Insect Nation: Chapter Five
Chapter Five: Tales From The Road
Before he had started this line of work, Simon had always imagined that armies and special operations teams in particular were all about excitement, adventure and extremely dangerous forays into the unknown.
What the stories had failed to mention were the long periods of boredom that interspersed the terrifying fights that could creep up on him at any time. Being behind enemy lines was, in theory, just a walk through the grasses - until an enemy spotted you, that is. They had been moving in spurts, advancing through enemy territory at night or day depending on what the best sentries of the bases were - some of them seemed to employ daytime fliers to oversee their lands as well as their nocturnal patrols.
They were currently at rest in a small hollow in the earth, formed by a partially uprooted tree on the side on an embankment. The General thought it best to be cagey in when they moved for now, as they were currently passing between the two termite hives closest to their destination and thus patrols could come from either direction. It had got to the point, however, where even Simon wanted a fight to break out, just so he could have an outlet for the frustration at their necessary but slow pace. At least they hadn’t seen any evidence of termites marching in force through the area, so Hive One was probably not being invaded as they toiled out here. The possibility was a sobering one, though.
To give him something to do, Simon had begun sculpting again. Web sculpture was an activity often looked down upon, even amongst spiders, because the form was prone to decay over time and it was often hard to make them look even remotely recognisable as what you were sculpting.
For Simon it was a way of translating his troubled world into a more malleable, controllable form. And lately he’d been finding it easier to make more complex shapes and items from his webs, as if some part of his mind had been unlocked by the stress of the last few days. He’d made reasonable approximations of the group in sculpture, but he still felt the urge to create more complex shapes and so he let his mind and hands wander as he watched over the slumbering forms of the party.
He found himself wondering how he would build something to try and decrypt the radio signals ciphered by the General’s mustache sequence. You could start from the most likely bristle distributions and then try alternating them according to sequence. Given some stored waves you could then try and apply all of the possible decodings on them …
He sat lost in thought for a while, and then blinked as he realised the web in his hands had been crafted into an exact replica of the shape of the comb. Looking down at it, he could practically feel, just behind the skin of the sculpture, the spaces where the circuitry would go, the steps needed to make it, the ways the components connected together all laid out across his brain like a star chart.
He leaped away from it in sheer surprise, and the thoughts scattered like motes on the wind. Cautiously he reapproached his work, and though he saw the workmanship present he didn’t feel the whole invention like he had done previously.
Simon decided that it would be best not to talk to anyone about this, at least until he could figure out what it meant. Perhaps he had a hidden talent? But then, why was it only surfacing now rather than years ago?
He ate the sculpture to recycle the silk. Best not to leave evidence of... whatever this was.
* * *
Hours later, Manuel was hunting through the woods, searching out edible insects for the more carnivorous amongst their number. The others were making their way more slowly along the path to the west, but he needed some time to think whilst being apart from them.
He’d not been sleeping nearly enough, and whilst a lifetime of rigorous discipline was keeping him upright he knew that he couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. Hunting would, he hoped, give him some sense of release from the overpowering sense of helplessness in the face of whatever it was at the center of his dreams. But what was it there? What was so numbing to his sense of spirit that he couldn’t even face the nature of his opponent?
What he had told Simon was true. We are not brave from not being afraid of the dangers in this life. We are brave from overcoming those fears, from drawing victory from the most difficult of circumstances and making it our own. He had never known the kind of doubt that now infected him, but he would master it.
Spotting movement in the grass ahead, Manuel leaps from his cover in the plants around him and closes with it, pushing the speed and ferocity of his pace to the very limits in his desire to purge the weakness from him. The grass parted, a small lizard darting through the grass ahead, jinking left and right at a lightning rate. He runs faster, matching movement to movement across the grass, digging claws into tree trunks as the lizard attempts an upward escape. His flashing claw catches the tail, which comes away in his hands, dropped immediately in his frenzied pursuit.
The lizard speeds up in total terror, the loss of the tail leaving little fat on its frame to foil the escape up into the branches. Clawing further and further, Manuel is now inches behind him.
A muscle in Manuel’s forelimbs suddenly twitches involuntarily and he abruptly loses his balance. For one disbelieving second his jaws clamp open and shut centimetres from the lizard before gravity catches his error and he is falling, falling down towards the ground. Legs lash out at the passing trunk of the tree, catching spasmodically to slow his descent as he crashes into the unyielding ground.
How could this happen? Manuel stared in consternation at his errant forelimb, closely examining every bump and groove. Was it his imagination, or was it slightly... bigger than before, almost swollen? He felt nothing wrong but … this kind of clumsiness had never afflicted him before.
The lizard was gone, vanished to whatever bolthole it knew around here. He could hunt it down, but suddenly that didn’t seem so important. If this injury proved to be more serious he would need his companions to watch over him as he recovered, though he would not tell them whilst he could avoid. To admit weakness was to admit defeat, and Manuel had no desire to let himself be defeated by this doubt.
Manuel stands, alone in the woodland and spies the tail lying forgotten on the ground. Something to show from this little excursion, at least. He starts off back towards the group, dragging the tail behind him. An observer might see his legs swell slightly, slowly, from the top down to the bottom as if possessed of some inflammatory disease - but then again, it could just be a trick of the light.
* * *
Slick marched along the path they were following, feeling a lot more optimistic as they skirted the outside of the termite hive nearest Dark Butterfly’s lair which they had taken to calling Enemy Nest One, just for ease of use. Without the influence of a second hive to spot them, their chances had much improved.
They needed something to pass the time. Manuel was becoming erratic, though no-one had called him on it yet. The General seemed to be holding back on calling for the use of stealth technology. which suggested to Slick that he thought them too stressed out to cope well with the potential side-effects of their abilities. Simon was nervous at the best of times. Still, he was the smooth, suave agent known only as Slick Phasmatodae and he could get them through this, by all that was insect-sized!
“General, perhaps we could pass the time by you relating to us one of your missions that you went on with the old team? We might get some valuable insight … sir.”
The last part was delivered in a slightly more faltering tone as the ant fixed him was a cool glare, but after a moment he nodded.
“Harumph. Well, perhaps you young ones could learn a thing or two from them, at that. Now, let’s see - how about the time we tricked the Black Widow into giving up the location of the forward wasp points in our territories? No, no too simple. There was the time that we took down the Locust Revolutionary in his lair - those were good times. David tunneled right into the middle of that tree trunk base and we just charged into ‘em out of the hole. Teri had already got up top and eliminated their archers, you see, and then Bea came back in with Robin from up top, shooting down into the mass of fire ant troops whilst we chewed them up from beneath.”
“Hundreds of them, there were, but we managed to close down their own gates and trap them outside. Leaving us not much time before we’d have to escape, we pressed into the Locust’s inner sanctum and confronted him there. For some reason he’d made this kind of throne out of various different coloured leaves and was sitting there, with some other locusts brainwashed into helping him defend himself. So he’s mouthing off about he’s going to cause the great insect domination, and how none of us can hope to stop him - standard megalomaniacal stuff.”
“Anyway, he cries out ‘Now you will all be undone by my secret weapon, you fools!’ and pulls this lever. And then the sides of the room collapse and show … giant crabs. Two of them, huge but sort of stupid and lumbering as they stagger out of their imprisonment towards us. Heavens only know how that locust got them into there in the first place and kept them alive and docile, but there they were, huge pets with tightly armoured shells that can’t really manoeuvre inside this room just because they’re so damn huge!”
The General was grinning now with the rest of the group and even Manuel has a small smirk on his face at the sheer ridiculousness of that situation.
“And so they move to attack us, right, but we dodge away fairly easily whilst engaging the rest of the forces, the Sergeant and his ants acting as a shield whilst David and I start wading through the locusts, cutting left and right as they buzz and snap at us. Anyway, the crabs try and beat up David but they’re basically just keeping each other occupied and circling around when Bea flits up in front of one and sprays he pheromones full in it’s face and orders it to kill the locusts!
So you’ve got one mentally dominated crab trying to fight the locusts and the other one fighting David whilst Robin gets on top of it and starts firing arrows down into the shell repeatedly, thinking one of them must go through eventually, right? I have to yell out from my duel for him to target the joints between the armour, because he was being a bit of an idiot. Barnes here is clinging onto the leg of the thing, gamely stabbing it and trying not to fall off as it lurches back and forth.”
“Anyway, the Locust realises that the jig is up and tries to flee through the rooftop exit and as he flies up he shouts out ‘You will never stop the revolution! You may thwart it today but tomorrow I shall rise from the ashes and revel’”
The General stopped for a moment, enjoying the rapt attention that the other insects were giving him at this point.
“What? What did he want you to revel in?” asked Simon, a wide-eyed look on his face.
“I’ll never know. It was about that point that Teri appeared behind him and stabbed him in the back. Ha! The look on his face then was just priceless - like he couldn’t believe what had just happened, right? Anyway, he’s tumbling to his earth and it’s about then that David charges one of the crabs in the side and pushes the damn thing over, clambering on top of it like he’s just scaled a damn mountain and wants to claim it in the name of all beetle-kind.”
“The fight kind of went out of them after that and we escaped through the secret exit that the Locust was trying to use, and dragged his comatose body back to Hive One. I guess he could still be rotting in a cage up there - no-one really knows what happens to the ringleaders up there any more. All very hush-hush.” The General smiled nostalgically, remembering the exploits of the past.
“So no-ones ever tried to use big animals like that in their fights like that?” asked Sarko, her wings absent-mindedly changing colour behind her as she thoughtfully looked across at the General.
“No, no-one with any damn sense anyway. The big ones don’t respond well to pheromones and if they ever get out of control you’ve got a recipe for an uncontrolled beast trampling all over your battle line. Maybe someday some villain will get it into his head again, but with most them you’ve just got to be better at dodging them and getting round the back - you’d be surprised how quickly a load of ants can devour a target when they want to.”
“Well that was one hell of a story, General! Sounds like you were quite the team back then” Slick commented, resting back on his legs for a moment.
A shadow passed over his face before he replied, brought out of nostalgic revelry to the cold hard truth of the present circumstances.
.
“Yes, well. That was before everything changed. Whether he likes to admit it or not, David isn’t as fast as he used to be so they put him in charge of hive defenses. Bea and Robin are off doing their own thing, and Teri... well, she’s practically turned into the Boogeyman of the entire insect world. Haven’t seen her in months. Barnes here is the only one still around from the old times.”
“Ah, ignore an old ant’s grousing - you lot will make me just as proud, I’m sure. Now, have I told you about the time we had to invade this exclusive club and bag the Fly Lord from under the noses of his very followers? It’s a lesson in seduction, that one! Now, we start back in southern territory, just before the first big ant-termite war. We set off in good spirits on a late autumn day two years ago... “
* * *
They were resting by the side of the path that they were following, in the last expanse of woodland that proceeded the relatively open expanse of ground that would take them the remaining distance to Dark Butterfly’s lair. Unfortunately it would also take them into an expanse quite close to Enemy Nest One and so they were much more likely to get into trouble. Given the weaker eyes of the termites, they were waiting for a night approach.
For Sarko, nestled up in the branches of the tree, it was all a little overwhelming. She hadn’t ever had to sustain a period of stealth use for as long as she had over the last few weeks and the stress was bringing on the latent psychosis of the technology. The only way she saw of getting through it was to really focus on the interplay of daylight through the leaves here, to bring her focus back through meditation.
The soft evening light was certainly helping her out - the subtly shifting leaves cast a beautiful play of dancing greens and yellows that almost seemed like children at play, running laughing through the shadows of the larger leaves in a madcap game of tag.
Sarko shifted slightly, using her wings to cast more shadows into the theater taking place below her with a giant smile on her face, slowly at first and then faster as she took off into the air, joining the dance with a sense of profound glee in the afternoon air. The children began running through a field of shifting flowers and animals, writ large and simple with broad strokes upon the dappled surface as if by a manic impressionist armed with a projector and loose sheaves of coloured ribbons. Dancing in the shadows of larger buildings, they chased and retreated and distorted as Sarko gleefully spun, giggling uncontrollably as she did so.
Suddenly a shadow passed over them, a cloud across the sky blocking out the suddenly fleeing children as if they had been buried by a cascade of falling rubble. Sarko shrieked and dived down, trying desperately to uncover them amongst the branches and leaves that battered at her wings and face. Desperately she ripped and tore at the leaves, breaking apart the layers of shadow until she was abruptly falling through air again.
For a second she panicked, scrabbling at the imaginary rubble falling in around her, before coming back to her senses and spreading her wings to arrest her sudden descent. She waved to Manuel to assure him that everything was fine, who looked less than sure but turned back to his sentry duty with a resigned shrug of his shoulders.
She shivered as she began to fly back up to her sadly denuded vantage point. She needed to keep her obsessions under control or she’d lose her mind completely. Flip-flopping between them like this was doing no-one any good.
* * *
A fly caught in a web has no idea of the complexities that led inexorably to it’s fate. If it looks back it can see where it should have flown to avoid the danger, but there is so much more nuance to the situation than perspective can allow. The places the spider did not spin the web, the lighting of the region, the lures placed beyond the web fall back in a series of paths taken and not taken, not unlike a web in and of themselves.
And in the end, the capture is a surprise to the fly. But to the spider, every step in the path that the fly takes can be manipulated until they fly directly into the web of their own free will, believing all the while that their future stretches beforehand.
What most spiders fail to realise, however, was that they too could be caught in ever larger and more subtle webs made by others, and how they tied and retied their supposedly free fates to each other just pulled them further inside the cocoon of their society.
The Black Widow knew all this. She even knew that she could be caught herself, but to one who truly sees the game the strands could be avoided from time to time. She let others believe her powers waxed and waned, that others delayed and stopped her plans, that the Termite Queen was the true threat to their liberty or that Mandible controlled everything from his lofty, isolated tower with it’s anti-insect forcefields and tales of huge enslaved insects caged inside just waiting for intruders to feast upon. Let the spiders in her realm believe her their puppet where it suited her plans and let them find the cold steel at the center of her web where it do not suit.
The Termite Queen thought strength alone was enough to win the day, but strength matters not one whit when you don’t have the cunning to place it in the best possible place and squeeze them mercilessly until they gave you what you want.
None of the posturing and warring and empty politics of the lower stations would be allowed to interfere with the master web that she had spent years weaving. In a way, she had been weaving it since the day she learned what their creator was and how he sought to control their abilities.
The final touches to that plan were taking place even now. All it required was one last pull on the strand and her ally would do all the heavy lifting for her. And then...
Then they would all find out who was really in control and who was a puppet on silken strings.
Before he had started this line of work, Simon had always imagined that armies and special operations teams in particular were all about excitement, adventure and extremely dangerous forays into the unknown.
What the stories had failed to mention were the long periods of boredom that interspersed the terrifying fights that could creep up on him at any time. Being behind enemy lines was, in theory, just a walk through the grasses - until an enemy spotted you, that is. They had been moving in spurts, advancing through enemy territory at night or day depending on what the best sentries of the bases were - some of them seemed to employ daytime fliers to oversee their lands as well as their nocturnal patrols.
They were currently at rest in a small hollow in the earth, formed by a partially uprooted tree on the side on an embankment. The General thought it best to be cagey in when they moved for now, as they were currently passing between the two termite hives closest to their destination and thus patrols could come from either direction. It had got to the point, however, where even Simon wanted a fight to break out, just so he could have an outlet for the frustration at their necessary but slow pace. At least they hadn’t seen any evidence of termites marching in force through the area, so Hive One was probably not being invaded as they toiled out here. The possibility was a sobering one, though.
To give him something to do, Simon had begun sculpting again. Web sculpture was an activity often looked down upon, even amongst spiders, because the form was prone to decay over time and it was often hard to make them look even remotely recognisable as what you were sculpting.
For Simon it was a way of translating his troubled world into a more malleable, controllable form. And lately he’d been finding it easier to make more complex shapes and items from his webs, as if some part of his mind had been unlocked by the stress of the last few days. He’d made reasonable approximations of the group in sculpture, but he still felt the urge to create more complex shapes and so he let his mind and hands wander as he watched over the slumbering forms of the party.
He found himself wondering how he would build something to try and decrypt the radio signals ciphered by the General’s mustache sequence. You could start from the most likely bristle distributions and then try alternating them according to sequence. Given some stored waves you could then try and apply all of the possible decodings on them …
He sat lost in thought for a while, and then blinked as he realised the web in his hands had been crafted into an exact replica of the shape of the comb. Looking down at it, he could practically feel, just behind the skin of the sculpture, the spaces where the circuitry would go, the steps needed to make it, the ways the components connected together all laid out across his brain like a star chart.
He leaped away from it in sheer surprise, and the thoughts scattered like motes on the wind. Cautiously he reapproached his work, and though he saw the workmanship present he didn’t feel the whole invention like he had done previously.
Simon decided that it would be best not to talk to anyone about this, at least until he could figure out what it meant. Perhaps he had a hidden talent? But then, why was it only surfacing now rather than years ago?
He ate the sculpture to recycle the silk. Best not to leave evidence of... whatever this was.
* * *
Hours later, Manuel was hunting through the woods, searching out edible insects for the more carnivorous amongst their number. The others were making their way more slowly along the path to the west, but he needed some time to think whilst being apart from them.
He’d not been sleeping nearly enough, and whilst a lifetime of rigorous discipline was keeping him upright he knew that he couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. Hunting would, he hoped, give him some sense of release from the overpowering sense of helplessness in the face of whatever it was at the center of his dreams. But what was it there? What was so numbing to his sense of spirit that he couldn’t even face the nature of his opponent?
What he had told Simon was true. We are not brave from not being afraid of the dangers in this life. We are brave from overcoming those fears, from drawing victory from the most difficult of circumstances and making it our own. He had never known the kind of doubt that now infected him, but he would master it.
Spotting movement in the grass ahead, Manuel leaps from his cover in the plants around him and closes with it, pushing the speed and ferocity of his pace to the very limits in his desire to purge the weakness from him. The grass parted, a small lizard darting through the grass ahead, jinking left and right at a lightning rate. He runs faster, matching movement to movement across the grass, digging claws into tree trunks as the lizard attempts an upward escape. His flashing claw catches the tail, which comes away in his hands, dropped immediately in his frenzied pursuit.
The lizard speeds up in total terror, the loss of the tail leaving little fat on its frame to foil the escape up into the branches. Clawing further and further, Manuel is now inches behind him.
A muscle in Manuel’s forelimbs suddenly twitches involuntarily and he abruptly loses his balance. For one disbelieving second his jaws clamp open and shut centimetres from the lizard before gravity catches his error and he is falling, falling down towards the ground. Legs lash out at the passing trunk of the tree, catching spasmodically to slow his descent as he crashes into the unyielding ground.
How could this happen? Manuel stared in consternation at his errant forelimb, closely examining every bump and groove. Was it his imagination, or was it slightly... bigger than before, almost swollen? He felt nothing wrong but … this kind of clumsiness had never afflicted him before.
The lizard was gone, vanished to whatever bolthole it knew around here. He could hunt it down, but suddenly that didn’t seem so important. If this injury proved to be more serious he would need his companions to watch over him as he recovered, though he would not tell them whilst he could avoid. To admit weakness was to admit defeat, and Manuel had no desire to let himself be defeated by this doubt.
Manuel stands, alone in the woodland and spies the tail lying forgotten on the ground. Something to show from this little excursion, at least. He starts off back towards the group, dragging the tail behind him. An observer might see his legs swell slightly, slowly, from the top down to the bottom as if possessed of some inflammatory disease - but then again, it could just be a trick of the light.
* * *
Slick marched along the path they were following, feeling a lot more optimistic as they skirted the outside of the termite hive nearest Dark Butterfly’s lair which they had taken to calling Enemy Nest One, just for ease of use. Without the influence of a second hive to spot them, their chances had much improved.
They needed something to pass the time. Manuel was becoming erratic, though no-one had called him on it yet. The General seemed to be holding back on calling for the use of stealth technology. which suggested to Slick that he thought them too stressed out to cope well with the potential side-effects of their abilities. Simon was nervous at the best of times. Still, he was the smooth, suave agent known only as Slick Phasmatodae and he could get them through this, by all that was insect-sized!
“General, perhaps we could pass the time by you relating to us one of your missions that you went on with the old team? We might get some valuable insight … sir.”
The last part was delivered in a slightly more faltering tone as the ant fixed him was a cool glare, but after a moment he nodded.
“Harumph. Well, perhaps you young ones could learn a thing or two from them, at that. Now, let’s see - how about the time we tricked the Black Widow into giving up the location of the forward wasp points in our territories? No, no too simple. There was the time that we took down the Locust Revolutionary in his lair - those were good times. David tunneled right into the middle of that tree trunk base and we just charged into ‘em out of the hole. Teri had already got up top and eliminated their archers, you see, and then Bea came back in with Robin from up top, shooting down into the mass of fire ant troops whilst we chewed them up from beneath.”
“Hundreds of them, there were, but we managed to close down their own gates and trap them outside. Leaving us not much time before we’d have to escape, we pressed into the Locust’s inner sanctum and confronted him there. For some reason he’d made this kind of throne out of various different coloured leaves and was sitting there, with some other locusts brainwashed into helping him defend himself. So he’s mouthing off about he’s going to cause the great insect domination, and how none of us can hope to stop him - standard megalomaniacal stuff.”
“Anyway, he cries out ‘Now you will all be undone by my secret weapon, you fools!’ and pulls this lever. And then the sides of the room collapse and show … giant crabs. Two of them, huge but sort of stupid and lumbering as they stagger out of their imprisonment towards us. Heavens only know how that locust got them into there in the first place and kept them alive and docile, but there they were, huge pets with tightly armoured shells that can’t really manoeuvre inside this room just because they’re so damn huge!”
The General was grinning now with the rest of the group and even Manuel has a small smirk on his face at the sheer ridiculousness of that situation.
“And so they move to attack us, right, but we dodge away fairly easily whilst engaging the rest of the forces, the Sergeant and his ants acting as a shield whilst David and I start wading through the locusts, cutting left and right as they buzz and snap at us. Anyway, the crabs try and beat up David but they’re basically just keeping each other occupied and circling around when Bea flits up in front of one and sprays he pheromones full in it’s face and orders it to kill the locusts!
So you’ve got one mentally dominated crab trying to fight the locusts and the other one fighting David whilst Robin gets on top of it and starts firing arrows down into the shell repeatedly, thinking one of them must go through eventually, right? I have to yell out from my duel for him to target the joints between the armour, because he was being a bit of an idiot. Barnes here is clinging onto the leg of the thing, gamely stabbing it and trying not to fall off as it lurches back and forth.”
“Anyway, the Locust realises that the jig is up and tries to flee through the rooftop exit and as he flies up he shouts out ‘You will never stop the revolution! You may thwart it today but tomorrow I shall rise from the ashes and revel’”
The General stopped for a moment, enjoying the rapt attention that the other insects were giving him at this point.
“What? What did he want you to revel in?” asked Simon, a wide-eyed look on his face.
“I’ll never know. It was about that point that Teri appeared behind him and stabbed him in the back. Ha! The look on his face then was just priceless - like he couldn’t believe what had just happened, right? Anyway, he’s tumbling to his earth and it’s about then that David charges one of the crabs in the side and pushes the damn thing over, clambering on top of it like he’s just scaled a damn mountain and wants to claim it in the name of all beetle-kind.”
“The fight kind of went out of them after that and we escaped through the secret exit that the Locust was trying to use, and dragged his comatose body back to Hive One. I guess he could still be rotting in a cage up there - no-one really knows what happens to the ringleaders up there any more. All very hush-hush.” The General smiled nostalgically, remembering the exploits of the past.
“So no-ones ever tried to use big animals like that in their fights like that?” asked Sarko, her wings absent-mindedly changing colour behind her as she thoughtfully looked across at the General.
“No, no-one with any damn sense anyway. The big ones don’t respond well to pheromones and if they ever get out of control you’ve got a recipe for an uncontrolled beast trampling all over your battle line. Maybe someday some villain will get it into his head again, but with most them you’ve just got to be better at dodging them and getting round the back - you’d be surprised how quickly a load of ants can devour a target when they want to.”
“Well that was one hell of a story, General! Sounds like you were quite the team back then” Slick commented, resting back on his legs for a moment.
A shadow passed over his face before he replied, brought out of nostalgic revelry to the cold hard truth of the present circumstances.
.
“Yes, well. That was before everything changed. Whether he likes to admit it or not, David isn’t as fast as he used to be so they put him in charge of hive defenses. Bea and Robin are off doing their own thing, and Teri... well, she’s practically turned into the Boogeyman of the entire insect world. Haven’t seen her in months. Barnes here is the only one still around from the old times.”
“Ah, ignore an old ant’s grousing - you lot will make me just as proud, I’m sure. Now, have I told you about the time we had to invade this exclusive club and bag the Fly Lord from under the noses of his very followers? It’s a lesson in seduction, that one! Now, we start back in southern territory, just before the first big ant-termite war. We set off in good spirits on a late autumn day two years ago... “
* * *
They were resting by the side of the path that they were following, in the last expanse of woodland that proceeded the relatively open expanse of ground that would take them the remaining distance to Dark Butterfly’s lair. Unfortunately it would also take them into an expanse quite close to Enemy Nest One and so they were much more likely to get into trouble. Given the weaker eyes of the termites, they were waiting for a night approach.
For Sarko, nestled up in the branches of the tree, it was all a little overwhelming. She hadn’t ever had to sustain a period of stealth use for as long as she had over the last few weeks and the stress was bringing on the latent psychosis of the technology. The only way she saw of getting through it was to really focus on the interplay of daylight through the leaves here, to bring her focus back through meditation.
The soft evening light was certainly helping her out - the subtly shifting leaves cast a beautiful play of dancing greens and yellows that almost seemed like children at play, running laughing through the shadows of the larger leaves in a madcap game of tag.
Sarko shifted slightly, using her wings to cast more shadows into the theater taking place below her with a giant smile on her face, slowly at first and then faster as she took off into the air, joining the dance with a sense of profound glee in the afternoon air. The children began running through a field of shifting flowers and animals, writ large and simple with broad strokes upon the dappled surface as if by a manic impressionist armed with a projector and loose sheaves of coloured ribbons. Dancing in the shadows of larger buildings, they chased and retreated and distorted as Sarko gleefully spun, giggling uncontrollably as she did so.
Suddenly a shadow passed over them, a cloud across the sky blocking out the suddenly fleeing children as if they had been buried by a cascade of falling rubble. Sarko shrieked and dived down, trying desperately to uncover them amongst the branches and leaves that battered at her wings and face. Desperately she ripped and tore at the leaves, breaking apart the layers of shadow until she was abruptly falling through air again.
For a second she panicked, scrabbling at the imaginary rubble falling in around her, before coming back to her senses and spreading her wings to arrest her sudden descent. She waved to Manuel to assure him that everything was fine, who looked less than sure but turned back to his sentry duty with a resigned shrug of his shoulders.
She shivered as she began to fly back up to her sadly denuded vantage point. She needed to keep her obsessions under control or she’d lose her mind completely. Flip-flopping between them like this was doing no-one any good.
* * *
A fly caught in a web has no idea of the complexities that led inexorably to it’s fate. If it looks back it can see where it should have flown to avoid the danger, but there is so much more nuance to the situation than perspective can allow. The places the spider did not spin the web, the lighting of the region, the lures placed beyond the web fall back in a series of paths taken and not taken, not unlike a web in and of themselves.
And in the end, the capture is a surprise to the fly. But to the spider, every step in the path that the fly takes can be manipulated until they fly directly into the web of their own free will, believing all the while that their future stretches beforehand.
What most spiders fail to realise, however, was that they too could be caught in ever larger and more subtle webs made by others, and how they tied and retied their supposedly free fates to each other just pulled them further inside the cocoon of their society.
The Black Widow knew all this. She even knew that she could be caught herself, but to one who truly sees the game the strands could be avoided from time to time. She let others believe her powers waxed and waned, that others delayed and stopped her plans, that the Termite Queen was the true threat to their liberty or that Mandible controlled everything from his lofty, isolated tower with it’s anti-insect forcefields and tales of huge enslaved insects caged inside just waiting for intruders to feast upon. Let the spiders in her realm believe her their puppet where it suited her plans and let them find the cold steel at the center of her web where it do not suit.
The Termite Queen thought strength alone was enough to win the day, but strength matters not one whit when you don’t have the cunning to place it in the best possible place and squeeze them mercilessly until they gave you what you want.
None of the posturing and warring and empty politics of the lower stations would be allowed to interfere with the master web that she had spent years weaving. In a way, she had been weaving it since the day she learned what their creator was and how he sought to control their abilities.
The final touches to that plan were taking place even now. All it required was one last pull on the strand and her ally would do all the heavy lifting for her. And then...
Then they would all find out who was really in control and who was a puppet on silken strings.