We sat in the glow of sunset, listening to the waves crash onto the shore. Our Queen perched on the highest rock, antenna sweeping the air. She loved the salty breeze.
Kinni and Lexis trudged up from the beach, each carrying a basket of shellfish. Kinni brought the basket to her dad, who sat next to me in the orange glow.
Mo hadn’t fared well in the battle. His right arm caught a stinger full on, and the wound festered. Now there was just a stump where a Builder had nipped the dying arm clean off, crushing the blood vessels with its huge mandibles and saving Mo’s life.
Sunshine had also lost a leg when the Soldiers attacked him at the transport. But Lexis had made a wooden replacement, strapping it onto the remnant. Sunshine would limp forever, but would never want for anything. He was the hero of the battle. I grinned, imagining how we must have looked as I rode Sunshine through the battlefield, the dead Queen’s head raised like a beacon.
“Cooked or raw?” Lexis asked, jiggling the shellfish in the basket.
“Cooked.” Chen answered for all of us.
He had led the people right up to meet our sentries in the mountain pass, just as I knew he would. When the fight ended and our Queen took over the Hive, we sent the least-damaged of our people up to join them. They had been cold and terrified, but in the weeks since the big Hive became our home again, they had settled into their new lives. Some of the women were having a hard time with the real story of our history on the planet, and Kinni rolled her eyes at their insistence that we were all just waiting to get some kind of magical wings. Now the ‘Mites that used to be their Masters and our enemies were enemies no longer.
They were hers. Ours. Mine.
Most of the humans didn’t live inside the giant mound. Along with the ‘Mites, we had started building our own, individual homes, scattered around the ridge. The Hive was becoming a city. None of us wanted to live inside the place that had been our prison.
Our Queen didn’t want to, either.
Lexis was starting to sort out the normal biology of these insects. She had already guessed some of it. When a Queen egg was laid, it was supposed to be allowed to hatch. If the existing Queen was healthy, the new one would leave the Hive with a group of Diggers and Builders, and go off to found her own Hive far from the old one. Now we knew that if the old Queen was ailing, the new Queen would stay in the original Hive, kill the old Queen, and eat her head, taking over the Hive and all the ‘Mites that lived in it. In this Hive, that hadn’t happened for far too long.
We trooped down to gather around an open fire on the beach. Most of the ‘Mites stayed away from the fire, retiring to their normal places in the dark tunnels. But the ones that had fought with us, that had come to serve our Queen in the distant, ruined mound, they stayed out with all the humans.
The last of the sun dipped below the horizon, and stars began to twinkle as darkness overcame the sky. We sat around the fire, cooking our evening meal.
Lexis had figured it out.
In the weeks after the battle, she combed every inch of the Hive, searching for whatever it was that made the humans of the Hive able to bond with the Queen through her oil. She tried the fungus that grew in the dark gardens underground, but it didn’t work. She drank the water that flowed in our river, but it was the same water that came down from the high mountain peaks and coursed under the whole area. I took her into all the dark chambers, and she breathed deeply, suspecting some spore in the air here.
In the end, it was the waterbugs.
“You eat them raw?” She’d been aghast. “They’ve got to be full of parasites. Who knows what all. You have to cook them through.”
I demonstrated, crushing one of the wiggling bugs with a rock, and scraping out the translucent, jelly meat inside. “You just slurp it down. They’re really good.” I nodded at Kinni. “They’re her absolute favorite.”
Kinni pretend-gagged. “They’re horrible.”
Lexis held her nose and took a bite. “Disgusting.” She gagged, but held it down. Her brow furrowed and she peered at Kinni.
“You’ve eaten these things raw?”
A shrug from Kinni. “He dared me.”
“When?”
I thought about it. “After you all came back down the mountain. Before we found all the weapons in the transport.”
We had carried the rest up and cooked them in the fire. Even I had to admit they were a lot better when cooked. Lexis touched the oil from the Queen’s head as she did every night, making notes in her little book about what she’d done that day.
Nothing happened for three days. But on the morning of the fourth day, after Lexis had received the oil again, she woke me from a sound sleep.
“Noah! Do you smell that? It’s blue!”
I grinned. “Yes, it’s blue. Like the sea on a bright day. The Queen is happy this morning.”
She thought it must be a parasite. Something that incubated in the waterbugs, and lived in the brains of the ‘Mites, and in us. Something that responded to the pheromones in the Queen’s oil and changed our brain chemistry, bonding us together.
“It makes perfect sense. They’re blind. Smell is everything to them. It’s how they communicate, and how she binds us all into one family, one mind.” She paused, realizing what she said. “Us. I’m part of it now. I’m part of the Hive.”
I had laughed. “We’re all part of the Hive.”
***
We ate our dinner, watching the sky fade from purple to black. The fire shot sparks up to the stars.
Along with our Diggers, we were planting some of the seeds we’d found in the transports. If we were lucky, we’d soon have plants growing that had come from a distant planet. Where we’d come from.
“Show me again where Earth was?” I asked Mo.
He pointed into the eastern sky. “It was there.” His finger traced a long, serpentine row of stars. “The one at the end.” It was dim in the cloudy sky.
I took a pile of raw shellfish to the Queen. She received them graciously, emitting a warm scent of appreciation. I wished humans had the ability to share our feelings through our scents the way our Hivemate ‘Mites could. We would always need the clicking language to help them understand us, and our own language to communicate with each other. But everyone in the Hive knew our Queen’s devotion to us.
She was as different from the old Yellow Queen as the ocean was from the moons. I liked to think the fact that she had shared blood with me in her larval form somehow let her see humans as part of her Hive, as valued as ‘Mites. She still didn’t speak a lot of the clicking language, but she didn’t have to. Her scent told us everything we needed to know about her wants and moods, and every human and ‘Mite in the Hive would give their life to protect her. Our Queen was serene in the starlight, confident and benevolent. I breathed in her scent and thought about the story the women of the Hive had told. Over the years, the real tale of Horizon Beta’s flight from another planet was twisted and warped. The women believed that when we were worthy, we would get wings. As I reveled in the closeness of my Hive, I realized they were right. In the safety of my family, I was a winged dragonfly, soaring over a perfect blue ocean.
The old Hive’s King sat uneasily next to the Queen. The only true male in the Hive, he would soon be the father of all the eggs our Queen would lay. He hated being out in the open air, but she refused to accompany him down into the dark chamber where her predecessor had lived. No deep tunnels for the Queen that had been hatched in sunlight. He’d have to get used to it.
And no more seals. In my flight from this Hive that seemed a hundred years ago, I’d stumbled on the answer. Our vats of algae, brought down from the stars, were a perfect nourishment for ‘Mite eggs and larvae. We’d started making large clay vessels so that when the Queen was ready to lay eggs, each one could have its own supply.
Kinni helped her dad open a shell, scooping out the hot meat. She settled down next to him and looked up toward the wash of stars overhead. “I wonder if they would have sent us here if they’d known.”
I looked around at the faces reflected in the firelight. Humans and insects, one Hive together, content and safe on a sandy beach.
“Probably not,” I said. “But of all those stars they could have picked, they found us the perfect place. I think we’re going to make it just fine.”
I lay back on the warm sand, smelling the salt breeze and the contentment of my Hive.
The people of the Horizon Beta were home.