Horizon Beta

by D. W. Vogel

  He whirled around, eyes blazing.

  Gil.

  I backed a step away. “You’re not dead? What are you doing here?”

  His eyebrows met in a scowl of rage. “We’re here to protect our Hive.”

  We. Our Hive.

  In an instant I realized he didn’t mean the free humans and our perfect Blue Queen. He meant the old Hive. The sickly Yellow Hive of death. He’d run straight back to them. And he’d led them straight back here.

  I cocked back my shoulder and rammed a fist right into the side of his face. He crashed to the floor and didn’t move.

  “You really are an idiot,” I muttered as I grabbed a spear and dashed toward the sounds and smells of the enemy.

  It was impossible to count the number of invaders in the chaos of the battle. I closed my eyes and dashed into the fray, spear held high. The Yellows were advancing through our pathetic line, tails whipping left and right to sting our peaceful Diggers. Were they dead, or just paralyzed? It hardly mattered. If the invaders fought their way down to where the Queen hung in her cocoon, they would kill her.

  Mo had instructed me not to throw the spear, but to jab with it. I saw two of the other men slashing with long metal knives, jumping and dodging the Yellow stingers. One of their Soldiers went down under a pile of Diggers, and the smell as they ripped it to shreds with their huge claws made my heart sing.

  We can do this. We can win.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw three of the Yellow Soldiers dash from the fray and skitter toward the lower tunnels, heading for the Queen. I bolted after them.

  Down they went, following the scent trails we left as we traversed the deep tunnels. They were faster than I was. They were going to get to her.

  From out of a side tunnel, two Builders bowled into the Soldiers. One was stung instantly and fell, partially blocking the tunnel. As the Soldiers climbed over its still body, the other Builder hunkered down right in front of them.

  The Builder’s head exploded.

  In an instant the tunnel was filled with a noxious, choking gas. The stench invaded right into my brain, stopping me cold. I was blind. I couldn’t smell a thing.

  The Soldiers were also blinded, and in that moment, I realized the advantage was mine.

  I couldn’t smell, but I could see.

  With primal scream, I flung myself onto the back of the Soldier in the rear. I buried my spear into the back of its neck, and it dropped beneath me. I wrenched out the spear, rolled away from the still-dangerous tail, and scrambled to my feet.

  The other two Soldiers heard me. They couldn’t navigate well, but their feelers could surely detect my motion. One of them advanced on me.

  And the other turned and resumed a much slower march down the tunnel, touching the wall to stay on course.

  It’s going for her. Stop it.

  But an enraged Soldier stood between me and my quarry.

  It whipped its stinger around wildly, searching for me in its blindness. I dodged left, but the thick tail whizzed toward me. With another yell, I plunged the tip of my spear into the meat of the tail. It stuck there, and the strength of the Soldier ripped the haft right out of my hands. The spear clattered away as the noxious explosion smell was replaced by a stronger acid stench.

  I feinted to the right, hoping to dash past it and run to defend the Queen in the lower chambers.

  But the tail hit me square in the left thigh.

  Numbness washed over my leg. I lunged toward the fallen Builder, hoping to crawl under its still bulk before total paralysis hit me.

  The stinger hit me again, this time in the right leg. But the numbness didn’t come. I couldn’t feel anything on my left side below the hip, but the paralysis stopped there.

  Another wave of the acid stench scorched my nostrils.

  My spear. It ruptured the venom sac.

  The Soldier was out of venom.

  I groped for my fallen spear and my hands closed around something sharp. In the dim light I could barely tell what it was, but the stench told me where it came from. I was holding the huge, serrated mandible of the Builder that had somehow exploded its own head to save us.

  With a feral roar, I flung myself at the Soldier. My movement was awkward, swinging my dead leg around, but the Soldier was still disoriented by all the conflicting smells in the narrow tunnel. The mandible in my hand was heavier and sharper than any of the weapons the humans here had made. I lunged right into the Soldier’s waving front legs. It closed them around me and plunged its useless tail into me again.

  I swung the mandible in my hand, putting all the power of rage and terror into the swing.

  The Soldier’s head flew from its thorax and splatted into the wall. We fell together into a pile of limbs and gore.

  Chapter 28

  Noah

  There was no time to bask in my triumph. The farther the last enemy Soldier got from the fumes here, the faster it would run toward our helpless Queen.

  Blood soaked through my pants from each of the stinger holes. My left leg was still dead weight, but I hauled myself up, climbing on the body of the Soldier. I crawled over and retrieved my spear, clambering over the dead ‘Mites blocking the tunnel. On the other side, I leaned against the left wall and swung my dead leg forward. Using my spear to support my weight, I limped forward, down toward the sound and smell of battle.

  In the Queen’s chamber, Mo and two Diggers were backed up into the pool where the larvae had incubated. Three other Diggers lay unmoving in the water; dead or paralyzed, I couldn’t tell.

  The Diggers waved their huge claws, snapping at the Soldier.

  With a flash of the tail, the enemy stung one of the Diggers. It collapsed into a heap.

  The other jumped onto the Soldier and plunged its claw right into the venomous tail. The Soldier flung itself to the side, and the Digger flew off and crashed into the wall. Its claw remained embedded in the Soldier’s tail and the air filled with the acid smell of venom.

  That’s it. We’ve won.

  Mo leaped at the Soldier. It crouched down and took the force of the unarmed man onto its hard shell. The tail whipped around and punctured Mo before swishing him off into the pool. Without the venom, the sting wouldn’t be fatal, but Mo was old. He reached up from the water as the Soldier skittered past, but couldn’t rise to follow.

  The Soldier raced for the cocoons. The Queen’s was in the back, protected by the others that had woven their shells all around her.

  Soldiers didn’t have huge, strong claws on their forearms like Diggers, but they had plenty of strength in the small, sharp pincers. It ripped at the first of the cocoons, pulling it open and spilling the liquid contents onto the hard floor.

  The smell electrified me. But I was so far away. And with my dead leg, I couldn’t run.

  Another cocoon crashed to the floor.

  I raised my arm and cocked it back.

  The spear flew from my hand and buried itself into the Soldier’s back.

  It grabbed at one last cocoon as it fell, pulling the shell down to the ground.

  I dropped to the floor and crawled as fast as I could, clutching the sharp mandible in my hand. Mo reached out for me as I slithered past, but I did not stop.

  Through a puddle of leaking venom I crawled, and dragged myself up onto the body of the dying Soldier.

  My mandible made short work of it, and as its head popped from its body, I looked up to the ceiling where my Queen’s cocoon hung, white and unharmed.

  “We did it. We saved you.”

  I collapsed on top of the dead enemy and the room went black.

  ***

  When the battle was over, we had lost two-thirds of our ‘Mites. One of the men, a quiet, olive-skinned guy named Sean, was dead. Mo was bruised and torn, but would recover. My puncture wounds oozed blood, but in a matter of hours a painful tingling in my left foot told me the venom was wearing off. I would walk again. Mo wondered if my previo
us stings back in the Hive had given me some immunity to the venom. If so, it probably saved my life.

  Our army was a disaster. The ‘Mites that remained were even more battered than before. More missing limbs. More scars. Sunshine survived the battle intact, and clicked sadly over the bodies of the dead.

  But we had done it. We had defended her.

  Those of us that remained gathered in the main chamber near the entrance. The surviving Diggers were dragging out bodies, but the stench still permeated the hall.

  Mo and I sat together, with the other three men and all the ‘Mites around us. Gil sat in the corner, guarded by two Builders. His right eye was already turning blue and swollen mostly shut.

  I shook my head, looking at him. “Why would he do that? Go back when he knew they’d kill him?”

  He muttered from the corner, “They weren’t. I was gonna be a hero.”

  My leg screamed as I jumped to my feet and limped over to him. “A hero? You really are an idiot. They were never going to let you live out this day. They came to kill our Queen, and then you’d be worthless.”

  His voice was nasal, probably from the swelling. Good. “They were gonna make me head of all the Lowforms.”

  I snorted. “Humans. Slave humans. Not Lowforms. Don’t ever call our people that. And if you believed them, you’re stupider than I thought.” I turned back to Mo. “Kinni said you had tried to rescue some of us before, and they always went running back. Who were they? What were their names?”

  He thought for a moment. “Micah was the last one. I think . . . Cody before that.”

  I remembered both of them. Runners, a few years older than me. They both disappeared, like Runners so often did.

  “Micah and Cody,” I said, crouching next to Gil. He flinched back away from me. Good. “Both of them brought here. Both of them ran back to our Hive. You ever see either one of them again?”

  Gil shook his head, wincing.

  “Of course not. As soon as the Soldiers saw them, they had to kill them. Couldn’t let them bring the truth back to a Hive full of slaves.” I sighed. “They’d have killed you right here, and you know it.”

  He didn’t answer, just glared at me with his one good eye.

  I turned back to the room. “We have to get reinforcements,” I said. “They’ll be back.”

  Carl, one of the other men, grinned, wrapping a bandage around a long cut on his arm. “Those ones won’t.”

  “No,” Mo said, “Noah’s right. When this patrol doesn’t come back, they’ll send another. They’ll follow the scent trail these soldiers left. More of them, most likely.”

  I nodded. “Who knows how many? And it won’t be long.”

  We looked around the room. Fourteen injured ‘Mites, and five humans, including me. That was all our defense.

  “That was pretty smart, using that jawbone as a weapon,” Mo said to me with a smile. He turned to the other men. “You guys should have seen it. He was a madman. Just flung himself on that bug and cut its head clean off.”

  Warmth spread over my face. “Didn’t have much choice.” I turned to the Builder nearest me and switched from the human language to the clicking ‘Mite language. I didn’t have words for what I wanted to say, so I clicked, “Head. Smell. Gone,” and pantomimed a head exploding.

  It clicked assent. “Yes. Save Queen.”

  The other guys were looking quizzically at us and I explained. “We were fighting in the hallway and one of the Builders just hunkered down and blew its own head off. Just . . . made it explode somehow. The stench was unbelievable. Even you guys would have been sick.” They all knew that my sense of smell had been changed, heightened to ‘Mite level, or nearly so. No one seemed to know how contact with the Queen larva had done it, but it hardly mattered.

  “So,” Mo said. “What do we have now?” He looked around the room and sighed. “We have to hold on here until the Queen hatches. Once she does, we can clear out of here and find somewhere safer until she grows up.”

  I shook my head. “They’ll smell her for miles. We’ll get more outcasts, for sure, but the Hive will send everything they have now that they know she’s here.” I shot a glare at Gil. “How long does it take for a Queen to become adult?”

  Clicking from the ‘Mites indicated six months.

  “No way.” I rubbed at my leg, still tingly from the venom. “We have to get far from here. Miles and miles. Farther than anyone has ever traveled.”

  Mo shrugged. “And who’s to say we won’t run into another Hive that wants to kill her? We can’t take her up to the mountains. It’s too cold. She’d never survive.”

  Carl tied off the bandage on his arm. “So . . . what then? We just wait here until they send more bugs to kill us all?” He spit on the ground. “Doesn’t matter anyway, really. Without the rest of the people they got in that Hive, there’s not enough of us to last another generation. Might as well die here.”

  Mo opened his mouth to retort, but I silenced them all with a wave of my hand, my eyes closed in sudden rapture.

  The sweetest scent billowed up from below. Ice blue, like the shallows of the sea on a calm day.

  “She’s emerged. Our Queen is here.”

  Chapter 29

  Kinni

  Lexis was smarter than any of us. She was always mixing things up, working from a bunch of handwritten notes in a faded notebook. She said that in the early days of our peoples’ flight, they had access to a world of knowledge on some kind of device. They knew the devices wouldn’t last long without repairs, so they tried to write down anything they thought might help them survive in this hostile country.

  There was a lot of stuff about bugs.

  It’s how we knew that our ‘Mites were a lot like tiny insects that built giant mounds back on Earth. No way Earth people would have ever believed ours, though.

  The book had all kinds of things about growing plants, treating injuries, making weapons. A lot of it didn’t apply here, because the plants were all different, but over the years our people had sorted a lot of things out.

  None of it seemed to be helping much.

  I was wrapping cord around an arrowhead, attaching it to a thin shaft of hardened reed, when I heard the boom. It sounded like a crack of thunder, and the whole cave shook. The air filled with the sound of a thousand bats flapping frantically around the part of the cave they roosted in.

  Sunlight streamed through the open doorway. So . . . not thunder. I set down the arrow and followed a crowd of people outside to see what had made the noise.

  Lexis was standing with her back to us, peering into a hole in the ground that I was sure hadn’t been there the night before. It was about an arm’s length across, and the edges of it were black. When Lexis turned around, her face was covered in soot. Under the grime, it looked like her eyebrows might not be there.

  “It works!” She was grinning, teeth white against her filthy lips. “I did it!”

  All the bats chose that moment to fly out of the cave. We all ducked as the dark cloud streamed by.

  People crowded around the hole. I sidled in and looked over the edge, but nothing was down there. Just more black rock.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  Lexis beamed. She pulled the old notebook out from under the back of her shirt. “I made an explosive.”

  People backed away from the hole, eyeing it with suspicion. Nobody seemed to want to know any more about it, and after a moment, Lexis’s face fell.

  She looked so disappointed that nobody had any questions, so I glanced at the book she was waving around. “How did you do it?”

  The old, dry pages rustled as she opened the book and pointed to a scribbled note. “See? It’s bat guano. What you do is, you soak it in water for a couple of days. Then you filter out the crystals, and you mix them with sulfur.” She pointed up the mountain. “This was a volcano at one time, eons ago. There’s sulfur all around the rim. Took me all day to climb up and get s
ome.”

  I looked up the hill but the rocks looked the same as all the others around here. Dead and dry.

  “So then,” she continued, “you take the crystals and the sulfur and you mix it with charcoal.” Her eyes turned serious. “And then you’re very, very careful with it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because it explodes,” she said. “It’s not very stable, and super flammable. Just one little spark, and boom!”

  I peered back into the black hole at her feet. “Boom, for sure. How much of that stuff did you make?”

  She glanced over at a couple of bowls sitting on the far side of the plateau. “Just a handful. I can make more.” She grinned at the cave opening. “Not like we have a shortage of bat poop.”

  I hadn’t known what “guano” meant. Now I did, and wished I didn’t. Exploding bat poop. Just what we needed.

  “Could you make enough to blow up the big Hive?”

  She nodded. “Probably. I wouldn’t want to transport that much. And we don’t want to kill our people inside.”

  Well, no. But if we could get our people out . . . not that I had any idea how we’d do that.

  “But we could maybe figure out how to stabilize it. Turn it into some kind of weapon we could use. Find some safer place to live and rig some kind of barrier so the bugs can’t get in.”

  I didn’t mention that if they couldn’t get in, we probably couldn’t get out. It would take an awfully big perimeter to cordon off an area big enough to support even the small number of people we had left. Maybe if our territory included a river where we could trap seals . . .

  No reason to put a damper on her mood, though. “That’s amazing,” I said, faking a huge smile. “Maybe this is a turning point for us.”

  She grinned and turned back to the notebook, making her own notes in the margins. “Maybe if the Queen that Noah brought back survives, we might just have a shot. This could give us the advantage in a fight. Finally.”

  We hadn’t heard anything more from the people we left with the larvae. My dad was down there. He’d told us not to come down until they sent a runner up to get us, and if we didn’t hear from them by next pollen storm, to move on to the next camp, farther down the hill on the other side. It wasn’t as safe as up there, but there were a lot of fruit trees and berry bushes we could harvest before moving to the camp after that. The endless cycle of trying to stay one step ahead of the giant bugs that wanted to kill us all.