The music was almost nothing to start, almost juvenile in its simplicity. A single scout, shivering within the yurt perched upon the plateau of the caldera, first to spot the rays the humanites called poison on the horizon. The cresting of the sun as it rose like a searing egg, birthed up into the frigid expanse of the red world. Forelegs raised, abandoning the single heater within the structure of skin and shell, every breath fogged from the flared vents as the scout began to sing. A greeting. A sorrow. A call sent to each beam turning hazy and bright the sky, welcoming the dawn while begging that the regard of the Composer be gentler this rise than it had the last. Lonely, the sound of that single observer was ignored by the aliens huddled and secure in their nesting structures, their mustering barracks, and only glanced to from across the sweeping chasm by the few selected to stand guard in thick, furry coats affixed over their fabric shells. The song was not for them. For as it traveled down, down through crags separated by carved clawholds cut into the rock, down the hundred lengths of sloped descent pockmarked with openings and tunnels one needed to see from above to discern the pattern of, fog began to steam from each and every entrance. One after another, the observers on high pitched their voices, and in their soprano a melodious bass responded, exhaled from the very lungs of the caldera. And when the rays of the sun had broken the crest of the land, and the cry became a clarion call, the answer was in the tremble of the earth, and the tremors of twenty thousand beating strides pouring into the bowl of the natural cistern.

One. The heartbeat, the pulse. Drone after drone, laborer after laborer, the black shells and crawling legs threw themselves into the pits touched by the light and began their work. Drumbeat joining the high call as they stamped and stomped within the triangular gullies, breaking up the sludge that had frozen the fade before. When the ice had splintered and rock-lined holes ran dark once more, haulers arrived to upend buckets of water and spew bile from their second stomachs, while others dumped their laden trays of dirt into the sludge. Each step was congruent with the last, each pit filled with the menials mashing and stirring the mud keeping perfect time with the last, and the next, and the next. The beat was heavy, the pounding endless. Whistling, whispering, the grains of silicate and sand were flung into only those pits where crafters rose and clapped antennae and forelegs, signaling the readiness.

Two. The wind and the string. Faster than the beat of the claw came the slice of the scythe, slipping the air and splitting the lengths of dried palmidia stalks. With a whine, a thousand legs raised their keratin blades; with a whistle, a thousand edges sung out and cleaved another strip from their allocated growth. Their lines sat above, and ran between, the paths winding and sectioning each percussive basin in which the workers churned. Their sounds, the body to the beat, a pull of band across taught cords as each timed cut sent shavings of the fibrous lengths into the mix. Duo lines of haulers ran behind them as they sat and shaped their tune, snipping and slicing, and each unified breath cast the organic fibers from claw to air to mud.

Three. The pattering and drumming strikes. The schlepping of the brown and reddish muck from pit to cast, poured into the prepared, angled molds. Set before the more dexterous of laborers, who struck and pushed to fill the shaped rocks and clay. Pat, pat, and scrape. Compact the mud, press it full, and smooth the top with a strike which rung out like the clash following the roll. Two thousand sets of forelegs raised in offering, and two thousand casts retrieved just as the next were delivered, ready for their own sounds to join the rising din. The filled molds placed from rise-fade to fade-rise, following the trail of sunlight that grew ever brighter through the thrumming activity filling the caldera.

And four. The cracking and the tapping, the hard concussive strikes as molds from the previous measures, now set, were knocked free. Added, stacked, piled into the flat platforms suspended on the backs of workers marching in tandem. Marching past the flow of bodies departing for the surrounding wasteland with empty carts and the ebb of siblings returning with their own laden with fresh sand and dirt. Marching, sagging under the weight, until they had reached the crafters with their shells filled with sealant at the base of the domes. The pillars. The walls and supports and ceilings that grew, brick by brick, smeared with binding and clicked to place as another piece was fitted to the whole. Thinkers pointed and drew with elongated staffs, lifters strained to pull back the cords as another woven sheet was hoisted above the gaps between the buildings. Between the curved streets through which ran fluids under claw and leg, above the nest awnings which curved out to shield the entryways from the light just now reaching the tips of the black shielding spires ringing the hundreds of lengths in perimeter at the plateau of the caldera. The single observer, even now, was ceaseless in its cry even as the world beneath it sung back with a force which shook the mountains themselves. With claw and scythe and chisel and staff and blow of hammer and creak of corded rope. A music of life. A music of action. A music of progress.

“Skthveraachk Queen, may your fields be filled with mass grown and killed in equal measure. …This will never be a method of communication I shall grow accustomed to, I think.” Breaths caught and a ripple of the subtlest interruption resonated across the surface, though originating deep, deep beneath the coordinated cacophony of shudder and sound above ground. Down through the sharp-edged tunnels, the triangular passageways that were now half lined with brick, stone and supporting braces. Past the insulated caverns, alive with the sounds of writhing pupae and the buzzing of the heaters which sat central in the teeming nurseries and nesting chambers. Emitting, with a musical warmth not even the rigid recitation of the technological marvel could suffocate, from the tap-pad held in the graspers of the slowly crawling form. Blotting out the entirety of the passageway, her four eyes all allotted to the view of the Slough Queen’s curvature depicted upon the device.

“I still expect an answer, and am about to chastise your rudeness with each pause when I remember.” The breaks were unnatural, the syntax irregular. But to Skthveraachk, even listening to the calls of her clutch beneath the ceaseless tempo of construction was a dourer color than the tastes of silver and green flowing from Ckhehnvraahll Queen’s message. Flung from distances she could yet not comprehend. “So, I shall make of my words a response to your last sending, a soliloquy to our present, and a prediction of the future. That your next composition does not waste quite so much time, much as I enjoy hearing your protests against decisions that will have been made measures before you ever hear this.”

“Sixty-three defects in the fourth nesting chamber.” She could not deny her responsibilities, even now, as the attendant murmured in harmony to the joy that was now spreading outward from the Queen’s position.

“Recycle. Biomass to second stage growths in second chamber. How many inferior births within the fourth after defects?”

“Four hundred twenty-six.” More than the last clutch. These were but menials, but the next to pupate would be specialists. They could not afford rejects amongst future thinkers and scentcrafters, and the Sovereignty’s next shipments would be another four measures yet.

“Disregard last. Recycled biomass to fourth stage growths in fifth chamber.” The Queen’s intent left the nests, and traveled instead to the larders stocked with proteins. “Cut meat rations to soldier clusters four and five, reallocate to nesting chambers.”

“Received.” A shudder ran through the two thousand bodies resting in torpor as they were notified in their stretched burrow halls above, their breathing slowing as they prepared to consume their reserves and own flesh if needed. The Queen crawled on.

“Yes, in answer to your last query; but you were always quick to lose the excess weight after laying, and I am certain you will ensure your lethal form once again before the cold ends. I insist that despite your protests, it is a glowing look for you. You could do with birthing more often. It is good to fulfill all your roles.” Skthveraachk flexed her gaster, and it lifted only a tenthlength from the floor before thudding back to the ground. Dragged more than carried as she pushed past the discomfort, both at the bulk remaining and the haired tickles laughed from the tap-pad. Three. She had managed three clutches during the winter, along with the other birthing queens. Now, with the rises lasting longer and the bite in the air fading more each measure, the girth of her abdomen was no longer a joy. It was a hinderance. “My own clutches have been without complication. I did not test the humanite’s concoctions myself, at your advice and ever interfering request, but the daughter I selected gave birth to a full three thousand without a single defect. Their biomass is untainted, Skthveraachk, and you must not hesitate so in its utilization. Wherever your suspicion of their food has rooted, it is tainted soil.”

“Unknown sounds. Potential humanite in distress. Queen’s antechamber. Investigate?”

“Disregard.” She ensured the inquiry was severed entirely from the growing song. The passage split, and Skthveraachk turned without looking, following the scent of the lain trail markers into the larger central hall. Here, as the lines of drones broke then reformed around her, there was room enough to rear should even she desire it. Even the memory of the inquiry was ordered removed, and by the time she was within the procession set for departure, it was a thought no longer carried within the chorus.

“And, to save you on the concern, yes, nine thousand is in excess of my colony’s capacities. Three shall be arriving on Dracan, with Aadarsh Who Has Been Blessed when he arrives.” Within the fourth layer, a pale mender was felt raising from their treatments to the victims of progress. Crushed under carts, too slow to avoid wheelbarrow, striking themselves with tools their damaged limbs struggled to hold. And like those who were as much of Ckhehnvraahll as they were of Skthveraachk, the news reaching them colored the colony’s song with an ever more vibrant opal sheen. The Queen wished she could bark irritation, protest the excess. But they had need, and they would find use quickly for the arrivals. And how could her annoyance more than flutter in the sounds of celebration from those soon to be united with more of their siblings? “But I could send you ten times that number and you would fear for not. I dream, sometimes, of the weapons you must see out there in the sky, War Queen. Of the wonders and the horrors. The Sovereignty has built for me reeking columns of black stone, and I have seen them liquify a herd of mantites at over a hundred lengths. They have shaped crystal and hardstone and woven them between the vines of Ckhehnvraahll’s Last, making the most beautiful of shapes stretch across my nest with each rise. I think the forsaken and Queenless Swarms of the desert could assault me tomorrow, and I would know no fear with these humanites beside me.”

“Destination?”

“Third layer.”

“Dispensing arrangement. Observe safe distances.” The lifters made a squirt of the most temporary indicator upon the platform, and the Queen waited the scant breaths needed for those departing earlier to file into their spaces first. Many carrying the limp or barely moving pupae, others trussed to the wheeled carts filled with stones from the ongoing excavations. Skthveraachk made but passing look before returning her eyes to the tap-pad. Stroking, carefully so the device did not register an input, one of her antennae in a faint longing across the dancing body of the pale grey Queen depicted, compensating for the lack of scent with wonderful, undulating movements. Palmidia, bone and chitin clunked as the braces fell away, ropes strained and groaned, and with a lurch as the tens of drones gripped their handles and began to push, the pulleys hoisted the squared lift. Wheels grinding as the platform rose through the grooves of the diagonal slope, while the other high above began its identical descent.

“Your union with the Hathan-Commander is a mixture of barbs in a salubrious brew. From all you tell, he is a warrior, and a leader. You must learn to fit your expectations of the aliens to their roles. It is one of the first things I was taught; they may all hold the capacity of Queens, but they retain the duties of their chosen or allocated caste.” The lift only slowed as it reached each layer, allowing both departures and arrivals their passage in equal measure. Skthveraachk slowly crawled forward as each chitinous body left the elevator, readying for her own destination. “I am glad you have found accord with him, despite your circumstances, but I sing my purest assurances that the Aadarsh is someone, something, entirely different. Not like the other aliens of the Sovereignty-Colony. He has slept in my nest. He has sung in my choir. You must accept him as you would myself, Skthveraachk War Queen, and let him help you as he has helped me to understand the future before us all.”

The platform rattled, and the tap-pad was paused with a touch before being lost to her. A drone responded to her signalled demand, and cradled it as though it were a piece of the Silent City itself. Freeing Skthveraachk’s forelegs to join her others in their quick tempo, pulling her heaving body from the lift with speed before it continued its climb. Not a message came which did not include some manner of extolling of the human male’s virtues. If it was not its patience, it was its understanding, and if it was not its understanding it was its eagerness to learn where comprehension had failed. The pad was offered back, but the Queen signed patience. She placed a claw upon her Band as the drone, in his part, sent notice of its delay.

“Hathan-Commander?”

There was a clicking in the symphony, a clacking in the walls and tunnels, but it was too late now. Skthveraachk let her mandibles strike twice together, then a third time for unnecessary reinforcement.

“Mira-Lieutenant, may your touch be as meaningful as it is brief. No, it does not require contacting the Commander if he is with the Admiral. I wish to confirm the projected arrival of the Aadarsh.” The halls of this layer were not like those below. These had been reinforced, the bricks and mortar utilized for both stability and security. Should the humanite’s shield dome fall, there was no defense from the death which would follow, no delay. But the passages here curved, slithering, turning gently from side to side to deny more than ten lengths of view in a straight direction. A lance rifle could remain accurate and deadly at almost two hundred lengths; no such advantage would be permitted here, for any who wished invasion. She passed beneath both a delver and a crafter, one gripping chisel while the other beat scythe against its base to prepare a receptacle for a scribed memory.

Audible irritation was transmitted through the band, and the Queen found it a bitterly pleasant taste. Rehearsals were underway, and they were one of the few things that had managed to drag the five-legged thinker away from his … duties, in the deepest bowels of the nest. Indeed, when Skthveraachk requested a census, she found over a hundred of her children who were supposed to be resting instead cutting shorter their sleeping allotments to lay within the specialized chamber. Watching. Listening. Going rigid at the tips, their vents trembling in embarrassment when they reported their locations and asked if they were ordered back to their barracks. The Queen allowed them their enjoyment. Witnessing the preparations.

“He is exalted with my vassal. You and the Hathan and the Sovereignty have repeatedly impressed upon me his importance, and the importance of his visit. I wish to ensure his reception by my colony is suitable.”

“No, there is nothing I need to tell you. Thank you, Lieutenant.” Communication never desired in the first was severed at the last, and an appreciative drone was quick to deliver the tap-pad back into her graspers as he rushed to his stalled tasking. Upon its translucent screen, on the backdrop of the tiled flooring across which the Queen crawled, the frozen splay of Ckhehnvraahll’s arms brushed, as if by their physical presence, away the lingering distaste the Lieutenant’s music had left. She reactivated the message, letting it resume against the backdrop of distant chanting.

“He says that soon, you will be returning to me and your home, here. And it is your home, for as much as I insist you sing longer and louder of this new nest your colony has founded on humanite lands.” The first garrison, passed. Then, the second. Curled and balled, they waited; a cluster to a room, a thousand voices to a cluster. Soon, that terminology would likely need to change. When the last clutch hatched, they would depart the cold season with near sixty-five clusters of soldiers, and another thirty of the attached supporting groups. “Do not let your role amongst the aliens distract your instincts and force smells to your song. You must ensure your scentcrafters are up to the tasks you have bitten. I cannot fathom the leading of an army more twice the size of my entire colony, sever a colony that was twice again that size.” She had not lied when Ckhehnvraahll had asked for the number of her troops. But she had not corrected the Queen when she presumed from there the distribution to follow. Sixty percent drones, thirty soldier, ten specialist. It was the divine balance, the perfect spread. Colonies since the Founders followed its guidance, and those who spurned it in greed or desperation found themselves lost to the memories. Skthveraachk could not lie that her soldiers totalled almost sixty-five thousand strong. But she would not share that, for the first time in the history of Skthveraachk-Colony, five percent had been taken from both menials and soldiers, and given to the specialists instead.

“Skthveraachk Queen.” The twelfth garrison. The powerful stance of the proud and former Vhersckaahlhn, who approached and ran his claws along her fattened gaster instinctively at her entrance. She could no longer think of him as one of the former red shell menaces, and felt not even a trace of revulsion at his unnecessary and uncommunicative embrace. Returning the contact as best she could with rear legs, the priority of her sight was only taken from her Slough Queen for the sight of her first brood. Head to gaster, rank upon file, the most senior of her soldiers arranged at the crown of each line as they recited every experience, every loss, each victory and each survived defeat to the spawnlings. The beautiful, sloped crests of red from shells of black, like helmets of ruby hardstone, adorning the juveniles who were already the size of the largest of her previous soldiers. “We share of our memories. They learn quickly. Their minds are as yours, quick and lethal.”

“But your celebration is tinged with anger. Mourning. What has disrupted your harmony?” He joined her, moving to her rightmost side. Supporting columns broke the ranks as they struck the ceiling, and upon them, the soldiers had each lain their scent. Unnecessary, for they knew to which cluster they belonged. But when they were dead and voices silent, perhaps the lingering traces of their mark would remain for those who would replace and follow. A strange ritual. A new ritual within the colony. The behemoth snapped his jaws together, keeping his abdomen and thorax settled firm to the larger Queen’s own.

“They are too small. Within the craters of the Vhersckaahlhn-Colony, these would be considered large menials. They did not receive the mass they needed. They will never grow as I have.”

“They are of us both. They share of us, strength and speed. The first unions are always the most complex, and the nursery drones will learn for our next clutch the proper formulas.” There had not been enough protein to go around. They had not expected the demands of the brood to be so great, and the Sovereignty was not prepared to meet the needs without notice. Little wonder Vhersckaahlhn Queen had been so brutal in her conquests, so demanding in her raids. It would take two, three entire reservations hunted to their limits to supply an army of these warriors. They did not have three reservations. They did not have one. “The crops will be in fullest circulation by next cycle. The clutch will be greater still.”

“We must wait a cycle?”

“Yes.” He was already crawling for her end, and a strike of her sheathed claw brought the giant out of his brief stupor.

“Yes. Yes. War Queen, Skthveraachk Queen, must not become as my mother. Skthveraachk Queen is a warrior. Skthveraachk Queen must be ready to once again take the field, and show the aliens her strength. Our strength.”

“Our strength.” Not a one of her children raised their heads or ceased the tapping upon the shell of their sibling, not a one let distraction waiver the purity of their voices. They were strong already. They would become stronger still. “I go to the new caste. You will remain and resume tasking.”

“I protest.” The Queen first dismissed the protest with laughter, her antennae clacking together as she thought the man once again expressing his affections. His rebuttal stilled that humor. “I protest again. I protest the caste. I protest their place within the army.”

“Drones have always served in combat.”

“As haulers. As assistants. As shields. As distractions. They may cooperate to kill a soldier. They may die to save a soldier. One drone cannot best one soldier. It is wrongness.”

“It is the future.”

“I protest.”

“It is the future you have helped create.” There was not a discordance in their voices. He matched hers, perfectly, and the conflicting ideas balanced against one another. “We go to war. War is change. The humanites have rested for a hundred measures and more. They will be ready for what we were. We must be more than we were, more than we are, to destroy them.” His protests were not of logic, and so he could not voice them any further. But deeply seeded was the belief in the past, and of in the truth of the reality that had seen them come from beasts to the masters…former masters, of their world. And it was in that ‘former’ that the truth would be found. The Queen passed from the twelfth barracks, and made for the last. The old ways had conquered their planet. The new ways had conquered them.

“But that is why you are out there, making ready the future for us beyond the sky. And I am here, making ready the home you will return to. Kthcvahlaatch-Colony, Shlthvelhneekch-Colony, even Hchevraaskth-Colony and the vassals of the Triumvirate; they whisper and they murmur now of these new arrivals. Beings like us, but not us. The sound is the same, from the sopra desert to the faderise ocean to the plains and on. Mistrust and skirmishes continue, but a stillness holds over all. Our people, every formite Colony, feels the approach of something greater than they can fathom.” With a final wiggle and dipping of head, Ckhehnvraahll drew nearer whatever mechanization was used to capture her voice and her likeness. Until the shapely bend of her head and deepest opal of her eyes was all that could be seen, illuminating up the dark passageways and the growing shouts of exertion. “My voice, one, under yours, War Queen. Fight for us all, and come back to us as only those blessed by the Composer have before.” The tap-pad blipped completion, and the screen kept that last blotting image of soft carapace betwixt softer eyes. Uniform shouts called to her, but Skthveraachk lingered on that last sight. Committing every detail to memory, which was in turn sent through the link of song to a hundred others. Five hundred. A thousand, pulled from their stomping and building and hauling to record within them something the Queen never wished to lose in a million cycles and more. She cradled the pad in her reared grip, faced forward, and strode heavy into the last of the sweeping chambers. To the astonishment, and aghast worry, in the drone’s music.

“Queen’s presence unnecessary!” These were not warriors, and they were not her children. Daughters of her daughters, menials and drones too small for proper roles, halted their movements and wiggled in confusion all throughout the hall. “Queen rest! Queen sent message, has orders?”

“Physical movement, necessary.” She flexed her gaster again, stressing the muscles to their limit. “Weight, unacceptable. Scentcrafters sent request bars ago. Expressed difficulty in communicating intent. Words not existing, ideas having no smell to them. I arrive to assist.” Skthveraachk sung at an even tempo, but here, the steady beat and endless march which filled the rest of the colony was all but absent. Five hundred glazed bodies, barely able to be called drones, listened with rapt attention. They would have been armor worn by true soldiers a cycle ago, or those chosen to draw the fire of the lances to steal precious seconds of life for the more useful. They knew this. They accepted it. They did not know how to accept this new task. “Where does complication arise?”

“Why must we not die?” The female drone barely reached her scythes, but it had folded its forelegs and curled its claws all the same. The menial’s neck bared, trying to keep steady its heartrate. “Why has our importance been adjusted?”

“You are drone-warriors. You are a new caste. You will study, you will learn, and you will prepare others like you for combat.”

“Armor allotment, minimal. Many soldier clusters lack shields or protection. Why are we given these?” One of the menials skittered nearer, and the thing strapped to its grasper was hardly worthy of the term ‘armor’. It was but a single shell segment, and not even the segment from the gaster, but of the thorax. A fallen soldier’s plating which another could perhaps fix to its core to soak two, three lance beams at most.

“The benefit to a soldier would be minimal. Held at angle, it will keep you alive through what should kill you thrice over.”

“We are prepared to die. We are birthed to die. We are insufficient.”

“You are insufficient.” There was a small relief throughout the room, and even Skthveraachk felt the calmer for having said it. But she pressed on, taking up one of the hundred and more poles that had been fashioned from the toughest and least edible stalks of palmidia. “Your scythes are small and blunt. You cannot carve. You cannot cut. But you can hold. You will hold this.” Tipped with keratin, with sharpened bones, with rocks that had been found to gouge and sealed with spit, the tool was clutched. “And it will carve for you. It will cut for you.”

“We will do as we are ordered. We will fill our roles.” Tipped poles, weapons, spears were tapped and turned in claws, but the uncertainty was untouched. “But we are not birthed to kill. We are not soldiers.”

“You will become soldiers. And you will become spitters. You will be both, and you will be neither.” Long had the thinkers and crafters labored through the measures, but the Queen’s excitement was as much trepidation as anticipation. Along the sides of the room, the scentcrafters signalled just as much confusion, seeking to inspire a fury in those who did not know its taste. They needed to know the texture, themselves, as the Queen had first learned the true fear of being buried alive as she had dug with the delvers. “One must die.”

“I will die!” The female leapt forward, and Queen set down the spear to touch the menial’s head herself. “It will assist the colony? It will be of use?”

“It will teach thousands.”

“I am ascendant. I am enraptured. What is my tasking?” Skthveraachk sent it twenty lengths down the hall, called to her side another from their number. Was it a waste? Was there another way? She did not dwell upon the notion. The thinkers had promised her the validity of this, of their tools, their weapons. They looked at these stunted drones and saw potential. Skthveraachk tried as well, and could just make out the lingering potential. But it was a potential hidden behind the hill of their insufficiencies. The spear was set aside, and the strap was taken up instead by the diminutive drone. Shield upon one arm, grasper setting within the elongated cord and pouch made from the skin of an alien a simple, single stone.

“You will become soldiers. You will kill as soldiers. You will become spitters. You will kill as spitters. We will do as the humanites. We will … borrow a corpse, and resurrect its soul.” The words were still foreign to her, their arrangement all but nonsensical. A whining, whistling whirr began as the armed drone turned their grasper, held rigid their reared foreleg, and began to twist. Applying pressure, adding force, relaxing and releasing when the cord could no longer be held without snapping the grasper, then retightening to expend energy again. To take something old and find within it new purpose, that is what the Hathan’s vaunted ‘book’ had told her after eighty measures of discerning its text. Weight and speed, mass and velocity, that is how her thinkers qualified ‘momentum’. The skin of a humanite, a stone from the wasteland, and the application of a fragmented concept. Separate, they were nothing. The whirring of the spinning sling intensified in its third rotation, and then beneath her, the menial released. Together, they sent the rock little more than a pebble like a hailstone hurtling across the room. Striking into the female at opposing end with such force that orange blood spewed forth from its core. It staggered. It swayed. The slinger below Skthveraachk stared as though it had looked upon the face of the Composer Himself.

“I am a spitter!” It sung. “I am a spitter! I am a spitter!”

“You are a spitter!” Blood oozed from the female’s vents, but still it stood. Fulfilled. Celebratory. The revelation, a new color and a new sound and a new smell, washing out across them all. Skthveraachk inhaled, breathed deep the blood the drone had spilled from thirty lengths away, and watched as the scentcrafters flew into a rush of recording and brewing. “I yet live! Again! We will be soldiers! We will kill! Again!” Ten, twenty, fifty of the menials hurried to take stances alongside their sibling, facing down the teetering body that only barely kept upright. And as in the rest of the colony, though it was a fragile and tenuous thing, their song at last began to become as one. Together, they rose back on four legs. Together, they bared the fronts of their shields of metal and silver and plates. Together, they swung and spun the cords, and the female, her shell already cracking wider from her movements and efforts to stay upright, raised her arms in the triumph of her final note. Together, they released the hail of bullets.

Skthveraachk dismissed queries as to the death and warning signals emanating from the barracks as she departed, and did not signal the haulers. Menial had given her life to inspire her cluster, drones which would wage war not with their thin scythes and nubbed mandibles, but with shield and spear and sling. Let them devour her mass and wear her carapace, markers of the first among them who had died at the hands of the drone-soldier caste. The Queen spared another look with her own eyes for the tap-pad, leaving the sounds of celebration behind her. Sounds which now joined in perfect balance, perfect unity, with the hammer blows, the stacking bricks, the creaking lift, and the single scout on the edge of a caldera-turned-primary nest, breath steaming in the cold early rise of another alien measure. Ckhehnvraahll Queen would give of all her lungs to ready their planet for the changes to come. Skthveraachk returned to the elevator, signalled the lifters to begin a descent, and basked in the orchestra of her colony. They, here, would make those changes a reality. Winter was ending.

The symphony of war thundered once again.