Shadows in Flight, enhanced edition (8 page)

Ender was oblivious to their concerns. "I've got all the images I can and they're stored back on
Herodotus
. So I'm going to take a sample."

"What happened to 'crumble into dust'?" asked Sergeant.

"I'll be careful," said Ender.

Carlotta saw that Ender really did have a delicate touch -- he lifted off sections of dried-up Hive Queen from various regions of the corpse, but never disturbed anything, or even pressed downward. Just nipped a bit, raising it as he did, and pushed it into self-sealing sample bags.

"The Formics were really good at genetics," said Carlotta.

"But no lab," said Ender. "Not here, anyway. Or their lab was the Queen's own ovaries. By an act of will she could decide when to extrude an egg that would become a new queen. And presumably to create an egg that would become a rab instead of a worker."

"It can't have been reflexive," said Sergeant. "She had to plan what she was doing, at least when she was making rabs."

"And while she was doing that," said Carlotta, "who was piloting the ship?"

"She was," said Ender.

"And who was tending to the ecotat, and who was doing maintenance everywhere, and who was reporting to the other Hive Queens on other worlds?"

"She was," said Sergeant. "Hive Queens are smarter than we are."

"Multitasking is fine, but was she really seeing and hearing the sensory input of all her workers at the same time, equally well? Or did she concentrate her attention where it was needed?"

"The individual Formic workers weren't just an extension of her mind," said Sergeant. "Not like hands and feet. More like perfectly obedient ... children."

"Somebody piloted this ship," said Carlotta, "and she wasn't there to control them. What if some of the Formic workers survived her death? If she wasn't controlling every thought in their heads, if they had the independence to learn their job and do it even when the Queen wasn't paying attention, then when she died, they could go on."

"No," said Sergeant. "It makes sense, but we know that
every
Formic worker died when the Hive Queens died. There were assault teams on some of the Formic planets when Wiggin killed the Hive Queens, and the human soldier reported that all the Formics stopped fighting at once. Stopped running, stopped doing
anything
. They lay down and died."

"But they lay down," said Carlotta.

"Dropped," said Sergeant.

"I read the same reports," said Ender. "They lay down. Some of them had vital signs for as long as half an hour. So Carlotta's right. There were at least some body systems in the workers that kept going for at least a little while after the Hive Queens died."

"What if this Hive Queen,
knowing
she was going to die, gave some of her workers instructions to keep piloting the ship?" asked Carlotta.

The others nodded. "We can't know what mechanism makes the Formics die when the Queen does," said Ender. "Maybe there's an exception."

"Let's find the helm and see," said Sergeant.

Carlotta looked out over the sea of rot that surrounded her. "Home sweet home," she said. "I'm trying to see this the way she did, when she was alive. All these little holes were like wombs for her eggs. All these slugs were being herded here to feed her and feed her babies."

Ender pointed up. "Don't forget the ceiling."

Carlotta looked up. Lots of stringy protuberances hung down from the highest points. A few of them had melon-sized balls hanging from them.

"What's that?" Carlotta asked.

"Cocoons. I'm sure they're all dead, but I'm going to want to take one back to the lab to study, if I can," said Ender. "Everything that's on the floor has been contaminated with that bacterial soup of decay. But larvae that cocooned themselves might still have clean genetic material I can study."

"Not our highest priority," said Sergeant.

"But not our lowest, either," said Ender. "We obviously have time to stop and chat. So let's collect a sample or two before we leave the Room of Goo."

"You going to take a slug back? And the bacteria?" asked Sergeant.

"Already collected samples of those on the way in."

"You were supposed to be our rear guard, not a prancing naturalist," said Sergeant.

"Nothing attacked us from behind," said Ender. "Hive Queens aren't the only ones who can multitask."

"Boys," said Carlotta. "Is this how our whole lives are going to be? The two of you sniping at each other?"

"Let's get one thing clear," said Ender. "Only one person has been sniping and it wasn't me. I've followed every order without complaint; I've criticized nothing. It's Sergeant who's determined to catch me doing something wrong. But I'm not. Carlotta said it -- the Hive Queens were expert geneticists, and they worked on their own genome to create the rabs. So what I collect here might teach us science that the human race hasn't developed on its own. It might save our lives."

"And here's where you're both so stupid it hurts," said Carlotta. "The illusion in here is so good that it fooled you both."

"What illusion?" asked Sergeant.

"The illusion of gravity," said Carlotta.

She watched in triumph as they realized: The cocoon wasn't going to drop when they cut it loose.

"But the other cocoons fell," said Ender lamely.

"During deceleration," said Carlotta. "The ship turned around and the rockets pushed upward to slow this big rock down. That's when the cocoons dropped."

"But all this liquid," said Sergeant. "It clings to the floor."

"It clings to the egg holes," said Carlotta. "It's not liquid, it's
goo
. Most of the voyage is in zero-gee. If the eggs and larvae need liquid to grow in, it has to be gelatinous so it stays put, or the Queen would be drowning in it."

Ender was, of course, extrapolating. "The Hive Queen needs an environment just like home," he said. "On a planet, the liquid might just be water, the larvae would climb to the ceiling to make their cocoons. So they make this place look like that and function like that even without gravity."

"Mags zero," said Sergeant. In a moment he was flying gently up to the nearest cocoon. With his laser pistol he deftly severed the stem, then floated back down holding the cocoon by that half of the stem.

Ender shrank an expandable bag around the cocoon and put it into the sample pack. "Thanks," he said.

"Now you'll try to baby that thing to keep from damaging it," said Sergeant. "Which means you won't be much help fighting."

"Sergeant," said Carlotta, "he learned a lot from the exploded rab corpse you brought back in the Puppy; he can learn from the DNA in a crushed cocoon. So he's not going to baby it, he's going to do his job."

"He
was
going to baby it," said Sergeant, "until you said that."

Ender slapped his sample pack. Hard. "Eh," he said. "Andrew Delphiki, reporting for duty, sir."

Sergeant couldn't help smiling. "Point taken. All right, Carlotta, where do you want to go?"

"The thing I'm afraid of," said Carlotta, "is going out the wrong door and letting in a bunch of feral rabs. They'd go for the new slugs and make hash of the working rabs if they tried to interfere."

"If we sedated them, then when they collide with this bacterial soup, I think they'll stick," said Ender. "If they don't drown, they'll dissolve."

"We'll do as little damage as possible," said Sergeant, "but there's no point in leaving the way we came, because the tracks just loop back to the starting point."

Carlotta agreed, but still had no advice about where to go. "The question is, will the helm be located at the hub, where it's equally distant from all the rockets and sensors, so all the controls and connections are the same length? Or at one edge, where it might have viewports?"

"If it has viewports," said Sergeant, "then they'll be as far forward as possible, so that they get maximum protection from the rock."

"But what good are viewports that only look in one direction?" asked Carlotta. "This ship has circular symmetry, there's no belly or back, like our ships have . So . . . more than one control room?"

Sergeant nodded. "And the control rooms are sealed off from each other, so damage to one doesn't cause atmosphere loss in the others."

"The pilots may be hiding from the feral rabs in just one of the control rooms," said Ender.

"So we go all the way forward," said Sergeant, "and then try for control rooms at the perimeter, exactly centered between the standpipes."

"Best view," said Carlotta.

"If the Formic workers ate these slugs, too," said Sergeant, "would there be a delivery system leading there?"

"I don't think so," said Ender. "The Hive Queen stays with the eggs and food comes to her. But the workers catch their meals between shifts."

"The question is, how far forward are we already?" asked Sergeant.

Good question. They had come a long way through the tram tunnel. "Map," said Carlotta.

A three-dimensional model of the ship seemed to stand half a meter away, in front of her visor. Of course there was nothing there at all -- it was just an illusion on the visor itself. The visor could see where she looked and when she made a little popping sound with her lips, it zoomed in. A click with her tongue zoomed out.

"We're actually farther forward than the back of the rock," she said. "The Hive Queen is surrounded by rock above and at the sides. Anything with viewports is going to be aft of here."

"So we passed the helm getting here," said Sergeant, sounding frustrated.

Sergeant led the way to one of the five obvious doors at the perimeter.

"How did you pick this one?" asked Carlotta.

"Eeny meeny," said Sergeant.

At the door, they found the cloud of debris again and a couple of eager rabs. A shot of gas and Carlotta closed the door again. At the next door, it was the same, and this time Sergeant led them through, they closed the door behind them, and fogged their way through to a passage leading aft -- down, the way the corridors were oriented for Formics; to the right, the way they were oriented as they walked along the wall of the low wide tunnel so they could stand upright.

The passage was all afloat with the debris of feral rab life. "What are they finding to eat?" asked Carlotta.

"All the debris is rab body parts," said Ender. "They eat each other."

They were at a level now that Carlotta's map said should be just aft of the intersection of rock and hull. "If there are viewports at all, they could begin at this level."

"Maximum shelter," said Sergeant. "Let's give this level a shot."

They fogged the corridor and began to make the circuit. There were doors but they all led inward, toward the hub.

"Maybe we were wrong and the control room is in the hub," said Carlotta.

"Might as well see," said Sergeant.