Aliens / Иностранцы

The planet was not hell.
It just looked and smelled and tasted like it, according to the
marines who had come there and raped it.
Its denizens were not demons.
They were far worse.
The marines simply called it Hiveworld, although the
navigators of hyperspace had an obscure numbered tag for
it. They had come here, to this blighted planet, and they had
plundered it, stealing its queen mother.
Without the psychic bonds of the ruler to guide the lives of her
minions, genetic drift occurred. Different queens, pretenders to
the throne, developed and flourished.
All were killed by the most dominant of the bunch, a
traditional creature who could have been an identical twin to
the queen mother who had perished in a nuclear blast in the Pacific Northwest of Earth.
Call them “black.”
Call her the “black queen mother.”
And the new group, the changelings.
Call them “red,” though they were not red. To a casual
observer, they looked identical. But to the “blacks,” through touch
and smell and morphic fields, they were anathema. Strangers,
aliens. Freaks that had to be destroyed.
Leader of this new brood, living against all calculable
probability, was the “red” queen mother.
Bearer of recessive genes, any sign of whose chromosomal
changes had brought instant death in the hive before.
The red queen mother and her minions fled. In the confusion
of reorganization, they escaped and they established a new hive
far enough away to thrive.
The red queen mother spawned, using the herds of animals
that roved this bleak planet.
A new rival kingdom was created and for years the kingdoms
lived in peace.
But each knew instinctively that the other hive was the
enemy, that this peace would not last long. And when war came,
the principle weapons would be in the numbers of warriors.
And so the creatures bred… and bred… and bred.
While others of their ilk were hunted under different suns…