The death of Lachesis did not mean the battle was over before it started. As Evoli had expected, most of the drones that made up this army did not belong to the freakish “queen of the future.” They were, rather, the army of the great queens. Plus, Lachesis had controllers, and males, and both of these could stop the drones from going feral. The single blow did nothing but enrage her enemy.
But for once, Evoli herself did not leave the field. She needed to be here, for the same reason she needed to make sure there were no other queens nearby. This new chemical warfare relied entirely on proximity to supersede all else among the regular drones.
This is the moment I change warfare for changelings forever. Once Evoli demonstrated it was possible to steal another’s army from them, the others would infer the method. They didn’t need Strand’s brilliant bioengineering to invent some new substance, not as they would when she revealed the greater abominations Strand was creating. From now on, queens will always have to fight with their armies.
After today, there would be no more puppet-mastering from the shadows, where only others were at risk if they failed. Even Evoli herself would have to enter the line of fire.
The army began to march on her fortification, a great swarm so dense that where it passed before the sun, there was nothing but shadow. A swarm so large that every soldier Evoli had could’ve been wearing powered armor and it probably would not have made a difference.
But the HPI would certainly not be fighting on her side, not after all that she had done. Her passing attempts to raise them on radio for trade had consistently failed.
At least she didn’t see any mechanical drones or helicopters fighting with the enemy. If the ancients decided to interfere, she might have to wipe them out too.
She might do that anyway, just to be safe. Once she ruled all the world, it would be her responsibility to make sure the children she protected would not be threatened again.
Her troops could not manage powered armor and firearms, those secrets were lost to the ancients. But Evoli could conceal some pipes in the battlefield, each one ending in a sprayer that would look like rusting junk to the enemy. The great queens had been so good to give her until spring to set this all up, and they had let her exercise de facto authority over where the battle would take place.
Evoli watched from the top of her fortress as the sprayers began to disgorge their vaporous cargo, raining a faint black shimmer down over the army. It billowed up into the air, swallowing most of the airborne changelings as well. Those few who were not within its reach immediately started flying higher, moving desperately to escape whatever it was. Even if they didn’t know what it would do, they would feel so many others vanishing from their hive-mind. Hundreds of thousands of drones would’ve abruptly vanished from the control of her enemy.
The wind blew up towards the fortress, and many of Evoli’s own troops would be struck as well.
Not a single primitive hivemind, as drones naturally formed in the absence of a queen. This was a hundred thousand individuals, suddenly without purpose, without enough intellect to form a mind. It was more torture than she could’ve inflicted by ripping their wings from their bodies.
Many began to turn on each other—but not in the clean, systematic way a swarm did. A swarm of feral drones forced all other drones to join or be consumed—this was a brawl. Thousands of little shapes all attacking each other.
The controllers and males were not immune. They still had their minds, of course, but both depended on the hivemind for emotional stability, for instructions, and for information. It would feel to them like they had just watched their family murdered in front of them.
The pheromone ran out, and the sprayers began pumping only water vapor, the pipes exhausted. Water didn’t hang in the air like the pheromone did, and so she could see the scene more clearly.
Beside her, Strand nodded with a satisfied look on his face. He had brought his own group of a few drones, his escort and laboratory crew. He kept calling them “his crew until he became a queen.”
Evoli would let him keep thinking that was in his future. It wasn’t.
“It is exactly as I promised,” he finally said, scratching down notes with a levitating pen as he watched the behavior of the primitive swarm. The pheromone wouldn’t reach them up here—though if it did Strand probably would just keep on working. He wasn’t exactly sentimental. “Claim your army, Evoli. Take what the great queens have given you.”
Evoli lifted up into the air. This would not be a new flood of glamour, as she had won with some of her previous victories. Rather the opposite—these drones would be a huge burden for her. She would lose a great many of them in the journey back to where they’d come.
But that was no concern of hers right now. “Prepare the cocoons. We will harvest Stonehearth soon.”
Strand nodded without emotion, as though it had been a remark on the color of the wallpaper, instead of a suggestion of the most heinous act any changeling could commit. But Evoli was long past the point of caring. It was time to secure the food supply. “They will be waiting to receive what your army harvests.”
She took off into the air, soaring up and over the ramparts, past her own changelings that milled about down on the ground, as much a part of the confused masses of the enemy as any of the invading army. Some of her old drones would probably have been killed today too.
It was a worthy sacrifice.
Out in the crowd, she could see a few patches of order. Some of the older males had managed to secure as many as fifty drones, keeping back the masses of the confused. But their grip was tenuous, and their minds could not stretch very far. Evoli could easily take those drones as well.
She flew into the center of the mob—or above it, anyway. The few drones who dared to attack her fell dead from her path like flies swatted as she flew. Eventually she reached the center, and there began to glow.
There was no single hivemind here anymore—there was confusion, agony, desperation. Drones were not loyal creatures, who knew the causes of the ones they served. They were creatures of instinct, without preference for how they got their glamour. More than anything else, they wanted purpose. Evoli would give them that.
She reached out, seizing every mind in a growing sphere around her. She gave glamour to each, such a small amount that she hardly even felt it—but to them, it was the spark of a covenant needed to seal their loyalty to someone else. She already represented a collection of drones, a mind of thousands. Not as large by half as this army, but that didn’t matter. It was stability. And as it grew, it attracted more.
They weren’t that different from ants, or any other swarming insects. Once a few started to move, their decision moved others. It was really just about managing that initial push.
She felt a few spots of resistance, dark patches where the ground below her was still filled with drones. She turned her new limbs upon them, devouring everything she couldn’t sense. The army turned into a proper melee, consuming its controllers and generals with the bloodlust of one recently returned to awareness. And what few drones had enough of a spark of intelligence to resist her will could be consumed with the rest.
It was wrong to kill controllers, it was wrong to kill males instead of capturing them as the spoils of war. Evoli no longer cared—she would set the terms of war from now on, not some dead queen from long ago. It didn’t matter that the dead queen had been her mother.
No more rules. No more trying to control us from the other side of death. We get to decide our future now.
Well, she did.
By the time the dust and blood had finally settled, one in ten of the attacking army had been killed. A surprising number of ordinary ponies had been ready to fight alongside the swarm, with their primitive armor and weapons instead of claws and exoskeleton. All dead. The drones had killed anything that wasn’t part of the hivemind.
Evoli arranged them into great ranks before her—an army that would’ve required several queens to control in the early years she could easily master on her own. Could her mother have commanded so great an army as this?
No. Riley gave up the power of numbers so she could raise a hundred controllers. What a waste. If you had cared about your children, you would’ve handed me an empire that spanned the world. We wouldn’t need to hide in the shadows from ponies, they would call us masters and worship us.
Evoli passed through the ranks of her new army, occasionally stepping over the fallen corpse of a male or a pony. There weren’t very big pieces left behind after being inside such a swarm. Some of these wore her own colors, those of her exterior guard who had been caught in the pheromones. It didn’t matter to Evoli where they ended up—all of them would serve her in time.
“Now you see the power we deserve!” she shouted into the crowd, though few of them would understand. She could sense a few controllers in the whole mess who had given in to the weight of the hivemind rather than be devoured by it. Not one male had bowed to the pressure, so not one of them had survived. Only those who had once been mindless drones themselves could understand the escape that option would’ve presented to them.
A shame to have so much waste. But at the same time, that was food Evoli didn’t have to spare for mouths that didn’t deserve it. “The pony town of Stonehearth is not far from here—its southern farmers have long since been converted to our cause, so that they ignore our drones flying overhead. We have been able to hide here without fear. Now, though, we will do more than hide.”
She spoke for her own males and controllers. They would need to be won over to this cause. Many of them were probably watching from the ramparts right now, or her words would be passed to them. “There are three thousand ponies living in that city. Enough for a much smaller settlement to survive as helpless parasites. Or, we could try something new. Instead of gathering the few dewdrops of glamour we can steal, this army will bring all of them here.”
Well, not quite all of them. The process she spoke of did not work on a pony until they had their cutie mark. That meant leaving the younger children behind, along with any members of other species who didn’t get cutie marks. But big speeches like this weren’t about specifics. “We will gather the food to feed this army. Not enough to march, but enough to sustain us long enough to arm ourselves.”
At her silent order, ten thousand drones took to the air in a single buzzing flight. Her grip on them was still tenuous—but within another hour or two, it would be secure. Another queen would not be able to take those drones back, even if they had been hers by birth. Only by killing Evoli could the original identity of that swarm be restored. Or if they could trick her to get far from her army, which obviously wouldn’t be happening.
They took off, buzzing away over battlefield as though they hadn’t suffered a serious trauma. These drones were eager to obey her commands, as any new swarm would be. And she had given them commands—fly to the village and take every pony with a cutie mark back to her fortress.
“Queen,” muttered Decimus from behind her. One of her loyal males, woken from cold sleep. That meant he was still too young to breed—and too young to know that questioning a queen wasn’t good for his safety. “What about out contacts in the southern farms? Will we harvest them too?”
“Yes,” Evoli said, resisting the urge to strike him down. It was a sensible question. “But we will let them live. They will join us as new controllers—the reward for their contribution. And as a matter of fact, I will assign them to you. Your first command, Decimus. Congratulations on your promotion.”
Evoli could already see the little village of Stonehearth coming into sight through the eyes of her drones. The children of plague survivors had built a thriving little agrarian community out here, oblivious of the nearby danger. By the end of the night, Evoli would remind them of fear.
And forget about her own hunger, at least for a little while.
And what works for a village will be even better for a city. What fools we were to ignore a source of food as limitless as this! Why harvest little drops of love over a pony’s whole lifetime when you could suck them dry all at once?
My mother was the greatest fool that ever lived. And I will be the greatest queen. Evoli barely even remembered what she had done to Lachesis a few hours before. She would feel no grief over the loss of that monstrosity.
If my father was still alive, he would be proud of me. Chip would know what it meant to do what is necessary. He would praise the queen I’ve become. And she told herself that, listening to her own thoughts instead of the terrified screams of Stonehearth’s ponies.