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Changelings: Insurgence

By Liam Corley

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Chapter One

Beatra Maro Personal Log
I tell myself these days are like those when we first met: dispatched to different planets, committed to different lives, yet amazed to know ourselves as one. Trusting. Wanting. Loving.
It’s a lie that helps me sleep. I lie to our son too. I tell him we’re a family, even though the war, the killing, the hate, keep us apart.
I’m caught in a hole, a black, devouring hole, that’s taking even my memories of you. Soon I will be that girl again, the one who never knew you. But I’ll be older. Cold. And the part of me where you fit will be dead.
#
Ascanius II, Fifthday, Eighthmonth, Year 296 Interstellar Era
#
The familiar stream of chatter in Tauran’s implant, punctuated by the thumping of an auto cannon, ended as an enormous explosion made all noise cease. Tauran staggered as a chunk of stone hurled from the center of the cavern struck his chest plate and skittered past, followed by a gust of superheated air. Ten thousand years of technological advancement, and I find a way to get bludgeoned by a stone. Ignoring the ache in his breathing, Tauran surged into the cavern, toward the source of the blast.
Flares launched by his assault team hovered like angry red stars at the roof of the cave, casting shadows around scattered boulders and stalagmites.
Too many shadows. The chamber was huge, and the quick strike he’d planned was turning into a bust. The cavern was too far under the extinct volcano that formed it for scanners to have picked up its size. Now Tauran’s team would pay for their ignorance in precious seconds, minutes even, for the defenders’ shock to turn into resolve, surprise into escape.
Tauran had missed the start of the raid because of his shuttle’s slow descent from orbit. Even now, the pilot’s words dug into him like a burr. “You should be on the Gemini, sir. By regulations, the commanding officer stays off-planet during a ground assault.” Well, slag regs. Rules weren’t going to stop him this time. He broke cover and began to run.
Just as he caught sight of the assault team, his XO’s voice sounded sharply in his ear.
“Cease fire, cease fire. No more hostiles. Say again, no more hostiles.”
Tauran skidded to a halt.
A cluster of disarmed mutants, changelings, knelt in the center of the cavern. Commandos from other sectors herded more of the deformed humans to the group. Some changelings were bare-chested, protected only by the organic armor of keratinoid scales covering their bodies. Others showed the more common changeling deformities of gigantism, exoskeletal growths, and cranial ridges. Field medics moved through, quickly triaging the ones with the worst injuries. Uninjured ones were fitted with cryo-restraints. Scores of gelid mutant eyes followed Tauran as he surveyed the scene.
In less than a second, he dismissed the captured ‘Lings as nothing more than soldiers. So much for nabbing the leaders and civilians who traveled with them. The captives were breathing without helmets, so environment controls must still be up. Good. He retracted his visor. The cold air burned his face, but eyes and ears were better than helmet sensors for what he was looking for.
Smoke seared his nostrils. He dashed from boulder to boulder, blinking away tears from fumes, searching for other bodies. Stun grenades in the distance played his ears like a drum.
Commandos who caught sight of his hooded eyes and chiseled brown face stiffened and turned back to their tasks. Two slipped behind him like ghosts, pulling security. Tauran acknowledged them with a curt nod. There was no hiding from guardsmen who’d followed him for years that he was in the soup with them instead of monitoring the fight from orbit. But even being among his own didn’t relieve the knot in his gut.
Where were they? He couldn’t have been wrong about the DNA traces they’d found on the surface. They had to be here, no matter how crazy it seemed. Three years he’d been chasing them, more than half the time Lausus had been alive.
Tauran panted in the thin air. Forcing a deep breath, he unfocused his gaze to take in the whole cavern. There had to be a clue. Had to be.
His nostrils prickled in the cold, and then his breath stopped. Tauran lunged to a pile of rags and bedding almost invisible in a corner but for a flutter of yellow, and stumbled to his knees. Scooping the rags to his face, he inhaled deeply. His eyes rolled back as familiar scents triggered images. A woman in tears. A boy not old enough to walk. Shouts, and the faint warmth of lips brushing his own with fire.
Beneath armor, a flush spread across his chest.
So close and yet . . .
Tauran let his wife’s torn scarf trickle from his fingers. Every muscle in his face tensed to keep the evidence of disappointment inside. He stood and turned to the soldiers who’d formed a cordon behind him.
“What happened?”
The commando closest flashed a look at the other.
“Intel didn’t say they had a personal transporter, Commander.”
“Dec’ing intel,” Tauran swore without heat, as if explosive decompression would do anything to the AI they used for predictive analysis. “Why’d they have time to use it?”
“Cave is big. We pushed through double-quick, but—” The commando hesitated. “The last ‘Lings destroyed the transporter instead of defending themselves.”
Tauran grunted and followed him to the mangled device. The transporter was too sophisticated to have come from a changeling world. Its control panel was seared completely away, leaving the computing core no more than a puddle of slag. No chance of ripping destination coordinates from that. A dead changeling sprawled next to the transporter, his face contorted into a smile of agony and triumph. Was triumph having something worth dying for? Dropping to a knee, Tauran closed the mocking eyes.
Behind him, a throat cleared. Tauran turned to find a tall commando in battered armor. Like his, Palinura’s visor was up. Sweat steamed from his executive officer’s hard features and fell on her pursed lips. As she tapped the ragged scar on Tauran’s chest plate, her titanium hand rang like a leaden bell.
“You’re a little early for the debrief, Commander. Didn’t trust your XO to follow the rules of engagement?”
Tauran grimaced. “Rules aren’t what worry me.”
“Obviously.” A storm raged in the commando’s green eyes. “Sensors show only two escaped.”
“Only two,” Tauran repeated, his hands balling into fists. His lip twitched as a howl rose up inside. Why had he believed this time would be different?
Palinura’s expression hardened, and her eyes wandered toward a groaning mutant attended by two medics. Sputtering flares revealed other dying and dead changelings scattered around the cave, no armor other than the bony extrusions and scales given by their mutations, no weapons more dangerous than welding irons and gas-powered slingers.
Palinura swept her arm to take in the entire cave.
“They never win, and yet they fight. Why?”
Tauran scowled.
Because we attacked them, of course. Wouldn’t you fight? ‘Lings almost always kept to the defensive, too wary to engage Commission forces directly. Tauran would have been happy to leave them alone if changeling independence didn’t threaten interplanetary supply lines. The mutants didn’t need to attack to hold the rest of the Commission hostage.
“You think we’re winning?”
Palinura shrugged. “We had no casualties beyond a few burns. The only dead ‘Lings were shooters. A lot are more humanoid than usual. Must be first-gens. Two’ve got no cranial or exoskeletal growths, and either aren’t changelings or are too early for deformities to show.”
“Show me,” Tauran replied. “Could also be ‘Ling sympathizers or relatives.”
Palinura’s gaze flicked away. “We’ll gather samples for testing, of course.”
Tauran tensed his face into an expressionless mask. He was making a hash of this. Pali had every right to be offended.
Dismissing Pali back to mop-up operations, Tauran crossed over to the changeling’s makeshift command center. A stack of defensive plans smoldered on a crate, all pointless now. He scattered singed fragments as he dug through the pile. At the bottom, he uncovered a mostly intact drawing, so crude it could have been made by a child: a stick figure with an oversized star on its chest, not unlike the insignia of a Guard Corps commander. The figure was faceless, either by design or because it was incomplete. The figure’s badge of office distinguished it rather than eyes or a mouth. Despite smudges and quavering lines, the drawing’s deep markings suggested considerable care.
Was Lausus already drawing? At what age do kids begin to draw?
Gingerly, he slipped the paper beneath his chest armor. Unbidden, he glanced back at the slagged transporter. Had he been five seconds away from recovering his son? Ten? Whatever it’d been, now it would be a million or more.
The whomp of a distant stun grenade snapped Tauran back into the moment. Across the room, Palinura unclipped her MaG and gave him an expectant smile. He nodded and lowered his visor. Nothing like a good fight to speed forgiveness.
This time, Tauran counted all the way to ten before he shouldered past his guards and charged.
#
Mitta pushed the bioscan reports away in disgust. She’d spent hours reviewing a DNA sample, looking for variations in chromatin-based processes that might indicate the beginnings of the changeling mutation. Grimacing, she massaged a sore point behind her neck. Despite her closed eyes, patterns of telomere dysfunction scrolled in her mind. Capped ends of chromosomes sorted themselves into increasingly subtle abnormalities.
Turning to her comm pad, Mitta wiped away a handful of messages from family members of people she’d recently diagnosed with late-onset mutations. Nothing she could say would help them understand why their loved one had become a changeling or make a difference in relocation orders that had already been carried out. Not a dec’ing thing.
Hope-killer. That’s what her co-workers called her. Whether it was the mother of diagnosed girl pleading for time to settle her affairs before accompanying her child to a quarantine world or another specialist reporting a suspected origin aberration in a gene, Mitta smashed fantasies with unrelenting analysis and facts. Fact: the changeling mutation was irreversible. Fact: every generation of reproduction beyond the mutation’s initial expression brought the genomic line closer to imbecility. Fact: humanity was running out of mutation-free genomic lines. Fact: the species was doomed. Fact: so was she.
Mitta rubbed soreness from her eyes. A dozen research stations lined the walls of the Genomic Security Institute laboratory on Regulon, all packed with gene sequencers, methylation scanners, and other tools. The heavy bulk of three IVIs, in vitro incubation pods, dominated the far wall, each gestating a second or third generation mutant for research purposes. All would be terminated before viability.
None of her colleagues were in the lab this late. Ever since the reproduction moratorium had all but announced to the universe that Mitta and her work were failures, they had tip-toed around. Her staff used to say good-bye and tease her about being the last to leave and first to arrive. Not anymore. Now they slipped silently away like vapor on an airless moon.
Standing, Mitta arched her back into a stretch. Her unmade cot was pushed behind two desks for a modicum of visual privacy. Was it worth walking to the nutrition station for a cal drink? She rolled her neck, testing its stiffness. No. Food later.
Just as she turned toward the cot, an alert sounded on her comm pad. The device was prox-coded to her DNA and showed an incoming CRITIC, the highest priority message that could be transmitted. A CRITIC locked access to all other comm pad functions until it was delivered. She stifled a groan. This was not the time to handhold some politician over her most recent funding request. The changeling war gobbled up money that used to come her way automatically. Politicians never understood the science, but they still insisted on regular updates they could use to advance their rivalries and hidden agendas. The fools should just let her work.
“Dimitta Diiudico, Genomic Security Institute, authenticating.”
After a moment, the holographic projection of Consul Maro appeared.
“Mitta, any news from the latest sample?”
The consul’s cheery voice made her want to smack him.
“No, Consul, but we’re still analyzing it. It will probably be inconclusive like all the others, but there’s still a few more trails to explore.”
A daily report didn’t require the encryption of a CRITIC. Why was the consul wasting her time?
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. No matter. You’ll have to delegate that to one of your assistants. I’ve received authorization from the council to temporarily reassign you.”
Mitta sat down hard. “Reassign? What could possibly be more important than fighting this mutation?”
“Research hasn’t been very effective, Mitta, not in the years you’ve been Chief Specialist, not in the years I’ve been consul. And we’re at a crisis point now.”
Mitta frowned. Who was he to lecture her about effective research and crisis points?
“Hear me out. The changeling mutation has been with us for, what, less than 60 years?”
“Over 130.”
“Ahh, yes, but I mean in a public way. Since we established mutant colonies and worker worlds. Anyhow, that’s not my point. What would you say to a chance to gather genomic samples from before the mutation ever appeared, before even the Resource Wars?”
The Resource Wars had been Terra’s last gasp, a final conflagration before the East Asian Alliance vaporized the polar ice caps and Euro-American reprisals made the planet uninhabitable. Sixteen billion humans had died, an appalling atrocity that turned the few thousand astronauts and space colonists in the International Space Commission into humanity’s only hope of avoiding extinction. And after four hundred years, that hope was unraveling by the spread of the changeling mutation.
“I would say that’s unnecessary and unwise given how much irradiation damage any traces of human DNA remaining on Terra would have. We have sequencing data from as far back as the late twentieth-century CE. None of it has helped localize the mutation within the genome.”
“I mean living samples, Specialist. Humans.”
Her breath caught. “There are humans living on Terra? Despite the quarantine?”
“There were. And we’re testing a device that should be able to send you to them. Back in time to collect DNA samples as well as living tissue actively growing and replicating. For that matter, genomic stocks we can use to repair or renew our existing lines. Anything you think could help us to purge the changeling mutation forever.”
Mitta shook her head. Why did the consul sound like a madman?
“Wait, I don’t even know where to start with all the wrong assumptions in what you just said. What good would old DNA do us? Just because we’ve only diagnosed the changeling mutation in the Interstellar Era doesn’t mean that’s when it arose. And even if we could get viable DNA from the past, we can’t know if splicing it into ours, or even templating off it, would purge the mutation.”
The consul regarded her with an amused smile, his fingers pressed together in a diamond shape. “Always the scientist, Mitta. At least you aren’t questioning whether time travel is possible. Some have.”
Mitta huffed. “That goes without saying. I have enough impossible work in my field without worrying about physics and space-time. But Consul, anyone on my staff could gather samples from past Terrans, if you can reach them. For that matter, you could send commandos to scoop up a herd of Terrans and bring them back here to renew the root stock of their poor, degenerated descendants. Why reassign me?”
The consul narrowed his gaze, as if weighing what she needed to know.
“We may only have one shot at this, Mitta. We have to send our best. Someone who can run analysis in the field to find out if ancient Terrans can save us or not. That’s not going to be a commando, even though we’re sending one, or a GSI staffer who gave up on finding a solution years ago. And you know we’re out of time to beat the mutation any other way. Do you really have anything to keep you in the lab?”
The question was a punch in the gut. Waking or sleeping, she’d been immersed in DNA systems, chromatin structures, core histones, codon usage patterns—anywhere she might look to uncover the mutation’s origin—for twenty years. Two decades of failure. Reluctantly, she shook her head.
“It’s possible something we never thought to measure could provide a clue to the mutation’s origin,” she said with hesitation. “Something has to have changed. Telomeres. Histones. Something. We have the sequence of every person born since the beginning of the Stellar Commission. We can synthesize any stretch of their DNA. But none of it has done any good. Maybe the limitations of sequencing techniques before the Resource Wars or how they dealt with non-coding RNA left out a key piece of the puzzle. It can’t hurt to look directly.”
The consul nodded vigorously, his brows furrowing into a solemn expression he must have fancied was encouraging. “That’s the spirit. The director of the corporation that developed the time-shifter requested you by name. Members of the council also insisted on you. They know how close we are to the end.”
The end. Mitta glanced at the discarded bioscans and then at the hulking IVIs. A pulsing scarlet diode marked heartbeats of changeling fetuses inside. The lights throbbed in concert with blood rushing through her temples. The changeling mutation had consumed her life, bite by daily bite, taking family, friends, and now her career. But that didn’t mean she had to go down easily.
“Very well. When do I leave?”
The consul looked at something out of the holo’s view.
“Four days. Not a word to any of your staff. Just gather some supplies and be ready to move at my signal.”
With a farewell nod, the Consul terminated the transmission.
Mitta’s stomach grumbled.

#
Back in his quarters on the Gemini, Tauran scraped the last of the carbonized residue from his chest plate and reinforced the pitted groove with a micro welder. The grime on his body could wait. No one died of stench or sweat. His ritual complete, he guzzled a liter of lukewarm, reclaimed water.
As he stowed the armor on its tree, his comm panel signaled an incoming CRITIC. A throbbing red alert screen made other command functions on the desk-sized screen fade away. On this ship, only the consul merited comms of that priority.
Infallible timing. The consul must have been monitoring tactical comms to know Tauran had left the planet. He kicked off his lev boots and limped to the panel. From the light of the CRITIC pulsing behind it, Lausus’s drawing looked stained with blood.
“Tauran Paulus, Commander, Commission Guard Corps. Authenticating.”
A holographic projection of Consul Solum Maro appeared after several seconds, a reminder that Tauran was far from Regulon, the Commission’s capitol planet. Once quantum encryption engaged, the lag would disappear.
“Congratulations, Commander,” the consul’s dry voice sneered. “You’ve smashed another scouting outpost Central Analysis didn’t know existed.”
Tauran’s heart rate spiked at the belittling description of the raid on Ascanius II. He nodded stiffly.
“Thank you, Consul. Central Analysis is gene sludge. It didn’t know the base was there, and it sure as slag doesn’t know why.”
Two seconds of seeming courtesy and the consul already had him in a boiling rage. That had always been Solum’s way.
“Even if that’s true, it’s no reason to investigate it yourself. I didn’t promote you so you could keep on playing foot-soldier. Let Palinura do the job you trained her for.”
Tauran fixed the consul with a patient stare.
After a waiting a fruitless moment for a response, the consul wrinkled his nose and pressed on.
“You won’t find her, you know.”
“Who says I’m looking?”
Neither of them said Beatra’s name. The consul had only mentioned his daughter a few times since she’d fled the Commission with her mutant son. For his part, Tauran hadn’t even bothered to inform his father-in-law in person about his wife’s self-imposed exile. He’d buried the details in an official report that the consul learned about from an alert staff member.
“You’ve been lucky, or else someone would be questioning the glacial pace of your campaign.”
“Lucky?”
“It doesn’t matter now. I’m recalling you to Regulon.”
Tauran’s finger stopped worrying at Lausus’s drawing. “What? Just for a little caution?”
“No,” Solum replied. “Whatever personal campaign you’re waging, I can’t tell it from a strategically brilliant one. Neither can the council. Besides, you’ve repatriated as many changelings as you’ve killed, and that’s a service too. As much as we won’t tolerate them as enemies, the changelings need to know that no matter how much their mutations have changed them, they are still a part of us. There’s a place for them in our society.”
Tauran stood at attention as his father-in-law played to a crowd that wasn’t there.
“Then why?” Tauran steeled himself. The consul let silence gather after Tauran’s question to sharpen anticipation. Beatra would never have let her father indulge in such theatrics, but Tauran was a subordinate. And alone.
“We’re breaking the Terran quarantine, Tauran. I’m assembling a research team for a mission to the planet’s surface, and I want the whole thing under military control. Your control.”
Tauran’s breath caught. Terra had been quarantined for over eighty years and uninhabitable for centuries before that. Even in its injured state, the human home planet was worth protecting from what its descendants were becoming, at least until no other retreat in the universe was feasible.
“What kind of research requires military support?”
“Research I want to be able to shut down if it gets out of hand. That’s why you’ll be the commander.”
“Surely there are others you can trust to babysit a group of scientists.”
Solum snorted. “The project has the unanimous backing of the council. And it’s . . . unusual.” He lowered his voice despite the quantum encrypted comm. “A corporation has developed a means of examining history directly.”
Tauran frowned. “What does ‘directly’ mean? More artifacts? Another doomsday vault with ancient viruses they want to revive?”
“When I say ‘directly,’ I mean directly. First-hand. Their shifter—that’s what they call it, why I don’t know—moves backwards in time.”
“Time travel?” Tauran said with exaggerated precision.
“Don’t be a slag-head,” Solum snapped. “Yes, time travel. And I’ve seen it.”
Tauran checked the encryption hash-tags to be sure this wasn’t a joke or a fake. “How could someone have made a breakthrough like this without CA knowing?” It was a cheap shot, but consul or not, he was still angry.
“The Corporation for Historical Research has labs on Pallena V. Off the information net.”
And outside the zone of Commission control. If the consul had traveled there to see time-shifting firsthand, he must be serious indeed.
“How long has this corporation had it? Is it reliable?”
“A year. Maybe longer. None of our engineers can make heads or tails of the schematics. We’d build our own, but, frankly, we don’t have the time or tech to do it. So we’re borrowing one of their engineers to install a prototype on a scout ship. It’s sketchy, I know, but the best we can do under the circumstances.”
“I still don’t know why you need me. Take Palinura. She knows more field engineering, and I’m sure your scientists will find her easier to work with.”
“No way. The team doesn’t need another engineer. It needs a fail-safe.”
An executioner, you mean.
“CHR’s director has unusual sway with the council. I’ve never seen them act unanimously like this. That’s why I need you. I don’t trust him. I don’t trust anyone who has lived so much of his life off the net. But that won’t matter if we can get into Terra’s past.” Solum leaned forward, his voice rising in excitement. “We might be able to gather fresh DNA to help us fight the changeling mutation. Maybe even end it. You know we can’t let that kind of opportunity be controlled by an outworlder.”
Control. It was always about politics with Solum. The CHR director must be more than just a smart engineer to keep his operations off the net. The net was essential for any communications or computing beyond rudimentary functions, but it was also a routine part of government surveillance. Tauran had used it to trace many changeling smugglers.
After a pause as long as Solum’s, Tauran replied, “Can you really trust anyone?”
Solum’s tone softened. “Lausus would be, what, five years old now? I still can’t understand why Beatra didn’t trust me to protect him. We have places for children from the best families.”
Tauran gripped the comm panel edge convulsively. “She didn’t stop to think.”
Solum blinked. “Sometimes I wonder about you, Tauran. You spent eight years with my daughter. Eight years. You of all people know she never did anything without thinking. She’d plan the most efficient or time-consuming way to walk from one side of a station to the other, depending on her mood. Even when she was a child, I couldn’t answer a simple question about my day without her thinking about how she would have lived it differently or better.” Solum slowed, and the edge dropped out of his voice. “I may not know why she took Lausus away, but I don’t for a minute believe it was because she didn’t think about what she should do.”
Tauran glared at the consul but said nothing. As angry as it made him, Solum was right. Beatra had good reasons not to trust her father. Or him.
With effort, he pushed a frenzy of swirling questions into a box. How far could Beatra take Lausus in the time he’d be away on this mission? Would he ever pick up their trail again? Would any of it matter if he didn’t find a way to end the war that made their reunion impossible?
Tauran ignored the acid in his gut. “When do I leave?”
“Immediately. Director Semeion expects to meet you soon. You’re not being interviewed, exactly, but try to make a good impression. I think the council would support me if I had to appoint you over his objections, but I’d rather not have the complication of needing to find out.”
Tauran nodded and reached for his boots. The holograph winked out, and he put his armor back on, tightening it more than necessary on the ache growing in his chest. He ran a thumb over the newly mended chest plate. If only healing the breach between humans and changelings were so easy. He tucked Lausus’s sketch into a pocket and tried to imagine an older version of a face he hadn’t seen in years. It was too hard. Even Beatra’s face was fuzzy without a holo. If he could control time, there was only one moment he’d revisit. The night she left. Could the outworlder Director make that happen?
Tauran keyed a remote command on his comm panel. Immediately, the Gemini left orbit. At full thrust, he could reach the nearest nexus in two days. Forty-eight standard hours. Seventeen thousand, two-hundred eighty seconds. Not fast enough.
#
Beatra Maro Personal Log Entry
We lost Castor yesterday. This is getting harder. Tully says we’ll have to split up. Somehow they can sense us in groups. I don’t see how that’s possible, but physics was never my field. I haven’t heard from Semeion in a million cycles. I’m sure he knows about yesterday though. Lausus cries whenever I put him down. He’s seen too much. I’ve seen too much. But he’s getting so heavy.
Must get out of this fog. Fog. What a word. Haven’t been on a planet with that much vapor in years. Tully thinks we’ll be fine for at least a few cycles. He says the Commission is preparing for something big and won’t have time for small fry like us. I hope he’s right. By Terra, I hope he’s right.

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