LIGHTNOVELONLINE They Answered The Call-Chapter Ten/Hive mother
Outskirts of the V’rn home system, 3.7 billion miles from the sun
Command Chamber of Insectoid Scoutship, 2174 A.D.
The command drone was releasing pheromones and issuing orders with her arms to the worker drones when she became aware of a presence creeping around the edges of her mind. She suddenly felt a heightened sense of fear as she continued issuing orders, trying not to instinctively fight against the intrusion as it pushed further into her mind. Doing so would be punished by the invader with her death, and she did not wish to die.
As the infiltration penetrated deeper into her consciousness, she resigned herself to her fate and, with great sadness, started to feel herself fade away as the powerful mind pushed her aside and subsumed her uniqueness.
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The Hive-mother finished her takeover of the command drone and surveyed the chamber with eyes that were not her own as she felt the lingering sadness of the command drone and brutally suppressed it.
This one might need to be culled, she thought to herself before she went about absorbing all the information being displayed on the consoles as the worker drones kept track of her newest weapons hurtling into the system towards their assigned targets.
It took many lunar months for all the proper preparations to fall into place for the renewed assault on the animal core worlds. Her daughters worked tirelessly to fulfill her requests, and three of them exceeded all her expectations.
One created the self-sustaining movers, another ingeniously created a chemical compound coating that absorbed the detection frequencies of the animal sensor network, and the third one plotted out the courses, speeds, and gravitational effects on the thousands of asteroids to ensure that they hit all the targets at the same time.
A fleeting thought of the high cost of the efforts that burned up the brains of almost a billion worker drones came to her, and she paused for an infinitesimal amount of time, mourning them. She then angrily suppressed her momentary weakness and focused on the consoles. They were just worker drones, and she will replace them.
She specifically selected this system for the assault because of the massive amount of infrastructure within it and the population density of the inhabitants. These disgusting animals were prolific breeders, and the six hundred billion inhabitants produced a significant percentage of the military and economic output of the animal empire.
She also relished the fact that they seemed to be much larger kin of the vole-pests that were a constant scourge in her Hives. Despite her best extermination attempts, they continued to thrive, spreading disease and devouring the Hive food supplies. She had a moment of levity within herself as she imagined tiny asteroids obliterating their hidden nests in the Hives.
The light from the impacts of the thousands of asteroids 5.5 hours ago was expected to reach her position soon, and she sent her thoughts out to the daughter-queens that made this possible.
She felt their thoughts respond and acknowledge her invitation. After a few moments, three other worker drones in the chamber suddenly stiffened, stopping midway through whatever functions they were performing. All three turned towards her and bowed to her before moving to the command dais to take their places beside her.
The daughter-drones all looked at her, their eyes filled with powerful intelligence as they bowed to her once more. She felt their thoughts in her mind as they all reveled in the coming destruction and the vengeance they were about to exact for the death of their sister-queen.
One daughter-queen seemed more hesitant and reserved, and she momentarily blocked out the other two as she sent her thoughts to the aberrant daughter-queen.
The daughter-queen was silent and looked away from her. She felt an anger that she had never felt towards a daughter-queen before, and she barely managed to reign in the impulse to tear the daughter-drone body in half.
She felt her daughter’s mind reel under the irresistible onslaught of her command and waited impatiently for her to recover. The two other daughter-drones felt the powerful thought even through the block she put on their minds, and they looked at her and their sister-drone silently, fearfully backing away a few paces.
All the other worker drones in the chamber lost consciousness from the psychic assault of their minds and had fallen to the floor in front of their stations, dead before they hit the ground.
Her errant daughter-queen finally regained her composure and responded to her.
She was slightly mollified by the answer, though she thought she detected a wrongness in the answer she could not remember ever experiencing before. Slightly disgusted by the weakness her daughter-queen seemed to have, she decided to teach her a lesson on how to be a strong queen.
The daughter-drone bowed towards her and remained bent in that position.
Satisfied by the answer, she reached out with a tarsal claw and touched the daughter-drone’s head, indicating that she was to resume her place at her side. The daughter-drone lifted her head and moved to her place by the Dais, and the other two daughter-drones did the same, seeing that the conflict was resolved.
An alarm went off, and she looked at the consoles and saw that the light from the assault was almost upon them. She got up and pressed several commands on the sensor consoles, oblivious to the worker drone bodies lying on the floor beneath her.
A moment later, multiple screens came alive on the forward wall of the bulkhead in front of her, and she marveled at the sheer destruction she was witnessing.
Four gargantuan animal shipyards and over eighty orbital facilities disintegrated in massive explosions when the asteroids smashed into them. Hundreds of domed animal cities on the outer planets and moons disappeared in blinding flashes of light as they were hit, while others were torn apart by the catastrophic impacts shattering the planetary crust.
She left the mind of the command drone she was in and reached out to the other command drone that was on another scout ship on the opposite side of the system. She wanted to see the animal birth world being hit, and its current position was behind the sun from her location.
As she took over the new command drone, she called out to her daughters to join her again on the new ship she was on and focused the screens on the birth world of the animals. She was just in time, and she reveled in the carnage as the first of many asteroids impacted.
The biggest asteroid, which was almost three hundred miles in diameter, struck the inner edge of the single supercontinent, and she could see the planet itself reel from the impact and deform.
Great geysers of magma and crust shot up, while the shockwave from the impact hit the coastline and generated massive 2,000-foot tsunamis that would travel across the ocean and drown the other side of the continent in an apocalyptic wall of water.
Another seventeen slightly smaller asteroids hit the planet in rapid succession, and it turned into an amorphous blob of fire and magma as it reverted to being a lifeless protoplanet.
She almost left the command drone without acknowledging her, but the way her daughter-queen responded triggered a deep instinct inside of her that she tried to suppress, for it made her weak and unworthy of being Hive-mother.
As she tried to fight against it, she felt long-dead, atavistic emotions roiling under the surface and decided to let them out. She sometimes secretly liked to feel them, despite their lack of usefulness in controlling the Hives.
The emotions she allowed herself to feel were on the verge of overwhelming her, and the Hive-mother left the command drone before she showed any more weakness to her daughter.
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The queen was left alone with her thoughts in the body of a worker drone after the Hive-mother left. She sadly looked at the other drones in the command chamber as she keyed in the self-destruct sequence into the engine console.
The command drone tried to recover from her possession by the Hive-mother and released pheromones asking for orders while she was barely able to stand upright, leaning on a sensor console. The queen was just about to press the fusion core overload button when she looked at the command drone again.
She looked into her eyes, and she saw something. It wasn’t sadness. It was resignation. The command drone knew what she was doing, and she still stood there waiting for orders. The queen continued looking into the command drone’s eyes as she entered a different series of commands and stopped the overload.
The queen waited to see if the command drone would respond.
I am here. Take me.
The command drone didn’t answer. It turned toward the queen and bowed deeply.
Yes. You are my queen. I will go where you take me. Will you use me and discard me?
No. I will help you to be a good Hive mother.
Yes, Hive mother.
You are our Hive mother now.