Book: the Firestone

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Book one of the Sorcet Chronicles:
The Firestone - Chapter 3

The stinger leader had been on her way to a distant storage area, leading a party of five workers, one of which carried her. The stinger-dug tunnels were round, smooth and straight but they did occasionally intersect natural fissures and caves deep in the mountain. As the work party approached one such intersection a slight vibration in the air told the leader that some large disturbance had occurred back in the depths of that fissure. She ordered the worker carrying her to pause a moment. Telepathically, she asked the workers what they had felt through their feet. It would not have occurred to any of them to report any odd sensation. Workers were the most numerous, by far, members of the hive, but were mere living automatons, unable to take initiative or formulate any plan without leaders telling them what to do. But, asked directly, they all reported feeling a vibration through the rock and sensed by special hairs on their feet and bodies.

The leader decided to investigate. They detoured from the dug-out tunnel and into a long and winding natural cave.  The hive tunnels were unlighted but all stingers had a glow-organ that lit up their abdomens and cast a bluish light for a few meters in all directions. The workers' small cutting jaws snapped excitedly at this deviation from their normal mindless routine but the leader kept them firmly under control.

They found the two intruders far back in a low-ceilinged cul-de-sac, sitting among a pile of bones, skeletons of perhaps a dozen animals of varying species. The alcove exuded a sense of dread but nothing that the leader paid too much attention to. Stingers had no concept of fear or personal existence; they were part of the hive and that was all that mattered to them.

The leader ordered two of the workers to seize the intruders, drag them out of the cul-de-sac, and hold them in the cave while she climbed down from her perch and examined the bones, most so old they disintegrated at a touch. None seemed to be from any species or creature she knew, but the leader had never left the hive and knew nothing of old bones. There was an odd round blackness in the wall and, next to it, a large red stone was socketed into a smaller hole in the wall of the cul-de-sac. The leader pulled it out to look at it and discovered that the stone was set into one end of a metal tube. This meant nothing to her and she tossed it into the bone pile.

She scuttled backward out of the cul-de-sac, and looked up at the two living creatures. To a stinger, everything that was not a stone or a plant, and not a living hive member, was just food. She considered cutting up this food on the spot but she had no soldiers with her and the workers would take much too long to do the job. Soldiers, when not dying to defend the hive and becoming food themselves, helped out with larger chunks of meat by using their huge cutting jaws. She decided that the creatures were a sylph and a human. The male had the typical sylphen eyes while the female did not. They were also both taller, taller even than a stinger soldier, about the height of the few sylphen that the leader had seen. The leader had seen humans, too, and droichen, more of those, slaving away elsewhere in the stinger hive. Which, she decided, was probably from whence these two had escaped.

She regarded her find with little enthusiasm. They were totally hairless and sunburned all over, a considerable feat, she thought, as they were then several hours' walk from the hive entrance and the outside sun. Both were covered with fine layers of gray ash, and their mouths opened and closed in odd patterns and if she was close enough she could detect small vibrations in the air from that. She had no idea what that signified but it was something she had seen other non-stinger prisoners do too.

Deep in the rock, well out of sight of other stingers, especially the message-relayers posted at major intersections, there was no way for the leader to send back telepathic information. The almost mindless workers would have continued on with their assigned task, regardless of unexpected interruptions, which was why leaders were always present to make decisions. She made one now, remounted her worker, and headed back toward the main hive and to a nearby gallery where, she recalled, some further excavation was underway using slaves. Her workers dragged the two captives along behind.

Tachi and Caitlin soon found themselves delivered to a large cavern with several different species of captives, a dozen all-told. Some were tall and thin, some short and stocky, none looked like Caitlin or Tachi. What they all had in common was that they were made to dig at one or another of several rock faces, digging out additional tunnels by using pointed stone battering rams so large that it took four of them to handle one. This chamber was about thirty yards in diameter with several columns left unmined to shore up the ceiling.

There was only one straight tunnel leading into the chamber. The large insects came and went down that one tunnel. Tachi knew only that it ran about a hundred yards to a similar large room where it intersected with several other tunnels, all arrow-straight. He guessed this was to be a hub like that one, as they were digging three more tunnels out of the room.

The rams' size was intentional. It made it impossible for a single person to use a ram as a weapon. While the rams were made of some harder rock than that of the walls, they still wore out regularly and there was a stack of spares by the exit to the main tunnel.

It was Tachi who first noticed and whispered to Caitlin one rest period as they chewed on some awful-tasting mold that the stingers supplied. "Cate, we are a lot stronger than these people, whatever they are. Probably a lot stronger than the bugs."

Caitlin nodded. "Best to keep that little secret to ourselves. Don't work too hard. The day may come when we will need a little surprise on our side."

Tachi and Caitlin had, from the beginning, looked for ways to escape. But there was only the one exit from the chamber and which opened into that long tunnel that led back toward the main hive. They could probably take down a worker or two but Tachi doubted he could kill a soldier quickly enough to avoid the snapping jaws, large claw "hands" or the dread stinger. And there was always a leader, at least one soldier, and several workers present, the latter mostly to provide light for the captives.

The bugs did not seem to mind, or even notice, if they talked, and Tachi and Caitlin began to acquire smatterings of several languages. The stocky creatures with very pale skin, pale blue eyes and brown hair, they learned, were droichen and they were cave dwellers too. The tall ones were sylphen, and these had been captured on the fringes of the forests they inhabited and which lapped up against the sides of the mountain in which the bug hive was located.

They had all been captured, some, the droichen, inside the mountain that housed both their own home and the stinger hive. The sylphen had been seized by outside raiding or work parties and brought inside.

The sylphen had almond-shaped eyes and pointed ears that seemed able to swivel like a cat's to pick up sound from any direction. They were tall, a head taller than the droichen, and Tachi's height. But the sylphen were thinner than Tachi and mahogany-skinned, darker than Tachi's own skin. Where the droichen had hands of three equal-length fingers and one thick thumb and no fingernails, the sylphen hands had two equal-length fingers and another thumb on the other side of the hand. Fingers and thumbs were very long and the feet almost matched and the sylphen had short black claws in place of fingernails. Tachi suspected arboreal ancestry. Sylphen eyes were yellow or green-tinted with a vertical slit in place of the round iris.

One of the droichen explained the purpose of the stinger leaders. It took a while, as Tachi and Caitlin had to learn smatterings of two languages first, that of the stout droichen and that of the few sylphen. But they had all the time in the world to talk and learn as they heaved the heavy ram against a wall. The droichen, it seemed, also occupied the mountain and occasionally came into conflict with the stingers and, therefore, knew more about them than the humans or sylphen who lived outside.

The stinger workers and soldiers were virtually mindless. The leaders, who often had workers carry them around, were smaller and almost helpless, but they were never alone. They guided the actions of worker and soldier alike with telepathic commands. A leader would control as many as ten or a dozen hive members and could also communicate telepathically with other leaders. Stingers did not appear to have any spoken or written language.

While being dragged to the cavern on the day he arrived, Tachi had noticed that the hive tunnels were long and straight, with distinct corners. At each corner a leader and a worker had stood. Now Tachi realized these leaders were message-relayers, as the telepathic commands and messages could not pass through solid rock.

Tachi's and Caitlin's skins healed quickly. Only the very top layer had been burned away to ash, sort of a bad sunburn. Caitlin would carry a scar on her right palm from the flashlight she had been holding when they passed through the portal. All their hair had been burned off and over time it grew back as stubble. Tachi was annoyed at this but for Caitlin it was most distressing as she had always been proud of her flowing red hair, which she had liked to wear in a single long braid. She had no time to weep over the loss, though. The stingers were always there, kicking their captives awake to resume the exhausting work.

"So, am I your girlfriend now?" Caitlin asked as they pounded a wall with a ram.

"What?" Tachi's hands had blisters from the first few days of digging. Later both his and Caitlin's palms would become almost solid callus from friction with the ram sides. The rams had no convenient handles.

"You said, back in the bat cave before we came here, that I was your girlfriend."

"I did? I don't remember that."

"You did. I remember."

Tachi stared at Caitlin. "Well. Look around you. Do you see any competition?"

Caitlin smiled. "All right then. I'm your girlfriend.  You're my guy."

For some reason that made Tachi's day. Then again, he thought. It didn't take much to make his day here.

The stinger soldiers were the height of a droich, about five feet, and probably weighed one hundred twenty pounds or more. Their glossy jet-black exoskeletons were thick and they looked like armored tanks. Most of the hive was made up of workers who were the same height but weighed less, and their dark gray exoskeletons were far less heavily-built. The leaders were much smaller, only some two feet tall and maybe forty pounds in weight and they were more than half head, with almost vestigial glossy-red abdomens and thorax. Stingers all had black multifaceted eyes and the uppermost two limbs were adapted to end in two thin claws that served as fingers.

All the stingers were capable of standing upright on the rear four legs. Every time one or more of them moved, their feet made a dry rustling sound on the hard stone floor. Tachi grew to fear and loathe that sound. Silence meant nothing was happening to threaten him. The dry rustling sound meant some stinger was up to something and the something was rarely good.

While they were called stingers by the captives, in fact only the soldiers had huge slicing mandibles and also stings at the tips of their abdomens. Just how effective those were as weapons, Tachi and Caitlin soon learned. During one of the long work periods a droich fell from exhaustion. He tried to crawl away to hide behind a pillar but a leader noticed and dispatched a soldier, which skittered over, its spike-like feet making faint scrabbling sounds on the smooth stone floor, snatched the droich up with the large claws on her front legs, and whipped her stinger between her rear legs and into the droich's stomach. The droich collapsed at once and started screaming and kept on screaming for more than an hour, writhing on the floor. The stingers ignored him; the captives fell to work with renewed desperation. Tachi and Caitlin learned later that a sting injected a toxin that broke down the tissue inside the victim. The victim dissolved from the inside out, still alive until some vital organ or blood vessel disintegrated, giving blessed relief in death. When the droich finally lay still the soldier lopped off arms, legs and head, and the workers carried limbs and the pre-digested torso away to be eaten by stinger brood-spawn.

Tachi was to learn later that stingers fed flesh to some pupae in order to create more soldiers, while worker pupae received a special milk some of the workers generated. Most stingers were female and only the food fed them at an early stage separated workers from soldiers, leaders or even from creating a new queen or the rare male drones which were even larger than the soldiers but just as vicious. When flesh was needed to brood more soldiers, most came from animals caught on the outside of the hive by work parties. But the work parties also brought in the occasional droichen or sylphen captives or, rarely, a passing human. These were used as slaves, valued by the stingers because the captives had more fingers and could perform tasks the stingers had trouble doing. Because there was a limit on how many captives could work effectively in the assigned space, when a new captive arrived, a stinger leader would look over the slaves, pick out the weakest, and a soldier would skitter forward and the screaming would began anew.

The horrible-tasting mold the captives ate gave sustenance, barely. The stingers supplied foul-tasting water, too, when a leader remembered to send workers to fetch some. The workers went someplace, swallowed as much water as their stomachs could hold, returned to the room and spit up the water into bowls carved into the floor. So Tachi and Caitlin and the rest were drinking, in effect, a slightly brownish and thin insect vomit.

"Well, what doesn't kill us only makes us stronger," he said wryly one day as they all sat around eating and drinking. The bugs stood nearby, mindless, patient, unmoving, their glowing abdomens supplying a dim light.

The others ignored him, but Caitlin said, "We are probably even stronger than when we came here, thanks to the exercise. But that can't last. We're at zero body fat and starting to burn muscle tissue. We’ve had no vitamins, especially vitamin D, and God only knows what's in this food they feed us."

Tachi nodded, swallowed more vomit-water and grimaced. "Yes, we are losing ground. And I don't see us fighting our way out of a giant ant nest by ourselves or even with all the captives in here. Just focus on staying alive and hoping for something to change, for us to catch some break."

"Well, that's what every other captive in here thought too. And they're all dead or will die soon. If we wait for a time when there is only one soldier on guard, the two of use could lift one of the rams, kill the one soldier, then make a run for it."

Tachi shook his head. "Run where? We would have no weapons, only our soft skins against the stingers hard shells, and you can bet that more soldiers would show up to swarm over us. The soldiers are likely at their most dense near the hive opening, wherever that is. Our odds of running past those guards are slim and none, even if we could find the entrance."

"We could find some out-of-the way place to hide."

"And eat what?" Tachi shook his head. "No, here, at least, we get fed and watered."

Life for Tachi and Caitlin continued its numbing cycle of work, more work, even more work, a little rest and some disgusting food and unthinkable water, then work and more work. They managed to acquire, from several of the executed slaves, some rags to wear and even some boots from droichen  who had no further use for them. The sylphen wore no shoes, it seemed. They also learned to relieve themselves in the corner everyone else used. In the fetid air inside the cavern, they didn't even notice the stench.

Caitlin scratched a tally with a sharp stone fragment on a wall for the number of times they slept and the marks grew to number several dozen. Some of the other captives did the same and the walls were covered with the marks. But what was day or night in the bowels of the hive was anyone's guess. They worked when told to and ate and slept when told to, on the stingers' schedule. The droichen used some sort of runic writing on the walls to record their days but the sylphen used the same vertical marks Tachi had seen anyone on Earth use. But where Caitlin made the traditional four upright strokes and one crossing over the others to indicate a set of five, the sylphen created nine vertical followed by an "X" to indicate the tenth. It amused Tachi that the sylphen were, sort of, writing Latin. But, he knew, it was only coincidence.

Caitlin had also tried to augment their time-keeping system by counting her periods. She had used birth control pills but those, like all else, were in another place now and, deprived of their hormones, her period should have been, if anything, heavier than before. But her first inside the hive was very slight and she had become very irregular, the hard work and bad diet affecting her cycle.

There were occasional longer messages on the walls, some in the droichen runic, some in the sylphen flowing script, and some in a sort of block script with a lot of long and short triangles. The others apparently expected Tachi and Caitlin to be able to read those, marks made in the past by other humans. When neither Tachi nor Caitlin could, the droichen and sylphen simply assumed they were illiterate, which, in a way, they were.

The work went on and the rows of marks grew longer. More captives screamed away their last anguished moments at the claws of stinger soldiers. Occasionally fresh captives arrived. The captives had worked out a crude assignment system, pairing fresh captives with the longest-there and weakest, trying to delay the inevitable. The stinger leaders didn't care, so long as the rams kept digging at the walls. The three tunnels, fairly new when they arrived, had extended to about twenty yards by now. The pile of spare rams had needed replacing and progress was a lot slower than it would have been had they proper tools. But none of the captives knew where the tunnels were expected to lead, or what other tunnels they might connect to, or even what would happen to the captives after the job was done. One leader and at least one soldier stayed in the main room, where she could see down all three of the tunnels being dug, and a second leader stood by the entrance to relay messages from the main hive. A worker came with each party of diggers to provide closer light from their glowing abdomens.

Periodically, the stingers changed shifts. Tachi knew that despite their reserve of strength he and Caitlin were weakening. Already half of the original captives in the chamber when he and Caitlin arrived had been replaced and turned into brood-spawn food. Their turn would come, no matter how delayed.

As they worked, they discussed just what place they were in. Tachi had assumed at first that there was some huge subterranean cavern inside Earth and that they had ended up there.

"It's likely," Caitlin agreed. "If you consider only the tunnels here, or even the droichen who say they live in similar tunnels. But there's a problem. The sylphen. They claim to come from a forest. They surely came from no forest on Earth."

"True. Unless there is somehow a forest underground. But, no, they have spoken of seeing the sun and stars and a moon. I'm confused about the moon because they describe it differently sometimes."

"Maybe there is more than one moon here?"

"Hadn't thought of that. Good point. Consider, too, the hands and eyes and skins. Droichen and sylphen have clearly evolved from something other than our own hominid ancestors."

"Especially the sylphen," Caitlin said. "One of them told me that in the forest they can change their skin from brown, like we see here, to green, and in patches, to blend in with the trees. They're like chameleons."

"Humm. Green and brown means chromatophores, cells just beneath the top layer of skin that contain colored organelles that can expand and shrink to match the surroundings."

"Thank you Mr. Scholar. Pretty handy in the woods, I suppose."

"Probably so. Handy at the beach too, as the brown is all melanin. Not any advantage in here, though. One other thing: I've noticed that the sylphen have reflecting tissue at the backs of their retinas, that's why their eyes shine back at a light. Doubles the effectiveness of the retinal cells and lets them see in near-dark, like a cat.

"Well, we're not on Earth." Caitlin sighed. "Wherever we are, it's not Earth. We're also stronger and can jump higher, or we could if the ceiling was not so low. The gravity here is less."

"'Fraid so, Cate. We're not in Kansas anymore."

One work period Tachi, Caitlin and two sylphen were ramming a wall when the two stinger leaders present became excited. One gathered up most of the workers and one soldier, and ran from the cavern. The other leader stayed to supervise a few workers and the one remaining soldier. The stinger workers herded all the captives back into the main room and stood waiting for further orders.

And Tachi heard something echoing down the main tunnel that led to their room. Voices, shouts, a clanging of metal. Odd, he thought. The stingers didn't talk. Then one of the droichen present shouted that it was a droichen raid.

"Well, what are we standing here for?" Tachi said. "We can take that one leader."

The others stared at him. Finally one sylphen male ran to one side away from them and started shouting and jumping. They may have had no spoken language but the stingers all turned to stare at the sylph. The soldier started forward, fearsome mandibles clicking.

"Now!" Tachi said to Caitlin. They picked up the ram that they had dropped when the commotion broke out and, using their full strength for the first time, ran at the leader's back. All the stingers had hard exoskeletons but the ram knocked the leader down. Before it could get up or even transmit a message, Tachi and Caitlin raised the ram over their heads and brought it down with a crunching sound. Their telepathic connection to the leader broken, the workers reacted instantly, either standing still awaiting orders or wandering almost aimlessly, trying to carry out whatever order was last given.

Not so the soldier. Soldiers, apparently had a hardwired standing order they reverted to in the absence of any other. And that was to attack anything not a hive member. The soldier ran to the waving sylph and grabbed him. The sylph managed to twist away from the stinger but lost an arm in the process, lopped cleanly off by the soldier's mandibles. Moaning, the sylph stumbled away but was cut down an instant later by the sting. The soldier then turned and ran straight at the nearest captive, a sylph female, only to be blindsided and knocked off its four feet by Tachi and Caitlin and their battering ram. In the few seconds it took the soldier to flip over and regain its feet, the ram came down on its head once, twice, finally a third time that got the satisfying crunch Tachi wanted to hear.

He looked around, still wary of the workers and their jaws, but the latter were mostly standing still. What is more, they were being swiftly cut down by axes wielded by a band of short, heavily-armored droichen who had burst into the cavern from the tunnel. In seconds all the stingers were dead. Their glow-organs, oddly, continued to glow for a time but the invading droichen had their own yellow-green lights too.

"Well done," the droich leader said, looking down at the oozing soldier at their feet. "But let us not stand here. We cannot hold off the entire hive. Come. To freedom come." He then walked over to the dying sylph and with one blow of an axe, took off its head, made some sign in the air and murmured, "Gift of Death," and turned back to give orders to his troops.

The droichen war band split into two, some to run ahead, some to bring up the rear, the gaggle of freed captives running as best they could in the middle. More captives joined them, rescued from other parts of the hive. Tachi and Caitlin carried the body of the dead sylph. The sylph female who had almost been caught by the stinger soldier ran behind carrying the head and arm and crying out in distress. They rounded corners with dead stinger leaders and workers and the occasional dead stinger soldier, clambered over a heap of dead stinger workers at a major intersection, and ran for a long time down tunnels and then into natural water-carved caves.

Tachi noticed that at some intersections and in some hub-galleries he could see old day-count marks on the walls, legacies of long-dead slaves who had worked and died there. The sight both amazed and saddened him. They overtook other droichen parties and then passed one acting as rear guard and backing slowly while keeping alert to a stinger counterattack. One party carried several dead droichen fighters. The droichen left no comrade behind to become pupae-food. Eventually they came to a cave wall with a small round iron door set into it. There was no handle on the side of the door facing the stinger hive. The door was open and more droichen guarded it. They passed through, stooping to clear the low opening, and ran on down a tunnel into a new life.

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