“You still want him alive?”
“More than ever! If he’s really this resourceful, we need to mingle his blood with ours.”
“He’s obviously out in the main tunnels again,” the observer said.
“Of course! Tell the searchers to concentrate on the elevators. He’s had a long climb. He’ll be tired. Concentrate every search team in the upper levels along the elevators. Have them scan every car and knock out any doubtfuls. I know—” Hellstrom held up a silencing hand as the observer turned in shocked alarm. “It can’t be helped.”
“But our own—”
“Better we do it than leave it to him. Look at what he’s done. He obviously has his stunwand turned to maximum and doesn’t know much about it. He’s killing workers close up with it. I feel the same outrage as all of you over this, but we must remember that he is panic stricken and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“He knows enough to stay out of our hands!” someone behind Hellstrom muttered.
Hellstrom ignored the sign of discontent and asked, “Where is that female captive? I ordered her brought up here almost an hour ago.”
“She had to be revived, Nils. They’re bringing her.”
“Well, tell them to hurry.”
From the Hive Manual.
One of our strengths lies in the recognition of the diversity we gain through a unique application of the social behavior of insects as opposed to the social behavior evolved by the wild human animal. With this lesson ever before us, we are, for the first time in the long history of life on this planet, designing our own future.
Janvert stood behind two females and two males in an upbound elevator. The quartet had shown disturbance at his entry and he had interpreted this as growing out of the wound on his cheek. A peremptory gesture with the gun, however, had quieted them, but he was left with the odd feeling that the gesture, not the gun, had elicited the response. To test this, he tucked the automatic under his right arm when one of the men turned, and he waved a palm at the man. It was as though Janvert had said turn around and leave me alone. The man turned, wiggled his fingers at his companions, and all of them ignored Janvert from that point.
He had the hang of the elevators now. You stood to the back in these upper-level cars. The act of stepping forward slowed them at a passing floor. Near the doorway there was a critical area that operated an invisible sensor.
One of the women glanced back at him presently, nodded at the doorway which was passing a blank gray wall. Last stop coming up? Janvert wondered. The others moved forward in a body. Janvert readied himself to join them, lifting the captured wand in his left hand. As he moved, the first thin edge of the opening gaped above him. The car slowed and he saw a cluster of bare legs, two weapons pointing inward at the elevator car.
Janvert depressed the stud on his own weapon, fanned it across the doorway as the opening deepened. He caught his fellow passengers as well as those outside. He leaped over the passengers, spraying his weapon right and left in a humming arc of destruction, and ran down the tunnel to the right, partly on the cold floor, partly on fallen flesh still warm under his feet.
As he ran, he heard a gushing crunch behind, glanced back without breaking stride. One of his fellow passengers had fallen with head across the door opening. The upward-surging car had left a head rolling on the floor in a patch of gore.
Janvert turned away, finding it odd that he felt nothing. Nothing at all. That denizen of this hive had been dead already, killed by one of his own kind’s weapons. It made no difference what was done to the body after that. No difference at all.
Continuing to depress the firing stud for short bursts of humming, Janvert trotted down the tunnel, clearing a path as he went. In this way, he rounded a corner, caught another group of elevator watchers. They collapsed as he burst upon them, but there was a new group running toward him down the tunnel ahead and Janvert heard the thrumming of their weapons. Obviously they were out of range. He lifted the automatic, emptied it into this group, dodged into the first up-car, and rode it two floors before emerging into another tunnel where the opening had been left unguarded.
Janvert dodged hurrying figures to cross this tunnel, entered another sharply slanted up-ramp which he abandoned at the first doorway on his right. This led into another hydroponics garden full of harvesters. He recognized tomatoes and hurled the empty automatic at a worker who ran toward him protesting the intrusion. He ran, firing the captured weapon ahead and to both sides. Tomatoes splashed on the floor from tumbling harvest sacks, and their red pulp spattered over his feet and legs as he skidded through them. His chest was one big band of flame, throat dry and painful, his body almost ready to quit.
A series of small openings became visible in the far wall of the hydroponics room as he approached. They were about chest height and he could see sacked produce whisking upward—then baskets, bins. He recognized berries, what appeared to be deep green cucumbers, string beans . . .
A dumbwaiter system!
Shoulders sagging, he came to a halt, stared at the wall. There was no door along its entire length—only these openings with produce whipping upward. There were flat shelves on a conveyor; some of them came past him empty. Containers went onto the shelves. The openings were about three feet square and the moving shelves didn’t appear to be much larger. Could he get in there onto one of those shelves? They moved upward at frightening speed. He could hear sounds of tumult growing in the tunnel behind him. What other chance did he have? He couldn’t go back.
Janvert summoned a small reserve of strength, backed off several steps, and watched for an empty carrier. When one appeared, he dove for the opening, rolling himself around the weapon clutched in his hands. The instant his head entered the opening, the carrier slowed and he landed hard. The shelf swayed under him, but he compressed himself into a fetal ball, managed to stay aboard. His left shoulder rubbed the back wall as the carrier gathered speed, and he left a trail of skin before he could jerk away. He peered up and around.
The dumbwaiter system operated in a long slot between gray walls, an area illuminated only by light from the feeder openings. He could make out many carriers moving swiftly upward around him and there was an acrid fruit smell overriding the other stinks. He passed more openings, glimpsed a startled face at one—a woman carrying a basket piled high with yellow fruit that looked like tiny pumpkins. Janvert peered upward, trying to find out how the system terminated. Did it disgorge into chopping machinery? Was there a bloody mincer arrangement up there, a sorting system, or conveyors?
A wide line of light was becoming visible far above him and he could hear the increasing roar of machinery up there. It drowned out the whistling, clanking, hissing of the conveyor he was riding. The wide line of light was nearer—nearer—he tensed himself and was caught by surprise as a trip system tipped his shelf at the top of the lift, dumping him into a bin piled high with yellow carrots.
Clutching the bin’s top with his left hand, Janvert righted himself, clambered over the edge into a room of long, waist-high troughs that flowed with bubbling pulp of many colors. Workers moved all through the area dumping bins of produce into the troughs.
It was easily six feet to the floor and Janvert landed with a slippery squishing that sent him lurching into a female who had come up to the conveyor outlet with an empty bin on wheels. Janvert’s momentum sent her sprawling. He kept her down with a burst from his weapon, charged forward, slipping and skidding. There was pulped tomato on his feet and the floor itself carried a skimming of multicolored debris from the processing that continued all around him.