There is a common trope in film and fiction: A ragtag platoon walks through the shattered remains of a city, its crumbling, bombed-out buildings but a shadow of the vital place that once stood there. Perhaps the camera focuses on a charred doll, or a tattered advertisement for makeup. Perhaps, if the filmmaker is especially audacious or simply sadistic, we see the remains of the people who lived here, picked clean by carrion birds. The imagery is clear. This is a dead land, a wasteland, and more than that, our protagonists, while alive and moving, have souls that mirror their surroundings.

This imagery is so potent because it is real. Visit any city after it has been through wartime, and you will see the same things, only so much worse, because there is no director to use their discretion to turn away from the bodies of infants, clutched in a parent’s arms, in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable.

It is horrible imagery, to be sure, but to the men and women on Hive Prime, it would have been something of a comfort. It would have been horror, but a comprehensible horror, a horror that they would have understood.

They walked through the wasteland of Subhive 1, and it was truly a wasteland – but one utterly alien to them. To be sure, there was death and destruction – the desiccated carapaces of insects littered patches where what the Insectoids saw as buildings had been demolished – but it was a raw and primitive sort of destruction. It looked not like the remains of a major city in a technological civilization. It looked more like someone had put an M-80 into a termite mound, lit the fuse, and ran.

Mpola paused, and held her hand up, and the group froze. She listened. Was that the wind? Or the sound of insects tunneling below them? Or debris falling from a building? The last one, she thought. Hopefully the last one. “Okay,” she said, “all right.”

Their nerves were frayed. They were less than a quarter of the way to the spaceport. They had not been attacked yet; they didn’t know why, and frankly, it bothered them. Not that they wanted to be attacked. But being attacked would make a sort of sense. Mpola knew from the data they’d retrieved that half the population of this world had been cleansed in the internecine battle. But the other half was alive, and that meant that there were still hundreds of millions of bugs on this rock. Hundreds of millions of bugs, seven titans, thirteen humans, an Avartle, and a Tusolan.

A distant explosion caused the group to spin in near-unison. A series of flashes were appearing from a point in the sky, and below that point, dust and rubble was being thrown into the air.

“Acolyte 26, splash eighteen.”

“Nine, what did you hit, Young-ja?”

“Column of ground transports,” I Young-ja said, turning her craft back along the pre-determined lemniscate path. “Appeared to be headed in the direction of the spaceport, didn’t want to chance it.”

“Copy that,” Ahek said. “24, Jerome, on the next swing, I want you to check 26’s work, see if anything’s left moving. If it is, have Sublieutenant Odsetseg blow it to hell.”

“With pleasure, Nine. Hercule, can you look at thermals long-range?”

“Uh…yes, sir,” Hercule said, turning his heads-up display to show long-range infrared scanners. He shook his head to clear it; it had been filled with thoughts of whether he’d been wrong not to want more with Fatou, whether he should have told her he loved her. (He did love her. But not, he knew, in that way. Nor did she love him in that way. So why did he brood on it? Not because they’d been lovers, that wasn’t it. Stop. Stop. You have a job to do. You must focus.)

“I see a lot of heat, understandable, but…wait,” he said. “I see some small craft. Well…small for them. Fighters. Sixty, maybe, about thirty clicks out and closing fast, bearing 702 carom 391.”

“Nine, this is 24, we see fighters inbound 702 carom 391, range twenty-six kilometers,” Jerome said, as he confirmed Hercule’s reading.

“Of course,” Ahek said. “All Acolytes, all Acolytes, break pattern and turn to engage. Good hunting.”

On the ground, they could hear the whine and whoosh of the tiny fighters as they changed their vectors.

“Sixty fighters are inbound,” Mpola said. “The Acolytes are going to engage them.”

“Four against sixty. We’ll lose our escort, I fear,” Dr. Regda said.

“Only sixty? They’d better have something new to offer,” Glyta said. “Those are Acolytes. I wouldn’t come at them with anything less than a Kuklopes-class vessel with a very good gunner.”

“Ms. Idisoko, you have a high opinion of the humans,” Regda said.

“They saved the Empire, gorram right I have a high opinion of them,” Glyta said. Her head hurt, and she was quite tired of having to defend people who had literally saved these ungrateful jerks. Well, not all of them. The Imperial officers seemed decent. The Tusolan ambassador had been friendly. But Regda was pissing her off, and she wasn’t in the mood to let it slide.

As if in answer to Glyta, the sound of distant explosions reached them. They floated through the air, dozens of them, until they began to die down, and finally stop.

“All targets destroyed,” Mpola said, as she listened to the chatter. “All Acolytes made it through unscathed.”

“You see?” Glyta said. “They’re a hell of a weapon. Thank Epolia that they’re backing us.”

“Frak.”

“Decanus?” Mpola said.

Sibel furrowed her brow. “They pulled them several kilounits away from us.”

Mpola was confused for but a moment, before comprehension dawned. “Prepare for incoming!” she shouted, and dove to the ground just before a phase cannon shot that would have severed her skull from her body.

The blasts seemed to come from all around them, all at once. “Find cover!” she shouted.

“Where?” Nasti asked.

“Anywhere!” Mpola shouted. “Acolytes, this is black platoon, we are under attack, taking heavy fire, say again, we are under attack….”

Myo was frozen in place, as she watched the bugs emerge from behind rubble, up from under the ground.

It was just like before. When they’d found them in the school. Amocalia, she’d been right by her. Amo was 14, a bit younger than Myo, but of course, they were all in class together. Amo had become like Myo’s little sister, tagging along with her, asking her about boys (and occasionally girls; Myo was pretty certain that she liked boys better, but Amo was a bit more flexible. And it wasn’t like Myo objected to girls. Just not her type) and schoolwork that was coming down the pike, and what Navyenev was like, and whether they might both end up at Tannhauser Gate University – Amo was from Forad, her mother was an anthropologist, her father was a biologist, they were on Hive Prime doing field work, they taught at Northwestern Orion Provincial University, but Amo was bright enough to set her sights high, and so was Myo….

The bug had chewed her arm off first, before killing her. The look on Amo’s face…it would stay with Myo forever. Her eyes nearly popping out, her mouth open, screaming…screaming. It wasn’t the scream of a person, it was the scream of a wounded animal, screaming for help. But Myo couldn’t help her, and before she knew it….

…a hand grabbed her around her arm and pulled her away. She was pulled into a small clearing amidst the rubble, away from harm. Dr. Regda had done that last time. He’d saved her again.

* * *

“How is she?” Mpola was shouting, from a different pile of rubble.

“I’ve got lattice gel on it, I think….” Glyta swallowed. “There’s a pulse, ma’am. But….”

“I understand,” Mpola said. “You’ve done your best for him, we have to hold out until the Acolytes can get back, or we’ll all be dead.”

Glyta looked down at the Avartle man, blood matting the fur that remained on his left side, the part that wasn’t missing. He’d lost his top two arms. She didn’t know if his wounds were survivable, but she had drug him to safety anyhow.

She picked up his rifle, and stood up. She saw Krator-Imperator Vidol start to edge around the corner, preparing to fire from her position.

“Ma’am,” Glyta said. “I don’t know as I’m as good a shot as an Imperator, but I do know that we can afford to lose me more than you.”

Mpola turned back to the young crewmate. Glyta’s uniform was covered with the blood of the Avartle officer; Mpola knew remembered enough xenophysiology to know that the fact that it was a brilliant bright pink, rather than the usual faint pink, was a sign that Embassy-Guard was already dying, his body having trouble maintaining hemostasis, even with the lattice gel. He probably had an internal bleed, maybe in his lungs.

He’d spent, in Avartle terms, well over a year of his life in that bunker, under her command. And she didn’t think he’d make it home alive.

It was very tempting to ignore the junior officer and risk her own life, to recklessly throw herself against the enemy. And if a blast struck her…well, then they would all die together.

Tempting. But Ms. Idisoko was right. So she nodded to her, and said, “Take up your position, and shoot at anything that isn’t us.”

“Aye, ma’am,” Glyta said, moving forward. She peeked around the corner, and was at least heartened to see that the street they’d been walking down had cleared. Everyone had made cover. Now, they just had to hold out a minute or two longer, until the Acolytes could reach them.

* * *

“Hold your position!” Nasti said.

“I’m not a soldier, I can do what I want,” Sibel said. “Not gonna die in a gorram hole, waiting for the bugs to take me.”

“You are quite brave, Ms. Idilidi, but Decanus Johkanan is not telling you to stay here for your benefit, but for ours,” Ambassador Ssutassa said.

“Exactly,” Nasti said. “This is saliva-hardened clay, they can’t tunnel through it, that’s why they build with it. Only way in is through the entrance. If they want us, they have to come in and get us.”

“You think they won’t?” Sibel said.

“No, they will, if the Acolytes don’t get here soon. But this will make it hard on them. We’ll get our share.”

“You know where Vif is? Or Myo?”

“Other side of the street, saw Regda pull her in somewhere,” Nasti said.

“It is fortunate he did,” the Ambassador said. “She had frozen in place.”

“Poor kid. This is bad enough for us. I’ve had training, and you two…at least you’re adults,” Nasti said.

“It is a horror for all of us, but battles always are,” the Ambassador said.

“I thought you people were led by warriors,” Sibel said. “The ones who aren’t religious leaders, anyhow.”

“Our leaders are trained as solders, this is true,” Ambassador Ssutassa said. “And for that reason, they know that war is something to avoid at all costs. War is only ever desired by those who do not know it. ‘To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.’”

“That part of the Tusolan Srarra?”

“No, Decanus Jokhanan. A human military philosopher named Lo Tssu. Quite a brilliant man. And in this, quite right.”

* * *

“It will be all right, Miss Usilu,” Dr. Regda said. “Help will be here shortly.”

“Yeah…but the Acolytes…even if they kill these bugs…can we make it to…I mean….”

“The Acolytes, yes,” Regda said. He fiddled with his pad for a moment, then slipped it into his pocket. “No, we are not relying on the Acolytes, you are right, they cannot save us.”

Myo didn’t really comprehend those words, not at first, not until a figure came around the corner and into their redoubt.

“Good, you’re okay,” Vif said. “I….”

A burst of light hit him, and he dropped.

Myo instinctively backed up, assuming he’d been shot by a warrior, but no…he was still breathing. Just stunned. But insects didn’t stun people. Stun guns were…they were….

She turned, and saw her professor. He had removed his left ear – or at least the top part. It was artificial, so it wasn’t as disgusting as it could have been…just close. He had it aimed – clearly aimed – at the fallen man. “Bad timing. Hopefully he won’t wake up before they get here.”

Myo looked to her teacher, to Vif, and back to her teacher. “Before…before who gets here?”

Regda slid his artificial ear – or more accurately, his stunner disguised as his artificial ear – back into place. “Who do you think?” Regda said. “The Insectoids, of course.”