Military forces worldwide, after twelve hours, were just beginning to approach full mobilization. In nations like those that made up the Confederate states, this meant that more and more of the National Guard were ready to respond internally, but the bulk of their real fighting prowess was still stationed overseas. So, ironically, Confederate soldiers were more often deployed to protect nations that were not their own.

For the soldiers, this was a source of agonizing frustration as they clamored for news from home but found quickly that even when communications were open, no one really knew anything of value. Another irony: In many places that had long detested the presence of the Confederate soldiers, they were now seen as true saviors as they deployed into combat areas, rescuing people they had only just a few days previously been watching with suspicious eyes.

The world political map was shifting and, in perhaps the ultimate irony, those who were normally the first to spot and counter trends like this were now so preoccupied that they didn’t have even the slightest of hints that it was happening.

Gaia looked over her world, a world that had birthed her and that she had walked for as long as she had memories to recall. She’d never felt pain in all the time she’d existed, not personally, not with such clarity.

“It was different,” she decided, “feeling the echo of another’s pain.”

The Drasin were abominations, unlike anything she’d ever felt in her very long existence.

Gaia could recall the sensation of nuclear devices annihilating thousands. She could remember the exquisite burn of mountains of rock slamming down from space, and she knew both the searing heat of droughts and the freezing cold of glacier shaped death . . . but these, these things were completely alien.

She could sense them, as she did every other living thing on the planet . . . everything that interacted with her, the Earth’s, magnetic field, in fact. They didn’t register as . . . thinking creatures, however.

Humans had a pattern to them, a way of thinking that superseded language. You could tell a human just by that pattern and nothing else. Surprisingly, the pattern was very similar for other species on the planet as well. Cetaceans were close, as were several other species both aquatic and terrestrial. She’d decided long ago that the pattern she could sense was as close to the definition of sentience as she was likely to come, for the time being.

Drasin, however, read more like some bastard version of arachnids.

It seemed trite, even to her, to call them spiders, but the more she thought about it, spiders probably got their bad reputation from the Drasin. Humans were almost biologically wired to feel revulsion to creatures like spiders, yet there had never seemed to be a real reason for that wiring.

Gaia now supposed she knew the reason.