Shadows in Flight Read online

  They found themselves in a long corridor running in the direction of the axis of the ship. This time the tube had tracks on what the Formics would consider to be the floor and the ceiling. It made sense -- a cart would never stay on tracks that only ran along the floor. Something was hauled along these tracks -- and regularly. Cincinnatus saw that the metal tracks were shiny with constant use.

  "The trains are still running," Carlotta said.

  As if on cue, Ender gave warning from the rear. "Press into the corners, here comes the train."

  Cincinnatus dropped to the "floor" he had been walking on and stretched himself out. Moments later, a tram moved along the tracks, tension bars holding the wheels to both sets of tracks. The body of the tram was like a chicken-wire cage, bulging with some kind of organic material. Plants? No, they were writhing, pushing against the wire. But nothing was getting out.

  Not rabs, not even rablike. These were soft-bodied creatures, more like slugs, but with wider bodies and a kind of hair. Or cilia. Caterpillars? Analogies to Earth fauna would probably be unproductive and misleading. Ender's job, anyway.

  Cincinnatus followed the tram but did not try to keep up with it. The thing was automatic. The question was whether it would run in a loop or reverse direction and come back this way for another load.

  It didn't come back, and after a while Cincinnatus came to a place where the tracks curved inward toward the center. Cincinnatus stayed with them, of course, and came up against the back of the tram, which was stopped exactly over an opening. A sickening odor was coming from the space where the opening led.

  Through the chicken wire Cincinnatus could see that something was cleaning out the cage.

  It was a rab.

  But it ate nothing, just scraped out the last of the clinging slugs. Then the opening closed, the tube was dark again except for the light from Cincinnatus's helmet, and the tram moved along in the same direction instead of backtracking. So it was a loop. And the load had been delivered.

  Cincinnatus gathered them around the place where the opening had been. There was no visible lever to open the door.

  "What now, Lot?" asked Cincinnatus. "There was at least one rab on the other side, but it didn't eat the slugs, just pulled them out."

  "Did it look like that's what the grabbing claw was designed for?" asked Ender.

  "Not our concern right now, but ... yes," said Cincinnatus. "Could be that this is the task the rabs were actually designed for."

  "Meanwhile," said Carlotta, "I think we can trip the signal that tells the system that a tram is here, so the door will open. It's mechanical. Look, the wheel passes over a treadle and the pressure trips a switch." She looked at Cincinnatus. "Ready for me to open it?"

  "Fog ready," Cincinnatus said to Ender. They got their nozzles into position to spray into the opening. "I warn you, it stinks in there," said Cincinnatus. "Now, Lot."

  The door opened.

  The stink hit them right away and got worse as they moved into the room, which was humid and hot.

  A half-dozen rabs were gathered nearby, but they were busy herding the slugs along a metal ramp that sloped gently upward. One of them noticed Cincinnatus and turned to face him, but it didn't leap to the attack. On the contrary, it simply went back and flipped the lever that closed the door again. But by now Cincinnatus, Carlotta, and Ender were all inside the chamber.

  No, not chamber. Cavern. Unlike the Formic workers' dormitory, this space had much higher ceilings -- several meters, maybe five. But rising to it or descending from it like stalagmites and stalactites was a lot more of that organic material, only now it was spongy and resilient, and the indentations were far narrower.

  The rabs pushed the slugs up the ramp toward the center of the cavern. There was a platform there, with a soft light aimed at it from several directions. The whole room was centered on that space.

  The smell got worse the farther they moved along the ramp, but they also got more used to it. The helmets also started cleaning the air inside the visor, which helped a little.

  The slugs stuck to the ramp and the rabs clung to the edges of the ramp. The mags kept the children standing upright.

  "It's like a throne room," said Carlotta.

  "These are egg chambers," said Ender. "This is the Hive Queen's chamber."

  But there were no eggs. Instead, the closer they got to the platform at the center, the more the egg chambers were filled with a brown goo with streaks of green. Putrefaction. The slime of decay.

  At the end of the ramp, the slugs were pushed onto the platform. But since it was already piled high with slugs, mostly dead ones, the new ones toppled off to the sides, plopping into the slime below the ramp. The slugs swam like eels, but there was nowhere to go, except slime-filled egg chambers.

  "They're feeding the Queen," said Ender. "Only she isn't here."

  By now Cincinnatus had reached the platform. He waded through slugs toward the center. At the focal point of the beams of light, a low wall kept any of the slugs from getting into a three-meter-wide circle in the exact center.

  Within that wall, sprawled and curled across more of the organic material, was the gray, dried-up corpse of a winged creature that had to be at least the size of the Giant.

  "She's here all right," said Cincinnatus. "But she isn't hungry."

  CHAPTER 9

  Carlotta hated the Hive Queen, dead as she was. The Hive Queens' ability to communicate so perfectly with their daughters meant that there was no need for any kind of communications system. The Hive Queen could pilot the ship from anywhere. The pilot could be anywhere, too, with no need for visuals or even instruments, because whatever the Hive Queen knew from any of her daughters was known by all the others.

  She stood over the Hive Queen's body while Ender took holoimages of the corpse.

  "Don't touch it," Ender said. "She'll crumble into dust."

  "So I guess this means interrogation is out of the question," said Carlotta.

  "Go ahead and ask her anything," said Sergeant.

  Carlotta didn't feel like joking any longer. "Somebody piloted this boat, and it wasn't her. But I can't trace the communications system because there isn't one."

  Ender was oblivious to their concerns. "I've got all the images I can and they're stored back on Herodotus. So I'm going to take a sample."

  "What happened to 'crumble into dust'?" asked Sergeant.

  "I'll be careful," said Ender.

  Carlotta saw that Ender really did have a delicate touch -- he lifted off sections of dried-up Hive Queen from various regions of the corpse, but never disturbed anything, or even pressed downward. Just nipped a bit, raising it as he did, and pushed it into self-sealing sample bags.

  "The Formics were really good at genetics," said Carlotta.

  "But no lab," said Ender. "Not here, anyway. Or their lab was the Queen's own ovaries. By an act of will she could decide when to extrude an egg that would become a new queen. And presumably to create an egg that would become a rab instead of a worker."

  "It can't have been reflexive," said Sergeant. "She had to plan what she was doing, at least when she was making rabs."

  "And while she was doing that," said Carlotta, "who was piloting the ship?"

  "She was," said Ender.

  "And who was tending to the ecotat, and who was doing maintenance everywhere, and who was reporting to the other Hive Queens on other worlds?"

  "She was," said Sergeant. "Hive Queens are smarter than we are."

  "Multitasking is fine, but was she really seeing and hearing the sensory input of all her workers at the same time, equally well? Or did she concentrate her attention where it was needed?"

  "The individual Formic workers weren't just an extension of her mind," said Sergeant. "Not like hands and feet. More like perfectly obedient ... children."

  "Somebody piloted this ship," said Carlotta, "and she wasn't there to control them. What if some of the Formic workers survived her death? If she wasn't controlling every though
t in their heads, if they had the independence to learn their job and do it even when the Queen wasn't paying attention, then when she died, they could go on."

  "No," said Sergeant. "It makes sense, but we know that every Formic worker died when the Hive Queens died. There were assault teams on some of the Formic planets when Wiggin killed the Hive Queens, and the human soldier reported that all the Formics stopped fighting at once. Stopped running, stopped doing anything. They lay down and died."

  "But they lay down," said Carlotta.

  "Dropped," said Sergeant.

  "I read the same reports," said Ender. "They lay down. Some of them had vital signs for as long as half an hour. So Carlotta's right. There were at least some body systems in the workers that kept going for at least a little while after the Hive Queens died."

  "What if this Hive Queen, knowing she was going to die, gave some of her workers instructions to keep piloting the ship?" asked Carlotta.

  The others nodded. "We can't know what mechanism makes the Formics die when the Queen does," said Ender. "Maybe there's an exception."

  "Let's find the helm and see," said Sergeant.

  Carlotta looked out over the sea of rot that surrounded her. "Home sweet home," she said. "I'm trying to see this the way she did, when she was alive. All these little holes were like wombs for her eggs. All these slugs were being herded here to feed her and feed her babies."

  Ender pointed up. "Don't forget the ceiling."

  Carlotta looked up. Lots of stringy protuberances hung down from the highest points. A few of them had melon-sized balls hanging from them.

  "What's that?" Carlotta asked.

  "Cocoons. I'm sure they're all dead, but I'm going to want to take one back to the lab to study, if I can," said Ender. "Everything that's on the floor has been contaminated with that bacterial soup of decay. But larvae that cocooned themselves might still have clean genetic material I can study."

  "Not our highest priority," said Sergeant.

  "But not our lowest, either," said Ender. "We obviously have time to stop and chat. So let's collect a sample or two before we leave the Room of Goo."

  "You going to take a slug back? And the bacteria?" asked Sergeant.

  "Already collected samples of those on the way in."

  "You were supposed to be our rear guard, not a prancing naturalist," said Sergeant.

  "Nothing attacked us from behind," said Ender. "Hive Queens aren't the only ones who can multitask."

  "Boys," said Carlotta. "Is this how our whole lives are going to be? The two of you sniping at each other?"

  "Let's get one thing clear," said Ender. "Only one person has been sniping and it wasn't me. I've followed every order without complaint; I've criticized nothing. It's Sergeant who's determined to catch me doing something wrong. But I'm not. Carlotta said it -- the Hive Queens were expert geneticists, and they worked on their own genome to create the rabs. So what I collect here might teach us science that the human race hasn't developed on its own. It might save our lives."

  "And here's where you're both so stupid it hurts," said Carlotta. "The illusion in here is so good that it fooled you both."

  "What illusion?" asked Sergeant.

  "The illusion of gravity," said Carlotta.

  She watched in triumph as they realized: The cocoon wasn't going to drop when they cut it loose.

  "But the other cocoons fell," said Ender lamely.

  "During deceleration," said Carlotta. "The ship turned around and the rockets pushed upward to slow this big rock down. That's when the cocoons dropped."

  "But all this liquid," said Sergeant. "It clings to the floor."

  "It clings to the egg holes," said Carlotta. "It's not liquid, it's goo. Most of the voyage is in zero-gee. If the eggs and larvae need liquid to grow in, it has to be gelatinous so it stays put, or the Queen would be drowning in it."

  Ender was, of course, extrapolating. "The Hive Queen needs an environment just like home," he said. "On a planet, the liquid might just be water, the larvae would climb to the ceiling to make their cocoons. So they make this place look like that and function like that even without gravity."

  "Mags zero," said Sergeant. In a moment he was flying gently up to the nearest cocoon. With his laser pistol he deftly severed the stem, then floated back down holding the cocoon by that half of the stem.

  Ender shrank an expandable bag around the cocoon and put it into the sample pack. "Thanks," he said.

  "Now you'll try to baby that thing to keep from damaging it," said Sergeant. "Which means you won't be much help fighting."

  "Sergeant," said Carlotta, "he learned a lot from the exploded rab corpse you brought back in the Puppy; he can learn from the DNA in a crushed cocoon. So he's not going to baby it, he's going to do his job."

  "He was going to baby it," said Sergeant, "until you said that."

  Ender slapped his sample pack. Hard. "Eh," he said. "Andrew Delphiki, reporting for duty, sir."

  Sergeant couldn't help smiling. "Point taken. All right, Carlotta, where do you want to go?"

  "The thing I'm afraid of," said Carlotta, "is going out the wrong door and letting in a bunch of feral rabs. They'd go for the new slugs and make hash of the working rabs if they tried to interfere."

  "If we sedated them, then when they collide with this bacterial soup, I think they'll stick," said Ender. "If they don't drown, they'll dissolve."

  "We'll do as little damage as possible," said Sergeant, "but there's no point in leaving the way we came, because the tracks just loop back to the starting point."

  Carlotta agreed, but still had no advice about where to go. "The question is, will the helm be located at the hub, where it's equally distant from all the rockets and sensors, so all the controls and connections are the same length? Or at one edge, where it might have viewports?"

  "If it has viewports," said Sergeant, "then they'll be as far forward as possible, so that they get maximum protection from the rock."

  "But what good are viewports that only look in one direction?" asked Carlotta. "This ship has circular symmetry, there's no belly or back, like our ships have . So . . . more than one control room?"

  Sergeant nodded. "And the control rooms are sealed off from each other, so damage to one doesn't cause atmosphere loss in the others."

  "The pilots may be hiding from the feral rabs in just one of the control rooms," said Ender.

  "So we go all the way forward," said Sergeant, "and then try for control rooms at the perimeter, exactly centered between the standpipes."

  "Best view," said Carlotta.

  "If the Formic workers ate these slugs, too," said Sergeant, "would there be a delivery system leading there?"

  "I don't think so," said Ender. "The Hive Queen stays with the eggs and food comes to her. But the workers catch their meals between shifts."

  "The question is, how far forward are we already?" asked Sergeant.

  Good question. They had come a long way through the tram tunnel. "Map," said Carlotta.

  A three-dimensional model of the ship seemed to stand half a meter away, in front of her visor. Of course there was nothing there at all -- it was just an illusion on the visor itself. The visor could see where she looked and when she made a little popping sound with her lips, it zoomed in. A click with her tongue zoomed out.

  "We're actually farther forward than the back of the rock," she said. "The Hive Queen is surrounded by rock above and at the sides. Anything with viewports is going to be aft of here."

  "So we passed the helm getting here," said Sergeant, sounding frustrated.

  Sergeant led the way to one of the five obvious doors at the perimeter.

  "How did you pick this one?" asked Carlotta.

  "Eeny meeny," said Sergeant.

  At the door, they found the cloud of debris again and a couple of eager rabs. A shot of gas and Carlotta closed the door again. At the next door, it was the same, and this time Sergeant led them through, they closed the door behind them, and fogged t
heir way through to a passage leading aft -- down, the way the corridors were oriented for Formics; to the right, the way they were oriented as they walked along the wall of the low wide tunnel so they could stand upright.

  The passage was all afloat with the debris of feral rab life. "What are they finding to eat?" asked Carlotta.

  "All the debris is rab body parts," said Ender. "They eat each other."

  They were at a level now that Carlotta's map said should be just aft of the intersection of rock and hull. "If there are viewports at all, they could begin at this level."

  "Maximum shelter," said Sergeant. "Let's give this level a shot."

  They fogged the corridor and began to make the circuit. There were doors but they all led inward, toward the hub.

  "Maybe we were wrong and the control room is in the hub," said Carlotta.

  "Might as well see," said Sergeant.

  They took up their standard positions at the door and Carlotta opened it.

  It felt as if all the rabs on the ship leapt at her. Carlotta was knocked into the opposite wall. Both Sergeant and Ender sprayed like crazy, but it took several seconds for the rabs to fall into a stupor, and in that time, two got claws up under Carlotta's visor. If they had understood human anatomy, they could have severed her carotid artery, but instead they went for the soft place under her jaw. The pain was exquisite.

  Carlotta tried to crawl away, but something had hold of her leg and wouldn't let go.

  Sergeant. It was Sergeant holding her. All the rabs that had poured out of the inner chamber were inert, floating and bouncing around with the force of their original launch. Ender was still spraying fog into the room. Nothing was coming out.

  "Bloody mess," muttered Sergeant. "Who ever knew the girl had so much blood in her?"

  Within a minute, he had a coagulant pad in place and anesthetic was doing its job.

  "Can you still use your tongue?" asked Sergeant. "Talk?"

  Carlotta made a try. The anesthetic was numbing her tongue a little, but she could move it. "Talk fine," she said.