170 - Great Hive Uptake

Kyrus’s first response was just to gape at the man. A woman’s voice out of the crowd behind him.  “Very rude.  Status: downgrade.”

“Naser Basserus.  I... just met my great grandfather and he... didn’t feel so restricted,” Ky managed at last.  “I believe that my father is the one to take his place.”  No one said anything to that.  “He actually announced his intention.  He named my father, Kyrus Talain, as his Kraganzh.”

The man on the throne shifted and waved a negligent hand, looking around at the slowly gathering crowd of onlookers, a whole crowd of people witnessing.  “That’s hardly conclusive.  If he is the new Emperor, why isn’t he here?  Under the Great Hive?  On his new throne?  The bees are probably just going to kill him, you know.  Then you.  There can only be one queen.”

There were waves of feelings running up and down his back, like creeping gooseflesh but when Basserus moved suddenly, wrenched a hilt out of the throne and actually hurled the weapon at him, he saw it coming and stepped to one side.  It was a mandered weapon and suddenly the whole room was filled with glowing lines of connection.  The bees... he could see them and their connections too and Nadian... was at the centre of a knot of them.  But so was he.  And he could feel that da was the middle of an enormous swarm of information.

Nadian cursed as his blade flew past Kyrus's head and evaporated, hilt clattering to the floor. Status: downgrade.  

Kyrus only had time to think what did that mean?  Basserus had the other hilt in his hand, sword-blade glittering new-mandered as he lunged down the stairs edge sharp enough to reach past the visible blade and bisect him with the edge of air itself.

Kyrus kept up his turn, drew his own sword, mandering the blade up just in time to save his own skin. His own blade almost startled him, it was more solid than he'd ever managed before but he couldn’t think about it as he backed up, just barely keeping Basserus from cutting him up.  Mandery, status upgrade. Clinery, status downgrade.

“Only... only one queen!”  Nadian grit his teeth and smashed Kyrus’s sword to one side, using sheer strength to overpower him.  Kyrus fell back, sword vanishing out of his hand completely and he stared up at Nadian, who smiled as he raised his own blade.  He reached his hand up toward the man’s sword, desperate, feeling, seeing his death.

“You shouldn’t kill me! I don’t want to die... this isn’t about killing anyone!”  Nadian faltered, paused when Kyrus yelled at him.

“Of course it’s about killing you.  I’ll use the Hive to kill your father since he’s a stronger warrior than you are, boy!” Nadian raised his sword once more.

“Kyrus! Son!” His mother’s voice cut through his despair and he could see her, behind Nadian.  She held out her hand and it was as if he could see the strands of connection, the strands of help she held in her fist.  Next to her the woman with the silver eyelids flung out more towards him and he grabbed, found himself suddenly enmeshed in what felt like the whole city.  “Accept us,” he heard another voice and blindly reached for it as well.  Three women supported him, then more and more, a flood of code, of will, of information.  A system that functioned.

It was the zardukar, the women.  The students and the people who worked every day of their lives to make the city better, to make the city whole.  He could see the whole thing, all the networks of lightning, actually being taken up by da, but that whole process was halted, he could see, until he and Nadian quit pulling and cutting at the Hive.  They weren’t fighting just each other, they were fighting two kinds of code.

Nadian was stringing everything to himself.  Everything to one node, one server.  He destroyed networks and re-strung them so the sole union of everyone’s effort, everyone’s will was routed through him.  Controlled by him alone.  He was a node, encapsulated inside Lainz, completely unaware of the greater honeycomb around him, slashing at his own connections, even as he thought he’d won.

Nadian's connection was thin.  His mother and his sisters held themselves encapsulated from him, even as he reached, trying to pull on their energy, their will.

Kyrus accepted what his mother offered him, from the other women.  He could even hear Hara's voice in the tumult. 

We are Lainz.  

He could see them.  Their mandery, their clinery, in this world of code they manifested wings. They glowed around their human cores, connected to each other and to the city, through blood and venom, through honey and bread and wax.  Their pulse was the Hive.  They were the bees.  They hummed with life against the dry, holding water and human survival thrumming in every heartbeat.

The Great Hive’s voice rang like a bell, through Kyrus the elder, through Kyrus the younger, through the Rasheem, and the lesser hive lords.  All those who were drones, all those who lived for the Hive’s shortest of needs, or who lived isolate, felt nothing.

Kyrus got to his feet before Nadian could finish his stroke, and stepped back.  “I’m sorry, Naser,” he said as politely as he could.  “You don’t understand.” Siwion, Hive acceptance complete.  Code sealed. Emperor Talain’s uptake continue. Drone stop.

Kyrus put out his hand and Nadian’s sword shimmered into thin air and vanished as he ‘clined it away. “Your mother... and your sisters want to talk to you, Naser Basserus.  My father, once he finishes being taken up by the Hive will have words for you as well.”  He caught Nadian’s flickering glance to the mist-curtained windows.  “You’ll have the chance to take the highest leap.” A flicker of code was dragged out of Nadian and he read it.  “You tried to kill my great great aunt, my matusa... Homa.”


Once he and the zardukar unlocked the codes in Nadian's deenay they began to pour out in a torrent like the river in flood. The images from Nadian that he’d thought were locked and sealed in his blood, came reeling out in answer to Kyrus’s inquiry.  “... and a lot of other family.”

“I’ll take this man to the cells, then, siwion?” The Rasheem captain.  Who is guarding da while he’s helpless? Ilax... of course.  The women were all nodding at him, his vision doubled, tripled.  He could see them physically moving and their images of light, in the code nodding as well; even the babies, cooing and waving as the guard dragged a silent Nadian away.  In Kyrus's sight, the man was dark, in the code, a mere shadow of what he could have been, trailing shreds of information like pieces of partially eaten shroud.

“I... don’t understand what just happened,” Kyrus said quietly, sat down on the throne-room floor and laid his head on his knees.  The bees came then, once the human queen-fight had been settled, and covered him, as his father, down in the courtyard, crumpled into Ilax’s arms, both of them unconscious.