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Some historians have been struck by the fact that Humanity reacted with instant, universal hatred and loathing the moment they first set eyes upon the Arachnids. The reaction is all the more pronounced given that the Orions, Ophiuchi, Gorm, Tangri, Thebans, or even Rigelians had not provoked that reaction. Yet the Bugs did... and closer acquaintance only made it worse. Their physical appearance (see below) was horrific enough, resonating as it did with some of Mankind's darkest phobias, but Humans might have been able to handle the way they looked if not for the way they acted . . . and if they had not epitomized the soul-less alien menace with whom communication and compromise alike were utterly impossible. And in fairness to Human phobias, every one of their allies appears to have reacted to the Bugs in precisely the same way. More even than in the case of the Rigelian Protectorate, the only possible objective for either side in the Fourth Interstellar War was the complete extermination of the other.    Fortunately for the rest of the galaxy, it was the Grand Alliance which succeeded in exterminating the "Arachnid Omnivoracity" (the term coined by xenologist Ephraim Matsuhito) rather than the reverse, yet the devastation wreaked upon one-time Arachnid worlds makes the historian's task difficult in the extreme. What follows is an attempt, based on the fragmentary information and artifacts available, to describe the Archnids. For reasons which will become clear, it can be no more than a body of hypotheses, but it reflects the mainstream view of who and what the "Bugs" truly were.    No one knows what the Arachnids actually called their imperium or, for that matter, what they called themselves, for no means of communication with them was ever established. While enormous amounts of electronically stored records of some sort were captured from them, no one has yet found a way to generate intelligible output from them, which appears to lend some support to the notion that the Arachnids were, in fact, the first true telepathic race ever encountered. While the Gorm were telempathic, their sense of minisorchi served only to communicate emotions, not concepts or information and operated on its own "wavelength," which was not detectable by any other known race. The theory of Arachnid telepathy posits that the Bugs were solely telepathic, with no other means of communication, and that the xenologists have, in fact, generated intelligible output from the records but, as non-telepaths, can no more recognize it than a blind man could read a page of print.    Be that as it may, the fact remains that virtually nothing so far deduced about Arachnid society can be positively confirmed. That leaves the field open to the widest of speculations, and generations of xenologists have speculated widely, indeed.    Certain things can be said with a fair degree of certainty. First, although the Arachnids were almost universally referred to by the Grand Alliance as "Bugs" (a Terran term whose pronunciation proved serendipitously reproducible by Ophiuchi, Orions, and Gorm, alike), they were not in the least insectoid. Physiologically, Arachnids might best be thought of as gigantic, radially symmetrical, hairy starfish, although they had an undeniably "spidery" look. The central pod which contained an Arachnid's vital organs was approximately the size of a Human's torso and supported by six long, multi-segmented and very powerful legs which rose to pronounced knees above the pod and then reached back down to it. Two additional limbs had developed as arms, and each ended in four long, flexible fingers, all of which were mutually opposable, thus conferring a degree of manual dexterity no Human could match. The arrangement of the limbs and pod undoubtedly accounted for the Office of Naval Intelligence's initial use of the term "Arachnid" to describe the newly encountered race, since Humans instantly thought of them as "spiders," whatever their actual evolutionary history might have been.    An Arachnid's eight eyes were carried on short, thick, periscopic stalks, one projecting approximately twelve centimeters above each of its eight limbs. Under normal circumstances, this gave a "Bug" 360° vision, but it seems probable that it came at the expense of some stereoscopic ability to estimate distances, since, unlike other species, Arachnids' eyes were not fixed relative to one another. On the other hand, a Bug could bring as many as four of its eyes to bear upon a single object at need, which may well have compensated.    Perhaps the most terrifying and disgusting physical aspect of an Arachnid (in Human eyes, at least) was the mouth--a gaping opening on the bottom of the body pod equipped with lamprey-like teeth and surrounded by a nest of short grasping tentacles to hold the Bug's (preferably living) food for ingestion. The tiny handful of individuals, Human or otherwise, who witnessed Arachnids actually feeding and survived to tell the tale react with universal horror to their memories.    In addition to their other peculiarities, Arachnid reproduction was unlike that of any other known sentient species. Like Rigelians, the Bugs were egg-layers, functionally similar to Terran oviparous mammals, but they are generally referred to as having been tri-sexual (not bi-sexual), although this is, in fact, something of a misnomer. Actually, there were only two sexes among Bugs, but one of them was a functional hermaphrodite, equally capable of laying or fertilizing eggs, while the other was the neuter worker/warrior class.    So far as can be determined, the sex of any Arachnid was decided for it at birth and, as with Terran bees or Orion seghaar, depended upon what the infant was fed. A certain number of infants were placed on a diet which allowed them to mature as reproductive hermaphrodites; the vast majority were restricted to a diet which inhibited sexual differentiation and resulted in their becoming neuters. Exactly how the decision as to who was to become what was reached is unknown, though some evidence (see Arachnid Reproductive Decisions, Ephraim Matsuhito, Oxford University Press, Old Terra) suggests that it was based primarily on three factors: (1) the number of reproducers currently needed to maintain some preselected population density; (2) the current requirement for expendable workers/warriors; (3) the genetic heritage (i.e., racial value) of the individuals in question. There is also strong evidence that Arachnid society routinely bred many more offspring than were needed, then selected the most promising of them for maturity and terminated the remainder in infancy. This deliberate over breeding, which "wasted" food on infants who were doomed to be terminated, would seem to have conflicted with the normal Arachnid emphasis on rational use of resources, but there is some evidence, though more speculative in nature, that the practice was intended to provide a cushion against unanticipated manpower needs, and at least a portion of the wasted sustenance was recouped after termination (see below).    Precisely how all this impacted on Arachnid social organization is difficult to say, since nothing is known of their political structure (assuming they had one) or their philosophical concepts. Empirical evidence suggests that the reproducers were protected from all risk with fanatic determination, but whether or not that means those reproducers constituted some form of aristocracy is unknown. Indeed, some xenologists have gone so far as to suggest that the reproducers were, in fact, virtual slaves, held in thrall by the remainder of the race to insure its continuation. What is known is that the Arachnids embraced a species-wide "communism" unimaginable to any other known intelligent race.    Arachnid industry was totally centralized and, apparently, operated to provide a subsistence level of survival for all members of the race. (There are some indications the reproducers' lifestyles were somewhat more "affluent" than those of the neuters, but this must be considered speculative at this time.) The Arachnids appear to have demanded that their "citizens" be maintained in sufficient health to insure the smooth, efficient functioning of their society; beyond that, all industrial potential was directed into the construction and maintenance of the military infrastructure to protect that society from outside threats. In many respects, Arachnids may be thought of as having been organized on a permanent "wartime" basis, with all individual needs subordinated to the survival and expansion of the race as a whole.    One of the things which Alliance military personnel found most frightening about Arachnids was that the neuter warriors they encountered appeared to have absolutely no sense of self-preservation. Rigelian and Theban fanatics had been bad enough, but at least both of those races had regarded suicide attacks as a last resort. An Arachnid admiral, on the other hand, apparently viewed his personnel precisely as a Terran or Orion might have viewed any other war machine--i.e., as totally (and reasonably) expendable in routine military operations. Perhaps even worse, from the perspective of those who faced them in combat, the neuter warriors appear to have accepted their expendability with absolutely no rebellion. It has been suggested that since reproduction was impossible for them, the neuters had no intellectual or emotional stake in the future. Certainly this would explain the unflinching acceptance with which so many of them embarked on deliberately suicidal attacks, but the concept was so alien that it produced an ineffable sense of horror in those who saw it happening. In very many ways, it was as if the Alliance's warriors truly were fighting a race of machines, and the brutal butchery it provoked would be impossible to exaggerate.    Dreadful and incomprehensible as the Alliance's members found the apparent Arachnid concept of self-expendability, what produced the greatest horror among them was the fact that the Bugs were carnivores capable of digesting a very wide variety of meat sources . . . including Humans, Orions, Gorm, and Ophiuchi. Not only was any communication with them impossible, but they clearly considered all other species primarily as food sources. Bug warriors did not surrender--ever--and once the Alliance discovered what happened to Arachnid prisoners, neither did they. The war against the Arachnid Omnivoracity was one in which quarter was neither given nor expected, and no battle of the Fourth Interstellar War ever ended until every single starship, fighter, gunboat, and individual warrior on one side was dead.    While it is impossible to determine exactly how decisions were reached among Arachnids, certain functional aspects of their social and military organization can be readily perceived.    Unlike most other star-traveling species, the Arachnids do not appear to have been interested in exploration for its own sake. Humans, on average, are comfortable with higher population densities than most races, but not even Old Terra's Japanese could have endured the density Arachnids appear to have found comfortable. The population of Home Hive-2-A-1, for example, which had a total land area somewhat smaller than Old Terra's, has been estimated at well over thirty billion, a figure which would have produced pathological violence and social anarchy in virtually any other race. Only a species which accepted bare survival as a "comfortable" level of subsistence could have endured such crowding, and the figures become even more appalling when one considers that this was a race of carnivores. It is quite obvious from physical evidence that the Arachnids didn't simply eat other races; they ate one another, as well. Precisely how members of the race were chosen to become food sources for their fellows is unknown, but certainly all infants terminated once they had been determined to exceed the required numbers went into the Bug food chain. It seems likely that the Arachnids regarded this as a perfectly reasonable way to recoup at least a portion of the food "wasted" on unnecessary mouths.    Probably because of the population levels they found acceptable, however, the Bugs apparently felt much less pressure than most other starfaring races to locate additional habitable worlds. Arachnid exploration appears to have been undertaken only once all available planetary real estate had been well filled with Bugs, but they devoted special attention to particularly suitable stars, such as the five the Alliance classified as "Home Hive" systems. Without exception, the Home Hives possessed multiple habitable worlds and asteroid belts, and they served (in practice, if not by design) as the central nodes which tied the entire Omnivoracity together. The sheer, concentrated industrial and military power of a Home Hive system was terrifying to contemplate, and the Alliance's military casualties in the horrific fighting required to break into one of them were staggering.    In general, the Bugs do not seem to have felt any particular concern over unexplored warp points. While it appears to have been their policy to survey at least three or four transits out from any Home Hive system to provide a security zone, they do not appear, as other star-travelers did, to have felt a need to push outward. By Human or Orion standards, Arachnid exploration and expansion moved with glacial slowness, but that may well have reflected the difference between Arachnid and non-Arachnid concepts of military security. Whereas an Orion or Human strategist always wanted to know what was on the far side of any warp point on the theory that it was better to know the worst immediately rather than risk being surprised by unknown threats, the Arachnids apparently concentrated on building up an effectively impregnable military position before risking contact with any unknown threat. Thus while the Federation and Khanate tended to be long, gangling, widespread polities marked by huge numbers of sparsely-settled frontier worlds, the Omnivoracity was compact, heavily populated, and extremely well fortified.    An additional feature of the Omnivoracity which caused the Alliance to make several serious miscalculations early in the war was that the Arachnids had no developed interstellar communication network. Human and Orion space tended to be marked by an infrastructure of navigation buoys, communications relays, etc., but the Bugs were perfectly content to rely upon courier drones and never emplaced communication relay stations at warp points. As a result, there was no way to tell that the Arachnids claimed or had explored a star system unless one actually observed their planetary populations or starships in it. There is enormous debate, even today, over whether this represented a deliberate security decision on the part of the Arachnids or was simply the result of a lack of interest in exploration generally and of star systems without habitable worlds in particular. Perhaps the most telling evidence that it was a deliberate policy lies in the Arachnid practice (long unsuspected by the Alliance) of picketing every single system with permanently cloaked starships whose sole function was apparently to keep watch on the warp points and alert the nearest populated system to any incursion.    Technologically, the Arachnids appear to have been rather more like the Gorm than like Humans. They do not appear to have pursued research for its own sake. From the evidence, an Arachnid researcher was interested only in solutions to specific, known problems. If no problem existed, no research was done, but this does not mean Bugs were incapable of impressive innovation. Their inability to operate strikefighters, for instance, placed them at a severe tactical disadvantage against the Alliance, and their response to it--the gunboat--was both swift and, given their racial limitations, highly effective. Indeed, the Bugs appear to have originated the concept, carried out the research and development, and placed the system in service in less time than the Alliance took to duplicate it even after seeing it in action. There is no doubt that the Arachnid tendency to react rather than innovate was a pronounced advantage for the Alliance, but it was never safe to rely upon it. The introduction of the monitor, for example, took the Alliance completely by surprise, yet in hindsight it was clearly no more than a logical extension of longstanding trends in Arachnid tactics and ship design.    It is difficult to characterize Arachnid military operations in a non-Arachnid frame of reference. Strategically, the Bugs' decision to stand entirely on the defensive after the first year or so of the war certainly appears questionable to a Human or Orion military analyst. In Alliance eyes, the renunciation of the offensive was tantamount to accepting eventual defeat, but the Bugs don't seem to have seen it in the same light. Of course, the Arachnids had never before encountered a multi-system polity (with the exception of the Crucians, whom they had driven entirely out of explored Arachnid space through a closed WP they could not locate) and may not have realized the true size and power of their opponents. On the other hand, they may have understood precisely how powerful the opposition was and simply decided that since they couldn't conquer such an immense sphere the only logical policy was to defend themselves in an effort to wear their enemies down. Without the ability to decipher their records, it is impossible to know the reasoning behind their strategic stance, and the debate over precisely what they thought they were doing will undoubtedly continue for many years.    One undeniable advantage of the Arachnid strategy, however, was that it compelled the enemy to come to them. Having once discovered how the Bugs regarded other species, the Alliance could never settle for anything short of their total defeat. Whether or not the Bugs realized this is impossible to say, but it didn't really matter. In practical terms, the Alliance was committed to an offensive war from the moment it stopped the initial Bug incursions, and the Arachnid stance compelled the Alliance to carry the war to them. Rather than dissipate resources on exploration in a frantic search for new ways to get at the enemy and skirt known defenses, the Bugs (with the notable exceptions of the Proxima Centauris and Kliean Raids) let their opponents do the exploring. Once a point of contact was found, after all, it would lead in both directions and, assuming a successful initial defense, Arachnid fleets could as readily use it to get at their enemies as their enemies could use it to get at them. And one must not forget those cloaked picket ships; on more than one occasion, Alliance survey forces sailed into bloody ambushes because they had no idea they were already in space the Arachnids had explored and controlled. (In addition, the inability to communicate with the Bugs or to decipher their records meant that, unlike any previous war, there was no astrogation data for the Alliance to capture. Since their intelligence services could make no sense of the data they did capture, it was impossible even for ONI's accomplished astrographers to map Arachnid systems or gain even the vaguest notion of the Omnivoracity's true extent.)    Tactically, the Bugs were very different from anyone else the Alliance's navies had ever fought. Arachnid military operations were marked by enormous concentrations of firepower and a deliberate pace no Human or Orion admiral would have tolerated. Arachnid warships were much slower, tactically, than their opposition because of the Bug practice of relying on commercial rather than military engines. Alliance admirals were initially slow to grasp the advantage in strategic mobility this conferred upon the Omnivoracity's ships, but even after they had done so, they felt no great temptation to build matching, slow units. They preferred to utilize their tactical speed advantages to dictate the range at which engagements were fought, and most of them regarded the Arachnid failure to respond with equally fleet warships as a critical Bug failure. In fact, however, this would appear to reflect a fundamental difference in their strategic and tactical concepts.    Whereas a Terran or Orion admiral embraced Old Terra's Napoleonic dictum to "Ask me for anything but time," an Arachnid commander was apparently quite prepared to spend years preparing an operation in order to undertake it in such strength as to be unstoppable. Arachnid operations showed a distinct tendency to identify an objective the enemy simply had to defend and then to drive straight towards it in overwhelming force. Since their opponents could not concede the objective without a fight, they were compelled to come within range of the Arachnid fleet, however slow it might be. There were, of course, drawbacks to this approach, particularly given the Alliance's monopoly on strikefighters, but the Arachnid development of the gunboat markedly reduced that Alliance advantage, and the sheer ferocity of a Bug warp point assault was horrifying. Given their willingness to sacrifice personnel, the Arachnids were quite prepared to launch enormous forces of cruiser-sized vessels on simultaneous transits even into warp points they knew were protected by heavy minefields, energy buoys, and OWPs, accepting both losses in transit and enormous minefield kills in order to swamp the defenders. The introduction of the warp-capable gunboat can only have made this tactic more attractive to them, and classic Alliance WP defense doctrine had to be radically revised.    Moreover, it should be noted that the Arachnid decision to adopt a defensive strategic stance did not preclude local offensive operations. In many respects, the Bugs appear to have adopted a classic concept of attrition--one more effective and far more costly than anything Humanity had ever seen, even during its own World War One. They were entirely prepared to sacrifice their own personnel to wear down an opponent, and they appear to have regarded the "spoiling attack" as a major defensive tool. Once the Alliance went on the offensive, the Bugs knew their enemies would be assembling attack forces on the far side of any strategically important warp point, and they adopted the policy of launching frequent attacks of their own to prune back those forces and preempt Alliance attacks. In a sense, it appears to have been a simple extension of their basic tactical doctrine: they knew the enemy was there and would have to fight to retain control of the warp point, which meant he would be forced to accept battle if they attacked him.    One major problem for Alliance analysts was that they were never able to identify any individual Arachnid commander (assuming there were such individual commanders) and get a "feel" for his tactics. In part, this resulted from the inability to communicate, which, in turn, meant that it was impossible to tap Arachnid communications or analyze captured orders, but it went further than that. Arachnid battlegroup command ships often could be identified, but no Alliance admiral ever succeeded in identifying an Arachnid flagship. Indeed, some analysts argued that there were no Bug flagships; certainly the disorganization which often afflicted Alliance formations when flagships were destroyed in action was never observed in any Arachnid task force or fleet.    At the same time, the Bugs' telepathy (which, provable or not, Alliance strategists and tacticians accepted as a given from 2362 on) clearly had its drawbacks. It was, apparently, the reason Arachnids could not operate fighters, since they seem to have required a certain "mental density" to function efficiently. No Arachnid vessel smaller than a cruiser, warship or freighter, was ever observed (except for the small craft), and the Bugs appear to have had a peculiar sensitivity to really major casualties. While their combat efficiency was never noticeably degraded by losses in combat, the Alliance observed at Home Hive-1, and again at Home Hive-3, that massive loss of Arachnid life anywhere in a star system seemed to produce a state of shock or confusion in that system's defenders. At Home Hive-1, the first major planetary bombardment strike got in without interception, courtesy of the "El Dorado" warp point, and the performance of the defending fleet was noticeably disjointed thereafter. Some analysts have argued that this was because the planetary strike had taken out some central command facility, but the degradation in Arachnid performance extended to the tactical, as well as the strategic level, and one is tempted to accept the Matsuhito hypothesis. Matsuhito argues that if the Bugs were, in fact, telepathic, they may have sensed the sudden shock of the attack. It is estimated, after all, that the bombardment killed in excess of twenty billion Arachnids in a space of less than thirty minutes, and a telepathic race may have suffered a sort of psychic shock or trauma as a consequence.    Ultimately, the Arachnids presented xenology with its greatest puzzle. They were the only species which no one else was ever able to understand. Incomprehensible as the genocidal impulses of the Rigelians may have been initially, it was still possible to consult their surviving records and determine what had driven them and to construct models to predict and study their behavior. The same was true, on a lesser scale, for the Federation in its war with the Theban theocracy, but no one could even communicate with the Arachnids. They were--and remain--the great, faceless menace, the very personification of the pre-space Human nightmare of the utterly incomprehensible "alien menace," which undoubtedly accounts for the enduring fascination they hold not simply for Human but for Orion, Ophiuchi, and Gorm xenologists, as well. And it also, no doubt, helps explain the ferocious determination with which the fleets of the Alliance hunted down and destroyed every single Arachnid in existence. The Rigelians had been exterminated because the Alliance of that war had no choice; it seems likely the Arachnids would have been exterminated even if the ISW-4 Alliance had been offered another option. Even the Ophiuchi, who had refused to take part in the bombardments of Rigelian civilian populations, participated unflinchingly in the destruction of the Arachnid race.    And perhaps that harsh, merciless attitude should come as no surprise, for whatever the truths of Arachnid military policy, social organization, philosophy, communication, and ultimate objectives may have been, their consequences were only too evident to the Grand Alliance and its citizens. The Fourth Interstellar War was the most costly--in civilian, as well as military casualties--that any of the Alliance's members had ever fought.    Back