Their thought patterns only partially resembled arachnids, however. The rest was something familiar, something she had seen before, but she couldn’t quite place the memory.

The itch was going to drive her mad, if the damned infestation of Drasin didn’t end her and everything she’d ever known first.

Gaia cast her thoughts back to New York, and in an instant she was there.

She formed her mental image near where Eric Weston was kneeling on a rooftop, firing down into a group of Drasin that had been happily munching on a couple of battle tanks, and stood with him for a moment.

“You need to finish this battle quickly, Captain,” the entity thought, looking past her subject to the city beyond. “We have real work left to do.”

She stepped off the edge of the building and vanished into the ether, leaving the subject of her attention to his battle. He paused only briefly, glancing around as if he had heard something in the distance, then continued the fight.

In space, surrounding the blue-green planet, a veritable horde of ships had slowly gathered.

Few times in history had this many Drasin been located in the same star system, and each time it had happened things had not gone well for the star system in question. This time, with hundreds of ships slowly converging on the world known to the locals as the Earth, the Drasin had a rather complex problem to deal with.

First, the world was heavily armed.

Initial sorties had confirmed that, with fighters on every continent that also swarmed the seas. Everywhere the Drasin had landed their forces, they were met almost instantly by counteroffensive capability that was actually quite shocking. Few worlds, in their experience, were quite so uniformly armed.

Partly that was due to their choice of landing targets. The ship minds realized this, of course. Landing within the cities put them directly among their enemy and, thus, directly into harm’s way. That was a necessity, however.

The sorts of nutrients that would allow a Drasin drone to reproduce simply didn’t exist anywhere else on this planet. Not remotely near the surface, at least. The convocation of ships could tell at a bare glance that this world had been heavily mined, with the most valuable materials removed from the ground, refined, and focused in specific areas across the planet.

That forced the Drasins’ actions in ways that simply could not be avoided, and it placed them in a quandary.

They had the numbers. They could simply swarm the planet.

That would guarantee wiping out all of the plague that covered the surface of the world, but it would be wasteful. It would leave the convocation unacceptably weak, and they had another enemy to deal with. An enemy that had proven itself even more dangerous than the inhabitants of this lethal planet.