~o0o~
Empathor and all three Strategors were in their accustomed council Chambor, portals closed when their cogitation was interrupted by an increasing clamor in Central Corridor.
"Chambor, what is that racket?” St. Prop asked, "Have you scheduled another silly festival for the people, Empathor?"
Before either could answer, all portals snapped open to reveal a puffed and preened Entertainor. He bellowed through all his vocal instruments at once, "Come, and give honor, for the Adjudicator is upon you!"
The council all rode into the corridor and gaped uncomprehendingly at the Imuqi mob. It seemed that the entire range of body types were crowded about Chambor as he backed into the traditional Adjudicator's rock niche. Chambor stopped flush with the arch and settled as hundreds of Transports slid out from beneath. He expanded slightly to create a seal with the rock, and dramatically irised open his portal.
To most of the Imuq, an Adjudicator was a legend and myth, but when Scout stepped forward they all felt the truth within their entire being. A tremendous noise gave forth, inarticulate sounds of wonder and joy. The three Strategors instructed their Transports forward, followed by a shocked Empathor when he recognized Scout.
The Strategors were not willing to give in to their feelings of awe and respect without some corroboration. Scout and the Strategors silently measured each other, but before either side spoke, Empathor screamed his outrage.
“Scout? You were my friend, my creation! We planned together to free all Imuq, not place them under the ultimate bondage of an adjudicator! You are a traitor, I hate you!"
Shaking violently, Empathor rolled off his Transports and undulated his way under his own power away from them all at best speed.
Scout watched Empathor leave without interference.
"Let him go. It saddens me, but he is emotionally broken beyond repair. So, Strategors, come inside. There is much to discuss."
They did follow Scout in and spent several hours trying logically to refute his position, if not his very existence. The longer they tried, the deeper their comm-nerve networks attuned to Scout’s Adjudicator frequency. They were finally convinced mind and soul, and from that point on worked under his leadership with diligence and loyalty.
~o0o~
Scout personally oversaw the programming and decanting of three Empathors, a Soheen, and a new Adjudicator. He led the group to his Chambor, where the Strategors, his Entertainor historian, and an awed Constructor awaited his presence.
"I hope you all now understand why a balance must be restored, for the good of Imuq. Although I am fully Adjudicator, I am also human. All the information I garnered about humans through the Soheen honey ends with the Catastrophe. I must go and seek the current realities of the world, both for my own peace of mind and for the benefit of Imuq. We cannot remain focused inward and survive. Do not worry, I would not leave without providing my replacement."
Scout nodded towards the Constructor, who raised a strong, sharp-edged limb and brought it quickly down on the top of the G'Soheen shell. It shattered into several large pieces and revealed almost a gallon of honey. The Strategors, even though they understood and supported this action, let out a gasp at what once would have been the ultimate blasphemy.
Scout cupped the newly birthed Soheen's neck and gently urged him to taste the golden fluid. The young Soheen brought his snail-like head down and consumed every drop. The Soheen lifted his head to look into Scout's eyes and emitted a long, contented 'Aaaaahhhhhhh' as he incorporated the last of Imuq's legacy into his consciousness.
An echoing whir wafted from Soheen's shell as a continuous line of transparent heliobees issued from the holes near the top. They paused a moment to record their surroundings in the entire electromagnetic spectrum, then dashed off to repeat at the far range of their sensors.
Scout stood between Soheen and the new Adjudicator and nodded his head. Soheen placed an antenna-shaped appendage on each of their heads and concentrated. Scout felt displaced and stretched as his entire mind was copied into his replacement. For a moment near the end, he experienced double awareness as he looked out from both bodies. He felt an internal snap as Soheen backed a step away.
"I am Scout, you are Adjudicator."
"I am Adjudicator, you are Scout. You are relieved."
"That I am" whispered Scout to himself.
Adjudicator shared one last look with Scout and turned to address his charges.
“Empathors, you shall shadow me as we minister each day to the needs of the people. Strategors, you know your duties, but the first thing each morning we shall all meet for discussion and adjustments. Soheen, go and spread yourself, for there are many questions awaiting answers, especially in these changing times."
As Scout quietly made his exit, Chambor spoke to his back, "Must you leave, Scout? It is an honor beyond measure to serve the Adjudicator, and I enjoy fame and respect throughout my peers, but you, you are my friend!"
Scout stopped and replied, "And I ever shall be, dear Chambor. But my duty now lies elsewhere. I promise I will return, if possible. In the meantime, I count on you to be a great help to the high and mighty, for they too are only Imuqi doing their jobs to the best of their design, just like you. Farewell, for now".
~end~
Chapter 3: Scout & The Sidmopisians, Part 1
~Twenty Years Post Catastrophe~
The female Sephian stretched her ten-foot long snake-like body to gather as much sun as possible. Her three much smaller attendant neuters cautiously slithered close and nudged the teat area between her large and powerful rear legs in hopes of a meal. When irritable, she often kicked out and caused injury or death, but today she just ignored them as they teased out a nipple each and suckled.
They used the two strong feeler limbs attached to either side of their lower jaw to hold open the covering scale while they firmly stroked the teat with the smaller, sensitive feelers along their upper jaw. When the thin purple fluid began to stream, they clamped the teat in the central gap within a circle of sharp, hollow needle teeth and whistled through them fully content.
Through the heat haze, the female saw a line of ten-inch spheres float and bob eight feet above the ground as they slowly approached in a gentle breeze that pushed them along. She opened her mouth and exposed three rows of curved needle teeth, the inner row smaller than the middle, and the outer larger yet. Each hollow tooth was controlled by its own muscle which allowed her to blow a beautiful whistling orchestra of speech. She called out to her neuters to ready the hunt as the interweaving melodics informed them of direction, speed, and distance.
The neuters immediately backed away from their meal, careful not to get their feelers pinched as the teat scales snapped shut and answered in their simpler, single-row toothed whistles. All four slithered towards the spheres, but the female suddenly stopped as they reached the unseen but clearly defined edge of her territory. She would defend her area to the death, but only extreme need would make her cross it. The neuters, though, had no such problem and raced towards the dark purple spheres.
The swiftest among them reached the small flock of spheres several body-lengths before the others and turned to get slightly downwind. The small Sephian turned toward the globes, lifted to point nearly straight up, and kicked with strong little legs to launch into the air. At the apex of the jump, the neuter’s ribs expanded out to the sides and provided an airfoil shape used to glide directly towards the nearest sphere.
The neuter caught a globe by mouth and immediately returned to the female and dropped it at her feet. The small teeth could not pierce through the thick rind of the helium-centered fruit, but the mature female’s middle row was designed just for this purpose. She carefully sucked the fluid from the thin sac beneath the rind without puncturing the center air bladder and allowed the sagging airbag to float away.
A few moments later, a second neuter arrived with its offering, which was soon emptied and sent limping aft
er the first. The third, younger neuter, was born with a slight defect that kept its left leg joint from fully extending. As a result, it could not jump quite as high as the others and was only successful in the hunt one time out of three as a general rule.
Its first attempt was a miss. Then worse luck yet, a swirling wind accelerated the spheres well out of reach before the misshapen neuter could attempt a second try. The female did not proffer the empty-jawed neuter a teat that day, or the next.
The third day, a mass that consisting of dozens of much smaller, bright-red spheres slowly drifted into sight. The female became extremely excited as this variety rarely came their way, and the flavor was as exquisite as was the mild narcotic effect the fruit provided. She dispatched her attendants the moment the flock approached her border. The pickings were good enough that even the smaller neuter brought down twenty fruits. They came in so fast she decided carefully to puncture the airbags and pile them up for later feasting. All three neuters happily suckled by the time the flock receded while their female methodically engorged herself.
A lone Sephian watched from a distant hillock, unnoticed by them all. She had been female only long enough to grow too large to glide and hunt her own food but had not yet enticed any neuters so had no territory of her own. She was starved and desperate. The sight of all that wondrous poignant fruit, plus the sight of the evidently competent neuters drove her slightly mad. She slithered towards the celebrating female at a steady pace, stopped and wavered for a moment at the scent barrier, then let out a screaming challenge through her fully extended outer row of fighting teeth.
The defending female rose to her feet and extended her muscular, ridged body high into the air the moment she realized an interloper had crossed into her territory. She swayed back and forth while raising dust clouds with mighty stampings of her legs. The two older neuters were quick enough to slither safely out of reach, but the smallest experienced the last bad luck of its short life as a stout claw broke her back.
The young female was barely six feet long, compared to the ten feet of the elder, and had no experience fighting compared to twenty-eight victories by her opponent. Her initial instincts were good as she jumped up to lock all four ropey mouth tendrils with their opposite number, which kept the larger female from impaling her immediately. Also, her shorter length positioned her claws slightly higher on the other's soft underbelly. She even managed to rend a nasty furrow through the scales, but size and experience soon won the battle.
The older female sank her long, hollow fighting teeth deep into her opponent's throat and emptied the majority of her blood in three long swallows. As the blood entered her stomach, she instantly collapsed to the ground in partial paralysis as her reproductive system flooded her body with hormones. An epiglottal flap shunted the blood to a special organ which contained enzymes that unstrung the strands of DNA and fertilized a string of twenty-four eggs.
The dead female’s wound strangely fascinated the quicker of the remaining neuters as a small pool of blood seeped slowly into the dry ground. The female breathed deep and steady, still in a stupor, so it carefully inched to the bleeding injury. It hesitantly flexed tiny teeth, touched them to the rapidly draining blood, and quickly took a sip.
The world exploded, overlaid with new sensations as she was flooded with maturation hormones. Both her female and the dead one suddenly reeked of dread–inducing pheromones. Even at a distance, the newly transfigured female accurately sensed her relationship to the boundary lines. The larger torpid female suddenly focused and lunged, but the after-effects of the red narcotic fruits slowed her responses just enough that the new female sped out of range and across the territorial boundary.
Exhausted from the fight and pregnancy, the female slithered near a small boulder, excavated a shallow pit, and laid her eggs. They would not concern her again unless she required neuters to hunt for her after their hatching. Finishing her maternal duties with a light covering of sand, she made a slow, angry circuit of her entire territory, sniffing for any sign of the new neuter-turned-female.
Several fist-sized scavengers worked on the defeated female’s body as she completed the circle. Nothing went to waste in this desert. As more of the round, spiky scavengers rolled in, they extended hollow spines into the flesh that dissolved the body into a thick paste that they siphoned until bloated. In less than a day’s time, there would be no trace that a corpse had existed.
The female’s eyes swept over the dead body of the broken-backed neuter, now also covered by scavengers, but it had less emotional impact on her than the eggs. For a Sephian of her size and stature, neuters were always easy to find. She returned to her interrupted meal of red fruits and allowed her remaining neuter to suckle to its heart's content.
The new female had not gone far, just far enough that her backbone no longer twitched from nervousness. Her feeding teeth began to poke through her gums after a few hours, although her fighting teeth would take much longer to evidence. She was still now to catch and eat fruit on her own, but her success worked against her as she quickly put on length and weight. Soon she would not be able to glide at all.
Sephian culture may have fallen to barbarism after of the Cataclysm, but their potential for intelligence remained unchanged. The new female knew she needed neuters. She remembered her old female’s favorite clutch deposit site and hoped the eggs would soon hatch. She began spying on the older female and would sidle up to the border and watch whenever her competitor wandered away from the clutch.
Success rewarded her vigil. Within minutes of each other, twenty-four full sized newly hatched neuters began to wander at random, whistling their high-pitched request to nurse. They had enough reserves to last weeks, but instinct dictated that attending a female meant survival. The new female whistled reassuring words and the closest six neuters turned towards her and slithered across the border.
The older female had heard the hatchlings but had seen no reason to hurry. Until, that is, she noticed the potential interloper. She whistle-screamed her rage and sped to the spot. Her first instinctual priority was to engage the other female in battle, and the second emotional priority was to crush the departing neuters if only to keep them from defecting. She almost stopped them, but at the last moment swung around and dug in her claws to keep herself from violating her own border.
The new female urgently presented her teats and irrevocably bonded the neuters to her. The two females lifted their fore-bodies into the air and glared at each other, but the contest was over. As soon as the neuters were satiated, their female led them leisurely away to establish a territory for herself.
The remaining female slithered over and inspected the new batch of hatchlings, selected the six healthiest, and crushed the rest to death. As a final show of ire, she petulantly picked each dead up in her manipulators and tossed them as far as she could across the border.
She knew better than to leave all that secondary nutrition lying around, but she was exhausted physically and emotionally, and just needed to sleep. Soon there were swarms of scavengers that moved by extending fluid-filled spikes in the direction of travel while they withdrew spikes on the opposite side to roll with a smooth, quiet grace. With thirteen dead neuters, one female body, and the pile of fruit rinds, the scavengers engaged in an unprecedented feast. And where scavengers gathered in numbers, juggernauts were sure to appear.
Opportunistic predators, juggernauts grew to immense proportions. A twenty-foot-high featureless ball quietly but inexorably approached the macabre banquet. Its movement mechanics were similar to the tiny scavengers but accomplished through internal organs that pumped massive amounts of fluid forty-five degrees up and forward-of-center. The transfer of weight rolled the body as gravity pulled on the engorged reserve at the top of the arc of the round body. As the fluid reached the bottom, muscular pumps transferred the fluid again top and forward.
Once they reached maximum speed, juggernauts simply steamrollered over their prey while flattened flesh and f
luids adhered to the rubbery skin and the nutrients absorbed through osmosis at leisure. The juggernaut consumed the Sephians, living and dead, the fruit pile, and most of the scavengers that were too greedy to save their lives by fleeing. The juggernaut rumbled ever on across the pink sands in search of its next meal.
~One Thousand Years Later~
Like many great historical moments, this one happened entirely by accident. Sephians had experimented with social cooperation for a couple of hundred years and learned that small groups enhanced individual survival.
Evolving physically while the Sephians evolved socially, surviving species filled vacant niches and thrived, prey and predator alike. The Catastrophe created a higher moisture content than in their natural environment, but the entire point of evolution is survival of the fittest and ablest to adjust.
Individual Sephians were easy prey for juggernauts but had learned to semi–domesticate a small breed of pack-beast that became camp followers and protectors. Scoopers, named for a ring of collapsible razor-sharp clamshell mouths, were beach ball size and shape and attacked in packs by gouging mouth size chunks of their quarry in passing.
Juggernauts were their favorite prey, both for their abundance of flesh and their flavor, but one juggernaut was more than an equal match for even a full pack of scoopers. If a juggernaut survived injuries from the dashing assailants long enough, the pack slowed down, and the juggernaut circled around to crush them where they lay exhausted.
Sephians on their own had no way to fight a juggernaut, and once it was on their scent, it would relentlessly pursue them without tiring. Before befriending scoopers, they split into separate directions and sacrificed the slowest while the rest escaped, which was their only defense.
When Sephians and scoopers worked together, juggernaut advantage disappeared. The scoopers would stalk and harry until the pack began to tire, then Sephians would take over to draw it off. Juggernauts always preferred chasing Sephians, perhaps because they could not fight back. The Sephians would take the juggernaut in a long circle and lead it back to the freshly rested scoopers. Three or four rounds usually ended in a feast for the scoopers and one less danger for Sephians.