There didn’t seem to be any sense in hanging around. The ship was loaded, my package safely stowed in with the baggage of a hundred or so miners from the mineral holes on Sheppard-1, destination Terran Moon for some R & R.
I knew Lester would receive the package at Toshiba Station and plant the contents for me on his next run to Earth.
Earth. I wondered why it was called that. It was sort of like calling Aldebaran-3 “Aggregate Chondrite” or Sirius Prime “Carbon Sludge.” No other planet I knew of was named for the stuff of which it was made. Even Mercury was made mostly of iron.
It was the planet that had spawned most of the life in the galaxy, at least the aggressive sentient life. Yeah, there were a few intelligent life forms here and there – the fish things on that water planet no one ever went to and the oddly humanoid Pargees discovered on Barak, but for the most part, if you ran into another creature piloting a ship or settling a planet or building a city or something, its lineage could be traced back to Earth.
That’s why I thought it would be fitting to unleash my little present on the place that started it all. The scourge of humanity had taken millions of years to evolve but only a couple thousand to spread throughout the universe.
The earth had become an overheated ball of waste topped here and there with hermetic hives. The great cities, as these hives were called, housed Earth’s populations while the sterile polluted seas provided energy to cool them. Resources were brought in from the outworlds, along with foods and luxury items. The birthrates were so low that the population controls had long been abandoned, and settlers for new worlds came from previously-settled worlds.
I knew Earth history – there had been dinosaurs, mammals, insects, aquatic species of all sorts. But only man, the most destructive and ingenious, had survived. When the planet heated up, most plants and animals died off within a short time, leaving only the human population which learned in a hurry to obtain food and other resources from the thriving outworlds. Museums and the like housed replicas and DNA stores of most of the past life, but it was a capital offense to import life from the outworlds. Even tourists had to undergo an offensively thorough cleansing.
I wasn’t born on Earth – hardly anyone was – but I knew enough about it to understand that the cradle of sentient life was a rotten pesthole which had vomited the human race out into the pristine universe. Something had to be done.
Only another plague of the sort that had colonized the galaxy would do. I spent a long time studying the hives and working out how all the other life forms had perished. I wanted to unleash something that would give a poetic balance to the situation, if not a real balance, which seemed impossible.
Viruses and bacteria were out, as Earth humans had genetically engineered themselves to be immune to such things. This turned out to be a good thing for settlers as well, enabling phenomenal survival rates on planets where life had developed to the microbial stage. Anything large would require care or sustenance, so that was out. But these were perfect, their growth synchronized by feeding and virtually indestructible in the modern hives.
I had Lester time the release so that the multiplication would take place during one of the monthly blackouts when the lighting systems in the hives were recharged. In the old days, these were thought of as romantic times, and the birthrate always spiked nine months later.
But I just wanted the wholesale panic that would ensue when the lights came back on. I knew the habits of my plague – calm in the darkness, but frantic in sudden light. And for some reason, they were repugnant to humans in a basic way, the thought of them enough to elicit shudders of disgust.
I couldn’t wait. Earth humans would be waiting for the rechargers to pop on, flooding the hives with light. And when that happened, and Blattidae Periplaneta Americana came streaming through the air ducts by the millions, the panic would be immeasurable.
But that was only the beginning. When the hive dwellers stepped on them, and heard for the first time in hundreds of years that crunching sound cockroaches make, they would truly be terrorized.
Fabulous story, Kate, as always. It’s good to read your work again.