"That does not make sense," Tau huffed, frustrated by trying to understand her. Penny agreed, the behavior of Earth's recent history didn't make any sense. But it was true all the same.
Tau was quiet, thinking about something, his hand over his mouth as he pondered.
"Humans and the Hive," he took his hand from his mouth to look at her, "Me and you. We are very different. We are not the same species. I did not have parents like you. You have never seen the sunset I know. I don't think you even experience happiness and sadness like I do. Is it possible that humans could forget we of the Hive are people? Could they come to hate us and want to destroy us, like the wars you spoke of?"
Penny was shocked by the question. She looked away, thinking about how certain people on Earth would react to learning the human exploratory crew had been imprisoned and put on trial here.
"Yes," she said, "It's possible. But it won't happen. That's what Ambassadors like me are for. We help even people who are very different find a way to cooperate. I'll find a way for us too."
She smiled, but Tau still looked worried. Penny scooted forward and reached through the bars to touch his hand and he jumped.
"Hey, we're not that different," she said lightly, "You and me. We're both ambassadors. We're both shaped a lot alike. And I know there are a lot of other things too. We'll figure them out together. Deep down, we are the same."
He smiled back at her, placing his hand over hers.
"We are the same." he agreed, squeezing her hand, "Now, tell me more of comics."
It had been past quarter day when Penny woke, and she'd more or less figured out that days here were 48 hours, divided into eight portions. Tau, built for 48-hour days, did not need a rest in between, but Penny did.
They talked until nearly the sixth-eighth of the day, and then he went out to deal with work and his ongoing investigation into the death of the queen while Penny napped, still recovering from her medical emergency.
When she woke from her nap, she realized it had been nearly two full 'days' since her trial. She only had five 48 hour days left to prove her innocence. And she was stuck in a cage, telling an alien about a lasagna loving cat.
The anxious desperation that caused inspired her to kick and struggle with her cage some more, but she still couldn't get it to budge. Frustration turned to boredom as the hours passed with nothing to do but work out or kick uselessly at the bars of her cage.
Eventually, just for something to do, she started singing. Some pop song that had been in her head, then things she'd learned taking choir in school, then half remembered musical numbers from movies she'd watched as a kid. She was half way through her favorite song when Tau burst through the door.
"Stop doing that!" he shouted, and Penny's mouth snapped shut immediately as he dropped something by the door, yanked his helmet off and hurried to kneel by her cage, leaving the door open behind him.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, expression lined with concerned concentration, "Are you ill again?"
"No," Penny stared at him, confused and startled, "I was just bored. Why are you freaking out?"
"That thing you were doing with your voice," he stared back at her in slightly worried wonderment now that he was no longer afraid she was dying, "What was that?"
"Singing," Penny replied, "It's normal. Every human can do it. I guess it makes sense you wouldn't have it, since most of your population doesn't communicate vocally."
"Every worker and drone for blocks around this cell has stopped working," Tau explained, "They just froze, listening. You shut down an entire section of the hive."
Penny paled in realization of what she'd done, and cleared her throat.
"Well," she squeaked, "And here I never thought I was that good."
"You do not understand the power of the Queen's speech," Tau said seriously, "The workers and drones, they cannot help but obey it. It is a compulsion for them. Even if they can't understand what you're saying, they must listen. You can physically hurt them with it if you try."
Penny, stunned, looked past him towards the open door, where a cluster of gold carapaced workers was clustered, staring in at her. She couldn't read emotion on their insectoid faces, but they seemed excited, chittering and jostling to see. Tau stood and hurried to close the door.
"You must not do that again," he insisted, "It's dangerous. It will make the regents think you and other humans are dangerous."
"I won't sing anymore," Penny agreed, holding up her hands in surrender, "But you have to give me something else to do. Maybe it's different for you, but a human can't just sit in one place for hours doing nothing. It'll drive us crazy. My team has books. Ask for one or two of them."
Tau sighed and nodded.
"I will do this," he said, returning to the front of the cage, "Just please do not make that sound anymore."
Penny nodded and Tau, shaking his head, went to remove his armor.
"Tau?" Penny asked as he was closing the armor cabinet a few minutes later, "Why doesn't my voice affect you?"
Tau paused for a moment before answering. Penny saw the tension in his shoulders before he turned and wondered if she shouldn't have asked.
"Because I am not a drone," he said at last.
"What are you then?" she asked, curious, "I assumed all the drones were like you under their armor."
"They are not," he replied, "They are more like the workers."
"I don't understand," Penny frowned, curious. Tau frowned, brows furrowed in an expression of keen discomfort.
"There are three castes, below the Queen," he explained, turning his back on her to go to the kitchen are and fetch his dinner, "The workers, the drone, and the winged males. The workers are all sterile females. The drones are all sterile males.
Both of them are... Mindless is not the word. They are of one mind. They lack a 'self' as you know it. When the queen or a winged male speaks, they become the self that drives the workers and the drones. The only functions a worker or drone will attempt if removed from the queen is to try and foster a new queen. If it is impossible to do so, they will only wait to die."
Penny resisted the urge to comment on how awful that sounded. It was just a fact of biology here and it wouldn't do to insult it.
"So are you a winged male then?" Penny asked, curious.
"No," Tau answered, staring into his food rather than at her, "The winged males are rare. They have a 'self' and can use the queen's speech. They carry out the Queen's will, manage the hive and the workers. But their most important duty is to accompany the Queen on her nuptial flights, once every few years, and contribute their lives to the laying of more eggs, for the continuance of the hive."
Penny nodded, realizing it was the same as earth bees. The males died immediately after copulating to prevent being a drain on resources. The breeding done, they had no more purpose. Here though, where they were individuals with other duties to perform, it seemed crueler.
"But what about you?" Penny asked again, "If you're not a winged male, then what are you?"
Tau turned his head away, ashamed.
"I am un-caste," he answered at last, "Defective. A mutant. Somewhere in between drone and winged male. Un-caste happen from time to time. Once we were destroyed on sight. Now, we are seen as useful. I can lead the drones, but I am not a threat to the power games of the true winged males. I will never join a nuptial flight or risk passing on my defective genes. I will command the Queen's armies until I die."
Penny felt a pang of pity for the alien. She couldn't hope to understand his life, being born wrong in a society with such rigid roles. But she could sympathize with feeling imperfect and unwanted.
"I'm sorry, Tau," she said, wishing she could reach him through the bars.
"I'm not," he replied, and smiled at her with a kind of distant affection. At that moment, watching him through the bars of the cage, she felt like so much more than just this prison separated them. There were lightyears of difference between them.
"I have brought
you something," he said after a moment, filling the silence. She had forgotten the thing he dropped by the door in all the commotion, but he brought it over now. It was a black, hexagonal panel, the top reflective like glass.
"This is surveillance footage of the attack," he explained, and with a touch the top of the panel lit up, a screen, and a video began to play, "I promised to explain to you why the regency blames you for the Queen's death. I have watched this video many times, and seen the wreckage in person. This is why they do not believe when you tell them you are innocent."
He passed the device to Penny through the bars of the cage and she frowned as she saw the film was of the city skyline, the cathedral rising in the center.
It was undamaged, the ragged hole she'd seen when they had not landed there yet. But there was something in the sky, falling fast, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. It arced towards the surface like a meteor and, as Penny watched, smashed through the cathedral roof.
"I don't understand," she said, frowning and offering him the panel back, "That wasn't us. We couldn't have done that."
He didn't take the panel, pushing it back to her.
"Please, continue watching."
She frowned, but did so, staring at the screen as the footage changed, moving inside the cathedral, still full of smoke and weird insect cries. The dais where the infant Queen had sat during Penny's trial was at center of a maelstrom of twisted, burning debris.
A vast corpse, unrecognizable to Penny's eyes, twitched and spasmed in its death throes, burned and shattered into a thousand pieces. And then the camera panned over a charred panel still bearing recognizable lettering.
"The Hermes," Penny covered her mouth in horror, tears welling in her eyes as she realized what that wreckage was, "My god, it's the Hermes."
"Bodies were recovered," Tau elaborated as the video continued to crawl over the debris, the scattered technology and belongings, the shattered cryo pods, "Their apparent biology is a match for your species. This is proof that the attack was Human."
"But it wasn't!" Penny sobbed, horror and despair overwhelming her at the thought of the Hermes crew scattered over that disaster area, "It wasn't an attack! They were our sister ship. We lost them during the journey here. A navigational error. We never thought they could have made it here before us!"
"But then why did they attack?"
"They didn't!" Penny put her face in her hands, shaking as she tried to comprehend how this could have happened, "They drifted off course. They must have passed something with weird gravity, or just encountered less gravitational bodies than us. Somehow they ended up ahead of us. Ended up in this solar system way ahead of schedule, before their cryo pods were even programmed to wake them up. With no one awake to correct the course, the ship just kept flying towards the source of the broadcasts..."
"You are certain," Tau pressed, "Certain this other group of humans may not have acted intentionally? Because of the human way of dividing and fighting each other?"
"We were on the same mission," Penny tried to explain, "We were the same group. It was a mistake. A horrible mistake that killed five of our people. Oh, god. Ambassador Nesmith, and Captain Gaugin and..."
She'd struggled accepting the loss of the Hermes before, now she was going through it all over again, but this time with undeniable proof of their death sitting in front of her.
"But could they have changed their minds?" Tau insisted, "Decided we were a threat?"
"Why do you want it to have been an attack so badly?" Penny shouted at him, hurt and confused by his fixation on this, "It was a horrible accident, isn't that enough?"
"It is not," Tau replied, his expression grim, "Because the regency will not believe it. They will not accept that the death of the queen was accidental. They will call you a liar, and they will execute you and go to war with earth."
"But we can prove it," Penny scrubbed at her eyes, pushing the panel at him through the bars, "Look, there in wreckage, do you see that blocky shape? That's the ship's computer. It's made to survive these kinds of crashes and back up all the ship's records so that if there's an accident we can figure out what happened. If we recover that computer and look at the files on it, it will show if the crew was awake or still in cryo sleep, what the flight path was-We can prove it was accidental."
Tau didn't look like he thought it would make a difference, but he took the panel anyway and nodded.
"I will look for this computer," he said, "I will try. But I do not think it will be enough. The regency wants blood."
Penny hung her head, already discouraged and hurting, haunted by images of the dead Hermes crew. Tau put a hand through the bars to touch her cheek.
"I will find a way for you to survive, Penny Allyn," he said, wiping away her tears, "I will not let them execute you or your team."
"Thank you, Tau," Penny clung to his hand, trembling as tears continued to overwhelm her, and leaned against the bars of the cage.
Slowly, he slid his other arm through the cage bars to put it around her shoulders, holding her as much as he could. It was a cold comfort, but Penny appreciated the gesture, lingering in that embrace as long as she could.
Chapter Nine
Eventually he had to let go, and Penny didn't try to hold him back, though part of her wanted to. He left to search for the ship's onboard computer, leaving Penny alone with knowledge of what happened to the Hermes, and what would happen to her own crew because of it.
She kept remembering the last time she'd spoken to Ambassador Nesmith, how excited he'd been about this opportunity. He'd encouraged and mentored her even when she'd been nervous enough to consider backing out of the journey entirely. She wouldn't say he'd been like a father to her, her relationship with her father wasn't that good, but he had been an important and supportive figure in her life.
It had been bad enough thinking he had just vanished into the void of space. Knowing it had ended like this was almost worse. He had probably never even woken up, never seen the planet that would be his deathbed. She wished she could show him even the little glimpses of this place she'd seen. If he could have seen the alien Cathedral before he died, that abstract Notre Dame, so much like what they knew and yet so distant, she knew he would have gone to his grave fulfilled.
The thought of his mission left unfinished ate at her. And now, there was likelihood she would not finish her mission either. Never return to earth with news of this other people, so strange and incredible. The way things were going, the first confirmation Earth received that it was not the only bastion of intelligent life in the universe would be a declaration of war.
She was not that tired, but there was little she wanted to do after learning such a thing except sleep. She curled up amid the pillows of her prison to dream away the lingering, useless hours between now and the next time Tau came for her.
It was near the appointed rest hour before he came back, shaking his head when she asked about the computer.
"Not yet," he said, "But there is hope."
"There's only four days left before the execution," Penny pointed out, her expression drawn and tired despite how long she'd slept, "Hope isn't worth much if it comes too late."
"Four days will be enough," Tau promised, and he sounded so certain that Penny did her best to believe him.
"Tau?" she asked as they sat eating, both of them near the bars of her cage, "Did they choose you to talk with me because you're a mutant?"
Tau didn't answer at first, uncomfortable with the question. But after a moment, he nodded.
"The winged males thought speaking to you was beneath them. They do not think you were worthy of their words. So they ordered me to do it, as I am also beneath them, but uniquely capable of speech."
She reached for his hand through the bars and, to her surprise, he took it.
"You're not beneath them," she said, quiet but fierce with sincerity, "Not to me. You deserve better than their disdain and dirty work."
"I don't regret it," he replied, sque
ezing her hand, "If they did not see me this way, I would not have been able to meet you. You were the first person to ever ask for my name."
Penny's eyes widened in confusion and he explained.
"Names are precious here. The drones and workers do not have them. The Queen has one, known only to her, which she signs to her secret sacred writings when she sends them into the void, because they are too holy to be read by any living being, and her shells have their mundane names for sake of historical record.
The winged males have them. It's custom to choose one yourself when you reach third instar. And it is held in reserve and told only to your closest friends and lovers. When I reached my third instar, I knew the life that was relegated to me and that a name was not my right. I chose one anyway, knowing the others would be scandalized to know I had one, and thinking I would never share it with another."
"But you told it to me," Penny said with a smile.
"Propriety would have told me to wait," Tau shrugged, "But no one had ever asked before. I was excited. I am glad I told it to you."
"I'm glad too." Penny rested her head against the bars, a glow of happiness in her chest and her hand still holding his. The lack of a fourth finger didn't make it any stranger to hold.
"So you have lovers?" she asked after a minute, raising an eyebrow, "Or is the translator misbehaving?"
"The winged males indulge in romance," Tau confirmed, "Their lovemaking is only fatal when performed with the Queen. And we see pairs and small bonded groups form among the workers and drones as well that may, ah, stimulate each other, if conditions are right."
"What about you?" Penny asked, knowing it was a bit risqué but curious anyway, "Can you...?"
He looked away and she saw that shade of embarrassment on his face for the first time.
"I can," he answered, "I have been sterilized, as a drone, to prevent my taking part in any nuptial flight, but I am intact. But I have never. I am disgusting in the eyes of the winged males. None would have me. And to be with a worker or drone when my voice can command them... It would be wrong."
The Warrior's Proposal (Celestial Mates Book 7) Page 14
