"David Freer - The Forlorn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Freer Dave)

This ultimate form of hell had not produced dehumanization, as it had in worker brood sows. Instead it
produced a terrible richness, a flowering of poetry, philosophy and mathematics, all directed toward one
end: the ultimate destruction of the Morkth. Now they'd found their toolтАФS'kith 235. And it was even
more pleasant than masturbation. It provided a basic human need they'd all been long denied: simple
physical contact with another person. For some seven years now the Alpha-Morkth warrior breeding
program had been quietly sabotaged. At least eleven thousand new Morkth-men were growing up
through the indoctrination classes. Passing unnoticed, yet with a terrifying gene cocktail of high
intelligence, intense curiosity and instinctive secretive cunning, virtually from their first reasoning thought.
This latter feature was S'kith 235's unique mutation, but he bred true, in more than eighty percent of
cases. His male offspring were passing undetected up the layers of the Alpha-Morkth warrior training. All
around them other lines were culled. But S'kith 235's children were tailored to survive and flourish in the
hive.

It was certain that a reasonable percentage would, like S'kith 235, find a way around the
just-post-puberty castration rite of passage, when the Alpha-Morkth collected and selected the semen
that was frozen and used for future breeding. And if they had testicles . . . sooner or later they'd find their
way down to the breeding cages. His female offspring were already being selected as potential warrior
sows. The vertebrate cockroach was adapting yet again. It would beat this system too, before inbreeding
weakened the strain.

In the dark, the statisticians calculated again. There was no need. They knew the answer. They simply
did it for the sheer satisfaction. The point of break-even probability had long since been reached. They
knew that with each S'kith-fathered conception the time of Morkth destruction came closer. They also
knew that with each conception the chances of S'kith's capture grew greater. S'kith 235 knew nothing of
love. He had little understanding of what the brew of emotions and hormones were that drove him down
into this dangerous place, again and again and again. But among the warrior-brood women he was dearly
loved. And they were already preparing to mourn him.

It was the twenty percent of his offspring that were culled that were reaching to enmesh S'kith 235. He
had manipulated the gene records after the women had pointed out that this would certainly trap him if he
did not. After his changes the gene records of his offspring were not what they were supposed to be.
Resultantly, when the cull-tissue sample was analyzed, the two did not match. An improbably high
number showed a particular chromosome group. A group not in the sperm-bank records. A mutant. A
mutation that bred without Morkth supervision. Slowly, slowly, the methodical net of the Morkth was
closing in on the Alpha-Morkth guard on the roof of the hive.

There were two possible ways that S'kith 235 could evade certain capture and death at the hands of his
masters. A Beta-Morkth raid, or flight. The probability of the former was about 0.2 percent. The
Beta-Morkth would simply kill him, it was true; they despised the Alpha's use of humanity. The human
race was something to be destroyed utterly, and not consorted with. The probability of S'kith 235 fleeing
was even slimmer: The hive was his universe, a conditioning going to the core of his being from his earliest
thought. The Alpha-Morkth had attempted to breed the kind of loyalty which was instinctive to them, and
constantly reinforced by the pheromones unique to each queen's gene line. At the same time they had
done their best to remove all normal human emotional cues: love, family and sex.

They had failed to make S'kith loyal to anything but himself. In humans loyalty is a two-way street, and
the hive gave none of the emotional return humans require above such physical things as nutrition. But