Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Butthole padded over to me and sat with a big canine grin on her face.
“What are you so happy about? I’m mad at you. At least have the decency to look embarrassed.”
Bear twitched her ears. Bear and decency clearly had nothing to do with each other.
I looked up. And forgot to breathe. Above me, the chamber climbed to a height of a hundred and fifty feet, expanding into a wider space. Long spiral ledges of something that looked like paper wrapped around the perimeter of the cavern, and between them huge luminous crystals glowed with pale yellow light. Far above, at the very top, a cluster of paper tubes hung together, some sealed with pale paper caps, others empty, their edges ragged. It was like standing inside a gargantuan conch shell, and it felt otherworldly, like a cathedral.
Regret pinched me. I destroyed this.
Yes, it was beautiful, but the spider herders deserved to harvest their eggs in peace, and I needed to get home. I had to get the coral egg and get out.
“Come on, Butthole. Let’s find what we are looking for.”
The ledges were paper, but they were the sturdiest paper I had ever seen. It had no problem supporting my weight. First, I walked up the ledges to the top, severed the cluster of pupae and let it fall to the ground. I didn’t need any more worker wasps hatching while I rummaged around their house. Then I searched the nest top to bottom.
I found the stolen spider eggs glued to the walls still in their web cocoons. Each egg had a bunch of blue coconut-sized spheres by it - the wasp egg sacs containing larvae. In some places, the sacks had hatched into fat three-foot-long grubs resembling maggots and were feeding on the spider eggs.
The lifecycle was clear. The wasps stole the spider eggs and left them for their young. Once the wasp larvae hatched, they would eat the spider eggs and grow until they formed a pupa and finally matured into adults. The spiders weren’t the nest’s only prey. I found three stalker corpses and the bodies of four goat-like animals the size of a small deer, all glued with that same rough paper near the egg sacs.
Most of the spider eggs were empty or dark. I destroyed any wasp sacks or larvae I came across.
The coral egg had been hidden away near the top of the nest, in a curve of the chamber, with a single egg sack attached to the wall next to it. Perhaps food for the new queen. I killed the wasp egg and gently removed the spider egg from the wall. It was smaller than the others, more like a soccer ball than a beach ball, and it felt warm and surprisingly light. I focused on it, activating my talent. A tiny life slept within, safe in a shell of nurturing liquid.
Oh.
The cream eggs came from the spiders. This one didn’t. This was one of them, a baby spider herder. A creature of an alien civilization, not just a sentient or a sapient. The official term was sophont, a being not born on Earth with intelligence comparable or greater than human and a capacity for creating a civilization.
I sat down and looked at it. A child separated from its parents, stolen to become wasp food and to be devoured by grubs before its first moment of awareness.
It was so much.
For millennia, humans were terrified of being eaten. It was the most primal of our fears. It drove our progress and our relentless pursuit of technology. We conquered the planet to keep our children safe from the predators that roamed in the night. We thought we put this anachronistic horror behind us. And then the gates appeared, and the ancient fear came roaring back. Once again, we were scared that monsters would attack and devour our children, and all our weapons and our progress would do nothing to stop it.
I hugged the egg gently and stayed like that until the inner storm passed inside me. I would get back to my children. And I would return this child back to its family.
In total I found five spider eggs that were still glowing, including the coral one. Now, I had to get them out and get down to the bottom of the cavern without getting killed. I needed a rope.
Well, there was a lot of spider silk around.
I cut a tendril of the spider thread from one of the hollowed-out cocoons on the wall and pulled on it. It came loose, dragging chunks of wasp paper with it. It was about the width of a thick thread and feather-light.
I flexed. One point eight millimeters in diameter, slightly thinner than cooking twine. Wow. The tensile strength was off the charts.
I weighed one hundred and fifty-seven pounds before the breach. I checked my weight regularly. The DDC gym had an abundance of scales. The DDC monitored all government-employed gate divers for any unusual changes. They checked weight and height every three months, bloodwork every six.