Queen, p.23
Queen, page 23
part #1 of Hidden Earth Series
“We don’t entirely understand the rabbit role in the pheromone process.” Varun spoke to the ceiling. “With that said, it’s no worse than any other idea, especially if we pair it with my theory on the role of light in Queen beetle communications. The rabbits should follow the clothes, and that should get the beetles interested. Following that success, if we can find the right sequence of colors—” His voice faltered. “—we might get out of here.”
It actually sounded like a great idea. Like one of the best ideas in the world, really, because it got the damn rabbits off the ship. Ember wasn’t sure how much more aggressive nose wiggling she could take. She could still feel their flat little teeth on her ankles and sharp claws digging into her back. Her cuts stung, but the blanket had warmed her up enough to be irrational.
“Wonderful,” she said. “Tara, open the hatch, would you?”
There was a long pause in which Ember felt certain Tara and Asher had managed telepathy. Asher glared at an overhead camera, and it glared back, as much as an inanimate piece of plastic could. Ember pushed the blanket off, stood, and broke through the ring of rabbits. She grabbed her clothes—shirt, pants, socks, and underwear. Asher muttered, the hatch opened, and Ember tossed the clothes high and over her shoulder. They landed on an awkward clump on top of the pod and promptly froze to the exterior, the fungus goop morphed to a disgusting glue in the frigid wind.
Three rabbits hopped first to the edge of the hole the ship sat in, then launched themselves at the pod. Two made it, scrambling with sharp little claws until they slid into the frozen clothing pile and burrowed inside.
Rabbits were in her underwear. Ember needed to not contemplate that.
“Tara, I’m going to input a flashing sequence for your main lighting,” Varun said. “Nok, you have any input?”
“Yes. Here, let me show you.” Nok joined Varun at the console, and the two retreated into conspiring whispers.
I’m ready when Ember is.
Ember stood at the apex of the hatch ramp and watched the beetle she’d ridden crawl down the side of the earth until it came up parallel with the flyer. The wind outside further chilled the air in her nose, and she grabbed her emergency blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders like a cape. Beetles lined the upper ridge, some crawling on top of others, their little toes scrabbling to find purchase on the striated exoskeletons of their neighbors. The remaining rabbits hopped, all at exactly the same time, to her beetle. Her beetle scuttled to the pod, touched an antenna to the pile of clothes/bunnies, and lit its abdomen light yellow, like a damn lightning bug.
The rest of the beetles lit up the same color.
“Now, please,” Varun said.
The white flood light on the front of the pod turned off. The track lighting around the ship circumference flashed green, then sputtered into a repeating sequence, bright enough that Ember had to shut her eyes
“Can we harness one now or something?” she asked as lights flashed through her closed eyelids.
No one responded, but she heard the sound of toes scraping clay. Fur brushed past her ankle. She opened her eyes just as Tara called Ember! And her beetle scuttled down the hole, scattered a handful of rabbits, and clicked its way to the base of the ramp.
Shit. Shit shit shit. Ember tried to back into the pod but came up against another body. Nok’s hand fell on her shoulder, and she turned, giving the woman an incredulous look.
“Move!” Ember hissed.
“Badass,” Nok whispered.
Antennae fell on Ember’s shoulders, one on each side, and Nok’s hand fell away.
“Varun needs you to stay put,” she said.
“Tell Varun,” Ember said in a low voice, when she really just wanted to yell that Varun needed to go fuck himself, “that I’d like to get back on the ship now.”
“Just give it a minute,” Varun called out. Apparently, they hadn’t been quiet. “For science.”
The beetle’s light began to blink in tandem with the pod track lighting.
“If I give you my PhD, will you let me back on the ship?”
“I’ll give you one of my fleakers if you stay put for another minute.”
Ember growled but stayed. The track lighting changed patterns; the beetle’s changed as well. The floodlight turned back on, green, and the beetle’s light turned red. Ember looked up at scattered clicks from the beetles above, thinking there might be a warren of rabbits peeking between beetle legs, but there was only mottled white exoskeletons. The rabbits that had hopped around her legs just moments ago had also disappeared, leaving behind a few tumbleweeds of loose fur and her trampled clothing.
“Yellow is for mating,” Nok said, her hand still hovering near Ember’s shoulder, just to the left of the beetle antenna. “I used to work on the beetle project, too, years ago. I’ve got a double PhD in entomology and bacteriology. Relax for a minute. We’ve got them off the mating part. Red is for migration. They’ve got spectral shifts we can’t perceive in there that Tara is copying with the ship. Your beetle is a flock leader, which is why it had a green light. Right now, Dr. Sinha is negotiating who gets to decide where we are going.”
Varun also came up behind her, his voice too loud as he said, “And I know the four cardinal directions, and I’m suggesting directions to the mella’s encampment since I don’t think the colony would appreciate our current cohort landing in the dome.”
“The light is shifting back to yellow though,” Ember said, pointing at the beetle. “Why?”
“Probably a negotiation,” Nok suggested.
“You have to have New Earth approval for human trials,” Nadia yelled to them. “Remember that before you consider feeding Ember to the bugs.”
Varun bristled. Nok laughed.
Ember got tired of waiting. The emergency blanket concentrated the rotten apple smell, and her body heat had turned the fungus goop from a viscous material to a liquid. She smelled, she was dripping, and a beetle was playing antenna-footsie with her shoulders. She’d hit her gross threshold for the day.
She reached out, steadfastly ignoring the mandibles that spread apart as her hand neared, and patted the beetle on its head. The angled red sunlight reflected pastel orange on the off-white exoskeleton, making the beetle look more like a mutated My Little Pony than an actual insect. That was a cute idea. She’d loved those plastic pastel toys as a child, even after Nadia gave most of her collection thorough haircuts.
Slightly less freaked out, Ember ran both hands through her matted, sticky hair. She pulled clumps of fungus ick out, flicked away the solids, and mashed the rest between her palms, trying to warm it back to runny. God, but it smelled foul, and even after warming, it still had the consistency of half-cooked eggs. When it looked like her hands had been encased in a tub of warm margarine, Ember stepped closer to the beetle and rubbed her palms on the exoskeleton, between the eyes, where she thought a forehead might be. A translucent green circle of slime remained. As she pulled away, strands clung to her palm like the world’s most disgusting cobweb.
The beetle’s light turned off.
Ember shoved her hands into her pockets, and the beetle backed away.
“Off means ‘I’ll follow directions,’ right?” Ember asked. Fungus goop threatened to congeal her hands to the cotton lining of her pants. She balled her fists and tried to forget how bad she smelled.
“Lights off, Tara.” Varun stepped away from Ember, and Nok’s hand came down. The ship went dark, leaving the triangular wedge of white that spilled from the open hatch as the only light source. “No light means they’re listening.”
Her beetle continued to back away, and Ember finally retreated into the ship, exhaustion hitting as her adrenaline ran out.
Varun spun a chair out for her, and she fell into it, sliding halfway down until Nadia’s familiar hand squeezed her elbow. Ember let herself sink deeper into the cushioning. Her eyes closed, and someone put another emergency blanket on her. Sleep. She really, really needed to sleep, even more than she needed a shower.
“There’s a possibility we may have to gift you to the beetle colony or find something of equal value in exchange,” Varun said, and Ember didn’t care to find out if he was serious or not. “No need to worry about that right now though. We’re a long, long beetle ride away from home. With Tara’s power rerouted to the lights, Kate says we can keep them on the whole way back.”
“You look like how I feel,” Nadia said. “Complete shit. Also—damn with the beetle riding and the fungus ripping. Mom’ll have a heart attack when I tell her the story. Remember how badly she panicked that time she visited you in Toronto during your postdoc, and you two got caught up in that riot but, like, it was just a few protestors, and the whole thing was super peaceful and she lost her shit? Yeah, this will be a hundred times better.”
Ember groaned at the memory. She opened her eyes, shook her head at Nadia, and tried to wring more fungus juice from her hair. It was still dripping despite the chill in the ship, and she had a sudden, visceral image of her head gluing itself to the chair as she slept. This time, all she managed to pull out were strands of her own hair.
“I’m going to shave your head when we get back,” Nadia whispered to her.
“I’m going to let you,” Ember returned. “And we can light the residuals on fire in Varun’s lab so the planetoid’s beetles all come visit and he never has to go scavenging carcasses ever again.”
Varun cleared his throat. Nok appeared at his side, loops of cable and leather gripped in her hand.
“So,” Nok said, looking hopefully at Ember, “we have to decide who is going to try to harness your beetle.”
Ember definitely eye-rolled Nok in response. “Not it,” she murmured as her eyelids closed, and she slid, mercifully, into sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
Nadia
A morning dawned with solid daylight instead of a perpetual bleeding sunrise. It looked alien from inside the mella base, and Nadia wasn’t sure how to feel about the beach thing, or Taraniel turning into an AI, the Queen for sale thing, or that her damn sister was still asleep when she could have really used someone to disassemble with. Also, Varun would be absolutely insufferable now in faculty meetings with all the beetle data, assuming the colony let them back in.
The colony had to let them back in. Nadia fought down a wave of panic. There were no mella universities, and it wasn’t as though she could get a transfer to another planet. Tenure was secure, but it wasn’t mella secure. If Nadia was going to royally screw herself out of her dream, she wanted to do it properly, with several sharpie markers and choice words for the science director.
Nadia yawned, stretching her arms into the tangerine sky. She’d slept well enough on the pod, under three emergency blankets, listening to Ember’s snoring. Their harnessed, fungus-smeared beetle had gotten them within spitting distance of the mella camp, a few of its buddies helping, and then riders on trained beetles had done the rest. Mercifully, Ember hadn’t needed to be a human sacrifice. The whole pod now stank of rotten apples. Ember would never be able to remove the unique bouquet she now carried.
Nadia had spent two hours in the mella hospital, which was just as well stocked as the colony hospital, if not better. Now, with drugs in her system and a patched leg, she felt as spunky as a full professor ignoring a faculty meeting.
Asher came out of the nearest building—two stories, cinderblock, no windows—trailed by Kate and Pui. They walked along the lake’s edge, directly to Nadia, who managed a polite-yet-academic wave.
“Afternoon,” Asher greeted her.
One of the problems with Queen was that you had no idea what time it was without a watch. Nadia did not, as a rule, like to wear anything on her wrists that would have to be taken off when working in a lab. “Yeah. How soon until we can go home?”
“Flyer’s shot,” Kate said and sighed as she sat in the sand. Pushing her legs out straight, she stared into the sunlight. “I’ve got it going as a short-range ground flyer again, but no way it’s going into space. And you’re not going anywhere unless you take a beetle.”
“Or you come with us to Earth.” Asher dredged the sentence up, loaded with a heaviness and optimism that made the muscles in Nadia’s shoulders bunch.
“You don’t have a ship anymore, remember. Besides, you really want to go back to Earth? Earth, Earth? Can’t you let that asinine dream die with your broken pod over there?”
Nadia plopped onto the sand. An old boat bobbed on the gentle waves of the lake. She’d already analyzed the water: drinkable, not brackish, no concerning algal stuff. But Queen didn’t have algae, so that made sense. The topographic maps she’d had recharged-Tara pull up didn’t have any information on the groundwater structure at the equator, and Nadia didn’t like hypothesizing on the lake’s origin. Hypotheses without any data were pointless at best and highly unpublishable.
Asher and Pui sat next to her, in a line with Kate. Pui patted her hand and offered a small smile, which Nadia returned halfheartedly.
A little kid came by and gave Pui a gap-toothed smile. She was maybe eight or nine, with short, black hair and beige skin. She dumped an armload of twigs in front of them, just at the edge of the water. Maples—Nadia realized—but none she recognized from Ember’s lab. The kid doused the limbs with a clear, odorless liquid, then struck a match and squealed with joy when the haphazard pile burst into flame.
Nadia scooted back. Everyone else stayed put, including the kid, and watched the flames of a small campfire rise skyward.
“We’ll find a new ship. We found one, after all.” Asher’s voice did not sound as confident as Nadia thought it should if she was really going to keep chasing and selling the Earth dream. “Besides, you’re not curious?” Asher asked. An ember jumped from the twigs and danced near Nadia’s hand. “Earth has been lying to us, all of us, since the beginning. They had to have been. Forget the lies you were told at the colony. If Earth is alive, then we all have a right to know.”
“Do we though?” Nadia blew a strand of hair from her face. “We collectively fucked up that planet. Some people stayed behind to bring it back. Maybe it’s their planet now. It’s not like we don’t have our own.” And I have a job here. A good job I worked my ass off for, as did Ember. As did Taraniel. No one would willingly leave all that behind, even grumpy colonists. “This is our home.”
Asher turned to her, and Pui emitted a weird, guttural laugh. “You don’t care at all?” Asher asked. “About the lies? The subterfuge?” She pointed back toward the colony. “You’re living a lie, squared. The presidium has you bust your butt on this sandstorm from hell so they could steal your science to repair Earth. Your research, Ember’s research—it was supposed to be going to help other worlds. And now the presidium is shipping us to other worlds.” Asher’s voice got louder. “And yet, Jesus, we don’t even know if there are other successful worlds! If all your research was going to Old Earth, who was helping the other colonized planets?”
Nadia’s gaze turned cold. “I chose this sandstorm from hell. So did all of you.”
“But you shouldn’t have had to. That’s my point.” Asher stood and kicked a plume of sand at the fire. The flames stuttered and dipped low. The girl frowned, stuck her tongue out at Asher, and ran off. “Once we have a new ship, we won’t have to choose it either.”
“I appreciate Nadia choosing Queen.” Ember came toward them, Varun at her side. She looked like hell, her hair tangled, the dopey mella clothes they’d given her hanging at all the wrong angles. Downwind, Nadia only caught the faintest hint of apples and had to admit it was a damn good thing the mella stole toiletries as well as tech. Varun looked great, but Varun always looked great, which Nadia kind of got and was also kind of jealous of. It rankled how he could find mustache gel anywhere, but she couldn’t even manage eyeliner.
Asher stepped back and made room for Ember in the fire ring. Pui nodded appreciatively at Varun. Varun blushed. Then she watched Ember as Ember watched Asher, her body strung with a tension Nadia definitely understood. About damn time for a rebound, and her sister deserved it. Sex was about the only decent thing on Queen, assuming you weren’t hunting a very particular phenotype.
Nadia patted the sand next to her. Ember turned to her, eyes wide and relieved, and sat. Varun did the same.
“Thirsty?” Nadia asked her sister sweetly.
“Shut up.”
“I have water,” Pui offered, oblivious, and tossed a plastic bottle over the dying fire. Nadia caught it. The bottle was warm, but she handed it to Ember anyway, a toothy grin on her face.
“You sure? Nothing cures a dry spell quite like—”
Ember snatched the bottle from her and threw it into the sand. It lodged at a forty-five-degree angle, the red sunlight hitting the plastic and refracting a kaleidoscope of oranges. Nadia saw what she needed to—that her sister’s fingers were their normal color, and she could still move all of them despite the scabs. No frostbite necrosis, no infections, and it seemed she had no significant concussion. Nadia was down a pinkie toe on her left foot, but she hadn’t ridden a giant beetle, so Ember was damn lucky.
