The Hive Engineers

by Emilia Zeeland

  “I haven’t swollen up like a blowfish yet,” Alec said with a little mirth.

  Yalena savored the feeling of his trimmed stubble against her hand. “And you’d better not give in to Novofex anytime soon.” She couldn’t hide what she thought from him. “You’ll have to hold on until we get back to the near worlds.”

  Alec stroked her shoulder with the backs of his fingers. “We’re working on our exit strategy, but you crashed that Fian ship pretty well. Twice.”

  “We only crashed it once.” Yalena buried her face closer to his neck. “The other time we shot at it, bringing it down.”

  He couldn’t help a snort. “Same difference. I don’t think it will be ready before my food runs out.”

  Yalena propped herself up on her elbows to face him. His warm eyes fueled the fire of determination in her.

  “There’s another way.” She kissed him deeply, getting lost in the scent of fresh soap on his skin.

  Alec’s hands left scorching trails when they moved lower down her back. “Is it something insane?” But the spark in his eyes told her he was growing less and less interested in the details of her plan. His hand brushed her thigh, then pulled her knee up.

  Yalena swept back the hair that had fallen in her face and leaned closer, letting their lips touch lightly, playfully. “It’s not insane. It’s simple. I’ll get you another ship. You’ll just have to worry about flying it.”

  WHEN ALEC WAS LONG asleep, Yalena carefully sneaked out of bed. She hesitated only briefly before she exited the room on tiptoe. Despite the late hour, faint light lined the frame of the door to Stanley’s room. She stopped in front of it, her hand balled into a fist.

  “Come in,” sounded from inside, even though she hadn’t knocked.

  She entered slightly nervously. “You’re still up?”

  Stanley sighed. “I don’t sleep much. Why don’t you sit down?”

  Yalena sat on the ragged couch and evaluated his face, as the vibe didn’t give her much to go on. He was pensive, but that could mean anything.

  Stanley smiled, his crow’s feet deepening at the corners of his eyes. “I can tell you about it if you’d like?”

  He sat next to her on the couch, half-turning to look at her, but Yalena had an inkling about the root cause of her father’s insomnia. Her heart wrenched, but she didn’t display her reaction. She was too consumed by piecing his story together.

  “I saw it in Lexa’s video. Veronica’s death. Your arrest,” she said. “It was horrible.”

  “I’m not going to lie and tell you that spending a lifetime in prison was recreational,” he whispered. Despite his peaceful demeanor, his voice was strained. “We’ve lost so much time together—you and I—but if you’d allow your old man to get a little philosophical, I think there are still things I could teach you, not only about Nova Fia and the seven families’ legacy, but about life.”

  Yalena was suddenly wide awake, afraid to miss a word Stanley said. Her vibe must have given away as much, because Stanley went on in his calming tone.

  “I have no regrets,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to admit that, because so much went wrong back then. I lost Norma, I lost you, and I lost my freedom. But every choice I made was borne out of a conscious decision to stay true to my beliefs—to the idea that peace is stronger than hatred, that reason can prevail over fear.

  “If you remember nothing else from me, please hold on to this one truth. Even if you lose everything, absolutely everything that matters to you in life, you will still be left with who you are. In fact, all any of us ever truly has is who we are. Nothing more and nothing less. When all else is stripped from you, don’t forget you still have the choice of who you want to be. Remember that, my daughter.”

  Yalena’s eyes welled up with tears that she struggled to explain. Shyly, she leaned in toward Stanley, as words failed her. Her father embraced her, one hand smoothing her frizzy hair away from her face.

  “The other thing I need for you to always remember is that prison was the only reason why I couldn’t come find you, take care of you, and bring you home with me,” Stanley said.

  He gave Yalena the explanation she’d always longed for in her heart. The answer to the question that had made her drown in hatred for the parents she’d believed never wanted her. Now, she finally knew better. She felt it in her bones. She’d been wrong.

  He loosened his embrace, letting Yalena straighten up, blinking the unshed tears away. “I’m sorry,” she said, even if it only made sense to her.

  “You have nothing to apologize for. I’m the one who’s sorry.” Stanley reached out to cup both of her hands in his. “I’m sorry the plan Norma and I had for you didn’t work. Nicky was smarter than all of us. She knew Felix would play me. I’m glad she sent you away, far away from his grasp, but I’m so sorry you couldn’t make it home. To your mother. To your brother.”

  Yalena’s breathing slowed as her skin prickled. “You didn’t know what had really happened, did you?”

  “Not until recently, no. I got some messages through the other rebels, the ones that acted as secret agents around Felix, but for all they knew, you’d been sent to Marcus O’Donnell.” Stanley’s eyes darkened at the memory. “I wasn’t sure if Norma would have been brave enough to confess to him that you were ours, but I was sure she’d find a way to keep you near, to adopt you, if that would appease their society. What I really didn’t know...” His voice grew rough. “Blaine told me after their first trip to Unifier. I had instructed him to find Norma, to learn how you grew up. But instead he found a woman named Dana—and she mentioned O’Donnell’s late wife.”

  Yalena looked away. Her admiration had always been reserved for Veronica. She had been the smart one. The brave one. The one that had sacrificed everything for her friend. Norma had been egoistic. Daring and a visionary, but egoistic and rattled. And as much as Yalena had wanted to accept Norma as her mother, those feelings had persistently nagged at her.

  Until this moment.

  Stanley loved Norma like he’d lost her yesterday. She was as vivid, as real, as wonderful to him now as Yalena was, sitting in front of him. She could feel it streaming through the vibe.

  “Norma got sick,” Yalena said hoarsely. “When Veronica didn’t get back in touch with her to tell her she’d sent me away, Norma must have known something had gone wrong. She drove herself mad, she kept asking about her baby, but she didn’t seem to mean Eric.” Yalena tried to recall each detail they’d found out about her mother. “When I was brought to Unifier as a baby, O’Donnell never told Norma about me. She was too troubled and on strong medications. He didn’t think there was anything to her words but madness, slowly taking over her. So, he gave me away.”

  Yalena’s eyes turned glossy again, and her heart felt small and fragile. She no longer cared if all her emotions leaked out through the vibe. She didn’t have to hide. Not from her father. Stanley drew her into a hug she readily fell into, shaking as the tears rolled down her face.

  “Now you’re found,” he whispered. “Yalena Troian Russo, and if you wanted to add my surname to the list, Tate.”

  The symbolism of her full name, bringing together all the different pieces of the puzzle of her life, washed over Yalena as she sobbed. Only she wasn’t crying about herself. She cried for Stanley, locked away for half his life in prison. And for O’Donnell, who’d spent his life believing a lie. And even for Norma, who’d made all those mistakes, until they drove her mad and destroyed her from the inside out.

  After a long pause, Yalena finally wiped her face clean of tears. “How did Blaine and Alec break you out?”

  Stanley cleared his throat. “Felix must have known the resistance wouldn’t be contained once he’d left with those loyal to him on Farsight. The security he left was scant, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if it wasn’t.”

  “Why?”

  Stanley smiled. “I’ve been something of a martyr for the resistance since I was thrown in jail. They would have done anythi
ng to get me out, employed the strongest weapon in their possession. And as it just so happens, the strongest weapon—a man with no vibe but with military training—had just landed unexpectedly.”

  “Blaine must have thought it was Christmas.” Yalena’s cheeks flushed with warmth.

  “Imagine my surprise, when the guard on my corridor was knocked out unconscious by a human boy with a silver glove.”

  Yalena wished she could have been a fly on that wall when that happened. They both laughed, then Stanley continued in an incredibly accurate mimicry of Alec’s Martian accent. “I’m your daughter’s boyfriend. I need your help to save her from the army on the ice moon.”

  Yalena wore a giddy, silly smile, but she didn’t care. The feeling only Alec could invoke in her exuded from her through the vibe like a wave, and she didn’t even consider trying to dampen it.

  “You have no idea what this means to me,” Stanley said more seriously. “Seeing you happy. Getting a chance to talk to you. To explain. To get to know you. It’s all I ever dreamed about.”

  Yalena relaxed, smiling on the inside. She and her father were going to be a better team than she ever could have hoped for. And that reminded her of the reason she’d come to him in the first place.

  Stanley seemed to sense the evolution in her thoughts. “What is it?”

  “I know we have rations for Alec now, but they won’t last long,” Yalena said. “And I can’t ask him to become a Fian. He shouldn’t have to. I wouldn’t forgive myself, especially after what happened to Natalia.”

  “First off, the girl will be fine,” Stanley said. “With her edge and attitude, she may as well have been born to be a Fian.”

  Yalena made a face at the joke, which turned him serious again.

  “She’s one of our own. There’s a richness that comes with that. We’ll always take care of her. I promise you that.”

  Yalena drew her knees in, hugging them with both arms. “I still can’t let that happen to Alec.”

  Stanley patted her shoulder. “I understand.” His lips formed a tight line. “That’s why I showed you the ship in the cave today. If the hive engineers can morph a planet to support only Novofex-based life, then this alien race is technically superior to all of us. That ship is a sleeping giant. It’s likely both powerful and fast. We just need to wake it.”

  Yalena’s grip on her knees broke and she tensed upright. She’d have to focus now. “Let’s do this.”

  Stanley went to get his tablet and a stylus. He opened detailed photos of the carvings on the outside of the alien corpus. Yalena scrolled through them, trying to memorize them, to look for patterns, but it was as unfamiliar as Arabic would be to an alien. Then, Stanley switched to a table where he’d listed all the alien characters in one column and the next columns showed possible meanings for each sign.

  “This is what I have so far,” he said.

  Yalena studied the characters in silence. She agreed with Stanley’s logic in creating the table. Judging by the amount and variety of the symbols, it was more likely they were expressions of concepts, like in Chinese, rather than letters, like in English.

  One sign popped up everywhere. Yalena skimmed through Stanley’s guesses for its meaning. He only had one. The hive engineers.

  Yalena scratched her chin, engulfed in her thoughts. “Do you think one has to be an alien to open the ship?”

  “Not necessarily, not if we can outsmart the lock mechanism,” Stanley said.

  Yalena made a low click with her tongue. “You said something in the cave... What if they wanted you to get back in touch with them?”

  Stanley’s expression was frozen. “It’s a theory I stand by, but the only sensor we’ve found doesn’t react to our touch.” He flipped back to one of the pictures. It was a circle glowing in faint yellow.

  Yalena’s mind raced, back to the first-year mission, back to Eric and Jen as they returned to Unifier with a chopped-off hand from the Fian morgue. “Maybe it needs something stronger than a touch. A touch or a palm print isn’t proof of Novofex.”

  Stanley’s jaw tightened. He must have seen her point. “Our blood is.”

  Yalena tried not to think of how exactly they would try this out. “It’s worth a shot.”

  Stanley evaluated her plan for a second. “We leave at dawn.”

  On a planet with two suns, where night lasted less than six hours, Yalena knew she didn’t have much time to get some sleep. She wished Stanley goodnight and stood to leave, but before she’d reached the door, she turned back.

  “This code-buster thing,” she dragged out, unsure how to describe her abilities. “And the way you’ve picked up on the Martian accent...”

  Stanley looked at her, welcoming. “Yes?”

  “Is it a Fian thing?”

  His face melted into a smile. “Perhaps a little bit of it, yes, but most Fians aren’t nearly as good at it as we are.” With a flutter in her heart, Yalena waited patiently for him to confirm. “It’s a Troian thing.”

  Chapter 31. Proof of Blood

  After what felt to Yalena like a second of sound sleep, Alec nudged her awake. She rubbed her eyes blearily.

  “Wake up, sleepyhead,” he said. “Stanley came by to brief me on your plan. We’ve got to go.”

  Yalena twisted and stretched out in bed for another moment, but then she jumped up, energized by the idea of trying to get the alien ship open. She wasn’t sure if Stanley had told Alec the specifics of that, but it didn’t matter. Perhaps it was a genius idea. Perhaps it was a foolish or dangerous one. The only way to know for sure was to test it out.

  She got dressed in a hurry and packed her things in a small backpack that Alec had already stuffed almost full of his own borrowed clothing.

  Out of the resistance quarters, the break of dawn brought crisp, humid air and a purplish sky, still illuminated by a few sparkling stars and the silhouette of the ice moon. A few rugged transporters were already lined up on the street. The Fian rebels loaded bags and ammunition onto the trucks.

  The vibe made Yalena aware of Natalia coming up behind her. When she turned around, Blaine was by Natalia’s side. Their conversation halted when they saw Yalena.

  “What kind of a suicide mission are you leading us on now?” Natalia asked.

  Yalena flashed a smile at Blaine. “How are you surviving the bite of her sarcasm?”

  “Surviving it?” he mocked. “I revel in it.”

  As a response, Natalia extended a punch that landed on his shoulder.

  “Ouch.” He tilted his head her way. “I didn’t see that one coming.”

  “That’s because I didn’t have to think about it.” Natalia shrugged. “I don’t plan when I punch you anymore. I just do.”

  Yalena snickered. “It’s usually called for.”

  Stanley waved them over. He was already sitting in the driver’s seat of the first transporter in the line. Yalena rushed to get in the front seat, while Alec, Blaine and Natalia squeezed into the back. Alec munched on dry supplies from his human rations, while Blaine distributed sweet banana-like fruits to the rest. They were a shade of orange and tasted like banana mixed with peanut butter.

  “Not half bad,” Yalena said. Even Natalia had to agree.

  When they got to the caves, Stanley instructed the Fians to split up in teams. “We need to check the integrity of the surface and the caves. If we manage to open the ship, we’ll also have to get it out from under there. Spread out and test the terrain. As I understand it, we have a STAR Academy science officer with us.”

  He regarded Natalia with something akin to pride. She perked up, a small smile blooming on her lips. Blaine eyed her with a bounce of his eyebrows.

  “I trust you to follow Natalia’s guidance,” Stanley said. “She’ll have a lot to teach us. Now, go, spread out.”

  Everyone nodded and moved swiftly at his command. It made Yalena feel closer to her father. Leadership was something they shared, and it made her smile.

  Then, Stanley beckoned t
o Yalena and Alec to follow him into the caves. Yalena slipped a few times but always regained her balance. She wasn’t as cautious as she’d been the first time. The nervous energy borne from testing out another one of her crazy theories buzzed inside her.

  They halted in front of the round sensor, bathed in a faint glow.

  “Here we go,” Yalena said. She double-checked what she thought was the character for Novofex on Stanley’s tablet. “Are you ready?”

  Stanley handed her a small med kit, probably one of the few they had been holding at the resistance. Yalena unzipped the bag. She found the alcohol solution and poured a little over some bandages in her hand. Sanitizing Stanley’s palm was the first time she felt truly nervous about this.

  “What exactly is going on?” Alec’s bushy eyebrows drew close together. “You said you knew how to open this?”

  “We have a hunch,” Stanley said. Then he turned to Yalena. “Don’t be nervous. I’ve endured much worse.”

  “That’s not exactly comforting.” She squirmed at the thought.

  Stanley’s limp came to mind, but Yalena didn’t let it distract her. She trusted herself enough to make a clean cut that would heal well. The skills she’d picked up at the Moon clinic came into use now and again. She fished the scalpel out of the med kit.

  “Whoa,” Alec yelped.

  Yalena took a calming breath to steady her grip. Stanley offered her his hand. She pricked his finger, enough to make him bleed. He didn’t even flinch. Neither did she pick up on any pain through the vibe. When she looked up at his eyes, she sensed he was going through all the trouble of erecting a wall around his vibe for her sake. He had a look of sympathy, more than pain.

  Yalena put pressure on the wound with clean bandages. They were soon soaked in dark purple blood that triggered a very unpleasant memory of Robin on the ice moon, but she couldn’t let the image linger. Yalena replaced the bandages and guided Stanley’s other hand to put pressure on the cut. Then, she brought the blood-soaked bandages closer to the sensor.