Ten years ago in the hatchery complex of Hive Southwestern Great River Delta on Colony-13 of the Metahive was born a Soldier Bug one of a batch of 4,096 hatchlings laid to meet that hive's commitment. She was designated Southwestern Great River Delta Soldier Batch Eight Curvedknife Redstone-09, which we shall abbreviate to Redstone. Like the rest of her batch she was cared for by nurses during her infancy as she grew, playing in the nursery wards before her fifth birthday she was taken to an Archivist. This huge creature grasped Redstone's antennae and directly relayed into her mind the memories of Soldiers long past, ranging from bow and warhammer armed warriors of the ancient past through musketeers, riflers, tank crew, fighter plane pilots and more modern soldiers in the span of thirty minutes. Redstone spent the next few days mulling over this information in her alcove with only the occasional venture to the refectory and lavatory, from marching through arrows into enemy formations through mud, cooking in camps hundreds of kilometers from hearth and hive, work moving supply trains along through rough terrain, repair work in dangerous conditions, muddy trenches, shell fire, exploration of new planets and more. There were victories and defeats. She communicated the information to her fellows and discussed it. In the end she knew what she had to do and she showed up for acclimation.





She was assigned to her squad of eight soldiers and was given a suit of armor. It was the latest model and brand new. Servo motors enhanced her strength and allowed her to bare heavy plating, communication systems augmented her natural bioradio, targeting sensors improved her awareness of the world and a pair of lasers and micro-missile launchers gave her a massive degree of stopping power. She practiced with it to get the specific feel of it and to integrate the information she was given by the archivist on the subject. Her squad accepted her and she soon developed a deep bond with them. Soon enough they were a smoothly functioning team able to rapidly relay information, make a common decisions and act on it. In war games they proved themselves well against other squads. But soon enough they'd be put to a proper test against a foe of incredible malignity: The Proliferators.





It had once been argued by members of Redstone's species that any meaningfully intelligent species would need to be Eusocial. How else could could the infrastructural complexities of a society be maintained without a hive structure. Said school of thought was smashed with the Metahive's discovery of the Proliferators, a race of intelligent species which had no hives, only random individuals concerned only with themselves and their offspring who communicated through barks. They bred without concern for carrying capacity, proliferating uncontrollably and consuming resources. Instead of cooperating with each other, they competed and stomped those beneath them into line. Their civilization was organized like a pyramid, with vast throngs of starved individuals toiling for bare sustinance at the bottom, several classes of individuals which had cultivated some measure of rare skill, connections within this society, managers, overseers which kept the masses in line and a small elite which lived in absurd abundance while their underclasses could barely scrape up enough calories in polluted overstocked habitation sections. Now they had turned their eyes to the worlds of the Metahive and had overrun some frontier colonies. The Metahive's fleet was sent out to deal with them, as was Redstone.





On Colony-52 Redstone and her squad first met the enemy, which swarmed across the fields like a plague of Black Quilled Reaper-Leapers. Most of them were pitiful, being only equipped with a basic firearm, a pouch for spare magazines, a simple helmet, some cloth coverings for their lower thoraxes and plastic shoes with occasional grenade or knife. Often malnourished, these pitiful creatures were surplus to requirements on their planets and were offered the chance to escape the miserably drudergy of their slave quarters, gain access to females and rise in the hierarchy of their society if they'd go out to new worlds to fight the aliens. Their masters packed them up like lifestock and deployed millions of these wretches in massive waves. Their masters saw them as surplus to requirement and treated them like ammunition. If ten milllion of their fellows were cut down to take a Hive, so be it. It meant ten million less to feed. Redstone pitied these creatures in the wretchedness, but also noticed the devastation that they wrought on hives. Maybe something could be made of them in the future when they learned to value not only themselves and their spawn but others, but now they needed to be dealt with.





Here we have Redstone working as part of a diversionary mission in the badlands. Several squads have been deployed to attack a camp of proliferators in which several thousand captured workers are being kept as a living larder. Their objectives are primarilly to force them to commit troops and if possible take out their AA emplacements so that gunships and dropships can come in and evacuate the captives. She has already taken down dozens of Proliferators but they have a lot of reserves and gotten some more to flee, which will in all likelihood get gunned down by their more heavily armed overseers. Even with the protection of her armor movement is key in this engagement and loosing the initiative is devestating when outnumbered hundreds to one. Even so, for a Soldier like her duty is second nature. Millions of years of evolution has forged her caste to be steadfast and calm under fire.







The basic idea here is taken from Starship Troopers, albeit inverted.

