The rest of the people came back late that night, trooping down from whatever mountain hideaway they’d been staying in. Lexis started directing the Builders and Diggers to start fortifying our Hive, with plans for a wall and a trench around it. Her eyebrows were missing, but I didn’t want to ask.
All day long there had been a steady trickle of new outcasts. Our Queen seemed to enjoy sitting in the sunshine, welcoming each ‘Mite with her oil. I sniffed them out as they arrived, but the Queen’s serene glow kept the edge off my nerves. Our numbers were growing, but nowhere near enough. Hardly any of the outcasts were Soldiers, and the few that were had obvious physical issues. Some army.
Lexis had a million questions for me.
“So you said that the Builders and Diggers at the old Hive helped you escape?”
I sat back on the ground, securing a Builder mandible to a thick wooden club. I thought back to my flight, with the Queen attached to my belly. “It sure seemed like it. They could smell her for sure.”
“But the Soldiers attacked?”
The memory of angry Soldiers raining down into the water sent a chill down my back. “They sure did.”
“Why?”
I had no answer for that. We had allies within the old Hive. ‘Mites of every class that realized their old Queen was sick. Her weakness was poisoning the whole Hive. Those few allies had orchestrated our escape in the first place. Did I just get lucky, and happen to run into more allies who recognized what we were doing?
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe because they’re inside with the Queen all the time, the Builders and Diggers are feeling the sickness more? Maybe they’re more accepting of a new one?”
A clicking sounded behind me. I turned to see a Soldier outcast, one of the few that had survived our battle. “Builders stupid,” it clicked. “No Hive-is-us.” It meant loyalty, but there was no word for that in the click language. “Follow any Queen.”
Lexis smiled. “That makes sense. With some Earth insects, a new Queen would leave her old Hive with some of the workers and set up a new one somewhere else. Probably with these bugs, some of the worker classes would follow the new Queen and be there to build a new Hive around her. Insect behavior, and insect larval stage with molting on an eight-legged monster that’s technically an arachnid. I wouldn’t have expected it, but here we are.”
She was also full of questions about the oil sharing, which she called a ritual. The Queen had favored her with oil, but like Mo, it didn’t change her scent. She didn’t bond. Wasn’t “us.”
“Gotta be some reason it works on you,” she said, pointing a Digger where she wanted it to work. “We’re all the same people, genetically. Doesn’t make sense that you’d get it and we wouldn’t. But we’ll keep trying. Maybe we have to do it more than once because we haven’t been around them as much.” She eyed one of the younger guys who was sawing the claw off one of our dead Diggers. “Maybe Mo and I are too old for it to work. Who knows?” She was making a list of every difference she could come up with, and theorized that there was something in the old Hive that changed our brain chemistry so we were susceptible.
Later that night, we all crowded together in the common room. We had maybe thirty-five people, and thirty ‘Mites. I was using a bit of Builder mandible to cut a dead ‘Mite’s thick back armor into small, sharp arrowheads.
Mo sat at the front of the group, and in the back, Gil clicked a translation for the ‘Mites of my old Hive that understood the clicking language. Our new Queen was learning fast, and her feelers waved, tasting all the scents of the room.
“So what do we know, and what do we have?” Mo said.
Lexis sighed. “We’ve got decent weapons, but nothing that will take down a Hive full of Soldiers. I’ve been working on an explosive, but I can’t blow up the enemy Hive with our people still in it. We’re not safe here, but we’re not safe anywhere that the ‘Mites can go with us. And we’ll need them if we’re ever going to rescue our people.”
Carl muttered from my left. “We need more Soldiers. All these Diggers are great, but in a fight, we need venom.”
I looked at the arrowhead I was working on and thought about the acid smell when I had stabbed the enemy Soldier’s tail. “Could we maybe take the poison from the dead ones?”
Everyone stared at me and I swallowed, suddenly hot. “I mean, they’ve got, like, a bag of it in their tails, right? Could we get it out and use it? Make some kind of weapon for ourselves?”
A murmur went around the room.
Lexis tapped a fingernail against her teeth in thought. “Noah, ask the Soldiers if they can squeeze it out at will, or if it just happens when they sting something.”
I clicked out the message as best I could. In response, the nearest Soldier raised its tail. In a moment, a drop of acid appeared on the tip of its stinger.
A grin made Lexis stop tapping. “Oh, that’s good. So we milk the Soldiers we do have, and coat our arrows and spears with their neurotoxin. That could change things a lot in a straight fight.”
“A straight fight is not remotely what we want,” Mo said, and all the humans nodded.
“No,” Lexis said, tapping again. “But if we could get all the Soldiers out of the Hive somehow, and get our people out, then next pollen storm when they’re all inside, I could try and blow their Hive up with them inside it.”
She’d explained about her explosive. I was still quite hesitant about the whole concept of fire, and couldn’t really imagine what she was talking about.
“Problem is,” Carl said, “if we get all the Soldiers out, they’ll kill every one of us. Even with poison arrows, we’re nowhere near enough in a fair fight.”
Kinni piped up from the back of the room. “You just said it, though, didn’t you?” We all swiveled to look at her. She grinned and pointed at me. “He knows how to do it. And we’re not fighting fair.”