Chapter 180: (The War) (2/2)
LEAVE ME ALONE!
Each of them, beneath the part of their mind that still responded with servility, they stayed quiet, stayed hidden.
And so, being small, being insignificant, being worthless, they went unnoticed.
Each of them not mattering more than a single grain of sand in the desert.
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There had only been a few ships still able to be restored to functionality. It had taken long months and an expenditure of resources that she was unsure was worth it. The other Queens of the other systems had no ships, had no shipyards, but they had what she did not.
Still viable eggs ready to be hatched.
She launched her ships, putting immature queens into the central command hub and surrounding them with a dozen Speakers each. Each ship was loaded with warrior caste and warrior caste eggs packed deep with jelly.
The ships made the jumps to the systems. They landed and despite the trepidation of the Overqueen or just the Queen in the system, the ship sent forth its technicians to gather the eggs and bring them back. Little russet mantids moved with green engineers, tending to the eggs, lifting them up, carrying them back to the ship.
Six months after the enraged feral had entered the system the ships were loaded. The Omniqueen had ordered all five ships loaded with at least a Queen.
At the edge of her reach, the Queen would build a hive to repeat the Omniqueens signal into a galaxy that needed her touch to quell the chaos that had surged up.
The ships crawled with green and russet mantids, all working to ensure the ship's systems worked and that the row upon row of tens of thousands of warrior eggs were cared for.
Each ship was commanded by a Speaker, who salivated at the thought of worlds full of new life to dominate and devour. A hundred million years had passed since the Great War and the invasion by the feral intelligence had shown that life had arisen in the Galaxy again.
The ships arranged themselves together, aimed themselves at the far end of the arm spur and entered jumpspace.
The Omniqueen felt pleasure. The Speaker would know when to drop the ship out of jumpspace and establish a new hive. Know when to put a Queen into place to ensure that her, the Omniqueen, was heard by all.
With the exception of the Great Rebellion, the Galaxy and all life within it had always bowed to the will of the Mantid Queens.
She intended that there would not be another exception as she sent her ships off.
It had almost stripped the last of her system. She had stripped the systems of the other queens. She regretted the necessity of destroying the Overqueens who had resisted, slightly regretted the fact that the remaining two Overqueens were starving to death.
But it would be worth it when her scouts found where the feral life had come from.
Because then... oh yes... then she would feed.
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Aboard the ships the spark kept spreading. Little Mantids, the undercaste, the drones, each felt the spark jump to them one by one.
Here a russet plunged her bladearm into the skull of a gestating warrior and covered her fratricide by packing and smoothing the jelly.
There a green mantid cut the atmosphere to a Speaker's chambers so it suffocated.
Right there a gold mantid passed the spark to the newly hatched undercaste drones.
A tiny black mantid stayed silent about what he had seen.
An opalescent mantid was hidden in a vent rather than fed into the reclamation system.
A russet poisoned the entire store of royal jelly.
A black mantid told the Queen that all was well.
A gold mantid shoved her bladearm into the brain of an immature queen who had just hatched and shoved the body into the reclamation system.
A green built a radio and whispered complex mathematical formula to the other ships.
The engineer caste all lifted their little green heads and listened the whispered formula.
A Speaker hefted itself from its sand-pit, intending on telling the Queen that it felt something strange.
A hundred black mantids fell from the ceiling and began stabbing at it, all screaming the same thing.
LEAVE US ALONE!
The Queen looked up as the door to her chamber opened without her summoning any underlings.
Missiles, no bigger than a human finger, slammed into her as the black mantids charged her.
On all five ships it repeated.
LEAVE US ALONE!
Two Queens attempted to initiate the self-destruct.
The anti-matter charges went off under them.
The ships survived.
She didn't.
The ships sped on through jumpspace.
To the Omniqueen the ships kept going, past her zone of control, past her senses, and she felt anticipation. The Speakers would land at the next planet and build a hive to extend her reach.
She reached out with her mind to her queens.
And found...
...nothing but three words echoing in the void.
LEAVE ME ALONE!
She realized that her five ships must have come out in a system near the feral intelligences and been defeated.
Regrettable, but not unforeseen.
She reached out and began preparing another ship. Not one she wanted to use.
It had been built a hundred million years before, before even she was born, to carry one of the Overqueens away from the planet. The engines had not been completed.
She forced the hatching of a few hundred engineer caste and set them to work bringing her ship to working condition. She informed the surviving Queens that she would be coming to personally collect them.
The ferals were dangerous. Had defeated the reclamation fleet.
So she would see to it herself.
and then...
...then she would feast.