Horizon Beta

by D. W. Vogel

  The thought twisted my stomach.

  I clicked to the Digger guarding me.

  “Tonight. I go. Get Queen.”

  It rubbed my belly with its feelers, tasting the welt the Blue Queen had left. It clicked a question.

  “Yes,” I answered. “She lives. Must get. You come?”

  The bug clicked assent.

  Chapter 14

  Noah

  I slept through the afternoon.

  When I woke up in a chamber by myself, the girl Kinni was there with more of the tasteless food. She handed me a little woven basket with strips of the dry stuff in the bottom of it.

  “What is this stuff?” I asked her, chewing without enthusiasm.

  “It’s bat.”

  I cocked my head. “What’s that?”

  She rolled her eyes. “The flying things that live in the caves.”

  The meat was rubbery and bland. I hadn’t seen any flying things in the cave where Jerome had died, but there was so much new information racing through my head that the thought didn’t have anywhere to go. Of course there were cave things that flew. I’d seen them from the underground rivers, flapping up through holes in the roof when the sun set. Of course this is what they tasted like. Because we were people who came from the stars.

  It seemed laughable in the daylight. But everything made sense.

  “You ever been out of that Hive before?”

  I straightened up. “Of course I was out of the Hive. I’m a great Diver.”

  She rolled her eyes again, standing in the doorway of the small room. “Great. Getting food for the slavers. That’s wonderful.” She dropped the woven bowl that held the rest of the meat. “Well, this is bat. It’s one of the things we eat. Along with seal and fungus and berries and whatever else we can find wherever we’re running from the monsters sent by your precious Queen.”

  “She’s not my Queen,” I snapped.

  Kinni shrugged. “Fancy words. But I’ve seen your kind before. Born a slave. We’ve taken some of your people in the past. We tell them the truth, and they smile and nod, and the first chance they get, they go running back to throw themselves at the feet of your masters. Just like your idiot friend did last night.”

  My head snapped up. “Gil? Gil went back?”

  “Like they all do,” she said. “Lexis thinks there’s some kind of chemical thing that turns your brains to mush. Makes you stupid. Makes you want to go back to being slaves even after you know what the bugs really are.”

  The bat meat churned in my belly. “He was as weak as I was. He’ll never even make it back.”

  “Hardly matters. If he dies on the way, fine. If not, they’ll kill him as soon as they see him.”

  I thought about that. Runners had disappeared in my lifetime. None had ever returned. None that I saw. As if they’d let someone bring that truth back into the Hive. My face sagged. Kinni was right. The Hive bugs would kill anyone returning. Gil had no chance.

  But I had to try. For the Queen.

  And I had to be smart about it.

  And to do that, I’d need more than just the scarred Digger for help.

  Chapter 15

  Noah

  I descended into the depths of the ruined Hive and found an entry into the river that flowed underneath it. Somewhere in the far distance, the water must connect to the rivers I’d known since I was a child. The river must run all the way under the mountains, through crevasses carved in the rock. My stomach was roiling from the unfamiliar food, and I ached for a familiar taste.

  The waterbugs here were easy to catch. I grabbed four of them, smashing them with a rock from the riverbed. On the way back to my room I found Kinni and waved a dead bug in her face.

  “Come on. I’ll show you what real food tastes like.”

  She looked like I’d just smeared poop on my face and tried to kiss her. Backing away with a look of horror, she shook her head. “What is that thing? No way!” But she was curious, and she followed me back to my sleeping quarters.

  When we got there, I showed her how to peel the shell up and suck the sweet meat from inside.

  “Oh, stars, no. No way I’m eating that.”

  I shrugged. “Didn’t think you’d be brave enough. I ate your nasty bat meat, but . . .” I let it trail off as I slurped down the second bug, peeking at her out of the corner of my eye.

  She stared at the two remaining bugs. I waited, licking juice off my hands.

  “Is it squishy?”

  I nodded. “So squishy. So good.”

  My jibe must have gotten to her, because she picked up one of the bugs. I took the other, and we sucked out the soft meat in tandem.

  Her eyes went wide, and her mouth twisted. “Oh, my . . . oh, yuck.” She couldn’t seem to decide if she wanted to swallow it or spit it out. In the end, she gulped it down, her face still looking wretched.

  She stared straight at me. “No matter what else happens in my whole life, there will never be anything as gross as that moment.”

  I laughed, and after a moment, so did she.

  My face turned sober. “I need your help. I’m going to get her back.”

  Kinni shook her head. “Who? The Queen? It’s too late, idiot. You lost her. She’s dead.”

  I wanted to scream at the possibility, but held myself in check. “She might be alive. But she won’t be for long. And even if she is, they’ll find her and kill her soon.”

  The thought of them killing her made my throat tighten up. This girl didn’t understand. She hadn’t lived in a real Hive, watching the bond among the ‘Mites and wishing desperately to be part of it as I always had. And she hadn’t touched my Queen. Hadn’t shared her blood. There was no way she could possibly understand the sickening grief that shot through me at the thought of my Queen being torn apart. This group of humans and their ways were foreign to me, as I must have been to them. How could I possibly convince her to help me? To help a Queen she’d never even seen?

  Honesty. I had nothing else to give.

  “Look, you’re right. I’m an idiot. I had no idea what was going on, and I want to fix things. But to do that, I need to get back into the Hive, find her, and get her out. I know where she is.” Or was. “I know how to get in, but I don’t know if I’ll make it back out. I don’t have a plan for that.”

  She stood up from my sleeping pad and stepped into the doorway, looking over her shoulder. “They won’t let you go. They know you’d die, and we need every human we can get.”

  “Not really, though,” I said. “I’m expendable. The Masters—the bugs thought so, anyway.”

  She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and smiled. “That’s sure true.”

  “So anyway, I need to figure out how to get out once I get her.”

  Kinni re-entered the room and sat on my pile of hides. I plopped down next to her.

  “We call them ‘Mites.”

  “What?” That word I didn’t know.

  “‘Mites. The things you call ‘Masters.’ The insects. Dad says the mounds and tunnels they build are like something called termites from the old planet.”

  “‘Mites.” I said. “Right. Well, whatever you call them, they’re not going to let me just take her away.”

  “They probably can’t smell her now if you threw her in the vat of algae,” she said. “But as soon as you wash her off, they’ll smell her for sure. No way to hide. They smell stuff a mile away.”

  “They do?” I had never wondered about their sense of smell before.

  “Of course they do. It’s how they get around. They’re blind.”

  I’d like to say my jaw didn’t drop, but I’d be lying. Of course they’re blind. They maneuver in total darkness. They stay inside when the pollen storms hit. I thought about the things I smelled outside that morning. The scent trail left by the outcast bug. The way it had used its feelers on the ring left by the Queen larva. The beautiful blue scent of that ring. I had never smelle
d anything like those scents before. Something inside me had changed. The Blue Queen had changed me.

  “That’s the key, then,” I said, after too long a pause. “I need to confuse their sense of smell so they can’t chase me.”

  Kinni leaned back against the wall. “They hate the pollen. It confuses them when it hits. Like us in the dark.” She looked at the bowl on the floor in the doorway. “We use it when we’re traveling close to the Hive. We sprinkle it over our back trail so they can’t follow us. Maybe you could . . . . . . I don’t know. Sprinkle it over yourself or something? So they couldn’t smell you as an outsider, and couldn’t smell her?”

  “That might work.” I sighed. “She’s in one of the outside chambers they must have added on. It’s got a million tiny holes for sunlight, but nothing big enough for me to get through, even if I could get close enough during a storm.”

  The next pollen storm wouldn’t happen for weeks. My Blue Queen didn’t have that kind of time.

  “Lexis is working on some kind of explosive,” Kinni offered. “We have some weapons we’ve made, stuff they salvaged from the ships early on, I guess. But she’s working on something that you can set on fire and explode.”

  Those words meant nothing to me.

  “Right,” I said, trying not to look completely stupid. “I’m not sure if that’s the right thing for now.”

  “No, it’s not,” she agreed. “She can’t really control it. It’s just as likely to blow the whole place up, or maybe nothing at all. Can’t count on that.”

  “But back to the pollen idea,” I insisted. “I can carry it to the river, no problem. But I need it to stay dry underwater. Do you have something for that?”

  She thought a moment. “Maybe. If you took one of the sealskin bags and, maybe . . . covered the seams in wax? That might work. Maybe.”

  Another word I didn’t know. Wax.

  “Right,” I said. “I’m leaving tonight. The Mast—the ‘Mite that’s supposed to guard me is going to let me go get her. Maybe it will come with me, at least part of the way, in case I get into any trouble. Can you sort out a bag full of pollen with . . . wax . . . for me? Before second moonrise tonight? There’s no time to waste.”

  Kinni shrugged. “I can do that.” She stood up and walked over to the bowl, scooping it off the floor. “You’re going to die, you know. You’ll never make it back.”

  I knew. But it hardly mattered. I had no Hive. Like the giant insect in the corridor, I was an outcast. And what did it matter if I died? If my Blue Queen was dead, there was no reason to live another day.

  Resolved to my fate, I gave Kinni a weak smile. “You never know. I just might surprise you.”

  She shrugged again and stalked out of the room.

  I pulled the slave tunic off the floor and laid it on the pile of hides. Later tonight, I’d take off these human clothes and put the tunic back on.

  Kinni was right. I would probably die. But despite the clothing I had laid out, I would not die a slave.

  Chapter 16

  Noah

  I spent the late evening in the large common room. Everything I’d learned had kept my head spinning the night before, and I’d hardly been able to focus on any of the other people in the dead Hive. Mo seemed to be their leader. He wasn’t the strongest or fastest, but everyone seemed to respect him. There were maybe forty humans, and a total of nine outcast bugs, who took turns keeping watch outside overnight. Since I’d learned they were blind and navigated by smell, it made perfect sense for the humans to watch by day, and the bugs by night.

  This odd community had lived all over the area, farther than I’d ever dreamed existed. In the early days, the Yellow Queen’s Soldiers would patrol from my old Hive, and had destroyed the bugs that built this one. Other abandoned Hives were located all around. But the Yellow Queen was getting old, and the Hive was weakening. They never came this far now, not for years. If I could retrieve the Blue Queen larva, she would be safe here for as long as we needed to build our army.

  The larvae that had arrived on Gil’s belly would be the start of our own Hive here. But they needed a Queen. We all did. She would hold us together, make us strong.

  Kinni had called Gil an idiot. He certainly was, running back to the old Hive even after he knew what they had done to our people. Of all the boys that could have been rescued with me, didn’t it just have to be him? He couldn’t cope with the truth. Jerome could have handled it.

  Poor Jerome. He was so close to freedom. So close to learning who he really was.

  But Jerome wasn’t here. Neither was Gil now, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but finding my Queen.

  And what if she’s dead? What if you find yourself back in the Hive without her? What will you do?

  That wouldn’t matter, either. Nothing would matter if she was dead.

  When I got back to my room after first moonrise, there were two small, sealed pouches tucked under my old tunic. There was some kind of thin bark with it, with markings on it, which I puzzled over for a few minutes.

  “What do you think of my message?” Kinni’s voice startled me from the doorway.

  “Um . . . thanks for the bags.”

  She snorted. “Right. The bags. But what about the note?”

  Another word I didn’t know, but she was looking at the thin bark. I had seen the other humans with thin sheets of bark like this. They seemed to like looking at them and making marks on them. I peered at the markings, which looked like some kind of dark juice in a pattern.

  “Um. It’s . . . good.”

  Her eyes rolled to the ceiling. “You can’t read, can you?”

  Read. There’s another new word. Don’t let her know. “I can do a lot of things. All kinds of things. You don’t know.”

  “Of course you can,” she said, a wicked smile on her face. “So what does it say?”

  She pointed at the bark. What does it say? I held it up and sniffed it. “It says you were nervous when you made it. Sweating.” I grinned. “You don’t want me to die, do you?”

  Her eyebrows drew together in a scowl. “I couldn’t possibly care less.” She flounced away down the hallway.

  When I was sure she was gone, I held the bark up to my ear. Kinni was crazy. It didn’t say anything. It was just bark with juice painted on it.

  ***

  After second moonrise, I stole out of the dead Hive. The Digger ‘Mite that was set to guard me followed along, feelers waving in the air. Kinni had told me this Digger was named Sunshine. She didn’t tell me who named it. ‘Mites at the old Hive didn’t have names. Did they? Would you have known if they did?

  I hardly needed the guide. Although the scent trail we had left was scant, there were only two low passes through the mountains that divided our side from the Forbidden Zone and my home Hive, and this was the most direct.

  Time to stop thinking about it like that. It’s not your home. Never really was.

  We walked through the night. The Mite’s knowledge of the clicking language was scant, and at first I thought this particular insect was not very intelligent. Through the long journey, I figured out that this was not the case at all. Among themselves, the giant insects didn’t use the clicks. It was a language developed specifically to communicate with Lowforms . . . human slaves. The ‘Mites communicated with scents, following each other’s paths and sensing each other’s thoughts through the different smells their bodies could make. I had never been able to detect these before, but now the air was alive with them.

  There was so much to smell in the darkness. A million kinds of little bugs scampered through the grasses and trees. Warm, furry things flitted through the air and scuttled in burrows underground. When we finally reached the halfway point of the journey, the cave in the hills where Jerome had died, there was no thought of staying there. The stench of his remains and the dead larva that had dropped off his corpse poisoned the air for a mile around it. It seemed cruel to just let him lie there, b
ut no way I could bear to move him.

  “Find your star, Jerome,” I whispered as I passed, breathing through my mouth, which didn’t help at all. It was what Mo had said when he learned we had lost Jerome on the flight from the Hive, and the words had made no sense at the time. But now I knew what stars were.

  I looked up at the night sky as we picked our way through the rocky hills. So many stars. Mo had said that some of them weren’t even real. They were something called satellites, sent out from the spaceship that brought us here so we would always know where we were. He didn’t explain how that was supposed to work, but it didn’t matter, because whatever was supposed to help us use those not-stars was lost years ago when the “Mites attacked out of nowhere.

  Dawn brightened the sky over the horizon by the time we began our descent. In the far distance, the ocean stretched away forever. The sun hadn’t yet risen over its edge, but it wouldn’t be long.

  “We need to go around.” I pointed down into the Forbidden Zone far below. “They patrol there. Can’t get caught.” I spoke in the human language, but Sunshine seemed to understand my meaning.

  We picked a new path, skirting down the hills to the south of the Hive. A thick forest rimmed the edge of the huge field, and we stayed deep in the tree line.

  The sun was well up before I found what I was looking for. An open patch of blue sky looked down onto bare rock with a deep hole in the middle. Below ground, the river flowed toward the Hive. I had never ventured this far in the underground river, but trusted my sense of direction to lead me in.

  Sunshine’s great strength allowed it to shove a small downed tree halfway over the edge of the sinkhole. If I made it back to this pocket, I’d be able to climb out.

  I was exhausted by the night’s travel, but too excited to nap as I’d planned. A rest would do me good, but there was no point in trying.

  I checked the bindings on the waxed pouches tied around my waist under my tunic.

  “Wait. One day. I come. Or no.”

  The ‘Mite clicked understanding. In one day’s time, I would either return victorious, or not at all.