The Golden Cuckoo by Allexis Weetman
It was a tough year in hive dock facility 00176884/D#101. Trade had been up, but the space dock regions were plagued by a lack of infrastructural maintenance. Rust and corrosion vied with electrical failures for the attention of the techs. But the real reason for the hardship that year was closer to home.
The workers of D#101 were comparatively well off compared to those living in the adjacent inner hive, and they lived with their burgeoning families in clustered hab-units, suspended beneath the gargantuan gantries of docking bay 6.9. Walkways and suspended tramways connected the whole together in a working unit. Here the little children of the workers learned to live life high above the base of the hive, their rookery protruding out from the main body of the city like the branch of a tree.
But nothing lasts forever. Chaotic entropy enters the systems of the hive and only with constant vigilance can it be countered. That year vigilance faltered and died. The subdivision of the crèche was full with every child beneath the age of 13 and old enough to be torn from mother when the abyss opened up and swallowed their lives whole.
It started in a single support – a hairline fracture surrounded by fatigued metal escaped the notice of the maintenance crew, rust seeped in. A hard winter expanded and contracted the steel and the support no longer held, the huge strain transferred to other areas and life hung by a thread.
The thread snapped.
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“Don’t shed tears life partner” said Dugoe to his sobbing lover, “I found us a new baby, a child who won’t ever die! The others on my shift showed me the child after yesterday’s rotation. He is truly a miracle, a beautiful boy so strong and healthy that to look upon him is to love him. But we have to keep it a secret and now I’ve told you you must come see the child and be anointed with his love, we all must!”
Luraan looked up, her face smeared, hot and red, “I just want my b-b-baby back! Oh but I know its hopeless… take me to this child I’m going to love supposedly if it will shut your jawing mouth”
The two huddled figures struggled up the step-way to the hab-zone, below them a vast expanse of empty atmosphere broken only by the distant ground.
“You will see Lur, you will see. Everyone in Docktown will have a new baby soon, it is a blessing, maybe from the Emperor himself who has taken pity on our poor childless souls. Even you may be with child”
Luraan blushed and bowed her head, since her first child had been killed she had been rendered infertile by the low level radiation in her work station and she had not hoped to have another.
The two continued their long accent. Being of lower class their use of sky-trams was limited. Luraan agreed to visit the new child, maybe this would be an opportunity to boost their status in the precipitous town.
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The life form had travelled far…
Its journey had been spent in a long aestivation, a deep sleep filled with the dreams of a new world and a new opportunity to turn a planet to its will. The hive mind node within knew that it was one of many such seeds sown to the galaxy, a little spark of life that could inseminate a world, assimilate genetic code, become one with the local population and manipulate it from within.
It traveled first in a spore pod for many centuries before coming to a system where it detected life. It found structures and ascertained that here it could find faster transport.
For months it traveled sealed in the cargo hold of the great ship Chalice of Purity.
Finally in orbit around a world it could sense was seething with life forms it broke from its hiding place and by stealth and instinct boarded the shuttle bound for the surface.
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Luraan gasped as the foetus within her kicked.
That night months ago they had gone to see the baby was clouded in her mind – the baby had been strange in some way she thought, but then
it had done something to her mind and all she could see was this perfect child, new and fresh and helpless, and she must help it, help it grow. It had
kissed her and then she had known that she would have child and that it would be special and that made her feel strong.
Marceel, the man who had shown them the golden child, had been working in cargo transfer when a six limbed angel had come to him and told him he would be with child, and lo it came to pass that a child grew in his lower intestinal tract and was born somehow… a miracle! His character changed during this time and he was no longer the feckless drunken lowlife of old. He worked hard, made friends, brown-nosed all the way up to supervisor status, all the time a strange lump in his belly grew and spoke to him
“talk to this man, make him like you, compliment this arrogant foolish official, gather friends around you, make yourself strong”
Now another child was growing in the more congenial environment of the woman’s barren uterus. Another miracle, Praise be.
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