Shadows in Flight Page 5

  Ender came back then. "How's she doing?"

  "Just soft flesh damage under the jaw. Nothing to the throat, and the meds will have it all healed up in a couple of hours."

  "Wish I knew how long the sedatives would hold," said Ender.

  "What were you doing in there?" asked Sergeant.

  That's when Carlotta realized Ender must have gone inside the chamber that the rabs had come out of.

  "It's a breeding chamber. They were protecting their young."

  "Any queens?" asked Sergeant.

  "More like seals -- mothers and their pups gathered around them. Huge room. I think it's the control center," said Ender. "All the cabling is routed through there. Ductwork everywhere, ducts filled with cables and wires, lots of maintenance doors on everything."

  "Let's go before they wake up," said Sergeant. "I think this might still be the level of the helm or helms. If all the controls are routed through the hub, they must be coming from somewhere and leading to somewhere. Might be on this level."

  But it wasn't. It was on the next level aft, which they reached an hour later. They also learned that the recovery time from the sedative mix was longer than that hour, because no rabs woke up. For all they knew, the fog was lethal and they'd never wake up.

  Carlotta knew the door of a helm room when she saw it. It lay in the floor beneath their feet, and it was exceptionally wide and high. There was also a window in the door, and there was light on the other side. Bright light. Sunlight. They were on the side of the ship facing the sun right now.

  "This isn't it," she said. "There has to be a way to block the sunlight when it's shining in the ports, and it isn't being blocked. But it'll be a room like this, farther along."

  It took a while to work their way around the ship. They fogged the corridors as they went, because there was debris -- but a lot less. And then Carlotta realized something and made them stop. "This sedative is going to work against the pilots, too -- they're bound to be biologically related to Formics, even if they aren't Formics themselves. We've got to wait for the fog to dissipate before we open a door."

  "The ventilation system is slow," said Ender.

  "Maybe we want them to get a little dose of the sedative," said Sergeant. "Not a full spray, but whatever seeps in from the corridor."

  "They won't like it," said Carlotta.

  "If they're asleep, they won't mind anything," said Sergeant.

  Carlotta conceded the point, though she still didn't like it. They opened the next helm door, a fifth of the way around the ship, where the sunlight wasn't so direct. It was a helm all right, several Formic-shaped perches and control sets. Lots of unlabeled dials and displays that consisted of arrangements of small lights. And perches in front of the viewports, so observers could be stationed there.

  But there wasn't a soul in the room. Not even a corpse.

  "Proof of concept, anyway," said Sergeant. "Now we know that helm rooms are arranged symmetrically around the hull, and not hidden away in the hub."

  "And we know the Formics wanted to look, not just take the Hive Queen's data," said Ender.

  "Or this is how she got her data," said Carlotta.

  "Could be," said Sergeant. "Observers in all the helm rooms, but actual pilots in only one."

  "So let's go find the one," she said.

  Sergeant seemed not to mind that she had, in effect, preemptively given the order. He led the way back into the corridor. No need for more spray -- the fog they had originally sprayed was still spreading through this corridor all the way around the ship. In smaller concentration, it wasn't so quick -- there were rabs still waggling their limbs and jaws. But Sergeant and Ender didn't spray again. These rabs weren't trying to attack anything, they were trying to stay awake. And failing.

  The third helm was dark. Nightside. But when Carlotta shone her helmlight on the door, she pointed to shininess on the metal near the lower and upper sills. This door had been opened repeatedly in recent years.

  They got in position. Carlotta stood away from where the opening would be -- lesson learned -- and shifted the lever. The door slid open.

  Nothing came out. Not a sound from inside.

  Sergeant lowered himself into the room and drifted downward, toward the wall with the viewports, setting his helmet to illuminate the room and do a sweep of motion search.

  "No movement," he said softly. "But there's a heat source."

  Carlotta came into the room.

  Ender hesitated at the doorway. "Keep watch out here?" he asked.

  "Come in and shut the door," said Sergeant. "We may have found our pilots."

  Carlotta got to the windowed wall and then followed Sergeant as he walked lightly toward the control bay of the helm.

  Unmoving, several small shapes with iridescent colors clung to the control panel. They were smaller than Carlotta, about half her height, but longer than the rabs. They had wings -- that was the iridescence. No claws. In fact, the two front arms on each side seemed to be fused together, parting only near the end. But the "Y" formed by the ends of the feet was able to grasp levers and controls. And the jaws were Formic-like, also able to grasp.

  "What are they?" asked Carlotta softly. "Did the Hive Queens breed special pilot creatures?"

  "No," Ender said, focusing his eyes on the creatures.

  "Formics?" asked Sergeant. "These are Formics?"

  "Pretty sure," said Ender. "Males, I think."

  "Why didn't they die when the Hive Queen died?" asked Carlotta.

  "Very interesting question," said Ender. "But maybe they don't react the way the workers do. Maybe when a Hive Queen dies, they stay alive so they can attach to the next one." Then he said, "Wait, I think we're as close as they can bear. That one is about to take flight."

  Carlotta could see it now, too. The wings were extending. The eyes were standing straight up. "Is there any hope of communicating with them?" she asked.

  "I hope we're communicating lack of threat," said Ender. "Don't point your hands at them. Set the shotguns down."

  "No," said Sergeant.

  "You're right," said Ender. "But the two of you back away, all right? Let me go in unarmed and alone."

  Carlotta immediately complied; a moment later, Sergeant reached the same conclusion. Ender sent his shotgun drifting slowly toward Sergeant. He took off his helmet and sent it toward Carlotta. Then he rolled over onto his back.

  Carlotta realized that this put his eyes on the top of his head, like the Formic eyes. She caught his helmet and held it.

  Ender was keeping his arms down at his sides as he drifted toward the control panel where the Formics waited. Carlotta realized he was treating his arms like wings, showing them folded against his body. He was imitating their posture. Was this how the Formics showed submission? Were they submitting to us, and is Ender now submitting to them?

  As Ender drifted closer to them, the Formics began to move. They were so small. Staying hooked to various controls -- controls that were definitely not designed for their use, Carlotta could see that now -- three of the five of them reached out for Ender's head.

  She heard Sergeant's quick intake of breath.

  "Let him be," came the Giant's voice softly through the helmets. "It's a chance that he has to take."

  Carlotta could not help but marvel at Ender's stillness as the Formic males reached out and touched his head, bringing him carefully to a stop. Those Y-shaped claws, the mouths so near his face. The residual pain in her jaw reminded her of how dangerous it could be to let aliens near your head.

  The three Formics who were holding him lowered their mouths toward his head. The other two were standing watch, it seemed.

  They pressed the tips of their forejaws against Ender's head.

  Ender let out a low moan, almost a cry.

  Sergeant started forward.

  "No," said the Giant.

  Carlotta caught Sergeant, helped him back down to where his boots could remagnetize to the floor.

  Ender sighed a
gain. Again. Then his voice came, an urgent whisper. "Don't hurt them," he said. "They're showing me."

  "Showing you what?" asked Carlotta, trying to keep her voice soft, to keep the fear out of it. Who knew what sense the Formics could make of the sounds they managed to hear?

  "Everything," said Ender. "How they've lived since the Queen died."

  CHAPTER 10

  Ender had never felt such loss of control over his own mind. Even in a nightmare, when nothing is going the way you want, the images still came from somewhere. You knew what you were seeing.

  But the images that started passing through his mind the moment the Formic males touched him were chaotic and strange. Half the time he didn't even know what he was seeing.

  Slow down! he felt as if his mind were shouting at them. Yet they did not respond at all. He caught glimpses of this and that. The Hive Queen alive. The small males flying around her, and then landing on her. Some she batted away, but others she helped stay in place while they attached. Images of the Hive Queen's own hand bringing slugs to the mouths of the males.

  But as Ender experienced it, the slugs came to his own mouth. He smelled them, he saw them wriggle, and they looked delicious. His mouth watered. He was so, so hungry.

  Ender tried to picture someone moving slowly, but their images overwhelmed what he was imagining. Then, desperate for communication, he tried simply feeling sluggish. Heavy-lidded. Tired.

  He got a jolt of some strong emotion that would certainly have wakened him, if he had really been dozing off. The emotion wasn't anger, it was -- alertness. They sent him what they wanted him to feel.

  They were definitely in control of this exchange.

  He tried something else. He took an image they gave him -- this time it seemed to be rabs bouncing around in a corridor -- and tried to freeze it. Hold still. Wait.

  Immediately they sent the image again; again he froze it. Examined it.

  And now they understood. The next image came, not as a pure memory, in motion, but rather as a frozen moment.

  Now he saw the image of a Hive Queen, tall, magnificent; he felt the devotion they felt for her, and the hunger as well. They needed to be close to her.

  She was covered with drones. If Ender hadn't seen her without the males, he would have assumed their backs were her belly, they coated her so completely.

  Then he felt himself become one of the drones. Again the image of her feeding him, but as she lowered the slug toward his mouth, she let go of it. The slug dropped away out of reach.

  The world seemed to sway; it was the Queen swaying. Then she lay down, half coiling within the circle of her private zone. Even as she pulled herself downward, she made sure not to crush any of her males. She was protecting them, loving them till the end.

  Then Ender felt something vital go out of his mind. He realized that the warmth and light he had felt when he was one of the attached drones was the mind of the Hive Queen. And now it was gone.

  The males, one by one, detached. As one of them, Ender understood that it was time for them to look for a new queen. She hadn't eaten them, so they were valued highly and allowed to help a new queen seed the hive.

  They rose into the air and flew. Around them was the constant pushing and shepherding of the slugs, the rabs, coming up all the ramps.

  Something else, though. Formic workers, becoming limp. Unlike the Queen, they didn't pull themselves down to the ground. They drifted, floated, rose, fell, depending on the eddies of air in the Hive Queen's chamber.

  All these images of dying Formics came as still pictures, one after another -- it was a change from when he was an attached drone, then a flying one.

  There was no Queen. Nothing but Formic workers, and they were all dying. All dead.

  Now a single drone was putting images into his mind. But since he had experienced the desperate search for a new queen, each drone pressing imagesinto the minds of the others, that was now what he gave to Ender.

  Again Ender tried to freeze the image, but instead the drone moved on. He felt a sense of loss, emptiness. It wasn't just the death of the Queen. The drones had images of every part of the ship, many of which Ender recognized from his travels. But each view ended abruptly; he was momentarily blind.

  He realized what they were saying in this image-language. The drones had shared in the Queen's connection with all the Formic workers. They were the minds most closely bound with hers, and she shared everything with them.

  They understood the whole ship. They were used to being able to watch any part of the ship at any time. When she died, they might have continued to connect with the Formic workers. But they died with the Queen. All that remained to the drones was each other's vision, and since they were all in the same room, they were all seeing the same thing. Dead Queen. Rabs herding the slugs up the ramps. Dead Formic workers.

  They went to a door. They had never opened one with their own limbs. But they all had the memory of being inside the mind of a worker when she opened the door. They knew exactly where the lever was and how it felt to work it. Only it was hard. The drone's hand slipped off the lever twice -- and to Ender, as if in a nightmare, it felt as if his own hand had slipped off.

  But the door opened eventually and they flew outside. One of them stopped to close the door. Ender was that one for a moment; then he was a different one.

  They all had the same destination: the helm. Ender knew what the place felt like to the drones. It was the most vital work of the whole colony. No matter what the Queen had been doing at any given moment, one or another of the drones always looked out through the eyes of the worker who was sitting at the helm, watching her choices, her actions. The guidance of the ship, the health of the ship, always there was a drone involved.

  Then a realization swept over Ender and made him shudder. Just as the drones each had their own mind, separate from the Queen's, no matter how tightly they were linked, so also the Formic at the controls had had her own mind, her own will. She was piloting the ship. The Hive Queen had given an order -- an image of what was wanted -- but the worker was carrying out the labor herself. The worker understood the task. The drones didn't control her; they sat inside her mind and observed, prompting her now and then, but she was doing it.

  If the Formic workers had minds of their own, perhaps there were occasional individuals who could resist the power of the Queen's mind. Perhaps there were free workers.

  Thinking of free workers made him realize that the workers who obeyed the Hive Queen as perfectly as they could, they were slaves. They were her daughters, but she refused to let them have minds of their own.

  Yet the worker had piloted a starship. It hadn't understood the astrophysics, the mathematics, but it understood the Hive Queen's plans and orders, and it carried them out using its own mind, its own skills and habits and experience.

  We misunderstood them completely, thought Ender. We thought the Hive Queen was the mind of the whole colony. But she was not. They had their own wills, just like humans, but she had the power to force obedience. And when she wasn't checking on them, the drones were.

  There was nothing subtle about the Hive Queen's control of her worker-daughters. She was overwhelming. They were swallowed up. And even when only the drones remained in a worker's mind, watching, they overwhelmed the worker. In some ways, because their whole attention was devoted to the immediate task, the drones had a stronger presence in the workers' minds.

  When the workers died, the drones were left to themselves, to each other. They had lost the Queen. Unlike the workers, they experienced her, not as a suffocating force, but rather as a being of light, an angel in their minds. She loved them and they never forgot it for an instant. But besides losing the Queen, they had also lost the workers. They had lost their vision of the whole ship.

  That's why they went to the helm. It was the most important job of all. They could no longer see what was happening. But they had to see, and since there was no daughter queen to attach to, to restore the network of visio
n, the drones went to the helm themselves.

  Once they got there -- here, Ender realized -- they pulled the workers' bodies off their perches and set them adrift. The drones remembered all the tasks that the workers had done while the drones were inside their minds; now they carried out those tasks. Checking the instruments. Looking through the viewports.

  For the rabs assigned to cleanup work were going feral. Their job was to eat anything spilled or dead in the corridors. When the Queen and all the workers died, they had an enormous feast of dead Formics throughout the ship. It was their job. The drones even let them into the helm to take apart and consume the bodies of the Formics.

  With the overabundance of food, the rab population grew; then all the dead Formics they could find were eaten, and the rabs were still there. When the last dead Formics were consumed, they found that their population had expanded too fast. There wasn't enough to eat. They were starving.

  So the rabs went wild. Or rather a few of them went wild, but within a few generations, those wild ones were the only ones still reproducing in the corridors of the ship.

  The drones realized what was happening in time to seal off the Hive Queen's chamber and their own helm. They also sealed off the doors leading "outside," or into the ecotat.

  This drove the rabs insane. Cut off not only from a supply of corpses but also from any access to the slugs, they went crazy, eating each other, eating their mates, their own young.

  But in their frenzy they broke into four of the tram tubes. Now the rabs inside the ecotat, as they collected slugs and put them into the trams, were really feeding the feral rabs. Only one tram continued to send unneeded slugs into the Queen's lair. The only reason the rabs left that one alone was that they were getting plenty to eat from the other four. It didn't occur to their tiny minds to search for more.

  All of this Ender received through visions and feelings put into his mind. It was a constant struggle to make sense of what he was seeing, but he never lost track of the intensity of purpose that the drones felt as they, through the one drone, "talked" to him.

  It finally dawned on him what they wanted. Give us the Hive Queen. He pictured each of his sibs and himself, and showed that they were also searching for the Hive Queen. He showed them searching through the Herodotus and finding nothing. He hoped they were getting the message: We have no Hive Queen.