This post is the 5th of the ten chapters of the speculative fiction scifi story Orussian Quarantine. If you havn't read the first 4 chapters yet, the first is available here.
Panic
Gabriëlla had been working twenty-hour shifts at the Lot hospital for six days now and there seemed no end to the constant stream of seriously injured refugees from South Uhm City. While some had wounds inflicted by Attame, most major injuries were the result of ERC collisions and ERC landing failures. Every Orussian knew how to create a basic and safe evacuation and rescue capsule in about one standard hour using nothing but a base computing unit, a few guild capes, and some parts that were available in any propulsion-based transportation device. But what a difference it makes if an ERC needs to be constructed with dozens of crazed Attames roaming the streets chanting "Death to the false gods, hail to our goddess, Queen Father Attame!'
While Attames were all only in the developmental stages of children and adolescents, and while an average adult ant-monkey would have only half the stature of an adult Orussian, Orussians were a peaceful species and remembrance of the Lilith incident had Orussians opting for fleeing rather than fighting. There were reports and rumors of ant-monkey attacks on schools and power plants that had supposedly left thousands of Orussians dead. These reports and rumors contributed gravely to the state of general panic within the dammed South Uhm City.
Where ant-monkeys had probably killed tens of thousands, the confirmed death count due to poorly constructed ERCs had already well exceeded a million. Combined with over two hundred thousand mid-air collisions between capsules due to bad trajectory or sensor settings brought the total death count to almost 1.5 million.
About ten percent of that number had had come through one of Lot’s 3 small hospitals before dying.
Each day, ten thousand new patients were being brought in to a little hospital built to house only a few thousand patients. Those who made it to the next day would most probably survive, but more than half did not make it to then. Lot was a relatively small town when compared to South Uhm City—twenty thousand full-time inhabitants and two million seasonal inhabitants who came to escape the hot South Pole summer.
So far fifty million had made the ERC jump from the South Pole to the North Pole peninsula. Rations were running scarce fast. Gabriëlla had some trouble distinguishing facts from rumors, but by working twenty-hour shifts at the hospital she had picked up enough to distinguish the general idea of what must have happened. A pet ant-monkey male named Attame owned by a merchant guild master had disappeared into a section of the Great Dam a few years ago. Around that same time there had been reports of other missing pet ant-monkey males but all of these showed up again after a few days. Seemingly unrelated rumors about a queen’s nest in the outer dam came from Dammons, the outcast dam dwellers. Officially Dammons did not exist, so reports about unexplained disappearances of Dammons and sightings of an ant-monkey queen had received the same status as the many other urban legends about the Great Dam. One such persistent urban legend was that Dammons breathed sulfur rather than oxygen, a myth probably based in the fact that Dammons were used as relatively cheap labor by the mining guild before the commercial exploitation of ant-monkey workers in the carbon and sulfur mines.
This time as it turned out, the reality was worse than the myth. There was indeed a queen’s nest in a section of the dam, but a very different kind of queen’s nest than those that were exploited in the Scayune breeding colonies. This queen wasn't just a queen, and her children weren't the regular workers and the occasional male. No, the runaway ant-monkey male was apparently gendermorphic and had transmorphed into a queen ant-monkey. Attame had mated with several pet ant-monkey males and had subsequently turned into a queen, creating an ant-monkey colony. And to make matters worse, all of her offspring had re-imprinted on her just as had happened in the Lilith breeding colony many years before. Attame himself was hatched during the quarantine before the queen killings were ordered by the interstellar senate. Now Attame, who as a male had never mated, had transmutated into a female. Somehow ant-monkeys refused the inevitable: "extinction".
Reports in the media from Ga were confirming what Gabriëlla already suspected based on what she had heard at the hospital and seen during surgeries at the mining guild’s veterinary station: The ant-monkeys’ Maarsolian ape DNA had its own timetable. It took six months for an ant-monkey to develop from its larval stage to the equivalent of an eight year-old Orussian child, one year for males to develop to breeding stage. Workers hardly ever survived the carbon mines for more than a year, let alone to the age of five standard years, when Maarsolian apes started puberty. You'd be hard pressed to find more than a handful of workers who had managed to live to the age of three standard years.
It now had been four years since the quarantine forced the mining guild to implement measures which brought down the high death toll in their mines. Conditions in the mines were still unhealthy, but that was where Gabriëlla’s guild master came in. She had devised a set of medical guidelines that would allow injured ant-monkeys to live and continue being productive at a minimum cost.
Gabriëlla sometimes managed to acquire batches of leftover spirits from a good friend who worked at the Lot casino. They weren’t as good as regular anesthetics, but at least they seemed to give the ant-monkeys some relief during surgery. Some of the older ant-monkeys were now at the age where Maarsolian apes would reach to sexual maturity. Five standard years. While ant-monkeys, like their Wolderian ant lineage, didn't have fur, and Maarsolian apes being mostly furless apart from parts of their skulls, Maarsolian apes reaching sexual maturity were known to develop small furry patches in their genital area and under their upper extremities. Gabriëlla had seen such patches of fur during her time at the veterinary station. Some older ant-monkeys also seemed to develop distinct small bulges of fatty tissue on their upper torsos, a feature visually akin to the pictures she had seen of Maarsolian apes.
It was all starting to come together in her mind now. Ant-monkey DNA was flawed in more ways than one. Not only was the RELI-gene defective, the supposedly dormant Maarsolian ape genes responsible for gender and sexual maturity were in fact active. The Ga nests proved this theory. In summertime Ga was completely abandoned but for a small workforce of worker ant-monkeys. Apparently some of the Ga workers with active Maarsolian ape gender genes reached ape puberty, and in the absence of any Orussian overseers, started exploring their new found sexual identity instead of tending to their responsibilities.
Gabriëlla chuckled at the idea of Sato, the pompous level 8 mining guild master in charge of all Ga mining activities and ultimately responsible for the minimal medical budgets she and her guild master had to work with, arriving by luxury evacuation hopper at his mare condo only to find the condo occupied by an adolescent queen and her thousands of first generation eggs. Ga was reportedly a very beautiful place. The landmass at the North Pole at its very most northern point featured a deep freshwater lake which filled the massive crater of what used to be the first carbon mine. This moor, by virtue of its depth and northern position, was the source of a constant cool moor breeze. Only the very top of Uhm's elite could afford a condo on Ga's moor. Most of that elite made its fortune by exploiting ant-monkeys or Dammons.
“All too fitting,” Gabrielle thought, “that the adolescent queens would choose this very condo for their nesting-grounds.” Attame she was not quite sure of.
There had been male ant-monkeys before who had reached the ripe old age that coincides with Maarsolian ape puberty, and none had ever shown any signs which she now recognized as belonging to Maarsolian ape puberty. For now her best guess was that the act of mating with a queen triggered hormonal changes that kept Maarsolian ape puberty from occurring.
One thing was clear though, the Interstellar Senate was going to intervene in matters in the Orus system. They had appointed a local Cherubian priestess as representative and had transferred the power of the top councils of all seven guilds to her. Many trades could be ascribed to Cherubians, but subtlety or willingness to compromise were never among them. Gabriëlla didn't know much about Anaiis, but the fact that she was Cherubian could only mean one thing: The Senate wanted the current ant-monkey crisis dealt with swiftly and decisively.
Continue to Chapter 6