Part Two: It's not the darkness, it's the monster hiding in the darkness that scares me.
They're behind me no matter how I turn, iron clawed, irresistibly strong, remorsely ravenous, black silently snapping jaws just out of sight.
I tried to read a book.
Close your eyes and imagine darkness, jet black, muddled with shadows, crisscrossed with ebony, and obscured by onyx. Open your eyes and it's still there. I was encased by roach bodies the size of guard dogs, enclosed by their insectoid and tentacled limbs, enwrapped in their chittering wings, alone in the dust of the Asteroid belt.
My AI was still delivering information to my visual cortex, the phosphenes producing a kind of virtual light that illumined nothing. It told me the vectors, the acceleration and speed of my suit, the physical facts of everything, from the skin of my mining rig, inwards to my pounding heart, but nothing outside. Rita was gone, location markers were gone, civilization, even the hours-away rescue stations, were gone. I was in a black sphere of silence with nothing but my suit and the pseudo light behind my eyes.
The meaningless numbers that scrolled along with the only vital information I had were no company. I called up the file of the last book I had been reading, the classic work on acoustics by Benade. I put it away. Maybe something light, a short story. Now I had to think about how long I might be out here. Maybe the AI can do the math. So now the numbers had some meaning.
She had Rita's last vector. Yes, I think of my AI as a female. No, I don't use an avatar for her and rarely use the voice function. I can take her apart and put her back together, I know she's just a machine.
She has the additive increases of vectors for my suit, she can compare them to Rita's probable position and give me a number of minutes. The numbers were in blue just above my line of sight. They were ticking up.
Usually a roach can apply about 5 newtons of force, but these larger hexapods were generating 0.5 gees, even with my mass. Each one alone might be capable of a full gee which was more than my space adapted vascular system could resist. Rita would not be catching up with me even at full thrust.
As soon as I realized that, the full weight of acceleration became obvious to me. I had been feeling it all along but since it was the normal acceleration for mining ships, I just blanked on it. But now I was obviously lying on my back, the full roach wing solar collectors between me and the sun and Rita, heading outward at a gradually increasing speed. The closest other rocks were more than two hours away. I got "The Fundamentals Of Acoustics" out again and began reading.
Three hours later I felt a stirring in my bowels that meant turn-over. We stole our EM engine design from the roaches, so I knew that they could apply force in any direction by changing the polarity or physical vector of the microvessels in their carapace. I just didn't expect them to make me spend three hours on my face while they slowed down to dock. I closed my eyes and let my AI do the mapping again. We were headed for a listed asteroid and known Roach Motel. It was stripped of all metals and semiconductors nearly a decade ago when we were first noticing the hexapods.
The Outwards had released the roaches in the Belt, an irresponsible act of war. Since both groups needed the resources, trying to automate the mining was both immoral and unethical. Releasing self duplicating pseudo life was even worse. We regained control over our mining bots centuries ago, removing their advanced AIs and replacing them with swarm AIs linked to our suits and ships. To risk that kind of event again was criminal of the Outwards and it earned them the constant war that we Inward cyborgs rained on them, when we weren't trying to find more metal.
The roaches leapt from rock to rock, eating anything, forming hexagons to reproduce, then leaping away again. The Outward mutants would call them in somehow, process their refined metals, destroying them in the process. As long as they kept that up, the exponential growth potential was not a problem. For them. But we kept finding more and more roach eaten rocks, which was days of work wasted.
This one was large. The roaches transporting me opened up their wings as they slowed and I could see it in the distance. It seemed more chewed up than normal. Frayed at the edges and dark holes all over it. As we came within a few thousand meters the magnification in my visor suddenly resolved it all for me. The frayed edges were a kind of fractal structure made of rock, and the dark holes were pools of black - crawling pools of hexapod black, many meters across. As we came closer one of the pools suddenly exploded towards us, a complex spray of giant roach bodies. It grabbed us out of the sky and drew us down into the seething mass of roaches it had sprung from. I was buried in them immediately and felt the shifting force as I was sucked further into the immense roach nest.
I came to an abrupt halt, and about a hundred roaches formed a matrix around me in what my sensors could now tell me was a large chamber in the asteroid, a bubble inside a shell of left over and useless friable stone. They held me by my arms and legs and turned me to face a light source by handing me off to sequential members of their group. They brought me forward and I saw that the light source was a compact helix of the large roaches, being serviced in some way by scurrying millions of what now seemed to be tiny roaches.
The helix was formed by the usual bisexual connection, but where a normal hexagon terminated back into itself, this one rose a level and started over. It spiraled up out of a hole in the rock, passed through a dozen feet of open space, then screwed it's way into another hole and disappeared from sight. Its jointed legs wth it's squirming tips were pulled aside so I could see a short gap between each layer. The light was coming from inside the coiled tube of carapaces. Their inner legs, usually just a few that dangled out of the middle of a hexapod, were woven into a rope of many legs from the perhaps 200 roaches that I could see, who knew how many more there were. Twined together, I suppose they could not radiate heat properly, they were red hot, and the tips were trending towards white hot.
The roaches pulled me closer and I noticed a distinct hum in my suit speakers. I could see a jittery haze in the back of my eyes, something was interfering with my electronics. The roach helix made a pulling motion and a wider gap formed in front ot me, the tips of the braided legs lifted out and the humming in my suit became a buzz. Its sound resolved into words and the roach said to me, "We have constructed this place to inform you that if you continue your war against my kind, we will eradicate you."
End part two.
All text my own, image listed as open source by natureworldnews.com
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