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“We’ve got to find you something you enjoy,” she says. “This place, you can do anything.”
“Anything? Like what?”
“Well, I’m going to go fly sprint shuttles after this,” she says. “They’re these little shuttles that teach you how to fly the bigga ones if you want.”
I do like the idea of that. I felt so helpless being piloted away from Isu by Cozza. If I could fly a ship myself, then I could go where I want. I could go back to Isu. I could go anywhere.
Maybe this is the beginning of something good. Maybe this is the beginning of my real life.
The human colony is busy and full of people who seem very happy. There are many people who escaped from the farm, who welcome me into their circles, offer me coffee, give me chocolate, and tell me I have nice hair. That seems to be the main means of connecting between humans.
It takes a long time. Days. Then weeks. Then months. But I start to adjust. The world doesn’t seem so crazy. I become part of it. I even become part of the space force when a spot opens up after Cozza falls asleep mid-mission and flies his ship into a small sun. It’s the least I can do to honor the memory of the man who saved me.
Everything changes, everything except my memory of Isu. When I close my eyes, it is his face I see. When I lie down in bed at night, it is his arms I remember around me. Time and distance have no ability to erode the bond between us, and though I know I may never see him again in this life, I will love him forever.
Chapter Eight
Isu
We are at war.
Our planet has gone over the brink of total destruction. The world we once knew is now a ravaged rock teetering on the brink of total collapse. Some say it was the human who woke her. Others say her waking was always foretold, that we knew we did not have forever, but lived as though we did.
Whatever the cause, the wyrm has been feeding faster and faster every day. The few of us still alive are forced to leave the planet entirely, but leaving is not easy. Space is inhabited, and nobody wants our kind sharing their planet. We are too strong, too warlike. Where our fire burns, others are consumed.
We have become like the wyrm, devouring worlds, and I cannot stop, not until my people find their way home.
This is the third planet we have come to. We do not know if it will be suitable until we drill to the core. We use the wyrm’s young to do that, an irony that is not lost on us. Every time we try to find a new home, we unleash the same destruction on other worlds as we ourselves are fleeing from. This is the third planet that will inexorably, inevitably be consumed once the wyrm, which is now small enough to be held in my hands, grows. It will take many thousands of years, but we are sowing death wherever we go.
“Do it,” Ziril encourages me impatiently as I hesitate a moment. What right do we have to spread death just because we ourselves don’t want to die?
“It’s cold,” he complains. “Put the wyrm in the ground, or… ungh…”
He makes an uncomfortable grunting sound as my elbow finds his midsection and bends him double.
The war has made me hard. For forty days and forty nights, I dug to find the survivors in the burrow. There were not many. The elders were gone. Most of the breeders were gone. Only the warriors survived—those strong enough to withstand the terrible crushing in of the cave, and metabolically capable of not eating for a very long time. A small number of females made it, and now we guard them with our lives. They will bear the next generation. My men, for the army is mine, vie for the right to spread their seed.
I have not taken my turn, even with the most beautiful of the females, though I know it must be my duty. I cannot look upon even the fieriest of our women without having memories of a broken little human who placed herself in my heart and refused to leave even now that all things seem to be coming to an end.
I loosen my grip on the wyrm and watch as it slides teeth first into virgin soil. It takes a matter of seconds for it to eat its way into the ground, the lashing tip of its tail flailing one last time.
There goes annihilation, without any fanfare, without any of the existing creatures on this pristine world even knowing what has happened. The wyrm will tunnel to the center of the planet. If it finds the heat it requires, heat capable of sustaining our own dear lives, then it will begin to grow the hard shell and multiply many times over the course of days. Soon we will feel the earth quake if the wyrm has found suitable habitat. If not, we will move again in our desperate ship made from the wreckage of so many lost vessels.
