The Hive

by Orson Scott Card

  Her fingers delicately prodded at his good arm. She was looking for the wound inside him. Like a doctor.

  She touched his dead arm and Khalid winced. Her fingers poked again at his collarbone, and Khalid cried out briefly in agony. Now she focused on that spot. The broken collarbone was her new, central fascination.

  She pulled a grub from her arm and placed it on the skin above the break. Khalid tensed. The grub was cold and wet and slimy. He could feel tiny hooks from its underbelly gripping at his skin, holding it in place. Was this a leech? he wondered. Would it suck at his blood? Infect him?

  The grub buried a stinger deep into Khalid’s shoulder. He hadn’t expected it. A sharp needle, like a spear, ejecting downward. Khalid writhed and shook and screamed and tried to thrash and get away, but the Formics held him. The hand was at his chest again. Other hands were holding his own hands against the slab. The hands on his ankles were as strong as an ape’s. She was feeding him to her worms. This was his death. She would place the worms upon him and they would stab him repeatedly until he expired.

  But then, to his great astonishment, the pain in his shoulder began to diminish. The throbbing, the agony, all dissipated like an ice cube melting in hot water.

  The grub had injected him with anesthetic, he realized. The daughter was helping him, silencing his pain.

  Her eyes watched his as his face relaxed and his body stopped resisting. He was limp now, and loose, and relaxed, or as relaxed as he could be with three Formics hovering over him.

  She prodded the left shoulder again with her finger and waited for his reaction. Khalid could feel the pressure of her touch, but his entire left side, from his neck to the end of his arm, was numb.

  Before he knew what was happening, the blade was in her hand again and she was cutting his shoulder open. It happened fast, with a single quick slice of the blade, and it wasn’t until her fingers were inside him that he realized what she was doing. He screamed then. There was no pain, but he could feel her reaching in and rooting around for the bone. A Formic’s fingers were inside him, moving things around, pinching pieces of him, shifting them. A feeling of absolute revulsion washed over him, and again he thought he might vomit.

  Her small, narrow fingers maneuvered the bone back together again. Then one of her other six appendages plucked a grub from her forearm and handed it to her bloody fingers. The daughter inserted the grub into the open wound and placed it on the spot where the broken bone had been realigned. Khalid couldn’t see what was happening now, but he could feel movement inside him. The grub, like the worm that had bound his wrists, was extending inside him and winding itself around the bone, creating a cast around the break, just as the wormlike creature earlier had wrapped around and bound his wrists.

  The daughter focused on the wound intently, and then, once the grub stopped moving and was secured, she extracted her bloody fingers from the hole in his shoulder and grabbed a third, larger grub from her forearm and placed it over the wound. The small hooks of the grub buried themselves into Khalid’s skin on either side of the wound, and then he could feel the grub pulling the wound closed. This creature was his stitches and bandage, he realized.

  She was not going to eat him. She was not going to feed him to her grubs or to some other creature. She was healing him. It would take time for his bone to mend. Six weeks at the earliest. Did she intend to keep him alive that long? Was she getting him well for some other gruesome purpose?

  She placed a grub on his right arm on the inside of his elbow. Another grub went to his neck near his carotid artery. Khalid didn’t dare move. At once the two grubs buried stingers inside him, only these were not as deep. Khalid tensed every muscle, but dared not resist. They were taking his blood, he realized. He could feel them sucking in his blood. Twenty seconds passed, then the daughter removed the grubs and placed them back on her arm. She pushed off the slab and twisted in the air, and her wings fluttered again, giving her the slightest push. She moved to the right and back the way she had come, disappearing from Khalid’s field of vision.

  The escort Formics grabbed him roughly again and pulled him away from the table. They were their original selves now. The absolute control the daughter had seized was now released. They pulled Khalid away, holding on to his ankles, as if he were cargo again.

  They did not go back the way they had come. They took him down a different corridor. Khalid twisted in the air to try to take in his surroundings and draw a map of the ship in his mind.

  They passed two more screamer organs. One was rooted to the wall and screaming like a man. Another was on the ceiling, its screaming voice also deep and resonant like a male’s.

  They reached a cell door, and it irised open. The Formics did not roughly throw him in this time. They rotated him so that he was upright and then gently nudged him inside. The room was larger than his cell and dimly lit by two doilies on the wall. With that light Khalid could see people inside, hunkered down in the half darkness. Faces he didn’t recognize. Maybe six people total, most of them wearing tattered and filthy uniforms of the International Fleet.

  Khalid’s body drifted into the room, and at once someone grabbed him.

  “Khalid!”

  Arms wrapped around his bare chest, clung to him, held him. Maja buried her face in his chest and began to sob. She was alive. She was here. The Formics had taken her. Khalid took her and gently pulled her away from the others, looking her over in the dim light.

  “Maja. Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head, then her eyes widened at the grub on his shoulder.

  “What is that thing on you?”

  “A bandage, I think. For the break in my shoulder. A Formic child has tried to heal me. Who else of our people is here?”

  “No one,” said Maja. “Or none that I’ve seen. Only you, Khalid.”

  He nodded. She was alive. This was good. Seeing Maja was like seeing himself again, reminding him who he was. She was looking to him for leadership, for comfort, for direction.

  “Who are you people?” Khalid asked the crowd. He could see now how haggard they looked, how sick and weak and broken. They had been here for some time. They had endured hell aboard this ship. They were shadows of the people they once were.

  A strained voice from the back of the room responded. “Who are you?”

  Khalid looked to see from whence the voice had come, but he could not fully see the person in the shadows.

  “Leave that man,” whispered Maja into his ear. “He is sick.”

  But Khalid didn’t heed her. He pushed off the floor and drifted back toward the figure. The pain medicine in Khalid’s shoulder was strong, and it gave him a sense of being himself again. He was no longer prisoner to the pain.

  Khalid reached the figure back in the shadows and almost recoiled at the sight of him. The man was anchored to the floor, but he was barely a man. His muscles had wasted away to nothing. Grubs and worms covered his body. His left arm was gone. His head was a mat of thinning hair, and yet Khalid could see that he was young. A large organism lay on his bare and filthy stomach.

  “I said who are you?” said the man. His voice was weak and strained, as if every word took effort, as if it pained him to speak.

  “I am Khalid.”

  “What’s your rank?” said the man. He looked down at the pants Khalid was wearing, pants of an IF officer, pants that Khalid had stolen off a dead marine.

  “Lieutenant,” said Khalid. “I am Lieutenant Khalid.”

  “Then welcome aboard the ship to hell, Lieutenant Khalid. We tried to get intel out of this one, but she wouldn’t tell us anything.” The man looked at Maja.

  “She has been through a traumatic experience,” said Khalid. “She was part of an asteroid-mining crew attacked by pirates. We rescued her and her crew a few months ago. We were taking them to safety when the Formics attacked us.”

  “What ship are you from?” asked the sickly man.

  “The Bosaso,” said Khalid. “It is named for a city fro
m my country of Somalia. That is why I asked to be aboard it, to be connected to my country.”

  “I’m from the Kandahar,” said the sickly man. “Corporal Jackson. From Mississippi in the United States.”

  “You are a long way from home, Corporal. What have these animals done to you?”

  “The same thing they’ll do to you. Poke and cut and poke some more. They want to know what we’re made of, what makes us tick. You see this thing?” He gestured to the organism on his stomach, a blob of wet purple tissue. “That’s my liver. Not the one my body made, but the one they made for me. That’s what they do, they take our organs and study them and try to make copies of them.”

  “Why?” said Khalid.

  “None of us know. Maybe they want to make a human. Maybe they want to just understand us. Maybe they want to figure out the fastest way to kill us. This is a laboratory, Lieutenant. We’re the rats.”

  “Where are they taking us?” said Khalid.

  The man made a gesture as if to shake his head, but it was almost imperceptible.

  “No one knows that, either. All we know is that we’re going out, away from the system, maybe into deep space. They’re not taking us to Earth, though. That’s for certain.”

  “How many others are there?” said Khalid. “Like us?”

  “There were twelve at one point, but people die quick. We get infections. That’s why they took my arm. Gangrene near killed me. I think it still might.”

  “What happened to your own liver?”

  “They took it, gave me this one instead. I think they want to see how long I’ll live. They want to know if their replica works or not.”

  “Are you in pain?” said Khalid.

  “If I don’t get my pain worms, I’m in constant agony,” said the man. He gestured to the others in the cell. “I’ve asked these people to kill me, but no one will. They don’t have the strength themselves. We’re all dying.”

  “I will kill you,” said Khalid. “I will give you the mercy you seek.”

  Relief washed across the man’s face and tears came to his eyes. “I’ve got a mother in Mississippi. If you make it out of here, Lieutenant, you make sure she never hears a word of this. Nothing about this in my file. You tell her my ship blew up or something. Don’t let them give her this picture.”

  “Your mother will hear none of this. And I will kill these Formics for you. Maja and I will kill them all.”

  The man’s eyes went from him to Maja, his expression grateful.

  Khalid anchored his foot to a hook in the floor and got down close to the man’s face. He pressed his palms together as in prayer. “Close your eyes and we will pray together. First I will pray to my God and then you will to yours.”

  The man closed his eyes. And that was when Khalid reached forward quickly with his good arm and his bad one and snapped the man’s neck in a quick and violent motion.

  The man’s body went limp. His chest stopped moving.

  There was a shuffling and mumbling of alarm from the others in the room as they backed away from the scene.

  Khalid turned and faced them. “I am Khalid, the man of men, the father of fear. If you wish to go to your maker now, I will send you there quickly and end your suffering. Otherwise you will help me. I do not wish to die here. There is a child in this woman’s belly that is mine and that will know the Earth. These Formics are strong, and we feel weak. But I am not ready to accept my weakness. Who here can draw me a map of this ship?”

  CHAPTER 21

  Mothers

  Immediately prior to and during the Second Invasion, as tens of thousands of women from Earth, Luna, and the system enlisted, the percentage of female combatants and personnel within the International Fleet far exceeded the percentages theretofore seen in any large-scale military on Earth. By the war’s end, slightly more than a third of all IF personnel was female. This trend continued after the war, and the number of females rising to positions of command dramatically rose as well, paving the way for both males and females to be equally considered as candidates for Battle School.

  —Demosthenes, A History of the Formic Wars, Vol. 3

  * * *

  There were no ships docked at the Minetek facility when Imala and the others aboard the Gagak arrived. “Do we go inside and check it out?” said Imala. They were gathered at the helm, looking at a holo of the Minetek facility. Imala was gently rocking Chee in her arms.

  They had seen from a great distance, based on the heat signatures created, that two ships had left the space station recently. Both left at roughly the same time, with one going outward, further into the Kuiper Belt, and the other launching inward, toward the sun.

  “One of those ships had to have been Khalid,” said Lieutenant Owanu. “This facility is deserted. Those weren’t Minetek ships coming and going.”

  “Okay,” said Captain Mangold, “we’ll assume for now that one of them was Khalid. Who was the other one?”

  Lieutenant Owanu shrugged. “Another pirate crew, maybe? Or maybe it was Khalid’s buyer. These people operate on the black market. They’ve got to meet and do business somewhere.”

  “Who’s to say Khalid only has one ship?” said Imala. “Maybe he has a fleet of them. Maybe these are two of them. And each is assigned a different sector to raid. Maybe this Minetek facility is the border between their areas, and they meet up to dump their goods, resupply, and have their pirate club meetings.”

  Captain Mangold still looked uneasy.

  “Not having a ship here is a lot safer for us than having a ship here that could decouple from the station and engage us,” said Imala. “We should be grateful for that.”

  “We came all the way out here,” said Lieutenant Owanu. “It’d be silly not to investigate.”

  “Unless the place is crawling with one hundred pirates,” said Captain Mangold. “There could be anyone in there. We could be walking right into a trap.”

  “We call them on the radio,” said Imala. “We open a channel and we tell them we’re coming in, and if they give us any trouble, we’ll blow a hole through the thing and suck them out into space. We know Khalid took four women, and if he doesn’t turn them over unharmed, we start doing damage.”

  “If one of those ships was Khalid,” said Captain Mangold, “then the women won’t be here. They’ll be with him, on his ship. And we’re not chasing after them anymore. This is the end of it. We’ve abandoned our mission for too long already. We did what we could with the resources we had. The miners can’t fault us for that.”

  Mangold had asked the rescued miners to stay in their quarters while he and his officers discussed the situation.

  “We won’t have to blow a hole in the place,” said Rena. “It already has one.” She reached into the holo and rotated it so that the group could see the other side of the shipyard, where a small, cleanly cut hole was visible in the hull.

  “Why would anyone do that?” said Lieutenant Owanu. “That shipyard is huge. You can do all kinds of things with that much space. Cut a hole in it and expose it to space, and you render it useless.”

  Captain Mangold turned to Sergeant Lefevre. “Get a recon drone down in the hole. I want to see what’s in there before we decide to go in.”

  Once the equipment was gathered and the drone was launched, Sergeant Lefevre piloted it from inside the helm. He stood in the corner of the room, off to the side, with his visorless flight helmet on, holding the remote controls. The projection inside his helmet was the same view projected onto the surface of the holotable, where Imala and the others were gathered. It showed the drone’s main camera feed as it approached the hole in the shipyard, flew inside, and lit up the space with its spotlights. At first they saw what they expected: large shipbuilding equipment, bots, beams, a huge manufacturing complex, with a large segment of a ship in the center that had been abandoned mid-construction. But then Lefevre piloted the drone further into the yard and around the ship segment, and a human arm drifted into view. Not a body, not a person, ju
st the arm.

  “Is that what I think it is?” said Rena.

  “Bring the drone in closer,” said Owanu.

  Lefevre piloted the drone right up to the arm, hitting it with its lights.

  “Male,” said Owanu, “judging by the shape of the hand. Dark skin.”

  “Could be a member of Khalid’s crew,” said Rena.

  “Could be anybody,” said Mangold.

  “Look at the wound,” said Owanu. “This arm was blown off.”

  “How can you tell?” said Mangold.

  “Slaser cut would be clean and precise. Look at the tissue at the deltoids. Torn, ripped, consistent with blast wounds, and yet no burn marks, no evidence of heat.”

  “Doilies,” said Imala. “We saw this in the Formic scout ship at the end of the First Invasion.”

  Her theory was confirmed as they kept looking. They found multiple bodies and pieces of bodies near the bottom of the room where it connected with the rest of the station. They found three dead Formics as well, which was all the evidence they needed.

  “So one ship was Formics and one was Khalid,” said Rena. “Question is, which was which.”

  “The Formics went further into the Kuiper Belt,” said Imala. “Khalid went inward. He was in a mad panic. He was desperate to get away. You don’t hurry out into no-man’s-land when you’re running scared. You hightail it back to where you think you’ll find safety. After an experience like this, Khalid would rush into the Fleet’s arms, if it meant getting away from the Formics.”

  “Unless the Formics left first and headed inward,” said Rena. “In which case, Khalid would definitely go in the opposite direction, for no other reason than to put distance between him and the Formics.”