Tales of the Multiverse: Kristen -- Wasp (Patreon)

Here's another of the stories from that archive.  I thought it would fit in with the previous Multiverse story.

"Trans-dimensional gateway 12-546a coming online," announced the Mission Controller. "System check?"
"TCOM is go."
"EAP is go."
"GTIME is go."
"COMPAN is go."
"AUX is go."
"All controllers show green. Kristen? Are you ready?"
"Affirmative, Control." 

Kristen, with her supplies and electronics backpack, stood at the base of the ramp leading to the hexagonal transference portal. Currently it was nothing more than a milky, swirling mass but, having seen several other missions, Kristen knew that it would soon be filled with the brilliant shifting patterns of the gateway. Normally, of course, the person sprinting up the the ramp would be the first person on a new world, indeed in a new universe. Not this time though. Quentin had gone through to this universe nearly five days ago. Everything had been going well but they suddenly lost contact with him. Although Kristen would be doing some exploration, her primary mission was to discover what had happened to Quentin. Her thoughts were interrupted by the voice of the Mission Controller.

"Gateway activation in 10 ... 9 ... 8 ... 7”

Kristen waited until 2 and then began running towards the gateway. Normally, they didn't worry about the length of time the gateway was opened but Quentin had been the projects first mission-related disappearance. They didn't want to keep the gateway open any longer than necessary. So worried was Mission Control that she would be setting up a comm station just on the other side of the gateway. When she got through, the gateway would close behind her and her messages would be saved until the gateway was periodically opened to retrieve them. Kristen, herself, would be out of touch with Earth for hours at a time. If she failed to discover what had happened to Quentin, it would likely mean that this planet would be deemed dangerous and written off. There were too many safer places to get raw materials.

She dashed through the hexagon of the gateway just as the colours switched. She felt the uncomfortable wrenching and pressure as she entered but, because of her speed, she was through in milliseconds. The gateway was unexpectedly higher than normal though. Instead of being at ground level, it was nearly 75 cm off the ground. Kristen nearly lost her footing as she dropped down onto the rough sand. The gateway shimmered momentarily and then faded. She was alone in this other universe.

The next few hours were spent setting up her base camp. The tents, of course, came first. You couldn't tell what kind of weather you'd encounter in a new universe and it never paid to be cocky about survival. The tents themselves were dull metal and she knew they'd survive a class 5 hurricane with little more than a wetting. One explorer had even survived a full tornado inside one. The tornado couldn't pull it loose because the auto-anchors tunnelled, over the space of a few hours, until the tents would be anchored solidly to the bedrock beneath. Like clockwork, a small portal appeared every hour giving Kristen contact with Earth. But with nothing to report, the gateway soon closed. Finally everything was ready but the failing light made her think twice about starting the search immediately. If would be better to wait until the full light of day before she began to search for Quentin.

The next morning came earlier than she expected. This planet's day length, it seemed was around 21 hours. It would be tough at first but Kristen knew she could adjust to it. She packed her now nearly empty pack. The main tents would be staying here. Only her emergency shelter tent would be going with her and that was small. Today's exploration would be short as well. She was only going as far as Quentin's base camp. She took careful verbal notes of everything she saw. Quentin had done something similar but his recordings had been strangely distorted. The comm techs were still trying to decipher them. Kristen's voice recorder wouldn't be broadcasting her observations as Quentin's had. Only when she returned to safety of the base camp and pressed the upload button would they be placed in the permanent storage waiting for the next gateway to retrieve. She also carried a homing pigeon. Not a live bird, of course. The homers she carried were a small bee-size robots designed to carry the contents of her recorder back to base camp whenever she chose to send them or if she were ever incapacitated.

The world had a fresh feeling about it. Earth's air and water had been contaminated by industrial activity for far too long to count as 'clean' any longer. The scents of the local life was unfamiliar to Kristen but not unpleasant. She jogged towards the faint signal that Quentin's relay transponder was giving off. Since it was only a few kilometres away, it was odd that it should be so weak. The battery on the thing would last for months before it began to fade. This was just one of the many puzzles that Kristen had to unravel before returning to Earth.

A small, monkey-sized insect caught her attention. They were far larger than any insect the Earth had seen in many millions of years. She unstowed her binoculars and zoomed in on the creature. It was darting about like a living jewel. Kristen paused, waiting for it to settle. When it did so, she noted that it looked more like a brilliantly coloured wasp than anything else. She took a series of images for the records and resumed her jog. As she neared the site of Quentin's base camp, she discovered more and more of the creatures. They were clearly some kind of social insect because they were engaged in the cooperative activities. Many were busy building elongated balls of some material in the strange trees or on flat stones. Clearly hives, Kristen detoured around them, carefully recording their activities with her binoculars.

As she crested a rise, she was brought up short by what she saw. Quentin's camp, it seemed, had been set up inside one of the largest hives she'd ever seen. The hive, a collection of interlined opaque bubbles, covered nearly 500 square meters. Why had Quentin set up there? There were far better places to set up. Safety was drilled into the explorers from the beginning of their training and setting up a camp inside an unknown creature's hive was clearly unsafe. Kristen used the rest of the day to circumnavigate the hive, taking images and scans at every opportunity. When light began to fail, she decided to return to her camp.  When she got back, she uploaded her observations and waited until the gateway opened before making contact.

"Kristen to TCOM," she stated as protocol demanded when the the gateway opened.
"TCOM here. Good to hear from you, Kristen."
"Glad to be back at base camp, Kenny. I've found Quentin's camp but its inside some kind of strange hive."
"He set it up there?"
"So it seems. Readings indicate that the anchors haven't moved since they were first set up."
"Odd. Doesn't sound like Quentin."
"He was always the most cautious of the lot of us."
"Way too cautious at times."
"Not this time it seems."
"No. He walked quite a ways to find a flat area for his camp. He chose that spot."
"That's clear from the records. They've cleared up some of his voice communications. He mentions something about large wasps."
"Affirmative. They're the creatures that are building the hive. Or perhaps I should say hives. They're all over this plateau."
"Dangerous?"
"Not sure yet. I've left them alone and they seem content to leave me alone."
"Understood."
"They do appear to have large stings though if my guess as to their tails is correct."

The gateway began to shimmer at the edges.

"Looks like the gateway is closing. I'll report more later," Kristen stated calmly.
"Understood. TCOM out."

The gateway folded in on itself and vanished. Kristen made a quick meal and turned in for the night. She took the meds that would help her body adjust to the different day length as well. Though a 21 hour day was close to the 24 hour day she was used to, it would have been over a month, without the meds, to get over the circadian rhythm shift that it caused. As it was, she'd be pretty foggy tomorrow. She decided to do local explorations and gather a few geological samples while her body adapted.

The next day came and went quickly. For the first two thirds of the day, she was alone in her thoughts. There were a number of interesting geological formations about that might contain useful resources. She took careful deep scans before returning to her base camp. When she got there, though, she discovered that the wasps had visited. They'd started to construct a bubble nest near her base camp. That puzzled her. Why would they go out of their way to build a hive here when there were so many other places available. She passed the observation on to TCOM when the evening gateway was established.

"Unknown. Do you think you should move your camp?"
"Not sure yet. The wasps aren't threatening."
"I wonder if that's what happened to Quentin? He didn't set up his camp in the hive. I'll bet the wasps built their hive on top of his camp."
"I've been thinking that, too."
"Any idea why?"
"None yet. I've set up continuous scans on their construction though. If I decide to move the base camp, I'll leave the new coordinates so you can establish contact there."
"Understood."

The gateway soon closed and Kristen was alone again. She watched they wasps create their hive. They really were very pretty creatures. The more she watched them, the more she enacted the ease they flew about. Watching them, it almost seemed as if they were playing while they built the hive. Instead of the usual totally purposeful movements of creatures such as ants and bees, these creatures did acrobatics. Kristen fell asleep when daylight failed and the wasps flew off towards the main hive.

The next morning, with the adaptation drugs out of her system, Kristen felt energetic again and quickly completed the morning chores. She set off towards the main camp, bioscanner at the ready. Her first goal was to discover whether Quentin was still alive. The bioscanner read a special medical implant that all explorers had in their bodies. Once she was close enough, the bioscanner would be able to contact the implant and find out what had happened to Quentin. Wasps passed her flying between their new hive near her camp and the main hive. She didn't feel threatened in the least. In fact, they seemed to be going out of their way to avoid her. They never came any closer than five meters to her and would veer away if she moved towards them. Kristen's puzzlement grew though as she reached the main hive and came in range of Quentin's implant. For the first part of the mission, all was well. His readings were normal and consistent. Then there was a brief period of wildly variable readings. The current readings were totally strange though. His temperature, blood pressure, neural readings, everything were bizarre not human at all. She'd expected to find no readings at all past a certain point in time but the implant was active and still transmitting. Quentin, it seemed, was still alive. Or, if not Quentin, something else had hijacked his implant somehow.

Kristen watched for several hours from a safe distance. The implant wasn't fixed in place. Quentin, or whatever creature had the implant, was moving about inside the hive. Kristen decided to return to the camp early to report this discovery. She might just catch the mid-afternoon gateway. Her report caused a great deal of worry. The mission surgeon did a quick look at the data and was completely puzzled by them. There was no indication that Quentin had died but his current readings were impossible. Their session ended with a request from TCOM to get a bio-scan on the local lifeforms.

Since the most common of the local lifeforms were busy careening a hive near her camp, Kristen decided they'd be the first she'd scan. The were wary of her at first and kept their distance. It was hard to get good readings from five to ten meters especially when the target wouldn't hold still. After a few hours, though, they settled down and Kristen got much better readings. She fired them off to Earth with the next gateway and settled down for the night.

She spent the next day doing bioscans of every living thing in the vicinity and returned, dirty and tired, to the camp in the evening. The wasps had bane extremely busy. Their hive bubbles now formed a complete U around her camp. The U shaped structure was nearly three meters tall and had started to narrow at its top. Clearly, they intended to enclose her camp for some reason.

"You'd best pull up stakes then," Mission Control insisted. "We've no idea as to why they're enclosing you but it isn't safe to stay there."
"Understood. I'll start the process immediately and leave a relay to let you keep track of me."
"Right. Mission Control out."

Kristen quickly stowed all the loose items in her backpack and sent the signal to the anchors to retract. Unfortunately, they'd had a few days to set themselves so it would be an hour or so before they'd be back in their cases. Kristen wondered whether she should stay while the anchors retracted or move out to try to find a new base camp site and retrieve the tents later. She was startled by a soft sound from overhead. The two sides of the wasp structure had folded together and sealed off. Kristen nearly bumped her head as she stood up. She made her way towards the front only to discover she was going nowhere. The wasp hive had sealed her in.  Making a quick note for her log, she decided to see if she could get out of the trap. The material of the hives proved tough though. She was barely able to cut it with her camping knife. A strange smell filled the enclosure as she broke the bubble and she dropped to her knees. Though not completely unconscious, she was entirely lucid either. 

"Gas," she muttered.

She felt a churning in her insides. It wasn't painful, but it was definitely unpleasant. She felt as if something were twisting her internal organs about, placing them in new locations. She watched, unconcerned, as her waist shrank. At first, her waist was only a few centimeters smaller than normal but, as the shrinkage continued, it narrowed until it was barely 10 centimetres across. Her legs began to shrink, too. They were soon little more than stubs attached to a large shiny blob that was all that remained of her abdomen and hips. Kristen watched as shiny skin appeared on her body. Lying on one side next to the torn wall of the hive, Kristen reached out. She had to get out of here. The hand that came into view was distorted and shiny. Kristen felt her back bow and her chest broaden. The hard shiny skin soon gave way to chitin, shiny jewel-like chitin, chitin like that of the wasps that had enclosed her. She felt a four bulges appear on her now hard abdomen and another pair at her back. She twisted her head back to see what was happening and was shocked to discover the new flexibility of her neck. The bulges were soon legs. Her arms and hands completed their transformation at the same time the four new legs grew out. Her wings took longer though. Even after they'd stopped growing, they remained little more than puffy sacs. This soon changed, though. Kristen felt her blood surge into the sacs, expanding them into wings. Within an hour, these had dried and hardened. Kristen's dizziness returned then and she turned over onto her stomach. Her strange insectile arms and legs were nearly useless as yet so she couldn't use them to stabilise her. Her vision blurred and focussed and blurred and focussed again. The world seemed to slow down and come into greater detail with each blurring. Nearly three hours after the process had started, Kristen lay at the base of the hive that enclosed her camp exhausted. She fell asleep soon afterwards.

The next morning, Kristen awoke feeling strangely energised. The transformation of yesterday would need to be reported. There was no way any more explorers could be sent to this world. As she tried to stand, she made a discovery. She saw the world completely differently than she ever had. She could see not only in front of her but nearly all the way around. She soon caught sight of a pair of sticks waving about in her field of view. When she caught hold of one of them with a clawed hand, she found they were attached and exquisitely sensitive. There was someone nearby and Kristen directed her gaze and her antennae towards him.

"Come my queen," Quentin, himself mostly wasp as was Kristen herself.
"We have a hive to build and a world to conquer."

Pushing herself up on her six legs, Kristen gave a tentative flap to her new wings before launching herself into the air followed closely by Quentin, her mate.

Photo Credits:
Woman: https://www.DeviantArt.com/Herarip
Wasp: Wikimedia: RushenB