Sacrifice by Nicky Martin
This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions #13
Rejoice! Today, I return my nourishment to the Hive. I fulfill my purpose, and like the breeders before me, I lived a perfect life.
I stretch my spiracles for a final time then slather lubricating-jelly across my mouth, tasting the wet, bitter, numbness along the bones of my jaw. My simplex’s luminescent walls dim. Morning nears. In my life, my simplex, my Hive and my Queen always shined bright. I knew no horrors of Whiteness.
Bless my glorious Queen, an unparalleled protector!
I fondly remember her massive body, spraying my face with a memory scent to picture her lumbering thorax, that thick, obsidian fur, and her massive extraction rod stabbing into my seed satchel. My essence spilled, the Queen marched onward for the next extraction.
The drones break my door down, but I keep reminiscing.
Once my Queen smelled me, everyone knew she was coming. We felt the quakes shaking across the Hive, every step trundling down the canals, her rasping breath, a syrup calcifying in my senses. Spraying a mist into my simplex, my exoskeleton would peel back, and the mouth manacles masticate out from the walls of my containment pod. They brace me tightly. My Queen’s abdomen slammed through the scab-door of my simplex, the needle-point rod on the tip of her tailbone is sharpened when she cuts through the door’s resin, then she plunges it through my mouth, breaking the bones and weaving it down my throat into my seed-sac, sucking out the mire inside me to mold into her nourishment, replenish my fellow Nallah and protect the tomb of our ancestors.
My life was sacred and just.
The drones keep marching me. I see the Reconstruction Room, the place I would lay, huskish and numb, after the Queen’s worship. I’d sleep for long stretches, much of my life spent dreaming here in this room.
I remembered watching my past lives: seeing the Queen’s molding, feeling my own birth; watching in horror at my adolescent combat trials; brilliantly dying a drone in the wild in hopes of reclaiming a bit of scrap for re-enforcing our Hive; configuring myself together with the rest of the Melters to break that scrap down into our wax as I become a builder who sculpts, filters and heats these goos into our salvation. For a brief moment, I am the Queen, piloting the Hive, powering it, illuminating our Hive with her majesty, my forbearers entombed around my throne.
As a Breeder, I must be crystalized in purpose. To ensure the future, the Queen cherished my essence and shaped it into my siblings, so one day the Hive worships my body and recycles it.
That day is today.
The dark, wax walls glow a warped orange. The Hive anticipates my sacrifice. Every simplex is empty. It’s strange, touring the empty Hive on my final walk. I stare upon the rooms, estranged now, no longer my home. I admire the architecture because soon I will become it.
My guards bring me through the ostia, we pop out from a puckering wall-hole. We avoid the throng of worshipers, getting in place for the death of myself and my brothers. All Nallah are here, preparing for the ritual, pouring into the sacrificial bowel.
A buzzing emanates from Queen’s throne.
We descend into the center. The two other Breeders arrive with me simultaneously. After we are melted and absorbed, the Queen will birth three replacements in our steed—three, jelly, fleshy, embryos ready to be fed the expedient-goo.
Myself and my brothers step on the sacrificial alter. The Queen beats the Resonator.
With every hit, our Hive rumbles, the vibrations tuning our sensory rods. The rhythm dictates our behavior. I wait before the sacrificial stairs.
The Drones arrive. Silently, each takes their position at the bubbling tubes. They all extend their thoraxes and prepare for augmentation.
The Elder stands apart from all. The Elder helped defeat the Whiteness, the only drone left alive after the Feed. Every hundredth day, she expresses her memory gland into our communication ducts, spraying the knowledge from her thorax into an amplification funnel rigged by the builders. The cone dosed us with her tragic, wet scent. We saw the massacre, by the smoke and the merciful feast of the Queen. At any time, the blinding white could return, the Elder warned.
Protecting the Queen is the only imperative to survival, for through her, all of us are nourished
We dedicate ourselves to protecting the Hive, and training our bodies to respond instinctually. The white overtakes everything: sight, sound, scent. But this matters nil: when they attack, we will be ready. All must protect our Queen.
Towering upon her throne, she nods at the Firstborn. My brother walks to the pyre and straps himself into the unfamiliar chains. The bone shackles splinter into the firstborn’s and feet. The Queen beats the drum beats faster. A poco, a poco!
Then the Melters ascend. Creeping close to the ground, like an impending puddle, they fill their sacred troughs. They slosh, melding their vicious visages together, filling the pools next to the alter-bed.
Firstborn opens and readies his mouth. A piston unsheathes from the midpoint of the Hive. It perforates through the ceiling of bowel and continues downward, standing erect throughout the entire structure. The Hive pillar punctures Firstborn’s small mouth, digging deep down to the core of his thorax.
I patiently watch standing next to my younger brother.
The Builders enter and—I see her, the one I know.
…the Builders enter and scuttle forth with precision, marching from drone to drone to affix the tubes into each drone’s flight glands. The tubes harness the gas emitted from the drones’ holes. The resulting effluvium plumbs through the rectal umbilicals, filtered into the Hive pillar, purifying it for our mouths. The tubes blow into the Melter liquids, and boil the puddles hot enough to bubble up, pop and melt the breeder’s tough exoskeleton.
Through her, I too touch the weaving tubes plucked into the drone’s nozzles. Her: not the Queen, the builder. My focus breaks. We’re melding again…
Long ago, our expression-scents melded during a Mush Harvest. During that cycle, too many drones had perished, so a builder (her) needed to pair with someone—and breeders have the facilities needed to process all scent expressions. We melded for on the mushing, all must meld.
That day, I felt an invigorating terror of understanding—clearly seeing all the inner-workings and conspiring complexity of the Hive. She, in turn, bore witness to the pain and benevolence of Breeding. Producing seed for the queen is a blessed curse. Looking at her, I felt the same terror I felt that Harvest.
The Queen’s drumbeats rumble our bodies, shaking the plates of our exoskeletons and massaging the skin inside the hardened shells. I at oneness with my Queen, the Hive and her…
Not the Queen!
Tubes gurgle. The Melters burst forth from their containment pools. I do not see. I see me.
She watches me watch myself. She empathizes with my glory, my pain; through her I understand how my exoskeleton will reshapen into walls, spears, manacles, my organs, juices glands melt into nourishment for the Queen. I drain into the mucus of my forerunners.
I see it all.
Unintentionally, she the builder melds with me again. Not now! Today is not a Harvest, but a Sacrifice! Will the Queen sense it? This is torture! I would have lived a perfect life, were it not for these last few seconds. All is ruined.
The scrape of Firstborn’s deathrattle mercifully focuses me.
Firstborn’s jawbones, clicking and clamoring, involuntarily scraping together as they tumble and smack, fall into the Melters pool, the last of Firstborn dissolves. What a glorious sound his sizzle makes!
The Hive-pillar rises slightly, exactly as high as the height of my mouth. It is my turn.
With purpose, I squeeze into the bone-manacles. I feel the coarse, brittle texture scrape me, the leg bones of my forefathers. Their feet turned to shackles, these bone-chains hold me down.
Today, I heal against the sacred scab.
The pillar descends again, engorging through my mouth, worming down my throat, past my breathing sacs, through my intestines, against my ootheca. I meld with the Hive now. I feel the Queenand her and the drones and my younger brother and her.
I’m a megacosm of Nallah.
How wonderful my death, fully immersed in all! I led a perfect life. Well, almost…
Perhaps my adulterous focus is what withheld my glorious martyrdom!
Part of the Hive’s wall crumbled with an artless smash, shattering my forefather’s bones into particles.
Bright and looming, the Whiteness arrives.
The Elder dashes to attack, as the rest of the Drones pull free their pipes, then fly into action. Now, the Melter muck won’t ever splash high enough to acid-bathe my exoskeleton, and reclaim my body whole. The ritual was a failure. I languish!
The Whiteness makes the senselessness occur. It is dark because of the all-encompassing light. I am nothing. Everything is gone. The pillar, the Hive, the alter, my chains: all cease to be.
White is all that is.
I do not see my legs or wings, I hear nothing, I feel everything. The world is a plane of blistering pain, emanating from my insides, through my skeleton, out into forever like a meaningless, white wave broadcasting for infinity. All is lost.
Until a living wax sculpture hurtles toward me.
Pulling me off the alter, she slathers a salve across my body with all her legs. She jams the gummy resin into the crevices between my bone plates. I smell it. The Whiteness spell is broken, I sense again.
Our world is dying.
The opacity envelops the room. I watch it absorb the last of the Melters out of their pools, embodying their causticity, and misting across the sacrificial bowel. Every Nallah is sprayed.
She drags me. I watch the carnage, powerless to help. The melting…
#
Drones don’t have protective exoskeleton like breeders. They must be light—to fly, steal, fight. As melting droplets mist upon their soft flesh, they melt into a slush of rancid foam. Oils that coat the drones’ bodies accelerate the corrosion, rotting their flesh on contact. The bubbling, fatty mist is absorbed, and thus helps accelerate the melting Hive.
Some drones fought strongly, but all of them died. Blind, deaf, and senselessly, they slashed their combat rods, merely succeeding in pushing aside a looming threat. The Whiteness melted them slowly.
The Elder, ready at the onset of the attack, slashed his combat rod at the Cloud, trying to stay at the edge of it, stabbing pointlessly at its expanding border. He thrusted, parried, and accidentally paraded the acid cloud around the entire Hive, helping it melt the walls, simplexes, and every Nallah inside.
I lay on my back witnessing the struggle, watching myself die over and over, yet I still moved against my will. I wanted to stay.
But She dragged me.
Finding a sizable hole at the foot of the bowel, she throws me out of it. My wings extend naturally, slower because of the resin.
I glide.
She jumps out and glides too, directing the pocket of air to move toward me. She cleans the gummy resin off my wings with her mouth. She expresses,
“The Whiteness cannot process the shielding resin”
We fall slowly. I am focusing on the Hive, bearing witness to its fate.
The Queen emerges
Lumbering from her thrown, the Queen grasps the walls of the Hive. She strikes the sharpened needle rod at the end of her tail with grace and precision. I realize her target, a small orb emanating smoke. It is projecting and protected by the Whiteness cloud.
With every thrust, the acid spray melts more of her tail. The Queen’s strikes are limited.
She thrusts a final time, stretching to stab the mist-emanating egg and—
The internal mist cloud inside the Hive finally melts the wall on which the Queen was perched. It trickles with a crackle and our glorious Queen plummets off the side of the Hive.
The Queen tries spreading her wings, but after decades of non-use, she can’t even glide. She could never fly like drones—with their specialized digestion systems and expulsion glands—so she could never fly back to and save her Hive. But perhaps if she could glide she could have carried herself to safety. She didn’t.
Instead, she plummeted toward the ground, faster every second.
Weswooped toward her, maybe we could make it in time and hold her up, if only to delay her demise, but we couldn’t move fast enough. She shrank from our view and we heard her crash to the ground below.
Much later, after properly directing our glide-path to her scent, we landed next to her carcass. It was already rotting.
Yet, my Queen! How beautiful you still are, even in petrification! Her plated-exoskeleton was empty, scavengers devoured her flesh. Wounded, I slowly crawl away from my companion and into the bones of my Queen.
She expresses, “I need your help building a shelter”
“We need no shelter,” I reply, pulling myself into her skull, I would sleep here tonight, but I expressed “The Hive shelters all, remember” You could smell the mockery in my pheromones.
I lament my fate, that of my Hive, the failure of our lives.
#
The next day, I find her expelling the thick, gloppy resin from her builder’s gland. She tried to mold it into a dense clay. She could not produce enough for a simplex by herself; she hardly made enough for a floor. It was pitiful.
“Help me!” she expressed, “We’re the last of our Hive! Our honor, their memory, lives only through us!”
I didn’t even believe this. I’m sure other builders covered themselves in that wax, glided to safety, and knew to build a shelter in order to survive. Maybe if the Queen didn’t die, all would be retrieved.
Maybe she thought she could reproduce with me, a Breeder. She can’t. Without the Queen, Nallah die painfully and quick.
She sprays toward me again, “Simply giving up is against the will of the Queen! The history of the Hive needs us to continue on! Move forward! Perhaps we can join a new Hive if such a thing even exists.”
I didn’t spray a response. The thought of joining another Hive is pointless and disgusting.
Rumbling in my pheromone-sac, I began to craft the situationally specific scent. A scent that says, “I don’t care about you, another Hive, or anything besides my peace, destroyed! Death’s glorious bounty was stolen from me! I must rectify it!”
But I did not have a chance to spray this scent.
Before my eyes, she convulsed. I chittered in fear. Scuttling to her, I tried to help—but I was much too late. Her body tremors in pain. I touch; it burns. She looks at me longingly, seeing the perilous and rewarding journey we could have taken together but never will…
I turn her on the side and witness her murderer. A small creature, perhaps one one-hundredth the size of a Nallah, burrowed into a gap in her plating. It vibrated its body at a strange frequency, and produced bright, blue sparks inside her. She fried.
Nallah were not made to be outside the Hive.
I smell the steam misting from inside her skeleton, the hard, crusted plates shake with the rising heat. The creature feasts on her, consuming every gland, sac, tumor, juice: all of it in sacrifice of her existence.
My awareness expands once again. I feel like I’m connected to all my Hive; however, I know it to be true that they have almost all perished. A few feint smells linger in the distance, but they’re extinguishing.
My duty is complete. I failed, just like everyone. My life is over, yet inexplicably it hasn’t stopped. I am free.
No Queen to steal my seed, no Hive to pledge my fealty, no her trying carry on, rebuild, perpetuate the same broken ship that makes breeders who cannot focus during a Draining ceremony, builders who crave glory and recognition, Queens that are too old to move, too weak to fight, too fat to fly?
I feel nothing, like I’m bathed in Whiteness again. I can still see, hear, act. But I need not do any of these, I choose to, and my choice was nearing completion. My sensations are vague and unimportant. Perhaps I am already dead, it is impossible to tell. I walk forever. I never find anything.
Then, I run up against a surface extending vertically into the sky.
I climb it, hard and rocky. The higher I get, the longer I’ll fall. Upward, I press my bruised and broken legs, my joints still raw from the shackles, that farce of a sacrament long forgotten by the world except for me. I push myself against the coarse barrier. I go slow. My skeletal armor braces me against the surface, digging in with every step. I crawl.
Nothing provokes me, all things now sense my drive. I know what will be done.
I reach the top of the surface. I gaze out upon the strange and terrible world around me. I understand none of it. Blurs of shapes, colors, movements, and all the awful sounds.
I jump, then instinctually glide, gazing bored upon the chaos.
Am I the first Nallah to do this? Fly freely through the air with no purpose or Hive? Or was my ship just one of a larger Hive, all Hives are Breeders, making more, replicating, expanding outward into nothingness forever.
My mind could not justify the futility caused by the Whiteness.
These morbid fantasies plagued me as I crashed, into a frozen stop, I was in the air now, floating—not gliding, suspended above everything. The Whiteness returns, seeping in around me. Without her resin, I lose all my senses. I’m immersed in the white.
Yet, I see the egg orbs spray the mist around me. This time, it is not caustic. It does not burn. I hang, trapped.
The beast approaches me. It opens its four mouths and spews a brown, liquid bile across my scabby exoskeleton. I melt. Vigorously, the beast devours me. I see it all.