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  Jack came to attention and waited to speak. Snipe settled back in his chair. “At ease, Major,” Snipe said finally, twisting gently in his seat. “What can I do for you?”

  “Sir,” Jack said, “My training program on the civilian transport central arena was canceled. The civilian authorities didn’t have the authority to cancel my session. I wanted to ask the colonel if you knew why training was canceled.”

  Snipe tucked his hands behind his head and clicked his tongue. “Take a seat, Jack,” he finally said, indicating the chair opposite him with a casual wave of his hand. “So, you’ve been training the recruits?”

  Jack nodded, a little surprised that the colonel wasn’t taking a keener interest in rebuilding the Marine Service.

  “Yes, sir,” Jack said. “We currently have one dozen volunteers for Marine Service training. I’ve been working on the training program since we entered the stellar void. It seems like a good opportunity to rebuild the force.”

  Snipe tucked his hands behind his head and looked up to the ceiling of his small office aboard the flagship Scepter. The massive carrier lay at the center of the fleet. From here, surveillance patrols were being launched regularly, flying tac boats at an astro unit distance away from the civilian transports that clustered around the carrier. The civilian pilots were getting better at close-formation flying, but even after several months in the stellar void, they were still not as good as the worst military pilot.

  The destroyers held position on the outer edge of the vast fleet. There were few military warships to escort almost a hundred massive civilian craft, but the fleet had got the civilian ships this far. Their job would not be done until landfall on a habitable planet that all were hoping to find on the far side of the void.

  “It’s a question of prioritizing resources, Jack,” Snipe said. “We have thousands of civilians on every transport and they all have their own demands on the energy usage. Until we get across this empty region of space, we are not going to be able to replenish our energy supplies. We all have to make sacrifices, Jack. I know you are keen on your little training program, but you have to understand that other things might have to be put before your pet project.”

  Jack bit his tongue. Pet project? Jack was attempting to rebuild the Marine Service while they had time. In the weeks that had passed since entering the void, they’d had no contact with any alien vessel. Even the Mech ships that had followed them into the void had finally disappeared. Their occasional appearance on the edge of sensor range had become a familiar sight to all the fleet vessels, but they had never shown any signs of aggression and had simply been noted and largely ignored. Now they had finally gone, and the fleet was utterly alone.

  With the Skalidion threat firmly behind them and little more to do than watch the blackness, Jack had suggested the Marines be given the opportunity to rebuild. At a meeting with the general and the colonel of the Scepter battalion, and the majors of the three destroyers’ battalions, it had been agreed that Jack would lead the training program.

  Only volunteers would be allowed, and Jack would be limited to training on one of the civilian transport’s central arenas. It was never going to be enough to provide the full range of training that Jack felt a group of new recruits needed, but it would have to do. With the call for Marine volunteers having largely been ignored by the civilian population, Jack had created the three training squads each of a dozen men. The first squad was nearing the end of its first week of induction and training. Soon, Jack would be bringing the second squad into the arena for their live training.

  “I’ve got one squad with half a training session under their belts. I’ve got my second training squad ready to start in a couple of days—”

  “No,” Snipe said, rotating gently. “I’ve canceled the other volunteer groups. I’ve put them on hold for the time being.”

  “What... Sir?” Jack felt stunned by this unexpected news. “Why?”

  “I will let you train the group of volunteers that have already started the training. I think it will be good for you to have something to do, Major Forge. But as I said, it’s a question of resources, and we just don’t have the resources for a full training program.”

  “We don’t have enough Marines to provide an effective force,” Jack argued, using the same line that had won over the general. “We have to rebuild the service.”

  Snipe stood up. “When you speak to a senior officer, you say sir. Is that clear, Jack?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jack said. He stood up and came to attention. “I’d like the general to decide on my training program, sir.”

  Snipe leaned on his desk. “I will decide, Jack. I will discuss it with the general, and you will be informed what the service intends to do about recruit training. Is that clear, Major Forge?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jack said.

  This is absurd, Jack thought. The Fleet Marine service had kept the fleet safe on numerous occasions. They had fought off alien boarding parties and they had projected the fleet’s power onto enemy territory. With every engagement, the Marines had secured the safety of the fleet, and none of it had come without the cost of Marine lives. The service was near to collapse. Jack’s own battalion, once over four hundred strong, was now reduced to a handful of squads. Jack and Sam were the highest-ranking officers on any of the destroyers. The battalions on the other two destroyers were similarly low on numbers and were under the command of company commanders and a handful of squad leaders.

  This was not the service Jack knew it needed to be. Once the fleet cleared the stellar void, the civilian population would have to set down on the first habitable planet they found. There would be danger there, no doubt, if it was a living world, which it needed to be if the civilian population had any chance of survival.

  There was any number of reasons why the Fleet Marine Service needed to be in good health. Colonel Snipe was ignoring any and all of these reasons.

  “I will take your concerns to the general. I’ll also be telling him that we don’t need a Marine Service at an increased strength. I will recommend we reduce our numbers somewhat. We have new technologies coming online from the Fleet Intelligence Sci Division. The Devex matter transport devices are currently being produced that will enable a squad to move from one ship to another virtually instantaneously. This and other reasons mean we can reduce our numbers and still remain effective. But these decisions are above your level, Major. You are not in command of the entire service. You are a frontline officer, Jack—a good officer, and I don’t want to lose you, but if you don’t toe the line, I will suggest to the general that you are redeployed in a less prominent role. I mean demotion. Is that clear?”

  Jack felt a twinge that he’d never felt before. He had never wanted to be a Marine. He had never wanted to be a squad leader or an officer, but after one engagement after another, Jack had won victory for the service and the fleet, and he had been rewarded with military honors and promotions. Although he’d never wanted it, the thought that it could now be taken away, particularly when he was trying to do the right thing, made him feel like he was being treated unfairly.

  “Dismissed, Major,” Snipe said, sitting back in his chair and pulling his desk drawer open, his hand reaching for the VR headset.

  Jack hesitated, desperately searching for something to say to the colonel that would change his mind.

  “Dismissed,” Snipe said again and pointed to his office door. “And next time you want to see me, make an appointment. Don’t just burst into my office.”

  Jack turned and marched out of Snipe’s office, the door sliding shut behind him. He turned to march down the corridor toward the landing strip where his tac boat was waiting. His pace slowed and he came to a halt, leaning against the wall.

  The Scepter was quiet around the Marine wing where Colonel Snipe had his office. Its battalion, although usually only one company strong, was itself at a reduced level. The Scepter battalion was purely for ship defense and security. It was the job of the destroyer battal
ions to project Marine power beyond the fleet. But as Jack looked around at the Marine wing, he could tell this unit was hardly functioning.

  When Jack was on board the Scorpio, he had his Marines posted and relieved on every watch. Although numbers were low, there was still a pair of Marines on guard outside the Scorpio’s command deck, another outside the main entrance to the drive section, and two more groups patrolling the main corridors on the upper and lower levels.

  Since Jack had been on board the Scepter, the only Marine he had seen was Colonel Snipe, sitting behind a desk playing VR simulations on his headset.

  Jack was going to discuss this with the general. Even though the fleet was adrift in a vast stellar void, lightyears from any planet or star system, the Marine Service should still be on duty.

  Colonel Snipe was ignoring his duty to the service. Jack Forge would not.

  3

  The nest asteroid drifted through space, the deactivated swarm floating around the old nest, fragments of a once-great swarm now leaderless and inert.

  As the neighboring swarm queen sent her observer caste in for a closer look, she saw the opportunity. Skalidion Swarm Queens were always looking for opportunity.

  Skoldra had watched Phisrid’s rapid expansion with a mixture of admiration and fear. Phisrid had grown her swarm more rapidly than any swarm queen before her. She looked on the verge of conquering neighboring Skalidion territory and even becoming Empress of the Skalidion Empire. If Phisrid had indeed expanded, then Skoldra’s territory would have been the first to be consumed. And Skoldra knew that when swarm queens fought, only one survived.

  But then Phisrid’s swarm had fallen silent. Skoldra had redirected observers from her attack on local Devex systems to investigate this silence.

  Skoldra’s observers came within the range of Phisrid’s nest asteroid. The swarm appeared more or less intact. Over half a million drones, most of them fighters, drifted in space. The gravity of the nest asteroid, bigger than Skoldra had even imagined, was drawing many of the nearest drones down to its surface. Many more hung across an astro unit of space.

  Skoldra sent her observers in even closer. She suspected Phisrid was cunning, given how quickly she had managed to grow. This might be a ruse to draw a neighboring queen into an ambush.

  Skoldra was curious. She was also highly suspicious. She had broken off her attack on the Devex to investigate her neighbors’ silence, and she had arranged her entire fighter swarm, two hundred and fifty thousand drones, in her screen in front of her. She came up behind, her nest asteroid moving slowly across space, matching the speed of her observers as they crept into Phisrid’s territory. If Phisrid decided to attack, then Skoldra’s two hundred and fifty thousand fighters would only hold her off for a short time. Skoldra was playing with fire, but her curiosity was too strong. She had to advance.

  The observer drones reported back that Phisrid’s swarm energy output was at zero. The drones were not receiving orders through the pheromone field. With no instructions from the queen, they could not act. Their strings were cut.

  Skoldra instructed a group of fighter drones to advance at speed and swoop deep into the seemingly sleeping swarm. A hundred fighters broke away from the center of her swarm and raced forward, their green drive trails lighting up the space behind them. The fighters passed the line of the observer drones and raced deep into Phisrid’s territory. Soon they came upon the outer sleeping drones, members of Phisrid’s fighter swarm hanging lifeless in space.

  If Skoldra had advanced her fighters into the territory of any active swarm queen, this was the point where battle would ensue, but the fighters remained silent.

  As she advanced her observers and sent her fighters swooping low over Phisrid’s nest, she realized the drones on the surface were unpowered. Skoldra, looking through the large black eyes of her observer drones, saw Skalidion nurse drones on the surface, larvae in their jaws not being placed into the spawn pods. Nurse drones were always the last to stop.

  There was no power, no activity. There was only Phisrid’s deactivated swarm.

  Skoldra advanced her nest asteroid dangerously close to the edge of Phisrid’s swarm. Even though all her observations told her that Phisrid was silent, most likely dead, Skoldra was still anxious. No Skalidion Swarm Queen should come so close to her neighbor and expect to live. Swarm queens did occasionally invade each other’s territory, but only if one had become so weak that the conquest was a formality and over in hours. If a queen had become so weak that her pheromone field instructions to her swarm were all but non-existent, only then could a neighboring queen overpower the pheromone field and take control of her neighbors’ swarm, hastening the end of the fallen queen.

  But Phisrid’s swarm was massive. There was danger here even from what appeared to be a dead queen.

  Skoldra advanced to the very edge of Phisrid’s swarm. Clambering out of her central chamber, Skoldra stood on the outer edge of her nest asteroid. She gripped her spawn pods with her hind legs and reached out into space with her forward arms. Her senses tingled as fear ran through her tissues, expecting an attack any moment. She reached out with her grappling arms and took hold of one of the sleeping swarm.

  Reeling in the sleeping drone in a fraction of a second, Skoldra pressed herself to the surface of the nest asteroid and quickly shoved the drone to her mouth. She rasped away at the tough outer hull of the fighter and exposed the Skalidion drone within. She pulled the sleeping fighter out of its craft and held it tightly in her grip.

  The fighter remained motionless. Skoldra scanned the entire sleeping swarm with her drones. This was her greatest piece of luck ever.

  Skoldra gathered a pheromone paste in her mouth and pressed the sleeping fighter drone into the sticky mass. The pheromones signal seeped into the drone, and it wriggled to life. Skoldra held it tight, waiting for its response, and then the fighter fell still, but not sleeping—awaiting instructions.

  Releasing the drone covered in her sticky pheromone ooze and pressing it to her nest asteroid, she fixed it in position. Skoldra scanned the sleeping swarm once again. She had them now. She directed her nest asteroid to greater speed. The nest accelerated slowly, and as she plowed through the swarms of sleeping fighters, she sent out her strongest pheromone field.

  The sleeping swarm would wake and be hers.

  Her existing fighter swarm swept in and surrounded her nest asteroid. As she moved through Phisrid’s sleeping swarm sending out the pheromone signal for them to arise, fighters from her own swarm escorted them far away from Phisrid’s asteroid by the thousands. Now that she had control of the new drones, Skoldra would not allow a sleeping queen to awake in an attempt to snatch them back. They were hers now. They were Skoldra’s swarm.

  The nest asteroids came closer and closer. Gravity began to take effect and pulled them even faster. As she closed in, Skoldra marveled at the size of Phisrid’s nest. It was enormous. Almost the entire Devex Empire had been destroyed, and Phisrid seem to have acquired the lion’s share of the matter. Broken Devex ships, warriors, buildings, all now built the nest asteroid at the center of the swarm, an asteroid now the size of a small terrestrial planet. A self-powered rogue that should be marauding through the entire region consuming all.

  So, why was Phisrid silent?

  Skoldra reached out from the surface of the nest asteroid, her enormous forward arms gripping the surface of Phisrid’s. The swarm queen drew the two nests closer together until her nest, tiny by comparison, collided gently with the surface of the massive one. Skoldra moved quickly. She scurried across the surface to find a passage down to the central chamber. Nurse drones filled the nearest corridor. Skoldra pressed her way down into the passage and crushed the nurse drones against the sides as she pressed her way forward. She would have the fighters, she would have the observers, she would have the builders, but the nurse drones were all potential queens and all belonged to Phisrid. In a sense, they were all Phisrid. They would never submit to Skoldra’s pheromone field. T
hey would all eventually die, if Skoldra could take control.

  Reaching the central chamber, Skoldra felt the fear wash over her in huge pulsing waves. She could smell the swarm queen that lay within. She had never been this close to another since her mother had spawned her and sent her off in her own embryonic swarm asteroid. And she had naturally feared her mother. If she had been born an hour earlier, she would have been a nurse drone, doomed to ferry the larvae to their spawn pods, constantly in threat of being murdered by her mother at the slightest hint that the nurse would rise up and take over the nest, but she had been hatched as a sub-queen and sent off to expand the Skalidion Empire. And now here she was entering the central chamber of the greatest swarm queen in the entire region. She was on the verge of becoming swarm queen to the greatest swarm ever known.

  And perched on the verge of such power, Skoldra felt so vulnerable. She was cautious, but curiosity had brought her here. It was too late to turn back. She dropped into the central chamber.

  Phisrid’s huge body drifted through the central chamber, her thorax burst open and inner tissues leaking out and floating through the chamber in huge purple and green globules. Skoldra gripped the head of the dead queen and pressed her gripping arms against the sides, crushing the skull into a sticky pulp.

  Skoldra cut the smashed skull of Phisrid off her body and drew it to her rasping mouthparts, and she feasted on the brain of a dead queen.

  The taste was intense. Few swarm queens ever tasted the brain of another queen. Skoldra quivered, every limb and antenna twitching and shivering with the intense feelings of victory and power. The dead swarm queen drifted headless across the central chamber that had once been hers. Skoldra spat out thick blobs of pheromone paste and began to smear it over the corpse.

  The builders from Skoldra’s swarm came scuttling down from her nest asteroid into the conquered territory and began to consume the dead queen’s body. All matter would be distributed to the double nest asteroid surface, growing the nest with the matter of her conquered enemies.