Chapter 35

Flotsam

Chapter 35: The Hive

“Put me down!”

“Stop squirming!”

“You are making this so much harder!”

“Good!”

“What if we just dropped her?”

I stop fighting and dangle, “Please don’t.”

“Oh thank God.”  

“Where are you taking me?”

“The Hive,” A cyborg honeybee Halley says as if duh.

“Um?” That makes sense since they’re cyborg honeybees, but also I don’t like the sound of ‘The Hive’. When has there ever been an alien hive that was a nice place for humans? And why the fuck are there a bunch of Halley cyborg honeybees? Why do they live way out in the Junk Desert? And most importantly: “What do you want with me?”

“The Queen wants to meet you.”

“Why? Is she going to eat me?”

Several honey-mes giggle, which is a relief. “That’s ridiculous!”

“Why would anyone want to eat you?” 

“Alright, then why?”

“Because she wants to help you.”

“I don’t need help.”

“You were being mind controlled by that crazy cowboy cyclops Halley.”

“And you’re naked in the Junk Desert.”

“And you haven’t got any arms.”

“Okay, okay, okay…”

“And what’s up with the pussy on your face?”

I sigh and glare at the scrap metal rushing past far below, “Long story.”

“It’ll have to wait, ladies, we’re here!”

The honey-mes lower me to the ground, their insectile wings buzzing furiously with the effort. This is where someone with arms would catch themselves to cushion their landing. Since I’m thankfully down a pair, I’m gently flopped to the ground shoulders first, legs second, sprawled flat on my back. I groan and something sharp poke me in the ass. “Shit.”

“Oh don’t be a baby.”

I sit up with the assistance of four little pairs of hands and finally get a good look at my rescuers, all six of these strange little cyborg Halley bees. They’re short, something like three feet tall, but maybe long is the more useful dimension, in which case they’re four feet long from head to stinger. They all have Halley’s familiar face, her nose and mouth, but their eyes are black crystalline globes, like an insect or especially cyberpunk sunglasses. They look like they’re wearing sleek metal helmets, mismatched and oxidized like the Junk Desert, except I’m pretty sure the helmets are built in. Sprouting from the tops of their metal heads are flexible roving antenna, insect in shape but made of something matte black and hightech. The Halley bees each have a slim human torso with small high breasts, a soft stomach, and the pert swell of a trim pussy. Their top limbs are human, slender girlish arms and hands, growing from slender girlish shoulders. Below their hips the honey-mes are pure robot insect. They have four slim robotic legs that end in mechanical pincers and a large thorax of overlapping mismatched steel plates that create the illusion of stripes. Orange-yellow light spills out of narrow gaps between the plates, as if their buggy behinds are filled with fire, and at the very tip of the thorax is a stinger, a wickedly sharp barbed spike long enough to eviscerate a human. On the back of every honey-me is a steel backpack sprouting four gossamer insectile wings of spun polymer, large enough for them to fly. Now that they’ve landed, the wings are retracting into their bodies, giving the cyborg bees a new anty vibe. One of the Halley cyborgs smiles at me, kind and shy, and reaches out her human hand, “Come on. We really want to help you.”

“Okay,” I say, because what choice do I have?

The squadron of honey-mes lead me down a crushed plastic path and towards the cavernous maw of a hollowed out starship nacelle. I spot movement and see hour four more Halley bees clinging to the structure. They’re bigger and more heavily armored than my escort, human-sized and each has a metroid-style blaster arm and a scarier stinger. One of the guardians nods at us and another smiles and waves with their human hand. Then we are through the hidden entrance and walking down a long dimly lit tunnel supported by pentagonal braces. The cyborg Halley’s insectoid claws click loudly on the smooth floor and the orange light leaking from their bodies casts an eerie glow. The tunnel winds down and down and down, deep into the strata of the Junk Desert.

I gasp as we emerge into a huge space built of a lattice of pentagons, like a honeycomb cathedral. The room is shaped like an egg, a five-sided cylinder that gathers to a pointed ceiling and forms a shallow bowl down at the bottom, like the dimensions of a hollowed out industrial beehive. There are openings in the pentagonal wall lattice, doorways to side-chambers or tunnels, and I see cyborg bees, all of them little Halleys, fly out of these openings or climb along the lattice gird like bugs. A bright orange-yellow glow shines down from the ceiling and pulses of orange light race chaotically up the pentagonal lattice like rising embers. “The Queen is waiting for us at the bottom,” one of  the honey-mes informs me. 

I look out over the edge and see it’s a long way down. The tunnel entrance opens into the main Hive chamber at midlevel, but aside from the pentagonal scaffolding I don’t see a way down. I’m not equipped to climb, and even if I was I wouldn't want to risk it. “Where are the stairs?”

The honey-mes giggle and one of them brandishes a spun polymer net with long tow cables. Four of the cyborg bees busy themselves  attaching the cables to their terrifying stingers while the other two guide me onto the net. “We’ll have to lower you like cargo,” a honey-me says apologetically, helping me to sit in the middle.

“Okay?”

“Great!” She says. “Okay ladies!” Polymer wings unfurl and a loud buzzing fills the chamber, and I’m slowly lifted off the ground. The little cyborg bees strain, gripping the cargo lines tightly with their four mechanical legs, and drag me through the air, out into the main chamber, and lower me down in a kind of controlled fall. The net twists in the air, and my view is spinning, ceiling, wall, the under chassis of cyborg bees, wall again, and bees, and wall, but soon I’m dumped bodily onto the floor of The Hive. 

I stand shakily, and find myself in front of a towering metallic insectile creature. “Presenting!” announces a honey-me, “The Queen!”

“Your majesty,” I say and bow, since that’s what you do for royalty, right? And a curtsy would just look stupid without arms or clothes.

The towering insect laughs, “That is ridiculous! Call us Queenie.”

I smile cautiously and study the Hive Queen. Her head is capped with a golden crown-like helmet, which has an elongated dodecahedron shape, with her face replacing some of the lower panes. From the top of her helmet emerge two long flexible antenna, six feet long, wire thin and prehensile. She has huge facetted black glass eyes, ellipsoids that begin in the usual human spot, but escape their sockets and wrap into the helmet one the sides like a mantis. The queen has a human mouth and chin and nose, familiar and identical to all her subjects. Identical to the ones I once had. Queenie is also a Halley.

Below the neck the Queen has a humanoid body covered in soft skin, although she has six elegant arms growing from her shoulders and six heavy tits on her torso, each of which is leaking a glowing orange honey-like milk. Bands of beautiful golden metal ring her neck, her upper arms, her throat, her collar, and she has polymer wings on her back, filigreed and beautiful, but far too small for her to fly. At her waist her hips bloom hugely like she’s wearing an antique ball gown made of steel, but instead of skirts, the bulge is an alien insectile segment. This modular segment is a steel dodecahedron hung with four huge udder-like breasts that ooze glowing orange honey. This udder segment is repeated a dozen times, one after another, like the Queen is a chain of lactating beads, or some sort of steel and titty millipede. Sprouting from Queenie’s lower back, just above where her human torso meets the first udder segment, are six towering mechanical insectile legs, almost arachnid in length and articulation, that hold up and move the front part of her body. The rest of her long segmented body spills across the floor like a rope and I notice a handful of honey-mes clinging to her breasts and nursing, greedily drinking her glowing honey. I watch one Halley bee and see the dull glow in her thorax become brighter with every suckle. I guess Queenie is responsible for refueling her honey-me Subjects.

I follow the chain of Queenie’s udder segments, looking for the end of her body, but instead find her tail sockets into the top of a huge dodecahedron the size of a mobile home. The dodecahedron is perfectly smooth and glows with a bright pulsing orange light. The towering polyhedron is built into the structure of The Hive, linked to the walls by five thick glowing conduits, which climb the structure like pillars and carry the orange light up to the dull sun at the ceiling apex. The dodecahedron is integrated into the pentagonal lattice too, and little pulses of orange energy discharge and race through the grid seemingly at random, outward and upward, the source of the firefly embers. This dodecahedron must be the power plant for the entire structure, and Queenie is connected to it, so she must be built into The Hive too.

I notice that there are five organic growths emerging from the dodecahedron pedestal, great bulging, pulsing, masses of flesh; bulbous toroids protected by thin steel carapaces and decorated with strange industrial components. One of the masses quivers and writhes, and squirts a sticky orange fluid from an obscene sphincter at its tip. Queenie gasps and fidgets in response, and I realize the masses are five huge thorax, insectoid birthing organs, all of them belonging to Queenie. This creature, this Halley, is a cyborg insect brood queen merged with an alien power generator.  “Holy shit.”

Queenie tilts her head and smiles, “We are a sight to behold, yes?” 

“Who are you? What are you?”

“We are… the Monarch of The Hive; the Source, the Archive, the Template, the Mother, the Queen.” She laughs ruefully, “But before the amalgamation, part of us was known as Halley-17.”

“What… happened to you?”

“There was an accident, yes? A collision of an Earthling clone and an… intellectual lifeboat? We are, as we said, an amalgamation, an unplanned joining of two substrates, an imperfect mixture.”

“How did this happen?”

“We were, the part of us that was Halley-17, out in the Junk Desert searching for Halley-Prime.”

I frown, it had taken me months of searching, and run ins with an imprisoned eldritch god, a hesdless spymaster, a gangster matriarch, and a troublesome sexual pet to get pointed in the right direction. “How did you figure out she was here?”

“Halley-17 had attempted to join the Ürnauts.”

“What? Why would she do that?” I thought of the faceless steel cyborg enforcers of Flotsam. As far as I could tell they were all unfeeling, grim, bastards. Why would any Halley want to become that?

Queenie’s antenna writhe delicately, “Why does any sapient join an army? Poverty and a lack of purpose. The Ürnaut have purpose, discipline, collective action.” She moistens her lips, “We find this commendable.”

“Why didnt Halley join then?”

“Part of it was Halley-17’s fear. She did not want to be made into a machine. Made inhuman.” Queenie’s mouth smiles playfully, and inclines her head, “We appreciate the irony of this.”

That’s good. “And the other part?”

“The Ürnaut would not have her. They checked her for… purity perhaps? Compatibility with their Collective, yes? They could detect that Halley-17 was not… entirely human.”

I nod, “Yeah, I learned this too. We’re physically human but have like, mysterious alien souls.”

Queenie tilts her head in acknowledgment, “This was upsetting and confusing for Halley-17, but this was also a clue, was it not? A hint for the puzzle of what had become of the Halley-Queen. Your Prime.”

“Okay, and what did Halley do with this knowledge?”

“She made a deal with an unhappy Ürnaut.”

“Unhappy Ürnaut?”

Queenie’s antenna twitch, “Not every Ürnaut is content with their decision to become machine, some regret their loss of autonomy or miss aspects of their biological humanity. They are part of a Collective but still Individuals.”

“Why not leave? Quit the Ürnauts.”

“Some do, but it is not so simple to leave a Collective.” 

I avoid looking at The Hive or the honey-mes or Queenie’s immobile body, but yeah, she’d know. “What kind of a deal?”

“Halley-17 sold herself as a Jaunt.”

“Jaunt?”

“She rented control of her body to the Ürnaut for two weeks.”

“Jesus. What did  the Ürnaut do?”

Queenie does a six armed shrug and flutters her wings, “Sex? Drugs? Loud music? We have no idea. Halley-17’s mind was suspended for the duration.”

My skin crawls, “But she was okay… after?”

Queenie nods, “Yes, the Ürnaut was trustworthy. Halley-17 had been their Jaunt before, when times were lean.”

“What did Halley get in return for…” lending out her fucking body. “the joy ride?”

“She received two boons. The unhappy Ürnaut exploited their Collective’s planetary surveillance capabilities. They were able to discover a strong energy source in Quarantine Zone 7 that matched Halley-17’s abnormality.”

“Which sent her this way.”

“Yes,” Queenie said, her antenna writhing.

“The second thing?”

“Halley-17 was gifted…” Queenie pauses and gasps, moans with a buzzing overtone. She tilts her head back and clutches her six breasts with her hands and groans. Three little Halley bees buzz past her and land near one of Queenie’s five thorax. The big insectile birthing organ pulses in waves, and the sphincter on the end dilates and spurts. Queenie’s wings beat and she whimpers in pleasure and her thorax contracts and forces something slowly, so slowly, through the stretched ring of the spinchter. Queenie’s human body arches and she let’s out an orgasmic shriek and an egg the size of a bathtub wetly squirts free of the thorax and into the waiting hands of the little Honey-mes. The egg is made of transparent polymer and I can see a fully grown Halley bee curled up inside. Queenie is panting and flush, a euphoric smile on her face. “Sorry… royal duty called…”

“No problem?”

“Where were we?”

“You were telling me the second thing the Ürnaut gave Halley-17.”

“Yes, yes. Halley-17 was also gifted a device that allowed her to track the energy anomaly over short distances. This would allow her to find the exact location of the energy, and hopefully something new about the Halley-Queen, yes?”

I glance around The Hive and watch some famished honey-mes latch onto Queenie’s udders for a refuel. “I’m guessing things did not go according to plan?”

Antenna furl, “Halley-17 was waylaid by bandits, by a tall Halley with an eyepatch and an eye made of madness and power.”

I shiver, “Ms. Fortune.”

“Yes.” Wings buzz angrily and six hands become fists. “Halley-17 managed to escape, to flee, but fell into a crevasse in the scrap, tumbled down and down.” Queenie’s mouth is a grim line. “Halley-17 hurt herself very badly and was buried deep in the Junk, lost in total darkness except for an orange light. She crawled to the light, broken, bleeding, likely dying, and found our other half, the Source.”

Queenie must be describing the dodecahedron. “What was it? The Source?”

“It was an Artifact of a Lost Civilization. An Archive, a Lifeboat, a Record of a People whose world was ending. A way to share their story with the universe. Perhaps a new beginning? It was scattered to the Nexus and like so many things dumped here. Cosmic flotsam, yes? It was lost from living memory until Halley-17 discovered it.”

“What happened?”

“It was, as we said, an accident. Halley-17 was badly hurt, the Source was… delirious and confused by time and abandonment and damage. A Connection was made, involuntarily. A Process was begun, a Coalescing, a Joining, an Amalgamation, yes? We were Created from these Components.”

“And what are you, exactly?”

“We are… a Reinterpretation? A Reenactment, yes?”

“I don’t understand?”

“When the Source and Halley-17 joined there was a Great Confusion. The Source was intended to carry history and restart a lost civilization, but our memory had become corrupted. During the Amalgamation… memories were borrowed from the mind of Halley-17 to repair gaps in the Source. We do not know anything about the Origin Species, what they looked like, their biology, but we understand they were a Collective, and so the idea of a Hive became central to us. Honeybees. A Queen. A Colony. So that is what we became, what we are. You see, yes?”

I nod, “So you are trying to restart an alien civilization that’s been reinterpreted as a bee colony.”

“Yes! Precisely!”

“And because Halley-17’s was the… inspiration for this new Colony, that’s why all the worker bees are little Halley clones?”

Queenie nods enthusiastically and her antenna wiggle, “Yes! She is the Template for our Sweet Girls.”

I look around The Hive, taking in the cavernous structure, the small cyborg Honey-mes flying and climbing and nursing and chatting and yeah, playfully fucking, and Queenie herself, this strange fusion of Halley and insect and robot and powercore. It’s bizarre, certainly, but maybe kind of beautiful too. “Are you happy?”

Queenie licks her human lips and her antenna do something like a whippier eyebrow shrug. “This is not what either of my Components would have chosen, but yes, we are content.” She shifts her long serpentine body and gestures at her Hive. “We have purpose and beautiful daughters, even if this was all an accident, it is one we are committed to making the best of. It is life, yes?” Her antenna droop a bit, “We regret that Halley-17 never learned what became of Prime.”

Yeah, to come so close must fucking suck. “I can only imagine.”

“Perhaps you could find her for us? Report back, yes?”

“Sure, I guess, but I’m…” naked and armless and lost my hoverbike and supplies back in town… “a bit lost?”

“Oh, we can assist with that.” Queenie’s eyes glint. “We know exactly where Prime must be.” 

“What?”

“We have tracked the source of the anomalous energy to a single location. My Sweet Girls cannot enter, they are prevented, yes? But they can convey you there, allow you to search? You would do this?”

Oh my god! A free ride to where Prime disappeared? “Of fucking course!”

Queenie claps her six hands and buzzes her useless wings. “Excellent!” 

“Yeah.” Prime here I fucking come.

***

Chapter 36