Hive 6 - Chapter One

Thanks again to Kris for the commission for Candy Girl (out now on Amazon!) and now back to work on the next entry in The Hive stories. Here's Chapter One:

1.

Red lights flashed and klaxons shrieked. In the ag dome, the sound bounced off the geometric panels that formed the largest of the three domes. Dani wrinkled her nose and covered her ears. Kelly nodded. There was no point trying to speak over the sound.

There were three of them in the garden. Charlotte joined Dani and Kelly in the exodus out of the dome, sealing the metal door shut behind them. Coming out of the humid agricultural biome was a shock when the cool of the passage hit them. Bubble lights flashed overhead, marking the exit. After one of the drills, Kelly asked Colby, the head of security, why some of the lights flashed and others didn’t.

“They lead you out,” Colby said. “They lead you home.” It was an uncharacteristically poetic line to come out of the tall woman with the hard expression, but it had been an uncharacteristic moment with her.

Dani led her team past the passage that would carry them to the administration and personnel pod. They were marching straight ahead, on to the personnel hub. That was where the showers and mess hall were. The big dinner table doubled as a conference table when they had biodome-wide meetings, but those happened less as time went on.

By Kelly’s count, they had been inside for two hundred and eighty-six days counting today. They were there to prove that life inside a dome was possible, and to reveal unintended problems with life in a self-sustaining environment. Kelly might not make it to Mars herself, but her work might be the next step in getting there. She wasn’t the most outgoing, so she was glad when she discovered that the icy security chief had a soft center, and while she wasn’t sure exactly what she would call the relationship between her and Colby, it was more than friendly.

“You don’t think there’s been a real breach, do you?” Charlotte asked.

She was the youngest, a grad student with more tits than brains according to Colby. Kelly found her pleasant enough, but she treated her time in the dome like a box that needed to be ticked for her to take a step toward… what? Some research job? Kelly never thought to ask. The dome, Kelly realized, did not call to the most social of volunteers. You had to be a little cracked to be in the bubble, she thought.

“Good morning, ladies, nice to see our green thumbs looking so ravishing.”

“Morning, Harlen,” Dani said. She moved instinctually between Harlen Jeffries and the woman beside him, Charlotte. “I don’t suppose this was your idea.”

“For all I know there’s a real emergency.” He grinned when he said it, all upper teeth and big forehead. Harlen was shorter than most men and perpetually dressed as if he was on a safari and not sealed inside a test facility of his own making. He had a deep voice and a British accent that immediately suggested wealth. The truth was he was far richer than one could easily conceive. Once he had spent a year inside his dome, he would emerge and announce to the world that Mars was ready for colonization. Charlotte would rotate out, too. The rest of them had another two years on their ticket. It was Mars they were simulating after all, not Cancun.

The double doors of the personnel pod hissed open. Inside the mess hall, Will and Merlin were already at the table. Colby was standing to the side, watching as they entered. Kelly couldn’t suppress a soft smile at the sight of her. She had her hair loose instead of back in a practical ponytail today. She knew Kelly liked her dark hair down. When Colby caught Kelly looking, she turned her attention fast to the table where Merlin saluted the women as they entered.

The klaxon died when Chambers arrived, looking frail inside his ill-fitting jumpsuit. He wasn’t the oldest, Harlen had that honor, but he looked a decade senior to any of them with his scrubby chin and sallow cheeks.

“I’m glad you all have time to run another of your simulations or whatever. Some of us have real work to do out there.”

A few acknowledged the grumbling, but seeing past the silver lining to the dark cloud was Chambers’s nature. He made himself a cup of instant coffee while Will rose and cleared his troat to get the attention of the room.

“Sorry to interrupt everyone, I know these drills aren’t convenient for anybody.”

Chambers chuckled, a wry sound that Will ignored. Will was soft-spoken, with a large, attractive jaw and wispy hair that fell neatly over his scalp. There was a Southern lilt to his voice that Kelly quite liked, and he always seemed to be smiling to himself as if he was always amused by the world around him. Such a wry detachment might imply cynicism, but Will was one of the more earnest, kind men Kelly had encountered in her life. While Harlen might be footing the bill and reaping the glory, Will went about the quieter business of making sure the dome was sustainable for all their well-being. When he spoke, even Chambers listened.

“We’ve been seeing some fluctuations in the temperature near the garden vents. Here in lovely Arizona, that means a fluctuation of about four degrees. On Mars, more like eighty. So we’re sealing the doors and flushing them with air, see what whistles. Shouldn’t take more than a half hour. Everyone can relax for a few. We’ll have you back at your stations shortly. Am I missing anything?”

Will looked over his shoulder at Colby. She shook her head.

“Chatty as ever. That’s it, everyone. Enjoy the coffee and cereal. Save that brown sugar and cinnamon oatmeal, that’s mine.”

Chatter commenced while Merlin excused himself from the table and conferred with Will. Colby moved around the perimeter until she was behind Kelly.

“I’ll be following up with Merlin before my shift is done. After, I thought I’d come by.”

Colby didn’t look at Kelly when she said it, instead focused on the others talking good-naturedly around the table. Kelly was unsure why Colby insisted on this level of secrecy. In fact, Kelly was sure that most of the other inhabitants of the dome were aware of their relationship. Not a relationship, Kelly corrected herself. It was something unnamed. She didn’t dare think of it as mere hook-ups, or a dome fuck buddy. Trying to get Colby to give it a name was like catching smoke in your hand. And so, Kelly nodded in quiet agreement. And then Colby was gone.

The sound found Her across the desert, beckoning to Her. For days and weeks she’d wandered on the fringes of the roads these humans used to criss-cross their land. It was lonely out here, away from the Hive she had known from her creation. When she was created as a Queen by a Queen, she was formed with the knowledge that she could not remain. While she was Hive, she had a duty beyond that of the drones who swarmed around her, jostling for a brush of her hand, beautiful in their subservience.

Leaving the Hive was painful. She felt the disconnection from the others, until the only voices were other Queens who all established Hives of their own. Across the globe these connections spanned, but this was silence compared to the rich world of voices within an active Hive.

Go, the Greater Hive told Her, build your nest. Make your Hive in your image. And one day you will make a Queen of your own, and send her into the world of imperfection to make it whole.

Thanks to the minds swallowed by Her birth Hive, this new Queen knew to follow side roads and to travel at night. Her sleek, dark form was invisible in the darkness. She made Her way west, into the desert. She imagined She might find something suitably private in one of the thickets of homes along the Arizona highway, but even these were crowded and the activity frightened Her. When She was with Hive, she felt no fear. Now, She was alone and scared.

And then came the siren wail, reaching over the dunes and scrabble of dried brush to find Her. The Queen followed until the wailing ceased, and then continued on, toward the source of the sound. At first, the Queen thought she had discovered another Hive, and reached out with Her mind to ask Her sisters.

Not ours, they told Her. Yours.

The Queen looked down into the shallow valley where three domes sat, connected by passageways like misshapen spokes. Smaller pods were positioned around the center dome. The sun reflected bright and hot off the mirrored glass, forcing the Queen to squint as she regarded the buildings. Waiting until night would offer Her more camouflage, but She was young and eager to find a mind to call Her own.

The Queen scurried across the sand to the dome nearest Her. Her eyes closed and for a moment the Queen looked like a silent black statue, the female form perfected and made flawlessly ebon. And then Her eyes opened and she moved to the place on the dome’s exterior where She heard it. Nothing more than a quiet hiss, but the Queen’s senses were sharp, and she moved with an unerring surety to the base of the dome. Her printless fingers moved over the white surface of the material, a fabric not unlike Her own latex stretched tight as a drum over the geometric frame. But when Her hand pressed against it, the tear was revealed. Just big enough for Her sinewy frame to push into.

The sun watched as her torso disappeared, and then her thighs, and then the tips of Her rubbery feet, the toes fused together and smooth. The flap fluttered once more and was still and the Queen explored her new domain.

Chambers scratched his cheek and looked down into the open service shaft. He gathered some spit and launched it into the hole. It landed with an invisible splash in the darkness. He hated going down into the service shafts. He was a grown man, a hell sight more grown than most of these scientist kids, but there was one thing Ron Chambers still feared and it was waiting at the bottom of that ladder.

“Balls,” he hissed and mounted the ladder down.

An LED light affixed to his breast pocket gave off a long throw of light. He had another flashlight clipped to his belt, nestled between a wrench and the radio crackling on his hip. His boots hit the water and he grumbled something unintelligible. He twisted his body both ways, illuminating both directions in the damp shaft. It was the usual nest of sealed conduit and vibrating pipes. With the water recirculation system that kept the mirrors cool churning, there was a constant hum in the service tunnel that saved Chambers the horror of silence. There was nothing worse to him than pure silence.

His father was a scientist. An older man, he’d chosen work over personal life for decades and only got around to the business of fatherhood when he was almost fifty. When he was little, his father would take Ron to some of the amazing research facilities in which he had worked. Chambers loved these trips for a long time. And then his father took him to Bailings, a facility studying the effects of noise pollution or something. He couldn’t remember now why the room existed, but it had. A room built inside the facility, but with no wall touching. An egg nestled inside the larger building. And this egg was perfectly quiet and oh so dark. When you went inside and closed the door, no light or sound at all could reach you.

At first Chambers was amazed by the nothingness. Not before and, thankfully, not since had Chambers heard so little. No whoosh of air, no distant drone of traffic, no refrigerator running. All the sounds one ignores are suddenly quite stark when absent. And then there was the sound of his own heartbeat, very loud without any competing car horn or door slam. His breath, the pulse in his ears, it was so loud.

His father told him later he’d only been there a minute, but when the door opened, Chambers was on the floor, crying and hugging his arms against his body. His father held him, brushed his hair back from his forehead, but Chambers hadn’t forgiven him, and he certainly hadn’t forgotten.

“Chambers? Over.”

He lifted the walkie from his hip. “Yeah, I’m here. Sealing the hatch. Over.”

Chambers reached over his head and pulled the hatch closed. There was a muting of sound, and his heart skipped a beat. Then he focused on the sound of his feet in the water and the rush of air and water moving through the pipes.

“Sealed. Over.” he told Merlin on the other end of the walkie. Fat fuck probably couldn’t get through the hatch, but somehow he was in charge.

“Great. Head northwest and close the doors behind you. Let me know when you hit the substation. Merlin out.”

The walkie went back to his belt and Chambers moved through the standing water to the first rib in the exterior service tunnels. He had to lift his knees high to step through and then close the seal behind him.

“Node two-oh-two. Sealed. Over.”

“Wait right there. Over.”

Merlin was filling the node Chambers left with compressed air, looking for signs of the leak. The fiber panels bulged out while gas filled the node, then sagged.

“Two-oh-two is green. Merlin out.”

Chambers trudged to the next panel and repeated the exchange with Merlin. Then, the next. His mood was starting to lighten as he went and the possibilities of where a tear might be narrowed. Once the job was done, he’d patch the bitch up and maybe head back to his quarters for a few, catch a piece of the Astros game that would be streaming in a couple of hours. That would be just fine.

“Two-oh-seven, green. Merlin out.”

Chamber sealed the hatch at two-oh-eight and called it out to Merlin. He leaned back against the wall beside the sealed door and felt the wall push against him as the node inflated. It was like lying against the chest of a giant, rising and falling with his exhalations. Only two nodes to go and-

His skin grew suddenly cold and his hearing sharpened. A splash from up ahead. He removed the second flashlight from his belt and swept it over the walls of the tube and its neatly-tied capillaries of pipes and wires. Up ahead, the hatch to two-oh-nine was open.

“Somebody there? You’re on government property. This ain’t some farmhouse. We find someone in here, you’re gonna explain why you ruined a billion dollar experiment to the cops. Hello?”

His voice chased down the tunnel, but nothing returned to him. Maybe it had been an overactive imagination after all. His flashlight fell to his side, but in that sweep of light, he saw something dark moving. It looked like a person, but so dark. The flashlight rose fast to find it again, but it was gone. Chambers knew deep down it wasn’t the nothingness that frightened him most about that dark room from his youth. He knew it as the water shifted around him. No, what Ron Chambers feared most as a child in that locked-up room was that in all that silence he would realize he wasn’t alone.

The thing rose from the water in a pillar of darkness. Black, shining eyes blinked open, and then it was on him. Chambers would never be alone again.

“Did they find the breach?”

“No, not yet. There are only a few nodes left. They’ll find it before any coyotes get inside.”

Kelly wrinkled her nose. “You don’t think a coyote could really get in here, do you?”

Colby rolled onto her side so she could look Kelly in the eye. She wore a familiar and exasperated smile. “Even if it did, it would turn around and go back out. No way into the dome without thumbs, gorgeous.”

Colby leaned further and pressed her lips to Kelly’s. Where Colby was long and lean, Kelly was shorter, curvier. Colby’s narrow thigh rising between hers made Kelly whimper. The kiss got deeper, the sort of kiss that preceded a second round of lovemaking. Rare for Colby, but not unheard-of. What was more expected was the moment when Colby eased her away by the shoulders, a literal metaphor for keeping her distance.

“I was thinking about heading to San Francisco after the job is up,” Kelly said. “I know the expenses are outrageous, but one thing isolation studies give you is some disposable cash, and-“

“Can we talk about this later?” That meant not at all. Colby’s face was set, her prominent jaw tight.

“Sure,” Kelly said. She curled back into Colby’s arms, quiet for fear of another of her lover’s swift rejections. But Colby wrapped her arms around Kelly and she closed her eyes, feeling safe in Colby’s embrace while she could.