Parsec

Venera was dead.

Parsec watched as six of her former attendants spun a death-shroud into being, whisper-thin silk sliding from spinnerets. It looked something like the idea of a sea boiling under a sunless sky. Venera would have approved, she thought distantly. And then realised that Venera must have approved, for she would have had to encode the appearance of the shroud for herself.

Already, the Hive would be springing into action; a singular successor egg fetched from its own hiding space—whether from a bed of luster-straw in the archival crèche or dredged up from a freshwater pool in the hidden depths of the hive, she didn’t know. That was the business of the attendants, the half that had gone off to find Leader General Perihelion and to spit out copies of a message: coordinates. Six attendants, and six copies for redundancy, so that the late-Titania’s wishes would not be lost. The egg would have been chosen and taken by now, and workers and movers and engineers would be bustling around to see it settled for its brief incubation.

All this, while the dappled false-light touched Venera’s body as it lay here—still, silent, scentless. Dead.

The inner sanctum would be metamorphosed over soon enough, once Venera’s body was archived. The rooms would be shaped and changed as the successor Titania saw fit. Venera’s softly-curving tree boughs and flaky silvered lichens would be washed away. Shadows that twinkled with constellations. The scents of strawberry and pine and cool, dry earth.

This did not feel right.

Parsec stared down at the mortal shell of her dead queen and wondered where it had all gone wrong.

She had done her very best. Skulking, stalking through the in-betweens, sliding her palms over each ley line; coronal, sagittal, lambdoid, squamosal. There had been no blockage, no fault. She had peered at every facet of the hive’s inner membrane, looking for cracks—and there too, she had found nothing. All of the other generals had agreed it to be a natural death; Venera had ruled for a full decade, after all.

But her predecessor had ruled for two. Parsec had been there for the predecessor’s end. She and Perihelion and Dysnomia. She had been the only one to not avert her eyes as it had happened. And she knew that Venera had spiraled faster. Venera had gone from being upright and speaking to comatose in a matter of days. She had declined quickly, not over the usual creeping turns of the moon. All her power leaving in a rush. Titanias did not live long, but they did not burn out that fast, either. Parsec felt sure of that, felt it in her very core.

And also—

Something that had happened the day before Venera had slipped under forever, almost completely unresponsive. It had been just the two of them. Parsec had been sitting, holding watch by the nest-side. Venera lay there, curled up and fighting for breath, draped in healing-silk. Her fine, birdlike wings had been plastered with herbal poultices. She had clutched a heated stone pillow to her chest. An intravenous line in her arm—nectar and saline. Not that it had seemed to do much good.

“Parallax,” Venera had said. Venera had looked her in the eye and she had taken her hand—it had felt cold and damp. Queenly silver against mournful indigo and somber, stygian blue. “Someone is doing this to me. I do not know who, or how. It feels like poison. Help me, please. Parallax—Parsec, I trust only you…please.” She had whispered it fiercely, eyes wide and spurs bowed. Then she had coughed and coughed and fought through the next crackling breaths. Parsec’s chest ached in sympathy to hear it. She’d squeezed her hand and Venera had squeezed back, with what little strength she had remaining.

“I will do all that I can,” she had replied, the only comfort she could offer. “You are the finest Titania I have ever known. I would not lose you for the world.”

Parsec had not spoken of that conversation to anyone, and not simply because Venera had said so, though that in itself could be reason enough. The other generals had already set their minds on the thought that Venera had fallen into delirium. Part of her understood why. It was true, Venera had been feverish and distraught, unable to synthesise nectar by that point. But there had been a clearness to her eyes then, brief lucidity, a cutting desperation behind those words. So who was to stop her, if she chose to take those words as her last standing order?

It was a secret between Venera and herself. The last thing she would ever own or take from the most noble Titania to have graced the Hive. The one who she had, in the end, failed the most.

Parsec had not been there for her passing. Not in a way that mattered. In the moment between her stepping out of the room and Dysnomia stepping in to cover her shift, Venera had died. Sharply, abruptly, in the moment between one heartbeat and the next. It had been quick—too quick. Perhaps the worst part of it, second only to the prior days of her suffering, was that Venera had died alone.

Could it have been a fault with the attendants? Could it have been them, feeding Venera the wrong nutrients, or a poison in small doses? But no. They were chitin-coated automata without soul, not real people in a sense, with capacity for neither malice nor stupidity. Venera had made them herself; each imbued with inherited instructions and absolute loyalty. They were perfect.

Still, Parsec had examined them all. She sampled pieces of the magic that lurked within them for Orion to look at, and he had said that nothing was amiss. Last night, when she had taken them all to the Archives for his personal perusal, they had all obeyed her instructions without fault. They had stood still as they were examined; no misdirection or shielding or stalling. None were found to be pretenders.

The attendants were closest to the Titania. A step below them were the generals. Now that was a disturbing thought.

It did not matter if others said it was circumstance, that Venera must have been gestationally faulty after all, that these defects happened sometimes, that at least she had done a good job in the time that she had served. Parsec knew better. Something fierce and hot writhed over the armature of her mind, hissing and biting and bothering.

Titania Venera was dead, and someone was to blame.

===

The egg was huge and smooth and grey, save for parts of the shell that were crusted over with ice. Even from this distance, it smelled of cold mist and spoiled nectar and flint-flower sap. It hung like a gaudy ornament, suspended from the chamber roof and anchored to the walls and floor by a web of gossamer and tar. Parsec sensed no silver-birch stately strength here; it was nothing like Venera at all.

Others watched in a crowd behind her; wings aflutter, chirping softly amongst themselves. Perihelion stood to her right, his wings tucked in and his chin raised high. He had told her that the egg had been fetched from the gullet of a frostbitten cave, deep in the unstable quadrant. She wondered why Venera would have chosen such a pale, insipid thing.

The egg cracked.

A floral, fruity scent filled the air, notes of lily and elderflower, peaches and cherimoya. Beneath that, Parsec breathed in a hint of something darker, reminiscent of raw meat, and soil after a hard rain. A frisson of excitement washed through the crowd as a finger, coral-pink and finely-segmented, emerged from the split in the shell.

It glistened wetly in the false-moonlight, like a questing worm.

Despite herself, Parsec felt the next frisson-wave of feeling reverberating in her core; it was equal parts wonder and burning curiosity. The feeling surged; out came the rest of the hand, the arm. Then a small, wiry body, and a pair of limp, diaphanous wings splayed proudly over the curve of a notch-patterned spine.

The successor Titania was coated in a clear, slimy serum; she glistened, pale pink all over but for spare splashes of ice-blue and ultraviolet, as she broke the remaining pieces of shell and slithered out. The chamber swelled with the scent of rainwater and wet petals, soft chitters and bated breath.

An incongruously thick tail, chitin-plated and blunt-tipped, curled protectively around the successor’s torso. Parsec watched as the successor’s tail twitched; she choked and coughed and hacked up a packet of clear slime, with twelve tiny spheres suspended within—ivory-coloured attendant eggs, which had incubated alongside—within—her.

The spheres broke open and proto-attendants crawled out, each of them small enough to fit into Parsec’s palm. They looked just like Venera’s when hers had first emerged, with none of the characteristic flourishes or bio-modifications that had been added later on. One by one, they crawled over the successor’s shivering body and began to cleanse her of the hatching-slime. In minutes, she was clean and dry. She raised her small, dainty head and blinked open nictitating eyelids to survey the silent masses before her. Her eyes were large and rounded, coal-black all the way through.

“I am Segin,” she said. Her voice was soft and youthful and slightly thick with the remnants of mucus clogging her throat.

They all bowed at her words, in sync with the thrum of the Hive. When Parsec straightened up, it was as one with the crowd.

Segin looked down upon them with a placid expression on her face, spurs at rest. She did not seem a true part of the Hive; not yet. There was only the faintest of threads tying them together. This was within ordinary parameters, she knew. It would improve with time. But Parsec sensed more than a greater distance—there was a subtler weakness in the link, too minute to place words to. Perhaps Venera’s memory was clouding her mind. The line that had tied Venera to the Hive had been sea-fresh and sky-bright and it had strengthened twofold as the years went on. Even the predecessor’s had been better than this.

She would serve successor Segin, she vowed, according to her duty.

No more, no less.

===

Venera’s body had been cleared away, death-shroud and attendants and all. And with her left the defining characteristics of the inner sanctum.

The rooms had settled back into their dormant state; creamy white walls, curved corners and soft edges all melting into one another. Some liked to refer to its dormancy as reminiscent of the inside of an egg, but Parsec thought that fanciful. It had always reminded her of stagnant dough. She felt exposed—an intruder, almost, a slash of inky indigo too starkly visible when superimposed over these pale surfaces. She much preferred Venera’s realm of dappled light and the cool, starry shadows that she blended into so beautifully. When she had walked in those shadows, she herself could not tell where her fingertips ended and where the darkness began. But Venera was gone, she reminded herself. Venera was gone, and this successor was to be the Titania now.

Segin lay tucked under her broad, armoured tail on her nascent throne—a roundish, raised platform—as her proto-attendants spiraled around her, growing and changing as they polished her skin and stroked her wings, folded tight against her back. Parsec’s attention kept skipping back to that throne; perfectly smooth and anaemic, with a polish that looked as it it had been lifted from the inside of a deep-sea shell. She knelt even as a visceral revulsion unfurled at the base of her chest.

“General Parallax,” Segin said faintly, her voice feathery at the edges. She blinked her eyes open and roused, uncurling into a sitting position. “Salutations and my thanks for your attention.”

“It is my honour. Are you well?” Parsec asked, because that was what Segin expected her to say. Truthfully, she only came here to sate her sense of scrutiny, to see if she could glean some meaning as to what kind of Titania Segin would try to become, to grasp at the trailing ends of Venera even as she knew, deep inside, that this newling would be nothing like her.

“I feel wonderful,” Segin replied. “General Perihelion has left to distribute instruction for my alterations to the Hive. Please, continue as you were. The predecessor’s systems are remarkable and I can only hope that I will improve them.”

Parsec bit her tongue. The predecessor, Segin had called her. It was innocuous enough, the usual way to refer to the most recently dead Titania if one had not been close to her. And Segin could not have been close to her, because she had not been alive when Venera had yet lived. Segin’s—sensible, appropriate, meaningless—choice of title should not have stoked a flare of anger deep in her gut. She stilled the beginnings of a twitch creeping up her tail.

“Of course,” Parsec said outwardly. “The Hive welcomes you.”

===

After she had left Segin to her attendants, she had thought that an evening flight might clear her head. Instead, it was only sparking more questions. Parsec circled over the Hive and considered its defenses.

It looked, from the outside, like a modest mound in the earth, a small hill at best, formed from a dark, dried-tar-looking substance. Impenetrable, or so she had hoped. Parsec had no builder tendencies of any sort, but she took occasional tours of their workshops, full of boiling hot and bubbling pits of shielding substances, to be painted over the entire hive at monthly intervals. Could it be, that someone had made a mistake?

But she had checked the seams of the inner membrane for herself, and there had been no hint of tampering in the material, whether physical or in the fast-flowing river of enchantment that flowed deep inside. The Hive from the outside was just for show; this mound of material was a capstone at best; a mere marker for a doorway. The reason for Venera’s death lay elsewhere.

She considered the humans, the city around the corner with all of its shining rabble, then dismissed the idea. The Glister alliance held true. It was why they called themselves Glister Hive, after all, because names seemed to matter to the humans. The name was a diplomatic thing, to soothe bruised Magister egos when it came to the fact that no human was allowed within half a mile of this place.

Instigators from other Hives, then? There were two other Hives within a few day’s travel; both combined would hardly make up half the size of their own. So if it was somehow either or both of them, then they would have much to gain but far more to lose. Schismatists? Unheard of. She lashed her tail in annoyance. No. This was paranoia.

Someone is doing this to me.

The Hive was not a true hivemind, Parsec conceded. But one would think that any rebellious pockets of schismatists would be swiftly detected, a defect in the rhythm. So if this ‘someone’ that Venera had alluded to was part of their Hive, then they would likely be working alone, or with one or two others at most. And it was likely that the person in question was part of the Hive, for they had entertained no visitors for months. Though the wind surged cool and strong against her wings and across the flight-smooth lines of her body, she felt ill at ease.

She thought of Orion, whether to visit and ask. Was anyone safe to talk to, to confide in—even him? Could he be the traitor? Likely not, but if she still felt it best to hold her tongue among her fellow generals, then it was likely wise to reveal as little as possible. But then, she had never claimed to have no weaknesses.

She circled round and dove into an entrance, guarded by enchantment and autonomous weaponry alike. Further in, sentries stood to attention and greeted her; she gave them a nod and pressed further in, through several cavernous, bustling chambers strung with pale lights. Then she took a shortcut.

The Hive was honeycombed with half-hidden pathways; passages opened up in the solid, engineered wire armature of the standard levels and districts, zones and blocks of home-cells. She fluttered her way upwards, through a one-way chute that blasted cold nitrogen at her back, emerged in a rarely-used intersection. The stone signposts were overgrown with black moss. She ignored both the signs and the pathways, pushing herself further upwards with a powerful beat of her wings; there was another chute here, and it led her straight to the lobby of the Archives.

Though she flew up the chute, she found herself flying down as she emerged from a gate in the lobby ceiling. It was a quirk of such shortcuts; one that she had mastered navigating after the first few instances of crashing headfirst into the moss carpet. Today, she alighted on her feet. Gracefully.

Orion sat front and center at his post, clearly mid-conversation with some young scout or other. He glanced up at her as she entered, the barest flicker of his eyes; three cuttlefish-pupils blazing blue, glimmering in the Archive light.

“…Personal talisman of sorts,” he was saying. “Chalk and enamel, pewter chain. Very minor charm. If the city has a lost and found, you should pass it on to them.”

“Thank you,” the scout said. She turned her head, spotted Parsec, and gave a little start, her dipterous wings paling with embarrassment. “Oh! General Parallax! My apologies for keeping you waiting.”

“Not at all,” Parsec said, and dipped her head in acknowledgment.

“I—I shall be out of your way then!” the scout squeaked, and saluted before she scurried out of the lobby.

Orion pushed a stack of parchments to the side of his desk. His third eye, set like a sideways jewel in his brow, narrowed as she approached, the colour within dimming to a calm, pearl-grey. “Parsec. What can I do for you today?”

The set of his spines was ever-so-slightly tense. There was no avoiding it.

“Has Venera been laid to rest?” she asked, though the answer was obvious.

He gave her a gentle look as he understood her question for what it really was, the real question that she felt too uncomfortable to ask directly; is she here and can I see her?

“Of course,” he said. “Just this way.”

She followed him to the beginning of the stacks; one of his attendants rushed to fill his spot at the desk; it was a clear message to any new visitors; be back soon.

She had asked him, once, if it was lonely being the sole archivist with nothing but forty identical attendants for company. He had said no, and she hadn’t quite believed him. The benefits were dubious—one acquired a certain mystery, when the role came with the prestige of personal attendants; far more than a Titania, even, not to mention the marked lack of a Titania’s reduced lifespan—but the Archives were a sombre place, and the idea of being locked away, alone among an endless warren of books and corpses and historical relics, was more dour than idyllic. She tried to visit him, whenever she had the time.

The traitor could be anyone, she reminded herself. It could be a fellow general, an esteemed architect, a lowly processor. All of them or none of them. There was also the faint possibility of it being Orion himself. Was he one of her few close—perhaps even closest—acquaintances, or was he a queenslayer, leading her on a mocking path to Venera’s final resting place? She grappled with the idea, then stowed it aside. Later. She would confront her fears later. She would plan for the worst and deal with whatever ramifications revealed themselves.

She clung to that small comfort as he led her down the stacks with his usual uncanny certainty, choosing between splitting pathways, weaving through wooden shelves and stone monoliths alike. They passed a spot—a clearing with a flat-topped boulder among a sea of mottled white pebbles—where he liked to share tea, and not for the first time, she wondered if she visited for reasons he could understand—isolation, and the like. Being a General was not nearly as wonderful as people seemed to believe.

She would have chosen to become a scout, in retrospect. It must be nice to fly free at one’s leisure, even if it involved keeping an eye on the humans and all of their dreary comings and goings. But things being as they were, she was burdened with dreary responsibilities and the mystery of Venera’s death. There was a traitor, somewhere in the Hive. It itched deep within her core; she would scrape at the soil with her bare hands to root them out. She would gut herself to remove that itch, if need be.

She shook off her clinging worries as they reached the tomb; an enormous, dark egg-like structure. She paused for a moment to bask in its magnitude. Then she reached out to touch it; the surface felt cold and glossy-smooth, like glass, though it was fully opaque. The tomb had been set into an area thick with bookshelves, an area with a ceiling that wavered when it was looked at, such that it didn’t resemble a finite barrier at all. The area smelled of dry paper and old, oxidising inks. Here was Venera’s grave. Now was the time to mourn, to be grant respect and imbibe in memory. Afterwards, she could hunt the traitor down as she liked.

Orion touched a notch on the tomb’s surface and a section of it unfurled softly outwards like a petal, a rounded, elegant door. Through it, she glimpsed a section of green and caught a whiff of sharp resin.

“Would you prefer to see her alone?” he asked.

“I…yes.” She stepped inside, not fully knowing what to expect. She took a moment to drink it in, and then: “…ah,” she said.

It was a miniature recreation of Venera’s inner sanctum. Sombre greenery blanketed the ground and elegant trees sprouted from the walls, through which delicate false-sunlight filtered. This, too, must have been encoded into her attendants, for them to build before they wore down without her power to guide them. She supposed that they must have laid themselves into the soil and deconstructed themselves into base parts. She imagined Venera weaving the instructions by candlelight, steady hands crafting the blueprint for her own tomb.

Venera’s body was cloaked over with her dark death-shroud. She lay on the ground on the far side, where the foliage grew thickest and the dappled light turned to twinkling, velvet shadow. Parsec flitted over to her, a touch unsteady.

It is just her body, she reminded herself. It is just her body. Empty shell, never decaying. Gone was the soul. She was not sleeping and the shroud was not a quilt. Mausoleum, not bower. It did not matter how much she wanted Venera to stir, to sit up, to unfold her wings and say that there had been a terrible misunderstanding. This was Venera’s body. She had seen it, just earlier today. Venera was dead. The Titania had died, but then the Titania lived again, leaving Venera in its wake. There was no use hoping.

Three feet away, she dropped to alight upon the grass. Bowed her head and knelt. “Titania,” she murmured. And then, said even more quietly: “Venera, my Titania. Upon my life, I will avenge you.”