Chapter Text
She was getting excited by the prospect of laying her eggs into one of the creatures hanging before her. She had seen stories, many times, of how they had discovered this planet, the third one from its star, and how they had, over many cycles, discovered that the dominant species would make perfect incubators. It had taken a lot of trial and error, of course, but they had eventually sent out a queen and colony to see whether their species could live on the cold inhospitable watery world. They could, and it had taken some work to prepare the planet, but she was seeing the results of their efforts hanging from the cave walls before her.
The incubation chamber was cool, noticeably cooler than the planet outside. The incubators hung securely, webbed to the wall by their strangely soft limbs - only four of them - and with as additional soft stretchy band of webbing silk between what should be the abdomen and the thorax of the creatures. She had seen incubators before but not from this close, and they looked strange to her, soft and uniformly-coloured, though there were colour variations between individual incubators. None of them had markings - her own iridescent colouration gleamed in the low light, shading from green all the way to ultraviolet.
The incubators were dull, soft. They all had two soft round lumps on their thoraxes, most with pumps attached. There were some that did not have pumps yet and one of them had slow drops of a murky white fluid gathering there, which a worker tasted. It seemed to be acceptable because she ordered a drone to fetch a pump, the cups of which were attached to the incubator, which moaned as the machine was brought online, sucking away the valuable white honey-fluid. Drones and workers fluttered around the cavern, tending to the incubators, and there were cleaner beetles cleaning the floor and walls of the cavern of the incubators’ waste product, a thin sour yellow liquid that occasionally spilled from one or another.
Some of the incubators had an additional appendage dangling between its rear two legs, and some of these had pumps attached there, too. She understood that these were the males of the species, and this hanging appendage produced a fluid similar to that which was fed to larvae to create workers. The other fluid, from the twin bumps on the thorax, was gathered to make the hive’s honey and to nurture all the larvae - whether they were going to be workers, drones or queens. There had not been a shortfall since her species had colonised this planet, though it had taken several cycles to produce the best atmosphere for their kind, who had colonised all over the planet once the temperature had been brought up and the ice caps melted off. This nest was one of the first, and one of the first to make use of incubators.
She rested back on her hind legs and examined the incubators webbed to the cavern wall before her. All of these were in brood, with their lower thorax stuffed full of eggs - they all had a visibly large bulge around the clutch inside them. She supposed it was the abdomen, really, but the native creatures only had two body sections, the head and thorax.
She touched the nearest one. Its surface was so soft and squishy, unlike her own exoskeleton. She knew that they had an internal skeleton but had never been able to picture what that might look like. She did not have much more of an idea now, but the creature’s surface was smooth, soft and yielding under her questing digit.
All the incubators in brood had a tube in their mouths, feeding them the proper nutrients to enable them to carry the eggs until the larvae were ready to emerge. The tubes were a similar size and shape to the tiny hanging appendage of the male incubators and filled the mouthparts nicely. It was very interesting to watch them swallow the nutrient mix being fed to them because the throat made motions that looked as if they must be painful.The tubes were webbed to the incubators’ heads and stayed in place all the time, but nutrients and water were given at regular intervals.
There were some new incubators that had just been brought in, which was why she had been able to come, a full lunar cycle before she would otherwise have reached the top of the list. Workers were webbing them into place against the walls and ceiling of the incubation chamber, despite their moans, shrieks and struggles. She had been told that they communicated only orally, which was a very poor sort of way to communicate, in her opinion.
She wondered whether this species had a third gender, for all these who had an appendage were lacking the thoracic bumps of the breeding incubators. She caught the attention of one of the workers and rippled her question in shades of blue and green and ultraviolet across her back. The worker rippled back yellow and purple - no, there are only two biological genders. The females had the bumps naturally because they nurtured their young with them, the drones did not, but they underwent a biological change when they had their first clutch of eggs fertilised, and the thoracic bumps grew and developed then in preparation to nourish the larvae they hatched.
They nurture their young? she rippled, stilling her wings and forelegs so that the worker would not think her a young and uneducated larva.She had seen five full cycles, after all!
They give birth to live young, the worker rippled back.
Live young, in a species as big as this? She was not sure she had heard of such a thing - she would have to investigate. She did like research, and the incubators fascinated her, now that she had the chance to see them properly, up close.
The last of the brand new incubators was firmly webbed into place now, despite its struggles, and the incubation chamber was settling down again from the sharp fear-scent they exuded; most of their pheromones would be filtered or captured by the webbing, she supposed.
She selected what would be the incubator of her first brood. It was a male, as denoted by the strange little additional appendage. The worker who had answered her first questions helpfully informed her that it was used during the species’ mating rituals, and she supposed it must inflate or something, to attract a mate.
Her chosen incubator was webbed near the top of the incubation chamber. It was no effort at all for her to fly up to it and settle on the vertical wall of the cave next to it, to look it over.
It was struggling against the webbing, heedless of the fact it was many many times its own height above the cave floor and it had neither wings nor the powerful jumping legs of her own species. That soft exoskeleton would split and tear against the stone floor of the cave, where there were several stalagmites growing.
She tilted her head, listening to the sounds it was making. She had been told this species had language, and the sounds were its communication, but it was inelegant and unsubtle, the sort of thing larvae did. She rippled ultraviolet and blue at it, telling it to calm down, but it did not seem to understand. She would have to resort to chittering, as she would to larvae - such a blunt way to communicate. She released some pheromones, too - surely calming pheromones worked even on incubators?
It seemed so, for it calmed, though the look in its flat eyes (coloured but only single-faceted? How could these creatures see anything - it was no wonder that they were used solely to incubate eggs, for surely they could not be useful in any other way!) was still a look of fear, which rolled off the creature in waves now that she was close enough to taste it.
She laid a digit on its thorax, and felt it shiver. That was interesting! Maybe they did communicate in ways other than larval chittering? She had not seen it change its colour, though. She stroked the smooth soft exoskeleton, marvelling as it shivered and rippled at her touch. Yes, this would be the perfect incubator for her eggs.
She stepped slowly sideways, settling over the incubator. Its rear legs were webbed wide apart, to make it easier to access its egg tube with her ovipositor. She extended it, questing between the creature’s legs and behind the soft dangling mating appendage - there were two more things hanging there, like round smooth stones in a soft bag. How strange!
Somewhere there, she knew it was there somewhere...
It was a tiny little hole and the incubator gave a very large ripple as she pressed into it, easing her way in with plenty of lubrication fluid. She did not want to damage such a beautiful object as this incubator was, after all, and had been told to move slowly - but that it would open up like a flower if stroked just right.
Oh, and the hanging appendage was apparently helpful in this process, too. She touched it with a secondary digit and was rewarded with a full-body jerk that made her pause. The webbing was secure - the incubator did not have a cutting implement on its legs - and she waited a moment before repeating the motion, fascinated as the appendage began to grow stiff and stand up straight, poking out in front of the incubator, which suddenly seemed to be hotter than it had just been. How interesting - it made its own heat! No wonder this species was so good for incubating eggs!
So it was a mating thing. There were no females of its species here to respond to the inflation of the appendage, though - they were all webbed into place awaiting their own clutch of eggs.
She wondered if it would be possible to have a male and female to examine more closely, to see if she could learn about the mating ritual and how inflating the appendage would attract a female to mate with, and how they mated. Where did the eggs get laid if their young came out live? What did an incubator look like in its larval stage?
All those were questions that could be answered later. Her ovipositor had continued moving inside the incubator, and she could not help the startled flutter her wings gave as it brushed across a little lump or something in the creature’s egg passage. The appendage she was stroking twitched under her digit and the creature gave a moan that was different from the other sounds it had been making. Its scent markers had changed too, it smelled more receptive. She stroked that spot again and the receptive scent grew stronger.
So it seemed the worker was wrong; the incubators didn’t just communicate orally, they did have scent-based methods of communicating! She chittered happily at her discovery before chastising herself for larval behaviour. She kept up with touching that bump, and feeling its appendage, and the scent changed again to something sharper and much more pleasant, as the incubator shuddered and moaned and spilled white fluid over her claw. It scented bitter and salty, perfect flavours to produce good workers.
She put her other secondary digit on the incubator’s abdomen as she began to lay her eggs. Each one was roughly the size of the incubator’s closed claw, and she had several to lay. Her species did not lay as many eggs as the cleaner beetles (whose eggs were much smaller anyway), which could lay over a hundred in one breeding - there was one at the next incubator, in fact, pumping it full of eggs. Her species only lay about twenty eggs at a time, and it was that and the conditions of their own planet, which were growing less ideal for hatching young, that had led them to explore the stars. To discover a species that actually gave off heat, whose temperature was constant and the perfect temperature to incubate eggs had been a miracle.
Her incubator was struggling in its webbing as the first of her eggs left her ovipositor, now deep inside it, and was pushed into its egg tube. As she continued to lay, it would be pushed along the tube to the egg sac, which had the perfect acid conditions and heat to incubate her eggs, once they were fertilised. More and more eggs joined it until she had laid twenty-five eggs in the incubator, whose lower thorax had swollen considerably to accommodate them - another benefit of the creatures’ strange biology and lack of exoskeleton. It looked beautifully round and full now.
She chittered happily at it and withdrew from it, moving to the side so that a waiting drone could take her place and feed its own tube into the incubator to fill it with fertilising liquid. The incubator puffed out even more as the liquid squirted inside to surround and cushion the precious eggs. A few drops of fertilising liquid escaped before the drone could plug it with a secretion that hardened immediately, sealing the entrance to the incubator's egg tube to prevent fertilising fluid or eggs slipping out, and preventing anything from getting in that might damage the eggs. Once done, he flew off to another incubator as she laid a digit on the thorax of her own incubator, pressing a little to feel how full it was of her eggs and the precious fluid that would fertilise and protect them until they hatched. So delicate and squishy, yet the perfect design to incubate her eggs! So very round and full of eggs and fluid. She had no idea how the incubator's body could stretch and adjust to hold her eggs, but it was a mesmerising sight and scent and felt astounding as she stroked and pressed and tapped at the fullness of its egg-sac from the outside.
A worker brought a feeding tube down from the ceiling - it was the exact shape and size of the incubator’s mating appendage, she realised, as it was put into the creature’s mouth and webbed into place. The incubator didn’t seem happy about it, but she could see the moment it started feeding on the nutrient solution, which was perfectly engineered to contain all the nutrients the creatures needed, with only the thin yellow liquid produced as a waste product. This flowed out of the same mating appendage as the salt-fluid. Such strange biology these creatures had! That explained why the mating appendages didn’t have a pump on them all the time, the way the thoracic bumps did.
She touched the thorax where the bumps would grow. There were two little marks there, darker than the rest of the creature’s soft covering, and a very slow drop of white began to well up at one of these raised marks. The incubator made a strange sound as she gently squeezed the surrounding area, fascinated to see it happen. The lumps wouldn’t appear instantly, of course, but the honey-fluid had appeared much faster than she had expected it to.
It was five lunar cycles before her larvae were ready to hatch and she returned to the incubation chamber to watch it happen, overcome with curiosity about the process, which she had read about but never actually seen. She settled on the wall by her incubator, her wings and forelegs folded, her head downward so she could see it properly.
The incubator’s thorax was bigger and rounder now than it had been when she had laid her eggs, but that was to be expected. It was moving from inside, bumps here and there which came and went, which meant that all the eggs had hatched and the larvae were jostling around to find their way out. The egg tube was long and winding, but each incubator had been placed so that the exit from the egg sac to the tube was downwards. Eventually the first larva reached the plug, which had dried and shrunk away from the hole now, allowing the workers to help the larvae out, flying them to the nursery chamber deeper within the cave system, where they would be fed honey and salt-fluid until they spun themselves a cocoon. They would emerge in another two lunar cycles as adult workers, or drones, or soldiers, or researchers, whatever the nest needed.
The incubator was moaning around its feeding tube as each larva made its way out of the egg sac and along the windy egg tube. It must be bumping that interesting spot just inside the entrance to the egg tube, because the incubator’s mating appendage was standing straight. A worker flew down and slipped a pump over it, to catch the white salt-fluid it excreted.
Sometimes the larvae get lost and come up from the egg sac through the other tube, and out of the incubator’s mouth-parts, the worker informed her. That doesn’t happen very often, though. Will you be laying more eggs today?
She rippled ultraviolet, yes.
The worker fluttered her wings in assent and flew off to find a drone to fertilise her next clutch.
She was interested to note that the incubator had grown the thoracic lumps since her first visit, and each one was excreting the white honey-fluid into the clear cups of another pump.
The workers gathered the last larva and took it down to the nursery chamber. She turned around on the wall so that she was on the same orientation as the incubator, and chittered quietly, moving into position over it to insert her ovipositor and lay her next clutch of eggs. She had chosen well, she thought. This really was the best incubator the nest had.