The Golden Queen

Chapter 11

That night, Gallen could not sleep. All night long he lay in a fever, waking in a sweat. For a time he worried about his health, but then he lay back calmly, realizing that the mantle had begun its instruction. He had been dreaming, and the dreams were memories of things that had happened to Veriasse.

He dreamed first of Fale. He had been escorting Semarritte on this world when the dronon warships fell from the sky in dark clouds. The dronon came in vast numbers, sealing off Guianne so that its residents were trapped in tunnels beneath the ocean. Guardians tried to fend them off, but the dronon were too numerous; like dark grains of sand they swept over the land.

Veriasse and Semarritte had become trapped here in Semarritte’s judgment hall. Dronon by the hundreds of thousands had surrounded the building, a black wave of warriors clambering over one another’s bodies, until at last they cleared a path so that and her Lord Escort could enter.

In his dream, Gallen struggled fiercely with the Lord Escort-landing blows on the beast’s chitinous body, ripping off one of its feelers, smashing eyes with a leaping kick. But in time he wearied, and the Lord Escort lashed forward a wing-an unprecedented move that would have availed the creature nothing in a battle with one of its own kind. But the dronon’s wing slashed through Veriasse’s belly like a saber, and suddenly he was reeling away from the battle, his entrails spilling across the floor.

The Lord Escort then rattled its wings in a thunderous roar, leapt into the air, and in one swift kick disemboweled Semarritte while Veriasse watched. The dronon vanquishers who encircled the room raised a rattling howl of congratulations. Then the Lord Escort cried to his people that Tlitkani of the dronon had become the new Lord of the Swarm, queen over all peoples both human and dronon.

Afterward, a dronon vanquisher rushed forward with an incendiary rifle, firing into Semarritte’s body. Smoke and the scent of chemical fire rose through the building. Veriasse pulled his intestines in as the world faded to gray, pinching the skin closed, unsure whether the nanodocs in his body could heal such a massive wound.

In the dream, Gallen could not feel Veriasse’s pain. He could discern the man’s thoughts, observe his actions. But the dream carried no emotional weight.

Gallen woke and thought long about the dream, wondered if there were any way that Veriasse could have defeated the dronon, and suddenly images of the planet Dronon filled his mind. He saw a brown world filled with odd plants, where insects had developed interior lungs that allowed them to grow in size far beyond anything on Earth. Dronon was a vast world, and it orbited its sun once each four Earth years. Its axis tilted at a forty-two degree angle, with the result that each year, each polar icecap would melt. During a summer, one hemisphere would bathe in perpetual daylight while the other suffered perpetual night.

As a result, the dronon were forced to migrate over vast continents with each changing season, foraging for shrublike fungi. Each hive continually competed with others for food and space, for the finest nesting sites, for water that became scarce during the dry seasons. The order of their universe was clear: expand your territory or die.

In each hive, as the first few females hatched, they would battle among themselves, fighting in order to remove the exterior ovaries from one another. The female who managed to keep her ovaries established her dominance as a future queen, and soon the others recognized her authority as a princess. She would bide her time until a Lord Escort flew in from another hive, one who would kill the reigning Lord Escort and queen, making the princess the new queen of the hive.

Those poor females who were spayed could never form the secondary sexual characteristics of a queen. They grew only to a small size, and their color remained as white as that of any grublike larvae. Their boundless energy was channeled into work, rather than procreation, and they became the most menial servants of the hive.

Among the males, a similar battle would take place, but only after the larvae had exited their cocoons as adults. Adult male vanquishers, with their flashing wings and huge battle arms, engaged in ritual combat, seeking to remove one another’s testicles, until only six males remained. These six princes would then fly to new hives, hoping to win their own kingdoms, while the neutered vanquishers remained with their hive.

A third sex often hatched without functioning sexual organs-neither male nor female. These had deformed wings and less energy than workers, but often had facile minds, suitable for solving problems. These become the technicians of the hive, the architects, counselors, and artists.

Over the eons, the queens had evolved to become more and more virile-laying more eggs, living longer lives. Only the strongest survived, and it was in the interest of the queens to root out the weak, destroy competing hives.

But among the queens, one great lady ruled each swarm. She could not begin her rule until she reached the age of one hundred and fifty dronon years. At that point, her exoskeleton would change color, bleaching from its pale wheat to a beautiful gold. If the queen survived to this age without injuries-broken appendages or a cracked exoskeleton-her offspring would gather near, carried into ecstasy at the sight of a new Golden Queen.

The Lord Escort of the hive, stricken with adoration, would pilgrimage with his Golden across the continents, seeking out the reigning Golden Queen.

The Lord Escorts for each Golden would then battle for the right to rule a swarm of one thousand hives. When one of the escorts was killed, his foe would attack the opposing queen and maim her, damaging her so that she would lose the adoration of hives. Such a queen was often allowed to cower back to her own hive and continue laying eggs until she died.

But the Lord Escort and the vanquishing Golden Queen became Lords of the Swarm. They would choreograph the great works of the hives-the migration across the vast plains of Dronon and through the reaches of space; they would choreograph battles with legions of the vanquishers as they sought to enlarge the swarm’s territory.

Gallen lay in a half sleep, and the mantle displayed battles that had been filmed between Lord Escorts. Veriasse had made a great study of the battles-had noted the various fighting stances, attack forms, the use of feelers, mandibles, serrated battle arms, and the clawed legs as weapons. He had performed autopsies on dead dronon vanquishers-had determined how much force was necessary to crush their faceted eyes, to pull off the hooked claw of a forearm, to rip out a feeler, to pry off a head. He had measured the thickness of their chitinous exoskeletons, searching for thin spots.

The dronon had few weaknesses. Their exoskeletons offered superb protection for the head, belly, and back. They were most vulnerable on the hind legs, where their respiratory orifices weakened the hip, but reaching those legs was a task-the dronon could protect themselves well from a frontal assault, and with the dronon’s flight and leaping capabilities, it was nearly impossible for a human to attack from behind.

Gallen lay for a long time, thinking about how one could engage a dronon in hand-to-hand combat with the hopes of winning. Sometimes, he would doze and wake to find himself sleepwalking, performing arcane exercises, stretching muscles he did not know that he had, leaping and kicking at imaginary foes in the quiet halls of the temple.

In one such session, Maggie came to him, half asleep herself. “What are you doing up so late?”

“I can’t sleep,” Gallen said. “Veriasse said this damned mantle would teach me when things were quiet, but it’s kept me up all night.”

Maggie simply said, “Have you tried talking to it? Just tell it to let you rest for the night.

Gallen gave the command, and immediately the mantle relinquished its lessons. He went back to bed, found himself compelled to lie next to Maggie, recognized that the mantle was whispering for him to lie beside her. “Why?” he wondered, and the answer flooded into his mind. You are a Lord Protector now. You must have someone to protect.

Over the next few days, Orick became inseparable from Everynne. He would disappear into his room for a few moments, and then while Everynne was speaking in a secret meeting with the masked Lords of Fale, she would suddenly turn and find him lying on the floor near her foot like some great hairy dog.

She did not mind his attentions. Few men could best a vanquisher in single battle, and she did not forget that the bear had already saved her life once. More than that, she found his presence somehow morally calming. Everynne was acutely conscious of the fact that she had been born to lead, that every facet of her appearance, even the chemical combination of her pheromones, had been designed to make her appealing to other humans.

From childhood she had been keenly aware of how easily she could manipulate people through a thousand seemingly insignificant things-by sitting when making a request of a man, she could appear more helpless and in greater need. By standing with head erect and back straight, she could more easily seem in control of any situation. By holding eye contact and softly making requests when someone hesitated to give allegiance, she could force the person to make a choice. By taking great care of her clothing and her appearance, she could make herself more desirable to men. By emphasizing the things she held in common with other women, she could convince a woman that they were sisters rather than competitors. The list was endless, and Everynne knew that her very ability to learn the art of manipulation was bred into her. Billions of people had none of her talent and as a result were born destined to become socially inept.

Orick, by not being human, should have been immune to her charms. Yet he stayed at her side, seemingly for his own purposes. Everynne wondered at his motives. Perhaps it was only the crowd. In the past two days, each of the Lords of Fale had come to her, detailing some startling atrocity committed by the dronon. A merchant told of vast assets the dronon had seized for war efforts, so that now he was poor. A mother told of a son who had disappeared. A builder told of a mass grave he’d discovered, filled with the corpses of handicapped children, or “defectives,” as the dronon called them. The tales of horror were far-reaching and personal, and Orick listened in startled silence, then would listen even more keenly as the lords told of their fondness for Everynne’s mother, told how they dreamed of her return. And though Everynne knew that her mother had never been a perfect governor, she had truly sought to be a Servant of All. There had been peace in the land, honest strivings for justice. But the dronon did not value peace or justice. Their biological imperative told them to vanquish all, then reap the spoils. To them, human lives were simply merchandise for the taking.

And if the tales that Orick heard were his motive for staying by her side, then she worried what he would think when he discovered her inadequacies.

On their first day in Guianne, Everynne collected her confidantes, and together they had devised a plan to escape from Fale. The dronon had been systematically sealing off the planet. Guards were at every gate to the Maze of Worlds, and warships were being diverted to block the skies above.

Right now, the beleaguered vanquishers were spread too thin. They could hinder Everynne from escaping, but they lacked the manpower to effectively search for her. But once their warships arrived, they would form a picket, reinforce the troops, and begin searching Fale in earnest. Everynne had to leave now.

In order to escape, Veriasse had designed a system of thrusts and parries that included three attacks: first, they would feint at another gate, forcing the dronon to send for reinforcements. Everynne’s forces would then attempt to hijack a starship. If the starship made it to hyperspace, the dronon would think she had escaped the planet. If it was destroyed, the dronon would believe she had died in the attack. In either case, they would be off their guard.

While the dronon had their support drawn off and were reeling from the belief that Everynne was on a spaceship, her forces would begin an aerial assault against the gate that led to Cyannesse. If that attack succeeded as it should, Everynne could leave.

Now, the morning of the assault, Veriasse drove up the highway in an ancient hoverbus. It was an old model-a long aluminum cab suitable for ten people, with flaring wings where the exhaust vented.

Beneath them, the highway rolled flat and smooth. For the moment, they simply looked like tourists, floating along the highway. Everynne glanced at her chronometer. It was nine in the morning, and three hundred kilometers to the south, the Lords of Fale had mobilized their workers in a ground assault at the gate to Bilung. The gate served well as a diversion, being close both to the city of Guianne and to the gate to Cyannesse.

Everynne closed her eyes and let her mantle connect to Lord Shunn’s personal intelligence via telelink. She watched his attack progress-silver fliers swept through the sky in a wedge, shooting low over the forest toward the gate, dropping a barrage of explosives along with canisters of chlorine gas, which was particularly toxic to dronon. As soon as the fireballs began erupting over the treetops, Lord Shunn’s attack force moved in.

Under cover of the trees, long-range laser weapons were nearly useless, so Shunn’s forces all wielded only incendiary rifles. No human could bear the weight of the armor needed to ward off an incendiary blast, so Shunn’s men were protected only by gas masks and lightweight heat-resistant combat fatigues. The men ran forward in loose formation, moving cautiously. Since the battle was meant only as a diversion, they were not in a hurry to engage the vanquishers.

Lord Shunn himself flew in behind on his hovercar, with its hood down, observing the battle. He glided through the trees, and only the distant smell of smoke signified that a battle had been launched. For fifteen minutes, Everynne watched the battle progress, until Lord Shunn’s troops met several dozen vanquishers. Suddenly the woods filled with fire as incendiary rifles began discharging. Flaming balls of sulfurous white whipped through the air with incredible speed.

She watched a civilian try to dodge behind a tree in hopes of eluding a ball that flamed toward him, growing in size. The chemical charge from the rifle splattered across the tree and across the man’s arm, erupted into flames hotter than the sun. He screamed and held out his arm, spinning once, kicking up detritus from the forest floor. In less than a second, he succumbed to the heat and lay burning.

The sight horrified Everynne to the core of her being. As a Tharrin, she was bred to be empathic. She detested violence. Somehow, knowing that Lord Shunn and his workers had volunteered to die in the woods this day made Everynne feel ashamed, weak. She only wanted the killing to stop, everywhere, but she was forced into a deadly contest and could not escape.

Suddenly on the highway ahead of Everynne, sirens began blaring as army hovertrucks approached. Veriasse pulled his own old bus off the highway to let them pass. Everynne disengaged the telepresence link and looked up. Three truckloads of vanquishers were heading south at full speed, perhaps sixty green-skinned giants. Ahead of her, Veriasse relaxed in his seat for a moment, breathed easier. The soldiers could only have come from the Cyannesse gate. Their ruse was working.

Veriasse let the soldiers pass, gunned the throttle. Everynne engaged her telepresence again, saw how the battle was progressing.

For four more minutes, the battle continued. Suddenly, far to the south, a spaceship lifted over the horizon, a distant white sphere that floated higher and higher into the morning sky. Lady Frebane began broadcasting urgent messages to Shunn and his troops. “My lord,” she called, “the lady’s ship is away! Repeat, the mission has succeeded. The lady’s ship is away. Break off your attack!”

Lady Frebane continued broadcasting for two minutes. The dronon vanquishers sent low-altitude fliers to intercept the ship, but they did not make it in time. Lady Frebane jumped into hyperspace before the fliers got into range, and Everynne was filled with a deep sense of regret. If she’d been on that ship, she would have made her escape already. But Veriasse had insisted that the ship was too dangerous, too large a target. He had opted for the double feint. The real battle lay ahead.

“We’re about sixty seconds from our gate,” Veriasse warned. “Gallen-” he began to say, but the young man was already playing his part. He lowered the hood to the hovercraft and got out his incendiary rifle, flipped it on so that its indicator glowed red.

For a moment, as Gallen’s black robes flapped, Everynne caught glimpses of the silver bangles of his personal intelligence, the lavender of his mask, and Gallen reminded her of Veriasse. But he turned and she caught the profile of his face, and the illusion dissipated. Everynne gazed across the desert. Three kilometers north of the gate was a line of low yellow hills. At any moment, three phalanxes of fliers would stream over the hills at four thousand kilometers per hour. The vanquishers would have less than three seconds to take cover.

Veriasse focused on the gate. The hoverbus hummed, bouncing as it hit small thermals. In the distance, Everynne spotted a flash of sunlight reflecting from the flier’s windshields, and she began counting: three, two … one. The saucer-shaped fliers were in a tight V, fifteen of them; suddenly the formation split and the fliers veered east and west. Antiaircraft fire erupted from the vanquishers’ outpost at the gate. Everynne watched gray pellets rain from the fliers, beacons designed to fool intelligent missiles.

Then the incendiary bombs landed. They were so small that Everynne did not see them drop. Instead, the ground around the gate erupted into a wall of flame that leapt thirty meters into the air. Everynne found it hard to believe that anyone or anything could survive that inferno, but Veriasse had insisted that the fliers make a second pass, and then a third.

By now, their hoverbus had reached the turn where the highway veered west, but Veriasse simply kept his northern course, slowing dramatically; the hover bus leapt from the shoulder of the highway.

The engines roared, straining as they raced down a small ravine, throwing up clouds of dust. The second wave of fliers was sweeping over the hills now, sooner than Everynne had anticipated, and they dropped a barrage of conventional explosives. Dust and burning bodies pitched into the air, twisting in a great whirlwind. Smoke and fire obscured the nearly indestructible gate, but Everynne pulled out her key and pressed the open sequence. The light under the arch shimmered.

Already the flames from the incendiary bombs were beginning to die. The third and final phalanx of fliers closed over the hills, spraying out their ordnance, an oily black substance that civilians referred to as “Black Fog.” It had no toxic properties, but absorbed light so completely that in seconds the sky turned black.

A black cloud boiled toward them, and Veriasse stared in concentration as they hit the wall of darkness. Everynne felt as if her eyes had been painted over. At first she could see no light at all, yet they were hurtling toward the gate; she feared that Veriasse would crash into a post.

Some vanquishers must have heard their hoverbus, for two balls of white fire whizzed over Everynne’s head. She screamed and ducked. Gallen returned fire at the unseen targets. Veriasse shouted, “I can’t see the gate!”

Gallen fired his incendiary rifle; a fireball of actinic light spattered one gate post, only twenty yards ahead. Veriasse hit the reverse thrusters, shouting, “Run for it.”

Everynne leapt from the hovercar. It was so dark, she could see only the fiery light above the gate. Orick tried to leap out of the hovercar but slipped. He yelled, “Damn!”

Everynne turned but could not see the bear. Maggie, Gallen, and Veriasse could be detected only by the faint shimmering of their masks; they floated above the ground like wraiths. Maggie grabbed Everynne’s hand, urging her to hurry forward, but they tripped over the body of an ogre. Everynne was just struggling up when the creature grabbed her ankle. She screamed and simultaneously the thing shouted weakly, “Vanquishers to me!”

“Gallen, help!” Maggie cried.

Everynne tried to kick free, but the ogre held her tight. Orick, hidden by the inky blackness, roared and pounced on the creature. The vanquisher let go, and Everynne heard more than saw the ensuing scuffle.

Suddenly the vanquishers surrounded them, too close to use incendiary rifles, faintly visible in the light from the arch. Gallen and Veriasse pulled out their swords and began swinging, but the vanquishers were armored. By the time Veriasse and Gallen brought one down, three more had taken its place.

Everynne had no choice. She reached into her pocket, pulled out a ball of glowing light. “Stop!” She stood defiant, holding the ball high, though her heart was faint.

“You vanquishers, do you see this?” she asked. “You know what it is?”

“A Terror,” one vanquisher said, a sergeant in heavy armor.

“If you don’t surrender now,” Everynne said, “I’ll destroy this world. My mantle is linked to eighty-four other Terrors spread across the galaxy, including one on Dronon itself. I’ve already initiated the arming sequence. They will begin detonating in three minutes, unless you surrender now! You will not have time to issue a warning. You will all die!”

Everynne gasped for breath. She did not know if the vanquishers would fall for her ruse. She was a Tharrin, dedicated to peace. All her training, all the engineering her ancestors had built into her, screamed that even to risk destroying a world was wrong. Yet she held a Terror aloft, hoping the dronon would treat her threat seriously.

From the darkness, a dronon limped forward. The fire had burned its wings, and it dragged one hind leg. A familiar clicking began as mouthfingers tapped its voice drum. “I am broadcasting your demands to Lord Annitkit, our supervisor on this world. He will contact the Golden Queen, Tlitkani, and learn her will in this matter. It will take several hours to learn her reply.”

“You don’t have that long,” Everynne said. “We’re leaving.” She turned to the others. “Get through the gate, now!”

She began inching backward through the crowd of vanquishers, moving carefully. It might be that Lord Annitkit would order them to kill her, risk losing eighty worlds in order to keep the thousands they had gained. But Everynne had to hope that he would take her threat seriously. The dronon were often as paranoid as they were violent, but they loved their queen. She did not know of a dronon who would risk the chance that his queen would be killed.

The dronon vanquisher rushed forward, and a segmented hand erupted from the hidden compartment in its battle arm, grasping her arm, pinning Everynne to the spot.

“I do not believe you will detonate the Terror,” the dronon said. “A Tharrin would not destroy a world.”

“Can you be so certain?” Veriasse shouted from behind the dronon. “Others of our people have detonated Terrors on your worlds. My mantle, too, has the access codes for these weapons, and I am not a Tharrin. Believe me, if you do not let us go, we will kill your precious Golden Queen.”

The dronon hesitated. He seemed to be stalling as he waited for further orders. “If you have a Terror on Dronon, why have you not used it? I do not believe you have another Terror.”

Veriasse strode forward, put his face close to the vanquisher’s, and looked into its eye cluster. “Perhaps we only take our orders from a higher source,” he whispered threateningly. “Perhaps we do not completely comprehend their plans for your queen. I only know that I am not free to contravene those orders. Friend, take your hand off the woman’s arm. If she drops the Terror, it could break open. We wouldn’t want any accidents.…”

The dronon held Everynne’s hand. It had a tiny metal device clipped to one of its feelers, and the device buzzed. The dronon addressed Veriasse and Everynne simultaneously.

“Lord Annitkit demands your word of honor that if we release you, you will relinquish your attack on Dronon!”

“Once I pass through the gate, I will initiate the disarming sequence. I will spare your queen, for now,” Veriasse said.

The dronon began walking, wrenched Everynne toward the gate. Maggie and Orick leapt through ahead of her, but Gallen and Veriasse stood on each side of the gate. The chemical fire of the incendiary rifle burned white across the arch. With their dark robes, weapons drawn and faces masked, Gallen and Veriasse looked like doormen to some hell.

They each took one of her hands. Together they leapt into the light.