999
m41
45 kilometers beneath the surface of the cloud layer.
Skemmy had always been slight, fragile and somewhat ugly. When he had been born the way to Thedias, deep in the bowels of an Imperial prison galleon, his mother had done her best to keep him near the gravi-plates that worked, and fought hard esto get him gruel, grub, and glow-light. The result was that when he had come to Thedias, he had been only a quarter again as tall as a normal groundbirth, and his bones were merely brittle, not glass. He had found a place to work in the deep caves, far away from the press and the people of the drop habs. In the dark, he had found veins of rich ore to start mining, and he had tapped them with lascutter and spinsorters. He had worked with gangs, and he worked on his own.
Now, Skemmy still worked, low and deep in the dark, with lascutter and spinsorters. He still labored hard and in dank and dangerous places. But he didn't do it alone - not even when he was the only human being in dozens of kilometers. Skemmy worked with the warm, radiating glow of the Sisterhood in his mind, and the lump of the implanted Kiss deep inside of him. He worked because he believed, and he worked because he understood.
The new schools laid it out, simple enough that even low down scutters like him could follow it: By the people. For the people. To the future. Everyone worked together, everyone got a share, everyone got to see tomorrow. There had been some things more complicated and esoteric than that for him. Stories about how the Kiss that he had gotten, that had worked its way through the colony after the scrap with the cogboys, it produced feelings that weren't real, but were useful. It made people feel together, and like they were working towards something. BUt feelings weren't reality.
The Sisterhood always said that.
But Skemmy saw it in more simple terms.
Before, he had been bone weary, alone, and working to skive rocks out of holes and dredges.
Now?
Now he could rest when he needed. He had food to eat. He had friends. Life wasn't perfect, but hey.
What life was?
And his job took him around the children, which made everything worth while. He scrambled between two narrow, rubbery masses of flesh, then skidded along a vein that pulsed and thumped beneath his belly. Slipping between bone knobs, he emerged into a large, humid chamber of glistening, miraculous flesh. The air smelled spicy and warm, and he started to run his lumen along the walls, humming a cheerful tune. His lumen caught a thick knot of grisley-gray muscle tissue and he whistled and clicked his tongue.
"Now that's not right, kiddo," he said, his voice echoing in the vastness, the only other sound the deep breathing of the children. He drew up his las cutter and planted it firmly in place. He triggered on the cutter and the beam scythed into the tissue. Just as he had expected, the only response was a shudder and quiver on the floor. He rocked with the motion and smiled as he pulled his cutter back. The cancer had been burned out clean and pure.
He continued to move through the children, and found sixteen other knots of cancer, and a few thick lines of damage that looked like it had been caused by growing bone spurs shifting and pressing against walls. He emerged, slimy and tired and profoundly satisifed, to find a purple robed woman who looked like she had once been one of the coggies. A few cogs kept their metal - for when ships came to deliver their passengers, but most of them looked like her now: Metal replaced with chitin, and specially grown fixtures, organics and symbiotes that writehd and squirmed. She listened to him as he explained, then clicked her tongue.
"Hmm, they're growing faster than expected...maybe it's the fact they're clones, rather than a proper breeding pool...hmm...but they're hardy beasts, they're hardy beasts indeed..." She seemed lost in esoterica and Skemmy started fidgeting from foot to foot, waiting...
She realized he was there. "Oh, I mean, good work, Skemmy." The sleek, faceted shell that had replaced her optic, which had replaced her eye, flashed. "IF we keep this up, the first will be hatching in the decade."
And the most Star Children blessed thing that Skemmy thought, as he went to the track-trailer that would haul him up from the deepest levels of THedias, to the drop hab that had become the capital of their new world?
He was fairly sure he'd live to see that decade. With children, too.
Skemmy smiled.
Through the bars of the elevator rising up and up and up, he could see the birthing chamber - the cavernous space carved out of the catastrophic damage that had been wrought during the war, filled with glistening purple flesh, hardened chitin and bone. The vast leviathan shapes lay there, growing day by day, moment by moment, and he could see people just like him, picking out cancers and bleeders here and there. He watched until they were gone.
Then, he whistled as he headed for work.
***
The Pits was not an active drophab. Its corridors remained empty, month on month. But once every few years, it thrived with activity. Priests came, and cult members too. They came and they cleaned, repaired, threw about some artfully designed decorations. They rounded up people who showed the blessing of their status in the cult - or those who had been infected very recently - and asked for volunteers. Most of them found it a lark, a huge adventure, and were eager to head in and play their part...but in truth, it was always dangerous duty, paid for with extra rations, extra blessings, extra honor.
The danger came from the fact that, for anywhere from a week or a month, the Pits had to return to the seeming of being a prison in truth. The fake guards and the fake prisoners needed it to look
quite real to the new prisoners who had been brought by the thin trickle of ships that continued to come to Thedias again and again.
The destruction of the planet's cult had been reported. The official story was that, in an act of desperate heroism, Shexia Af-Baru and the Machine Saint Ophidian had both worked together to detonate the lance in a
controlled fashion, which had merely killed a quarter of the planetary population and the entire cult, which had been seeking to claim it for their own.
"I'm not so bad for a dead woman," Shexi murmured to Sur as the two Kelermorphs knelt in the vent, looking down at the people streaming through the corrections facility. They watched with the same intensity as Korine, Seelie, Laza, Qarak and the other members of their strain. The only non-Kelemorph here was Bataar - the former space marine had taken to her new augmentations quite well, but no one would have ever called her a Kelermoprh.
Hidden, they watched.
Sur grinned. "See the redhead?"
"Yeah," Shexi said, frowning. "Not only do I see her, I recognize her - that's Raquel DeFree...she's a former Cold Trader turned spy for a puritan with a sense of humor - he implanted a bomb in her brain, but I doubt it'll be set off unless she completely fails to report in."
"Huh," Sur said. "That's only the second one this year."
"I think they're beginning to trust the story," Shexi said, shaking her head. "But it won't last forever. Inquisitors have very, very, very long memories, and they can let a situation sit and simmer if they need to." She rubbed her jaw. "Time is not on our side." She lifted her upper right arm, making a hand gesture.
Laza, seeing the gesture, nodded and scrambled off.
Shexi sighed. "We're going to need to keep this one running until she's convinced and exfiltrates."
"This is going to
suck," Sur muttered. "Someone might die."
"Everyone volunteered, but...I'll see if we can maybe find some solutions," Shexi said. "Maybe a telepathic fake..."
"Maybe," Sur said, sounding as if she didn't quite believe it.
Shexi and her sighed, watching. In the darkness, her mind unfolded out the possibilities. If Raquel DeFree was misled, like the last agent - who was significantly easier handle, being just an Arbites check up squad to investigate Sur, who had needed to be reduced back to merely human seeming with biomorphic transformation - then there was a chance they'd have not just years, but decades of time to work. The mineral output of Thedias Prime had been reduced by the 'destruction', and the Adeptus Adminitratum would not expect them to read old quota levels of quite some time. In that grace period, everything mined and smelted on this world would flow into their own future.
Machines would be built here, for the people of Thedias.
New habitats would be carved, safe underground. Greenery that had once been the purview of the wealthy nobility would be planted.
And the Children would grow.
But if Raquel DeFree managed to notice something...
If she had to be killed. Or changed.
Well.
She frowned intently, watching through the grille of the vents. She laid there, half between darkness and light, her body changed irrevocably by her time on Thedias, and felt a strange kinship with her old self. She remained a watcher, from the shadows, with something so very fragile and sacred in her hands. A reliquary to a future undreamed of. Then she felt a clawed hand gripping her shoulder. Laza was back, and with a single smile, he communicated to her that the word had been given. Shexi felt a deep sense of ease settling into her, an ease that she had never felt, not once when she had been an interrogator.
She might still be between darkness and light, watching a fragile and dangerous moment wind its way through time.
But she was
not alone.
She stood within the vent, and slipped off to keep an eye on the future.
***
Magus Trilla rolled a small orb of glass around on the table, her fingers planted against her temple. She rubbed, slowly, and wished that her headache might go away. "Run those numbers by me again, Liliand."
"At the current rate of population growth, we'll be at double the planetary population in thirty five years," Liland said.
"Double," Yolanda said, her eyes wide.
"The factors are a combination of the reduction of extermination work quotas, the-"
"The orgies?" Yolanda asked.
"The improvement in medical care and the better food," Liland said, chuckling. "The changes in mores have actually done little to increase the average rate of breeding - humans like to fuck, cult or no." She shook her head. 'But more children are going to reach adulthood since we have better care facilities...and more than a few of those children are better suited to surviving Thedias. The geneline evolutions are what's most interesting, due to the Patriarch's involvement, we've been able to begin to retroengineer modifications from the geneseeds into alternate expressions and seed them into reporducable clades."
"We're
breeding space marines!?" YOlanda spluttered, while Xandra blinked and sat up.
Liliand flinched. "Uh, no."
Yolanda frowned. "Then what are we doing?"
"Well, three clades have managed to adapt the Catalepsean gland into their bodies naturally, reducing their need for sleep," Liliand said. "ANd the muscular enhancements have been shown to crop up in a few pure-lines." She paused. "The lack of sleep has made the children, uh..."
"A holy terror?" Xandra asked, dryly.
"Precisely," Liliand said.
Trilla leaned forward. She rolled her glass orb into her palms, then pocketed it. Her fingers steepled before her chin.
"The food supplies," she said. "Will we manage the
food supplies."
Liliand clicked her teeth. "That's where things get difficult." She sighed. "We can always eat a bioshi-"
"What!?" Yolanda exploded, while Xandra recoiled and Trilla went white.
Liliand lifted her hand. "Hold, sisters. Hold. I've considered this deeply. There are currently six bioships in gestation, and more will be bred up as the years go on. They are no longer a single, solitary Child that we have to monitor - nor are we beholden to the religious programming that the Tyrannic hive mind built into us. We can look at them rationally - and rationally, they are an immense amount of biomass, and we can lose one to sustain us in lean times." She sighed. "...but it'll just get us through one or two bad seasons. It won't solve the problem of Thedias Prime has a limited amount of arable land. We've pushed it as hard as we can, but there are simple functional limits we cannot get past without significantly more resources."
"The President is not going to like this," Xandra said.
"That's why we do not simply present her insoluble problems," Trilla said, frowning. "We're advisors. We
advise. We need a solution."
They all considered for a time.
"We could modify a bioship and turn it into a food production system," Yolanda suggested.
"We could attempt to create asteroidal farms - but those run into the same issues of scale-" Xandra started.
"We could institute birth control measures," Liliand said.
Everyone looked at her.
"And we will need to spread the cult to other worlds," Liliand said. "We combine those two, and we can stabilize our population and push the doubling off to fifty, sixty years - which gives us time to secure agri-world shipments, or possibly improve Thedias' arability with the more long term methods."
Trilla considered.
Then...
SLowly.
She grinned. The glass globe in her pocket slid into her hand and she held it up, letting the small world held between her fingers catch the light and glitter.
"What world did you have in mind?" she asked.
THE END
