Alex the Inventor - Chapter 2

Read Books 1 & 2 at: Deep Sky Stories

The Evil Not Yet Gone...

Within the secret world of insects, there is harmony and cooperation in each of its communities. There is a hierarchy within each cooperative group as well where some serve others and the colony as a whole may also serve a single, ruling insect. However, it is also a world in which life and death struggles for survival and dominance occur. It has long been a known fact that every bee hive must have a Queen Bee in order to survive. The queen is served and fed by all the other bees and she, in turn, provides the hive with new offspring to continue their existence. The drone bees will defend their queen to the death against any outsiders who wish to invade the hive and it is also this vicious instinct which will prompt them to war with others of their kind. The Queen Bee is the ultimate figurehead of authority to these blindly obedient creatures. The bees constantly communicate among themselves to support their hive or to quietly declare war against another. In the wild, war is only declared where food or living space has become scarce, and it was for the latter that the Others declared war against Alex Faraway's people. The humans just didn't know it yet. The Others, both Flies and Spiders, had lain dormant inside their oil pods on the two moons of Mars, or nearly dead, lying scattered and buried under the cold Martian sand. Eons dragged by since their untimely defeat which was caused by the arrival of an unforeseen comet-world when they were on the brink of victory. The surprise attack against their Martian Masters had been all but successful up until that moment. The sudden arrival of the rogue planet and the resulting destruction caused heavy casualties equally among both Martians and Machines. Thus the Others, who survived stood themselves down, still and silent in the frigid and hostile world which Mars quickly became. In their virtual state of death, they were resigned to wait with long patience for a new change or opportunity to arrive. Ten thousand years later, with the ticking over of the 21st Century, a new dawn approached for them. The arrival of the first curious Earthers was a chance that was better than any of the creatures could have hoped for. They seized upon the arrival of the first remote rover vehicles, destroying them in full view of their cameras. The arrival of the excited and gullible Earthly explorers was almost immediate and enabled the cat-sized Flies, one-by-one, to be reborn and activated again. For the Flies, and especially for Zin, The Dreaded One, the best plan was also the simplest: allow the humans to re-activate them, then wait and rebuild until there were enough of their numbers to betray and destroy them.

Zin, the Fly, knew what she wanted, with absolute clarity though; above all else, she wished to be Queen of the Others within their own HIVE. With the death of her sole competitor, Larj, The Cunning Coward, in the failed battle to destroy The Gardener, (who, regrettably, escaped with the last Royal Child), the way was now open for Zin. Like all others of her kind though, she plotted her take-over carefully and waited for the opportune moment to arrive. It came much sooner than she had anticipated. The male human, who was her host-human for many years on the world of Earth, began receiving voice and email messages from another human. The other which was I.D.'d as one, Wallace Chater, said it needed to speak to the host about, "something of great urgency." Zin buzzed excitedly to herself now as she scanned the data found in her host's mind. The human's I.D. was indeed there along with the memory module containing all past experiences the host had had with that human. Zin clicked with cold logic through this module, collecting all pertinent data regarding age, character profile, and present location of, Wallace Chater. When the name, "Delta-Town" was revealed as that human's current location, Zin stiffened with controlled excitement, clenching her ganglia wires around the head of the host as it slept, perhaps a little too tightly. Zin was finding it stuffy where she hid, under the bed, but she would soon have no further need of the host since she would be outgrowing it. The Fly who had come down with the first wave of Others had been more successful than most in finding a human with a wealth of scientific data. This had all been scanned, copied, and uploaded to the H.I.V.E. Network through the years, with much of it being used to betray the humans under John Faraway as well. It was a rather simple plan, after all. Zin buzzed again with renewed anticipation of the information that would soon be gleaned from the human named Wallace in Delta-Town. There was, after all, another Faraway who dwelled somewhere in that same town who was beginning to be troublesome to the Others. That one would now need to be found and dealt with sooner rather than later, it seemed. Much sooner...

Next: Chapter 3 - A Recurring Dream

Alex is having a strange dream every night of trying to fly off and away from Earth, and this time, he flies away to someplace very different and experiences a world and time beyond Earthly comprehension. As of 2017-08-20, Book 2 / Chapter 2 can be found at: Deepskystories.com