children and young people who were required to enter into long contracts of servitude. After years of this, when the first travelers had all gone and were replaced by their children’s, children’s, children, an uprising began in Three Hills and sparked a war. The timing of the uprising had coincided with one of Tanaka’s longer periods of absence from the public eye, and he returned in time to lead the battle to quell the main body of rebels in their first settlement.
This civil war, as small scale and brief as it was, wrought a destruction on the settlements and almost left Three Hills burnt to the ground before peace was agreed. After that, years of oppression reigned until Tanaka finally handed down control to another of his name, a great-great grandson perhaps, and normality returned.
For a while at least, because their war and the huge inferno had attracted the attention of something devastating and unexpected.
“It is called The Swarm,” Harrison said, his eyes wandering upwards as he spoke of the terrifying things in the dark, “and it comes each moon when it is at its darkest and no light casts onto the earth. They have come at other times, according to legend, but never in the light.”
“What are they?” I blurted out, not even certain that I knew I was going to speak until it happened.
“The Swarm? They are large insects, like the ants in the jungles and the beetles in the leaf dirt. They strip anything in their path clean; I’ve seen entire bodies of men cleaned down to dry bones in minutes,” he said, with an almost passionate glee at the frightening violence. “If they find a wall high enough and nothing attracts their attention, they simply carry on without bothering us, and that is how we have lived for generations. We are at peace with the others, because any of us could so easily bring death to people by damaging their walls and letting The Swarm do the rest. It is what the legends call mutually assured destruction.”
Eyes met knowingly among our group. The world had ended, the planet had changed, a thousand years had passed and still the concept of humans eradicating one another endured.
“Do you know how Tanaka executes people?” Tori stepped in to ask. A few shakes of heads answered her question.
“He has them stripped naked and staked to the ground for The Swarm to devour them,” she finished, leaving a silence which stretched until another voice spoke.
“So,” said Jones, shocking people by speaking out loud when he usually kept everything to himself, “we’ve gone and pitched our bloody tents in the middle of a cold war with killer insects on the loose?”
“Looks that way,” I said, half in shock. I cast my eyes up to the others; some quiet in their own thoughts, a few scanning the tree line out of defensive habit, and some staring at Harrison and Tori in the hope that they had better news. Amir perked up first, returning to a subject he still hadn’t fully understood.
“So,” he said with a furrowed brow, “is the first Tanaka still alive?”
“The first?” Tori answered, shooting an almost embarrassed look at Harrison. “Of course not, how could he be?”
It was Amir’s turn to glance to his people for support, and Hendricks bailed him out.
“What do you know about the very beginning?” he asked. “About how we survived the asteroid?”
Harrison’s uneasy look told him that he didn’t know much, or at least he was wary of saying what he believed in front of people who would know more of the truth than he suspected he did. He wasn’t a leader because he was quick to demonstrate a lack of knowledge.
“Only that our ancestors went underground …”
“Yes, into a facility controlled by another Annie, but do you know how they lived for so long there?” Hendricks asked carefully, receiving a shake of Harrison’s head.
“We all went into something called cryostasis, those who went underground as well as us in space,” he said, raising an unnecessary finger toward the sky to unconsciously make his point, “and that kept us in a sleep-like state where our bodies didn’t age. I think that is how the first Tanaka stayed alive for so long; he went in and out of cryostasis for years at a time before coming back out to give orders.”
Harrison and Tori exchanged a look. One which was both disbelieving and simultaneously seemed as though the distance between their beliefs and the facts had suddenly