...and they are us 3: HiveWorld

by Patrick McClafferty

“You called in Mike and Dimitri?” Katherine sounded shocked.

  LOLA gave a small dry laugh. “Zed was well beyond any human power to stop. It took all four of the Synthetic Intelligences working in concert to subdue him. We took him back home to heal his mind.” LOLA gave Katherine a sad look. “Now you begin to see why Zed is the only person who has even the remotest chance of destroying the Hiveworld, and the Creednax queen who resides there.”

  “What are his chances?” Kat asked in a small scared voice.

  “His chances of succeeding in his mission and destroying the Hiveworld are quite good. Zed and Athena worked out a decent plan that has every chance of success, given even a modest amount of luck.”

  “And what are his chances of survival in this… plan?” Kat’s eyes narrowed.

  “Ummm.” LOLA looked embarrassed.

  “We purposely don’t speak of that.” Zed finished for her. “There is a plan in place that sees me safely out of the Hiveworld prior to the activation of the device, if all goes well. The chances of everything happening without a glitch are something like the odds of you falling off of this couch and winding up back on Earth.”

  Katherine gave Zed a flat angry look, while at the same time resting her hand on her swelling belly. “I will not have our baby born without a father.”

  “If we don’t stop the Creednax here and now, the galaxy will eventually fall to them.” Zed murmured in an intense tone. “There are too many Creednax to fight, Katherine. LOLA counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 Creednax ships in orbit around Hiveworld. There are two battle fleets of over 3,000 ships each. If the Creednax had hit us with one of those on Callidus we wouldn’t have had a chance. They would have swarmed Thal’ark Station and the Yamato with their sheer numbers.”

 

 

  “No!” Katherine said firmly, her voice going up several octaves in pitch and quite a bit in volume. Her fair cheeks were turning scarlet. “I don’t give a damn about the Creednax or about the galaxy. If we have to live our lives running then we will. I will not… NOT… allow you to throw your life away.” Her voice had reached the screeching level, and Zed winced. “Your son needs you. I need you. Don’t you realize…”

  Zed sighed, and reached out his hand, touching Katherine’s arm. He caught her as she slumped. He’d found long before that human neural synapses were very similar to the digital synapses in the ship, and just as susceptible to his manipulation. LOLA reached over and brushed a strand of hair from the sleeping woman’s face. “How long do you plan on keeping her asleep?”

  Zed picked his wife up and gently carried her to the bedroom. “Until this whole mess is over.” Katherine’s form sparkled, and her kimono was replaced by warm pajamas. “Thank you LOLA.” Zed lay her on the bed and gently pulled the blankets up to her chin. “If I survive this I’ll apologize to her. If I don’t… I guess I won’t have to worry about it.” He looked across the bed at LOLA. “I noticed that you didn’t mention Olympus or The Morrigan, or any of the other exotic stuff.”

  LOLA’s smile was crooked. “She was having trouble swallowing the easy stuff, like you dying and being brought back. How do you think she’d handle the rest?” Her voice turned sarcastic. “Oh, by the way Katherine, your husband’s home is now in an alternate universe we call Olympus, where he lives with three beautiful women that are actually one superbeing called The Morrigan. You can’t go with him, by the way. He will also probably never die a natural death and you can forget the idea of having another son. In addition, a sizeable part of this galactic arm owes allegiance to your husband, personally. We thought you might like to know.”

  “Yeah.” Zed replied bitterly. “I see your point.” He gave Katherine a wistful look. “I wish we could have had a normal life together. You deserve that much, and I really do love you.” He bent and kissed her cheek.

  “We should go, Zed.”

  “Go?” He asked, feeling stupid.

  “Home.” LOLA said gently, taking his arm. “Perhaps as we developed we shouldn’t have pursued you so… vigorously. We should have given you the room to say no.”

  “You were just experiencing your first emotions as a thinking being, LOLA, and sexuality is a very strong emotion. I should have expected it.” He gave a harsh laugh as they entered the living room. “What ever happened to free will? I feel like I’ve been maneuvered from the very beginning.”

  “What do you mean?” LOLA asked, frowning.

  “I tried to exercise my free will and steal the Belerophon to crash it into the Hiveworld.”

  “We couldn’t let you do that, Zed.” LOLA responded instantly. He gave her a flat look. “Oh…” Her golden eyes were wide. “I think I’m beginning to understand. It’s not very fair to you, is it?”

  “Look deeper, LOLA.”

  Her eyes got wider yet, until they almost looked like the eyes of an ancient Earth anime character. “We’ve all been - are being manipulated.”

  Zed gave her a small smile. “This one is going to cook your brain… to what end, LOLA? To what end?” His smile grew wider. “Our unknown string-puller has always been very good at concealment, never letting us know our strings were being pulled. Why let us know now? Are we coming to the End Game? Are all the cards on the table, or is just the end of a hand in an eternal game?”

  LOLA pulled her hand away from Zed, looking at him with suspicion. “What are you Zed?”

  “Just a human being, LOLA.”

  “That young woman you left sleeping in the other room is a human being. You are not like her. What are you Zed?”

  “Simply another pawn in the celestial game, defending my queens.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand you, Zed.”

  “That makes two of us. Shall we go?” Hand in hand, they stepped.

  Athena greeted them before the temple with a solemn face. “You always seem to be able to upset LOLA, Zed.”

  He took her hand and kissed it, then held her eyes. “It really wasn’t my fault. I just pointed a few things out.”

  She laughed lightly as she took his arm. “Don’t shoot the messenger, as you say?”

  Zed’s own laugh was slightly vicious. “After you shoot three or four messengers they stop sending you bad news. It works for me.”

  “Things didn’t go well with Katherine, I take it.”

  “You might say that. I had to put her to sleep before she worked herself into a proper tizzy and endangered our child. As I said to LOLA, if I survive I’ll apologize to Katherine when I see her again. If I don’t, well, the point is moot.”

  “You’re in a fairly negative mood.”

  “It’s been a long day. I’m saving the rest up for the next few days.” He took a crystal glass from the kitchen and walked into the tree shaded courtyard, where he filled the container with water from a burbling fountain. It was sweeter and colder than any bottled or filtered water he’d ever tried. Truly, it tasted like the nectar of the gods.

  “When will you leave?” Athena asked from his side as she filled her own glass. Zed dipped his glass again, handing the dripping, ice-cold goblet to LOLA. “I’ll probably leave in two or three days. I’d like to recover all the data we can from the probes we sent out. It will also give our survivors time to rest before things get tense again.”

  “And Katherine?”

  Zed sighed. “Let her rest. I meant it when I said I’d see her when it was over.” Listening to the bright calls of the songbirds, he looked around the courtyard at the riot of color from the flowers and gaily painted pots. “Katherine may not want me back after this.” A sparrow swooped at his head, and Zed smiled. “It would be nice to live here.”

  “This is as much your home as it is ours, Zed.” Athena said softly. “You will be h
ere with us anyway… sooner or later.”

  “I’d really like to have a daughter or two first, before I move in.”

  “Did I mention that this will eventually be their home also? All your line will eventually live here.”

  “Your ideas make my head swim Athena. I still have to survive the confrontation with the Hiveworld.”

  She put her arm through his, guiding him back to the house. “There is that, but for now dinner is ready, and after that we will do our best to keep your mind off your worries.” Zed just smiled.

  The bridge was quiet. Before them floated the horrible reality of the Creednax Hiveworld. Slightly bigger than Earth, any atmosphere the planet once had was long gone. Great tunnels bored through the world, making it look like a chunk of gray Swiss cheese floating in the blackness of space. From his current angle Zed could see thousands of tunnel entrances, some large enough to handle three Creednax battleships abreast, some small enough to barely take a single shuttle. What surface he could see was ashen and rocky.

  The Belerophon might as well have been a hole in space. With her improved cloaking systems at maximum and her drives shut down she floated like the rest of the mined out asteroids and chunks of rock an Astronomical Unit out from Hiveworld. Her small, undetectable sensors surrounded the Creednax planet like a thin cloud, probing its secrets and relaying the information back to the Belerophon via a secure FTL link. Those sensors had revealed that LOLA’s estimate on the number of Creednax ships was extremely low, with the actual number of ships topping 20,000. LOLA managed to determine from the sensor data, that a mere 11,000 were warships. Zed found the view on the screen both horrifying and mesmerizing.

  “How many of those ships have active power-plants?”

  “Less than half the warships are powered up Zed, and fewer than ten percent of the rest.”

  Zed glared at the planet. “Have you figured out where the main door is?”

  “I’m working on it.” There was a surprisingly waspish note to LOLA’s voice.

  “I’m sure you are, dear.” Zed replied softly. Some of the crewmembers smiled at his familiarity with what they thought was a simple AI.

  LOLA apologized.

 

 

  His neural display lit to show Hiveworld. Five tunnels seemed to be crawling inward toward the center of the planet. The view obediently zoomed.

 

  On his display the other four passageways winked out, and the display centered and zoomed in on the remaining tunnel. Zed found it fascinating to watch it crawl along, side tunnels suddenly opening. At one point the probe stopped as a Creednax Tulari class destroyer edged by. Zed was amazed that he recognized the ship as the same one that had taken Katherine and the saucer.