Horizon Beta

by D. W. Vogel

  “I’m not,” I insisted. “A slave doesn’t have a choice. A slave is owned. But I’m not owned. I choose to be hers. She’s my Queen. I’m as much a part of her Hive as any of these ‘Mites.” I thought for a moment. “And they’re not really hers. Not yet. Not like I am.” I had shared her blood. The ‘Mites around her were smitten with her scent, but only I was truly part of her glorious self. The roomful of giant insects clicked and whirred. Few of them would understand our language. Only ones from the sickly Yellow Hive where all my friends were captive.

  Mo shrugged, looking just like his daughter in the gesture.

  Where was she? I hardly smelled any humans in the Hive.

  “Where did everybody go?” I asked him.

  His face fell. “I sent them all away. We have a lot of camps all over, places we go to stay away from the big Hive’s soldiers. I sent almost everybody up into the mountains in case any of the ‘Mites followed your trail here.”

  Of course they would. Without a direct trail to follow, it might take them a while to patrol out to where Sunshine had waited for me. But when they did, they’d track us straight here.

  “We need to go,” I said, popping up out of the water. “We need to go now.”

  He shook his head. “We can’t leave them.”

  I followed his gaze to the larvae.

  “But they’ll be here. Probably not for a while yet, but they’ll come.”

  Mo crouched next to me. ‘Mites crowded around, over and under each other, each taking a turn to be nearest the Queen. “I know. But we can’t take them. And we’ll need them to take back the big Hive.”

  “No, we don’t,” I said. “We only need her. I’ll take her back on my belly.” Where she belongs. “As long as we keep her moist, it will be fine. You just keep feeding me and I can do it. I have strength enough for both of us.”

  Mo stared at me for a long moment. “Lexis has been studying these bugs her whole life. She thinks there’s some kind of pheromone, some kind of bonding thing they do to keep the Hive together. How they act like one unit, and will happily die for the sake of the rest of them.” He sighed. “Whatever they use, it’s working on you, too.”

  “But not you?” How could he not feel it? She was right here.

  “Nope.” He ran a hand through his short gray hair. “And I don’t want to risk your life feeding her, but you might be right.” He looked around the crowded chamber. “If all these bugs found us already, the big Hive can’t be far behind.”

  The Queen larva stirred. With a wet plop, she detached herself from the remains of the seal and flopped into the water. I reached for her, but she inched away from me. Using a hundred tiny appendages I hadn’t realized she possessed, she crawled out of the pool. The ‘Mites around us backed away, making a path in the direction she was traveling. She paused at the wall and reared back. Her tiny feet grabbed at the little imperfections, and she climbed. When she reached the ceiling, she stopped, hanging upside down by the hindmost feet.

  As I watched with open mouth, she dangled there, wiggling. A thick, silky material oozed out of her head, and her movements propelled it all around her. Every head in the room was fixated on her progress. The scent of the silk was a warm, soft brown, like the beach at sunset.

  Long moments passed. The silk flowed all around her until nothing could be seen of her inside it. As it dried from the top down, the shiny surface became dull and hard. The rest of the larvae followed her, dropping from the dead seal and creeping up the walls, spinning their own silken shells.

  Finally it was finished. Eighteen hard cocoons hung from the ceiling of the chamber. All the ‘Mites relaxed as one, and my shoulders lowered.

  “It’s time,” I murmured. “Now we can only wait.”

  There was no moving those cocoons. I would have to be extra vigilant while my Queen transformed within it. She would rely on me to keep her safe from any threats while she was cemented to the ceiling, helpless and immobile.

  “Blast it,” Mo muttered. “We’re not going anywhere until that thing hatches.”

  As if I would leave her. As if I would ever stray from this room until my Queen emerged from her shell, a glorious adult ready to fight for all of us.

  I smiled. “Can you bring my bedding down here? And some more food, please?”

  Mo stalked away and I settled down on the hard ground underneath the cocoon to wait.

  Chapter 25

  Kinni

  I shivered in the cold morning air and inched closer to the dying fire. Of all the camps we had all over the area, this high mountain cave was my least favorite. By far the safest since the cold kept the big bugs away, it was freezing and damp, it stank of bat poop, and the smoke from our fire hung in the air and choked my lungs. The smell of the cave mixed with the cloying scent from the floral wax candles we burned all around us to keep the smaller, biting insects from eating us alive in our sleep.

  This was it.

  This was my life.

  When Dad and Lexis came up with their crazy plan to hatch a Queen bug that wouldn’t be hostile to us, I thought he was crazy. I knew what those things could do.

  I was only six years old when they raided the camp we thought was safe. I had never seen them up close before. The land all around the big Hive was empty of the dangerous bugs, and the patrols from there had slacked off in the years since the Queen had conquered everything around. We got complacent.

  Our camp was in a pine forest on the edge of a wide river, one of the few above-ground branches of the waterway that honeycombed under the whole area. The fields around it were thick with berry brambles and a tall, thin plant we could grind into flour and bake into flat bread on a hot rock. Mom was teaching me how to do it, pulverizing the little seeds in a stone bowl. There were all kinds of crustaceans in the rivers that cooked up sweet and juicy. Life was good.

  The bugs attacked in the dark on a moonless night.

  They were blind, and the darkness meant nothing to them. Their sense of smell and vibration was better than sight. We never had a chance.

  Our population had grown a bit by then. We were almost up to a hundred people scratching out a living on a world ruled by insects. A lot of the women had multiple children by then as we started to feel safe enough to have them. My mom had just had twin boys, and I doted on my baby brothers.

  We weren’t totally stupid. We had sentries stationed all around our camp. They should have seen the bugs coming across the field. Should have cried out a warning. Only one of them managed to screech out a dying call as the soldiers overwhelmed them from all sides.

  Everyone jumped up from where we slept under the low-hanging boughs. The darkness was chaos as bugs appeared from every side. People were screaming, but usually not for very long.

  Someone grabbed me from behind and dragged me out toward the river.

  “No! Mom and the boys!” I cried, but the arms kept pulling me away from the center of camp.

  I saw them go down.

  In the flickering light of fires from all around the camp, almost everything was a silhouette, but only my mom would have been carrying a baby under each arm. She was running from the massacre behind her. Men fought the bugs with the bladed weapons we made out of everything we could find on the planet. Some people had spears tipped with sharp metal, scrounged from the old wreckage of our ships during the pollen storms that kept the bugs away.

  We thought those weapons would help us. But in the dark against an enemy that was taller and faster, that could “see” in pitch darkness and was armed with a venomous stinger, we were like mosquitoes fighting back against a colony of bats. Our blades rarely found their marks. Their stings rarely missed.

  My mom ran through this chaos. Dad let go of me and raced toward her, shouting back at me as he went. “Get to the river! Swim downstream!” It was our escape plan from this camp: swim where the bugs couldn’t follow and run when the river ducked underground.

  Dad made it about th
ree steps away. He thought I didn’t see what happened, that he had been blocking my view, but I saw. One big soldier scuttled by. It didn’t even turn a glance at my Mom, just swiped her with its tail in passing. The sting caught her in the back, and she pitched forward. Somehow she held onto my brothers as she fell.

  Dad was still bolting towards her. He must have known he couldn’t save her, but the boys . . . they were just babies. Their cries blended in with the screams of the night. Before he could get anywhere near them, another bug came and scooped them up, skittering back into the forest.

  “Dad, no!” I screamed, and I don’t know if he heard me, but he turned around and dashed back to where I was standing, frozen by the edge of the water. Without a backward glance he grabbed my arm and jumped with me into the river. We swam away from the carnage with the few survivors.

  That was nine years ago. What did the bugs do with my baby brothers? Did they take them back to their huge, evil Hive and raise them as slaves like all the rest? Did they use them to incubate their horrible maggots? Did they eat them, or just leave them to die alone in the forest?

  I huddled by the fire now, thinking back on that night, like I did every night when the fire burned low. The caves here were safer, but there was nothing to eat. We stockpiled as much as we could carry from the lowlands, but we couldn’t live here forever. So we traveled, migrating in an ever-changing pattern, trying to stay one step ahead of the bugs that could destroy what was left of us on another dark night.

  Dad’s plan was crazy. But it might be our only chance. And that idiot had blown it.

  I shook my head and burrowed deeper into my covers. The thick seal-hide wasn’t soft, but piled on top of layers of woven silk, it was warm.

  A figure burst into the cave mouth and we all jumped up, reaching for our weapons. My knife was in my hand before the seal-hide hit the ground.

  But it wasn’t a bug. It was Daniel, one of the men that had stayed behind with the larvae at the prairie Hive.

  “He’s back!” he said, and I looked around in confusion.

  “He’s back,” Daniel repeated, stepping into the firelight. “He brought the Queen back. We’re saved!”

  Chapter 26

  Noah

  I kept my vigil in the dark bowel of the crumbling Hive for days. More ‘Mites kept arriving, drawn by the scent of our cocooned Queen. They all passed my smell test. No aggression. They smelled weary. Injured. But even through the cocoon, our Queen’s scent gave them hope.

  We were across the mountains from the Hive I’d escaped, and I hoped the Yellow Queen might be too old to bother with us, that her sickly Hive would just be content with the bounty they enjoyed at the hands of my friends. With each new ‘Mite that showed up, my nerves grew more taut. Sooner or later, the Yellow Hive would come.

  I didn’t even know how long to expect the Queen and the rest to stay cocooned. Back at the Hive, we never saw this stage of the ‘Mites’ development. All we saw were the adults. Newly-hatched ones were smaller, but they grew and grew, molting their exoskeletons until they towered over us. A few of us saw the larvae, of course. I realized that now. But no one lived to tell the tale.

  Back at the Hive, I’d always felt smart. I caught onto things quickly. Was one of the best at the clicking language of the ‘Mites. I helped the younger boys with their tasks, and thought I was really something. Here, I was an idiot.

  It wasn’t just that I didn’t know our history, where our people had come from. I didn’t know anything. The first time I saw someone make a fire, I almost wet myself in terror as it flared up in front of him from sparks he made with rocks. There was no fire in the Hive. I never knew we needed it.

  These people had weapons, slashing pieces of metal they’d pulled from the collapsing hulks of the ships in the Forbidden Zone. They had arrows, which they shot with bows strung with worm silk. They cooked their food and made marks on thin bark that other people could look at later and know what words it meant. And there were so many words I didn’t know.

  Mo taught me things over the next week. I was terrible at striking the fire rocks together, but my strong swimmer’s shoulders made me pretty good with the bigger weapons. Mo said my Queen would lead an army of ‘Mites to rescue our people and defeat the Yellow Queen. He said that we would fight along with them. I was a strong swimmer and a decent runner, but apart from some scuffles with other boys, I had never learned to fight, and we would never have been allowed to use weapons. Now I realized why. Hour after hour I practiced with the hard wooden spears and thick clubs, swinging at imaginary enemies in the dry dirt outside the Hive, trusting Sunshine to watch over the Queen in my absence. When the time came to fight, I would be ready.

  I worked myself until my arms ached and my back cramped. A couple of the Builder ‘Mites made large piles of the chewed clay and wood that made up Hive walls, and I bashed them down to dust. When I swung a club into a block of clay, my mind was full of the battle we would someday fight. So much better than the thoughts that plagued me when I wasn’t smashing up targets.

  But in the late afternoons when the heat stole my strength and I retreated to the cool depths near the pools, the questions burned in my brain. How had I never realized what we were in the Hive? How could I have lived my whole life in such blissful ignorance, happily serving a species that saw us as no more important than a seal in the river? I was at war with myself.

  On one hand, I was completely devoted to the Queen in her cocoon. I would happily have died for her. The bond I felt was as much a part of me as an arm or leg. As more outcast ‘Mites arrived from all over the area, I felt more and more possessive of her, and somehow more welcoming at the same time. We would all be her Hive together, reveling in her glorious blue scent, working together to ensure the health of the whole.

  On the other hand, I knew what they were. I had learned the concept of slavery and realized what humans once were, and should have been. I still had little idea of the technology that had been taken from us in denying us access to our ships. The concept of interstellar distance was completely outside my ability to think. But those ships once flew. What must this place have looked like to those first humans who landed here? Through the red mist of pollen that gave them such a false security, what did they think of this land that became so hostile? When the ‘Mites who became Masters swarmed over their ships, killing and enslaving almost all of them, did they hope for revenge? What would they think of me, bonded to one of their destroyers as I was?

  And really, what was I?

  Mo said one of their number had been taught some science, handed down from the original settlers. Her name was Lexis, and she had theories about the ‘Mites and their scent markings. It was working on me, for certain. I belonged to the Queen. But was it real? Was my devotion to her a choice I was making, or just another form of chemical slavery?

  “Noah, you okay?”

  Mo startled me from my confused reverie.

  I was sitting in the lower chamber where all of the cocoons hung from the ceiling, wanting to be there when the Queen emerged. ‘Mites came and went, checking on her as I did. Surely she would remember me. Surely she felt the same about me as I did about her.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Just thinking.”

  He nodded. “It’s so much to take in, isn’t it?” There was a series of soft pops from his knees as he sat on the ground next to me. “But this is the start of something great. When that little Queen comes out, we’re going to teach her everything we know. You’re the best at that clicking language, and you’ll teach her. She’ll grow up here, nice and safe, and we’ll just be part of the bug family. When we’ve got enough soldiers, we’ll attack the big Hive and free the rest of our people. When we’re all safe, we’ll be able to do so much here. Farming and mining . . . The things we can build . . .“

  I stiffened as a waft of pure terror shot through the tunnel.

  Mo obviously didn’t smell it, rattling on about how much better life would be.
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  I jumped up, along with every ‘Mite in the place.

  “What’s wrong?” Mo unfolded next to me with more pops and creaks.

  The smell of fear was all around me. ‘Mites skittered around in olfactory panic.

  I closed my eyes and breathed in. Rage coursed through me as the hated smell lanced into my head. The sickly yellow of the Hive where I was born. The aggression and venom of Soldiers in attack mode. And the devastating scent of death right above me.

  “Stay with Queen,” I clicked to the largest of the Diggers in the cavern with me. They formed a wall around the hanging cocoons, huge claws at the ready.

  Mo was wide-eyed in confusion. He couldn’t smell any of what was going on, but the sounds of battle echoed through the tunnels.

  “They’re here to kill her!” I shouted. “The Soldiers are here!”

  Chapter 27

  Noah

  I bolted up the long, curving tunnel. The sounds of fighting were everywhere, bouncing off the walls of the honeycomb of chambers all around me. My blood screamed to charge in and attack the invaders, but I gritted my teeth against the instinct, and turned toward my chamber instead. Without a weapon, I had no chance against a Soldier. I had to get a spear.

  We had forty or fifty Outcasts in our ruined Hive that would fight to the death for our Queen. Mostly Diggers and Builders, but twelve were Soldiers, mostly missing legs and one missing its stinger. Four men, plus me.

  And it smelled like at least ten Yellow Soldiers. Maybe more.

  The spear was with the rest of the weapons in a little chamber they called an armory.

  I raced into the room and ran smack into the back of someone.