Chapter Forty-Seven of my current wip. As before, all and any comments very much appreciated

Please note: This is a weekly post

Jess settled into the flier, calmed his mind, put his worries aside and entered the psi-sphere. Although he’d recorded his destination on the Techs’ leather-bound log, he’d told no one, not even Kookka, exactly where he was going and why. He expected to be away five or six days. When he returned there would be tubes to cut. The bamboo-grass ought to serve. And the powder to mix. Carefully. But first to that smouldering volcano that belched out its sulphurous fumes. He spent no longer there than he absolute needed, just time enough to locate and collect. In next to no time, he was bringing the flier to land near Cela-Byi’s dragon cave.

He smiled at the thought of her, yet that smile was wiped by sorrow at a memory. “What’s that?” She was forming the squadge of clay she’d asked off him from the Techs’ store into a womanly shape. “That’s our baby’s spirit carrier. He’ll be safe there until he’s properly born.” “He?” “Or she.” He had seeded in her another baby? And that after he’d tried his hardest to resist.

With a swift apology to the small dragon that guarded the cave, he stunned it. On his way to the upper caves, he collected his second ingredient: charcoal, the remains of Cela-Byi’s many fires. To help him enter those squeeze-him-tight claustrophobic passages he again entered the psi-sphere. There he found the necessary composure. There wasn’t a dragon following his heels. The roof of this passage, of this cave, wouldn’t collapse on him. He wouldn’t find himself wedged, stuck, unable to move. His lungs wouldn’t deny him another breath. And to scream would deliver him no comfort. Slowly, methodically, taking it a move at a time, he made his way through the four connecting passages, to the uppermost cave – although that cave wasn’t the cause of this expedition.

He didn’t sleep once on the way. He wouldn’t sleep till he was out of that place.

Three Techs held on leashes the undeniably mature Monza males.

One of those Monzas stood in the midst of the corralled women – not the Itamakku headman as Cela-Byi had thought. It was a Monza male, a zem, most likely. And the women, corralled like the goats at Hive Eight, awaiting slaughter? But the goats were food for the operatives and observers. What were these women? Food for the Techs?

“I am dead,” the Monza male says. And in the adjoining cave there are his bones along with those of the women.

And beneath him, surrounding that legend of ‘I am dead’, what seemed random lines, yet Cela-Byi had thought them plants. He traced them with his fingers, the better to memorise. Perhaps they were illustrated in the Tech-issued Information Pack. If not maybe Shelek would recognise them. He was always about with his paper and paints. Jess sighed. Shelek had taken a flier, possibly while Canipse held a stun-gun at his head. To Clutch Seven or Eight. Kookka had proven it could be done.

And that was the reason for this improvised gun.

In the bat’s chamber, Jess dropped to a squat to scrape and shovel the abundant supply of guano. Packed into a box that unfortunately wasn’t airtight, he then squeezed his way back to the entrance cave, his stun-gun ready. He was tempted to soak that shit in water and leach out the chemical he wanted, the potassium nitrate, before taking it back to base. The thought of it stinking out the flier upset his belly. But rather he’d be away from this place, be back to base before however many Techs arrived in answer to Canipse’s call.

“Should I pray to the Itamakku gods in the animosphere? Are they the best gods to help me here? Or to the star-gods?” He laughed at himself for talking out loud. Yet after being isolated in those caves, he needed to hear a voice. Any voice. Even his own. “Yea, Cela-Byi, I call on your god, the dragon, to protect you and I.”

What would the Techs do if they arrived before he’d prepared these guns? “That treacherous Canipse. It ought to be his bones back there in that cave.”

*

The flier hovered over the basecamp. Or rather, over where the basecamp ought to have been. Horror swelled and stole Jess’s thoughts, his reason, his breath. What had happened here? Beneath him one flier, just the one flier. Not a single hive remained. Were it not for that flier and his stack of drums he’d wonder if Clutch Six had ever existed.

Jess pulled the flier away, out westward, southward, to Toki-dow. He checked on the other two dows in the programme. All looked as they ought to. He returned the flier to base and brought it down beside the other.

By then, Shelek and Canipse had formed a small greeting party.

“What…?” That’s all he could say, hurting deep inside him, senses and breath taken away. Where was Kookka, where was Cela-Byi? Where had they gone?

“Best sit down,” Shelek said.

Canipse led the way to the other flier. “We’ve made a cosy hive here. Waiting for you.”

“You knew…?”

“The Banmakka saw you leave,” Shelek said. “They said they hadn’t seen you return before the lander came.”

“The lander?” But the Techs only used the landers at the end of each term, to collect the Monzas from all eight clutches. And they didn’t take away the hives when they came.

“The Banmakka fought them,” Shelek said. “Fought the Techs. They said there were scuffles, our Monza refusing the call. The Banmakka didn’t want them to go.”

“Well, no,” Jess said, some resemblance of sense returning. “We’ve been a regular source of food. And what’s happened to the women? Cela…?” By the Black Dragon’s Clutches, it hurt him to say that name.

“The Techs stunned them but didn’t take them. The Banmakka got the women out.”

“Is this by your doing?” Jess rounded on Canipse. Sitting close in that flier, his fingers itched to strangle the traitor.

“No.” Shelek defended him. “No. Canipse is good, you leave him be. Sure, we took the flier, and I thought he was going to plead for a Tech replacement – he’s said it so many times. But he didn’t. Those Techs got into my head as soon as we’d landed at Clutch Eight, but they couldn’t get into his.”

Canipse jutted his chin. “I’ve kicked them out, them and their lies. I’m open again to my memories. And I’m telling you, Zem Jess, those Techs are evil.”

“I’ve known a while that they’re liars.”

Canipse vigorously shook his head. “Liars? You think that’s all? Killers. Killed my sister. Made me cook her.” He turned away while he scrabbed at his eyes. “You know what they do, what they do here, their little schemes?”

Jess didn’t want to linger on Canipse’s memory. And he’d thought the Techs’ treatment of his own sister had been brutal? “I know the GM Programme is just a cover. I know they killed the Monza breeders, our females. And I know it wasn’t the Adamzal who sent that virus. And the Adamzal still have females, they still produce young, but the Techs take them – harvest them – on some kind of agreed quota. And if that’s so, why the need of this GM Programme?”

“They’re farming us,” Shelek said. “Farming the breed pools too. All of us, work us, or eat us.”

Jess sat back in the flier’s wide seat, hand to his mouth, while the pieces slipped into place. “And that’s why they want us to mate with the breed-pools? They want us to do that though they say it’s forbidden.”

“Breeding swimmers,” Canipse said, and Jess scowled his puzzlement. “To harvest the seaweed. It yields—”

“Iodine,” Jess murmured the word. He’d been slow, he should have identified the seaweed from the cave drawing.

“Black sea-poison,” Canipse said.

“But why?”

“You wouldn’t ask if you’d seen what I’ve seen. It’s no pretty sight, and here’s me used to fiddling around in warm blood and guts.”

“They cannot kill, you see,” Shelek said.

“Canipse has already told you all this?”

“Not exactly bedtime stories,” Shelek said. “But yea. We had a day or two to wait for you.”

“But they—”

“Monza and breed-pools, yea,” Canipse said. “And not just here but on all the planets. But that’s for food, they’ll kill anything for food, same as us. But a Tech can’t kill another Tech and can’t kill themselves. And yet they have to die to reproduce.”

“Replicate,” Shelek fed in the right word.

“So, they sup their black sea potion.”

“Which sends them into a coma?” Jess said, a deep scowl making his eyes ache deep in his head.

“And in that coma comes death. By then, starved of nutrients, their ancient grey skin dries. And splits. Rips right down the middle, it does.”

“Have you seen those seed pods that split like that?” Shelek said. “They dehisce, that’s the word, and the seeds within all spray out.”

“But they don’t produce seeds like Shelek’s dehiscing pods. Twins, Tech-twins, multiple twins, two, four, six…”

“Clones?” Jess said and Canipse nodded. “But how do you know this?”

“You think I’m lying? That I’ve created it all in my head? It’s what I’ve been trying to escape, why I didn’t want to enter the psi-sphere. But you forced me to there.”

“I didn’t force – you turned a psi-powered stunner on yourself.”

Canipse flapped his hands to brush away that truth. “However done, the memories returned. I tell you truth. I worked the kitchens on Kreegirn, no better place to learn their secrets. Maybe they gave me Cally’s carcase as a threat to seal my mouth. But that mouth is open now.”

Jess sat with his head in his hands, aware that time was racing and there were things must be done. “Where did the Techs take them, our clutch, either of you know?”

But his question merely drew shaken heads.

“I can tell you this though,” Shelek said. “They didn’t just take our clutch. The Banmakka said that lander was heavy with Monzas.”

“From what they could see of it,” Canipse added.

“The landing port,” Jess said, the answer suddenly there in his head. “They’re withdrawing, like they did on Urgula Teth. But why, just as they’ve achieved their aim. We’re mating, like they want.”

“But we don’t produce live young.” Shelek chewed on his lip.

“No, we don’t.” And again Cela-Byi was carrying his seed.

Continues on Monday. Not many episodes left
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