Arach by C.M. Simpson

Author:C.M. Simpson [Simpson, C.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: C.M. Simpson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

18—Contracted to the Queen

The queen arrived, but would have been too late to save her guard, if one of the Odyssey agents hadn’t been carrying a syringeful of nans, as well as several applications of skin-seal.

“Can I help?” she’d asked, looking down at T’Kit, and brushed aside the wasp’s reply of ‘only the queen’. “She will not reach you in time.”

To my surprise T’Kit did not argue, but flipped an antenna towards me.

“She doesn’t know?”

I glared at the wasp. I might not know, but I’d guessed. May not survive, indeed!

Bandages would not work, but T’Kit finally agreed it would be a disservice to her queen if she allowed herself to die without trying to stay alive long enough for the queen to decide her fate. Odyssey combat operatives carried auto-injectors filled with nans, right alongside their emergency stim packs and adrenaline shots.

Man, I never wanted to meet these guys on a bad day…unless that bad day was mine and they were on my side.

It was both a relief and a disappointment when the operative didn’t respond. At least the party-line in my head was limited to the five usual culprits… oh, and every vespis psi in range.

T’Kit gave the buzzing laugh I’d heard from others, and I glared at her. I’d held the chitin apart while the agent emptied the syringe into one of the arach wounds—the ‘killing’ wound, if T’Kit was to be believed. After that, we used the skin-seal to close the opening, and hopefully keep any infection out.

I pushed away the nightmare thought that we had no idea what we were doing, that the vespis couldn’t tell which human treatments were safe for use on her species or not, and that we might be killing her with kindness, instead of saving her. For some reason, that made her laugh even harder.

“I die without help, when it is there, or I die from trying,” she said, when the buzzing jerked to a stop. “Either way I die, and bring my queen grief. It is better to try, than to do that without a fight.”

She made it to her feet when the queen arrived, and I caught the upwards quirk of antennae as the other vespis expressed surprise.

“What did you do?” the queen demanded, turning to the Odyssey agent, and me, and I didn’t know if she was relieved, pleased, or incredibly angry.

The agent explained, and the queen shamelessly dipped into her head to pull the extra information she needed.

“Oh.”

She was quiet for a moment, and then she very carefully peeled the skin-seal back and handed it to the agent.

“A good substitute,” she said, “but no replacement for this…” and she reached into a cavity on her thorax and pulled a sticky waxy-looking substance out of it. This, she smeared on T’Kit’s wound, nipping the broken edges of chitin together in her powerful mandibles. When she was done, she brushed an antenna over the closed injury.

“Please put more of your sealant here. It will aid the healing.”

Surprise touched the

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