Chapter 15: Reclaimers

When he had dried off, David got into bed with his laptop, carefully angling it so that the cameras couldn’t see what he was doing. It was time for another exploratory foray into the city’s intranet. Almost as soon as he had turned it on, he was met with a text box that popped up in the bottom corner of his screen.

<Would you like to know a secret?>

His heart froze in his chest, and he shifted position on the bed, double-checking that he couldn’t be observed. Just as promised, the stranger was contacting him again. Whoever it was, they must be fully aware that his laptop had network access.

David hesitated, his fingers hovering over the keyboard, then he typed an affirmative reply.

Immediately, his laptop took on a life of its own, windows opening and Broker text scrolling. The stranger had taken remote control of his system and was rapidly navigating through the city’s network. All he could do was watch as star charts began to pop up on his monitor.

<It was around five hundred years ago that the Brokers began to proliferate inside Trappist. Once they had explored and colonized their home system, they set their sights on the stars.>

Colored lines began to trail from one of the navigational points, linking them to neighboring solar systems, showing the spread of Broker fleets over time. They claimed half a dozen systems around Trappist, slowly building up a small interstellar empire.

<There are no asteroid belts or gas giants in the Trappist system, so asteroid mining and gas harvesting were some of their primary motivations. Great corporations rose and fell as they warred over resources. It was a boom era for exploration and exploitation.>

David noted that they were expanding in a pretty uniform direction, moving along the Galactic spiral arm. As he began to match the stars to known positions, he realized that they were moving away from Sol.

<Around this time, your species had colonized their own solar system, and they began to expand. As you have probably learned by now, Brokers are not the most social of beings, and they had little interest in engaging with a territorial neighbor who was just beginning their foray into interstellar space travel.>

The Brokers had made a point of avoiding humanity, then. It was hard to blame them. During what was known as the expansion period – before the Betelgeusian war – the human race was still warring amongst themselves over petty territorial disputes. The UNN hadn’t even been established yet in any significant capacity, and the frontiers were the Wild West, with both colonial and corporate forces getting into frequent dust-ups over claims.

There were other species in the local area – the Borealans in the Alphecca system, the Krell in 61 Cygni, and the Valbarans in HD-217 ... something something. He could never memorize the designation numbers. The Valbarans wouldn’t even have achieved space flight yet, and the other species lived in pre-industrial societies to this day, so they wouldn’t have posed any threat or any special interest to the Brokers.

As human space expanded slowly, the Broker empire grew exponentially, spreading out further and further. Even now, David could see that they were overextending themselves. They mustn’t have known about the Bugs yet either. While the human systems were densely clustered, the Broker ones were spread out over vast expanses of space. After a couple of hundred years, they had colonized two dozen systems and were exploiting more for resources. At its greatest reach, human space occupied a sphere with a 75LY radius, and the Brokers were already 400LY from their home system. It was no wonder nobody had stumbled upon any of their abandoned colonies yet.

<Approximately three hundred of your years ago, one of their colonies was attacked.>

Something appeared in a window – what must be archive footage of some alien planet beneath an unfamiliar star. It was seen from low orbit, perhaps from a ship or a satellite, swirling clouds drifting over an expanse of blue ocean far below. There was a flash of color in the far left side of the window, a cloud of colorful gas spreading out in a halo. Ugly biomechanical vessels began to fan out from the jump point, like grotesquely malformed deep-sea crustaceans floating through the dark depths, green methane flame belching from their engines. It was a Betelgeusian fleet, and they had set their many glittering eyes on the planet. The assault was swift and merciless, swarms of fighters pouring from their motherships like bees from a hive, forming dark tendrils that snaked their way down towards the orbiting vessels.

A pair of Broker carriers responded, disgorging their own fleets of drones from their hollow bays, the two opposing forces forming a seething mass of chaos in high orbit. One of the Bug vessels closed on a carrier, scarring its white hull with scorch marks from its arrays of plasma cannons, carving burning craters into the armor. Drones harried it, but to no avail, the vaguely lobster-like craft barreling into its target to bring a set of scything claws the size of buildings to bear. It was a third of the carrier’s size, but it chewed through it like paper, the point defense weapons that lined its segmented back pouring fire into the swarming drones that were trying in vain to stop it. The carrier buckled, its spine broken, burning wreckage drifting as its assailant picked out its next target.

The Bugs cut through the unprepared defenses with harrowing ease, the bulbous, shrimp-like motherships descending towards the planet to begin what David knew would be a genocidal bombardment.

<This new enemy had been expanding down the spiral arm in the opposite direction, and the two intersected for the first time to disastrous results. Nuptial fleets fleeing more established hives were hungry for new territory in which to establish their own colonies. The Brokers fought back, but despite several victories, the enemy’s overwhelming numbers proved impossible to overcome.>

Another star chart appeared, this one showing colonies and outposts succumbing one by one over a period of decades. The Betelgeusians were no organized invasion force, which made them harder to deal with in some ways. Mature hives produced nuptial fleets periodically, which would then venture out independently in search of whatever fertile ground they could find before their supplies ran dry. They would run a spectrographic analysis of nearby systems and jump wherever the proverbial grass looked greener, frequently popping up behind battle lines and in unexpected places. Gradually, the Broker’s burgeoning empire was pushed back.

<Despite their impressive technology and growing experience, they faced a foe that outpaced them in many areas. A Betelgeusian Drone is adaptable to a variety of environments, can heal minor injuries, and can be produced in numbers that match any Broker factory as long as sufficient biomass is available. Most importantly, they are capable of independent decision-making and tactical acumen far in excess of the neural networks of the time. More – the intense competition between rival PMCs often hindered operations, with different groups competing for lucrative contracts. Many outlying colonies were evacuated back to the core systems and abandoned when deemed too costly to defend.>

The Bugs were getting dangerously close to Trappist, and if he hadn’t known better, he might have guessed that Broker defeat was imminent. But suddenly, their progress was halted. As he watched, the map changed to show the Brokers taking back some nearby colonies. Before he could ask what was happening, another window appeared that depicted a rotating graphic of a Krell equipped with white Broker armor. It looked very similar to what he had seen the guards in the research facility wearing, complete with a large, intimidating plasma weapon.

This was the beginning of the Broker alliance with the Krell and the founding of the Coalition – the Reclamation, as Selkie had referred to it. Although the map was changing in seconds, a ticking timer showed that decades were passing, the grueling campaign slowly clawing back control over systems that must play host to very dangerous and established hives by that point.

Even with the Krell at their side, it was an unlikely turnaround. Only a few months prior, a Coalition fleet consisting of hundreds of ships and over half a million troops had invaded Kerguela – a moon previously occupied by the Valbarans where a very dangerous hive had established itself. Even with the combined strength of all member species, there was still low-level fighting happening there to this day. It was always on the newscasts. What did a campaign to clear out dozens of hives over a period of centuries look like?

Something didn’t add up.

<You’re probably wondering how a planet with a pre-industrial population was able to provide the millions of troops that would have been required to sustain such a campaign for three hundred years. The secret is, they couldn’t.>

More windows popped up, quickly filling the display, David’s eyes darting between them. Some were images, some were video recordings – others were reports in Broker text that were rapidly being translated in real-time. He saw something that looked like a hatchery with fluid-filled vats of leathery eggs being tended by hovering drones, row after row of them running from floor to ceiling. Another window showed iguana-sized reptiles floating in tanks, their bodies hooked up to trailing cables and wires like they were in some kind of suspended animation. Those were infant Krell ... thousands of them.

He saw Brokers surrounding a table that projected a holographic representation of a DNA strand into the air, their hands reaching out to manipulate the protein chains, adding and removing segments. There were videos of what must be adolescent Krell curled up in the fetal position in their tanks, monitoring equipment displaying vitals on the transparent glass, workers with tablet computers pausing to inspect them. There were flashes of reports showing the projected growth rates, population counts, exploded diagrams of Krell anatomy and long strings of genetic sequencing. It was industrial in its scale – a production line that fabricated people.