Part one : Giant Freaking Monster Roaches
"Jack!"
"I'm almost done!", I touched off the catalyst and stepped back from my work. The thousand meters wide, slightly convex, light grey surface developed a spreading blacker-than-blackness that neatly filled the crater which had taken us a month to dig and shape.
"We got roaches"
I was now looking at eighty five shifts of ruined work and someone's yearly salary of wasted material. Not my paycheck, by God! Not mine again!
"Rita," Years of practice kept my voice level and professional, "We scanned for roaches. There are no hive tunnels on this rock."
The last of the semiconductor ceramic set and my HUD lit up with the startup dialogs. In a trillion tiny resonance chambers solar electricity was being converted to nanometer scale EM waves which somehow grasped the fabric of the universe and would pull the asteroid out of orbit and towards the waiting foundries sometime in the next century. My sensors detected the tiny thrust, but I couldn't feel it.
"There are still no hive signs, Jack, these six just showed up. I think they just landed." Good, not my paycheck - Bad, a hexagon of hexapods means a roach attack. "They're closing in on your location, Jack!"
"Should I jump?" I kept my suit battened down for a jump at all times, but I had some external tools to collect.
"I'm coming around for a better view." There was no way I would see her at this range, but I looked. "Jack, they seem to be bigger and faster than usual." Keep it professional. I didn't see them on my horizon, but I was in a depression.
"Should I jump?"
"Jump now, drop everything and jump now!" You don't have to tell me twice. I was squatting for the jump before her sentence ended. My jets were hotter than standard, but 0.1 gee is the most I could get without an assisted leap.
It all happened in a second.
I jumped, the servos in my suit giving me a near blackout one full gee, the roaches came over the rim of the depression in two groups of three, the forward two of each group grabbed the rear roach and slingshotted it into the sky, and my jets powered me right into their legs.
You may not understand, but roaches don't do that. They don't cooperate, they don't plan, they don't aim ahead for a spot in open space. It takes six of them to have the intelligence of a plant. Alone they can eat and move, that's all. In a hexagon they can reproduce, swarm, and attack. That's all they do. They eat anything, they ruin my work, they might try to eat me if they swarmed over me on the rock, but they don't capture people in space.
I was well and truly captured. They wrapped around me, grasped each other on both sides of me and I was loosely held in a cage of giant roach legs.
You've seen images of roaches, but have you studied them up close? The main carapace is a hexagonal prism with six legs on three sides and six sensor organs on the alternate sides. The sensor organs are like male and female on each of the three sides. Yes, very much like male and female. When they form a hexagon they are all catching and pitching with each other all at the same time, like a weird sexual lego spider orgy.
But the legs are the worse. Imagine the skeeviest parts of insect legs and octopus tentacles joined together. Each segment decreases in length by about half, so the first three look like roach legs, spiny and jointed. Hence their name. The rest, and I am assured there are a total of 36, form a wriggling chitinous worm that reduces to a squirmy needle. Usually they use them to crush rocks and feed them into the hexagonal parrot beak built into their undersides. They are as quick and flexible as the flames of Hell, with all the delicacy of a bolt cutter. Your standard roach is the size of a dinner plate from leg tip to leg tip and a swarm of them could disassemble you in five minutes. They give me the shivers even when they weren't giant freaking monster roaches like these two.
The carapace in front of me was easily 50 centimeters and each leg about a meter. I was looking right at one and it's penis eye was rotated to look at me. I lit up my arm torch and they quickly grabbed my wrist, one leg from each, and locked me in place. My other arm had testing equipment and was useless in a fight but they grabbed that too. I expected them to crunch through my suit and start eating me but they just held me loosely in place as my jets ran out.
I realized Rita had been shouting at me and I tried to focus on her words rather than the masticating jaws of the roach so close to my chest plates. Still professional.
"Jack, I see you. Please respond."
"Here. I'm here!"
"You were screaming."
"I was yelling."
"I see two roaches on you and you accelerated away from me, what the hell is going on?"
"The roaches captured me!"
...A pause.
"Roaches don't capture people."
"I think I just said that, Rita"
"You screamed that."
"I yelled that."
"The other four are on intercept with your projected course."
"Roaches don't intercept, Rita."
"I know that Jack!" That was a scream. But no need to point that out. . .
"Rita, they're not eating me, don't ask me why, so just get here and kill them." She was probably on the wrong path and our boat only made 0.5 gee in an emergency. I could tell by her voice she was near that now.
"Jack, you're going too fast in the wrong direction. By the time I come around the other four will catch up to you and you know what hexagons do." Hexagons were seriously aggressive, I always figured it was because they were doing each other while they were trying to kill you.
"Rita, these guys are different somehow. They might not eat me. Just get here when you can." Our ship runs the same way everything does now, EM drive. We got it from the roaches. I mean, I know humans discovered it back on Earth in the old days, but it didn't work well and they only used it on a couple of long range robot missions that we never heard back from. But the roaches do it right, millions of carbon silicate buckyshapes the size of a decent protein, ultrahigh frequency EM radiators built out of mutated nerve dendrons, and three axes of bidirectional thrust. They could generate 0.1 gee with no need to carry fuel. They do it with nanomachines, we do it with smart pseudo-ceramics, same thing. Rita would absolutely catch me, eventually.
I was sure of it. Totally professional. Then the other four roaches latched on. I might have screamed.
They formed a hexagon around my waist and configured their arms for travel. I was in the middle of an insect orgy and then they deployed their solar collectors. We called it their roach wings because it looked like them, veined, overlapping, black as night, unfluttering from their carapace and expanding hundreds of times. Rita said, "I'm losing telemetry..." and I remembered that their photovoltaic skin absorbed or stealthed nearly all frequencies of EM. I would be alone in the endless dark night with the roaches. I felt an increase in thrust.
End part one.
All text my own, image listed as open source by natureworldnews.com
I invite you to persue the other stories in this series, linked below
| Previous | Chronological Map | Next |
|---|---|---|
| Emily | The Current Title | Next |
| Duringmath | The Net Value of Intelligence Part 1 | The Net Value of Intelligence Part 2 |
| Clemson's Tale | The Full Index | They Were the Enemy |
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