The hornet’s jagged jaws opened, threatening any creature that dared to stop it.
Mustering his courage, Sid jabbed the hornet’s face.
A spark lit up the end of the prod, zapping the hornet. It backed up a step, more surprised than hurt. As it darted forward again, Sid stabbed it in the mandible. This time, the hornet jerked its head up, but it didn’t back up.
Hari called out, “Sid, get back! These prods aren’t powerful enough to stop the hornet!”
“They might not be right now, but they will be in a minute!” Sidney ran back to them, and cracked open the prod and switched the inner power regulators. “Open yours up and switch these two modules. If I’m right, they’ll deliver a lot more juice.” Hari and Penny scrambled to follow his lead.
Determined, Sidney watched for an opening and then lunged with his modified shock prod.
“Eat this!” he shouted as he swung the end of the prod at the hornet’s face.
A bright flash of light flooded the hive entrance as a blinding spark of electricity leaped from the prod to the hornet’s exoskeleton. A loud clap filled Sid’s ears, and he was thrown backward. When he got back on his feet, the hornet was gone.
“YES!” he crowed. “It works! C’mon, you guys!” Hari and Penny waded through the bees to reach him and activated their shock prods. But when another hornet landed at the entrance, the bees reacted differently. This time, they backed away from the hornet as it pushed its way into the hive.
“What are they doing?” Hari asked nervously as he, Sid, and Penny were left alone at the entrance.
“Move back. I think the bees have something in mind,” Sidney said. The three friends ducked into the cells of the honeycomb.
The giant hornet was now completely inside the hive. But rather than retreating further, the bees began to surround it. A worker bee lunged forward, closing its jaws around one of the hornet’s legs. Before the hornet could open its jaws to deal with this nuisance, another worker bee attacked. Then another and another, each triggered by the last. Suddenly, hundreds of bees swarmed, containing the hornet within a vicious shell of death. The bees were vibrating rapidly. Sid toggled the controls on his faceplate and activated the thermal filter. What he saw made him gasp. The temperature at the center of the warrior bees was much higher than on the outside. The bees continued crawling, buzzing, and vibrating their bodies. “The bees are cooking the hornet!” Sidney shouted. “The vibrations are creating massive amounts of heat!” After a few more moments, the bees dispersed, revealing the baked, unmoving carcass of the hornet.
“Whoa,” Penny whispered. Sid and Hari nodded silently.
But there was no time to contemplate what had just happened. More of the colossal intruders were squeezing their way into the hive. As each one entered, worker bees mobbed it.
“We have to help them!” Sid said. “There aren’t enough bees to go after all the hornets.”
Penny agreed. “If we don’t, the hornets will kill us after they’re finished with the bees.”
“We have to be careful. These giant hornets are dangerous to regular people. They could kill micros like us with a single bite,” Hari warned.
For a fleeting moment, Sid worried about his bee allergy, then realized that at this size, Penny and Hari were in the same danger of being stung as he was. There was nothing to be done except fight. And he wasn’t going to let them fight alone.
“Are we doing this or what?” Sid asked.
“Only one way out!” Hari replied.
Penny raised her prod. “Let’s do this!”
Together, the three friends stood at the entrance to the hive, holding their shock prods like spears and jolting the hornets whenever they attempted to land. Their hard faces couldn’t show emotion, but the hornets definitely seemed to prefer not being shocked.
Whzzap! Wild streaks of electricity crackled through the hive.
The bees bravely tried to defend their home, but more and more hornets were arriving to pillage the hive. The ground around the hive became littered with dying bees, sliced in half by the hornets’ hungry mandibles. Sid, Penny, and Hari were doing their part by shocking the huge bugs, but it was clear the bees were losing even though they completely outnumbered the hornets.
“My battery’s low!” Hari cried out.
Sid and Penny checked the power levels on their shock prods. Theirs, too, were almost exhausted.
Their helmet speakers crackled again, faintly. “Zzt… approximately forty hornets sighted, but more may be on the way…zzzt…complete lockdown of microshelter! This is a Red Priority! Take shelter immediately…zzt.”
“Forty of those huge things? The shock prods will never last long enough to scare them off!” Sid cried.
“We can’t just let them die!” Penny shouted over the buzzing of the bees.
Sidney scanned the hive, taking in the gruesome insect war. They were out of options. “We have to,” Sid called back. “Once these batteries run out, we’ve got no way to defend ourselves from those things! There’s no way we can fight them, Penny. We have to get out of here, while we still have some shock power left. Now!” He grabbed Penny’s arm and tried to tug her away from the insect massacre.
“Let go!” she yelled, yanking her arm free. Her brown eyes blazed in anger.
“Sid’s right, Penny,” Hari said quietly. “The hornets are going to win this. We have to get out before they kill all the bees and get inside the hive. We won’t stand a chance against them once they’re inside.”
The bees were throwing themselves at the hornets, but the pile of severed bee bodies and heads just kept growing higher on the ground outside.
Finally, Penny backed away from the entrance. As soon as the trio ventured into the depths of the hive, the number of bees dropped off sharply. They had all reported to the hive entrance to fight off the hornets.
“So, where do we go?” Penny asked softly.
“Those hornets want what’s inside. If we can find some way out, I think we’ll be safe,” Sid said. “I say we climb to the top and try to break out of the hive.”
They climbed in silence, moving higher along the vertical cell walls into an older part of the hive. The cells there were worn and paper-thin, crumbling under their feet. Penny’s gravity belt yanked her back from a fall when her foot punctured a cell wall.
“I don’t think we can go much farther this way,” Hari said. “The walls won’t support our weight.”
Sidney looked back. “The hornets are inside the hive. I can see them below us. They’ll be coming this way soon. We either need to find a place to hide or get out of this hive right now!”
“We might be able to break through these cells,” Hari said as he crumbled a piece of cell wall in his hand. He clambered inside a cell, made a fist, and punched a hole through. Honey oozed from the wall. “It works! Come on!” He started to tear at the hole he had made, making it larger. Huge gobs of honey dripped like tree sap.
“I will never eat honey again,” Penny swore as she tore at the cells. Honey was dripping on their faceplates. When they tried to wipe it away, it only smeared, making the hive look yellower than ever.
Sid felt a sharp tug on his foot. He looked through the haze of honey to find himself staring into the glossy eyes of a giant hornet. The claws on its forelimb had caught on Sidney’s leg. It was so close he could see the tiny hairs growing from its pitted face. His horrified expression was reflected back at him in the thing’s dark, unblinking eyes. The hornet’s jagged mandibles opened wide.
Sid screamed.
Hari grabbed his friend’s arms and pulled, but the monster was too strong.
Penny hurled honey at the hornet’s eyes, using the same precision she displayed in zero-G ball. A glob of the sticky, sweet stuff pummeled the hornet’s eyes. “How do you like that, you big bully?!” she taunted.
The huge insect paused for a split second, and raised its foreleg to rub its eyes. Sidney yanked his foot free.
Hari ripped into the hive wall and scram
bled through. “Let’s go—while that thing can’t see us!”
“I’ll bet Pradeep’s never fought off a giant hornet, has he?” Sid remarked with relief.
Hari grinned back at him. Penny and Sid raced after Hari as he dug through the cell walls.
“We have to be near the outer wall. Keep going,” Sid said.
Finally, Hari’s hand tore through the wall, and a shaft of light broke into the hive.
“We’re through!” yelled Penny.
They climbed up through the last sticky layers to the top of the hive, raised their sticky faceplates, and peered down at the ground.
Thousands and thousands of dead bees surrounded the hive.
“Oh, man. What a slaughter,” Sid said quietly.
“Look what those things have done,” Penny said, shaking her head. “They came here and…and….” She raised a hand to her mouth, unable to continue.
“I really thought the bees would be able to stop them,” Hari said quietly. “They outnumbered the hornets by thousands. I never imagined anything so vicious.”
Sid looked at him. “I think we’re lucky we didn’t end up in that pile down there.”
The giant hornets were already starting to leave, carrying the bees’ larvae and pupae back to their own hive. Penny, Sid, and Hari sat despondently on top of the hive and watched as the last hornets flew back to their nest.
A voice sounded in their helmets.
“ This is Dr. Sharp. The hornets have cleared the area. It is now safe to approach the hive. We need to begin searching for the missing students immediately.”
“They must not know we’re okay,” Hari said. He activated his transmitter. “Dr. Sharp! This is Hari Gupta. I’m here with Penny Day and Sid Jamison. We’re all fine!”
“Hari! Thank goodness! We were so worried. We’re coming to the hive now. Sit tight and we’ll have you out of there quickly….”
Sid could see several microsize humans approaching the hive’s entrance. “We’re up here, guys! Hey, up here!” He stood and waved his arms. One of the tiny people below waved back.
Sid sat back down next to Penny. “I’m glad that’s over, aren’t you, Penny? Penny, are you okay?”
She looked at him with bleak eyes, shaking her head sadly. Sidney nodded. There was nothing okay about this situation. The three friends sat quietly as they waited to tell the others what they had seen.
CHAPTER 8
After the showdown in the hive, returning to classes at Sci Hi was a welcome relief. Sid, Penny, Hari, and the other students were eager to learn the results of the Great Mutation Challenge. A few days later, Sid and Hari sat in front of the image wall, studying the data their organism had generated while they were gone.
“This can’t be right,” Hari said. “It can’t be.”
“Yeah, it can,” Sid replied. “It’s totally lethal! Our eyeball parasite infected almost fifty percent of the animals in the simulation! See, I told you. Eyeballs! We are going to win this, Hari, you watch. Hey, where’s Penny? She’s got to see this. I can’t believe she didn’t think the eyeball thing would work.”
Sid punched in her voxpod code, and a window opened on the image wall. Penny was sitting at her desk across the room from the voxpod on her bed. Her room was decorated with the periodic table of elements on one wall and pictures and posters from her favorite band, Fusion Giraffe, on the other. “Hey, Penny!” Sidney said. “Come on over. You have to see how our parasite is doing. At this rate, all the animals’ eyeballs will be infected by…hey, are you all right?”
“Fine,” she said listlessly. “Just tired.”
“We have to get our presentation ready for the Symposium,” Hari said. “We could use your help with the animations. You’re the only one of us who has any artistic talent.”
Penny stared offscreen, frowning. “Okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Sid sat back down at his desk, pushing the pieces of a disassembled antigravity ball out of his way. “Have you noticed that Penny’s been in a weird mood since we got back from the field trip?”
Hari nodded, changing the channel on the image wall to display a space probe hanging in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The thick orange clouds rushed past, hypnotizing him. “She took the hornet attack hard. She really liked the bees, and I think she was pretty shocked at the way the bee colony was wiped out. I don’t blame her. It was really intense.”
“Yeah, but the hornets were just being hornets, right? Being mad at them for attacking the bees is like being mad at a spider for catching a fly, or being mad at a lion for eating a gazelle. They’re all just doing what they were born to do,” Sid said. “We just happened to be there to see it this time, that’s all.” He picked up a sonic screwdriver and poked around inside the zero-G ball.
“I know you’re right, but it’s still hard to watch something like that happen,” Hari said. “Penny just needs some time to accept it. She’ll be fine.”
As the term drew to a close, it was time for the Sci Hi Student Symposium. The students presented their findings on everything from microbiology to advanced intergalatic spacecraft design. A panel of world-renowned scientists and former Sci Hi students was seated in the back, ready to score each project according to how well the students followed the scientific method and yielded results that were reproducible and compelling. The large auditorium was packed with students and faculty eager to watch. Sidney had never seen a gathering like this at the schools he had attended.
The auditorium had been expanded to its full size, and a light show of the atoms colliding in the underground particle accelerator was projected on the ceiling like a fireworks display. When a particle collision made a bright flash, an “oooh” or “aahhh” could be heard from the crowd that packed the cavernous space. Flags draped along the walls of the auditorium were decorated with the faces of scientific greats from around the world and every age of civilization. Aristotle, Curie, Ibn al-Haytham, Darwin, Newton, Sagan, and Macron were all honored. Students sat in groups according to the dormitory they were housed in. As the hovering cameras projected their faces onto huge holographic screens, they cheered and waved.
Dr. Macron hosted the event with flair. She still wore her lab coat, but today it displayed animations of atomic structures making complicated patterns that changed second by second. When she stepped to the podium, a small robot floated nearby, picking up her voice and amplifying it for the other students. Her image was displayed on the center screen at the front of the room. “Hello, everyone,” her voice echoed. “I truly enjoy attending these events where we share what we have learned with one another. Presenting our observations is one of the most crucial aspects of the scientific method. Every scientist is expected to present evidence, observations, and experimental results to other scientists, whether through a publication, a symposium, or a meeting like this one. This process allows the scientists’ data and methods to be critiqued and scrutinized. That way, we can know that the data collected is, in fact, showing what we thought it showed.
“Scientists have been following this method for hundreds of years for the simple reason that it works and works well. Every faculty member here at Sci Hi follows this scientific method, and their work is an inspiration to scientists around the world. But the faculty and the students at Sci Hi aren’t here for fame or fortune. In fact, most people will never hear of this school or what its graduates achieve. We keep our focus on science rather than celebrity, and the advances that are being made here are changing billions of lives around the world. I’m so proud of all you do and so happy to celebrate all the great work that was done this term. Let’s get started!” Dr. Macron moved aside to let the students take center stage.
First up were the seniors that took part in the Black Hole Challenge. The students had been allowed to use Sci Hi’s particle accelerator, buried under the perimeter of Goddard Island. The audience was excited to see if anyone had been able to design a probe that could measure the properties of a black hole. The students’ s
olutions were wildly original, but the team that ultimately won had bonded nanomachines to gas molecules that were sucked into the singularity of a black hole. Each tiny machine could only relay data for a fraction of a second, but when billions of them recorded data in succession, the students were able to create a computer simulation of what it would be like to travel into a black hole. The simulation showed a slightly jerky view of a jet-black sphere surrounded by a sparking blue glow. The focus moved toward the sphere slowly at first but built speed rapidly. Something weird happened when the sphere filled the screen. For a second, the view tilted crazily, and colors shifted rapidly. The motion slowed dramatically. The view stabilized and froze, showing a distorted view of a strange planet with several huge colored rings circling the world in multiple orientations. It wasn’t Saturn. It was a completely alien planet, some unknowable distance away in time and space that was visible as the probe shot completely through the black hole and emerged in some other universe. The crowd cheered as the image faded to black.
This is totally lethal, Sid thought. These people are cheering for stuff that no one ever cared about at my other school. Before, his love of science and next-gen gadgets had always made Sidney an outsider, or at the very least “quirky.” But here, he fit right in. He felt like he might even do great things at Sci Hi. More importantly, he thought he would be free to try, even if he failed at first. That was how real scientists worked.
Not to be outdone by the seniors, the juniors concluded their paleobiology presentations by introducing a Neanderthal clone. After extracting DNA from a forty-thousand-year-old tooth, the students had found a way to bring an ancient human ancestor back to life. Their modern-day caveman looked a little wary of being onstage but appeared to be completely comfortable with his new friends. He slapped one of the students on the back in excitement and nearly sent the kid flying off the edge of the stage.
The sophomores had spent the term creating a universal language that could be used to communicate with extraterrestrial life. They hadn’t discovered any aliens, but they knew their system worked when they were able to communicate with the world’s newest Neanderthal, who exclaimed in a video how much he had enjoyed the cafeteria’s tuna-salad sandwiches. The auditorium was abuzz with the possibilities.
Hive Mind Page 7