I was laying in my bed, trying to convince myself that I really needed to get up. But, laying next to Bethany, it was hard. But the siren that went off made it a lot easier. Bethany, her swollen stomach making her look really funny as she leapt up, especially all naked and trying to pull on her uniform.

I leapt up, too, and pulled on my uniform, my armor, and grabbed my weapon, running out of the door. I knew that Bethany, along with the other pregnant women and children, would go to the shelter. It was my job to man the perimeter.

“What’s up?” I shouted at the sergeant as he, too, came plunging out of his tent.

“I dunno, sir. Alert from the overhead drone, by the signal. We probably overwhelmed the locals.

After our experience on Hell we had decided that too many humans in one place triggered some kind of instinctive reaction. So we had these drones… lighter than air, moving randomly around our bases, a couple to each base, to warn us in the case of an attack.

And, given the sounds of firing coming from up ahead, we were definitely under attack. “What’s up?” I asked my squad when I got to the top of the hill nearest my tent, and plopped myself down next to one of them.

“A second or two after the alert sounded a wave of normal adults came over that hill there, all armed with spears and things. We took them out, we and the other squad over there. But now they’ve stopped, coming.”

“Order, lieutenant?” the Sergeant asked, his voice just a touch sarcastically.

I waited a minute, and no more adults came. “This is really different,” I said. “Not hing like the attack on Hell. I’m going to take a couple of men up there to check it out.”

“Lieutenant?” he asked, but I had already waved a couple of the squad over and we were rushing down in the valley.

“Cover the idiot!” the Sergeant yelled. Not exactly great discipline, but I didn’t mind being ‘covered’.

We got near the top of the next hill and dropped into a crawl, I, myself, crawled up behind the corpse of an adult, and we looked over the hill.

There were adults there, dozens of them, but they were all running away from us. On the top of the far hill… “It’s one of them!” Ben said. “An adult one!”

One of them… one of the new kind of Bn. And definitely an adult… or more. I had never seen a genius but… “Is that a genius?” I asked, just as it disappeared over the hilltop. I cursed… not really but I felt like it… because here I had been, faced with my first genius, and I hadn’t even tried to shoot it. Should I, should we, give chase?

No, no I couldn’t. We were, at least theoretically, under attack. All of the adults, all of the living ones, were gone now, so I took my squad back to our line.

—

But nothing happened and, two hours later, we ‘leaders’ were all sitting in the dining tent and the Colonel, who had come down, was standing in front of us. “So, gentlemen, what was that? That was not a random attack by a single adult, but, then again, no more was it an overwhelming group attack like we got on hell.”

The conversation ran for a while and then I, tentatively, raised my hand. “Yes, my newest lieutenant?”

I stood… which I suppose I really didn’t need to do. “Sir, I think I saw a genius. And a new one, I mean, one of the new types, with the new markings.”

“Well, that could be,” the colonel said. “A genius attack, I mean. I accept your expertise on the ‘new’ markings. But perhaps this is the way a genius would attack. A brand new genius, that is. We certainly haven’t seen any of the signs of a genius starting up. But who knows how long that will take?”

I raised my hand again. “Yes, lieutenant?”

“Could I take a squad out and kill him? Or maybe we could call in an air strike?”

“Well, I think you have already told us why we can’t do that.”

“Sir?”

“You said it was one of the new marking types. That means that we need to study it, not kill it. Not right away, anyway.”

I cursed (I didn’t, you know that, but I felt like it). Here I had found my first genius, and I myself had made it so they wouldn’t let me kill it. If only I had thought to shoot it! But I had been so surprised!

—

My disappointment faded over the next hour, however, as it was gradually decided that ‘studying’ meant that we would get to go sneaking over there and ‘see what was going on’, including leaving devices behind to monitor them…

That hadn’t gone well. The new creatures had startling weapons that killed from afar. It’s own life had been at stake, with only random chance dictating that none of the weapon fire had hit it… which would almost certainly have been fatal.

It moved its group to decent distance from the new creatures, displacing, and in some cases commanding, several obedient ones along the way. He set the obedient ones to farming and began to think. New thoughts flowed though his brain, and he soon had other obedient ones searching for materials to test.

The weapons of the strange creatures did not seem like they would be easy to duplicate, even if it could get ahold of one of them. But they gave ideas for weapons, simpler weapons but still better than the weapons it knew now. Weapons that could strike from afar.

—

“Bows!” Benjamin whispered. “From spears to bows in a matter of days!”

“They’re not that good at shooting them, though,” Mac said from my other side, as we watched the row of adults shooting at some improvised targets.

“No. Being able to make bows and being able to shoot are not the same thing,” I said. “But that was amazingly quick.”

“Look,” Benjamin said, “that one’s headed to the water.”

Mac got out the tagger gun while Benjamin and I watched. Soon, just before the adult we were watching got to the top of the nearby hill, there was a soft pfft and, we hoped, the adult was tagged. Benjamin got out his com, and put on some earphones. We had wanted, we still wanted, to tag the genius. But the powers that be had told us to tag any adult going to the water, so that, hopefully, we could keep track of what was said… verifying or denying the theory that the females were the repositories of knowledge for the aliens.

—

It had invented the new weapons but, reviewing its memory of the system the alien creatures had used, they were obviously not going to be enough. It thought for a while…

“Call one of the older ones in,” It said to the younger ‘adult’ standing by its door. It worked on the table it was making while it waited… a table organizing the various elements that seemed to make up all of physical stuff. The table was a fascinating mix of brute reality and mathematical beauty. It was still considering what seemed to be a hole in the mathematics when an older creature walked in, bobbing its head in the ‘I am listening’ gesture that these strange creatures used. It truly was odd that they seemed so similar to it in someway, and so different in others. It had seen others like itself, only younger, before. Indeed, it had eaten several.

“I need you to go into the aliens camp and steal me one of those weapons it used against us.”

“Aliens?”

“The other creatures. The ones we attacked the other day.”

“Oh. So, one of those long shiny things that shot the light out and killed so many of us.”

“Yes. And be careful or it will kill you.”

The creature looked startled, but bobbed and left.

—

“We have an interesting exchange between the aliens,” Benjamin said, poking his head through the open flap of our tent. “Everyone’s talking about it in the mess tent.”

I looked at Bethany and, shrugging her shoulders, she levered herself to her feet. She did look very funny.

“What’s it about?” I asked, as I took Bethany’s hand and we walked out the tent flap.

“We haven’t been able to tag the leader, not yet,” Benjamin said. “But we tagged this one adult when he went for a swim.”

“How has that been going?” I asked. “I have been out scouting.”

“Oh, it’s going great. The scientists were right. The females talk pretty much all the time, and there are female geniuses, too. And they talk alot too… and still make babies. And they are all super smart, too. We don’t even have records for a lot of the words they are using.”

“And the males get smarter?”

“Not that we can tell. They are thinking that they just kind of ‘sit on’ their new knowledge until they become geniuses.”

They pushed aside the tent flap and joined the gathering crowd.

“Just kill it!” one boy was saying. “What’s to talk about?”

“This is a great chance to study them!” another boy said. I knew him. Joel. Loved to study. He wanted to be some kind of scientist. He was good for this assignment.

“But we can’t let him come in and grab a weapon!”

“Give him a fake!” I said, and everyone turned to me. “What? We could work out a fake gun, at least one to fool a normal adult Bn, no?”

“Why?” Joel asked. Ok, so he loved to study but wasn’t always very smart.

“It will let you study it as it comes in, and leaves. You could even wire the thing for sound and video and find out what happens when he brings it back to the genius. Wire it with explosives and kill it!”

That last was sheer frustration. Here I was… I knew there was a genious just a little way away, and I couldn’t go after it.

My idea, not the explosive part but the rest, caused quite a bit of fuss. And the the colonel got called in, and that caused even more fuss…

—

Finally it came back. “What took you so long?” I asked it… him. I had been studying the differences between us, wondering why it was that I was so easily able to do things that the others couldn’t do… and why they went off to the ocean from time to time, despite anything that I said or commanded.

I had finally analyzed the differences. It seemed that the creatures were divided into two different types; and it took both types to make new creatures. This type, here, I had decided to call ‘male’, and lived here on land, mostly; entering the ocean only to meet with the ‘females’ and fertilize their eggs, which the females then laid on the shore, ensuring the continuance of our race.

They also spent a good deal of time discussing things with the females, who seemed a repository of knowledge. I had learned a great deal by interviewing males who had returned from the ocean.

But I was neither a male nor a female. Anatomically I was, or had been, a male. But I had none of the instincts and, I suspected, I was missing some internal anatomy.And I had a very different set of instincts…

“Attention!” a voice said.. A voice coming from the weapon I was about to examine. “This is Colonel YYY, the leader of the aliens.”

Aliens? I thought I had invented that word!

“We have an ultimatum for you. You realize you are different from the others?”

“Yes…” I stammered out.

“You will not be able to destroy us. We have tools and other devices that can destroy you in an instant.”

“Why… why are you telling me this?” I asked, not really doubting the creatures ability to do what they said.

“We have a job for you. If you do it, you will rule this entire planet… except for the areas that we will colonize.”

“What is the job?”

“There are others that arise, like you, only the go to the water.”

“The males, yes.”

“Ah, that is a new term for us. The males, yes, but there are ones that have made the transformation you have, to where you can command others or your sort.”

“Ah… I did not know there were such ones, but it is logical. The physical transformation surely cannot be related to the injury I sustained.”

“That injury,” the voice said, sounding different than it had, “Do you know what caused it?”

“No,” I said. “I was swimming, I started to hurt inside, and then, later, it stopped hurting. Now, what do you want me to do?”

“Those others, those males, the ones that are like you. We want you to kill them.”

—

“Gladly,” the alien said. We were all sitting around in the mess tent. The colonel was sitting at the front of the room with a microphone and, in front of him, was an enormous vision screen, and we could see the alien plus, due to a variety of other cameras, we could see the rest of the room.

“Well,” the colonel said, turning back to us. “That takes care of one of our problems. We’ll keep a drone, several drones, overhead. But we’re no closer to solving our other problem.”

“Actually, sir, it really helped,” Adelphe said.

“What? How?”

“He said he was swimming at the time. So it needs to be something in the water. But it can’t be everywhere in the water, or it would affect all of them.”

“Ah… and does that help?”

“Well, it keeps us from looking at things on land, things they could eat, that is.”

I wasn’t the only one that had a look that said that that didn’t seem all that helpful.

“And it has to be water soluble,” she said, and this time it wasn’t her that wished that I had studied more technical stuff in school. Luckily someone else asked the question…