The Hive

by Orson Scott Card

  Pain

  There are several accounts of Formics in the Kuiper Belt raiding ships and taking human prisoners of war. Whether these accounts are all tied to a single Formic ship or many ships traveling together is unknown. What can be concluded, however, is that the abductions were relatively few in number and that the practice was not reported elsewhere. The recorded dates and locations of the incidents suggests that the Formics were moving away from the sun and further into the Kuiper Belt as they collected prisoners. At least one of these ships—which may in fact be the only ship that participated in the practice—headed toward the Formic observer ship out in deep space.

  —Demosthenes, A History of the Formic Wars, Vol. 3

  * * *

  Alone, inside his dark cell, Khalid held his dead arm tight against his body as people screamed in terror and agony all throughout the Formic ship. Most of the screams belonged to men, he realized, but a few he recognized as women, their voices higher-pitched and frantic and piercing. Khalid could only guess what was happening to them. Torture, perhaps. Or maybe the Formics were feasting on the humans while the humans were still alive.

  He felt like vomiting, but he closed his eyes and tried to calm his stomach. He was in zero G, and the vomit would fill the room and cloud the air. Worse still, vomiting would force him to move and bend his body, and he desperately wanted to remain still. He had struck his shoulder against the cell wall when they had thrown him inside, the same shoulder where his collarbone was broken. His arm was already throbbing before this second injury, but now his entire upper body, from the top of his head down to his groin, was a pulsing mass of pain. Any movement, however slight, was agony.

  The snakelike creatures that had bound his wrists and ankles and waist had released him before he was thrown into the room. Khalid was grateful for that, at least, to no longer endure the horror of having a worm or snake or whatever it was squeezing him like a python.

  He wondered if that was the source of the screaming. Perhaps people were getting squeezed by the snake creatures. Or perhaps there were other creatures aboard. Maybe those creatures feasted on humans. Maybe those were the creatures that controlled the Formics. Or perhaps the creatures were pets to the Formics. Or perhaps the Hive Queen herself was on this ship, and she alone feasted on humans.

  He desperately wished the screaming would stop. Khalid found it unbearable. How many people were being tortured and killed? Ten? Twenty? It was impossible to tell. The screams came on so suddenly and overlapped so frequently.

  They were his own men. That was the worst of it. They were men who had flown with him, fought for him, killed for him. Were the Formics cutting them open? Was Maja here? Were they cutting her open? Were they taking out his child?

  He tried to clear his mind. It did him no good to imagine all of the ways his people were being killed. And yet, he couldn’t focus on anything else. The screaming wouldn’t let him. It went on and on and never stopped. Relentless. Agonizing. How could a man or a woman scream that loudly and for that long? That incessantly? Wouldn’t a man lose his voice from all that strain? The larynx could only be pushed so far. Sooner or later the tissue in the wall of the throat would tear. The person would go hoarse. Khalid should know. He had heard many such screams over the past year. He had caused many of them as his men took ships and killed those they found inside.

  I am no better than the Formics, he thought. I am as evil as the Hive Queen.

  This is God’s punishment, thought Khalid. God sent the Formics to take me, to avenge what I have done to others. Just as God filled Maydox’s heart with mutiny and turned him against me. Just as God filled Maja’s heart with jealously. God put it all in motion to punish Khalid for his murders and his raids and his brutality.

  But, no. Why would God put murder in the hearts of men? If he did, why would anyone worship such a god? Why would anyone follow someone so vengeful, so full of malice?

  Ah, but men do follow leaders full of malice, thought Khalid. Did my men not follow me?

  No, God was not a vengeful God, for if so, he too, like Khalid, would be no better than the Hive Queen.

  A scream right outside his door startled him and made him flinch, which sent a bolt of pain through his body as broken bones shifted in his shoulder. He gently prodded the wound with his fingertips. The broken bone was thankfully not piercing the skin, but the bone had snapped in half, no question.

  He was drifting weightless in the darkness and he reached back with his good arm to stop himself. The wall was cold, rough, metallic, and slick with a wet sticky substance like mucus, as if snails had been using it for traffic all day.

  Another scream outside his door, but this one farther away. A brief scream. Not long and sustained like the others.

  He wondered if the Formics would come for him next and what they would do to him if he resisted. Rip him in half? Rip his dead arm out of its socket? He imagined all variety of deaths, all of them excruciating and gory and slow. If he did resist, it wouldn’t be much. His dead arm was useless, his body aflame with pain. He couldn’t scare off a sparrow if one landed on his head.

  He steadied himself again as he drifted lazily into the wall. The rough texture surprised him. It was nothing like the smooth polished surface of hullmat that he had heard so much about. This was almost like the surface of stone. Cold and rugged and pitted. And yet when he knocked on it, it had the dull ring of metal.

  The only light in the room was a narrow beam of dim blue light that leaked in from the corridor. The door was composed of closed aperture blades that irised open and closed. Two of the blades did not quite connect because of a bend in one of the blades, which created a thin sliver of a hole in the door that Khalid could look through. He drifted to the door and placed his eye close to the hole. He couldn’t see much, just a small piece of the wall opposite his cell. The blue light in the corridor was brighter, though it was still far too dim for his liking. He had heard that the Formics were tunnel dwellers and had dug all kinds of paths into the ground when they invaded China. Perhaps they preferred the dark, thought Khalid. Perhaps their massive black eyes, like deep-sea creatures, needed little light to see.

  He could not see the source of the blue light in the corridor, but the brightness and hue were similar to the light produced by the doilies fired from the Formic jar weapons. Perhaps the Formics used the doily creatures for light in their ships. Perhaps the doilies hung on the walls like ornate, web-shaped, bioluminescent nightlights.

  He pushed gently on the apertures in the door, but they didn’t move. He tried to squeeze his fingertips into the space where the two blades of the door didn’t quiet meet, hopeful that he might push down on the blade hard enough to initiate an opening mechanism. But the space was too narrow for his fingers. And what good would it do him if he opened the door anyway? Where would he go? The Formic ship had long since left the Minetek shipbuilding facility behind. There was no chance of Khalid escaping now. His only hope was to kill every Formic aboard, seize control of the ship, and then fly it to some depot without the International Fleet destroying him first. Such a mission was impossible, he knew. He didn’t have the strength to button his own shirt, much less attack and kill a ship full of Formics.

  No, he thought. I am Khalid. Man of men, the father of fear. No room can hold me. No power can contain me.

  But he knew, even as he tried to convince himself, that he could not lie to his own mind. That was foolish. This was his new reality. This cage. He would never get off this ship again. He would never see the Minetek shipyard again. If some of his men had been fortunate enough to evade capture and escape, they weren’t coming to rescue him. The men of Khalid were not so loyal as to attempt such a mission. Khalid was dead, as far as they were concerned. If they had reached the Shimbir, Khalid’s ship, they were fleeing in the opposite direction now. Khalid had trained them to do so. At the first sight of Formics, they were to run. That had always been Khalid’s position. Do not investigate. Do not linger. Flee.

&nbs
p; How had Khalid not seen this Formic ship coming? He had put men on watch at Minetek. He had put other men at the scopes, men whose job it was to scan space for threats and alert him of warnings. Had these men seen nothing?

  Maydox’s mutiny had distracted them, Khalid realized. The mutiny had made the men on watch abandon their posts. And yet, what were the chances of such a coincidence? How was it that in all the hundreds and maybe thousands of hours that Khalid’s men had watched for threats, the Formics had come and attacked during that one single hour when Khalid’s men were not paying attention?

  No. There was another reason he had not seen the Formics come. A reason he could not guess.

  The screams started up again. They had paused momentarily, and Khalid had found the silence a brief mercy. But now they were back again. Loud and long, like sirens.

  It was then that Khalid wondered if perhaps the screaming wasn’t real. Had the Formics recorded screams? Maybe this was psychological warfare. Maybe they knew that the screams would terrify new prisoners and make them more compliant. Maybe the captives resisted less when they were so disturbed by what they perceived as agony all around them.

  But would Formics even understand that concept? Did they comprehend the human psyche enough to create and implement such tactics of fear? Khalid doubted it. The Formics were so alien, so beyond human comprehension that humans must be equally incomprehensible to them.

  Perhaps that is what this place is, he thought. Perhaps this was a lab for studying the enemy.

  The door irised open. Two Formics were anchored there, shoulder to shoulder. Khalid was right at the door. He recoiled, scrambling to find purchase on the floor and push himself away from them.

  One of the Formics reached in casually and grabbed Khalid by the ankle. Khalid screamed because pain rippled across his shoulder like a thunderbolt as the Formic pulled him into the corridor. Khalid scrabbled with his good hand at the floor to root himself in place and stop them from pulling him away. But his fingertips found nothing, and then he was drifting behind them in zero G like a bag of cargo, helpless.

  At first he flailed his good arm about in a desperate attempt to grab at something. There were handholds on the floor. If he could reach one, maybe he could yank himself free of their grasp. But every movement was like a hammer of pain in his shoulder, and he stopped.

  What good would resistance do him, anyway? Even if he freed himself momentarily from their grasp, the Formics would only grab him again. They would pull him away, maybe with more force than they were doing now. They could see that his shoulder was in agony. All they had to do was strike it.

  A better use of his energy was to learn what he could about the corridor and the ship. To reconnoiter, to observe.

  He let his body go limp and took in everything around him as the Formics pulled him along. He had been right about the doilies. They were positioned on the wall and pulsing with light, casting a faint blue glow that brightened and dimmed, as if the light itself were alive.

  There were other creatures as well. Worms and grubs on the walls, like slugs on a sidewalk after a rain.

  A piercing scream to his immediate right made him recoil. The movement caused another dagger of pain in his shoulder, but he barely noticed, he was so startled by what he saw. It was not a human beside him screaming, but there on the wall was what looked like a human organ, purple and pulpy and breathing. Tube-shaped, with a V-shaped sphincter at the top and folds all along the side that vibrated slightly as air passed by them.

  And it was screaming. A woman’s scream. A human woman. Not exactly like a human, though, Khalid realized. There was something slightly off about it, in the pitch or timbre, in the vibration of the air. It throttled too much, the air currents vibrating too sharply, like someone being shaken while they were screaming. He had not noticed it when he had heard it from a distance in his cell, but he noticed it now. It was human but not human. A scream but not a scream. It was an attempt to generate human sound. An organism designed by the Formics to mimic the human voice. But why?

  “Hey,” he called to it. “Can you speak?”

  The screamer didn’t respond. It had finished its scream, and now its protuberance was relaxed and no longer fluttering at the ends as it had when it was making its noise.

  The Formics pulled Khalid into a cavernlike room with a higher ceiling and walls covered with hundreds of worms and grubs. The Formics turned Khalid over and laid him flat on his back on a stone slab. One Formic held his ankles against the slab, the other put a single hand flat against Khalid’s chest to hold him there. Khalid gritted his teeth in agony, forcing himself not to scream. His shoulder was pressed hard against the slab. The pain was excruciating.

  They were going to cut him open. This was an altar to their Formic god, a sacrificial table. This was their religion, their worship, vivisecting humans for the Hive Queen’s amusement.

  A shadow moved to Khalid’s right in his peripheral vision. Khalid turned his head and saw a Formic, much smaller than the two who had escorted him in here. This new, smaller Formic was near the far wall, maybe ten meters away, with its back to Khalid. It was examining a dense pack of grubs adhered to the wall, as if searching among them for one specific organism.

  Elaborate wings protruded from the creature’s back, but they were far too small to provide any lift, suggesting that they were grossly undeveloped and not nearly as wide and long and majestic as they would one day become. At the moment, they were like pretend wings that a child might wear with a costume, fairy wings.

  And then Khalid realized that these were a child’s wings. This creature was a Formic child. A daughter of the Hive Queen. Khalid remembered a report from the ansible maybe seven or eight months ago. A squad of tunnel commandos had killed one of the Hive Queen’s daughters, the report said. The description given in the report matched what Khalid saw now. He had found another daughter. Or rather, she had found him.

  The tight grip on his ankles loosened slightly, and the Formic holding his ankles began poking and prodding him, not like someone trying to agitate a dangerous animal, but like someone examining a species of animal they had never seen before. Fingers pushed at and squeezed his knee caps, hands, feet. The Formic pulled off one of Khalid’s shoes and socks and examined his foot and toes as if they were one of the seven wonders of the world.

  Khalid strained his neck to see the Formic positioned behind him at his head. Like the other escort Formic, this one was staring at him with a new unflinching intensity. When they had come for Khalid in his cell, the escort Formics had given him only a passing glance before unceremoniously pulling him down the corridor and flipping him onto the slab, like two unenthusiastic assembly-line workers going about their labor, moving around the stock, doing a rote task in which they were only superficially invested. But now, in this cavern, they both regarded him like he was some prized jewel, as if nothing else in their world had any purpose or meaning. Only him. Only Khalid. Their focus on him was so absolute, so unwavering, so committed that neither of them looked at the winged daughter at the wall. Instead, their eyes were locked on Khalid, as if seeing him for the first time, as if studying every pockmark in his skin, every hair upon his face.

  They were new creatures, as if their previous, disinterested minds had been removed and replaced with new highly intelligent minds dedicated to learning and observation. The daughter is controlling them, Khalid realized. She was examining Khalid through their eyes. These Formics were her instruments, her microscopes, her limbs, her vision, extensions of her own body.

  The daughter turned away from the wall. Dozens of worms now clung to her upper arms. She pushed off the floor, and her wings fluttered, not to give her flight, but to propel her forward in the air toward the slab. She was small and hideous, but Khalid recognized, even amid the horror of her features, a certain grandeur, a majesty, an aspect of greatness. This was a future queen. The royalty was already there in her.

  She landed beside him, her hind legs grabbing two hooks e
mbedded in the slab, put there for her to perch on, perhaps. She bent forward, bringing her face close to his. Khalid wanted to scream, wanted to cry out in terror, but he could not find his voice. He cowered back from her as much as he could with the two Formics holding him. The movement stretched his shoulder and then he did cry out, now in pain, his mouth opening wide in a scream.

  The daughter watched him intently, and when he stopped screaming, she opened her maw as well. Khalid screamed because she was going to eat him now, she would feast upon his face. But she didn’t move her head. She merely closed her maw and opened it again.

  She’s mimicking me, Khalid realized. She’s doing what I’m doing.

  He opened his mouth wide, though this time he did not scream. He was testing his theory.

  The daughter opened her maw again, copying him.

  Was she playing with him? Khalid wondered. As a cat plays with a mouse before it sinks in its teeth?

  The daughter closed her maw and leaned in closer, her massive black eyes coming right near his face. Khalid saw no pupils or irises in that blackness, but he could sense that her vision was moving all over his face, that her focus was shifting from one feature to the next, taking note of every detail.

  Perhaps she rarely sees specimens with skin so dark, thought Khalid. Perhaps I am a new curiosity.

  The Formic with a hand against Khalid’s chest moved his hands and grabbed Khalid’s shoulders instead. The pain was like a mini–atom bomb inside him. Khalid screamed again, and the daughter recoiled slowly from him, not because she was startled but because this was new information that needed examining. The Formic released Khalid’s shoulders, and sweet relief washed over Khalid. He still felt pain, but the agony had greatly diminished.

  The daughter produced a blade. A knife was suddenly in her hand.

  Khalid tensed. She would bury the blade in his chest. She would cut him open, she would disembowel him.

  She began cutting his clothes away. First the vest that had once been the jacket of an IF officer. She grabbed the fabric and sliced as expertly as a surgeon, never touching his skin. Next came the undershirt, which she cut straight up the middle. Then cuts from the center to the right and left, slicing through the sleeves, removing it all from him and exposing his chest bare. Some of the fabric she pulled away and tossed to the side, where it floated away. The rest of the fabric remained beneath him on the slab.