2 - I am a Mortar Bee

The bees roar up around me as if the wave of darkness in the sky washes down onto the planet and their flight up and away draws me to my feet.  I can see the wave of the hive against the stars, a blot of shifting greater blackness against the night sky.  There are no stars falling from the moon.  There is no water falling from the sky.  Prime... Perrin Thurmontaler... has stopped the water we all need.

I put my hand out, grab the ladder pole, set my foot against it and push off so I slide downstairs, far faster than I could climb.  Bees are passing me in swarms and waves, up and out to join the others outside.  They must be dropping their tasks and coming from all through the loggia for there to be so many.  What is going on?

I spiral down, seeing everyone’s upturned faces looking at me, as I do. Ky is over at a desk by the wall with Werfas, both of them working on a model pump.  Wer doesn’t have his veil on at all and I feel a flash of envy.  I’m a siwion, or princeling, as the Lainz see it, even if we don’t, and I have to be more proper than one of the barbarian Milari who isn’t related to somebody important. “Haraklez!  What’s happened?  Where are the bees going?” That’s pa...

Stepapa’s question... almost identical, treads on his sentence’s heels.  “Hara, the bees aren’t telling me what happened... did they tell you?”  There is almost a note of panic in his voice.  If it weren’t so serious – Kyrus is one of the premier warriors, though I still think da’s better -- and new Emperor of Lainz, it would almost be funny, after all I’m not adult yet and he’s asking ME what the bees are saying?

“They haven’t said anything yet, stepapa.  The stars falling from the moon have stopped.”

Everybody checks in their motion, as if the whole city had suffered a crustal shift, but just for a second.  Then both pa and stepapa have my shoulders.  I hadn’t realized I’m shaking.  It’s frightening.  Terrifying, even if all the water we have now isn’t going to just go away, just vanish.

“We need more information,” pa says.  He has a way of taking charge of the situation, but that’s from years of being the active politician in Milar, even when there isn’t a war.   

Ilaxandal Vania ah Ruikart isn’t going to let little things like the world losing the influx of water from the moon slow him down.

He and stepapa exchange a look.  “I’ll go talk to the whole hive, see what I can find out in the code,” stepapa says.

**

Kyrus looked down at his stepdaughter and then up the ladder to the meditation space.  He really wasn’t used to this ‘being Emperor’ thing.  He didn’t need to be isolated from everyone else to talk to the bees or to let them talk to him, he was just shy of doing it in front of anyone else, except his husband Ilax and even then it was like taking off his veil in public in Lainz.  Or like stripping naked in Milar. The water from the moon has stopped. Why?

He patted her on the shoulder and headed up the ladder.   

“I’ll see what they tell me.”

Once sitting cross-legged he did unhook his veil to better feel what was on the wind.  He’d be spitting up orange brown mucus for the next few hours but that was what Lainz lungs were for.  Coughing up dust.

The bees came down to meet him, barely giving him time to settle into place, buzzing around him clinging to his wristbands and his fingers, his hair and the sarband covering his head.  They buzzed and the roar of them lifted him up and as he closed his eyes they flew him into the code.

There is my gateway.  There is the ruined gateway, that still has access.  There is mount Prime, with its ranks of security code dragons, sleepless, sharp-edged programs with a thousand eyes and a thousand ears to hear and see the slightest hint of irregularity. They open their jaws, filled with fangs to shred alien code, broken code, sacrificial code, each fang longer than I am tall.

Here I am still myself.  I haven’t learned how to hide but I must.  I must be a mouse. I must be a sandsheet pretending to be part of the desert.  I am not here to challenge, to don shining armour and slay them, fight my way to the top of the old man’s glass mountain to save the planet.

He was in deepest shadow, watching.  I hate this. I’m a warrior not a spy... not a sneaker.  I am what I seem and show my own face to the world instead of lying, but that is the wrong thing to think.  For my people.  Grandfather trusted me to protect the source code of my people.

I begin again.  I diminish.  I fade. In the code there is nothing to smell, only to see and hear.  I do not need to breathe here, hush breath.  Here I have no blood, hush my heart.  I am here to see and hear.  I am insubstantial and thin as a knife blade.

I slide into a crack in the code and slither careful as a cushion spider lying in wait.  I stretch a single thread of myself up and in and up and in.  It is an ear the size of a grain of sand.  I am a bee, walking so that my buzz not give me away.  I am a mortar bee lost in the thousands of my hive.

“Son. You needn’t shout. This is all part of my greater plan!  You don’t understand that the water is poisoning the lifeweed –“

“—Old man, this is murderous!—“ ### ### A crunch, and a squeal. My bee has been destroyed by something.  Probably a security program, one of the little ones... I need to get out... A flare of white slams me between the ey---