The Awakening of Insects Read online

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  Jingru smelled the storm long before it came.

  The dusty, moist scent wafted in on the morning breeze as she tended the flowers on her porch. It tickled her nose. Her assistant-intelligence, Aimee, chirped a precipitation warning through her jawpiece.

  “Attention! A significant pressure system has been detected by Central Station. There is a 64 percent chance of a sub-category storm in Reserve-133 in the next 12 hours. Estimated wind speed is 57 kilometres per hour. Please stow all lightning- and wind-sensitive equipment in an appropriate location, Dr Lee.”

  “Yes, Aimee. Thank you. I’ll get the collectors.”

  She put the watering can away; there would be no need for watering today. With a deliberate ease, she glided across the faux-wood boards of her front porch and slipped into her shed. The shed, somewhere between smithy and laboratory, was neat and almost well-mannered; her unstudied specimens, packed in cryojars for preservation, were neatly shelved and categorised. A long workbench was arrayed with glassware and cutters, while various items of powered lab equipment and assistant drones lay dormant along the walls. A door at the back led to a large storage room, where the specimens she’d finished studying went. Her field armour was in the corner, plugged into its charging station: a silvered, helmeted suit equipped with an exoskeleton for speed and laced with shear-thickening ferrofluid to protect from unexpected impact. Manoeuvring cables, tightly wound and connected to a body harness, rested on either side of her hips, and a pair of flechette guns were woven into its wrists. She unfastened her clothes from her body, stepped into her armour, and checked its equipment one more time before stepping out. She had work to do.

  * * *

  Jingru stepped out of the house to a second chirp from Aimee.

  “Update! Central Station has detected an unexpected increase in meteorological activity. Storm classification has been upgraded to Category 1. Please be careful out there, Dr Lee.”

  “Noted with thanks, Aimee. Ask Central Station to authorise the mission. Oh, and ping Maia for me, please.”

  There was a click; several seconds passed, with their attendant ringing, before Maia answered the call.

  “Hey sweetie, what’s up?”

  “Not much, beb. Heading out for a routine collector retrieval. Central’s detected a storm. How’s Luna going?”

  Jingru could hear Maia sigh audibly over the connection. “Six hours of Martian civil servants, with so little charisma they make resource management boring, talking into their slides. Watching plants grow in real time is way more exciting, and I’ve actually done that. At least dinner was good, but we’ve got another full day of this before it’s my turn. I’m definitely better than these folks.”

  “Aiya. That sounds awful,” Jingru said. A notification from Central popped into view; she was clear to proceed. “Listen, I have to go, but I’ll ping you when I’m done. Love you.”

  “Love you too. Take care out there, alright?”

  “Yes, beb.”

  Jingru cut the connection. She sighed. The biannual Luna Economic Conferences brought economic scientists from all over the Democratic Community of Nations, which governed Earth Original, Mars and most of humanity’s galactic outposts, together. They also took Maia away for three weeks at a time; a week both ways using a faster-than-light shuttle from Central Station, located over Earth-IX, and then five days of conference with two “social” days included. Hypercomms made telepresence possible, but physical attendance at such conferences was still insisted upon. Jingru thought it absurd, but clearly the senior members of the academic community did not.

  She slipped her helmet on; the heads-up display took less than a second to initialise, projecting data on suit power, wind speed, air quality, and half a dozen other indicators onto her faceplate. She stepped off the porch and looked up at the vast expanse before her; rolling fields of knee-high yellow-and-red foliage, with a tangled web of tree-like vines in the distance.

  She exhaled. “Suit, engage exoskeleton. Aimee, please give me a countdown to that storm, and locate my collectors. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  T-11:45. The first collector was approximately 10 kilometres away, nestled among a clutch of red bushes with striking pink flowers. The device was simple: a ten-centimetre-wide multifunctional sensor staked into the ground, with a second sensor encased in aerogel floating three metres above it tethered by a thin carbon nanofibre. The sensor pair, which gathered environmental data as well as images with sound, was protected from inquisitive fauna and the occasional mobile slime mould by active camouflage, but its minimal-impact design meant that unlike the larger, shielded automatic observation stations, it wasn’t protected from storms. Jingru deactivated the collector with a suit command, and it gently collapsed itself, its lower half retracting its upper half with an inbuilt motor. As soon as the last of the aerogel had disappeared into its main body, she unfastened it from the ground and put it in her suit’s inbuilt pouch.

  “Aimee, I’ve retrieved the first collector. Mark it, please.”

  “Yes, Dr Lee. Local fauna activity has been detected, if you wish to observe. Biosign monitoring indicates your presence is unlikely to have been noticed.”

  “I’ve got time for it. Suit, record.”

  Jingru peeked out from the bushes as a herd of chubby isopod-like creatures scurried past. Some of the most common fauna present in most of the Reserves on Earth-IX, they were about thirty centimetres tall with shiny, oblong brown-and-yellow bodies ending in two long, reed-like “tails”. The species was entirely herbivorous; its two large pincers were meant for tunnelling and cutting vegetation rather than predation, and its twin tails were highly sensitive antennae rather than stingers. Despite their appearance, they were warm-blooded and had highly efficient respiratory systems, as most of the invertebrate life here did. They chittered among themselves, switching their antennae back and forth to maintain group cohesion as they scuttled on their spindly legs. Jingru knew they were headed for the nearest body of water, to dig in and weather out the storm.

  Jingru waited until the isopods had departed from projected sensory range before stepping out. T-11:40. Plenty of time to retrieve the rest of her collectors. Her suit chimed: its sensors had picked up a rapid increase in temperature about a kilometre away, which quickly subsided. She frowned. The collectors had recently been reporting these “flashes”, as she’d called them, at seemingly random times and locations in Reserve-133. She checked her pouch to make sure it was secured, logged her location with the suit and sprinted towards the next collector, her exoskeleton lightening her feet.

  She ran almost mechanically; almost two years training with the suit in Beijing, and three years using it on Earth-IX, had familiarised her with its waypoint syste
m. All she had to do was keep the blue indicator on her HUD centred, and she could concentrate on other things. Now, she thought about what she would do next. The other researchers on the planet had reported similar flashes over the past few weeks, and Central had cleared them to investigate. Dr Vijay Menon, her counterpart from Reserve-32, had proposed that these flashes were a cyclical phenomenon that had gone heretofore unobserved in the eleven years that the planet had been under study; they were regular, as opposed to atypical, events. He had suggested investigating subterranean activity, as well as the soil chemistry in areas where flashes had occurred, to see if spontaneous geological processes or chemical reactions had triggered these flashes.

  Jingru thought about convening a teleconference with the other researchers, both environmental and economic, after the storm was done. Central would take a while to process this, but it would probably go ahead. She smiled in anticipation, and kept running.

  * * *

  T-10:39. Three down, seven to go. Jingru pocketed the collector, which had been on a small rocky outcrop on a hill overlooking a clump of vine-trees, and informed Aimee. She fired up her manoeuvring cables again. The one on her left anchored her to her current position, while the one on her right arced towards the top of the hill and impacted with a soft chnk, locking itself firmly into the rock. She detached and fired the left cable at a separate anchor point, and once her HUD indicated both were securely in place she began her ascent. Between the suit’s power and the tension on the cables, running up a steep incline was almost as easy as running along a horizontal surface. She sprinted, leaping and swinging over and around the small boulders in her path.

  The view was, in her opinion, spectacular. The hill, which she’d previously named “Rocky Hill,” gave her a great vantage point over several kilometres of reserve. The clump of vine-trees below bristled with the larger forms of flying insect, Earth-IX’s analogue to birds. Dense and shady, the trees provided shelter from storms, and collected enough water to serve as watering holes. A bonded pair of hawk-wasps began a circling descent towards the trees, not for predation but for protection. In the distance, several packs of isopods merged into one striped, twitching mass, evidently headed for the same destination; the trees protected all, predator or prey, without prejudice.

  There was still no visual evidence of the storm, which was good. The wind had picked up slightly, by a few kilometres per hour, but it was still sunny. Jingru sat down and sipped from her suit’s built-in hydration system, modelled after those used for extra-vehicular activity in space, which not only contained several litres of water, but also recycled every drop of sweat and urine that its wearer excreted through a highly efficient reverse-osmosis system. The suits hadn’t changed much from those issued to the first research teams on Earth-IX, when it was assumed the planet might have been unexpectedly hostile. Since then, Earth-IX might have been deemed near-ideal for terraforming, with an environment that could be adapted for human habitation in a minimally-invasive way, but for scientists like Jingru it would always be a dangerous, if beautiful, world.

  Jingru’s HUD chimed again, as various types of insect burst from the top of the tree cluster in clouds. Another flash, and this one had been particularly hot. Her suit indicated that, in less than two seconds, temperatures somewhere in the cluster had hit two hundred degrees Celsius, flash-boiling anything unfortunate enough to be caught within. Jingru looked at her countdown timer. T-10:35. She hadn’t had nearly long enough to rest, but there was work to be done.

  “Aimee, send a message to Dr Menon, from Reserve-32. A flash has occurred in my vicinity, and I’m investigating it. Mark the time as of now, and give Central Station my location and intention.” She exhaled slowly through her teeth, and then continued. “Put the Vega Protocol on standby too, please.”

  “Yes, Dr Lee. Connecting audiovisual feeds to your designated backup device … done. Preparing hypercomm for automated message … done. Preparing statement of assets … done.”

  “Thank you, Aimee. I’m moving out.”

  Anchoring her right cable firmly to the top of the hill, she ran for the trees.

  * * *

  Jingru’s helmet switched to low-light mode as she stepped into the cluster of vine-trees. The trees in each cluster were part of a single organism. Somewhere between plant and animal, its flexible, vine-like “trunks” had evolved broad leaves and a responsive, hydraulic system that enabled each trunk to quickly reposition its branches in order to block off almost all the light beneath their canopy. Below, its subterranean root networks stiffened the soil so water would remain close to the surface and not percolate rapidly through to the layers underneath, maximising accessible resources. Water collected in pools where the roots were thick, and it was around one of these pools that Jingru saw what the flash had done.

  Gently but firmly swatting aside curious beetles, bumbling flies and the occasional aggressive wasp (whose stingers could never penetrate her armour), Jingru knelt beside the watering hole, where her HUD indicated the flash had occurred. The water level had been significantly reduced to about half the level it was in the other pools. Dead insects drifted on its surface, bodies shredded by the force of the steam expanding from within them. A large water-bug slipped into the water, grabbed hold of the abdomen of a hawk-wasp and sank beneath the surface. The wasp’s head and thorax struggled weakly by the water’s edge; having only been half-caught in the explosion, the wasp had been torn in two, slowly but surely dying. Jingru grasped its head with her right hand and fired a single flechette round into its brain, putting it out of its misery.

  Removing a specimen vial and a multitool from her suit, she carefully retrieved several samples from the wasp, slicing them out of its body. The smaller insects, dead and dying, she swept into specimen bags, one for the insects on the water and the other for those on land. She dug samples out of the soil and the watering-hole’s mud and placed them in separate vials, alongside samples of the water itself. The cause of the flash could be revealed by any of these things, she knew; she would bring the samples back, analyse them and pass the findings on to her colleagues. Taking one last look around, she turned to leave for the next collector.

  Then, the suit screamed a warning.

  Instinctively, she tethered herself to the nearest vine-tree with both cables, pulling herself into the canopy; her body slammed into a thick branch, winding her but doing no serious damage. Her chest ached slightly from the impact, but it was better than being boiled to pieces. The HUD had shown a flash forming right behind her; she’d barely gotten out of its way before it peaked at a hundred degrees, and then subsided. The light was still blinking, though.

  “Suit, engage active thermal overlay. Highlight that abnormal heat source!”

  Jingru’s HUD briefly flickered as the suit scanned her surroundings for thermal abnormalities. It highlighted a large red spot near the watering hole, where nothing had been visible just seconds before. Through the overlay, whatever it was looked like a swirling, almost spherical cloud of thermal energy about a metre across, invisible to the naked eye but clear as day in thermal. Its temperature fluctuated between 50 to 70 degrees Celsius. Jingru timed the fluctuations and visualised them on the HUD; the average cycle lasted five seconds and followed a predictable, almost-consistent sine-wave pattern. Then, as Jingru watched, the flash began to move.

  It circled around, moving in an ever-widening sweep from its original position. Insects scampered out of its path, with those that could not escape in time left writhing from the intense heat. It moved through the vine-trees, and the cluster trembled in pain; Jingru’s tether held her fast, but she nonetheless reached for the trunk to steady herself. The flash stopped once it reached the tree she was on, and then, to her horror, it centred itself within the tree trunk.

  “Fuck!”

  Jingru yanked herself to the next tree just as the one she had been tethered to splintered at the base; the suit’s HUD recorded a sub-second increase from 50 to 500 degrees Celsius from
within the flash. The vine-trees, whose hydraulic systems relied on significant amounts of pressurised water to operate, were prone to exactly this kind of situation; Jingru had watched collector footage of vine-trees detonating from lightning strikes. Shards of vine-tree embedded themselves in her suit’s outer layer, prevented from going any further by the shear-thickening fluid below. A jagged chunk slammed into the back of her helmet, driving her faceplate into the tree she was on; she could feel a slight sting above her eyebrow where it had impacted the faceplate, but nothing too bad.

  The light on her HUD had stopped blinking. The flash seemed to have exhausted itself. She checked the countdown; T-10:18. Jingru was angry, but also curious; as much as whatever this was had gotten the better of her, it was … intriguing. She took a moment to catch her breath, then started to think.

  “Aimee, send audiovisual feeds for the last 17 minutes directly to Dr Menon, please. Include both raw and thermal overlay versions. He’s going to want to see this.”

  “Yes, Dr Lee. Data transfer in progress … done.”

  “Also, visualise the correlation between the number of localised spikes in temperature disregarding lightning strikes, proximity and intensity of storms at or above sub-category level, using collector data.”

  “Yes, Dr Lee. One moment … done.”

  A three-dimensional visualisation appeared on her HUD. Jingru sucked in a breath through her teeth as she looked at the results; there appeared to be a strong correlation between how often the flashes occurred, and the proximity and strength of Earth-IX’s storms.

  “Aimee, first give me a prediction for when the highest number of spikes will occur during this storm, and their approximate location. Then, put in a request for an all-environment research vehicle to Central Station, and have it airdropped outside my house. Finally, drop a message to Dr Menon, ask if he can get here by shuttle in five hours.”

  “Yes, Dr Lee. Working … done.”