A Royal Baby

In the ancient gloom of the Windsor Castle birthing pits, the three thousand eggs laid by the Queen during the Galactic Eclipse were beginning to hatch. The primeval ritual always began the same; with a single Reptilian breaking from its calcite prison and squawking in triumph. The staccato scream would taunted its siblings to do likewise, but few would succeed. Annunaki eggshells were sometimes inches thick and hatching was almost impossible. This unnatural selection would ensure the weakest of the hatchlings would die in-utero, but this was no flaw, it was part of a complex organic algorithm to weed out the weakest genetic variations. Amongst thousands laid by her Majesty since the cosmic conjunction of 2012, only around a hundred would claw their way to victory.

But only one would survive. 

As soon as second shell cracked open and the two siblings exchanged glares, the battle commenced. The war cries of the two infant reptoids sounded the alarm to others yet unhatched that the conflict proper had begun, causing them to scratch and bite at their shells all the more furiously. The muffled screams of the thousands who would die in their shells became the background noise for the awful chorus. The gladiatorial conflict soon became three... four... ten, and as more and more hatchlings joined the fray. As they did, so the tenor intensified. In the coming hours, the skirmish escalated to a hundred-strong battle royale where splinters of eggshell and shattered bone were used as improvised weapons. Despite the unrelenting brutality of the fight, reptilians died hard and sometimes the battle would last days. Often, tribes spontaneously formed to wage wars of extermination on others. When one clan had extinguished the other and feasted on the remains, these ad-hoc alliances would implode in an orgy of treachery and bloodshed.

To human minds, this might be considered a rather random way to choose an heir to a global Empire. But the alien minds of the Annunaki had engineered the birthing ritual to molecular levels of detail. The chaotic logic behind the bloodshed was to them as precise and rigorous as any scientific formula and was designed to produce only one possible outcome. To them it was like channeling electrons to through a computer.

At its height, the noise generated by the conflict was thunderous, but the pits lay far from the senses of most humans. Located in a secure corner of the Windsor catacombs a thousand metres beneath the earth's surface, few of the surface-bound mammals had ever witnessed the birthing ritual. Only those specially bred for service to Annunaki's inner circle were permitted that honour, and one of those humans was the a Yeomen Warder known to his fellow Sheeple as Jeffrey Cunningham.

Jeffrey sat snoozing on a worn wooden chair, in theory guarding the entrance to this part of the labyrinth from any interlopers. In reality, both he and his predecessors hadn't seen action for centuries. Not since the uprising of the Ant-People, anyway, but he often thought that was just made up by the other Beefeaters to boost morale. His job was in essence a lifetime-long night-watch of the most tedious kind, sitting alone in a cave for hours on end, whistling to himself and playing Candy Crush Saga. All that would all change tonight.

He was dreaming of a talking Jack Russell when the inhuman din of the pits stirred him from his sleep. The moment his conscious mind became aware of it he instinctively stood up and reached for his halberd. As he did so his iPhone fell from his lap and clattered to the floor.

"Oh bloody hell." he muttered, as he squatted down awkwardly to pick it up. He held it before the wall-mounted torch and moved it around to check for scratches. There was a dent in the soft aluminium rim that glistened in the haze of the fire.

"Bugger."

He slipped in into his pocket, angry with himself, and turned his attention to the the nightmarish wail emanating from the birthing pits. Once the general confusion of being woken had subsided, he began to assess the situation. The grotesque wail was the unmistakable signal that the morpho-cycle had begun, but that wasn't scheduled until the Void Storm in July, which was weeks away. It just wasn't possible for the victorious hatching to emerge ahead of schedule. He looked up at the cycloptic pyramid that stood at the apex of the enormous stone archway he was guarding. It was a comfortable reminder that in this job, everything went to plan, everything went to schedule, everything was overseen. In this line of work there was no such thing as a surprise. Gazing around the darkness, he searched for something, anything, that could make sense of this anomaly. Tension began to spread from his neck and down his back.