Hunted (7 page)

11

MEETING THE HIVE

Fast as I could, I knelt and lifted Counselor out of the dirt. Gentles are the smallest caste of Mandasars; they look frail and fragile in comparison to warriors or workers, but they still weigh as much as a hefty human adult. And they’re all floppy-awkward to pick up.

“Let’s get her inside,” I said to her hive-mates. They didn’t answer. They were still all gaping in shock—fresh venom must pack quite a wallop to the Mandasar nose. Struggling on my own, I lugged Counselor through the door of the nearest environment dome, then set her on one of the lounging pallets around the dining-room table.

The communal water bowl was still half-full from lunch. I started to splash Counselor’s face and neck, mostly because I didn’t know a truly useful way to help her recover. When a gentle faints, it isn’t from shock or anything like that—it’s actually more of a trance, when she’s come up against something that needs a whole lot of thought. Her conscious mind shuts down so her unconscious can go into overdrive…kind of like a computer letting its external interface go blank so it can use all its processing power internally. Counselor would wake up when her brain had come to grips with the venom she smelled; but I still kept splashing, because I had to do
something.

While I splashed, I had time to peek around the dome’s interior. More than anything, it looked like one of the “heritage chambers” at Queen Verity’s palace: a room where you stored stuff that was too historical to throw out, but too many centuries out of fashion to actually use. The dining table was a perfect example. Laminated on its surface was a glossy reproduction of a two-hundred-year-old Troyenese painting: the one of old Queen Wisdom rising from the sea after sporting with the first envoy from the League of Peoples. It’s as famous to Mandasars as the
Mona Lisa
is to humans…and that means it’s a great whopping cliché you’d never want to show in your home.

At least, that’s how people felt on Troyen. Things might be different on Celestia. I could imagine a hive buying the Queen Wisdom table as a joke, the way kids in their twenties get a kick out of kitschy old treasures; but maybe these kids didn’t
know
the Queen Wisdom painting was corny and old-fashioned. As one of the few works of Mandasar art known to the outside world, maybe they thought it was special and important—a connection to their lost home planet.

The same could go for the mish-mosh of other knick-knacks around the dome: a cheap little rain-stick from Queen Honor’s continent, Rupplish; a pair of sharp iron tips that bolted onto a warrior’s pincers…something no one on Troyen had used since preindustrial days; a little needlepoint sampler with words written in one of the ancient pictograph languages. I didn’t know which language, which continent, or how long ago these particular pictographs had been edged out by the unromantic efficiency of an alphabet.

The nobles back in Queen Verity’s palace would have flicked their whiskers at such a rummage of decorations clumped in one room. The stuff didn’t
go
together: antiquey things from a dozen different ages and regions, all dating back at least a hundred years. But the pieces weren’t real antiques; they weren’t even good fakes. Every hunk of bric-a-brac looked gleaming and modern, as if Celestia had a hundred factories knocking off shiny-bright copies of old

Troyenese things…whatever artwork and gewgaws the outside world happened to have pictures of.

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for these kids, how they were ready to buy anything that was sort of a kind of a teeny bit like mementos from Troyen. They didn’t mind mixing stuff together from all three continents and heaven knows how many eras of history, so long as it brought back memories of their birth world.

So lonely. So homesick.

But as much as I felt sorry for them, I felt pretty proud too…the way they hung on, trying to stay connected to a planet they only half remembered. Big red Zeeleepull had never heard the word
Naizó,
even though it’d been standard for centuries…but he knew the longer phrase, the original, like some cherished hand-me-down from the medieval warriors who’d invented it.

The more I thought about it, the more I saw what was really going on: the Mandasars here weren’t just twenty-year-old kids, they were
children.
No matter how grownup their bodies had got, their house was like a tree fort filled with a hodgepodge of valuable junk they’d pulled out of trash heaps or bought for a penny. None of this was sad and pathetic, or even noble; it was just what youngsters did while they were rehearsing to own adult things.

Even if a Queen Wisdom table was still tacky, tacky, tacky.

The other four hive-mates trooped in from outside just as Counselor started to wake. From the looks on their faces, Zeeleepull and the workers had mumbled and grumbled about what to do with me but hadn’t come to any conclusion. All Mandasars can make decisions when they have to, but if there’s a gentle handy, the other castes give her the deciding vote. I don’t know if that’s instinct or just habit; the gentles all swear it’s biologically hardwired, how other castes defer to them…but warriors and workers claim they only do it because gentles whine when they don’t get their own way.

Counselor blinked and twitched her whiskers a few times, shaking off the water I’d splashed on her face. Suddenly, she sat bolt-upright, staring at me in horror. “You smell…”

She couldn’t finish the sentence. Zeeleepull muttered, “Stinky hume,” while the workers crowded in to see if Counselor was okay. They did all the standard things worried Mandasar moms do with children: patting Counselor’s face to check for fever; examining the color of her fingertips; sniffing the tiny musk glands at the base of her tail to make sure she didn’t smell injured.

I looked down at those button-sized glands myself. If Counselor had become a queen when she was little, those glands would have ballooned into huge green sacs.

“The smell on my face,” I said to them all. “It’s venom. From a Mandasar queen.”

That sent the five of them into another bout of whisker-twitching shock. With Zeeleepull, the shock only took half a second to swoop into outrage. “Dare you to pretend—”

“I’m not pretending,” I interrupted. “It’s the truth.”

“Then worse!” Zeeleepull yelled.

The burning-wood odor of Battle Musk B began to pour off him like smoke. Thirty seconds of that and he’d go berserk…especially in the dining room’s enclosed space, where his own musk would fill the air and whip him to frenzy. Counselor put her hand to his cheek, and whispered, “Calm, calm,” but Zeeleepull just kept yelling.

“If a hume, dirty awful you, dares to wear sacred venom like…like
perfume…”

Uh-oh. It’s too complicated to explain now, but one of the causes of Troyen’s civil war was snooty-pants aliens riling the populace by dousing themselves with Mandasar pheromones. Zeeleepull obviously knew that…and in his mind, he’d suddenly identified me with the troublemakers who drove Troyen over the edge.

The workers were snorting and trembling now, half-scared to death by the Musk B in the air. That particular type of musk always terrifies nonwarrior castes.
A scent specifically evolved to stimulate the fear response,
a Mandasar scientist once told me. Counselor hollered,
“Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzó,”
but Zeeleepull was too far gone for that to have an effect. The words only work when everyone’s cool-headed, not when a warrior desperately
wants
to run riot.

Any second, there was going to be a fight…and a real fight this time, not just a warrior feeling testy, deciding to drive off an unwanted visitor. Now Zeeleepull had a reason to really hurt me: because he thought I’d committed the deliberate sacrilege of wearing venom as cologne.

I had no room to maneuver inside the house. Even worse, the dome had closed and sealed itself shut after everyone came inside; I couldn’t find the door to get out. Zeeleepull would try to kill me, and the only way to prevent that was to hurt him…bash him unconscious or cripple him so badly he couldn’t pincer me in half. I didn’t want to do it; I didn’t even know if I
could
do it, because there was so little space for ducking and dodging.

Then…while I was thinking and worrying and trying to figure out what to do, my hands reached out of their own accord. I wasn’t moving them, I swear. I had no idea what they were going to do. But they grabbed Zeeleepull’s snout like I was as strong as a tiger, and dragged his nose around till it was a hair breadth from my face.

He tried to yank away, but couldn’t. I remember thinking,
I shouldn’t be able to hold him. In a straight tug-of-war, he outweighs me three to one.
But I wrestled him close so that all he could smell was the fresh venom on my face; and I heard my own voice saying, “I am Blood-Consort Edward York, last and rightful husband of Verity the Second, High Queen and Supreme Ruler of all those who tread the Blessed Land. If you fear her name, you will yield; if not, be named her enemy and pay the price of your folly.”

The words came out in a dream. I couldn’t tell if I was talking English or Troyenese; I’d never said such things before, never once tried to bully people by using my position. For all I knew, these Mandasars had no idea Queen Verity ever married a human husband…and even if they’d heard the story, why would they believe I was that man?

But Zeeleepull’s nostrils were full of the odor of queen’s venom: the venom on my face, stronger than the scent of battle musk, or the aroma of fear rising from Counselor and the workers.

Slowly, the warrior crossed his
Cheejreth
over his chest and closed his eyes. When I let go of his snout, he lowered it to the ground till his whole body was flat on the floor.

“Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzó,” he whispered.

Counselor was already lying down. Hib & Nib & Pib dropped prostrate too, pressing their faces tight against the chipped-wood rug. For a second I was standing high above their heads…and I could feel an unfamiliar expression twisting up my face. I didn’t know how it looked, but it scared me. Something out of nowhere was making me act like a stranger.

I pushed and pushed, trying to shift my face, my arms, anything. Suddenly, everything holding me back let go and I was in control again, able to move my body however I wanted. I dropped to my knees and nearly blurted out,
I’m
sorry, I didn’t mean it…
but I stopped myself in time. Warriors are quick to recognize signs of weakness; if I started apologizing, we might head back where we started, Zeeleepull going berserk and no way to avoid an all-out bonecrushing.

“Um, rise,” I said. Which didn’t sound very regal. I tried to remember how Queen Verity talked to her subjects when she held court. “Rise,” I said again with my deepest, most gracious voice. “Rise and let us converse.”

Counselor was the first to perk up. She’d only caught a slight whiff of the venom…not like Zeeleepull, who’d practically had his nose rubbed in it while I held his snout to my face. No wonder he was slow getting up off the floor. The workers, of course, were busy being cowed—opening one eyelid for a quick peek at me, then closing the eye fast if they saw I was looking their way. You can never tell with workers whether they’re really as intimidated as they seem, or if they’re just putting on a show of being menial. Maybe the workers don’t know either.

“Were you really the high queen’s blood-consort?” Counselor asked in a hushed voice.

“Yes. I really was.” For eight whole years, till Verity got killed and the war began…but I didn’t say that. I also didn’t mention she’d had six other consorts at the same time…”

“What are you doing here?” Counselor asked.

“I told you: my escape pod landed in your canal.”

“So you didn’t…seek us out?”

Counselor suddenly had a hopeful look on her face, enough to break my heart. I could imagine the kids on Celestia, cut off from their home for twenty years and looking to the sky every night, wondering if anyone would ever come to tell them, “We love you and want you back.” They’d have a terrible time if they actually
did
go back to Troyen—with their gutter-baby accents and their attachment to dreadful fake antiques—but they didn’t know they’d be out of place.

As out of place as they were now.

“Things are still bad back home,” I said. “When I left a week and a half ago, the war was as fierce as ever.” Not that I paid much attention to the fighting…but the other observers on the moonbase would have told me if the war had ended.

“Yet you recently had contact with…a royal person,” Counselor said. “The smell on your face is fresh.”

“Yes,” I nodded, “but that queen is dead now.” When I realized how bad that sounded, I quickly added, “Someone else killed her. It’s really complicated. A ship was trying to bring her here, but things went wrong.”

“So you’ve come in her stead?” Counselor asked, all shining eager. “To save us from the recruiters?”

“Um. Hmm.”

Counselor sounded so beamingly hopeful, I didn’t want to ask, “What recruiters?” That would dash her down hard, like I’d come all this way, then didn’t know the first thing about her troubles. From the sound of her voice, I could tell she wanted me to be a great savior, fallen out of the sky to rescue her hive from danger. So I didn’t open my mouth till I’d picked my words carefully. “Talk to me about these recruiters,” I said. ‘Tell me everything.”

And she did.

Counselor started with something I already knew: despite all those human settlers twenty years ago, Celestia still didn’t belong to the Technocracy. Then she told me a secret: over the past two decades, Celestia had become one of the Technocracy’s most valuable assets, precisely because it’d never signed the Technocracy charter.

It turned out the humans Dad brought to Celestia weren’t interested in clearing a few grubby acres and trying to grow butternut squash. Instead, they wanted to grow huge acres of cash: for example, by establishing big secretive banks outside the Technocracy regulatory system. Places where wealthy Tech-citizens could store money without worrying about taxes or subpoenas. Celestia also became a meeting ground for folks making shady deals…especially under-the-table arrangements with alien species. One group of newly arrived entrepreneurs took up catering to tourists with tastes that would be illegal elsewhere; others built factories that spewed pollution or exploited workers in ways the Technocracy would never allow.