They Answered The Call

Queen World of the Insectoid Empire, 2173 A.D.

The Hive mother concentrated as the glands on her thorax continued excreting silk as she deftly added it to the construct in front of her, marveling at the shape that was coming into being as she worked rapidly. Finishing it, she then willed an organ inside of her to create a specific harmonic frequency and directed it at the construct, watching the silk respond to the frequency and crystallize.

The Hive mother then stared at it, envisioning it as its individual atoms, and then focused on imprinting her essence on it. She felt a brief surge of pleasure as she received a thought echo and then ordered one of her attending worker drones to bring it to a relay ship that was waiting for it.

She imprinted the spatial coordinates that she wanted the focuser to be dropped at into the drone’s mind and watched it leave as it scurried out of the brooding chamber to fulfill her wishes.

She had sent out dozens of relay ships to bolster her thought range to prepare for the swarming, with the focusers being dropped deeper into animal territory than ever before. She made several changes because of the battle with the unknown animals, such as no longer placing fertilized larvae on the Hive ships for rapid colonization and showing her queen daughters how to build different ships to face the new threat.

The Hive mother reached out with her mind, entering a worker drone on one of the Builder worlds, and surveyed the massive flat expanse that stretched for as far as the eyes could see. She watched as millions of worker drones scurried about, bringing in materials and fabricating the components for the thousands of half-finished cruisers that dotted the landscape.

She left that world and entered a drone on another Builder world, standing amidst hundreds of monstrous shells that would become Hive ships as tens of millions of worker drones went about their tasks. She entered another drone on the other side of the planet and got her first look at the new ships being built, which was a hybridized Cruiser/Hive that bridged the gap between the two classes in size.

The ancient Hive mother she communed with provided her with the design for this ancient class of warship that was the backbone of the Insectoid fleet during the Great Persecution and the following migration that finally led them to this area of space.

The Hive mother returned to her body in the brooding chamber and reached out to the ancient one with her thoughts, feeling her stirring in response.

She waited for the ancestor to respond to her thoughts. She felt a momentary wave of fear and sadness emanating from the ancient one before memories that were not her own began entering her mind.

The memories flashed through centuries, showing a great Hive empire that spanned many worlds rich in resources, with great Hive and Builder worlds teeming with a hundred trillion workers and thousands of queens living in a peace that is only known to sapient species that are alone in their area of space.

The memories showed their first contact with an animal species that was expanding and had come into contact with the Hive Empire. At first, the Hive mothers tried to talk to these animals, but they never responded. They did not know that animals do not share thoughts, and they did not understand that the noises emanating from the animal ships were attempts at communicating.

The memories suddenly turned darker, and now the Hive mother saw tens of thousands of animal ships entering the Hive Empire, destroying any ships they found in space and laying waste to entire worlds with antimatter bombs.

She shared in the anguish as the ancient one felt trillions of her drones die and hundreds of her queen daughters perish as the bombs dropped onto the Hive cities. The Hive Empire had no weapons or ships of war. They never needed them, as they did not fight wars amongst themselves, and they were always alone until now.

They fought back by ramming into the animal ships and destroying or disabling them, and they learned how to make weapons and null space engines by bringing one of the disabled ships back to their birth world and dismantling it to figure out how to construct them.

Over the next solar cycle, as more of their worlds fell to the onslaught, they hastily assembled a fleet of their first warships and Hive ships and prepared to defend their birth world. The animal ships entered the system and advanced no further than the asteroid belt, lingering there for almost a solar month.

The Hive mothers and daughter queens did not know what to do, having no experience waging war, so they just waited as their confusion over these animal actions grew. Suddenly, they saw thousands of asteroids streaming towards their fleet at speeds far faster than should have been possible.

They fired their weapons for the first time, missing many of them as they did not know how to track targets, while other weapons failed or malfunctioned. Still, they tried their best to fight and continued to fire the weapons that still functioned.

They watched in horror as the asteroids smashed into their fleet, wiping out hundreds of their ships while thousands of asteroids entered the atmosphere and impacted, creating shock waves visible from space as massive fires spread out and gigatons of soil ejected into the atmosphere.

The few surviving Hive mothers and daughter queens that were in the tattered remnants of their once mighty fleet were all that remained of their entire civilization, and they fled, leaving behind their birth world as massive fires engulfed it and it was rapidly being shrouded in darkness.

They fled into the unknown for many cycles as the unknown animal ships hounded them, attacking them whenever they tried to establish a new Hive and chasing them over thousands of light years. After a long time and great distances, the animal ships stopped harassing them, and they never saw them again.

Still, they continued migrating for another hundred cycles before they finally felt safe enough to start a new Hive world in an area of space that showed no signs of any animals.

The Hive mother reeled in anguish as she came to terms with the near destruction of her entire species and the actions of the first animals they had ever come across.

The Hive mother felt the ancient one receding from her mind as her ancestor returned to her slumber. The Hive mother turned her thoughts back to the new animals she fought and the violence of their actions, mourning the loss of her daughter-queen.

She recalled the many victories her empire had with the animals over the last 50 cycles as they expanded the Hive Empire in search of more worlds to colonize. The Hive mother who ruled before her did not want to expand and engage in conflict with the animals, but she still saw them as enemies even as she avoided antagonizing them.

I had to expand. There are too many mouths to feed and not enough resources in our few worlds, she thought to herself as she once again obsessed over her first defeat.

These new animals are a danger, and I must destroy the old animals first and take their worlds for Hives if we are to survive. The Hive mother then recalled the battle as she had done thousands of times already, playing out scenarios for what she would do the next time she faced this new enemy.

She had a sudden moment of inspiration from the newly gained memories of the Great Persecution and reached out to her daughters. They entered her mind and waited for her thoughts.