Chapter 10: Replete

Walker was roused by the chittering of Bugs, feeling hard shells moving around him as the pile that he had been sleeping in was spurred into activity. They slept clustered together, a dozen limbs draped over his naked body, colorful carapaces pressed up against him on every side. He rubbed his eyes groggily as he rose to his feet, stifling a yawn as he got his bearings. The Workers were filing out of the room, and it seemed that he was expected to follow them. He searched for his fatigues on the floor, stooping to pick them up and hastily pulling them back on. After what had happened the night before, he had expected to wake up covered in all manner of sticky fluids and emissions, but he felt as clean as if he had just taken a lengthy shower. The Bugs had bathed him in their own way, cleaning away every trace of their activities, though he couldn’t quite remember when. It was all a blur, a soup of emotions and sensations. He could recall having sex with a few of them after his first encounter but not much after that. He must have passed out at some point.

He felt something tug at his wrist and he looked down to see the familiar horn and coloration of Fig as she urged him to follow her. He was still getting used to the idea that these creatures were all females, but it was undeniable after what he had seen a few hours prior.

“Fine, fine, I’m coming. I guess taking a minute to read the news feeds and get a cup of coffee is out of the question?”

She hurried him along, barely giving him enough time to button up his jacket, and they joined the column of Bugs that was heading off down the tunnel. Before long they were passed by another group, and Walker was certain that these were the Workers who had passed them the day before, returning from their shift to sleep. The hive ran like a well-oiled machine, everything carefully timed and organized to ensure maximum efficiency. The routine would have been grueling for humans, but the Bugs seemed right at home in this environment. He found himself wondering where they would put him next, what manner of strange job they’d have him trying to do.

So far it felt as if they had been trying to find a place for him in the colony, trying to ascertain what his skills were, what humans were good at. It was hard to imagine that their motives were benign, but he couldn’t figure out their angle, not for the moment at least.

Every caste that lived in the hive seemed hyper-specialized. Their entire physiology was geared towards accomplishing a handful of tasks, and nothing else. The Workers had shovel-like upper hands for digging and a pair of more dexterous hands below for doing finer engineering work. The Repletes were walking food bins. When swollen with that amber liquid they were ill-suited to doing anything beyond lounging around and feeding their hungry colleagues.

The Drones were obviously fighters first and foremost, perhaps acting as police or peacekeepers when they weren’t at war. The Warriors, or at least their spindly Pilots, were still an enigma to him. He had only seen a handful of them, and their only purpose that he was able to ascertain was driving those organic machines around. Might they fly the spacecraft too? It was a reasonable assumption to make. There might be other castes that he simply hadn’t come across yet, hidden away somewhere in this maze of dirt tunnels, but there was one thing that he could be sure of. There was a Queen hidden somewhere in this hive. These aliens shared too many characteristics and behaviors with the social insects of Earth for it to be otherwise, there must be a leader of some kind heading this operation and birthing new Bugs for the swarm. If he could figure out her location, maybe he could pass that information on to the UNN when he escaped, and they could deal a crippling blow to the Bugs on Jarilo.

Was that what he wanted now? To drive the Bugs off and see them all killed? The more he learned about them, the more sympathetic they became. They were capable of emotion, compassion, empathy. So why did they not express it towards other species? Why the violence and the aggression, the unbridled xenophobia? It frustrated him. He was still missing pieces of this puzzle, the best thing he could do right now was to keep learning.

They came to a fork in the tunnel, and to his surprise, Fig led him away from the column of marching Workers. Walker could smell the pheromone from the factory leading up the other passage, so where was he being taken now?

<COME.>

A pheromone from Fig, the Bug was growing impatient, and he had learned that resisting her was pointless. He followed her down this new tunnel, winding deeper into the hive as he trailed behind her. He was learning to navigate by smell now, mapping these tunnels in his head, and he sniffed the air in an attempt to ascertain where they might be going.

There was a trail here, yellow in hue, somewhat sweet. Yes, he recognized it, he had smelled this scent before! It was the one emitted by the Repletes, the pheromone trail in this tunnel marked the way towards food.

Was Fig going to try to make him eat again? He hoped not, but he hadn’t eaten for a good while, and he was certainly starting to feel the pangs of hunger now. He needed to return to his cell, he had enough food there for a good week if he rationed it. Water was another, more dangerous problem that he would have to address soon. These Bugs might drink from underground streams or wells, or perhaps the honey created by the Repletes contained all of the moisture that they needed. It was a liquid after all, so the water content must be pretty high.

If only he could communicate, but his understanding of their strange, pheromone-based language was still rudimentary. He knew now that he could emit such pheromones as well as reading them. Perhaps with time, he would be able to speak as they did. But if he didn’t get some water in the next forty-eight hours, it wouldn’t matter because he’d be dead.

The smell of honey grew steadily stronger as they neared their destination. There was something else too, it almost smelled like foliage. Eventually, they emerged from the winding tunnels into a large chamber. It resembled all of the others in outward appearance, a rough dome carved out of the dirt and sealed with the thick saliva that the Workers secreted, lit by clusters of luminescent moss that clung to the curved ceiling. Only the scent served to differentiate it from the other rooms in the colony.

This one was populated by Repletes, some of them lounging as they cradled their bloated bellies, others trim and flat as they gorged themselves in order to replenish their stock. The floor was piled with plant matter, everything from the fern leaves that he had seen in Jarilo’s expansive forests to the branches of the coniferous trees. The Repletes looked like panda bears, sitting on the floor as they ate slowly and methodically, using the specialized blades that protruded from the wrists of their upper limbs to strip away the pine needles from their branches and to cut up their food into manageable chunks.

Where the Workers had mandibles that almost seemed vestigial, these were razor sharp and packed with powerful muscle, designed to shred and break. The Repletes might well be the only caste that ate anything solid, acting as the mouths of the colony as they passed on the nutrition that they gleaned from their food to the other castes.

Fig led him into the room, and one of the Repletes rose to its feet, this one sporting a more modest belly and a pair of breasts that were more comparable in size to those of a portly human woman. It seemed to have only recently started eating, its subtle paunch a cloudy orange in color, the liquid visible through the near transparent skin of its pouches. It approached the newcomers, a head taller than Walker, and the two aliens exchanged a series of scents. Walker concentrated hard, trying to pick up the individual words, using context to determine their meaning.

<GIVE.>

<RECEIVE.>

<CARE.>

<FIND.>

The emotions associated with the words gave him clues as to their intent. Fig was presenting the Replete with something, and the Replete was expected to use it to find the answer to some question.

Fig turned and promptly left the way she had come, Walker watching her go as a mild panic rose in his chest. Was she leaving him in the custody of this Replete? Was Walker the thing that was to be given? When would he be allowed back to his cell? Suddenly he felt like a lost child in a shopping mall, out of sight of his mother.

“Hey, wait! Where are you-”

The towering Replete reached out a hand and gripped his arm, assertive, but Walker sensed no malice in her. She released a pheromone that conveyed possession, an almost maternal care. Perhaps she too could sense the emotions that he was feeling? Was he emitting them without thought, as he had done when he had slept with the Workers? It was a form of communication at least, however unrefined.

She guided him towards the center of the room, foliage crunching beneath his boots, and then she sat on the dirt with her legs crossed. She released an expectant pheromone along with a new, more complex scent, and patted the ground beside her with one of her lower arms. It was a word, sit, that much was obvious from the context.

He sat down beside her, waiting for more instructions. Every day that he spent in the company of these insects was stranger than the last. It was best to just play along and do what they wanted. It was easier than trying to fight them on everything.

This Replete had a cherry-red, iridescent shell, and a single horn that resembled the stem of a fruit. He would refer to her henceforth as Cherry. If she was to be his new ward, then Fig must have run out of Worker-related tasks for him to accomplish. Based on what she had told Cherry, find, he felt pretty confident in the assumption that they were trying to figure out what kind of work he was suited to. These Bugs were so specialized, it might not even occur to them that humans didn’t have jobs, not in the way that a Betelgeusian did. These creatures were engineered to perform specific roles, either through natural selection or genetic manipulation, while humans were versatile and could perform thousands of different tasks with varying degrees of efficiency.

He might not have limbs evolved for digging, but give him a shovel, and he’d do a fair enough job of it. He didn’t have saliva that could be used as glue or sealant, but with some ... glue and sealant, he’d get by. He wondered what the Repletes would have him do, surely they could tell at a glance that he couldn’t process raw material into nutrient paste?

Cherry reached down and picked up a long branch from one Jarilo’s titanic trees, bringing it up towards her mandibles and beginning to strip it bare. He watched with fascination as her mouthparts moved mechanically, cutting away every green pine needle, moving along the branch like a hedge trimmer. She was fast, efficient, and she rapidly stripped the foliage away in a matter of seconds. When she was done, she started on the bark. She dug into the wood with her serrated mandibles, chewing away anything that might have nutritional value, aided by the blades on her wrists.

He looked around the room, seeing that the rest of the Repletes were doing the same, some taking handfuls of loose leaves and cramming them into their maws as others gnawed at gnarled branches. Were they herbivorous? It didn’t seem likely, the species of ant that they so resembled were all omnivores opportunists.

He examined Cherry’s growing belly, peering into the swirling amber fluid, trying to see what was inside. It was not her stomach, he realized. He could see no organs. Her digestive system must be contained somewhere inside her body, and this translucent sack was merely where the end result of that digestive process ended up. Her belly was about the size of a beach ball right now, the armored plates that lined her torso slowly splaying apart as she consumed more matter. Her breasts were of average size right now, comparable to those of a human woman, their shape and firmness surprisingly similar...

He banished the intrusive thoughts from his mind. He had already succumbed to the advances of the Workers, he needed to keep his dick in his damned pants this time.

Cherry crushed a handful of fern leaves down into a ball in her hand and pressed it into her mouth. She lacked the jaws that were common to more evolved forms of life, but her mandibles were doing an impressive job none the less. Her mouth was like a damned wood chipper, her set of four mandibles moving mechanically as they crushed and shredded her food before moving the resulting pulp into her oral opening.

There were maybe fifty Repletes packed into the room, and they were all engaged in eating, not even pausing between mouthfuls as they hoovered up the plant matter that carpeted the ground. Where had it come from? Had the Workers collected it above ground and then brought it down into the tunnels? It seemed likely, in this society nobody expended energy on a task that wasn’t completely necessary.

Cherry glanced down at him, seeing that he wasn’t eating, and rummaged through the pile of leaves. She picked out a suitably sized branch with her lower arms, not even pausing as she continued to eat with her upper pair, and thrust the stick into his hands. He stared at it, looking up at her as she loosed a cloud of expectant pheromones.

“I appreciate the thought, but I’m on a strict no-branches diet. Don’t suppose you have anything with a little less ... fiber?”

She waited, confused, and then suddenly reached towards his face with one of her hands. He drew back reflexively, but she caught his cheeks between her fingers, leaning in to examine him more closely as she chewed on some kind of coniferous cone.

He felt her squeeze his face, surprised by the elasticity of his flesh perhaps, her large eyes scanning him as she tried to figure out his alien anatomy. He had no mandibles and so she must be wondering how he ate.

He opened his jaw, and she blinked with surprise, pushing a long finger into his mouth to explore it. This was a little more personal than he liked, but she had a firm grip on him, her chitinous fingers digging into his skin. She felt his teeth, running her hard digit across them, then pressed it against his inner cheeks and the roof of his mouth. His tongue struggled around her finger, and she prodded it curiously. She pushed deeper, glancing the back of his throat, then withdrew in alarm as he gagged. She released him, cocking her head, and Walker didn’t need to smell her pheromones to know that she was puzzled.

“I’ll show you,” he said, selecting an inoffensive fern leaf from the floor and placing it in his mouth. He opened wide to demonstrate how he ate, crushing the leaf between his teeth and rolling it around with his tongue. She watched the muscles of his jaw as they expanded and contracted, her curiosity palpable, and then he spat out the green paste rather than swallow it.