The Hive

by Orson Scott Card

  “Don’t you dare,” said a woman’s voice.

  A young Hispanic marine wearing a blue jumpsuit and a disapproving expression hovered at the doorway. “Those straps are there to keep you still. If you remove them, you’ll only detach your sensors, and then all these machines will start wailing and I’ll have paperwork I didn’t ask for. If the straps are too tight, we’ll loosen them. Otherwise, hands off.” The marine pushed off the doorway and floated into the room, a tablet in her hand.

  “I’m Lieutenant Rivera. Your nurse. Major Tokonata is your physician. She’ll probably come around tomorrow to check in on you now that you’re awake. My orders are to keep you eating and downing your meds. Do you have any pain?”

  “What happened to me?” Victor asked.

  “Some idiots in the IF launched you in a coffin rocket. That’s what happened to you. You’re lucky to be alive, considering how long you were bottled up in that thing. I heard about a comms officer shot from Luna once who went six months in a zipship. When they opened the thing out near Saturn, they found him dead inside. Turns out, he’d been dead for months. The wound around his feeding tube had become infected, and his organs had all failed. I’m not sure you fared much better. Deep breath.”

  She had a device pressed against his chest. Victor breathed in multiple times while she listened.

  She put the device back in her pocket. “Any pain?”

  “Where am I?”

  “The Vandalorum. The five-star luxury cruiser of the Fleet, with first-class accommodations for all passengers of any rank. What’s your poison? Caviar and crackers, or the seared halibut? Just kidding, this ship’s a rust bucket. The barracks smell like halibut, truth be told. Halibut or something else funky. Heaven knows why. Or what. But, hey, we’re alive still, so I’m not complaining. Of course, that may not last.”

  “Why are there casts on my legs?”

  “Those aren’t casts. They emit high-energy electromagnetic waves and frequencies to help guide the bone-building medicines we’ve given you. The meds are delivered in nanostructures, and the waves somehow point the meds to areas of osteoporosis. Don’t ask for a better explanation than that. I didn’t build the things. I just put them on. You’ve lost a lot of bone density. Maybe fifteen, twenty percent. Months in a zipship will do that to you. Serious muscle atrophy, too. But you hardly need me to tell you that. But don’t worry. You’ll come around. Right now you look like kuso, but I’ve seen worse.”

  “You have?”

  “Not really. I’m just trying to lift your spirits. You’re by far the worst I’ve ever seen. But Tokonata is the best field doctor in the Fleet. We’ll get you well again. It’s going to take time, but we’ll get there.”

  “How much time do we have?” asked Victor. “How close are we to the motherships?”

  Lieutenant Rivera frowned. “Closer than I’d care to be, between you and me. Less than two months out.”

  “Is that enough time to get me well?”

  “You won’t be back to one hundred percent. Not even close. But you’ll be a hell of a lot better than you are now. You can expect a bumpy road along the way, though. You’ve got kidney stones. Lots of them. From the calcium buildup brought on by the loss of bone density. We’ve blasted the stones, but to pass them they first have to move from your kidneys to your bladder. For that you need gravity. All of our exercise equipment is down in the ship’s fuge. We’ll move down there so you can start building back your muscle mass. The gravity will move those kidney stones but it’s going to feel like a bear trap in your gut.”

  “I’ve had them before,” said Victor.

  “Then you know what a joy that experience will be.”

  “I need to speak to the Polemarch,” said Victor. His head was clearing now. He was getting his bearings.

  Lieutenant Rivera stared. “The Polemarch? Not a chance of that happening.”

  “This is his ship, isn’t it?”

  “No, the Polemarch is on the Revenor, another ship in our fleet, several hundred thousand klicks from us.”

  “I was told the Polemarch requested me for his ship, the Vandalorum,” said Victor.

  “Then you were misinformed,” said Rivera. “The Polemarch has never touched this ship. And wouldn’t. It’s too old and small for his tastes. Nor has he made any request to transfer you to the Revenor that I’m aware of. Sounds to me like someone in the Fleet may have gotten their wires crossed on your orders.”

  “Wires crossed?” said Victor. “I’ve been flying for over seven months. Are you telling me I’m not even supposed to be here?”

  “Relax,” said Rivera. “You’re supposed to be here. The Fleet wouldn’t have put you on a zipship for that long unless they had a reason.”

  “I need to see the captain then,” said Victor.

  “I’d avoid Captain Hoebeck, if I were you,” said Rivera. “He’s not exactly thrilled to have you on board. We used a lot of fuel to pick you up, fuel that the captain didn’t want to lose. Plus he wanted to be in the vanguard that attacks the motherships, but altering our speed and trajectory to pick you up took us out of that position. You basically wrecked the captain’s plans.”

  “If he knew I would wreck his plans, why did he bother to pick me up?”

  “He had to. The order came from the Polemarch.”

  “So the Polemarch does know I’m here,” said Victor.

  “Like I said,” said Rivera. “You’re precisely where you’re supposed to be. Just relax and be grateful you’re alive.”

  “Where’s the zipship?”

  “Your coffin rocket? In the cargo bay, I’m guessing. Why?”

  “Can you tell me how to get there?”

  Rivera laughed. “Your sleep drugs are still making you loopy, Ensign Delgado. You’re not going anywhere. You’re in recovery.”

  “I saw something when I was in the zipship,” said Victor. “Something the Fleet needs to know about immediately. I couldn’t broadcast it during the flight. I didn’t have the capabilities. Now I do.”

  Rivera’s smile faded. “What did you see?”

  “If you tell me how to reach the zipship, I’ll get what I need and then show you.”

  Rivera frowned and glanced at the door, then turned back to Victor. “Doctor Tokonata does not want you moved. If she finds out I moved you, I get skewered.”

  “You won’t move me,” said Victor. “You don’t have to do anything but tell me where the cargo bay is located. Then you go check other patients, and I go on my own. Doctor what’s-her-name can’t fault you for anything because you’ll never be suspected. It will be entirely my doing.”

  “That’s a stupid plan. Everyone knows that Victor Delgado is on this ship. You’re a celebrity. If you step out of this room, all eyes will be on you. You’re wearing hospital scrubs, and you look like death warmed over. You won’t exactly blend in.”

  “What do you mean a celebrity?”

  “You’ve never heard the word ‘celebrity’ before? It means a famous person.”

  “I know what it means, but why would I be a celebrity?”

  “You are Victor Delgado, are you not? The free miner who warned the world and then saved the world. I read the graphic novel.”

  “Graphic novel?”

  “Unauthorized. You were much more muscular in that.”

  “I need to get to the zipship. There are data cubes of information that need to be shared with CentCom.”

  “Even if you get this information, you can’t send it to CentCom from here. The only ship that has a direct link to CentCom is the Revenor, the communication ship, the ship with a quad. The Polemarch’s ship.”

  “What’s a quad?” Victor asked.

  “Some new top-secret comms device. Faster than light, apparently. No time delay in communications. Blows laserline out of the water.”

  “I’ve seen it in action,” said Victor. “I didn’t see the actual device, but I saw how quickly messages were sent and responses received. I was on an IF outpos
t in the Kuiper Belt. CentCom responded like they were in the other room.”

  “That’s the quad,” said Rivera.

  “Why is it called that?”

  Rivera shrugged. “Why is anything called anything in the military?”

  “Okay, we don’t have a quad. But we have to have some system of communication on this ship.”

  “Laserline. But that won’t help you. We’re billions of klicks from the nearest relay station. It would be impossible for us to hit it from this distance. We’re eight months out. But it doesn’t matter anyway because we’re mostly radio silent, meaning only close-proximity laserlines are permissible. One ship right next to another. Easily targeted communications. And only what’s absolutely necessary. The Polemarch doesn’t want to risk us broadcasting radio in every direction and alerting the Formics of our approach.”

  “We’re in open space,” said Victor. “They’ve likely already detected our approach.”

  “Maybe,” said Rivera. “Maybe not. Maybe their scopes and scanners are as bad as ours. We didn’t see you, for example, until you were only a day or two out.”

  “I didn’t see you at all,” said Victor. “I thought the Fleet had abandoned me.”

  “We’re behind schedule,” said Rivera. “Lem Jukes developed a special weapon that can eat through hullmat, and we had to slow down while he sent it to us in some rockets. That put us weeks behind. If you want to blame someone for us missing the rendezvous, blame Lem Jukes.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” said Victor. “Okay, so we’re trying to be inconspicuous in our approach.”

  “As much as we can,” said Rivera. “Little to no radio. Plus all the ships are spread out. We’re not bunched up together. That would make us easier to detect. That was the Polemarch’s orders: cover a wide swath of space, stay thousands of klicks apart. I suspect we’ll close in before the attack.”

  “I need to get my intelligence to CentCom,” said Victor.

  “Why? What did you see out there?”

  “A Formic superstructure,” said Victor. “Or what I think is a superstructure.”

  “That isn’t news,” said Rivera. “The Formics have been building big structures all over the system. The Fleet has destroyed quite a few of them already. Most of them are Potemkin structures, though. Our ships reach them and discover that the structures are hollow inside. It’s just deception. To waste our fuel, time, and resources.”

  “This isn’t a superstructure,” said Victor. “This is the superstructure. There’s nothing else like it in the system.”

  “What do you think it is? A base?”

  “I don’t know,” said Victor. “But whatever it is, it’s of enormous value to the Hive Queen. She doesn’t want us to find it. That’s obvious. She’s trying very hard to keep it a secret. That’s why I’m certain it’s a high-priority target.”

  “If you don’t know what it is exactly, how do you know she’s trying to keep it a secret?”

  “Because she’s making it invisible,” said Victor.

  Rivera stared back at him a moment. “Where are these data cubes?” she said. “I’ll go get them for you myself.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Analysis

  To: littlesoldier13@freebeltmail.net

  From: noloa.benyawe@juke.net

  Subject: NanoCloud Paint

  * * *

  Dear Bingwen,

  This will seem like an overly simplistic solution, but that’s what we want: a solution that any marine can easily replicate. For a marine to apply NanoGoo onto the hullmat in the tunnels, he needs a small two-inch paintbrush, a metal bucket with a brush-holster lid, and a silicone paint of any color. All of these materials should be found on any IF warship in a maintenance closet. We checked with standard inventory files and confirmed this.

  The marine pours one-fifth of a liter of NanoCloud dust per liter of paint and stirs. He then applies the NanoCloud paint to the hullmat impediment, seals the brush back in the bucket, steps back, and activates the NanoCloud.

  Now, this is the part where we come in because activating the NanoCloud is the technical step that only we can provide. My engineering team has created an app (attached below) that marines can download onto their wrist pads. The app turns the NanoCloud bots on and off. Once the NanoCloud has eaten through the hullmat, marines MUST TURN OFF THE BOTS BEFORE PASSING THROUGH THE HOLE to ensure that no NanoCloud bots get on other marine equipment and damage it.

  This works. We tried it. Please forward this app to every marine who needs it.

  Happy painting,

  Noloa Benyawe

  * * *

  After twenty straight hours of staring at a screen and studying the battles that had ended Operation Deep Dive, Mazer was having a hard time staying awake. His eyes were bloodshot. His neck and back ached from hunching forward and crowding the screen. The words and images on the tablet kept going out of focus as sleep kept trying to take him. He had already dozed off twice. Not into a deep sleep, but into the ice-thin sleep that causes you to jerk violently awake when your head drifts too much to one side.

  Common sense told him to go to bed. And yet just as he was ready to, he would discover something he hadn’t seen or noticed before, some new thread of possibility that had to be explored. Those threads often went nowhere, but they had also led to what he believed were his most crucial observations.

  Operation Deep Dive was a disaster. Mazer had reached that conclusion in moments. The individual battles that ended the operation were not all defeats; the IF destroyed more Formic ships than it lost. But since the Fleet’s casualties and losses were ones it could not afford, and since the operation was abandoned before the Fleet even reached the military target, to call it anything other than a total defeat would be inaccurate.

  The Formic ambush was arguably the enemy’s best executed stroke of the war. The blinds that the Formics built and hid behind defied reason in their size, stretching kilometers across in some instances. Even more impressive was the discovery that the blinds could move and position themselves closer to the approaching IF ships without the IF ships detecting their movement.

  The animation of the battles showed the ships’ movements prior to, during, and immediately after the battles. But since the battles all happened simultaneously across a vast stretch of space, moving through the model to analyze all the data points was painstaking and tedious. The ships of the IF had not traveled together, bunched up in a group, but rather spread out to minimize the risk of detection. The battles, therefore, were not a single ambush as Mazer had expected, but rather seven simultaneous ambushes from behind seven enormous domed blinds, each a great distance apart.

  To Mazer’s surprise, however, the data cube offered up no analysis. There were only facts, not what they meant. Most of the documents included on the cube were unhelpful—crew manifests, cargo manifests. But Mazer did unearth one collection of data that proved crucial: ship movements according to one lone observational satellite tens of millions of klicks away.

  A knock at his door startled him.

  Mazer opened it. Bingwen stood holding a paintbrush and sealed bucket of paint.

  “You’re either redecorating your barracks or vandalizing,” said Mazer. “I’m afraid to ask which one.”

  Bingwen came in and explained how the engineers at Juke Limited had found a solution to the hullmat obstacles in the tunnels.

  “Have you forwarded the app?”

  “It’s on your forum and currently trending,” said Bingwen. “There are already over two hundred downloads.”

  “That was fast. And Juke Limited just gave this away free of charge?”

  “A win for humanity. A loss for capitalism.”

  “Well done. And the other countermeasures?”

  “We’re in communication with several other contractors. It’s taking a little work because people are skeptical and not everyone wants to work for free, even if they’re saving marines.”

  “So much for humanity. W
ho in Rat is working on this?”

  “All of us.”

  “Welcome to modern warfare,” said Mazer, “marines sitting at a computer terminal.”

  Bingwen glanced at the tablet in Mazer’s hand. “Is that what you’re doing? Fighting a war?”

  “More like figuring out how not to lose one.” Mazer pushed the tablet through the air to Bingwen, who caught it easily. “Colonel Li has given you clearance for this as well. I’m going to close my eyes. When I wake up, I expect you to have all the answers.”

  * * *

  In his mind Mazer knew it was a dream. A dream and yet not a dream. He lay on his bed, staring up at the Hive Queen hovering above him, her face inches from his own. And yet despite her proximity, Mazer couldn’t make out her features. Where her face should be was only darkness.

  But he could feel her. She was a force, a presence, a weight pressing down. She was there and yet not there. The ceiling behind her was the infinite canvas of space, dark and cold and dotted with stars. A black place, unforgiving and empty, and the Hive Queen, now a swirling black mass of smoke and tattered cloth, was almost invisible against the backdrop. Black on black forever.

  Kim lay beside him, snuggled up tight, her chin near his shoulder, sleeping, oblivious to the thing floating above them. Mazer wanted to call to her, warn her, shield her, but the Hive Queen was a throbbing pressure in Mazer’s mind, a constant thumping of mental power pushing through his brain, pressing him further into the mattress, smothering him, choking him, squeezing out what little life remained.

  The Hive Queen called Mazer’s name, but it was not his name. It was another word. A word unspoken. A word that could not be heard but felt. It was the name that she had given him. A small name. A name for something that had no worth. A name that demanded obedience.

  She grabbed his arm, and Mazer jerked awake to find Bingwen recoiling from him.

  “Hey, whoa, sorry,” said Bingwen. “I just figured you’d want to be up by now. You’ve been out for eight hours.”