Stardogs (57 page)

The comfort of the garments, and the first rays of sunlight lifted her spirits considerably. She raised her arms and shook her small fists, jangling her bracelets defiantly. She looked at them and smiled to herself, for the first time since her life had abruptly begun to unravel. On her arms was a small fortune. Perhaps, perhaps she had the means to some power. In Shael’s mind power and security were automatically equivalent.

She was still trying to work out the best approach, considering each of her father’s generals in turn, when she stumbled upon the stream. She was unsure how one did this rough drinking: usually a servant brought drinks on a silver tray in a container of some kind. She settled for kneeling and scooping water up rather ineffectually with her hands. The water was cold and peat-stained. A day before she would have looked at it, raised an eyebrow and rejected it disdainfully. Now she drank until her side had a stitch in it.

Her vanity was still intact however. Shael was still kneeling, looking at her reflection in the pool when a coldness began creeping down her spine. Small, almost hidden sounds told her there was someone behind her. Slowly she turned. She steeled her face for calmness, but the muscles in her neck were jumping with tension, betraying fear which was mounting towards panic.

Well, he was no Morkth-man. Those were always clean-shaven, both on the head and face, and clad in black. The heavy stubble on his cheeks was the only thing that was black about this man. He was long-haired and his clothes had once been a Tyn States uniform, a lancer’s at a guess. He attempted a disarming grin. The blackened stumps of several rotting teeth made it less of a success than it could have been. He touched the hank of limp, greasy hair on his brow, his shifty eyes darting about. “Morning, missy. You alone?”

Her first inclination was to run. Her second, on realizing that this was totally impractical, was to claim a score of companions.

“My . . . my servants are just back there. Lots of them. If you touch me, I’ll scream and they’ll come.” Despite her training her voice belied her.

He was certainly not fooled. He snorted derisively. “Likely bloody story, missy. They’re hiding in the grass, belike? Calm down, I’m not gonna hurt you.”

She relaxed slightly, even if it was not a credible performance on his part either. This slightly run-to-fat goliath might be physically stronger than she was, but she had other skills. Words . . . and certain
other
talents. She was unaccustomed to being alone. She felt sure she could manipulate him easily. Then he would provide her with company, protection and—most important right now—food.

CHAPTER 3

Humans are the vertebrate equivalent of the cockroach. They can, and will, adapt to nearly anything. The Alpha-Morkth hives pushed this adaptability close to its limits. At this point most humans crack. Some go insane, some try to rebel, and some become catatonic. Still, after more than three hundred years of selection, the Alpha-Morkth had to weed out about seventy percent of each crop of humans they bred. The culls went back into the food supply for the others. The remaining thirty percent were almost all perfect Morkth-men. Almost all . . . but there were always a few exceptions. Adaptation to survive could always be pushed one step further. A few of the humans the Morkth bred had learned not only to survive, but to exploit the system. S’kith 235 was one of those. He was a great danger to the entire hive system. Not only had he learned to exploit it, but also he still had his balls.

The Alpha-Morkth wanted uniformity, absolute obedience, and antlike industry from the humans they bred to replace workers and, reluctantly, warriors of their own species. The warriors were a problem. A good fighter needs a certain amount of flexibility in their response to an enemy. A degree of tactical adaptability is also needed. A soldier may also have to be deployed at a variety of tasks, given the chaotic nature of war. The sheer stupidity bred for in workers was thus unsuitable, but with too much intelligence and flexibility the warrior Morkth-men could be dangerous to their creators. The cull rate here was over ninety percent, and the resultant warrior-breds were still somewhat less effective than wild-human fighters. The selection bias toward strongly left-brain-dominant warriors failed to adequately deal with the erratic nature of hand-to-hand combat. It was the main reason for the hive cities’ lack of speed in their advance against the internecinally squabbling city-states.

In the lower levels of the hive were the small lightless cells where the Alpha-Morkth kept their brood-sow humans. It was a place where no male Morkth-man should ever be found. Even the cleaners down here were microcephalic hormonally-altered male neuters. S’kith 235 moved calmly along behind one as it mopped the passage. It would almost certainly not turn around, or react, no matter what noise he made, but S’kith never took chances. His curiosity was almost equally matched by a secretive caution. The mopper moved around the corner. Experience told him that it would be at least twenty-five minutes before it came back.

The grille on the bottom of the cell door was intended to allow any solid matter to be washed out after its daily hosing down. The floor within was curved and sloped towards the door to ensure that the system worked efficiently. Even the food and water dispensers were positioned on the back wall, to assist gravity. S’kith knelt down beside the grille, and spoke, his voice very low. There could be no mistake about the eagerness of the whispered reply.

Copulation through a six-inch-wide by five-inch-high steel-barred grille is not easy. It can be done, however, if both participants are very determined. The warrior class are bred for physical strength, agility and speed. They are fed on a well-balanced diet—the protein often coming from the most biologically suitable source: their own species—and are renowned for their stamina. Thus it was that the human cuckoo was able to beat the Alpha-Morkth artificial insemination team five times. Then the sound of the mop bucket being pushed forced him to withdraw and retreat hastily up the passage and onto the internal beam structure which he railed along to reach the next level of the hive. He had another fifteen levels to go before he reached the place where he was supposed to be on guard.

Morkth drone males are nonintelligent. In fact, the brain is reduced to pinhead size. The body, too, is a stunted thing with few functional internal organs. Before maturity they could not survive for an hour outside the caring nurture of the hive. Even their food has to be carefully predigested for their growth period. On maturity the mouth parts meld and change, forming a long tube with vicious extrudable hooks on the end. They crawl up the vast body of the Morkth queen, following pheromone tracers till they reach the soft spot in the chitinous armor, where the great vein pulses close to the surface. Then the sharp snout is forced in through the soft tissues, and the hooks extrude. Sometimes up to a dozen drone males may hang like small, bloated ticks just above the egg vent.

Most of the eggs would be neuter, unmaturing females, the workers and the warriors. The Queen selected which drone male fertilized which egg, depending on the purpose of the egg. She secreted the hormones into her bloodstream which altered the eggs to produce new drones, or new queens. The same hormones in her blood affected the male, altering the fertility and type of gamete he produced. If a drone gene line proved less than viable, the Queen’s giant chela would pluck it off, and leave it discarded, to die and be cleared away and eaten by the workers. It was scant wonder that the Morkth found human sex and the emotions associated with it totally incomprehensible. One sex must, logic insisted, be just a source of gametes, nothing more. To the Morkth this was the province of males, but their first human male captive had shown some sign of intelligence by escaping. Therefore females in this species must be the gamete source. It was strange, but then the entire species was strange. Decision was reached. Thereafter the subject was closed. The noises the human sows made were not speech, just instinctive speech imitations. They were fed, watered, washed . . . and bred.

Most of the Morkth-men gene lines were bred stupid. With pain as a punishment, and food as a reward, workers could be trained to perform their tasks regardless of thinking ability. With intelligence-poor gene lines, deprived of almost all sensory stimuli in the dark, small rearing cages, many females producing dim-witted workers had become a pitiful once-human equivalent of the Morkth drones. Brood sows that produced intelligent offspring went to the flesh renderers . . . or, if these offspring had good physical characteristics, the females were used for warrior breeding. The genes for good warrior broodstock also carried other linked characteristics, characteristics that had little to do with the traits the Morkth sought. The harsh selection process had refined and reinforced both the desired and unrequired, carried-along traits. Good warriors of the clockwork type the Morkth liked were powerfully left-brain dominant. This made, purely incidentally, for a natural predilection toward math. . . . They were also good at logic. . . .

Since the Morkth denied that female humans were capable of speech, communication could be easy enough, so long as one did not make too much noise. Noise caused punishment. And punishment meant pain. The Morkth were expert in the administration of pain . . . to other Morkth. Unfortunately, the frail humans died quite easily. The less intelligent and less logical worker brood sows, kept separately from the warrior broodstock, had never realized that they
could
talk, so long as one kept speech quiet and away from high-pitched sounds. Their section of the hive was virtually silent, apart from quiet, purely animal sounds.

It was different, vastly different, in the layer of hive where the warrior brood were kept. Here there was always a susurration of low-pitched cage-to-cage talk. The human mind needs stimulus of some kind. Without stimulus it atrophies. But speech, even only speech, can be enough to keep sanity and, if the selection pressures favor intelligence, can produce far more . . .

The oral tradition had generated a strange and distorted picture of the outside world, passed down from the first captives, but the women had a very real idea of the function and structure of the hive. They had time, endless time, to talk, to theorize, to plot and to scheme, until they became reproductively dysfunctional and were taken away to the rendering rooms. The only other distraction in the tiny cells was one’s own body, and the products thereof. The Morkth were unaware that in the eternal semidarkness of their warrior breeders’ bare cells they had been fomenting a rebellion for generations now.

This ultimate form of hell had not produced dehumanization, as it had in worker brood sows. Instead it produced a terrible richness, a flowering of poetry, philosophy and mathematics, all directed toward one end: the ultimate destruction of the Morkth. Now they’d found their tool—S’kith 235. And it was even more pleasant than masturbation. It provided a basic human need they’d all been long denied: simple physical contact with another person. For some seven years now the Alpha-Morkth warrior breeding program had been quietly sabotaged. At least eleven thousand new Morkth-men were growing up through the indoctrination classes. Passing unnoticed, yet with a terrifying gene cocktail of high intelligence, intense curiosity and instinctive secretive cunning, virtually from their first reasoning thought. This latter feature was S’kith 235’s unique mutation, but he bred true, in more than eighty percent of cases. His male offspring were passing undetected up the layers of the Alpha-Morkth warrior training. All around them other lines were culled. But S’kith 235’s children were tailored to survive and flourish in the hive.

It was certain that a reasonable percentage would, like S’kith 235, find a way around the just-post-puberty castration rite of passage, when the Alpha-Morkth collected and selected the semen that was frozen and used for future breeding. And if they had testicles . . . sooner or later they’d find their way down to the breeding cages. His female offspring were already being selected as potential warrior sows. The vertebrate cockroach was adapting yet again. It would beat this system too, before inbreeding weakened the strain.

In the dark, the statisticians calculated again. There was no need. They knew the answer. They simply did it for the sheer satisfaction. The point of break-even probability had long since been reached. They knew that with each S’kith-fathered conception the time of Morkth destruction came closer. They also knew that with each conception the chances of S’kith’s capture grew greater. S’kith 235 knew nothing of love. He had little understanding of what the brew of emotions and hormones were that drove him down into this dangerous place, again and again and again. But among the warrior-brood women he was dearly loved. And they were already preparing to mourn him.

It was the twenty percent of his offspring that were culled that were reaching to enmesh S’kith 235. He had manipulated the gene records after the women had pointed out that this would certainly trap him if he did not. After his changes the gene records of his offspring were not what they were supposed to be. Resultantly, when the cull-tissue sample was analyzed, the two did not match. An improbably high number showed a particular chromosome group. A group not in the sperm-bank records. A mutant. A mutation that bred without Morkth supervision. Slowly, slowly, the methodical net of the Morkth was closing in on the Alpha-Morkth guard on the roof of the hive.