Children of the Hive

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But there were plenty of other sounds that filled the terrible void. She realized, perhaps too late, that anyone who told her that death was serene and peaceful, had told an appalling lie. The sound of the Hive was maddening.

A beautiful cacophony of life.

Humming. Clicking. Constant.

The sounds came from everywhere. Not just from within the limits of the prison she found herself ensconced in, but literally from everywhere. The far off reaches of the stars sang to her in ways they had never sung before. Individual sounds breaking through in fragments and flashes.

The legs of the armored soldiers as they made ground on Terronda Prime. The droning of the ships as they hovered in orbit around Pertinax and its five moons. The songs of the spinners as they cocooned the remains of broken buildings and fallen bodies on Ghazan. The sounds melding together into a perfect white noise. The sound had driven her near to the precipice of madness when she first arrived here. It thrummed in bass notes and muted tones through her skull. The vibrations caused her very ligaments and bones to pulsate painfully to their song. They cracked, twisted and pulled in a primordial response to the sound.

Reshaping. Reforming.

Many fledglings welcomed to the Hive did not survive this process. The newest ones would howl in their morphing chambers, their individual capsules. They would howl in pain, begging to be killed. The notes of agony all adding to the symphony of the Hive. The initiates would bleed and splinter and break. And one day, very suddenly, their song would end. The workers would carry them away to be repurposed, and the capsule would be sanitized and await its next initiate. She had begged too. She had begged to be put out of her misery as her bones broke, shifted and molded into new shapes. Sculpting themselves into exquisite and terrible new formations. She remembered well the day her eyes shriveled and died. The day they were plucked from her aching skull, and suddenly she could see them.

All of them. Her brethren.

And for the first time she truly heard their song, and it soothed her. The pain dissipated and melted away into stark awareness. Suddenly she had a hundred thousand limbs and tens of thousands of eyes. She could see everything they saw, hear everything they heard. The song. But there was more. Something else, floating above the din. A voice. Clear as crystal and as deep as the Kaladrian Sea. Powerful. It called her, beckoning to be followed. Down countless halls and corridors until she reached the center of the Hive itself. Its living heart. Suspended from the ceiling on spindling fibres of silk and sputum was a woman. Or perhaps what had previously been a woman before her absorption into the Hive.

Her features were still very much humanoid in nature, angular and elegant in the face. Extra pairs of eyes resting on her brow and beside the original sockets. Her skin was slate gray and chitinous in places but somehow still appeared welcoming to the touch. She had retained long and graceful humanoid limbs, like that of a dancer, but an extra set of spindly arachnoid ones made of bone had sprouted from her ribcage, hips and mid-back. Her ears were long and tapered back into graceful points. They sat just below a set of onyx, curled horns that jutted cruelly out from her temples. They appeared so seamless, it was not immediately apparent that they had not been an original feature she'd been birthed with. A hinged mandible replaced her jawbone, yet still allowed the humanoid feature of dark blue lips to be witnessed between small, fanged palps. The familiar voice that had guided her to the chamber suddenly spoke in the recesses of her mind again.

"Come closer, my child. Let me see you better." The voice, an amalgamation of insectoid humming and clear speech. The suspended matriarch suddenly began to move, lowering herself to the ground before the initiate with spindles of organic silk until pointed bony protrusions of legs touched the ground. She moved with feral grace, the way a natural spider in its own web might approach a captive fly. Multiple eyes of a dark violet sheen appraised the initiate's face. Her changed body and features all drunk in, in one appraising gaze. Approval was met with a hum and almost a smile from those dark lips.

"You have assimilated well. Most off-worlders do not survive the process, but you... You are strong. You will serve us well. Tell us your name, hatchling." The matriarch spoke, those varying eyes staring straight into her core. She suddenly found her voice faltering as her mind raced, seeking an answer. It had been there, resting like a snowflake on the tip of her tongue, hadn't it? A name that she had for a lifetime now fled her consciousness, melting away into the ether of her new experience.

"My -- my name?" The look of panic on her face must have been achingly apparent as a soft gray hand with long ringed fingers slowly came up to caress her cheek. Comforting. As a mother would do for a lost child.

"Shhh, you are one of us now. One of my children. You have been reborn in our image, and I will give you a new name to befit your station. Your purpose..." The matriarch cooed. An unsettling yet simultaneously consoling sound. The initiate's scarred eye sockets burned slightly, as she focused her new ethereal sight on the figure before her.

"And what is my purpose, my Queen?" The words tumbled from the initiate's mouth before she could stop them. As if she was not the only one who was answering anymore. The bone wings that she had been blessed with after her rebirth, arching and ruffling, then settling again. The matriarch cupping her hatchling's face between her graceful, yet deadly hands, and stared deep into those vacant, scarred eye sockets.

"You, my child, you have the sight. You will be my Champion. My greatest warrior. From this day, you shall be called... Legate. Any other names you had, any past is dead. You belong to us now, Legate. Protect us, with your life." Legate nodded stoically, kneeling in reverence to the honor bestowed upon her scaled shoulders. All of her past was now among the ashes. Even if she could recall it, she no longer cared. The Mother of the Hive had given her life and purpose. The sight to hunt down any enemies of the Hive, regardless of their skill or stealth.

"You honor us, my Queen." Legate looked up as the matriarch released her and turned, slowly returning to the web of her constant repose. Her violet eyes glimmering as she spoke deep inside Legate's mind.

"Please, Child. Call me Mother. Now go, the invasion of Ocasta has begun." Mother raised herself from the floor, returning to her rest, her voice silenced for now. The thrum of the Hive returned to full volume, flooding her senses. Scaled and scarred limbs carried her on an assigned path past the stasis pods towards the armory. Drones skittered about frantically, stockpiling carefully curated explosives and munitions. A large Cniderian with an armored thorax approached her.

"Mother has sent you. Your scent..." the soldier drone hummed into Legate's brain, causing a tickle of chemicals to be released into what remained of her organic brain and spine. Legate straighted to her full height and nodded. Her physical voice cut through the blanket of noise like the crack of a shot.

"Blood. I smell of blood." She said curtly. "I am the Hive Champion. Ocasta awaits us. I require weapons." The Cniderian warrior's faceted eyes shifted hues; then it motioned to a series of pods against the wall. Each one held a tightly armored Cniderian warrior. One of the pods, though, was conspicuously vacant. A few taps from the quartermaster's clawed legs and the pod slithered open with an eerie hiss.

"Step inside. You will be armored well, Champion. Protect the Hive at all costs. Glory to Mother and to the Hive." Legate stepped inside the pod and a slow, syrupy sensation began to envelop her. It felt as if she was slowly immersed in a vat of warm gelatin. It inched up her body and enshrouded her snugly, keeping her appendages restrained while the armor was grafted onto her flesh. The agony lessened this time by the strange warm cocoon and the never-ending song of the Hive. Noiseless tools of dissection dutifully lacerated her flesh and bone to integrate blades into her organic limbs. Countless sensations bounced in and out of her periphery; countless voices humming in the dark. A few of them floating high enough above the commotion to be heard individually.

"Does she remember?"

"No. She is ours now. Loyal."

"An Ocastan loyal enough to destroy her own for us?"

"She will..."

"Glory to Mother. Glory to the Hive."

The final words falling into a wondrous chorus, lifted up through all corners of the Hive.

A beautiful cacophony of life...