everything ablaze.
It wasn’t as devastating as it might first appear. This was the fifth attack in as many weeks. The citizens of Topeka hadn’t moved back into their city after the second. Nor had they started repairs on the ruins. There wasn’t much left of the city to destroy at this point. Which meant that if I didn’t stop the insects here and now, they’d probably march on in search of more appealing hunting grounds. From there, they’d spread across the globe.
But the real danger of the bugs wasn’t in their ascendance to dominance, but in the radioactive waste left in their wake. It was even more difficult to contain than the insects, and if enough of it contaminated the water supply and air, the native Terran life-forms were due a painful death.
I’d rather not have my reign over Terra end with her as an unlivable wasteland. Though if the Terrans went extinct, they wouldn’t be around to hold it against me, and the rest of the system already considered me an irredeemable criminal. So it wasn’t as if I had to worry about damage to my reputation.
But it would’ve still been a lousy way to end my warlordship.
Several jumping spiders pounced on my saucer. I pushed a button and electrocuted them. A praying mantis snatched a fighter out of the air and devoured it in three bites. The ship self-destructed, blowing off the mantis’s head. I blasted the tide of fire ants, but there were more.
There were always more.
I couldn’t help but think myself somewhat responsible for keeping this doomsday from happening, and it probably had something to do with the fact that the bugs were an unintended consequence of my own entomological research. My design had been some genetic tweaking, the creation of a new breed of insect that could excrete a useful power source as a backup should the molluskotrenic ever fail. A simple splice of some Mercurial queen wasp genetic material in a few native species. A carefully controlled experiment until a few ants escaped into the wild.
I still didn’t know what caused the gigantism. The Mercurial insects weren’t this large. But some of science’s best discoveries came from happy accidents. I was ever optimistic that this research could be salvaged. Though at the moment, I was more concerned with keeping it contained.
While my automated tanks and fighters waged their battle, I hovered over the city, scanning it block by block. There had to be a queen to this insect empire, a prime carrier to infect the other creatures. There always was. Every time before, I’d destroyed the queen and hoped that was the end of the problem. It had yet to take.
If it didn’t work this time, I’d have to vaporize the state.
My sensors pinged, detecting unusually high levels of radioactivity. It had to be the prime queen’s nest. My research suggested that she was likely to be a vast, virtually immobile creature whose sole function was to spit out the mutagenic contagion. The swarm would defend her to the death, but they were outgunned. And once the prime was gone, it would be easy to clean up the mess.
The nest was under a building barely standing. I toppled it with a blast and then used a tractor beam to clear away the rubble. The buzzing of the insects grew angrier. My defense forces kept them at bay while I dug deeper.
A sonic shriek rattled the air as a geyser of dust kicked up. Sensors went wild. A shadow blotted out the sky. The prime queen was seven times the size of my own craft. And she was unhappy.
She was also far from immobile. She was too massive to fly with her vestigial wings, but her three pairs of legs worked. A volley of rockets exploded against her natural armor plating, inflicting some minor wounds. She barfed up a ball of slime that I weaved under. It exploded against the ground with tremendous force. At least the energy source idea had proven viable.
She spit a stream of unstable mucus across a row of tanks, destroying them in a burst of flames. She hunched over.
It wasn’t as devastating as it might first appear. This was the fifth attack in as many weeks. The citizens of Topeka hadn’t moved back into their city after the second. Nor had they started repairs on the ruins. There wasn’t much left of the city to destroy at this point. Which meant that if I didn’t stop the insects here and now, they’d probably march on in search of more appealing hunting grounds. From there, they’d spread across the globe.
But the real danger of the bugs wasn’t in their ascendance to dominance, but in the radioactive waste left in their wake. It was even more difficult to contain than the insects, and if enough of it contaminated the water supply and air, the native Terran life-forms were due a painful death.
I’d rather not have my reign over Terra end with her as an unlivable wasteland. Though if the Terrans went extinct, they wouldn’t be around to hold it against me, and the rest of the system already considered me an irredeemable criminal. So it wasn’t as if I had to worry about damage to my reputation.
But it would’ve still been a lousy way to end my warlordship.
Several jumping spiders pounced on my saucer. I pushed a button and electrocuted them. A praying mantis snatched a fighter out of the air and devoured it in three bites. The ship self-destructed, blowing off the mantis’s head. I blasted the tide of fire ants, but there were more.
There were always more.
I couldn’t help but think myself somewhat responsible for keeping this doomsday from happening, and it probably had something to do with the fact that the bugs were an unintended consequence of my own entomological research. My design had been some genetic tweaking, the creation of a new breed of insect that could excrete a useful power source as a backup should the molluskotrenic ever fail. A simple splice of some Mercurial queen wasp genetic material in a few native species. A carefully controlled experiment until a few ants escaped into the wild.
I still didn’t know what caused the gigantism. The Mercurial insects weren’t this large. But some of science’s best discoveries came from happy accidents. I was ever optimistic that this research could be salvaged. Though at the moment, I was more concerned with keeping it contained.
While my automated tanks and fighters waged their battle, I hovered over the city, scanning it block by block. There had to be a queen to this insect empire, a prime carrier to infect the other creatures. There always was. Every time before, I’d destroyed the queen and hoped that was the end of the problem. It had yet to take.
If it didn’t work this time, I’d have to vaporize the state.
My sensors pinged, detecting unusually high levels of radioactivity. It had to be the prime queen’s nest. My research suggested that she was likely to be a vast, virtually immobile creature whose sole function was to spit out the mutagenic contagion. The swarm would defend her to the death, but they were outgunned. And once the prime was gone, it would be easy to clean up the mess.
The nest was under a building barely standing. I toppled it with a blast and then used a tractor beam to clear away the rubble. The buzzing of the insects grew angrier. My defense forces kept them at bay while I dug deeper.
A sonic shriek rattled the air as a geyser of dust kicked up. Sensors went wild. A shadow blotted out the sky. The prime queen was seven times the size of my own craft. And she was unhappy.
She was also far from immobile. She was too massive to fly with her vestigial wings, but her three pairs of legs worked. A volley of rockets exploded against her natural armor plating, inflicting some minor wounds. She barfed up a ball of slime that I weaved under. It exploded against the ground with tremendous force. At least the energy source idea had proven viable.
She spit a stream of unstable mucus across a row of tanks, destroying them in a burst of flames. She hunched over.
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