"All of tried to figure out how to use our voices on the drones like you can," Cho explained as they hurried down another winding tunnel, "Rivera only managed it once or twice. I'm a little better but not enough to be useful. Salome is pretty good, as long as she's speaking her own language. They don't listen to Ian at all."
"Typical," Ian laughed it off with a shrug.
"Finally," Rivera said in relief as the drones turned off the hall, leading them down steps to what looks almost like a subway station. A small vehicle waited in the tunnel, just big enough for them to pack into, leaving the drones behind.
"Wait, what about Tau?" Penny asked, grabbing Rivera's arm as one of the drones began fiddling with the controls of the train, "We have to wait for him."
"He'll catch up," Rivera promised, "He has his own transportation."
The doors of the train closed abruptly and it rocketed off at unexpected speed, making them stumble against each other as it raced away at what felt like near the speed of sound.
"Will we be followed?" Penny asked, frowning behind them.
"With any luck, they have no idea where we're going," Rivera said, "Tau told us the people rarely leave the Hive cities. They have all the technology for space travel but don't use it. They don't see any value in exploration unless it's to expand. There are huge parts of their planet that are completely unexplored because they were deemed less than optimal for settling. This mag lev will take us to the edge of the city. From there, he's arranged a craft to take us into the mountains."
"What's in the mountains?"
"A way home."
Chapter Twelve
It took twenty minutes, even in the bullet train, to reach the edge of the hive city. From there, Rivera hurried them into a waiting vehicle, which turned out to be some kind of magnetic hover shuttle. There was a worker inside, its golden carapace more striated and unique than those she'd seen in the city. Also more worn. The worker didn't look at or speak to them.
Penny had only seen the workers acknowledge her existence at all when she used her voice. It just operated the controls to raise the shuttle off from the grass and send it soaring silently out over to plains and towards the blue gray mountains that reared solemn in the distance.
"Tau mentioned Wasp-kind living out here beyond the cities," Cho peered through the windows of the shuttle as they flew, looking up at the dark sky, "Will they be a problem? I'm not even sure what they are."
"I don't think so," Penny joined her at the window, curious, "From what I gathered, they're a closely related species. Like us and homo sapiens idaltu or homo habilis. Hive-kind consider themselves superior because Wasp-kind don't have a Queen. Wasp-kind also apparently lay parasitic eggs in anything they can catch, including Hive-kind. They raid the edges of the Hive cities regularly apparently."
Cho shuddered.
"So how do we know they're not going to attack and lay eggs in us?" Cho asked, raising her eyebrows in concern.
"Well, they're mostly a solitary species," Penny went on, "Nomadic. They form small groups of no more than three or four on occasion, and there have been reports of large gatherings once or twice in one of this planet's years. But I doubt they would try to attack a vehicle like this with only three or four people."
"That's not very reassuring," Cho frowned, "How technologically advanced are they? If they're equivalent to the Hive-kind, three or four people are all they would need to take us down."
Penny frowned back, realizing Cho was right.
"I don't know," she replied, "He made it seem like they were sort of backwards..."
"But you said Hive-kind think Wasp-kind are inferior. What if he was just underestimating them?"
Penny didn't have an answer for that. They watched the skies warily for the rest of the trip.
At last, they reached the mountains and the silent worker set the shuttle down on a high peak. It exited ahead of them and the team followed it, wary and unsure of where they were going. That this might be a way to get home was all Tau had told Rivera. With no one else in this solar system they could trust, she'd had to take his word for it.
The worker led them into a cave which at first seemed unremarkable. A little deeper in, strip lighting illuminated its stone walls, which were soon after replaced by the smooth wax Penny had become used to seeing in the city.
"Tone of greeting! Welcome! Hello friends!"
The tunnel opened into a wide cavern, the sides and ceiling of which were dotted with nests, some waxy, some papery, some made of no material Penny had yet seen. Like beehives or small houses they filled the cavern, illuminated by strip lighting that ran between them and hung in loops from the cavern roof.
It was full of people, some of them recognizable as workers or drones, others not so easy to identify. A figure raised its arms to greet them and Penny, momentarily confused, tried to determine what caste it was.
He was humanoid, like the winged males, and appeared basically masculine, but his skin was layered in gold chitin scales. His hair, which Penny had learned was actually a kind of clustered antennae, was golden as well.
His eyes were solid black, with no visible iris or pupil, reflecting the light iridescent when he moved. As he spoke, Penny saw translator chips light up on her team's clothing and realized Tau must have given them the technology.
"Hello," Penny replied, stepping forward, "Tau sent us?"
"Tone of friendliness, yes! We've been expecting you!" the golden carapaced man said, "I imagine he did not tell you what to expect, in case you were captured. Please don't worry, I will explain everything."
Chither See, who was flustered and delighted when Penny asked his name, took them to one of the larger wax hives, which was decorated with furniture made of the same organic material as everything else she'd seen the Hive-kind make.
Even the computers, if that's what the blocky machines filling one wall of the house were, seemed organically based. Chither asked them to sit and explained that this mountain was a refuge for mutants and dissidents, Hive-kind and Wasp-kind alike, which explained why Penny hadn't recognized many of the life forms she'd seen in the cavern.
"Tone of pride. I am myself a mutant," Chither said without the shame Penny had seen in Tau, "In my larval stage, I was meant to be a worker, but began developing gendered traits. I might have become a Queen, but a new one was not needed at the time and the proper adjustments to my pheromone intake were not made. If I had been born without a self, they would have destroyed me. But being conscious, they waited to determine if I could be useful. I was luckier than Tau. Before they could decide how to use me, I was smuggled out here."
The mutants in the caverns were not just cross-caste like Tau and Chither. There were otherwise physically unremarkable workers and drones who had been born with or developed unique selves. There were persons of all castes with physical deformities, some of them inherent, some of them the result of injury or illness.
Penny glimpsed a winged male, ragged and harrowed looking, who'd had his wings torn off in an altercation with an ex-lover, according to Chither. Not all of the people there would have been destroyed for their abnormal physicality.
For some, it was the social stigma or the trauma that sent them looking for somewhere to begin again. For that reason, they kept people who could hide their mutations among the hive city population, to find people looking for a way out and help them.
One had approached Tau, but by then it had already been decided that Tau would be kept alive to work with the drones, and he'd decided to stay, thinking he could be more useful in the hive. Many of the mutants here were here because Tau had found them and helped them.
"It seems likely that you'll be the last people he helps out of the hive city," Chither sighed, "If what I'm hearing about the stunt he pulled getting you out of the trial is accurate. He's been keeping me up to date on everything, since he approached me about decoding the data from the first ship's computers."
"That was you?" Penny asked, surprised.
"It was indeed. The regency didn't care about his investigation and didn't want him wasting resources on it. He had to go outside the city to find help. And I've been working on more than just that."
He led them out of the main cavern and down to a smaller, lower one, one wall an open cave mouth looking out over the mountain range. There were a variety of small mag-flight vehicles in various states of disrepair scattered across the hanger like cave, and one huge shuttle whose silhouette Penny recognized at once.
"The Hermes!" she exclaimed.
"Not quite," Chither corrected, "Tau could only steal bits and pieces of the original wreck for me. Most of it I had to recreate from local materials. But, as you can imagine, the workers here work very fast. I've led them in not just rebuilding it, but improving it, upgrading it with some of our tech. It will be much easier to get into atmosphere now. No need for the rockets you were using before. You'll be able to move much faster as well."
The team, excited, boarded at once to examine the replica ship, exclaiming at how incredibly accurate it was. Of the few mistakes, most were cosmetic, or misunderstandings about human functioning. Only one really stood out. Chither had added a sixth cryo pod to the sleeping area.
"It seemed indecent to leave it at five," he confessed, blushing, "I don't know how you could stand it, being so close to six but one away. I would lose my mind."
"How soon do you think it'll be ready to fly?" Rivera asked, clearly eager to get home.
"A few more days, depending," Chither answered.
"Depending on what?"
"On whether Tau's part of things goes according to plan," he replied, and Penny's stomach curdled at the concern in his dark eyes.
"What's his part of the plan?" Penny asked, frowning.
Chither gave her a look that said he'd rather not answer, but he could tell Penny wasn't going to back down about it.
"He intended to get the last of the parts I needed for this ship from the one you landed here, then destroy it so it can't be used by the hive-kind."
"Intended?" Penny's frown deepened, "Why the past tense?"
"He should have been back by now."
Chapter Thirteen
The rest of the team mingled with the mutants for a while, Cho taking notes in a froth of enthusiasm at finally being allowed to interact with the aliens the way she'd wanted to. The cave dwellers seemed to react well to her excitement. Penny imagined they'd never met someone so thrilled to talk to them.
They were lucky, Penny thought, that in so many ways Hive-kind thought models were very similar to their own. They could have encountered a species with a completely alien way of thinking. No amount of translation software would have helped with that. Though Cho did seem to have some trouble with the few Wasp-kind in the cavern, weird narrow waisted winged creatures who were just humanoid enough to be unsettling, and whose conversational skills suffered somewhat both from having no concept of plural pronouns and a certain difficulty in registering anything not Wasp-kind as being alive at all. Talking to them wasn't so much talking to a brick wall as it was being said brick wall and trying to convince someone to talk to you.
The Hive-kind mutants dined communally at midday, close to twenty four hours from when Penny had woken this morning. Though they couldn't eat the food, the team joined the aliens at their meal, watching them consume a strange kind of nectar they cultivated in flower fields in a valley down the mountain.
Penny sat near them but, as in the hours before, couldn't quite find the will to participate in the conversation. Her eyes were always turned towards the open cave mouth, waiting anxiously for Tau to arrive.
The team explained to Chither that humans were used to resting for the last six to eight hours of a twenty four hour day and Chither, baffled but amused, had led them to sleeping cells for their 'mid-day nap.' Penny hadn't joined them, though her eyes itched with tiredness.
She couldn't make herself rest with Tau still out there somewhere, potentially in danger. Any time she took her eyes off the sky the anxiety ate at her unbearably. Somehow she felt that if she stopped willing him back to her for even a moment, he would never make it.
Eventually, leaning against the wall near the cave mouth, looking down on the craggy gray stone of the range, crawling with blue velvet moss towards the valley far below where flowers grew in a riot of color by the Hive-kind's careful cultivation, Penny dozed off, too exhausted by the long and stressful day to keep her head up any longer.
She woke to the sound of familiar engines. Her eyes shot to the sky, her heart leaping as she saw the familiar shape of the Oshun descending towards the cave. She scrambled to get out of the way as it came in to land, hope a wild wind in her heart. Behind her the mutants were hurrying closer as well, anxious to see if friend or foe emerged from the ship.
Penny forced herself to stand still and wait as the ship, heavily damaged and smoking, limped to an unsteady landing in the cave mouth. She could hear her pulse in her ears and she'd never wanted anything as badly as for the hatch to open and for him to be behind it.
The engines wound down and for a moment there was near silence, the pops of metal cooling. And then a hiss as the hatch lifted and, finally, Aiten Tau stepped out.
"Tau!" Penny shouted before she could help herself and ran to him. Eyes wide, he caught her and embraced her tightly. She kissed him hard, trembling with relief in his arms.
"Friend, you were meant to bring part of the ship, not the entire thing!"
Chither was approaching, and Penny stepped back, taking in how injured and battle worn Tau looked for the first time.
"I'm afraid that's not all I brought," Tau's eyes were dark with the seriousness of the situation, keeping an arm tight around Penny, "Getting out did not go as planned. I did my best to lose the fighters that followed me in the mountains, but it will only buy us time."
Chither nodded, grim but not upset, and reached for another worker.
"Go and tell the others," he said, "Prepare to evacuate. There's always another mountain."
"I'm sorry to make you do this again, my friend," Tau's regret was clear, but Chither only shook his head.
"It won't be the last time," he shrugged, "This is the life of our kind. We were prepared to go as soon as we heard your plan."
"What about the Hermes?" Penny asked, "Is it ready to fly?"
"Not yet," Chither confirmed, "And this ship Tau has brought won't make it out of the atmosphere. We will need all the time we have to get the Hermes ready to fly. Either the humans leave before the fighting starts or they do not leave at all."
"Then we had better get to work."
The commotion had woken the rest of the human team, who were hurrying up now, Rivera leading them.
"I promised my wife I'd be home in time for my kid's graduation," she said with a smile, "So tell me what I've got to do."
Chither grabbed every worker he could spare from the evacuation to work on the rebuilt Hermes, ripping whatever parts they could salvage out of the wreck of the Oshun and moving it over. Penny worked with them, as familiar with both ships as any of her team. But there was much to be done.
A Wasp-kind scout flew in through the open cave mouth, chittering loudly in its strange, clicking language. A tangible wave of anxiety went through all the Hive-kind listening.
"The Hive city has sent a legion of drone ships," Tau translated for Penny, who looked up from pulling a pump out of the Oshun's inner workings, "They'll be here in less than an hour."
"But we're not ready yet," Penny felt like there was a lump of ice in her stomach, "We need more time!"
"You will have more time," Tau replied, his expression suddenly set in ferocious determination. He hadn't yet had time for his injuries to be treated and Penny watched him in worry as he limped rapidly away to find Chither.
A minute later, the hanger was literally buzzing with new activity as newly armed Hive and Wasp-kind mutants climbed into the small ships that filled the cave or else took off directly from the cave m
outh on their own wings.
"Anyone who couldn't or didn't want to fight has been evacuated," Chither said as he and Tau hurried back towards to two human ships, "The rest will keep the drone ships away a little longer."
"But they'll die," Penny was horrified, "We can't ask them to do that for us!"
Chither shook his head quickly, reaching for her shoulders.
"They want this, human Queen," he explained, "It is the desire of all Hive-kind to fight and die defending Queen and hive. You have given them an opportunity they thought lost forever. Honor their gift by escaping and surviving this."
Penny couldn't argue with that. At least until she saw Tau strapping a stinger to his arm.
"Tau, no," she said as firmly as she could, "I need you here. With me."
"I can command the drones," Tau wouldn't look at her, focused on his armor, though his hands were shaking, clearly having difficulty just standing, let alone fighting, "They'll need me."
"They have others with the voice," Penny insisted, "Besides... I can't let this be the last time I see you. If we get away and my last memory of you is seeing you fly off to die..."
That stopped him for a moment, and he turned to look at her, his face lined with solemn regret.
"Then what should I do, Penny Allyn?" he asked, "Evacuate with the others? Live the rest of my life in a cave, a mutant outcast, without you?"
Penny's heart ached at the pain in his voice. She took his hand, pushing away the stinger to lace their fingers instead.
"Come with me," she said, her voice trembling, "There's a spare cryo pod. Come back to Earth with me. If I have to go back there anyway, give me something worth going back for."
Tau was silent for a long moment, deliberating, watching the other Hive-kind mutants taking off, going to fight. Then he looked at Penny, and she saw in his eyes the moment he made his decision.
Alien Romance: Caged By The Alien: Scifi Alien Abduction Romance (Alien Romance, Alien Invasion Romance, BBW) (Celestial Mates Book 4) Page 10
