18. The Swarm

Auctoritas Station, Terra
Imperium Stellarum
September 25, 2847

Altair Janus Solaris, twenty-sixth emperor of the Imperium Stellarum, left a pair of imperial guards outside the airlock and stepped into the situation room on Auctoritus Station, to find it already awhirl with activity. At the center of the room, a projected, holographic map of the Imperium hovered over the recessed floor, just above eye level. Twenty systems, extending out from Terra at the center of the map in an uneven explosion of blue light, encompassed twenty-seven settled worlds, three Alu’kan ringworlds built around stars which should never have supported life, four Torean arc-fleets, and and dozens of moons, asteroid mining bases, orbital stations and shipyards. Those lights, Altair knew, represented nearly seventy billion sentient lives.

On the upper edge of the map, five systems shone cerulean, shaded with just enough green to let an observer pick them out from the rest of the Imperium at a glance. Those were the worlds of the LeShaii, the most recent species to join the Imperium, and the reason, Altair knew, that he’d been called to the situation room. But before addressing the current crisis, he couldn’t help but let his eyes drift to the wedge of red light that cut toward the heart of the Imperium, ending just thirty-one light years from Terra at Wolf 1069.

The Singularity. The very sight of it stuck in his craw: five breakaway systems whose continued existence destabilized the very foundations of the realm his ancestors had spent centuries building. Before his thoughts could twist his lip in that long-held, simmering anger, Altair smoothed his face and turned toward the small group of men and women who awaited him.

“My apologies for interrupting your day, Emperor,” Admiral Jack Nakagami began, stepping forward to offer a hand to his liege. Nakagami, despite the best telomere therapy the Imperium’s doctors and gene therapists could devise, was showing his age. The son of a Mikaboshi-born mother and a spacer father, Altair knew that he’d spent a miserable childhood enduring the scorn of the Nightside upper class for his mixed heritage. It had driven the man off-world and into fleet, and the Imperium couldn’t have been more fortunate. Without Nakagami’s leadership during the Singularity War, there might not even be an emperor.

Altair not only took Nakagami’s hand in his own, he reached around with his left hand to pat his old friend on the shoulder. It was a level of intimacy that few, outside of his own family, had earned. “What have we got, Jack?” he asked. Around the room, the admiral’s staff officers worked at their stations, collating data and running projections as they tried to anticipate the old man’s needs.

“Probable Swarm contact here,” Nakagami said, reaching up to take hold of the projected map with his hands. Optical sensors placed around the ceiling and walls of the room read his movements and seamlessly translated them into instructions, and the map zoomed in to center on LeShaii space. “LHS 1140, a red dwarf with a single inhabited planet.”

“Hav’eth,” Ambassador An’cet said, stepping forward. “An ocean world with a sprinkling of islands grouped into three major archipelagos. It is where my people first encountered the Alu’ka, actually. They were scouting it out for their own use.”

“Ambassador.” Altair stepped in to take the LeShaii’s hand in turn. “I presume that I’m going to have to break that habit, and get used to addressing you as ‘senator’ in the near future.”

“I’m not certain whether I should congratulate you on that, or not,” Jack Nakagami said. “You’d have to shoot my knees out to get me to sit down in that senate chamber. I asked the ambassador here to join us because we haven’t even started integrating LeShaii officers into our chain of command yet, your imperial majesty, and we’ve only got spotty intel on Hav’eth.”

“I would have preferred that we had a decade or so to get ourselves into shape before this happened,” Altair admitted.

An’cet nodded. “The first LeShaii are only just entering imperial military academies,” he agreed.

“Your daughter among them, if I recall,” Director Wik Void Skimmer said. The Torean head of imperial intelligence had a disturbing way of being so quiet and unobtrusive that, until the moment he spoke, Altair often forgot he was in the room. “Attending the same school as our princess imperial.”

An’cet inclined his head, and the projectors splayed blue light across the opalescent shell that adorned his skull. “That is so. I am told that they are sharing the same room, in fact.”

“So am I,” Altair grumbled. In fact, he’d already received the first recording from Cassie complaining about that fact. He’d hoped that putting the two girls in close proximity would help to build a relationship between the imperial family and the newest member species of the Imperium, but perhaps that had been putting too much faith in his hot-headed daughter’s personal skills. Still, plenty of roommates began life at odds and settled into being friends. He’d seen to it that Rear Admiral Townshend would leave them right where they were for the first year, at least.

“What can you tell us, Wik?” Altair asked, reaching out to drag a wheeled chair away from the conference table along one side of the room. He settled back into the cushioned seat with a sigh. He hadn’t made noises like that twenty years ago—but then again, he hadn’t had an aching back twenty years ago.

Wik Void Skimmer reached up to snap his fingers, and a young human woman stepped forward. “Monica Yarborough is our senior analyst in the sector. She’s been working closely with her counterparts among the LeShaii. Miss Yarborough, you may proceed.” Wik, An’cet, and Jack Nakagami all took their own seats at the conference table, settling in to listen.

“Thank you, Director,” Yarborough said. She gave the impression, Altair thought, of extreme competence and professionalism. She wore a skirt-suit in charcoal gray, with her nut-brown hair pulled back into a tight bun, and she wore a set of wire-frame smart lenses that perched just at the tip of her nose. The glint of light from inside the frames hinted at scrolling text, but it was impossible to see just what she was referencing. Yarborough lifted her tablet from the conference table, tapped at the screen, and supplemented the projected map with half a dozen informational boxes and pictures.

“Most of what we know about the Swarm come from our LeShaii allies,” Yarborough began. “First contact between the two species occurred so far in the past that we might more accurately consider it mythology than history, and early sources are unreliable at best. Religious texts, for instance.”

An’cet nodded, though Altair wondered what the man was thinking. What would it be like, the emperor mused, to be able to reach out and grasp the thoughts of another person? To satisfy that primal curiosity? It was probably a good thing that they hadn’t even begun research into whether it might be possible to create human psychers. The last temptation an emperor needed was the ability to pry into the thoughts of his subjects.

The LeShaii ambassador tilted his face in Altair’s direction, somewhere between a nod and a glance. “I can understand how those early texts would appear unreliable, when one is considering them from an outside perspective. But I will point out that our ancestors’ depiction of the Swarm—or the Na’xir, as we call them—has remained remarkably consistent when measured against more recent accounts.”

“I will concede the point, Ambassador,” Monica Yarborough said. “The Na’xir Swarm—I think that may be the best way to refer to them—is, at its core, a species evolved from ancestors similar to terran arachnids, rather than insects.” Several of the images that she’d summoned expanded in size while she spoke, answering to the touch of her fingers at her tablet.

“All castes of Na’xir have certain biological and anatomical qualities in common,” Yarborough continued. “An exoskeleton, for instance, rather than the internal bones we’re used to in most Imperium member species. They have eight legs, two pairs of which have evolved to be used for locomotion, while one pair is used for fine motor control and manipulation of tools. The pincers are for combat.”

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Altair noted that Yarborough had said ‘most’ member species, rather than all. He mentally adjusted his estimation of her security clearance—and Director Void Skimmer’s faith in capabilities—upwards.

“Unlike terran arachnids, Na’xir form hive groups more similar to bees or ants,” Yarborough went on. “A queen lays eggs based on the needs of the hive. My apologies, but we don’t have any media of a Na’xir queen. But we do have images of warriors and workers.”

Altair couldn’t help but lean forward in fascination. There was nothing human-like in the faces of the Na’xir. In fact, their heads could hardly be said to possess a face at all. There were two wide-set eyes, facing forward like in so many predator species, rather than to the side, and set back into the protective embrace of the carapace. The mouth, if it could be called that, consisted of wicked-looking, scissoring chelicerae.

“Just how big are these things?” he asked. A man without his genetic modifications might have begun taking notes, but the emperor was confident in his augmented brain’s optimized ability to process and retain information.