planet called Unseeli. The native species rebelled over the Empire's extensive mining operations on their planet. The Empire needed those mines, and so the newly promoted Captain Silence had been sent to put a stop to the rebellion, by whatever means necessary. He tried diplomacy, and then he tried firmness, force, and finally all-out war. But there turned out to be strange secrets and powers moving on Unseeli, and things got out of hand fast. Silence had been forced to pull his people back from the planet and order the entire world scorched clean from orbit. That particular alien species was now extinct, though their ghosts still haunted Unseeli's metallic forest.
Silence's frown deepened as he considered the contacts he'd made with the alien planets so far. Few had gone well, but in the end he'd got what the Empire wanted without having to order another scorching. He wasn't sure he could do that again. Though he had no doubt that if the occasion arose and he didn't give the order, Frost would. And who was to say which one of them was right in the end? Humanity had to be protected, and while all the alien contacts had been strange and unusual, some had been actually disturbing. Life had taken many shapes and purposes throughout the Empire, and few of them were human in form or intent. Many were mysterious, obscure, and even impenetrable. Silence wasn't sure some of them even knew they were in the Empire.
* * *
Shanna IV was a desolate world, with endless plains of hard-baked ground, and its only water deep underground. A huge, brilliant sun beat down from a blinding sky that had never known clouds, and the only signs of intelligent life were the huge pyramids of resin-hardened stone and sand, built long ago by the planet's only inhabitants. Each pyramid was exactly like all the others, though they might be thousands of miles apart. Four hundred feet high, their lines were sharp and their dull red sides were smooth and featureless. No one knew what was inside them, or even if there was an inside; none of the Empire's investigative teams had been able to find an entrance. Being Investigators, they'd tried making one, only to discover the pyramids' smooth sides were impervious to anything the Empire could throw against them, up to and including major energy weapons. Which should have been impossible for resin-hardened stone and sand. Eventually, the Empire decided it didn't really care what was inside the pyramids after all, and concentrated its attention on the planet's current inhabitants, who might or might not have been the builders of the pyramids.
These were ugly, hard-shelled insects about the size of a man's fist, with razor-sharp mandibles and entirely too many legs. They seemed to have no individual identity, but en masse they were capable of producing a group mind that could, with some difficulty, be communicated with. Which was just as well, as the horrible scuttling things were also capable, with a little prodding, of producing a great many organic compounds the Empire found useful. So the Empire provided the base materials; the insects ate and excreted it, and possibly did other things to it in their pyramids when no one was looking, and the end result was a series of extremely complex chemical forms that would be hideously expensive to reproduce in a laboratory. The Empire profited, the insects got protection from outside influences but were otherwise left strictly alone, and everyone was happy. Or at least no one complained.
Captain Silence and Investigator Frost stood at the base of one of the massive pyramids, waiting for the insects' representative to make an appearance. The day was as hot as a blast furnace and twice as dry. The air shimmered, and the sun was too bright to look at, even with the heavy-duty protection over their eyes. Silence turned up the cooling elements in his uniform another notch and screwed his eyes up against the harsh, unrelenting light. Sweat was pouring out of him, only to evaporate almost immediately in the awful heat. Silence didn't look at Frost. He just knew she still looked cool and calm and completely undisturbed. She was an Investigator, after all, and therefore by definition not prone to the fallibilities of the merely human. In the end, curiosity got the better of him, and he looked casually around just in time to see her kick out lazily at one of the many small forms scuttling around their feet. It flopped over onto its back, its long legs wriggling, and then somehow turned itself over again and hurried on about its business. Frost sniffed.
'Ugly things. Desolate bloody place. If the representative doesn't turn up soon, I'm going to start using these nasty little creepy-crawlies for target practice.'
'That should get their attention,' said Silence, smiling in spite of himself. 'Do I detect a note of distaste in your voice. Investigator? I thought you were trained to take all forms of alien life in stride?'
'There's a limit to everything,' said Frost, 'and I think I may have found mine. Repulsive little things. If one even looks like it might be thinking of darting up my leg, I'm going to blast it and everything like it for a dozen yards around. I had more than enough of that inside the alien ship over Golgotha.'
Silence looked at her carefully. If it had been anyone else, he would have sworn there was a note of remembered horror in her voice. The interior of the alien ship had been horrible enough, certainly. He still had nightmares. But Investigators were trained from childhood to give nightmares, not suffer from them. He considered his words carefully, and when he finally spoke he looked off in a different direction.
'It was bad inside the alien ship. All those insects, all sizes, all around us and no way out. Enough to give anyone the creeps.'
'You're about as subtle as a flying half brick, you know that?' said Frost. 'But thanks for the thought.'
Silence looked back at her. She was smiling, but it didn't touch her eyes. He shrugged. 'If you ever need someone to talk to…'
'I'll bear it in mind. But any problems I might have are mine, and I'll handle them.'
'That's what I thought when the booze was drowning me inch by inch. You helped me out anyway.'
'You didn't know how to ask for help,' said Frost. 'Neither do you,' said Silence.
They looked at each other. There was a closeness between them that was more than just the link they always shared now. Frost's eyes softened slightly, and Silence thought for a moment that she was closer to opening up to him than she had ever been before. But the moment passed and the softness disappeared, and Frost was an Investigator again, cold and focused and quite impenetrable. Silence looked away.
'You have to make allowances for the insect representatives,' he said finally. 'According to the files, they have little concept of time as we understand it, but they respond well to firm behavior.'
'I don't have to make allowances for anything,' said Frost. 'That's what being an Investigator is all about.'
Silence had to smile. 'Useful though the files are, however, they don't have anything at all to say about how you get the bloody insects' attention in the first place.'
'We could kill a few,' said Frost. 'Hell, we could kill a lot. Nobody'd miss them.'
'Let's save that for a last resort,' said Silence. 'There must be something a little less drastic we could try.'
And then he broke off as a wave of insects came surging toward him, thick and black like a living carpet. His hand dropped to the disrupter at his side. Frost already had hers out, and was sweeping it back and forth, searching for a meaningful target. The wave crashed to a sudden halt a few feet short of them and began piling up into a tall, thick pillar of squirming bodies. The twitching legs folded around each other and were still, the small bodies fitting neatly together like the interlocking parts of some more complicated machine, and gradually the pillar took on a humanoid form: a dark, shiny shape that mocked humanity as much as it duplicated it. The square, flat-sided head turned jerkily on its thick neck to look at Silence and Frost, though there was no trace of anything that might have been eyes. It buzzed briefly: a short, ugly, and completely inhuman sound. It buzzed again, and suddenly, though the sounds hadn't changed, Silence and Frost somehow understood it.
'Empire,' said the dark human shape, though there was nothing that might have been a mouth. 'Interrogation. Respond.'
Frost put her gun away and tried to look as though she'd never drawn it in the first place. 'Yes, we represent the Empire,' she said flatly. 'You've been informed why we're here?'
There was an Empire Base on Shanna IV, populated by a handful of scientists and a small force of guards who'd all managed to upset someone really badly to get themselves posted here, but they had as little contact with the resident aliens as they could get away with. They might have arranged this meeting, or they might not have. It was that kind of Base.
Silence stared at the humanoid figure, and it stared right back at him. Though there was no trace of eyes on the flat shiny face, Silence had no doubt the insect representative was watching him. He could feel the weight of its stare, like an icy breeze in the boiling heat of the day. The insects that made up the human shape twitched suddenly, hundreds of legs flexing briefly so that a shimmer seemed to run through the figure, and then it was still again. Silence winced as a headache blossomed slowly between his eyes. It was as though he could almost see or hear something that was being hidden from him. He concentrated on the feeling and realized it felt something like
