permission from the Elders to participate in their first potential breeding season as a reward. Only a small percentage of families contributed enough to society to gain that honor so early in life. The average age was thirty while everyone made the journey by age forty.

Burgundy and Rose presented their machine to their supervisor, who swam outside the work boundary to put it through its paces. She came back half an hour later and flashed her approval. All of the other working families within sight flashed their congratulations, which made the Reds blush in pleased embarrassment. They entwined tentacles and swam off to wrap up private affairs and say their final good-byes to friends and acquaintances.

The Red family dismantled the repelling fence that protected the small grotto they called home, packed the last remaining items, mainly small intricate amusements, and gave them to their oldest friends the Blue family. Sapphire and Turquoise were out of town but made sure they participated via the telechromatograph. Dozens of families showed up for the party, some with up to twenty spouses, so the event spilled out into the common area. It was a farewell they all remembered for years.

~o0o~

The procreation staging area remained fairly dim considering the excitement since few intra-family conversations took place out of respect for privacy. There were officially one hundred and forty-two families, but most averaged only three to five members. Vissou typically chose others of similar intellect and character for their life partners, but an exceptionally ambitious individual could rise above her station if she showed true commitment. There were even a solo Grey participating, but then, there usually was.

The Elders made sure to equip each family with the tools they would need on land, including maps to the breeding grounds. Once there, it was up to each family to stake out the best territories. With over five thousand traditional sites, no one expected a problem. The Chief Elder solemnly flashed a countdown, and the race commenced.

The line of Vissou breeders remained fairly even until they hit the surf zone. A mild storm crashed ten-foot waves into the rocks on either side of the Bay and created an unexpected undertow. The Red family managed to stay together and offered a helping tentacle to Lime and Mint, separated from their family, the Greens. The Grey dashed upon the rocks, left to fend for herself and ignored by polite society as she had been her entire life.

Thankfully, the beach was clear of major debris and consisted of damp compacted sand that made the foray onto land only difficult rather than impossible for the boneless, soft cephalopods. They dragged each other and their tool bags across the quarter mile wide beach and rested under the shade of wide frond trees. The Reds immediately saw half a dozen potential birth spots, but only lazy parents chose to build so close to the shore and deny their offspring the opportunity to prove themselves and gain confidence at the earliest opportunity.

They chose to follow a creek, and then branched off to climb a small hill. They found a meadow at the edge of an ancient lava flow where the rocks and nearby trees provided excellent building material. Their only modern tool was a melting rod, which they immediately put to use and constructed a waterproof basin at the center of the birthing site. Each Visou remained lost in a private reverie of joy as every young female planned and dreamed of this moment from the time they made their first permanent family attachments.

The remaining tools were simple saws, hammers, picks, and planers. The only other item was wrapped protein discs sufficient in number to see them through the end of their task. Construction took a full month, but they felt it well worth the effort.

They built the first floor around the birthing tub and continued layer upon layer in a spiral. Each successive room presented a unique and more difficult challenge or puzzle to overcome. Their goal was to prevent all but the cleverest, strongest, most cooperative, and most driven from reaching the exit without creating so much difficulty that no one survived.

Exhausted but fulfilled, the Red family helped each other onto the roof and slid down a central shaft and sealed it behind them. They engaged in a final orgy of love and commitment to the future. They caressed and made love until every bioluminescent cell along their communication band flashed in unison during their first and final orgasm. Visou bodies consisted of ninety-eight percent seawater. When they lost continuity and melted they filled the tub with liquid, thousands of eggs and sperm and enough sustenance for their progeny to begin their journey in life.

A week later, the fluid in the tub pulsated in waves of color as microscopic Vissou learned to control their tentacles and photo transceivers. Life at first was simple and easy; eat, move, babble, and eat again. They quickly grew fat on the remains of their parents, but food soon became scarce. The first winnowing happened as the weak failed to grapple food away from stronger siblings. When the food was gone, the weakest starved to death.

The smartest discovered they could access the central mouth of the deceased by inverting the head sack and feasting on the organs. This created a small island of healthy Vissou around those first geniuses as others learned by example. Those unlucky enough to be located in the intellectual wilderness grew weak and starved. Unfortunately, the remaining thousands of now grape-size younglings again knew hunger as this new food source literally died out.

It did not take long for the smartest and strongest to invent murder. This evolutionary pressure soon necessitated the invention of cooperation, as some smart but weaker groups discovered they could conquer even the strongest individual.Then again, strength did not always mean stupidity, and soon a constant flux of alliances and betrayals evolved into tactics and simple societies. When the younglings numbered a few hundred grapefruit size individuals, they grew wise to the advantages of group gestalt and realized they needed a new strategy or all would eventually die.

The birth tub was all they knew of the world. They organized into exploratory teams that defined the length, width, and depth of their world, but the effort revealed no solutions. The sides of the tub were smooth and frictionless; a purposeful effect of the melting rod, and tall enough that the weak light from their communications organ faded midway to the top.

They might not know what lay beyond the upper darkness, but it offered the only viable option. At this point, they invented structural architecture and used their own bodies as scaffolding. There were many initial failures as stacked groups of Vissou collapsed in disarray and disappointment, but perseverance led some to success. The victors formed intricate ladders of their bodies and reached the top, then the lowest climbed from the bottom up. They discovered piles of food and a seemingly endless two-hundred-foot diameter room.

As their parents planned, the younglings soon depleted this stockpile also. Their growing intellect intuited that the closely packed boulder barricade along one wall was the only anomaly in an otherwise smooth, featureless room. They broke through with the help of two pick axes thoughtfully left behind and entered the next challenge. Every success rewarded them with nourishment and additional tools necessary for the increasingly complex puzzles.

Not everyone made it through the last doorway as mortal hidden traps lay towards the end, but six of the best finally stretched in the sunshine and heard the call of the sea. The Red progeny were not the first siblings to emerge from a birthing chamber, but they were near the top, and waiting Elders warmly greeted them as they entered the water for the first time

.

The Elders escorted the new generation to their residence and school, a large bubble that floated halfway between the ocean floor and the surface. Their teachers filled the next five years with wonder, love, and tenderness while they carefully evaluated each one for both talent and inclination.

Due perhaps to a more physically intimate liquid environment than that of air breathers, their technology developed along concise, eco-friendly paths. Rather than limiting their science, this produced tools and a way of thinking that coaxed nature rather than bashing her into submission.

At the end of their school years, the students enjoyed a season-long vacation in a sheltered cove where they were expected to play, enjoy life, and eventually join a family. Most experimented with every combination of affection from simple pairing to ridiculous groupings of a hundred. The intimacy of a family group went far beyond physical and emotional. The constant information exchange through their chromatic band formed a synergistic bond and created a holistic mind that grew in intensity the longer a potential family stayed together. This also required extremely compatible, though not necessarily similar, personalities.

Three individuals, through no fault of their own, found they did best on their own. There was nothing deficient about them; in fact, they were among the most intelligent. The Elders eventually removed the soloists and placed them in advanced training in specific fields of study. These special few found fulfillment in ways other than social and contributed to society on their own terms.

The bestowed familial name Grey was simply an observation. Without a family group, they were often silent and dark while those within a family flashed colorful communication continuously. Most Greys joined the procreation activities at the same rate as the other families, but a select elite were chosen for a far different life.

At the end of their holiday, everyone besides the Greys had joined in a family. Elders evaluated each member of every family for their interests and skills, and placed the family group in apprenticeships that allowed them the best chance to reach their potential in life as well as contribute the most to society. Within this near idyllic system, no one ever wondered where Elders came from, except perhaps the occasional Grey, who likely questioned everything.

The secret of the Elders, each a former Grey, was that Vissou, which never procreated nor met an accidental death lived virtually forever. There were no physical differences between a Grey and the others in their biochemistry or in their DNA, so Elders simply saw themselves as slightly superior, at the very least in their moral fortitude. They also grew over time so that Elders were recognizable, in addition to their air of authority, by their generally greater size.

~o0o~

Slate was her generation's star Grey, or as the Elders affectionately called her, their youngest Elder. She excelled at her studies and showed great respect for her teachers. She settled in quickly at Elders Island, the separate facilities carved into an island in a series of caves where they studied advanced science and headquartered social administration.

Each Elder felt a personal responsibility to learn as much about the physical world as possible and apply only those advances that had a positive effect on the Vissou as a whole. Slate was still starry-eyed at the technology at her disposal but had yet to learn and fully accept the reasons for slow, steady applications into society.

Her self-esteem and sense of place in the world were a little too inflated, but her teachers knew the final revelation of the Elder's largest secret would take care of that as it had for each of them. Her favorite mentor, Mist, escorted her into the heart of a quiet, isolated chamber. Mist approached a control panel and operated the various knobs, switches, and slides in quiet concentration for several minutes.

Finally satisfied, she pulled a cover back from a small energy dome and tuned it to her satisfaction. The dome crackled and revealed itself as a four-dimensional holographic display that showed every detail of the room they swam in with a top down view in real time. Slate was fascinated. The scene pulled up and out, swept across the entire Vissou-inhabited ocean, then moved again into the air to a point on the shoreline. This was the limits of geography which Elder's taught to all.

Mist turned a dial, and the scene slid the color values towards the ultraviolet and revealed a domed barrier that span the world. Slate flashed inquisitiveness but otherwise remained dark. Mist moved the observation point once more until they saw the curvature of the planet. The barrier that surrounded Vissou was but one section of a divided-fruit layout. Slate learned that Visou shared the planet with other alien races, kept separate by an unknown force and for unknown reasons.

The only blind spot focused on an island from which the barrier radiated and Vissou's most advanced techniques could not penetrate past it. Slate also learned that one of the aliens races, the humans, had been their allies. Human technology was as advanced as Vissou's, but a radically different approach and world view made collaboration difficult if productive. The humans claimed they had discovered a way to neutralize the barrier, but the lead Vissou scientists were convinced the calculations contained a flaw.

The humans had created an inverted waveform of the complicated barrier energy signature, theorizing that the barrier would simply tune to a neutral frequency and quietly fade away. They had no way of knowing that those responsible for the barrier had immensely further advanced science than they could even imagine and powered the barrier with energies siphoned from the ninth dimension.

Had they access to equal power, the humans may have succeeded. As it was, their interference created a harmonic feedback which nearly broke the world and destroyed Vissou society. The revelations also broke Slate, who's ego could not accept a world with powers so much greater than Visou, or herself for that matter.

~Part 2~

Scout stood on a promontory thirty feet above the boulder-strewn headland. Through the heliobees, he knew about the ocean, but second-hand recordings were a pale comparison with the experience. A slight onshore breeze brought the tang of salt, iodine, and a sickly sweet pinch of rot. Seabirds wheeled and argued over the abundant tidbits of marine life, which added an organic liveliness to the rhythm of the waves. To his left, he saw a half-mile curved beach that faded into a distant warm-weather fog bank.

In his travels so far, he had experienced endlessly empty deserts, mountain vistas that repeated to the horizon, and plains of waist-high grass so flat he could see to the convex curve of the planet. None of that brought him as much joy and peace as the ever-moving waves that sparkled with glints of sunlight. Or it would have, if not for the tens of thousands of Vissou that lined the beach and spilled into the forest.

He might have ignored the sound of tentacles as they dragged sagging bodies across the sands, but the psychedelic waves of intricate colors from so many bioluminescent flashes gave him a headache. He had anticipated encountering the Vissou, so had already dipped into his overstuffed memory and gave himself time to recover, but nothing hinted at the chaos he now saw.

Individuals constantly formed, dissolved and re-formed into temporary families without pattern or reason. Random groups found shallow tide pools, slight depressions, or even settled on whatever patch of ground on which they happened to be and fervently mated until they puddled in procreation. Nowhere did he see tools of any kind in use, nor even an elementary birthing maze.

Scout sighed and made his way down the beach, determined to investigate whether the mystery of such chaos continued below the waves. Not one Vissou showed the slightest interest in him enough to move out of his way as he walked among them. Even the content of their flashings seemed like the babbling of toddlers who had yet to master syntax.

Scout never needed artificial protection from the elements, nor had he ever lived in a culture with body taboos. He entered the surf naked and trusted his designer body would adapt rapidly in whatever environment presented itself.

He walked steadily until his head dropped underwater and fell forward to float just above the sandy bottom. He exhaled and mentally prepared for the slight uncomfortableness of adaptation. As his body realized no more air was forthcoming, slits opened across his ribs to form gills while webbing grew between his fingers and toes. As he swam with leisurely strokes, his skin oozed a thin film that reduced drag as well as provided thermal insulation. Internally, an air bladder activated for automated buoyancy, and a line of sensitive pressure divots appeared along his spine.

The density of the Vissou population thinned slightly, but then maintained at a steady rate as he swam away from shore. At first, Scout saw no sign of the vast underwater cities in his heliobee memories. All he found were forests of coral between empty areas of muddy bottom. There were also fewer species of fish than he expected, although that did exist were composed of vast schools. The Vissou fed off the edges of these schools at leisure and acted like grazing ruminants rather than Masters of organized husbandry and technical science.

He maintained a level depth of twenty feet while the ocean floor began to slope into the murk below. With the perspective change, he noticed unnatural patterns to the way the coral lay. He finally found missing remnants of the city after he broke off a few pieces. The area was quieter than in the shallow water and nearly deserted, but further out he found more activity near an isolated but dormant volcanic island.

As he swam closer, he finally came across groups of Vissou that worked together to herd schools of fish and larger single predators towards a large outcropping at the base of the volcano. Twice, individual Vissou came towards him, swam around, and returned to the mountain. Shortly thereafter, a group of thirty surrounded him while one stopped in his path and flashed.

"Come. God hungry. God always hungry."

After this cryptic comment, the surrounding Vissou tightened their circle and encouraged him forward with gentle pushing. Scout had no method to return communication so simply complied. They headed for the three-hundred-foot-tall gumdrop-shaped underwater mountain, but as they approached, Scout froze in astonishment and allowing his escorts to push him along without his help.

The mountain resolved into a gargantuan Vissou. She spread out in rings, each lower successive layer spread further apart and grown to a larger scale, including a chromatic band with four tentacles per level. She reminded Scout of a monstrous fir tree that waved in a stiff breeze. Whichever tentacle was closest grabbed at proffered fish and handed them down to the massive cavernous maw at the bottom. Most of the oversize speech organs flashed variations of "FEED ME!" Or "HUNGRY!" but as they took Scout to the top, she flashed words at him specifically.

"HELLO HUMAN, NICE OF YOU TO FINALLY VISIT. I THINK YOUR KIND HAS DONE ENOUGH HARM FOR ONE LIFETIME, EVEN ONE AS LONG AS MINE."

Each band of light went dark for a moment, and then flashed in unison, "PLACE HIM WITH THE ELDERS, NOW!"

Two obviously distressed servants approached Scout with a metallic box while several others grabbed hold of him. He was well versed in hand-to-hand combat but had nothing to use as a base while he floated in the middle of the ocean. He continued to kick and thrash and scratch and actually held them at bay, but the giant Vissou grabbed him by either wrist and yanked. He felt an excruciating tear as his left arm pulled out of his socket and off his body. He watched his arm make the long journey down into the beast's mouth and disappear inside. He went still from shock, and when they touched him with the artifact, he lost consciousness.

~o0o~

Scout became aware of his surroundings by degrees. First, he felt a hard surface below his back. Later, occasional noises intruded, but nothing he could recognize. He finally opened bleary eyes, but they failed to focus properly. He only could tell he was in a large space lit by a bright wavering glow. He finally awoke and felt clearheaded and tried to sit up, but his muscles were slow to respond. He gathered enough energy to roll over and slowly fell three feet through water onto a hard floor without too much injury.

Cyan and magenta lights suddenly blinked in a staccato rhythm. Someone or something picked him up and placed him back on the metal tabletop. A nine-foot tall Vissou came into focus and stood over him. She was nowhere near the scale of the monstrosity he encountered but still many times larger than an average Vissou and intimidating enough to a weakened Scout.

"Well, human, you are full of surprises! Wait a moment, let me get that alarm."

The Vissou disappeared from view and the blinking lights stopped.

"So, how are you feeling? Oh, wait, how can you speak? For that matter, can you even understand me? Raise two of your tentacles, or whatever you call them if you can understand me."

Scout slowly raised both arms, which quickly dropped again. Then it hit him, BOTH arms!

"Well, that's good. Anyway, we searched the archives and created a translator. Just rest and I'll return shortly."

She returned a few minutes later carrying a belt covered in an array of dots. She placed it against his chest and pressed a switch.

"Just make those waveforms you call speech, and the translator should repeat it in real language."

"I am very hungry. May I have something to eat? Anything will do."

His first sensation was an overwhelming thirst, but he was underwater, and his body had no problem filtering the salt. He gulped down a couple of swallows and the thirst abated. His voice sounded strange to his ears before he remembered he was underwater, but the translator seemed to have no trouble.

"Of course, I should have foreseen that, where are my manners? Just a moment again."

The Visou floated over to a small mesh cage and pulled out a fat eel–like fish. It was cold, slimy, and had a particularly unappealing head, but Scout ate it with all gusto, except for the exceptionally hard rib cage. Stormfront saw what Scout discarded and ate it herself without comment.

"Thank you, and thank you even more for restoring my arm."

"For the food, you're welcome. As far as the arm, we had nothing to do with that. The fact that it grew back was our first indication you might spontaneously recover from suspended animation. Just curious, how long would it normally take to reconstitute an appendage?"

"I didn't know I could! It doesn't surprise me; I had exceptional designers."

"Curious, but then I know so little about humans."

"May I sit up?

"Of course, And I am Elder Stormfront Grey, do humans use names?"

"My name is Scout, pleased to make your acquaintance, Stormfront."

"Scout? That is a strange word for a name. If it is all the same, I think I'll continue calling you Human. It's not like there's another around to mix anyone up."

Scout became irritated with the slow measure of the conversation so far. He supposed it was due to the long lifespan of an Elder. He was bursting with questions and assumed Elder Stormfront was also.

"You used a phrase, suspended animation I believe. I'm not familiar with that term."

"It is the result of a serum that inhibits decay in living tissue on a sub-molecular level. In minuscule concentration, it is the natural process that allows us Vissou the potential for a nearly unlimited lifespan. Our young Elder Slate synthesized a more powerful version that is also a paralytic. We were quite proud of her at the time. Unfortunately, she was at a sensitive point in her emotional development when you humans nearly destroyed the world."

"I would like to clear something up. While I have human DNA, that is only the sub-matrix used to give continuity to the rest of my complex genetic structure. I have never seen a human, other than as heliobee data, nor do I have any direct knowledge of how they caused, or even if they caused the Catastrophe."

"Hmm, my apologies, jumping to conclusions seem to be a side effect of aging. And I am getting old. Heliobees? Then you are a product of Imuq! That explains a lot. And be assured, the humans did cause the Catastrophe. After all, I was there."

"But, I understood that was millennia ago. How old are you?"

"So old I lost interest in the accumulated total. I do understand your astonishment, though. I have only been out of suspended animation for a tiny portion of that time. I am disappointed that you do not have a firm grasp of human technology. It was my hope that a fresh perspective would help us solve our problem, but perhaps your Imuqi knowledge may be even better.

Would you mind a quick historical rundown? The Catastrophe set off major climate changes and other disruptions, destroying buildings and releasing toxic substances from factory processes. Food supply dwindled alarmingly, and we estimate that we lost eighty percent of our population that first year. Elder Slate blamed science and technology, and the leadership of all Elders. She coordinated an attack on every Elder, other than herself, and placed us in suspended animation storage. To this day, we don't think she has an actual plan concerning us.

It was only by an oversight that the last two Elders received a reduced dose of the serum and re-animated some unknown time later. Elder Slate had already contiguously lived much longer than any other Vissou that she had already grown nearly half the size you now see her. As the last Elder, the people looked to her first as a prophetess and then as a god. She forbade all science and technology except under her direct supervision and ordered every Vissou to procreate by age ten. Perhaps you have seen the results."

"Yes, I am sorry to say.You mentioned a problem for which I might be able to help?"

"When the two re-animated Elders realized the situation, they worked for a time on an antidote for the rest of us. They were partly successful, but the effect only lasts a hundred years, at which time the process reinstates. We still work in secret. Slate remembers us and sends someone to check on us every now and again. Thankfully, I suppose, their current counting skills aren't accurate enough to notice two of us missing from storage. During our rotating hundred-year watch, one of us continues to work on a solution while the other remains hidden, just in case they discover us and place us all in suspension, or worse. We really are at a standstill for now, but by hundred-year rotations we all hope to resume a full life one day."

"Well then, let's get started. And while we're at it, maybe you can fill in some gaps about humans. I may not be fully human, but they are half of my heritage, as well as a mystery to me."

~o0o~

It took a while for Scout to ramp up on Vissou technology which they based on physics and energy states, and even longer to adapt that to Imuqi biochemistry. Still, it was not a permanent obstacle as observable science and repeatable results are the universal language of science. Over and again, Stormfront shared negative results in the archives for every possibility that Scout formulated.

They also faced additional pressure from ever more frequent security checks since the sudden appearance of Scout renewed Slate's paranoia. He was caught unaware a couple of times, but Scout found that he only needed to stop and play dead to fool the uneducated and intellectually diminished Vissou.

"You know what, Stormfront? We started this investigation front to back, with little result. Let's try looking at it the other way around. We have isolated the chemical process; we just haven't been able to break it down without the subject's body losing all integrity resulting in death. You've told me that Slate is an aberration, and should simply have continued growing instead of budding repeated layers. What if the chemical slurry after the Catastrophe has mutated her?"

Stormfront seemed to shut down for several hours as she brought her long-lived focus to an intellectual point.

"I think we may have lived too close to the solution for too long! We need a sample of her blood. Any ideas? Of course you have; you are an exceptional individual."

Scout was never one for false modesty, but he did admit to a small amount of pride.

"Indeed, I do. It won't be as easy as if I had access to an Imuqi Regenitor, but your impressive lab facilities should still make it possible."

Scout created a crude biological tool, only intelligent enough to understand simple commands and perform straightforward functions. When finished, the tiny leech-like worm swam to the edge of Slate's massive mouth unnoticed, found a soft crease in the ancient being's gum line, and scraped some tissue into its storage belly. It returned as programmed and expired happy since it fulfilled its life's purpose.

Scout and Stormfront discovered the mutation with ease and used its genetic signature as the key to manipulating the formerly recalcitrant hormone to their will. They now had the ability to permenantly wake all the Elders.

"Congratulations, Stormfront, but I still see one small...make that one huge, barrier to your success."

"Yes and that barrier sits just outside. Believe it or not, that is going to be the easy part. We need just one more of your charming little biological toys, this time to deliver a specific chemical."

"Certainly, what will it do?"

"I think I'll leave that as a surprise. Let's wake everyone up, and share the show!"

~o0o~

There were too many Elders to fit into the small lab, so they took a few days to hook up remote viewers so everyone could watch. Most of the Elders knew in general what was to transpire, but only Stormfront knew all the details. The new tool Scout created had a corkscrew shaped, designed to drill its way towards the center of Slate's brain, a quite specific area of her brain.

The partially cognizant tool made its way to the middle of the top chromatic speech band. Once satisfied it had found the proper spot it began the long journey to the center of her brain. It released the targeted hormone from within its holding bladder with orgasmic pleasure and caused the same state within Slate.

For the gargantuan Visou, it felt as if the Catastrophe had returned. Slate shivered, shook, and undulated uncontrollably. She flailed and stroked herself into a frenzy with all her limbs, from the smallest at the top to the obscenely large quadruple set at the bottom. Her body took hours to liquefy completely but over time released her countless microscopic progeny into the sea. The Elders faced an immense challenge in rebuilding their culture and society, but they had both patience and time.

"There are no words, Scout, to convey our thanks, or the depths of our debt. Anything of ours is forever yours."

"It has been my pleasure and privilege. You have shared everything you knew about my human heritage, but still, I would like to visit the destruction myself to see if anything at all survived."

"I have just the thing in mind to help you along your journey!"

~o0o~

Scout sat in the pilot seat of a comfortably sized vehicle, reminiscent of a classic flying saucer. Its propulsion utilized antigravity plates which made no sound, so as he exploded up through the ocean waves and into the sky he heard the whoosh of water as it cascaded off the edge. The clear energy dome allowed bright sunshine to bathe the cabin in warm light, which lifted his spirits even as he set his course for what he now knew was a macabre destination.

~end~

Chapter 7: Scout & The Nuplar

~Part 1~

Snar had no particular direction, and certainly no destination, in mind. His parent had dropped him in a prime location, nestled in a V notch between two boulders. The blinding methane ice storm covered everything with inches of frozen whiteness. That would not help hide him since his enemies used high-energy echolocation in place of sight.

The ferromagnetic outcroppings around him would help, at least long enough for his exoskeleton to harden from his recent molting. That interference, however, could work both ways and become dangerous during the upcoming battles of will.

Snar raised his three-foot wide pancake-shaped body to his maximum height of six feet. One by one, he tested his five spiked legs at the rotator joints that were spread equidistant about his body. He also admired the extra serrations his latest molting had left on his hinged, scythed claws. He grabbed a basketball-sized rock and smashed it against the top of his featureless reflective-white body. It shattered with a clang that he felt throughout his Ferro-calcite bones but experienced no other effects, not even a scratch.

Snar never considered himself especially athletic during his adolescence, and now with his new adult size slipped off the rocky edges more often than not. He was also apprehensive about the transmitter portion of his transceiver organ which might not fully activate.

Nuplar young began life with a receive-only nodule that gave any adult full remote access to their nervous system. Snar had always walked a fine line between willfulness and obedience, submitting to authority by his own volition rather than by force or fear. Now he faced fifteen thousand of his peers in a battle of dominance.

He faintly detected others at the edge of his awareness but kept beneath the ridgeline in the cautious strategy his parent taught him. He rounded a boulder and nearly walked into a hidden competitor. His first childish instinct was simple submission, but he quickly remembered his whole future hung on this day and, in particular, this first encounter.

His opponent recovered from surprise a moment before him as Snar felt an exploratory tingle spread through his body. Never had any adult tried to humiliate him by forcing his submissive response posture. The fact that a stranger, and a peer at that, now attempted such an abrupt takeover absolutely infuriated him! Snar pushed back and felt feeling a satisfying pulse of power rush out from his transceiver organ.

As he engaged in the silent battle for the first time, Snar felt as if he was looking into an endless hall of mirrors. It requiring an intense amount of concentration and effort to distinguish his own body from that of the other's. Equally matched, at least in their inexperience, neither gained ascendancy. Snar's one advantage lay in growing up as the offspring of a high-ranking officer, an inheritance that now stood him in good stead.

While he maintained the mental struggle, Snar leaped the gap between them and in two snips removed two of his foe's adjacent limbs. Any three legs were sufficient for walking, but not for battle. Snar's opponent retained the sense of mind to drop to the ground since his claws could still articulate for full defensive coverage, but the psychic shock of his sudden reversal of fortune heralded his end.

Snar completely shredded the other's will and sense of self. Exultant in the hormonal afterglow of such strenuous and overwhelming effort, Snar leisurely spent a period of time experimenting as he remotely manipulated and explored the absolute extent of his power over his new thrall. This amusement soon palled, so he sent a death pulse and the remaining legs sagged against the lifeless shell.

Snar scratched through the frozen surface to find a seep hole of the chemical slurry his kind used for nutrition. He knelt so that the semi-permeable membrane that surrounded his leg joints submerged enough for osmosis. He was extremely hungry from the stress of battle, as well as the recent molt. He stood up and hesitated, then returned to his defeated adversary and grabbed one of the dismembered limbs.

He placed it in the slurry, where, in time, it would generate a small Nuplar identical to the original. He could have regenerated clones from all five joints, but did not think such a quick defeat deserved propagation. He only saved the one because this was a cousin of his bloodline. The grandparent would retrieve the new child at the end of the games, locating it by the resonating signature since the donor had regenerated from one of his own legs in some previous battle.

Full of confidence, Snar sought a bolder strategic position. He now had a greater understanding of his purpose here; the greater number of thralls he could hold, the higher his standing in the adult community. He quickly and easily won the next six confrontations and his newly acquired attendants followed along with hardly any thought or attention required on his part. He learned to gauge the relative strength of each new opponent based on the timber and quality of their transceiver and decided to go off in search of new and more powerful opponents.

The next opportunity provided an experienced victor in their own right with a cadre of four thralls. They stood on opposing hillocks, sized each other up, and simultaneously locked wills. They slipped around and grappled through each other's minds. Snar became more exasperated than fearful, confident he would not succumb but unable to catch hold of the other.

In his impatience, he sent his vanguard to scuttle over and physically attack as a distraction, and the opposing minions met them with a clash. It was soon apparent that while his troop fought smoothly and under his complete control, the others occasionally slipped out of their master's control. Two of the opposing thralls broke free entirely for a moment, at which time Snar attached their will to his. Game over.

The pattern repeated for several days until he controlled a troop nearly one thousand strong. The logistics of command became cumbersome, so he stopped the march and set up a defensive position. Snar chose a handful of mid-strength captains and released them from his control on condition of their sworn fealty. Each understood that he could kill them with a thought if they proved disloyal.

By the time he controlled ten thousand, his challenge was one of organization and leadership. Once again relying on his parent's training, he set up hierarchical groups. Any individual that did not meet his expectations, or even hinted at rebellion, caused discipline down the entire line, up to and including execution. There may have been better ways to maintain control, but for the moment it sufficed.

Two months into Snar's coming-of-age war, only one other leader stood in the way of his total domination. Trop, his opposite number, rose to his position despite a bloodline of low repute. His lack of formal education allowed him to develop a style of fighting and leadership as distinct from the traditional as it was successful. Snar tried to arrange a parley, but paranoia had too tight a grip on his only opponent, who flatly refused.

As they stood and faced each other across a wide valley, Snar tried one last overture. He offered amnesty if Trop simply surrendered his troops and promised to let him walk away free. Trop attacked Snar's will immediately in response, and actually had a deeper and broader native strength of mind.

Snar could not break Trop's will no matter how hard he tried. Trop yelled invective oaths and curses while he ran around and abused his own troops mentally and physically without care. Even with his added histrionics, Trop could not overcome Snar, who sat quietly and concentrated his attacks in measured and disciplined fashion.

An idea suddenly came to Snar, something simple yet so different from any battle in which he'd engaged. He entirely withdrew his troops to an easily maintained defensive posture and one by one wrested control of Torp's generals without attacking him directly.

Torp did not notice at first but assumed Snar's troop withdrawals were simply in response to his rage and righteous anger. Snar handed off control of his new acquisitions to his captains until it finally dawned on Torp that he stood alone on his hilltop. All his ex-thralls had quietly withdrawn and been absorbed into the enemy army. With a cry of rage and disbelief, Torp ran away at top speed. Snar let him, to his ultimate regret many years later.

With the entire peerage under his sole guidance, the first young adult to do so in twenty-two generations, Snar walked out of the badlands and returned to civilization. Meeting him at the border was the Supreme Warlord of Snar's bloodline, their original progenitor. He entered Snar's mind with caution, but also with decades of experience. Without real effort, he enslaved Snar and brought him to his feet as his vassal.

It happened so quickly and without the possibility of defense that Snar stood in quiet shock. This legendary Warlord bent close and touched carapace to carapace and released his mental hold. He communicated on a private channel no others could hear and said "Welcome Snar, well done. Decide now, the honor of immediate death, or the prestige of voluntary service as my personal protégé. You are much too dangerous for any other choice."

Feeling the restrained depth of power that pulsated against his body and mind, Snar felt anything but dangerous.

~Part 2~

Thanks to the Vissou, Scout had a fairly detailed map of the world and the dividing barriers. He wanted to fly their amazing anti-gravity powered craft straight to the desolation of the old human lands, but the energy barrier seemed to be slowly repairing itself. The nearest unrepaired opening cut across Nupl, which was not his first choice of lands to cross. He located a plume of methane that intruded into Vissou airspace to locate the nearest crack regardless and crossed the border.

Scout knew something was wrong the moment he flew into the inhospitable, frozen white environment. His saucer-shaped craft randomly began dipping and rising. The clear energy bubble that covered the cockpit crackled and sputtered before it disappeared entirely. The lack of oxygen and the extreme bitter cold raced to see which would kill him first.

He feared that the sudden changes, as well as the radically different biochemistry needed to survive, might overwhelm his genetic ability to cope. Scout had never experienced such sharp pain, which even reached through the coma his body used to insulate his nerves and mind. Oscillating power surges brought the ship lower and lower until it finally skimmed over the ice-covered landscape and came to a stop. The crash tossed Scout out of the open craft as it slammed against an outcropping.

Before he passed out, Scout took refuge in his heliobee memories. In the off chance, he did not die he wanted to know little more about the Nuplar than their name. The tiny bioengineered information-gathering devices had been ubiquitous in every land before the Catastrophe and provided extensive if perhaps outdated data.

Even the small amount of matrix honey Scout ingested contained more information than he could begin to catalog in a lifetime, but the heliobees were passive devices. All he learned, besides Nuplar physical characteristics, was that they communicated by some unknown energy-based means and that they were terrifyingly aggressive.

The ship came down in a DMZ between warring bloodlines, but Scout's progress was tracked by border patrols from each side. The low-status Nuplar posted in this unimportant region, given their total lack of authority, knew better than to make independent decisions. Relays sent reports up both chains of commands, a delay that gave Scout a chance to recover from full unconsciousness.

Scout remained curled into a fetal position after he regained awareness and just concentrated on breathing. The thin poisonous air hurt as much exhaling as inhaling, and even though his skin had transmuted into a soft, crystalline substance, the cold tortured him mercilessly.

He was slowly dying and had to find the fortitude to return to the ship that lay an impossible twenty yards away along a frozen methane sheet. Walking was not among his current capabilities, so he methodically stretched one arm towards the ship, then the other, and pushed his feet while he pulled in a swimming motion. He gained nearly 10 inches towards his goal with every circumvolution.

The Supreme Warlords of the two bloodlines stood silently at opposite ends of the invisible border. Neither had any knowledge of humans or the fallen craft nor saw an intrinsic advantage in finding out. There was, however, the possibility that the other side might, and that was not acceptable. Each ordered a squad to retrieve both the creature and the artifact, and barring that, destroy them both.

The squad's arrived at the same time. Twenty scythe-clawed warriors circled and feinted around Scout and clashed as he progressed painful inches at a time. The repetitive struggle required an immense amount of willpower, but not a lot of thoughts, so Scout once again lowered the barriers that protected his limited human-intellectual capabilities and analyzed the situation. The one glaringly obvious data intersection was correlated patterns that had mirrored the movements of combatants and aligned with his electromagnetic, gravitational drive oscillations before the crash.

Scout could think of only one plan of attack, and that required access to the ship's control panel. The terminal effort to breach the lip of the cockpit required a minute of rest to garner the energy for one final push. During Scout's exertion respite, one warlord decided it time simply to destroy the anomaly and retreat to his own territory. He transmitted the command, and the warrior nearest to Scout swung a serrated claw that intended to cut him in half.

The opposing warlord had not yet made up his mind, so two of his warriors quickly dismantled the enemy that attacked Scout. It saved his life, but the melee opened a deep gash along his thigh. A thick stream of antifreeze-green blood arced onto the ground and gelled without quite freezing. The intense pain gave Scout the impetus to roll into the cockpit.

He disengaged the antigravity final drive mechanism and brought the engines up to full power while he manipulated the amplitude and modulation output. He quickly observed the range where some Nuplar began stumbling, and by adjusting the delicate gain, found the perfect frequency that interrupted their transceiver organs.

They all, including the warlords, collapsed in twitching piles. Scout tore apart the sound baffles to create impromptu filter shields against the Nuplar transceiver transmissions, re-engaged the drive, and flew away without further issue. He saw the Nuplar regain their feet beneath him. He was not privy to their thoughts, but he assumed they were not pleasant. In that, he was correct.

~o0o~

Every Nuplar ultimately claimed the same ancestor. The race that created them long since disappeared, but in the Nuplar they reached a level of perfection in form-equals-function design. Their ultimate tool of war thrived and followed their own cultural evolutionary path but remained physically changeless.

The unknown Power that divided the world with barriers and stocked the sections with various races, whatever their ultimate purpose, had not needed the Nuplar's full potential for violence. They disabled a key feature that allowed Nuplars to network as a parallel processor, which left them as separate components of a possible holistic whole that awaited a final assembly that never happened.

Back at the site of Scout's emergency landing, his blood had pooled in an indentation left by the crash. It was deep enough that it covered the regenerative membranes on two of the dismembered Nuplar's limbs. Scout's blood made a reasonable substitute for the nutritive slurry used to grow a new Nuplar, with the added benefit of Scout's regenerative DNA. The combination repaired the disabled networking function and a terrible force was released on the world.

~o0o~

The moment the two genetically restored Nuplar finished their final molt, everything changed. Working together, they immediately reached out and rebooted everyone in their generation. Soon the process expanded to every corner of the land and brought the previous generations into the fold. They were now one, the Uber-Nuplar. The overmind had access to all the bits and pieces of knowledge and memory distributed among his noncontiguous body, plus the computational power to put all that data to use.

The amalgamated creature was capable of a full range of emotions but discarded the majority of them as useless. As he analyzed his current situation, Uber decided to embrace two; rage and vengeance. The rage came with pre-programmed subroutines that allowed him to split into temporary semi-autonomous raiding parties tasked for general total destruction. The vengeance had only one target, a target with the proven potential to shut down or control Uber at will. That was not acceptable.

~end~

Chapter 8: Scout & His Shadow

The harmonic feedback distortions melted everything in the human lands the day they attempted to remove the barriers. Oscillations bound and rebound until all that remained was a uniform fog of free-floating constituent atoms. Over the centuries, the heavier elements settled to create a hard bottom layer, followed by striations of lighter material. The flat, featureless landscape gave ultimate meaning to the term 'devastation'.

Scout wandered a full year in every corner of the no man's land in search of even the tiniest artifact. He adapted the antigravity engine of his Vissou craft and drilled exploratory plugs down to the bedrock. There were only uniform layers of sediment wherever he explored. He finally accepted that he would find no answers here. His disappointment slowly changed to loneliness, so he eventually set a course for home.

Scout was originally designed as a self-contained exploration tool, the first in countless generations since Imuq closed its borders in paranoia. His human genome had been added illegally, but since every Imuqi was purpose built for individual duties and station in life, no one realized the horror of his heritage. He loved his life during childhood and eventually rose to the top of Imuqi hierarchy as an Adjudicator. He left to take on his role of Scout and searched for his human heritage after he handed-over power and authority to his clone. He looked forward to sharing his adventures with his Imuqi brethren and updating them as to the current events of the world.

~o0o~

Imuq turned inwards after the Catastrophe and retreated underground to an endless series of tunnels. Only a few select exits existed, creatively concealed and guarded with vigilance. Scout returned and found the exits were neither. He knew each location from his former post as Adjudicator. He found each was deserted and their camouflage destroyed. The surrounding grasslands and gentle hills was trampled by unknown hordes. So many feet had passed through he could not read individual tracks.

Scout settled his craft near a central opening as he wished to avoid either terminus of the tunnels in case of remaining invaders. As he approached the entrance, he was forced to stop and retch, overwhelmed physically and emotionally by a rolling miasma of death and putrefaction. Imuq used neither machines nor technology other than their own flesh so that even the intelligent rooms and tunnels that constituted the warrens decayed with the rot of dead Imuqi.

Scout forced himself onward after he retrieved a portable light source from his ship. He had gone only one hundred yards before he turned back in horror. Something had cut and shredded everyone, from the smallest messenger to the largest living Chambor. Through his haze of impending denial and gathering grief, Scout realized it only could be a Nuplar Army that caused such carnage.

His immediate thoughts turned to plans of obliteration and revenge. The Sidmopisian Queen as well as the entire races of Dhos and Vissou owed him a debt and would not deny him. He would plunge the world into a war of extinction that would make the Catastrophe look tame. He would ensure that no piece of Nuplar bigger than a grain of sand would remain!

His breath was heavy with an almost sexual excitement as he pictured their entire race reduced to nothing but blowing dust. His memory overlaid this fantasy with visions of that same fate as happened to his human ancestors. That brought him abruptly back from the wrong edge of sanity.

Something about this entire world was not right and ultimately, he believed, someone must be behind the conditions that wrought such atrocities. He determined to discover those responsible and force them to answer for their crimes. According to his Vissou map, he could fly to the central enigma that connected the barriers that separated the lands in less than a week. He stood for some time in silent homage and remembered every single Imuq he had ever known. He then placed their memories in a mental strongbox and filed them away until he avenged their passing one way or another.

~o0o~

Twenty miles from his destination, Scout came upon either a large circular lake that contained an island city, or a defensive moat that surrounded said city. From that distance, he could just make out a forty-story tower in the center with a series of one-story buildings that radiated out in six directions. There was no activity anywhere in the city except along the shoreline, where massed bodies congregated, but he was still too far out to see details.

The Catastrophe had not been kind to the barrier wall terminal ring. Everywhere else in the world, the invisible wall and cover was mostly cohesive and impenetrable, but here the structure existed only as curved radial strips of base bedrock. As he slowly flew his craft towards the island, Scout lowered to investigate the large crowds that milled about on the open beach.

Scout considered himself an Imuqi, by nurture if not wholly by nature, so he considered variations of physical attributes normal, but the pathological biology expressed beneath him was far from any definition of normality. After his long and futile search, he finally found evidence of humans in the flesh, but only as mixed body parts in a chaotic hodgepodge attached to pieces of every other race on the planet.

No two individuals among the swarm looked the same. In one living tragedy, a human head atop a male torso sprouted a tentacle in the place of an arm, plus a Nuplar claw in place of a foot. It painfully attempted to copulate with a Dhosu-winged Vissou body. The mating was evidently consummated because the female liquefied into a pile of tiny wriggling monstrosities.

Most of the poor souls, if indeed such genetic dregs had souls, ambled aimlessly and exhibited little to no intelligence. A few groups of like-based forms, especially those with minimal aberrations, congregated nearest the food sources and at least assisted each other in organized intent.

Automated barges moved about in the body of water and scooped up fish along with mats of aquatic vegetation. Full loads were conveyed to large hoppers and processed into a pulp that trickled into steel troughs set along the docks. A constant stream of the locals rotated through to eat their fill. Most then wandered away to avoid the crush of the incoming hungry and slept, defecated, and attempted to copulate as the mood hit. The greatest majority did use scattered communal midden dumps, pummeled by the less dim-witted as motivation where needed. This was the only organized social standard Scout noticed in his short flyover. Not one enough curiosity to glance his way.

Scout lost control over his craft the moment he crossed over the ruins of the barrier on the island proper. The flight remained smooth and steady, but the ship veered towards the top of the central structure despite his attempts to regain mastery. There was nothing he could do short of shutting down the engine but had too much altitude compared to desperation.

The building was windowless along all four smooth sides and tapered slightly towards the top. As the unseen force lowered him to the roof and through an aperture that irised open to the inside. The ship dropped through the interior of the building and came to a stop with a gentle bump in near darkness. A sourceless light momentarily flickered and then revealed a variety of aircraft scattered at random inside a cavernous hangar.

Scout just sat without moving for a long time. He felt overwhelmed by the absence of a course of action or even enough information to create one with any strategic validity. He had lost all operational momentum for the first time in his life despite all his enhanced intelligence and training and experience. He did not like the feeling.

Scout wallowed in his depression while the overhead access irised closed and the lighting disappeared once more. As his eyes adjusted, he noticed luminescent stripes along the floor that angled from each ship, including his own, to terminate against a far wall. That seemed the only invitation he would receive. He was out of any other options and over the emotional snit, so slid to the floor and followed the line across the hanger.

The path ended at an open door that gave into a small closet-size room. Scout shrugged and entered. The only feature was a panel that contained a series of translucent buttons except for the bottom right-most blinked a consistent red-and-yellow. Scout disliked this feeling of manipulation, but once again saw no real options. He pressed the button. The door closed and immediately fell.. Scout had never experienced an elevator and seriously hoped this was a planned descent.

He stopped with a slight jolt, and the door opened to reveal a new luminescent strip along the floor that flashed the same red and yellow pattern as the button. He followed it through a labyrinth of corridors until the path reached a small alcove. A raised dais, inset with one lone button that flashed red and yellow was the only feature. Scout considered simply walking away and find a street level exit. He was getting weary of always standing in to be the center of world-changing events.

"I'm pretty sure I'm going to regret this."

Click.

"REBOOT INITIATES IN FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE..."

The light stopped flashing to be replaced with a pleasant non-directional ambient glow. The inset button rose an inch and a perforated ring released an inky fog. The fog swirled and coalesced into a tenuous shadow figure similar in size and shape to Scout. The shape cocked its featureless head left and right as if stretching out a kink, and spoke.

"Well, that was...interesting."

Scout, beyond apprehension, just stood and waited. And waited. And waited. He resolved to force the universe into taking responsibility for its own actions for a change rather than laying the blame on his. The universe out-waited him.

"Hello? You do realize I'm standing here, right?"

"Yes."

The shadow offered nothing more.

"Well... Who, or what, are you? And what series of events did I precipitate by pushing the button?"

"Please wait a moment while I scan and choose the most efficient protocol for information transfer."

Scout felt a slight tingle that began at the crown of his head and continued to sieve through his body down through the soles of his feet. The tingle stopped, and the shadow lifted a wispy hand and touched a faux index finger to the center of Scout's forehead. A brilliant flash of light struck behind his eyes and...

~o0o~

Nothing was. From the nothing, everything became. Everything that would be, everything that might be, but only as potential. This potential organized as quanta foam, ready and willing. The only problem was that quantum physics required an observer to potentiate an observer. The quandary made the universe impatient, so got started on its own.

Direction, as a geometric concept, spontaneously propagated. It began as a line that consisted of points constructed with zero dimensions. Placed end to end, they were measurable yet with neither beginning nor ending, infinite in length but without width or depth. The lengths aligned side by side and filled the newly defined universe with width. The planes of width stacked on each other and created depth. The process continued until there were dozens of dimensions.

The universe existed but was static and in no better shape than it was before. The quantum foam vibrated in frustration, which coalesced into energy, and the first movement of that energy engendered time. From the nothing to the first four dimensions took fewer than three minutes.

Five billion years later sufficient clumps of energy cooled into matter and succumbed to gravitational bonds. The clumps form planets, stars, cosmic strings, black holes, and dark matter, to name a just a fraction of the diverse wonders of the universe

.

From the viewpoint of matter, other matter appeared solid, but that is only an illusion of perspective. The space within each atom is magnitudes of scale larger than the size of the constituent parts of the atom. Whether by design or chance, those distances mirror the relative ratio of emptiness between the clumps of matter on the larger scale of "outer" space.

While half of the upper dimensions expanded through the macro cosmos, just as many tilted and curled within the space between sub-atomic particles and created intertwining layers of topographical complexities.

The quanta foam wanted to continue to grow an infinite number of dimensions but remained constrained within certain boundaries delineated by the concepts of math it created by default. Every possible configuration was potentially available, but not every possible configuration could exist concurrently without danger of the entire edifice crashing down. The most elegant solution to this conundrum: spontaneous self-awareness. Thus was born the Eldest race. Each Eldest existed in an undifferentiated state from the others, yet each individual remained both independent and a holistic portion of the whole.

The Eldest decided the optimum number of base dimensions to begin at ten, and the foam complied. They decided to inhabit only the tenth, which allowed them to travel and manipulate the lower nine, but only as shadows or extensions of themselves that they might not be constrained within them.

Ten billion years later, the Eldest created life on widely disparate worlds within but limited to the first four dimensions. They hoped that at least some of the new races would eventually evolve and provide companionship even though of much lower intelligences. Unfortunately, for all their vast power and intellect, the Eldest was neither omnipresent nor omnipotent and ran into a second quandary.

The six races that exhibited the capability to reach the cusp of transcendence also embodied the same flaw. Every prognosticated future foretold that each race would reach extinction before maturity either by their own hand or that of another. Further extrapolation predicted that the Eldest's direct intervention would cause eddies in the quantum foam that only served to increase the rate of annihilation.

The Eldest did not give up on their goal, but studied the various alternatives and possibilities inherent in the situation and sought a stability point where they might successfully intercede. They dispatched a shadow extrusion of their will to perform a preliminary experiment to gain more insight.

For the initial phase of the Eldest's plan, their Shadow sought a rogue star with a single planet. The Shadow was limited to the lower dimensional physics it inhabited, but maintained contact and directed the Eldest in the use of their paramountcy over creation. As their proxy, Shadow found the perfect planet and backtracked its existence through million of years to its nascency.

He used the Eldest's power to clip both ends of the planet and its primary's time line from beginning to end temporarily stitched together the severed ends. When finished, he would replace it exactly where/when it was in local space-time in order to minimize disruptions in the quantum foam. Shadow then shaped a ribbon of dimensional time into a Mobius strip that caused a bubble in which time moved a thousand times slower than the outside universe.

Next, he prepared the planet. Each race differed in environmental needs, so he created energy barriers that maintained optimal physical parameters and also kept them separated. Upon completing the eco-forming, he added the appropriate flora and fauna to each section and sent a poly-dimensional message to the Eldest that indicated readiness for the population influx.

Two thousand individuals from each race were instantaneously deposited in the middle of separate wilderness areas, along with enough tools and materials to lead a pre-industrial lifestyle. The experimental subjects were unaware of the fact, but they were not abductees, rather exact clones created by the Eldest. Shadow used this self-perpetuating population base in an attempt to solve the dilemma of self-inflicted destruction and continued making progress until the project was interrupted by the Catastrophe.

~o0o~

Scout's mind reeled as all the information appeared in his head and he processed it in one chunk. Shadow waited until Scout's pupils reduced to normal-size that indicated the transfer was successful.

"All my systems overloaded, and I remained in stasis until you hit the reset button."

The full sensoria presentation in Scout's head faded into the here and now as Shadow resumed speaking.

"The maintenance automatons were not affected due to their low intelligence matrix and have repaired or replaced each component under their purview many times. I estimate it has been six to seven thousand years by the accumulation of discarded materials. I planned to complete this experiment in less than four hundred years. I doubt the reason for this experiment is any longer applicable."

"I wouldn't imagine it would be after thousands of years, whatever its purpose."

That is a correct assumption, although based on incomplete data. The is a time differential between this planet and the outside universe that grew exponentially so that nine hundred billion years have passed.. I can find no connection or sense of the presence of the Eldest through any of the ten dimensions. The last impression I can find roughly translates as 'Wow, so this is what it all means.' The Elders seem to have moved elsewhere."

Scout understood everything he heard, intellectually, but in the scale of his life, none of it had any practical impact. Even so, he could not slow his Imuqi super-genius brain structure as it integrated all this new data and performed a first level analysis.

"That was probably more information that I needed, but thank you anyway. I still don't understand the purpose of your experimentation. What were you trying to achieve?"

"Each race exhibits xenophobia, a fear of outsiders that will always lead to extinction. We hoped to find a way to change this deep-seated behavior. I successfully combined all DNA strands into one complex matrix. My intention was that each birth randomly expresses a race other than the progenitor. That would force them into mutual offspring exchanges to ensure their own survival. Any race that did not cooperate would end up producing fewer children each generation. The drive to replicate one's genetic material is the most powerful motivation in the universe.

Scout would never have imagined each race on the planet was a microcosm of billions of individuals in a pan-galactic community, but accepted the fact and shared his conclusions with Shadow.

"If the original space faring cultures were anything at all as their descendants here, it would never have worked. Most likely the strongest would simply enslave the other races to harvest their own young and dispose of the excess alien offspring. The victors could easily increase the breeding stock from the random births.

Each race would also become so enraged that they would direct all resources, physical and intellectual, to win the resulting war. The best ultimate outcome would have only one race in the end, and perhaps not even that. Your plan also ignores the strength of the bond within a direct bloodline. An infant received during a mass exchange that does contain the assigned parent's personal DNA would never establish the same bond as one that does. Most of the societies would simply collapse from lack of love and commitment for the younger generations."

"Then you calculate extinction is always inevitable due to intelligent societies' very nature?"

"No, I believe a guiding nudge at the proper time and place in the proper manner is viable, if there were a way to gather and process sufficient amounts of data. I have experienced enough of these historic leverage points during my own travels to know how little effort is required under the right conditions."

Scout felt oscillating waves of vibration through his feet that began at the edge of his perception and built to a tooth-chattering thrum.

"What is happening? Are we in danger?"

"I have finished calculating all the data points of the last six thousand years as well as extrapolated further by inference and concur with your observation, hypothesis, and conclusion. I detached this vessel from the planet and am in the process of returning this pocket universe to its original space-time continuum. You are only in danger in the sense that you will cease to exist, but that is an imprecise statement based on the limits of your understanding and language.

As a sidereal temporal paradox, this bubble and everything in it never existed, and will return to/continue its nonexistence as it rebounds back into its proper time/space. As a result, I will return to the time point from which I left will then report to the Eldest."

"You can't destroy millions upon millions of sentient beings! And didn't you say the Eldest had disappeared or moved on or something?"

"You are correct; I cannot destroy that which has never existed. The Eldest will have disappeared from the perspective of this temporal artifact, but we have now returned to objective time, and yes! The Eldest are answering!"

The shadow apparition wavered and thinned, but just before he disappeared altogether, his form returned to apparent solidity.

"What are you still doing here?"

Scout again felt a tingle as Shadow scanned him. Shadow confronted him in an accusatory and somewhat irritated tone.

"I do not understand. You are an effect without a cause, an ending without a beginning. You do not exist. Explain yourself!"

Scout laughed at the absurdity. Although he could not explain it, he certainly felt existent. Shadow tilted his head as if listening and then spoke before Scout could think of a response.

"You, originated in this time as a zygote in a human dispersion spaceship before it slipped into the pocket universe. Everything that had happened to you since then left an exact negative impression in the 'real' space/time continuum when those experiences returned to nonexistence. The situation created a vacuum that the intrinsic universe duplicated to remove the abhorrence of that vacuum. The replacement intaglio impressions appear indistinguishable from the original".

The faceless Shadow gave the impression of a frown and truly disappeared for a full minute. On his return, Shadow transformed into an exact image of Scout's face and body, albeit still in a non-reflecting midnight black.

"The Eldest are pleased to propose a solution. Should you agree to act as guardian and mentor regarding the continued survival of all races, they will have no need to endanger the future by their interference. To give you the tools for this endeavor, they have disengaged the part of themselves that is me and I shall submit entirely to you. I and my powers are yours to command. I am the Shadow of your will.

Scout shook his head and sighed as the universe seemed once again to pass its responsibilities onto him. Secretly, at his core, he could not be more pleased.

~end~

Chapter 9: Author's Notes

As the title implies, I am diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. For those unfamiliar with the condition, we are a subgroup that shares certain genetic variations in the hardwiring of our brains. In a metaphorical sense, we are as different from an "average" person as a cat is from a dog. We are not broken people any more than a cat is a broken dog, although one would have more success explaining that truth to a dog than to the average person. Even a cat understands they make horrible dogs, but because of the pack-nature of dogs, cats are always the ones expected to change.

I have two main goals in publishing my stories; the first is to give an insight into one Aspie's world view, and the other is to give hope to anyone with life challenges (such as D.I.D.) that it is possible to become successful on your own terms and use both your strengths and weaknesses to surmount any obstacle.

The majority of my story ideas are based on semi-autobiographical incidents, hopefully presented in enjoyable, or at least entertaining, simile and metaphor, with the addition of less pure fantasy than one would expect.

In addition to Asperger's, I also fall under Dissociative Identity Disorder, previously known as multiple personalities. This is another highly individualistic condition and if anything, even more misunderstood than Asperger's. For me, I live nine distinct lives within one body. In my case, each of these identities is me, but can only accesses the memories they experience while in control (or "up front" in D.I.D. speak.) They seem to shift randomly, but I have recently had some success with intercommunication.

Different stories are written by different personalities, and longer stories often end up with multiple authors, which further explain a lack of cohesion in style and subject matter. Many of these stories could easily fill their own novel, but my inability to maintain continuity became so frustrating I decided to shorten them. In many instances, this forces me to perhaps put too many concepts and transitions into a short story format, but it seems the only way, for me, to share them.

A further contributing complication is Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness. It is estimated that 2 to 3 percent of the population experience some form, and the condition is associated with the part of the brain that attaches emotion to and imbibes a cohesive individuality to a collection of facial features. I cannot look at a face and see it as a whole, which means I cannot recognize family or friends by sight, even my lovely bride of fifteen years, or my own daughter.

This also comes out glaringly to some in my stories, since lengthy descriptions of character facial attributes and expressions are meaningless to me, and I always feel that writing something for which I am ignorant comes across as artificial. This gives you the reader a unique opportunity to participate in the storytelling and design character's physical features to your own expectations and perhaps enhance the experience.

To round off this exhibition of the bizarre, and give one final refutation to anyone who might wish to claim that their situation is too insurmountable to follow their dreams, I spent thirty-two years without sleep. A horse kicked me on the left temple when I was four, which damaged the Hypoglossal nerve that opens throat muscles when taking a breath while sleeping or unconscious. This was not known at the time; so as a result, whenever I tried to sleep, I could not breathe until my blood oxygen level depleted, and my brain would wake my body enough to take a few breaths.

At age 36, technology finally caught up, and I was properly diagnosed, confirming that, for those three decades, I never slept more than a minute or so, certainly not long enough to enter a REM dream state. I've been treated successfully with a type of respirator, but I'm still not sure about the whole dreaming experience. The brain is a wonderful thing, and given half a chance, finds ways around even the most extreme conditions and barriers. Through these experiences, I believe I have more access to my subconscious thoughts, feelings, and processes than most.

As a further example of the power of determination, I experienced a stroke which caused temporarily loss of the power of speech and the ability to write with my dominant hand, and still experience extreme headaches when trying to type, especially while creating fiction. Along with several physical mobility challenges, which I won't go into here, that was perhaps the lowest point of my life. Between the dogged determination of my Aspie nature and the multiple viewpoints of my multiple personalities, I experimented with voice-to-text software, and this book is testament to that success.

Before the explosion of e-publications, none of this would have been possible as the mainstream publishing industry would never take a chance on something so far out from the ordinary, but then again, my intended audience is not ordinary, rather extraordinary. For the more visually imaginative among you, I have a gallery of several hundred works of digital art that I use as a secondary outlet of expression and internal dialogue, at http://veguitarat.deviantart.com/gallery/. Once again, the purpose of posting what amounts to a personal journey is to encourage others to find their own outlets. Now, go be inspired, or at least entertained.

(As a final note, this story has a special place in my heart. I began writing Scout over thirty years ago, intending it to be a full novel. It was not until I stumbled across my diagnosis and explored both my limitations and my talents that I adapted them to this format. That choice has resulted in five more anthologies in four years as of this writing, and many more are queued up in my head. Adapt and overcome, then follow your dreams. \--Bob Kite)

~end~

