The Hive

by Orson Scott Card

Eight hours? Mazer hadn’t slept that long since Luna.

  “I’ve studied the battle,” said Bingwen. “Not as extensively as you have. But I think I’ve reached the end of my mental patience on this. I don’t understand fleet warfare.”

  “You do,” said Mazer. “I was with you when you learned it.”

  Bingwen raised an eyebrow. “I think I would remember that.”

  Mazer anchored the tablet to the wall in front of them. “What ships do in zero G is not unlike what marines do in the Battle Room. In fact, learning maneuvers as a platoon in the Battle Room is akin to moving as a squadron of ships through space. Same principles. I’d go so far as to say that mastering combat in the Battle Room is a good education in Fleet warfare.”

  “Good thing Rat Army is getting plenty of Battle Room practice,” said Bingwen. “Oh wait, we’re not.”

  “Are you going to be petulant, or are you going to listen?”

  “I can’t be both? You’re right. Sorry. Go on.”

  “You’re not getting Battle Room practice time now, but we practiced for months on our first transport out of Luna. The skills and lessons we learned then are the tools of analysis I’m using here. I think of each individual ship in a squadron as an individual marine in a Battle Room platoon. Master the Battle Room, and you understand Fleet dynamics.”

  “And what do you see?” said Bingwen.

  “For starters, the Formics are relentless. They never stop. When the battle became fiercest, they didn’t retreat. It’s a standard military maxim to retreat so you can preserve your forces when the enemy demonstrates the advantage. Yet the Formics didn’t, even when it made complete strategic sense to do so.”

  “I thought they ambushed us,” said Bingwen.

  “They did. We suffered instant heavy losses, and most of our fleet scattered. But a few of our ships made a counterstrike. The damage they inflicted was catastrophic. Look at this part of the animation.” Mazer moved the model on screen until he reached a cluster of colored dots. “Here you have a large grouping of Formic ships that have emerged from behind this blind. This small group of our ships scrambled to counterstrike and pounded the Formics. I’ve got to give credit to some of our captains because their response was swift and lethal. It caught the Formics off guard.”

  Mazer fast-forwarded the animation and then paused it again. “Now, this is the moment of decision for the remaining Formic forces. This is when any commander with half a mind would retreat. No, correction. This is the last possible moment. Anyone else would have retreated long ago. To stay is to die. Yet the Formics stayed. They continued to inflict some damage, but it was nothing compared to what we did to them. We annihilated this cluster.”

  “So they fought to the last man,” said Bingwen. “Dumb, maybe, but they wouldn’t be the first army to do so.”

  “But it’s all they do, is my point,” said Mazer. “They don’t retreat. I experienced this inside the Formic scout ship at the end of the first war with individual Formics. Relentlessness. You experienced the same inside the hive in the asteroid. Even when it was obvious the Formics would die in their attack, they surged forward. Why?”

  “Because they’re under the Hive Queen’s control,” said Bingwen. “She tells them to fight, so they fight.”

  “So she doesn’t care about her soldiers?”

  “Apparently not,” said Bingwen. “Or she believed that they would eventually win, despite all the evidence to the contrary.”

  “The Hive Queen is smart,” said Mazer. “I think it’s safe to assume she knew her soldiers would die and yet she made them stay and fight it out anyway.”

  Bingwen shrugged. “Maybe this isn’t a big loss for her. She knows she can replenish her troops and ships easily. Maybe she sees these ships and crew as expendable.”

  “Maybe,” said Mazer. “It still strikes me as wasteful. Now you tell me something you saw.”

  “Her ships were easily destroyed,” said Bingwen. “Meaning they weren’t covered in hullmat. They weren’t shielded. We vaporized them without much effort. That surprised me because we also have evidence that the Formics moved asteroids down there long before we arrived. So they harvested asteroids and yet they didn’t use those asteroids to make hullmat. Then I thought, they obviously needed the asteroids for the raw materials required to build the blinds. These giant blinds would require more raw materials than the ships themselves.”

  “Then how did they build their ships?” asked Mazer.

  Bingwen shrugged. “If I had to guess, I’d say the Formics cannibalized their motherships and built these smaller warships with scrap metal.”

  “That was my conclusion as well,” said Mazer. “But why weren’t these ships at least shielded? The Formics came here on a massive starship moving at a fraction of the speed of light. Without shielding, that ship would have instantly disintegrated as it came in contact with micrometeorites and particles in space. So we know they have shielding tech. Why not use it on these ships?”

  Bingwen considered for a moment. “Okay, this is all speculation, but maybe they didn’t shield their ships because they had to cannibalize their shielding tech for some other purpose. Or maybe they only know how to shield large vessels and not tiny ones. Or maybe small shields for small ships require far more energy than what they can produce on a small spacecraft. Or maybe they needed certain metals not found in our asteroids. Or maybe it was taco night, and they were too busy to bother.”

  “All good answers,” said Mazer. “Except for taco night. It’s a question that’s been bothering me, and maybe we’ll never know the answer. It just struck me as odd that for some reason the Hive Queen isn’t using shielding tech when we know she’s invented it. Which tells us what?”

  “That she does have weaknesses,” said Bingwen. “That she has some limitations here. That she isn’t indestructible, that there are chinks in her armor.”

  “Maybe more than chinks,” said Mazer. “Maybe gaping holes so big we can shove a lance inside. But before we get overconfident, we need to keep in mind that the Hive Queen learns and changes. She evolves her strategy. If she made a mistake here, she won’t make it again.”

  “Her only mistake that I can see is that she kept her ships fighting when they should have retreated.”

  Mazer smiled. “Yes, but that, I believe, is the biggest surprise of all. It’s not in the animation. I only discovered it by accident as I combed through satellite data. Here.” He pointed to the animation. “The IF passes by the blinds. The Formic fleet leaps out from their hiding place and attacks us from the rear. Pandemonium follows. Most of our fleet scatters. But the blind rotates.”

  “How do you know it rotated? I thought the thing was invisible.”

  “Not invisible. Camouflaged. With stars on its surface. Which is what gave it away, because in the satellite scans, the stars all shifted to the right and got closer together. Meaning this domed surface, this camouflage, was turning.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there was one ship hiding behind the blind that didn’t leap out and attack like the others,” said Mazer. “The biggest ship of all. So the blind rotated as the IF ships passed to keep the camouflage pointed at the IF so that the hidden ship remained hidden.”

  “Except by rotating the blind,” Bingwen said, “the hiding ship exposed itself to this observational satellite it didn’t know was watching.”

  “Not only that,” said Mazer, “but when some of the IF ships fled, this hiding ship did as well. He moved back toward the ecliptic along with the fleeing IF ships. It did what Formics never do. It retreated from a fight. It ran for the hills. The biggest ship of all, the one that might prove most lethal in an ambush, bolted.”

  “Why didn’t we go after it?” Bingwen said. “It would have left a heat signature.”

  “We didn’t go after it,” said Mazer, “because we didn’t know it was one of theirs. It was chaos. It was every ship for itself. No one was scanning. Everyone was running. None of our ships could real
ly talk to each other, at least not in any cohesive manner, because of the time delay. None of the surviving ships had ansibles. And amidst all that chaos, the Formic ship slipped on by completely unnoticed.”

  “The Hive Queen,” said Bingwen. “Has to be.”

  “I think that’s a strong possibility,” said Mazer. “Because it explains why these weak Formic fighters didn’t retreat. Their objective wasn’t to destroy us. Their objective was to engage our ships and hold them at the battlefield so that this one ship of theirs could slip away. A deception. If they had followed her to protect her, they would have drawn attention to her. So they kept the attention on themselves to allow her to escape unnoticed. A sacrifice with a strategic purpose.”

  “Has to be the Hive Queen,” Bingwen repeated.

  “Maybe,” said Mazer. “Whatever it was, it was clearly of great importance to the Formics and we missed an opportunity. At the very least we know that there is a high-priority target somewhere in the plane of the ecliptic.”

  “Do you know the ship’s trajectory?” said Bingwen. “Can we determine where it was headed?”

  “Roughly,” Mazer said, tapping at the tablet and bringing up a model of the solar system. “If her course was true, she was heading here, just beyond the outer rim of the Belt.”

  “That’s near us,” said Bingwen.

  “Near in the relative sense,” said Mazer. “But yes. Near us. Problem is, according to our scopes there isn’t anything out there. There’s no visible reason for the Hive Queen to go there.”

  “No visible reason?” said Bingwen. “You think there is something there, but we just can’t see it.”

  “She made an asteroid disappear,” said Mazer. “That was obviously the result of camouflage, the same tech she used to create these massive blinds. I think there’s a strong possibility that there’s something out there hidden from our view, something she doesn’t want us to see.”

  “Her hive,” said Bingwen. “Her base, her headquarters, whatever you want to call it. It makes total sense, Mazer. She creates superstructures all over the system. She’s done it many times. She makes a great show of bringing asteroids together. They’re all very conspicuous, very visible. So we go there and check them out, and guess what, they’re all hollow. They’re Potemkin structures. She sends us on all these wild goose chases because she doesn’t want us looking where she really is. Even the motherships. Those might be Potemkin ships too, for all we know. And all the while, her real hive is hidden out beyond the outer rim.”

  “There’s one problem with this theory,” said Mazer. “Her hive would have to be built. But we haven’t seen asteroids move to that sector, and that’s where she would get the raw materials to build any structure.”

  “The fact that we haven’t seen asteroids move to that place should make us suspicious,” said Bingwen. “She’s moving asteroids all over the place. Except to there. Why? Because she doesn’t want us going there to investigate an asteroid. She doesn’t want to draw us toward her hive. She wants us looking everywhere but there.”

  “Possibly,” said Mazer. “But it’s speculation and not proof. And CentCom has already shown their aversion to theories and speculation. I doubt they’ll investigate a hunch.”

  “Then remove CentCom from the conversation,” said Bingwen. “Post your conclusions and all the data on the forum. Now. Today.”

  “Can’t,” said Mazer. “This is classified intel.”

  “So?” said Bingwen. “Who cares? We don’t have to play by their rules. This is the Hive Queen, Mazer.”

  “This is maybe the Hive Queen. And if I post it, Intelligence will take it down immediately and shut me out of any future intelligence findings. I think we should at least try traditional channels first. This intel didn’t come from CentCom. It came from whatever intelligence organization Li belongs to. We should give our analysis to them.”

  “Through Li?” said Bingwen. “We can’t trust Li with this.”

  “Why shouldn’t we?” said Mazer. “Li has no reason to sit on the information. His people gave us authorization to review it. They’re expecting a response.”

  “They’re total unknowns to us,” said Bingwen.

  “This is the same organization that sent the Kandahar to investigate a disappearing asteroid. The same organization that has the data from the recon drone. The same organization that asked you and me to look at this highly classified battle. If anyone is going to believe us, it’s them.”

  Bingwen frowned. “I know you’re right, but I hate that you’re right.”

  “I’ll give my report to Li. We’ll see what happens.”

  After Bingwen left, Mazer typed up his report and saved it to the cube. The question now was how to deliver it. Confinement to quarters meant he could visit the cafeteria and the restrooms. Otherwise, he was in his room. Li’s office was on the other side of GravCamp, nowhere near any of those locations.

  He considered ignoring his confinement and going directly to Li’s office. Since the start of his confinement, Mazer had not once heard from or seen Colonel Dietrich. The suggestion from Dietrich that he “would figure out what to do with” Mazer had obviously been a lie. Dietrich was perfectly content to keep Mazer locked up indefinitely as a slight to Colonel Li.

  At first, Mazer had found confinement agonizing. But then the forum had given him purpose. He wrote multiple posts condemning the decision to abolish the theory of the Hive Queen. He gave critical analyses of military actions and commanders’ decisions, praising what was done right and faulting what wasn’t. He responded to requests from fellow junior officers on how to handle difficult problems with staff or command. He monitored closely the discussions on countermeasures the Hive Queen introduced and directed people to the conversation, namely engineers and anyone on the forum who might offer technical expertise. And now this: Li giving him classified intelligence that could potentially lead to military action in the outer rim. It was the most engaged he had felt in well over a year. And all within the tiny cramped confines of his quarters on GravCamp.

  He could send Li a message telling him the report was ready, but if Dietrich was monitoring such communication, that would cause more problems than it solved.

  In the end he decided to wait for Bingwen, who came around constantly, and who could easily courier it over to Li.

  But Mazer never got that chance because MPs came to his room, asked him to step out into the corridor, and then did a thorough search of his quarters while he stood there watching. They found the tablet and the data cube, confiscated them, and then took Mazer into custody.

  * * *

  The MPs made Mazer wait for three hours in an anteroom outside Colonel Dietrich’s office. One MP stood guard in the corridor, as if to ensure that Mazer didn’t run for it, which Mazer found amusing. Where was he going to go? To one of the service shuttles? Top speed, five kilometers an hour? There was a brilliant plan. He’d reach Earth in about ten million years, give or take. Quite the getaway.

  He suspected that Dietrich had employed one of his technicians to open the tablet and data cube, a suspicion that was confirmed when Mazer heard muffled shouting from inside Dietrich’s office, and then two young techs left in a hurry, looking defeated. They both glanced at Mazer as they left. One looked resentful, as if he blamed Mazer for his situation. The other one looked apologetic.

  A lieutenant who looked far too young for his rank came out of the office and bid Mazer to follow him inside.

  Mazer was not surprised to discover that Colonel Dietrich’s office was a spacious shrine to himself. Framed commendations adorned the walls, along with photos of Dietrich throughout his naval career, posing with various German commanders, dignitaries, and politicians. Clearly a man who liked being seen with VIPs.

  The young lieutenant maintained a flat expression and anchored himself to the left of Dietrich’s desk at parade rest, like a statue that had enjoyed a brief moment of movement and was now settling back into its stone position.

&nb
sp; Colonel Dietrich was anchored behind his holodesk with a fan of documents opened up in front of him, which he was pretending to read. He gave Mazer a quick once-over as if inspecting the state of Mazer’s uniform and frowned disapprovingly, as if Mazer had just tracked mud into his office. Mazer kind of wished he had.

  “Captain Rackham. I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. Your appointment to this space station is not one I would have approved. Instructor positions are filled by CentCom. I have no say in the matter. I had assumed that the Fleet vigorously vetted any marine being considered for a teaching position, as I would have, but I see from your records that I was mistaken.”

  Colonel Dietrich gestured to the documents in front of him. “I didn’t have to look hard to find reports of insubordination and recklessness. Rear Admiral Zembassi gives you a strong recommendation, but Rear Admiral Vaganov gives you one of the most scathing evaluations I’ve ever read. Vaganov says you’re a liar and a scoundrel and the worst the Fleet has to offer. He calls you conniving and dangerous. He says it broke his heart to do so, but he had you court-martialed because he, quote, ‘considered it my duty to remove Captain Rackham from the International Fleet to ensure that he didn’t further tarnish the reputation of the military and further endanger the brave men and women under his command,’ end quote.”

  Colonel Dietrich wiped a hand through the docs to make them disappear, then folded his arms. “I find those reports troubling, Captain. More than troubling. Disgraceful. I feel a great shame that I didn’t review your records with greater attention when you arrived.”

  “It’s worth noting, sir, that I was acquitted of all charges at the court-martial.”

  “Acquitted, yes,” said Dietrich, “but the judge in the case, despite the acquittal, issued a letter of reprimand, which is unprecedented. A letter of reprimand is a form of punishment, issued only when the defendant is deemed guilty. I see that your attorney subsequently got the letter expunged, but I have to ask myself, why would an honorable judge break judicial precedent and threaten his own career to punish you? The only answer I can muster is that the judge knew you were guilty but the prosecutor, for whatever reason, couldn’t deliver a conviction.”