Angels of Eternity Read online

  “I’m with the emperor’s forces,” she told them. “I didn’t think there were any other humans here. We can escort you back to our ship whenever you’re ready to leave.”

  The man she’d addressed made a hissing sound and snarled at her. He backed up to the wall with the others and glared at her. Before they could say anything, the group was manipulating levers and switches along the wall frantically. Lights began to flash on the panels and her sensors showed a release of wasp pheromones into the air.

  “Sweet Mother of Heaven,” Durga exclaimed as she realized something. “They’re trying to set off an alarm!”

  The women seized the group. They managed to restrain them with shock cords and utility cord. Salina had some trouble binding the hands of one, but most didn’t give them trouble. The people they captured snarled and made noises, but didn’t appear dangerous.

  “Tara,” Shakti called out, “I want you and Dharma to take this group back to the docking port. Call the Vindicator and tell them we’ve taken some human prisoner. I think they were working for the wasps. Tell the captain he’ll need a security detail to take them back because they don’t want to go on their own will.”

  The two warbrides managed to get the people between them and pushed them down the hall. Shakti made sure they had them under control. She returned to inspect the room they were inside. It appeared to be another kind of command and control center. The ship they were in wasn’t built to fight, but had some basic defensive capabilities. The destroyer they took previously was a kind of escort. The imperial fleet destroyed the other ones, so this had to be an important ship to the wasps.

  “Why would they use humans inside this place?” Durga asked her. “I thought they grew what they needed in some kind of royal chamber.”

  “I don’t know,” Shakti responded. The suit she wore was uncomfortable right now for some reason. She wanted to take it off and continue, but it was too dangerous. Even to open up the helmet was to invite a head wound. Until they knew fully what was on this ship, they had to wear suit armor.

  “I think they were trying to send a signal,” Durga pointed out as she stared at the wall instruments. “Damned if I can figure out how they intended to do it, but I think we stopped them.”

  “The question remains,” Shakti said, “who were they trying to contact? Didn’t they know the wasps on board were all dead? Or maybe some are still alive?”

  It was enough for the rest of the women to hold their weapons that much tighter.

  They tried to makes sense of the designs on walls and placement of the controls, but the symbols were not the product of a human mind. Even if some of it was built for by humans, the principles were all from wasp brains. They took countless pictures for study and continued through a connecting passage.

  “Do you think this was some special research vessel?” Lakshmi asked. “The wasps valued this place. I don’t understand where those people came from. They didn’t even seem to recognize us.”

  The possibility of humans being used by the wasps came up several times before they entered the combat zone. No one seemed to know what happened to the humans in the areas under wasp control. Before the capture of this ship, no human had ever escaped from the wasps. It was assumed the wasps killed every human they could, given their aggressive nature, but no one really knew for sure. Shakti didn’t understand why the wasps would kill every human they found; it didn’t make sense.

  “Okay,” Shakti told the rest of the women, “It’s time to move ahead. We need to find the control center of this place or at least see if there are any wasps still alive.”

  “We don’t have the time to search the whole place over,” Chimata told her through her audio feed. “They’ll pull us out soon enough. Besides, we need to return to the corvette to get more oxygen.”

  “Objection noted,” Shakti told her. “I want to find out as much as we can about it before it’s time to leave. Now let’s move.”

  The warbrides picked up their weapons and walked forward into the next corridor. Every now and then, they would see small marks on the wall that the sensors told them were pheromone indicators. There was something very important down the corridor they traveled. The wasps marked it repeatedly. Durga followed her slightly to the right this time, hanging back just far enough to call battle formations if she had to do it.

  The corridor emerged into another dome-shaped room, which was the preferred wasp style, or so it seemed. Shakti saw a balcony and a ramp before her. The room itself allowed them to look down into a much larger floor. The ramp followed the wall and ended at the floor. Once again, the pale light from the ceiling barely allowed them to see.

  Shakti and Durga were the first ones into the gallery. They were able to look down to the floor from the walkway which ran around the room. They stopped and froze. The rest of the women walked into the room and looked down too.

  No one said a word for at least thirty seconds.

  “This is horrible,” Durga spoke to Shakti. “It’s worse than I could have imagined.”

  Shakti was without speech. She tried to say a few words, but couldn’t.

  Below them, on the floor, were forty women attached to machines monitoring their vital signs. They were unconscious, although some did move and writhe. Most of the movements were caused by their condition. It was one that could not be cured. It ended when the women no longer served the purpose for which they’d been taken into the ship. Some were dead and the remains of their internal organs were scattered about them. It didn’t matter, as the pupae they’d produced were intact and laying on the floor too. Without any wasps or human servants to take them away, there was nothing else they could do.

  The women were victims of the wasp grubs the princess caste deposited into them.

  They would later discover it happened before they were transferred into the brood chamber. The women on the floor were each arranged in hexagonal chambers. The chambers were elevated off the floor a few feet. It made them easier to be examined by the wasp minders.

  Later, the warbrides would find the antechamber on the other side of the main room where the captives were taken to be implanted. It wasn’t the straps they found on the wall that sickened them the most; it was the recording equipment that showed how it was done. For some reason, the wasps wanted the process documented. Lashmi speculated it was to improve on it.

  This was the reason for the ship’s importance. It was a brood chamber to make new wasps. The wasps needed animal hosts to breed their young. A princess wasp would deposit a fertilized egg in the body of a victim. It would mature into the pupal stage once it had feasted on the internal organs. Further studies by the prefects would show the entire process took two standard weeks. The more victims they could harvest, the more wasps could be produced. It was never discovered why the wasps needed live hosts. They never developed artificial means for reproduction. Most speculated they would move onto the next inhabited world once the supply of hosts was used up. It didn’t have to be mammalian, any large animal would do.

  Before Shakti could say a word, Kamala walked down the ramp to the floor where two of the pupae rested in their cocoons. Mature larvae spun cocoons once they emerged from a host. The cocoon was taken by the wasp or human minder to another chamber where an adult wasp would emerge from the cocoon in four days. These cocoons had not been removed since all the adult wasps on the ship were dead and the humans transferred to the corvette.

  In one swift movement, Kamala swung her weapon and crushed the pupae beneath her. She swung it several times and crushed the other ones too. Shakti couldn’t see her face through the helmet, but she didn’t have too. She felt the disgust and horror every other woman did in the room.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Shakti told Kamala, “the prefects would have wanted those for study. I don’t think anyone knew what was inside here.”

  “We are in hell,” Durga announced. “At least the outer gate of it. I expect to see devils any minute. Maybe the wasps are demons.�
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  Chapter 7

  “Up till today,” Salina said. “I didn’t really understand why we were here. I thought it was another game the emperor played. Marry some pleasure girls, look good to his subjects, and send them out on a mission. Keep everyone in the empire amused. I didn’t think the wasps were anything other than a nuisance. Now, I don’t know what to think. Part of me wants to kill every last wasp I find. Part of me worries there won’t be enough of them for all of us to kill. What happens if there are too many wasps?”

  “What kind of planet produced these things?” Lashmi said aloud over the audio. “That’s what I want to know. We need to find their home world. They have to be stopped.”

  “We have a more immediate problem,” Shakti pointed out. “What do we do with these people? We can’t just sit here and let the grubs eat them from inside out.”

  Lashmi walked along the victims with the wasp young inside them. She looked at forms of the young wasp grubs as they moved. It didn’t seem there was much left of the host. Similar wasps preyed on other species on the home world. She tried to avoid looking at the eyes of the victims. She found it impossible not to feel guilt and rage at the same time. Guilt for not arriving soon enough and rage at the wasps for doing this. She wanted to detonate a nuclear warhead inside the wasp ship, but it wouldn’t bring back the women hosts.

  “I don’t think there’s much we can do,” Kamala pointed out. “They’re just about gone. Putting them out of their misery would be the merciful thing to do.”

  Shakti and Durga walked along the rows and looked down. They also avoided the faces. The victims seemed to be of all shapes and sizes, although the wasps preferred younger ones from what they could surmise.

  “We need to get in touch with the corvette,” Durga told Shakti. “They need to know about what we’ve found over here.”

  “Can’t get a good signal from inside,” Shakti responded. “I worry if we wait too long, some of these things might begin to mature.”

  Chimata slung her shield over the back of her suit armor. She slid her sword she into its scabbard, attached to a belt around her suit armor. She walked up to Shakti and Durga.

  “I’ll go back to the entrance port and let the corvette know what we’ve found,” she told them, “I can stand there and communicate with the captain. If we station women close enough through this ship, we might be able to create a chain to send the message across.”

  Shakti thought a minute and told her to go ahead. She had her inform the two women escorting the prisoners wait for further instructions. Furthermore, she had one of the other women deployed as a relay point closer to the chamber where they stood. This method had a better chance of communicating with the corvette. She sent Kamala along with her.

  “Anyone sees one of these grubs try and break through its host,” Shakti transmitted to the other women, "kill it right away. We can, at very least, keep it from entering its pupal phase.”

  Ten minutes later the voice of the captain came across to Shakti’s helmet. “What have you found? We’re sending over a squad to take back the prisoners. Did you say they seem to have cooperated with the wasps?”

  “Yes,” Shakti sent back. “They act like wasps. It might be a learned behavior. Keep them under close watch; I wouldn’t let them roam free under any circumstance. As for what we’ve just discovered, stand by for a visual feed, but be prepared to see something horrible.”

  She transferred the feed from her helmet camera to the Vindicator. There was a moment of pause as the captain took it all in.

  She heard the captain swear in three different languages. “It’s what we always suspected,” he told her. “You never see any survivors from a wasp raid because the wasps use them for the brood chambers. I need to figure out what to do with these victims. We don’t have much in the way of medical facilities aboard. At least not big enough to handle this many civilian victims.”

  “What do you propose we do about them, captain?” Shakti said to him. “We can’t leave them here until the dreadnaught comes in to haul the ship away. We have a responsibility to do something. These people are still human.”

  “I can’t tell how much of them are still left,” he replied. “I need to keep this private. If it comes out the prisoners had anything to do with what happened on board this ship, I wouldn’t be able to control the crew. They’ll kill every one of them before we can get any useful information out of them.”

  “Just keep me posted,” she transmitted back. “We’ll wait and see what the war college wants to do.”

  Shakti pulled the women still in the chamber back from the room. It was enough to know what was in the chamber, another thing to deal with it up close. They filed out of the room and watched the light filter into the corridor. Most of the women stood and checked their weapons, ready if they had to use them. There was no guarantee the wasps had been cleared out of the ship.

  “I didn’t come inside her to slaughter a bunch of women whose only mistake in life was to be captured by wasps,” Kamala told to her over a private channel.

  Shakti didn’t respond. It wasn’t a refusal to follow an order or any other violation, just her opinion. The rest of the warbrides had similar thoughts; she could see it through the faces in the helmets. No one expected this atrocity.

  “I suppose the medical corps and intelligence people will want to see them first,” Shakti heard Durga transmit to her. “I’m hoping we don’t become involved in the final disposal. It wouldn’t go over very well, even if it’s a mercy killing. We’re warriors, not butchers.”

  Shakti stood still and waited for a final deposition from the captain, but none came. Something kept the war college busy and prevented them from making a decision. If she didn’t hear anything soon, the captain would act on his own. It was one of the responsibilities of his position: to represent the emperor.

  Two hours later the warbrides received a message from the war college. They were told to do with them as they saw fit since it was not likely any of them would survive the ordeal. The medical corps was interested in taking one of the hosts as a sample, since they did not have an infected host to examine. No one had the opportunity to study one so far. All they knew about the parasitic practices of the wasps came from the human settlements attacked by them. They had suspected something this nightmarish in the past, but not at such a level.

  “However, as much as they would like to take one of the victims for further study,” the captain explained to them over his transmission, “they feel the risk of taking one would be too great. They told us to keep the humans you discovered working with the wasps in a confined area and to disinfect everyone when they return from the wasp ship.”

  “Great,” said Lashmi, “that means more time in the infirmary. I can’t wait.”

  “I will read the entire message I received,” Captain Wu told them. “You all need to hear this.”

  “It is recommended,” the captain began, “that you try and take plenty of images and measurements of the brood chamber so we will have some idea of how the wasps reproduce. Knowledge of their biology is essential if we are to defeat them. We understand the horror you must feel about the wanton killing of so many innocent people, but in truth, there may not be too much of them left that is human. From your description, it appears the wasps reproduce like their parasitic relatives on Terra by the infection of insects with their eggs. The eggs hatch and the paralyzed host becomes food for the larva stage. When the larva matures, a new wasp comes into being. According to what the wasp commander said on the destroyer you captured, they grow their troops much in the same way we recruit and train them.”

  “Therefore, we recommend you explore the vessel to the best of your ability and scuttle it with the infected hosts on it. It will be one way to avoid any contamination to the humans on the corvette. Knowledge of wasp propulsion is rudimentary, but they appear to use some kind of electrostatic drive to cross the void between worlds. You should be able to carry out the demolition of the ship wit
h your explosives.”

  “We regret there can be nothing more we can do or offer, but this war is fought for the future of the human race. Isolated groups such as you are the only ones who can prevent the wasps from destroying all of humanity. We await the outcome and good luck.”

  “Is that all you received, captain?” Shakti asked him.

  “That’s it,” he transmitted. “It sounds like they want you to decide what to do about those women you found on board the ship.”

  “Yeah, nice of them to dump it all in my lap. Now I’ll have to make a decision on what to do. I’ll let you know when we decide. Later.” Shakti broke the connection to the corvette.

  All the warbrides had visited the brood chamber to view the result of the wasps’ breeding program. They saw what remained of the women, not able to believe it. Finally, Shakti spoke up.

  “Have we searched all of this ship we can?” she asked the assembled women. “I think there is more to be found. I know we have another two hours in these suits before they need to recharge. I’m ready to explore the remainder of the wasp ship. I want to see what they have here. There may be more wasps still on board, so be careful.”

  “What are we going to do about the women?” Tara asked her. “We just can’t leave them here to die as victims. It appears some of those wasp larvae are ready to enter the next stage.”

  “We’ll deal with them before we leave,” Shakti responded. “We’ll line the ship with charges and blow it up after we’re gone. Kamala, do you have enough explosives to do the job?”

  “I’ve got enough to split this thing in half if I plant them in the right places,” she told them. “It all depends on where I put them. If we find any kind of nuclear power plant, I can use it.”

  “Good,” Shakti said to her. “Take your mines and distribute them to the rest of the group. We can each plant the charges where we need to, depending on what part of the ship we’re inside.”