4 - He Doesn't Know

The room was almost silent, except for the distant roar of the hive settling down and the muffled, distant complaints of people picking themselves up from the floor.  Dagdohva, the lin writer, and Kyrus’s mother, pushed herself up from wall. A hundred bees settled on her sarband and veil, tiny bees, barely the size of a smallest fingernail.

As their venom coursed into her system she straightened. One of her eyes was fuzzy, as if she looked through a mist, a broken bloodvessel, but there was no blood in her mouth or her lungs.  “There is a fragment of data, before the security device tried to erase us.”

“If the lady would sit?”  Servants eased chairs in for people, and no one commented on who might have called them.  The Rasheem, the guards, were still on their feet.  A dozen people were not recovering and they were being carefully carried out to where they could be tended by healers.

“I’m awake, deovar.”  His Radiance’s voice was hoarse, and barely audible but it was clearly his.  Dag straightened her veil and stepped up to where her boy stood, hands opening and closing as if there were something he could do, something he could fight, and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Shh... son,” she said.  “He’s all right.  The hive has him, I can see it. I can feel it..”

Her boy jumped and cast a startled glance back at her.  He just wasn’t used to her being there.  She shook head slightly, and he nodded abruptly.  “Yes, ma, thank you.” Then he turned back to his father and stepfather.  She’d spent so many years wandering in the code, so many years ravaged raw and stripped down and struggling to rebuild herself and her mind that she was nothing like the raving mother he’d left in a dark monk’s hospice, hoping they might help her stop picking at her skin and at things that weren’t there, stop her coughing up her lungs in green strings and bloody clots. Am I envious that they are the parents he turns to?  No.  For years I was the child in an adult’s body. Something unstrung my mind and tore me into tatters.  Something that I cannot remember unhooked me from time so I tumbled in the present and the past and the future, never knowing what I was seeing.  I was ma to him only when he was young.

Thriti, the woman that all the zardukar called mother, was carried in.  “What happened?” she asked the room in general.  “Something burned through all my defenses and nearly injured me!  I could see the swarms of bees so came here!”

His Radiance was sitting up now, no longer cradled in Ilax’s arms. “I tried to listen in on Prime—“

He was interrupted with almost everyone exclaiming with horror.  “—I know.  I knew I shouldn’t try to get past the CEO’s security.  Diryish told me—“

“—And Diryish himself, who was one dark of a good programmer didn’t dare try himself!”  That was Hive Lord Sander and Shashi Basserus both together speaking almost identical phrases.

Kyrus rubbed his fisted hands over his temples, before letting his forehead settle onto his raised knees.  “Now I realize... know... in my head and my gut why.  Endarkened owners!  That was one of his tiny, stupid, security systems.”

“That was tiny and stupid?” Ilax looked concerned.  “The whole city felt that.  It may have killed people.”

“Then thank the dark that it isn’t likely to let him know that we are still here,” Mother Thriti said tartly.  “We still have a chance to build up our own security for the day he does realize that he didn’t manage to kill our ancestors.”

“We’re still at the stage of swords and rocks, Mother,” Kyrus said.  “He has flying machines and weapons that can destroy us from above, from higher than where the air stops.” He waved a hand as someone made an inarticulate noise.  “There’s data on it in the hive, access it...”  He accepted his husband’s hand up, only to immediately sit down, though not on his throne.   

“Prime... still doesn’t know we exist... the data I did manage to glean suggests that he’s having some trouble with his own son.  Perrin and his Heir, William have been estranged but they were arguing.  Together in the same room.  The old man... is the original Perrin as far as I can tell, so he’s almost a thousand years old but he sounds... in the code... a bit like what Diryish sounded like.  Insanely strong and incredibly fragile at the same time.  Their argument will likely keep them occupied with each other and unlikely to notice my prying.”

“What about the water from the moon, stepapa?”

“It has something to do with too much water being bad for something living down here.  He’s stopping the water but I don’t know why he wants to preserve this particular creature.”

Shashi had been sending her own insects... black moths... to taste the strands of data the bees shared, the ones that Kyrus had surreptitiously copied before the security program had been alerted.  “That seems right... what is ‘Millennial Assurance?  What is lifeweed?”

The zardukar, all those on their feet and drawn close and listening, were silent.  Kyrus looked around at his programmers, all the people his grandfather had left in his hands and truly wanted to curse.  “This isn’t going to change the amount of water we have right now.  We won’t have any less in the rain cycle for several years... it could be hundreds of years before the air starts fleeing back to freeze on the moon once more, so this is a side problem.  We have to continue to focus on our two biggest ones.” No one even moved, much less interrupted. “One: we need to keep increasing our knowledge base so we can defend ourselves on equal footing against Prime. Two: we need to find a way to get a message out to our ancestor’s lawyers and protectors, so he never has a way to try and kill us all, again.”

Kyrus stood up and looked around at them all.  “This is our home as much as his.  We shouldn’t live under threat of death as if we were waxer dogs slinking around bush dragon kills, or oyucks hiding in the dark cracks of the house.”

“You tell ‘em, Naser!”  Werfas looked around as everyone around him started to laugh, and though he reddened, his cheeks showing pink over his guest veil, he refused to back down.  “Well, it’s true!”

“Thank you, lad,” His Radiance said.  “I think we have no choice but to shut down for today, though.  Shashi, everything but barest of essentials, please.”

“Of course, Radiance,” she said.