The helmet kept him going in a straight line toward the center, showing him the way to go whenever he got off target while avoiding the undulations in the ceiling and floor. They got to a rather impressive speed, considering, so when a metal wall loomed into view, there was no way to brake himself. He could only flip himself around to land feetfirst, absorbing the shock with bended knees. The magnetics were set too low to hold him in place and he rebounded, though at a much lower speed.

  “Mags at two hundred,” said Cincinnatus. Meanwhile, he and Ender collided—Carlotta had narrowly missed him—and they made a mess of the surrounding Formic bed spaces while they waited for the mags to draw them toward the metal at the center. They were both covered in flaky bedstuff by the time they got their boots attached to the metal wall.

  “Mags at five,” Cincinnatus said, so he could move again.

  The hub had regular openings, with no doors on them. Cincinnatus dropped through the first one when Carlotta gave the OK.

  They found themselves in a long corridor running in the direction of the axis of the ship. This time the tube had tracks on what the Formics would consider to be the floor and the ceiling. It made sense—a cart would never stay on tracks that only ran along the floor. Something was hauled along these tracks—and regularly. Cincinnatus saw that the metal tracks were shiny with constant use.

  “The trains are still running,” Carlotta said.

  As if on cue, Ender gave warning from the rear. “Press into the corners, here comes the train.”

  Cincinnatus dropped to the “floor” he had been walking on and stretched himself out. Moments later, a tram moved along the tracks, tension bars holding the wheels to both sets of tracks. The body of the tram was like a chicken-wire cage, bulging with some kind of organic material. Plants? No, they were writhing, pushing against the wire. But nothing was getting out.

  Not rabs, not even rablike. These were soft-bodied creatures, more like slugs, but with wider bodies and a kind of hair. Or cilia. Caterpillars? Analogies to Earth fauna would probably be unproductive and misleading. Ender’s job, anyway.

  Cincinnatus followed the tram but did not try to keep up with it. The thing was automatic. The question was whether it would run in a loop or reverse direction and come back this way for another load.

  It didn’t come back, and after a while Cincinnatus came to a place where the tracks curved inward toward the center. Cincinnatus stayed with them, of course, and came up against the back of the tram, which was stopped exactly over an opening. A sickening odor was coming from the space where the opening led.

  Through the chicken wire Cincinnatus could see that something was cleaning out the cage.

  It was a rab.

  But it ate nothing, just scraped out the last of the clinging slugs. Then the opening closed, the tube was dark again except for the light from Cincinnatus’s helmet, and the tram moved along in the same direction instead of backtracking. So it was a loop. And the load had been delivered.

  Cincinnatus gathered them around the place where the opening had been. There was no visible lever to open the door.

  “What now, Lot?” asked Cincinnatus. “There was at least one rab on the other side, but it didn’t eat the slugs, just pulled them out.”

  “Did it look like that’s what the grabbing claw was designed for?” asked Ender.

  “Not our concern right now, but … yes,” said Cincinnatus. “Could be that this is the task the rabs were actually designed for.”

  “Meanwhile,” said Carlotta, “I think we can trip the signal that tells the system that a tram is here, so the door will open. It’s mechanical. Look, the wheel passes over a treadle and the pressure trips a switch.” She looked at Cincinnatus. “Ready for me to open it?”

  “Fog ready,” Cincinnatus said to Ender. They got their nozzles into position to spray into the opening. “I warn you, it stinks in there,” said Cincinnatus. “Now, Lot.”

  The door opened.

  The stink hit them right away and got worse as they moved into the room, which was humid and hot.

  A half-dozen rabs were gathered nearby, but they were busy herding the slugs along a metal ramp that sloped gently upward. One of them noticed Cincinnatus and turned to face him, but it didn’t leap to the attack. On the contrary, it simply went back and flipped the lever that closed the door again. But by now Cincinnatus, Carlotta, and Ender were all inside the chamber.

  No, not chamber. Cavern. Unlike the Formic workers’ dormitory, this space had much higher ceilings—several meters, maybe five. But rising to it or descending from it like stalagmites and stalactites was a lot more of that organic material, only now it was spongy and resilient, and the indentations were far narrower.

  The rabs pushed the slugs up the ramp toward the center of the cavern. There was a platform there, with a soft light aimed at it from several directions. The whole room was centered on that space.

  The smell got worse the farther they moved along the ramp, but they also got more used to it. The helmets also started cleaning the air inside the visor, which helped a little.

  The slugs stuck to the ramp and the rabs clung to the edges of the ramp. The mags kept the children standing upright.

  “It’s like a throne room,” said Carlotta.

  “These are egg chambers,” said Ender. “This is the Hive Queen’s chamber.”

  But there were no eggs. Instead, the closer they got to the platform at the center, the more the egg chambers were filled with a brown goo with streaks of green. Putrefaction. The slime of decay.

  At the end of the ramp, the slugs were pushed onto the platform. But since it was already piled high with slugs, mostly dead ones, the new ones toppled off to the sides, plopping into the slime below the ramp. The slugs swam like eels, but there was nowhere to go, except slime-filled egg chambers.

  “They’re feeding the Queen,” said Ender. “Only she isn’t here.”

  By now Cincinnatus had reached the platform. He waded through slugs toward the center. At the focal point of the beams of light, a low wall kept any of the slugs from getting into a three-meter-wide circle in the exact center.

  Within that wall, sprawled and curled across more of the organic material, was the gray, dried-up corpse of a winged creature that had to be at least the size of the Giant.

  “She’s here all right,” said Cincinnatus. “But she isn’t hungry.”

  CHAPTER 8

  At the Helm

  Carlotta hated the Hive Queen, dead as she was. The Hive Queens’ ability to communicate so perfectly with their daughters meant that there was no need for any kind of communications system. The Hive Queen could pilot the ship from anywhere. The pilot could be anywhere, too, with no need for visuals or even instruments, because whatever the Hive Queen knew from any of her daughters was known by all the others.

  Therefore Carlotta couldn’t find the helm by tracing the wiring of an intercom system, or looking for radio signal sources. The helm did not have to be in a place where visuals were possible.

  She stood over the Hive Queen’s body while Ender took holoimages of the corpse. “Don’t touch it,” Ender said. “She’ll crumble into dust.”

  “So I guess this means interrogation is out of the question,” said Carlotta.

  “Go ahead and ask her anything,” said Sergeant.

  Carlotta didn’t feel like joking any longer. “Somebody piloted this boat, and it wasn’t her. But I can’t trace the communications system because there isn’t one.”

  Ender was oblivious to their concerns. “I’ve got all the images I can and they’re stored back on Herodotus. So I’m going to take a sample.”

  “What happened to ‘crumble into dust’?” asked Sergeant.

  “I’ll be careful,” said Ender.

  “I guess he thought we’d kick our way through her,” said Sergeant.

  “I don’t care about your rivalry, boys,” said Carlotta to Sergeant. “We’ve found the heart of the ship, and it’s a pool of rotting corpses that were supposed to be the Queen’s food.”

  “It’s a system that’s so resilient it keeps going even when the Queen is gone.” Ender couldn’t keep the admiration—no, the pride—out of his voice. As if he had designed the Hive Queen’s system himself. “No robots, no computers, just animals bred to do a job.”

  “Like us,” said Sergeant.

  “The Giant was bred,” said Ender. “We were born.”

  “Just a continuation of the experiment,” said Sergeant. “Only our designer wasn’t as good as the Hive Queen’s.”

  Carlotta saw that Ender really did have a delicate touch—he lifted off sections of dried-up Hive Queen from various regions of the corpse, but never disturbed anything, or even pressed downward. Just nipped a bit, raising it as he did, and pushed it into self-sealing sample bags.

  Then what Sergeant said registered with her, and she saw that it registered with Ender at the same time, because he raised his hand away from the corpse and got a thoughtful look.

  “The Formics were really good at genetics,” said Carlotta.

  “But no lab,” said Ender. “Not here, anyway. Or their lab was the Queen’s own ovaries. By an act of will she could decide when to extrude an egg that would become a new queen. And presumably to create an egg that would become a rab instead of a worker.”

  “It can’t have been reflexive,” said Sergeant. “She had to plan what she was doing, at least when she was making rabs.”

  “And while she was doing that,” said Carlotta, “who was piloting the ship?”

  “She was,” said Ender.

  “And who was tending to the ecotat, and who was doing maintenance everywhere, and who was reporting to the other Hive Queens on other worlds?”

  “She was,” said Sergeant. “Hive Queens are smarter than we are.”

  “Multitasking is fine, but was she really seeing and hearing the sensory input of all her workers at the same time, equally well? Or did she concentrate her attention where it was needed? There has to be a limit to how far she could subdivide her attention.”

  “Why does there have to be a limit?” asked Ender.

  “Pretend I’m as smart as you for a minute, and think with me, please,” said Carlotta. “It’s not as if the Formic workers have no brains. And look, she’s dead, but this system goes on without her.”

  “It’s not Formics, it’s rabs,” said Ender. “Sheepdogs.”

  “She could have had Formic workers do all these jobs, though, couldn’t she? What was the advantage of creating a self-replicating species to do it for her?”

  Sergeant and Ender now understood her point. “She can’t subdivide her attention infinitely,” said Sergeant. “She needs to have automatic tasks that go on without her having to think or decide anything.”

  “This was a mindlessly repetitive task,” said Carlotta. “But doing maintenance on the ship required that you understand what you were doing. Did she have to simultaneously control each Formic worker doing every job? Or did they have independence once they knew what job to do?”

  “You’re saying that the individual Formic workers weren’t just an extension of her mind,” said Sergeant. “Not like hands and feet. More like perfectly obedient … children.”

  “Somebody piloted this ship,” said Carlotta, “and she wasn’t there to control them. What if some of the Formic workers survived her death? If she wasn’t controlling every thought in their heads, if they had the independence to learn their job and do it even when the Queen wasn’t paying attention, then when she died, they could go on.”

  “No,” said Sergeant. “It makes sense, but we know that every Formic worker died when the Hive Queens died. There were assault teams on some of the Formic planets when Wiggin killed the Hive Queens, and the human soldiers reported that all the Formics stopped fighting at once. Stopped running, stopped doing anything. They lay down and died.”

  “But they lay down,” said Carlotta.

  “Dropped,” said Sergeant.

  “I read the same reports,” said Ender. “They lay down. Some of them had vital signs for as long as half an hour. So Carlotta’s right. There were at least some body systems in the workers that kept going for at least a little while after the Hive Queens died.”

  “What if this Hive Queen, knowing she was going to die, gave some of her workers instructions to keep piloting the ship?” asked Carlotta.

  The others nodded. “We can’t know what mechanism makes the Formics die when the Queen does,” said Ender. “Maybe there’s an exception.”

  “Let’s find the helm and see,” said Sergeant.

  “That’s the problem,” said Carlotta. “I don’t know how to find it. Do we have to try every door in the place?”

  “You’re saying,” said Sergeant, “that if the workers had some independent thought, and the Hive Queen wasn’t constantly having to channel information from observer Formics to Formic pilots, then there might be data connections after all.”

  “Or the daughter who was serving as pilot at any given moment would have to be in a position where she could see. At least dials, readouts. She had to know when she was exactly the right distance from the planet. And if the Hive Queen wasn’t channeling that information to her constantly, there’d be instruments I could track.”

  “Why not just track the firing mechanisms of all the rockets?” asked Ender. “The pilot has direct control of those—that’s how the ship is steered, so controlling them is what the pilot is doing.”

  “Because that’s the most dangerous part of the ship,” said Carlotta. “Tracing instrumentation isn’t intrinsically dangerous. Tracing the firing mechanism of the rockets is. The pilot might be waiting right now for us to get near that system so she can burn us up.”

  It felt vaguely wrong to think of a female in connection with brutal violence. But all the Formics the human race had ever seen or known of were female, and they were as dangerous as they needed to be. What had Kipling said? The female of the species is more deadly than the male. True for Formics, that was certain.

  “Anything that would kill us would damage the ship,” Ender pointed out.

  “They have redundancy built in everywhere. They can absorb some damage. We can’t.”

  “So let’s start the open-every-door approach and if we run into the data collection system we can trace the wiring,” said Sergeant.

  “This is a big ship,” said Ender. “There are a lot of doors.”

  “But most of the ship is the cylinder of the ecotat,” said Sergeant.

  “It’s more than a kilometer in diameter,” said Ender. “The rabs are well behaved in here, but the feral ones will be in a lot of other places. Our supply of sedatives isn’t infinite, and the effects wear off. I can just see this working out like a videogame where all the bad guys suddenly come back to life and pounce on you at once, game over.”

  Carlotta looked out over the sea of rot that surrounded her. “Home sweet home,” she said. “I’m trying to see this the way she did, when she was alive. All these little holes were like wombs for her eggs. All these slugs were being herded here to feed her and feed her babies.”

  Ender pointed up. “Don’t forget the ceiling.”

  Carlotta looked up. Lots of stringy protuberances hung down from the highest points. A few of them had melon-sized balls hanging from them.

  “What’s that?” Carlotta asked.

  “Cocoons. I’m sure they’re all dead, but I’m going to want to take one back to the lab to study, if I can,” said Ender. “Everything that’s on the floor has been contaminated with that bacterial soup of decay. But larvae that cocooned themselves might still have clean genetic material I can study.”

  “Not our highest priority,” said Sergeant.

  “But not our lowest, either,” said Ender. “We obviously have time to stop and chat. So let’s collect a sample or two before we leave the Room of Goo.”

  “You going to take a slug back? And the bacteria?” asked Sergeant.

  “Already collected samples of those on the way in.”

  “You were supposed to be our rear guard, not a prancing naturalist,” said Sergeant.

  “Nothing attacked us from behind,” said Ender. “Hive Queens aren’t the only ones who can multitask.”

  “Boys,” said Carlotta. “Is this how our whole lives are going to be? The two of you sniping at each other?”

  “Let’s get one thing clear,” said Ender. “Only one person has been sniping and it wasn’t me. I’ve followed every order without complaint; I’ve criticized nothing. It’s Sergeant who’s determined to catch me doing something wrong. But I’m not. Carlotta said it—the Hive Queens were expert geneticists, and they worked on their own genome to create the rabs. So what I collect here might teach us science that the human race hasn’t developed on its own. It might save our lives.”

  “Might,” said Sergeant.

  “There’s the sniping again,” said Ender. “It isn’t ‘boys,’ Carlotta, it’s Sergeant.”

  “We have to find the pilot,” said Sergeant, “and we’re not splitting up.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” said Ender. “You shoot down one of the cocoons and Carlotta and I will catch it.”

  “With what? Sedative fog? A shotgun?” Sergeant looked triumphant.

  “With the laser cutter you hid in your belly pack,” said Ender.

  Carlotta hadn’t noticed. Ender didn’t miss much. “So you have a much more lethal weapon than we have, is that it, Sergeant?” she asked.

  “I thought it was possible we might face a living Hive Queen,” said Sergeant.

  “But only you would have the power to kill it?” asked Ender.

  “So much for you never sniping or criticizing,” said Sergeant.

  “Enough,” said Carlotta. “The Giant is listening to everything we say. We’re wasting time arguing about whether we have time to waste. We don’t. But collecting a cocoon is not a waste, so let’s just do it and then go on to look for the helm.”