Horizon Beta

by D. W. Vogel

  They needed to get out of here. We all did. But the wind was still blowing, and in what felt like seconds, the air cleared enough for the bugs to start smelling their way around again.

  I raced to the edge. “Take her out of here!” I yelled over. “Get her through the pass!”

  The people below me heard, and tried to change the Queen’s course. With a rush of relief I recognized my dad among them. He didn’t look good. One of his arms was hanging at an odd angle, and he wasn’t walking right. But he was down there, and he was moving.

  “We’re coming!” I shouted, but the Queen wouldn’t be swayed.

  She kept moving straight toward our ship.

  “No, don’t come up here! We’ll all be trapped!”

  Maybe they thought we had more bombs, but we were totally out. If we didn’t get down fast, we’d all die.

  It was already too late.

  The enemy Soldiers swarmed around the base of the ship. Our people and our Queen skittered up the sides, pushing each other and helping the weak. The Queen appeared on top and I reached down to pull my dad up. One of the bugs at the bottom broke away from the group, streaking back toward the Slave Hive. I was sure it was one of ours. Probably the only one of us that will survive the day.

  We spread out around the edges of the ship, beating down at the enemies that tried to make the climb. In the center sat the Queen, looking serene and calm. I followed her gaze.

  She was pointed straight back toward the Slave Hive, and her feelers waved, pulling scent into her flat nostrils.

  “What is it?” I asked her, but of course she couldn’t understand me.

  I picked up a loose bit of the rail that had fallen off and whacked at the head of a Soldier that appeared over the edge. The crunch made me grin.

  Behind me, the Queen was still sitting like she hadn’t a care in the world, facing the ocean. Her scent matched that far-off water. Blue and smooth.

  She knows we’re gonna die. She’s at peace with it.

  I swung my railing at another Soldier. We could hold out here for a bit longer. But their numbers would win the day.

  The Queen obviously knew it, too. She turned her eyeless face toward me and clicked a single word in the language Noah had been teaching her.

  “Death.”

  “I think so, too,” I told her in human language, and turned back toward the rail. “But I’m not going alone.”

  Chapter 44

  Noah

  In the chamber beyond, the Digger stood frozen. Even the paralyzed Soldier stopped moving when I emerged through the crumbling crack from the Queen’s chamber, clutching her severed head under my arm.

  The boys were still there, standing on wobbly legs.

  I clicked to the Digger and the twins. “Come. Follow.”

  They all did.

  I strode up the tunnels, exuding the hated smell of the Hive Queen. Diggers and Builders shrank away as I passed, confused by the scent of their Queen mixed with the scent of death. We emerged into the light.

  In the distance I could hear the battle raging. The rest of the escaped humans were long gone. I couldn’t see them over the hillside, but surely they’d made it far enough away that the remaining Soldiers wouldn’t find them. They’d be safe once they reached the height and cold of the mountain. Our people would find them and lead them to sanctuary.

  Explosions ripped the air.

  That had to be their escape, the final blast that would bring down the mountain pass. Any minute now, the Hive’s Soldiers would be heading my way.

  “Whatever happens, you have to get away,” I said to the boys stumbling along behind me. I pointed to the pass where Chen would have taken the rest. “Go that way, as fast as you can. Keep running. When you see the feral humans, go with them.”

  They nodded. They’d learned what the Hive meant. Like me, they knew our lives were lies.

  Diggers and Builders crowded around me, and I clutched the Queen’s head, machete raised. Along with the boys, I ran toward the ledge that overlooked the long grassy hillside that led to the Forbidden Zone.

  The mountain pass stood. I smelled pollen and dead enemy Soldiers by the hundreds. I smelled humans, some alive and some not. I smelled the blue of our Queen.

  They hadn’t escaped. They were trapped.

  “Go!” I screamed at the boys, and took off at a run toward the battle zone. If my Queen died today, I would die by her side.

  Sunshine met me at the top of the slope that led down into the Forbidden Zone.

  “Bad,” he clicked. “Death.” He touched the dead Queen’s head under my arm and pulled back in alarm.

  I could smell it everywhere. Death.

  It would be over soon. All our remaining people had climbed to the top of one of the transports. My Queen was there, and Kinni, and Lexis. I could pick out their scents. The wind shifted away from me as I ran but I could still see them, swinging their weapons at the Soldiers that swarmed up the sides, pelting them with arrows that would soon run out.

  The Soldiers all around the transport smelled the change in the air. I was suddenly upwind. With their dead Queen’s head.

  They froze, antennae waving toward me. Our people knocked the highest ones straight off the edge of the transport.

  I stopped running and raised the dead Queen’s head.

  “Death!” I clicked, with fierce, manic joy.

  The wind shifted again, and I smelled my Queen’s summons. Blue tinged with green, she called me with an urgency I’d never felt.

  But my legs were wobbly. I was out of steam.

  “My Queen!” I called, stumbling forward.

  Strong claws picked me up. Sunshine flung me onto his back and dashed forward toward the tail end of the transport. My machete fell to the ground as I clung on with one hand, gripping the dead head with the other. We pounded toward the ship where the Soldiers were starting to move, no longer stunned by the smell of death in the changing wind.

  They swarmed toward us.

  We’ll never make it. They’re right on top of us.

  Sunshine slid to a halt and I tumbled off his back. My body skidded right under a crushed section of the transport and I hauled myself up, wedging into a hole in the ship’s underbelly. Dragging the Queen’s head, I climbed inside the ship.

  Outside, Soldiers flung themselves at the thick metal walls. Far ahead, they darted into the half-open hatchway, frenzied at the smell of their dead Queen in my hands.

  I lunged forward and jumped onto the interior ladder. Holding the head by its limp antennae, I climbed for my life. I didn’t even know why I was still holding it, but couldn’t imagine dropping it when I’d come so close.

  At the top of the ship, a hatchway was half caved in. I pounded on it, clinging to the ladder as Soldiers rushed toward me inside the ship. The seats below me filled with clicking anger and waving, venomous tails.

  With a great, squealing screech of metal, the hatchway above me curled back, ripped away by a great claw. Blue sky shone down, and the massive claw reached in. I grabbed it with one arm, still clutching the head, and it hauled me clear just as the Soldiers launched themselves from the seats below my feet, wordlessly screaming their rage.

  I slid onto the top of the transport. From beneath me, the angry clicks of Soldiers echoed inside the ship, but they were too large to fit through the hatch. The hull vibrated as more enemies climbed up the sides.

  This is it.

  This is where we die.

  But we had done it. Chen and the rest of our people were free. Whether or not they found a way to survive on their own in this hostile, bug-ridden wasteland was up to them, as it should have been all along.

  And she was here. My glorious Queen.

  She settled down next to me and gently took the dead Queen’s head from my grasp.

  The Soldiers were seconds away.

  We didn’t have clicks to mean “Goodbye,” so I bade my Queen farewell in the only w
ords we had.

  “Eat well.”

  She did.

  In five sickening, crunchy bites, she ate the dead Queen’s head.

  All around us, time stopped.

  The enemy Soldiers that had been poised to end our little revolution stopped in their tracks, feelers waving in the air.

  My Queen stood up on her hind legs. She exuded her clean, healthy blue scent. The air filled with the joy of her youth and strength, mixed with the yellow of her vanquished enemy.

  Every ‘Mite, ours and theirs, dropped to their bellies in submission.

  The Queen lowered her head, presenting it to me. In awe and wonder, I pulled myself up to my knees and touched the oil she granted, rubbing it onto my skin. First of the hundreds around me to receive her blessing.

  First of the new Hive.

  The Queen was dead.

  Long live the Queen.

  Chapter 45

  Noah

  We sat in the glow of sunset, listening to the waves crash onto the shore. Our Queen perched on the highest rock, antenna sweeping the air. She loved the salty breeze.

  Kinni and Lexis trudged up from the beach, each carrying a basket of shellfish. Kinni brought the basket to her dad, who sat next to me in the orange glow.

  Mo hadn’t fared well in the battle. His right arm caught a stinger full on, and the wound festered. Now there was just a stump where a Builder had nipped the dying arm clean off, crushing the blood vessels with its huge mandibles and saving Mo’s life.

  Sunshine had also lost a leg when the Soldiers attacked him at the transport. But Lexis had made a wooden replacement, strapping it onto the remnant. Sunshine would limp forever, but would never want for anything. He was the hero of the battle. I grinned, imagining how we must have looked as I rode Sunshine through the battlefield, the dead Queen’s head raised like a beacon.

  “Cooked or raw?” Lexis asked, jiggling the shellfish in the basket.

  “Cooked.” Chen answered for all of us.

  He had led the people right up to meet our sentries in the mountain pass, just as I knew he would. When the fight ended and our Queen took over the Hive, we sent the least-damaged of our people up to join them. They had been cold and terrified, but in the weeks since the big Hive became our home again, they had settled into their new lives. Some of the women were having a hard time with the real story of our history on the planet, and Kinni rolled her eyes at their insistence that we were all just waiting to get some kind of magical wings. Now the ‘Mites that used to be their Masters and our enemies were enemies no longer.

  They were hers. Ours. Mine.

  Most of the humans didn’t live inside the giant mound. Along with the ‘Mites, we had started building our own, individual homes, scattered around the ridge. The Hive was becoming a city. None of us wanted to live inside the place that had been our prison.

  Our Queen didn’t want to, either.

  Lexis was starting to sort out the normal biology of these insects. She had already guessed some of it. When a Queen egg was laid, it was supposed to be allowed to hatch. If the existing Queen was healthy, the new one would leave the Hive with a group of Diggers and Builders, and go off to found her own Hive far from the old one. Now we knew that if the old Queen was ailing, the new Queen would stay in the original Hive, kill the old Queen, and eat her head, taking over the Hive and all the ‘Mites that lived in it. In this Hive, that hadn’t happened for far too long.

  We trooped down to gather around an open fire on the beach. Most of the ‘Mites stayed away from the fire, retiring to their normal places in the dark tunnels. But the ones that had fought with us, that had come to serve our Queen in the distant, ruined mound, they stayed out with all the humans.

  The last of the sun dipped below the horizon, and stars began to twinkle as darkness overcame the sky. We sat around the fire, cooking our evening meal.

  Lexis had figured it out.

  In the weeks after the battle, she combed every inch of the Hive, searching for whatever it was that made the humans of the Hive able to bond with the Queen through her oil. She tried the fungus that grew in the dark gardens underground, but it didn’t work. She drank the water that flowed in our river, but it was the same water that came down from the high mountain peaks and coursed under the whole area. I took her into all the dark chambers, and she breathed deeply, suspecting some spore in the air here.

  In the end, it was the waterbugs.

  “You eat them raw?” She’d been aghast. “They’ve got to be full of parasites. Who knows what all. You have to cook them through.”

  I demonstrated, crushing one of the wiggling bugs with a rock, and scraping out the translucent, jelly meat inside. “You just slurp it down. They’re really good.” I nodded at Kinni. “They’re her absolute favorite.”

  Kinni pretend-gagged. “They’re horrible.”

  Lexis held her nose and took a bite. “Disgusting.” She gagged, but held it down. Her brow furrowed and she peered at Kinni.

  “You’ve eaten these things raw?”

  A shrug from Kinni. “He dared me.”

  “When?”

  I thought about it. “After you all came back down the mountain. Before we found all the weapons in the transport.”

  We had carried the rest up and cooked them in the fire. Even I had to admit they were a lot better when cooked. Lexis touched the oil from the Queen’s head as she did every night, making notes in her little book about what she’d done that day.

  Nothing happened for three days. But on the morning of the fourth day, after Lexis had received the oil again, she woke me from a sound sleep.

  “Noah! Do you smell that? It’s blue!”

  I grinned. “Yes, it’s blue. Like the sea on a bright day. The Queen is happy this morning.”

  She thought it must be a parasite. Something that incubated in the waterbugs, and lived in the brains of the ‘Mites, and in us. Something that responded to the pheromones in the Queen’s oil and changed our brain chemistry, bonding us together.

  “It makes perfect sense. They’re blind. Smell is everything to them. It’s how they communicate, and how she binds us all into one family, one mind.” She paused, realizing what she said. “Us. I’m part of it now. I’m part of the Hive.”

  I had laughed. “We’re all part of the Hive.”

  ***

  We ate our dinner, watching the sky fade from purple to black. The fire shot sparks up to the stars.

  Along with our Diggers, we were planting some of the seeds we’d found in the transports. If we were lucky, we’d soon have plants growing that had come from a distant planet. Where we’d come from.

  “Show me again where Earth was?” I asked Mo.

  He pointed into the eastern sky. “It was there.” His finger traced a long, serpentine row of stars. “The one at the end.” It was dim in the cloudy sky.

  I took a pile of raw shellfish to the Queen. She received them graciously, emitting a warm scent of appreciation. I wished humans had the ability to share our feelings through our scents the way our Hivemate ‘Mites could. We would always need the clicking language to help them understand us, and our own language to communicate with each other. But everyone in the Hive knew our Queen’s devotion to us.

  She was as different from the old Yellow Queen as the ocean was from the moons. I liked to think the fact that she had shared blood with me in her larval form somehow let her see humans as part of her Hive, as valued as ‘Mites. She still didn’t speak a lot of the clicking language, but she didn’t have to. Her scent told us everything we needed to know about her wants and moods, and every human and ‘Mite in the Hive would give their life to protect her. Our Queen was serene in the starlight, confident and benevolent. I breathed in her scent and thought about the story the women of the Hive had told. Over the years, the real tale of Horizon Beta’s flight from another planet was twisted and warped. The women believed that when we were worthy, we would get wings. As I r
eveled in the closeness of my Hive, I realized they were right. In the safety of my family, I was a winged dragonfly, soaring over a perfect blue ocean.

  The old Hive’s King sat uneasily next to the Queen. The only true male in the Hive, he would soon be the father of all the eggs our Queen would lay. He hated being out in the open air, but she refused to accompany him down into the dark chamber where her predecessor had lived. No deep tunnels for the Queen that had been hatched in sunlight. He’d have to get used to it.

  And no more seals. In my flight from this Hive that seemed a hundred years ago, I’d stumbled on the answer. Our vats of algae, brought down from the stars, were a perfect nourishment for ‘Mite eggs and larvae. We’d started making large clay vessels so that when the Queen was ready to lay eggs, each one could have its own supply.

  Kinni helped her dad open a shell, scooping out the hot meat. She settled down next to him and looked up toward the wash of stars overhead. “I wonder if they would have sent us here if they’d known.”

  I looked around at the faces reflected in the firelight. Humans and insects, one Hive together, content and safe on a sandy beach.

  “Probably not,” I said. “But of all those stars they could have picked, they found us the perfect place. I think we’re going to make it just fine.”

  I lay back on the warm sand, smelling the salt breeze and the contentment of my Hive.

  The people of the Horizon Beta were home.

  If you love

  Horizon Beta

  Don’t miss D. W. Vogel’s The Forgotten King

  From the Super Dungeon series

  Click here to get the book now!

  Acknowledgments

  Folks who don't write might imagine a book like this springing forth, fully formed, from a solitary person sitting in front of a computer, wrapped in a blanket and covered in cats. While the computer and cat part is absolutely true, and the blanket part is seasonally accurate, there's nothing solitary about the process of bringing a manuscript from rough draft to publication. I owe the success of this story to the unsung heroes of the book world: