Mike Christopher and Natalie Kendall ducked around a corner and paused a moment. Mike stood with his hands on his knees, gulping deep breaths. Natalie looked back down the long corridor from which they'd come. Korolev Habitat was a cylinder only a kilometer long, but they'd both run nearly its full length. And Mike could hear the Jenregar scouts gaining on them.
He was wondering what to do next when he saw what he was looking for. More importantly, he smelled it. A cramped storage space beneath a pedestrian ramp. He grabbed Natalie's arm. "In there." They might elude the Jenregar yet.
Natalie was taking quick, sharp breaths. The better to notice the stench coming from the pale green, cylindrical waste canisters crammed into the storage space. She blinked her piercingly-blue eyes, shook her mane of coal-black hair, and told Mike, "Forget it. You don't want to know what's in those canisters."
Now Mike glanced around the corner. No Jenregar scouts visible yet, but they had to be close. He looked straight up. The Jenregar presence was most visible 180 degrees and .2 kilometer overhead, where Mike could see the neighborhoods, farms, and parklands Humans had abandoned as the previously-unknown species had overrun them. "They'll catch up to us soon," he said. "We have to hide."
"The recycler's out on this block. The techs have been packing everything from Human waste to soured milk in those things."
"That's what I'm counting on," Mike said. "And this is where I'm hiding." He bent to squeeze himself into the storage space. "You do what you want."
Natalie muttered something that Mike was probably glad was unintelligible, then said, "Move the heck over, then."
Natalie's squeezing into the already-confined space pushed Mike more closely against two of the nauseating waste canisters. Thankfully, they were not spilling any of their contents, but Mike gagged just the same. "Quiet," Natalie told him. "They'll hear us."
"I can't help that I smell better than most people."
"You mean you have a better sense of smell. Neither of us is going to get out of this smelling very good."
"They're close."
"I don't hear--"
"Remember that musky smell they have?"
"You are good, if you can smell that, even over--"
"Artificial Human. Augmented senses." To anyone who didn't know Mike's origins, the mixture of tightly-curled hair, light-brown skin, and blue eyes with small folds of flesh covering their corners would have given them a clue.
Both Mike and Natalie were trying to push themselves farther behind a row of smelly canisters when three Jenregar scouts rounded the corner.
Their bodies were hard carapaces that appeared black until you glimpsed highlights of a deep red. Each stood about .75 meter tall. Their legs bent "backwards" to a Human eye, and though thin and bony, looked strong. Their "arms" appeared boneless, each movement sinuous and flowing. Three-fingered hands, with the presumed "thumb" sporting a mean-looking stinger. Mike had seen just minutes earlier what those stingers could do. Five Humans dead, right before his eyes, all within seconds. He and Natalie had barely escaped.
Jenregar faces had no noses, and their mouths were mere slits. They stalked down the corridor and would pass right by Mike and Natalie's hiding place within seconds.
Natalie whispered, "Scoot back further. They'll see us."
"Maybe not," Mike said. "Look at their eyes. So small. And those flaps of skin on the sides of their heads. All they have for ears. Both secondary organs, I'd say."
"So how do they perceive anything?"
"See on top their heads? Those bumps?"
"I get it. Scent receptors. Their primary sense?"
Mike only nodded as the three Jenregar drew closer. Then they paused simultaneously, none seeming to lead the others. Their antennae-like organs pivoted slightly. They did not look around, never cast their gazes toward Mike and Natalie's hiding place. Then they moved on.
Only now did Mike become aware of his pounding heart. "Let's stay here another minute. Just in case."
Natalie said, "You knew they wouldn't see us."
"Didn't know. Guessed. We live in a world of sight and sound, mostly. Theirs is smell and taste. I hoped we'd confuse them. I noticed how their antennae and their eyes worked when...."
"...The others were killed?"
"Yeah," Mike said. "We shouldn't have tried to parley. I should have figured that out sooner."
In retrospect, the attempt to make peace with the Jenregar had been naive and uninformed. A week earlier, a single craft had fallen out of stardrive and begun sending over shuttles that quickly and efficiently figured out how to mate with the habitat's locks and pierce its hanger decks' force fields so they could begin disgorging Jenregar scouts. Those beings quickly overran entire neighborhoods, occupied homes and public facilities, and stung to death anyone who resisted. Human stunners did not work against them, and disruptors were in short supply. Force shields only protected neighborhoods so long against Jenregar incursions. They apparently worked without sleep and went for long periods without eating. They would probe, then pause, as if waiting for unheard instructions, then probe some more until they would discover a counteracting beam that would tear through a shield or a resonance frequency that would disrupt it. Then more Humans would die or fall back, and the Jenregar would advance another few dozens (or hundreds!) of meters.
And the sheer numbers of them! If a thousand Jenregar descended upon a neighborhood whose shields had fallen, it didn't matter how many of the mere dozens of Humans had disruptors, they were quickly overrun. No forms of communication had worked, and the Jenregar ship had made no transmissions toward the habitat.
Mike was chief contact officer of the exploratory starcraft Asaph Hall, and Natalie, who was a Korolev Habitat councilwoman, was an old friend. She called on him when she'd learned the Hall was only days distant.
Mike, to his horror, found habitat mayor Gordon Riley about to leave on a peace mission top-heavy with self-important politicos who'd never been involved in a First Contact situation. Mike failed to convince Riley of the obvious dangers involved and, reluctantly, went along on the ill-advised mission into the occupied area. Soon they confronted a phalanx of about a dozen Jenregar scouts who stopped short when confronted with a Human presence.
Riley must have known verbal communication wouldn't work, with the Jenregar language not in anyone's datalinks, but he tried anyway, without success. Sign language, transmitting prime numbers on subspace frequencies, wild gestures--all equally futile.
And that was about it. Alternatives quickly exhausted, the Humans just stood there, waiting for any response. When the scouts stepped forward without preamble and began grasping men and women by the necks and stinging them, Mike knew he couldn't help the others; the Jenregar's thumb stingers pierced an enemy's skin and inserted acids that injured and immobilized you, and poisons that finished you off within minutes if the acids didn't do the job. Mike didn't even try to pull his stunner, just grabbed Natalie by the arm and they got the hell out of there.
Now, still hiding behind filthy waste containers, Natalie put a hand on Mike's shoulder. "None of this was your fault. Were you supposed to knock Riley on the head and keep him from going?"
Mike said, "I'm the contact specialist. I should have figured something out." He shoved a container aside. "Let's get going again." The Jenregar had swarmed over about a quarter of the cylindrical habitat's area, in the process killing dozens of Humans and displacing nearly two thousand out of the current population of five thousand. An impractical number to evacuate quickly, though Earth Unity craft were on their way just for that purpose. Though at the rate of Jenregar expansion, the evacuation craft and the promised light cruisers would arrive too late.
Once out of hiding, Mike glanced around. No Jenregar in sight, and the musky odor they exuded constantly was fading. Mike looked up. About 45 degrees from their current position in the cylinder, he could see the nearest checkpoint, and safety. He and Natalie started around the curving floor of the cylinder, didn't encounter any more Jenregar, and made it there within minutes.
)
Mike Christopher confronts a hive-mind species about to take over a Human habitat.
