Same pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09 as "The Suliibruum Scream," overlaid in a different configuration upon itself -- and to hear the swarm buzz, scroll down to near the end!
Two things immediately came to mind upon realizing this creature was not a myth from 3,000 years ago in the Suliibruum imagination. The first was Emily Dickinson's poem -- "I heard a fly buzz -- when I died" -- because this was definitely a candidate for what she heard.
The second was from the book of Ecclesiastes, contemporaneous with the destruction of the Thakesian civilization by the guardians of the Suliibruum: "When riches increase, they increase that eat them."
In essence, the millennia-old records my uncle, Admiral Benjamin Banneker-Jackson, pieced together in his thirties and the scientific record made by him then showed the same thing: there was no evidence of organic material left in the Thakesian civilization that should have left some trace of its decomposition -- with six entire planets having their crusts and atmospheres blown almost clean off by the Suliibruum Scream, some elements common to life should have been in the dust clouds even 3,000 years later that showed that.
Nope, and the survivors accounts showed why: all that had been eaten, some before death had actually occurred on every planet, for the atmospheres had been slower to go than most of the crust. Figures varied on what could have done that, but, between the two cultures that had records, we had a general symmetry for the lead creature in mind. The Suliibruum and Thakesian drawings differed, in the end, on what they highlighted ... obviously, the Thakesian survivors saw these creatures while trying to escape them, and the Suliibruum, who had warned the Thakesians not to invade, worshiped their protectors.
My crew, taking over the data that Adm. Banneker-Jackson had compiled while a lieutenant commander 50 years earlier, found something else interesting: the order of events by which the Thakesian worlds in their comfortable habitable zones were. My uncle had noted that the outermost habitable worlds and the innermost habitable worlds were spared, and that those worlds were not comfortably habitable ... one could not build what are generally thought of as an advanced society on any of those worlds.
What we found from further review was that the Thakesian comfortably habitable worlds had indeed been destroyed with from the outermost first, beginning with Thakesi 9, it had not been sequential from Thakesi 9 down to Thakesi 4 -- Thakesi 9 had been first, then Thakesi 5, 7, 4, 6, and 8, in that order.
So we rolled the clock back on the computer to see where each of these planets had been in orbit ... no, that wasn't the issue, because the nearest planets from the direction of how anyone coming from Suliibruum would enter the system were actually Thakesi 4, 5, and 6.
"But do we know how the Thakesians preferred to come home?" my first officer Helmut Allemande asked. "The Solar System has nine planets, but humans are always doing their trajectories for planet no. 3 no matter what direction we are coming from."
Turns out that the Thakesians docked their fleet in the vicinity of Thakesi 9, and from there indeed had favorites ... Thakesi 5, 7, 4, 6, and 8, in that order. Not only that: raw materials were generally processed on Thakesi 5 and 7, and then shipped for consumer use to Thakesi 4, 6, and 8.
"So, basically," Lt. Almuz said to Cmdr. Allemande, you take Suliibruum stuff not knowing it is all a bunch of homing beacons, and then the guardians follow you home."
"Basically, Lieutenant. "If you look at the Baloanaweigh worlds and how they were blown away last week and probably are going to be munched on next week, the same pattern holds. The plasma-based Suliibruum are literally just following the traces of the worlds from place to place that those things go."
"Do we know if any contraband material made it out of the system?" I asked.
"It is being investigated at this very moment, Captain, but perhaps not with the urgency it should be," Cmdr. Allemande said.
I called a conference with Commodore John Allwood, Admiral Banneker-Jackson, and Admiral Elian Bodega who had responsibility for the fleet attached to this matter, and brought to the table the information my marriage to Capt. Rufus Dixon of the commercial fleet had brought to me.
"We can save time by isolating who does shipping from new systems -- some commercial shippers on the frontiers only do inbound shipping."
I remembered the conversation so well ... my husband and his business partner, Capt. Marcus Aurelius Kirk, were explaining to a company head of a younger shipping company: "Oh, no, Kirk and Dixon Shipping is not your competitor -- we don't do shipping of resources from new regions, but only do shipping to new regions for suppliers whose materials have a good paper trail. We've been in business close to 30 years, and one of the things we know for sure is that you can get into a galaxy of hurt shipping raw materials from new areas in space where humans haven't lived for 100 years and made sure that A. the materials themselves aren't toxic, B. The sentient locals are OK with us moving the materials, C. The microbial locals are not going to now or later do something under conditions of transport or in a new planetary or stellar environment that is going to wipe everybody out, and D. Everything A-C has been checked and double-checked and triple-checked. We're not going to compete with you for that. You are competing with the galaxy itself."
My husband and his business partner had a lot of grateful competitors who were still alive off that advice.
"Captain Biles-Dixon, that just sounds like common sense to me," Comm. Allwood said to me about that, much later on.
"Everyone didn't go to the Academy and make straight As, sir," I said. "Everybody didn't even stay awake during the Mars study and about why Mars can never be home even though it is home for some just because perchlorate salts that we know about are so pervasive and how everything else is harder than that because we don't know what we are walking into."
"Yeah, a whole lot of people phoned the Mars module in," Comm. Allwood said, shaking his head. "I remember that in the Academy, too. So then there are a lot of people flying around out here who never even got to phone it in -- but it did make our work easier because only so many of them are up and running at one time."
At the time, it took us all of five minutes to figure out who was doing outbound shipping of raw materials in that region of space, and in the next same five minutes, the order of contraband material from the Suliibruum System through the Baloanaweigh System was also confirmed.
"Of course, we knew that," Comm. Allwood said as he shook his head. "How were the planets wiped out? Nos. 8, 5, 6, and 4, with No. 7 spared because it is an uninhabitable gas giant anyhow."
"Although the outer layers are inhabited at the moment," I said.
"And those are going to be some stories to hear that we hope we can get to them in time for them to tell, Captain."
People who do resource poaching where no one has poached before are generally not the easiest groups to run to ground, but in this case the fleet enjoyed full cooperation. Ships turned right around at the offer of safe surrender and dropped off things for the fleet to return to the Suliibruum planets from which they came. People who had things made from them from said non-consumable resources yielded them up without complaint. Apologies were drafted. Licenses were yielded up. People went on to find other lines of work without complaint.
That's what happens when, 24/7, the fleet streams footage of the Suliibruum Fly, chowing down on every gram of organic material left in the Baloanaweigh System in real time, with its complex buzz constrained into human auditory range for those bold enough to want to think of every Earth nightmare of flying insects that sting and bite and suck blood, deepened and heightened.
"One of those things could crack anything less than our big-time starships like a walnut," my third-in-command and chief engineer Lt. James Doohan said, "and even with full shielding, Captain, even the Amanirenas would have to fight for her life."
"Which is why this whole fleet is staying back here and just observing," I said. "We're on a rescue and recovery mission, not a go-in-and-be-stupid mission."
It turns out that sitting in terror in whatever spacegoing vessel you can muster up in the outer layers of Baloanaweigh 7 for a few weeks is less dangerous than being in the middle of the buffet of a swarm of Suliibruum Flies that can crack anything less than a Galaxy-class starship like a walnut. In the meantime, a new record was being built... my admiral uncle and my first officer, each in their generation two of the most remarkable science officers who ever lived, spent copious time with my communications officer Lt. Jorge Almuz, comparing the language of humanoid Suliibruum with their plasma-based analogs, especially what we were calling the Suliibruum Flies even though obviously they were not.
"From the old records of Suliibruum worship, there was some means of communication between the two Suliibruum sentient classes that we know of," Adm. Banneker-Jackson said, "perhaps telepathic mostly, but there are several notations that the humanoids stopped worshiping their plasma-based neighbors because said neighbors told them to stop, some 2,000 years ago and given that there was no universal translator, they must have been able to communicate in a way understood in words in Suliibruum with all its dialects."
"Humanoid Suliibruum is well understood and translated," Cmdr. Allemande said, "and there do appear to be some patterns in common with the scream and the buzz. It would be to your interest, Captain, to know that Kirk, Dixon, and Oahuapedal Solutions has volunteered its service at no charge to the fleet to work concurrently with us on this. Mr. Oahuapedal himself is on the line, with his wife and children."
My uncle and I permitted ourselves a slight smile. Mr. Oahuapedal, of the mighty molluscoid races of the Ventanan frontier, was the being who figured out how to recover the sound of spoken Uppaaimarn for the universal translator, and likewise discovered that not all Uppaaimarn had left their home region when their second star went into super-shed mode and blew off Uppaaim's atmosphere ... some of them had stayed within the light of their beloved twin stars, intermarried with those humanoids who were compatible and near enough to them in appearance (including a few Earthlings, perhaps!) and retained their language and blended it with others.
The C-SHELL program, specifically its algorithm, was being leased by the fleet, but still: Mr. Oahuapedal's brain, wired as it was for thousands and thousands of tentacular touch points at any given time, was the one you wanted when you had to figure things out in a hurry. Now that he had a family, they were essentially a language-cracking super-computer working in conjunction with C-SHELL, and all of them were working on understanding a nexus between humanoid Suliibruum and plasma-based Suliibruum that the universal translator could make sense of.
Still, the clock was ticking ... the layers of a gas giant planet generally aren't safe, and ships that were not built for those conditions can only hold for so long hiding within them. Because Adm. Bodega had made his evacuation orders clear, his fleet was not going to go into the Baloanaweigh system until it was safe ... so we could not go in while the Sullibruum Flies were chomping every remnant of life there was.
But ... one day, three weeks out, the buzz softened a little ... it was not much better but it was noticeable.
"That's an adjustment downward in frequency," Lt. Almuz said as his hands flew across the communications board. "Mr. Oahuapedal, did you get that?"
"I did," my family friend said, "and that's not just an adjustment -- that's an adjustment *toward a range that you can actually manage hearing without massive compression. Don't take your compressors off yet, but that's a change."
Later that evening, my admiral uncle was providing dinner for the command staff as he was often inclined to do in high-stress situations, and this is where we remembered something always said about him: humans do not possess telepathy, but the memo missed Benjamin Banneker-Jackson. He was such a huge natural empath that other beings who were telepathic picked up his concern toward them and everything around them -- that is, he was a true telepath in the sense of feelings at distance being within his grasp, both knowing and being known.
So, at a certain point, he looked out the viewport nearest him, got a strange look on his face, and just listened ... that was what he was doing ... and then turned back with his eyes slightly wide.
"Admiral?" I said, knowing he was also hearing, "Uncle?"
"Our ancestors have a song," he said. "'Hush! Hush! Somebody's calling my name!'"
"Captain!" Lt. Almuz called over the comm.
"Acknowledged, Lieutenant," I said.
"There's a change in buzz I think you and the team need to hear -- and see!"
"Inform Commodore Allwood and Admiral Bodega -- we're on our way to the bridge."
Lt. Cmdr. Doohan had nearly turned over the table in his excitement, only for immense, calm Cmdr. Allemande to steady said table with the pressing grip of his hand upon getting up and also recall his junior officer.
"Lieutenant Commander -- your uniform jacket!"
"How do you even think about these things at a time like this, Commander?"
"We are in the presence of Admiral Banneker-Jackson and Captain Biles-Dixon. How can I not?"
Whole side story to be written about how people that basically grow up with you treat you as opposed to people who meet you at the admiration stage of your life ... but I was focused on my uncle, who again was looking through the viewport and softly singing the end of the song we had learned from his grandmother, my great-grandmother and namesake Khadijah Banneker:
"Oh my Lord, oh my Lord, what shall I do? What shall I do?"
@deeanndmathews, I'm refunding 0.822 HIVE and 0.139 HBD, because there are no comments to reward.
Thank you.