Alliances broke down and new ones formed as the first eight ships closed on the alien. Immotiles disagreed on how to deal with the situation. Some wanted to capture the aliens and their ship, others were keen to follow MorningLightMountain17,735’s advice and exterminate the invader.

The alien started transmitting signals at the Prime ships as they closed on it. They were incomprehensible; no immotile could understand it. Missiles were fired as alliances came into sharp conflict over how to proceed.

With the lead Prime ship approaching fast and launching a missile salvo, the alien vanished inside a huge burst of spacial distortion.

The surface-to-orbit transport ship descended vertically through the Prime homeworld’s lower atmosphere. It was a large blunt cone shape, although it made little use of aerodynamics to land. Eight fusion rockets were arranged around the rim of its base, roaring out slim two-kilometer-long jets of incandescent plasma. Between them, they produced point nine of a Prime gravity, lowering the ship gently toward the coastline beneath it.

Steam began to swirl up from the surface of the sea as the wavering tips of the plasma stabbed down into it. Within seconds, a hemispherical tempest of radiant vapor was streaking up and out from the epicenter like a squashed nuclear mushroom cloud. As the ship sank down into the supersonic storm front, force fields came on to protect the fuselage from the maelstrom it was creating. The fusion rockets died away when the ship was only a few meters above the seething surface, and its conical base splashed down with a soft bump into the boiling water.

Tugboats closed in and towed the spaceship back to the piers and loading bays that stretched for over a hundred kilometers along the coast. This was the main planetary spaceport that MorningLightMountain had built to handle the cargo flying between the planet and its offworld territories. Thousands of flights arrived and departed every year, pouring heat and mildly radioactive contaminants into the local environment. Nothing grew within a hundred kilometers of the spaceport anymore, no crops or weeds of any kind, turning the land behind the shore to a desert of sodden lifeless soil. Even the sea was dead, a choppy expanse of gray water with a thin skin of ochre scum.

Once the ship was docked, a sub-herd of soldier motiles came on board. They were slightly smaller than standard motiles, with better sight and hearing; they could move faster as well, and had a much greater agility, though they lacked any long-term endurance. Encased in dark armor they were two and a half meters tall, with electronic sensors complementing their natural ones and limb strength enhanced mechanically. Every arm gripped some kind of weapon. Under direct microwave linkage with MorningLightMountain, they approached the two bipedal alien motile captives with considerable wariness. The immotile wasn’t sure of their potential, so it was taking every precaution. The compartment they’d been confined to was heavily shielded, and they’d been under constant observation for the whole flight back from the asteroid fragment where their ship had been lurking. Physically, they had done nothing, remaining almost motionless for the whole time. Their suits, however, had been emitting those strange microwave pulses almost continually.

When the soldier motiles came into the compartment both creatures stood upright. MorningLightMountain watched the process with considerable interest. Their legs bent in the middle, pushing the main bulk upward. They seemed to have no trouble standing still while balancing on only two legs. A great range of electromagnetic emissions were pouring out of the suits again, the usual fast short pulses. MorningLightMountain ignored them and told the soldiers to load both alien motiles onto the waiting ground vehicle. As the sub-herd moved forward to grab them, the taller of the two swung its upper torso limbs around knocking their pincers away, and tried to speed past them. It could move surprisingly fast, but the soldiers were ready for it, and lifted its twisting body off the ground, carrying it down the ramp to the waiting ground vehicle. The second, slightly smaller alien motile offered no resistance as it was dragged along behind. Both of them were dropped into the cage. A force field flicked on around the mesh.

MorningLightMountain drove the vehicle along the road connecting the spaceport to its original valley. Long black clouds boiled overhead as they did ceaselessly these days. Rain lashed down across the road’s stone and metal surface, warm water saturated with soot particles. The road was hemmed in on both sides by buildings of toughened plastic, shielding manufacturing machinery from the acidic rain. Big vehicles shuttled between them, carrying components around. Herd after herd of motiles worked around the huge blocks of industrial machinery, servicing and repairing. They didn’t live as long as they used to two thousand years ago, especially in and around the spaceport. Many of them had sores and scabs mottling their skin from cold radiation burns. Limbs often trembled and shook from the damage that heavy metal contamination inflicted on their nervous systems. They ate from troughs filled with a treaclelike nutrient sludge that was processed in food factories scattered across the territory’s farmlands. Sensor stalks twitched constantly and gave poor visual reception, degraded by airborne irritants gushing out of the refineries.

In the mountains behind the industrial landscape where the radioactivity was considerably reduced, fields cloaked every slope in a drab unvarying gray-green patina. Plants struggled out of the thin sandy soil, forced into overactive life by chemical fertilizers that were spread across the terraces by farming motiles and tracked vehicles. All wild plants had been eradicated from the planet now, surrendering their valuable land to the intense agricultural cultivation vital to feed the billions of motiles.

As the vehicle carrying the alien motiles drove along the switchback road that led down into MorningLightMountain’s original valley it passed through the strongest force field on the planet, one capable of deflecting nuclear assaults and beam strikes. Rain beat down upon the sparkling energy plane, flowing into rivulets that ran away over the craggy granite ramparts. Light did still shine down into the valley in the morning, though now it was a bruised gray twilight that leaked through the planet-wide smog layers. At night, the smog fluoresced a funereal khaki from the vast lattice of fusion drives that caged the world.

Ahead of the vehicle, the conical mountain rose up from the valley floor. It was home to over fifty thousand immotile units now, still the true heart of MorningLightMountain, even though there were groupings dotted all over the planet, linked to it via secure landlines. The mountain had been transformed into a single building, with each immotile nesting at the center of its own chamber. None of them made physical nerve contact with the motiles anymore; their sensor stalk nerve receptors were all connected to an electronic network that connected them en masse to the herds as well as every mechanical segment of their territory. A battery of maser units perched above the valley ramparts extended the gigantic immotile group’s presence across the star system. Below the building floor, the mountain was riddled with pipes and sewers. The immotiles were bathed in a gentle shower of clean water produced in desalination plants north of the spaceport, and piped into the valley. Waste water carrying away body effluent was flushed straight back into the sea, while water carrying nucleiplasm batches was directed into the moat of congregation lakes around the base of the mountain.

The vehicle drove over a six-kilometer-long causeway between lakes. The alien motiles stood upright in their cage; the fat sensor stalks inside the transparent bubble on top of their suits were turned so the two eyes regarded the emerging herds. Below them, the lake surfaces writhed as tens of thousands of congregating motiles squirmed against each other. Not yet mature, their bodies were partially translucent, with great globules of transforming base cells clustered around limbs and torsos, as if they were surrounded by lumpy jelly. Big pipes poured a torrent of sluggish liquid into each lake: water saturated with base cells that were bred in a huge series of vats at the eastern end of the valley. At the edge of the lakes, motiles helped the newly formed up out of the water. Relay modules were attached to their nerve receptors, allowing MorningLightMountain to fill their brains with its thought routines and commands. On the wide concrete apron ringing the lakes, herds formed up in long ranks to be collected by vehicles that would drive them to their work destination. Over a million a day were transported out across MorningLightMountain’s territory.