Transiting null space

2,364 light years from Earth, 2175 A.D.

The Hive mother dreaded the coming battle, and she obsessed over the fleet she assembled, constantly entering and leaving the minds of her numerous command drones to make sure that they were following her orders precisely.

After her ascension, two of her eight sister queens refused to accept her as the new Hive mother, accusing her of matricide and leaving to return to their Hives. The remaining six sister queens accepted her as Hive mother, pledging their Hives to hers and helping her to perform the ritual burial of the old Hive mother.

As a result of the refusal of the two sister queens to acknowledge her ascension, the new Hive mother was forced to withdraw to their pre-swarming space, leaving behind numerous new Hives and hundreds of millions of drones in the animal space they had conquered to consolidate the remaining forces she had under her control.

The loss of the secondary builder world and the ships that were there, as well as the loss of the two fleets in the animal system, severely reduced the ability of the empire to hold onto the new territory they had conquered.

The old Hive mother’s obsession with eradicating the animals blinded her to the reality of the poor decisions she was making and left them in a perilous state as her desire for revenge consumed her.

The new Hive mother was forced to recall some of the ships that had been guarding the forbidden areas since they established their new home in this region after their long migration following the great persecution.

For almost four hundred cycles, those massive fleets had vigilantly patrolled the forbidden areas as they watched for signs of the unknown animals. Eight of every ten ships they built were sent there, and there was never a need to draw ships from those fleets until now.

The much smaller fleets on the other side of the empire were always more than enough to overpower the other animals. Their pattern of expansion and consolidation, coupled with the reluctance of the other animals to truly fight them, allowed them to maintain the lopsided distribution of ships to the two frontiers.

The losses inflicted on them by the new fighting animals severely disrupted the balance, and the Hive mother reluctantly recalled a small portion of the guardian fleets to increase her overall ship numbers in preparation for fighting her two disobedient sister queens.

She needed to bring them under her control and reunify the Hives, or she would be a failure as the new Hive mother and her other sisters would turn on her and kill her. She also needed to wrest control of the primary builder world back from one of her insubordinate sister queens, and that is why she was forced to recall those ships from their more important patrols in the forbidden areas.

She felt the Hive mother within stir in response to her question, opening her mind to her thoughts.

She returned to darting around her fleet as she continued to enter the minds of her command drones. It was almost time to drop out of null space and engage in battle against her rebellious sister.

The one hundred and twenty Hive ships, plus the four thousand cruisers she had recalled, would have to be enough. She did not have the time or ability to retrofit them with the new hiding missiles or engines, as it took almost three lunar months for them to make the long trip back from the forbidden areas.

She sent one hundred of the recalled Hive ships and two thousand cruisers to the borders, reinforcing her severely depleted patrol fleets to deter any animal invasions, keeping only twenty Hive ships and the remaining thousand cruisers for her coming battle.

She had an additional ten Hive ships and five hundred cruisers, and these had the hiding missiles and new engines. Her sister had tested the engines properly and determined that the old Hive mother had sent them too deep into the inner system the first time, causing more than half of the new engines to fail catastrophically and destroy the ships.

The minimum safe distance for the new engines was 400,000,000 kilometers from the star, a vast improvement over the typical 800,000,000 kilometers they used to have to exit in the outer system. This advantage would allow future invasions to occur deeper in the inner system, reducing the amount of sub-light travel time to targeted worlds from several solar days to just one or two.

Her fleet also had over one hundred of the new battlehives, but she would reserve them unless absolutely needed, as she did not have the ability to make any more of them until she regained control of the primary builder world where they were made.

She had come up with a plan that she hoped would allow her to claim a quick and decisive victory, thus minimizing losses on both sides, though she was ashamed of the source of her battle planning.

She had accessed the memories that were shared with her by the old Hive mother, and she had gleaned many new insights from watching how the new animals fought and defeated them in the two animal systems.

As she collated billions of data points and viewed the battles from many angles, she started to see how the old Hive mother kept losing to the new fighting animals, and shame overcame her for being willing to learn from them to defeat her sisters.

It was the Hive mother within that corrected her thoughts on the matter.

Her ancestor’s thoughts stopped, and she could sense the hesitation.

< Hive mothers do this on purpose to prevent queens from gaining too much power and wisdom; otherwise, the queens might join forces and overthrow her. This is a weakness that has plagued us since the beginning. This is why we lose when fighting the new animals. These animals, who do not share thoughts, become unified when making war. That is their strength.>

The Hive mother considered her thoughts and saw the truth in them. She had always been more concerned with research and finding better ways to make things for the prosperity of the Hives. She always delegated the management of her Hives to her command drones, dedicating her energy to invention.

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Most of her sisters were more concerned with increasing their Hives and territories and competing against each other. Now she understood why the old Hive mother would assign individual daughters their own tasks and keep them isolated from each other. She was ensuring that they remained fragmented and reliant on her to keep the peace between them.

The Hive mother within withdrew, and she turned her attention to the task at hand. Her fleet was moments away from exiting null space, and she prepared herself for the coming battle.

V’rni System, 2175 A.D.

“Private, get your head out of your goddamn ass and keep up!” Screamed SSgt. Ayoub, her once beautiful voice now hoarse and grating as her words came over the com channel.

“Aye, staff sergeant!” He replied, barely able to gasp out the words as he struggled to reload the fresh missile magazine into the damaged port. He started punching the casing with his suit fist, and it finally slammed in, the indicator light turning from red to green.

He tapped her helmet as she continued firing with her arms, the rotary laser and autocannon barely stemming the tide as more drones streamed over the growing piles of Insectoid bodies in front of their position.

“Slow is smooth; smooth is fast, private. Forget the mortars; just focus on the missiles and the ammo belts.” Alixa grunted in reply as he forced himself to slow down slightly to get a handle on the reloads.

He opened a new ammo container and kept his head down as he waited for the autocannon to finally run dry. It clicked, and the belt feeding mechanism cover popped open as Ayoub pulled her arm back and lowered it. He deftly inserted the new sliver belt and made sure that it was coiled correctly before slamming the cover back down.

Ayoub lifted her arm back up and resumed firing the autocannon as he went back behind her and pre-staged another missile magazine, watching as the last ten rounds of the fifty-missile magazine he just installed were fired in quick succession.

He took a quick step to the side when it reached the last three rounds, and the loading port slid open, ejecting the now empty magazine with a loud clang that shot it out with enough force to knock him over if he was directly in front of it.

He stepped back and inserted the fresh magazine, slamming his fist into the casing twice to get it to go in. Tapping her helmet again, he grabbed another ammo case and missile magazine and staged them for the next reload, leaning over and gasping as he tried to catch his breath.

He had been reloading for almost two hours non-stop, only managing to take three short breaks, averaging less than thirty seconds in between the drone waves that continued their relentless assaults.

Over 500,000 drones had already been killed along the four-kilometer front they were barely holding against the Insectoid swarms, each wave coming closer to reaching the lines as the growing mass of corpses provided cover for each successive assault.

There were several times when small masses of drones managed to breach the lines, and he had to deploy his arm blades to kill the intruders as they clambered all over Ayoub’s suit at one point. He had always wanted to test his hand-to-hand combat training skills in real life, a desire he no longer held after experiencing it for the first time.

He did not realize just how powerful the drones were, and he learned the hard way when one of them sent him flying back over five feet with a kick from a single leg and knocking the breath out of him despite the armored suit protecting him.

He felt the autodoc inject him again, and within moments he felt a wave of relief as the stim cocktail coursed through him, bringing energy and focus. He was just about to pick up the missile magazine to be ready to reload it when there was a significant reduction in outgoing fire along the entire line, and even Ayoub’s volume of fire lessened.

Alixa activated the PIP screen on his HUD, and a small window popped up from the overwatch drone telemetry. All along the four-kilometer front, the drones were retreating en masse, and even the crippled and severely wounded drones were trying to retreat.

“Did I tell you to stop reloading, private?” Ayoub asked him, jerking his awareness back to reality as he stopped looking at the PIP screen. “No, staff sergeant. Sorry.” He picked up the missile magazine and stepped to the side while Ayoub softly ejected the magazine that was in her suit with fourteen missiles still inside of it.

He stepped back and loaded the fresh magazine before moving the ejected magazine and placing it on the grav-sled. He grabbed another ammo can and removed the autocannon sliver belt, replacing it with a fresh one, and started cleaning up the mess of empty cans and missile magazines behind them.

An all-clear siren blared from the drones floating above them, and the commander came over the comms.

“Nice work, people. Keep your head on a swivel and secure your weapons. We have a friendly insectoid shuttle with the allied queen inbound. Do not fire on the shuttle. I repeat: Do not fire on the shuttle. Medbots are on the way to take care of any wounded; the eta for the friendly inbound shuttle is thirty seconds, coming west of your positions.”

He heard the click over the channel as the commander closed the line, and he resumed clearing the workspace, sneaking furtive glances at the sky to catch a glimpse of the shuttle. A few moments later, there was a bright object that flared briefly as it entered the atmosphere before it leveled out at 3,000 meters and headed towards the Hive location, almost a thousand meters in front of them.

Ayoub tracked the shuttle with both arms, making weird noises to herself as she mimicked shooting the shuttle out of the sky, following it all the way down to where it landed about five hundred meters in front of them. A few moments later, a large section of the hull flipped down, turning into a ramp.

Almost two dozen android combots surged out of the opening and took positions around the shuttle, establishing a perimeter. He couldn’t help himself, and he leaned on the lip of the riverbed and zoomed in to see better. The combots were easy to identify by their four arms and the dome-shaped sensor mechanism mounted where a helmeted head would be.

“Are the combots good fighters, staff sergeant?” he asked, hoping that she wouldn’t chew him out for stopping to look. She grunted before answering him.

“They are very hard to kill, and they have an impressive weapons suite. Their AIs are bound, however, so they are not capable of operating and making decisions like you and I are. They need very specific instructions and mission parameters and will perform admirably at their assigned tasks, such as protecting the queen on that shuttle.”

Another figure emerged, and he could see the alien silhouette of the queen descending the ramp. She walked on four legs with her abdomen parallel to the ground, while her thorax and two upper arms were bent upright like a mammalian torso. It was his first time seeing a queen, and he was fascinated by her appearance.

She was wearing a helmet that prevented him from seeing her head. Her two antennae were free and moving around from openings in the top of the helmet, and there was some type of flexible armor material covering the rest of her body save for her thin, triple-jointed legs and arms.

She reached the bottom of the ramp and turned towards the Hive, and he could see the large, flexible wings shimmering in the sunlight as they draped down her back. The combots assumed a circle around her, and she started walking towards the Hive at a fast pace.

The combots continued with her until one hundred meters from the Hive, where they stopped and took up defensive positions. She continued ahead until she got fifty meters from the main Hive entrance, where she finally stopped.

An overwatch drone had maintained a position above her, and he accessed the telemetry and put it on his HUD. A few seconds after she stopped, a small group of drones slowly emerged from the entrance, and he could see their antennae bending and focusing on the queen fifty meters from them.

After a few more moments, they started walking towards the queen and stopped a half-meter from her position. One of them moved closer and touched the queen with its antennae, slowly moving them over her body and the armor she was wearing. The others crept forward as well and did the same.

The first drone gingerly put out a clawed arm, and the queen took its claw in hers. The drone turned towards the Hive, and another drone offered its claw to her, taking her other claw as it took position on the other side of her. They started walking, and the group of drones took the queen into the Hive, still holding both of her claws as they disappeared into the interior.