A few hours of sleep had done wonders. I was back in the archive well before morning roll-call, going through the records with great efficiency, having already found several good candidates to replace the captured infiltrators, more than I needed actually, and in much less time than it had taken me yesterday! I could have gone to Chrysalis with what I had, but thorough as I was, I didn’t want to miss any in the remaining scrolls.
One, however, I could dismiss without a glance: Thorax’s record had somehow found its way into the pile of useful drones. I rolled my eyes and moved it to the unworthy-of-a-second-thought pile.
At least he’d gotten up early today.
Normally, he clung to our sleeping burrow every morning, reluctant to start his daily duties and often whining about the so-called senselessness of our lifestyle or the bullies waiting for him out there or some other such thing. A scowl and a hiss had in the past been enough to snap him out of it, but ever since Canterlot, it would usually end with me throwing him out and yelling at him to pull himself together, or threatening to personally beat him to a pulp unless he stopped the charade, and in extreme cases, with me dragging him by the ears to the storage-and-maintenance section and shoving the broom in his face, or fulfilling the aforementioned threats, or both. None of that had been necessary today; he had already been gone when I woke up. Maybe my yesterday’s ranting had actually paid off and he’d finally decided to get a grip and make himself useful for a change! I wasn’t going to celebrate just yet - I knew better by now - but if this proved to be the start of a trend…
I was almost done with the scrolls when I heard commotion outside the archive. Now what? It couldn’t be Thorax on the receiving end of bullies again; he didn’t have the clearance to be anywhere near here, and he certainly would have known better than to try to impersonate a higher-ranking drone even if he somehow learned their clearance code, not to mention that he had no reason whatsoever to come here! Had we been attacked? And if that was the case, why hadn’t the airborne sentries put the hive on alert? Why hadn’t they and the border patrols stopped the intruders? Were they dead? Who could have defeated them so easily?
I galloped out into the hallway, ready to switch into my battle disguise.
A swarm of guards, led by sub-commander Hornet, were searching the hallways and adjoining chambers and burrows furiously, shouting reports as they went. Whatever it was they were looking for, they weren’t finding it.
“What is going on here?” I outyelled them. “Report!”
“First Commander Pharynx?” Hornet finally noticed me. “Is that really you?”
“Of course it’s me!” I recited my clearance code. “What’s gotten into you all?”
Hornet closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Why was I getting the feeling that I wasn’t going to like what she had to tell me? As in, more than I didn’t like other bad news?
“Earlier this morning, Sir,” Hornet began, “sub-commander Apex reported to Chrysalis that you had left the hive without authorization, having claimed to the airborne sentries that you were there for an unannounced inspection, and slipped away above them when they weren’t looking. While he was reporting it, Maintenance Supervisor Proboscis came to report that Thorax hadn’t reported for duty and she couldn’t find him anywhere! So Chrysalis ordered all the guards in the hive to look for you two!”
Every last remnant of my good mood evaporated instantly. What had Thorax done now? Not what it sounded like, I hoped!
“Just to make sure, everyling else is accounted for?”
“As far as I know, yes,” she said. “We were told to report any other drones that turn out to be missing, and the search teams have been in contact with one another ever since we started looking for you. If any of them had found out about any more missing drones, they would have spread the word by now! Speaking of which, Sir, I should inform the others that you’re here and verified as yourself!”
She summoned the nearest of her subordinates and sent him to relay the news to the other teams.
I was still trying to process what she’d told me. Surely I’d misunderstood something! We all must have misunderstood the situation! Thorax couldn’t have been that stupid to do what he seemed to have done! Was I dreaming? Hallucinating? This couldn’t be happening for real! He had to know that he’d get tracked down and tortured and executed for running away! He hadn’t really done it, right? He couldn’t be so delusional to think he could escape punishment, and there were many better ways to die if that had been his intention! Even I couldn’t escape punishment with all my skill and cunning if I’d pulled off that kind of a stunt; with his skill level, catching him would be easier than beating up a training dummy, and he had to be aware of that!
No. This wasn’t happening! I had to stop overthinking things based on wild guesses and half-informations!
“Wait… let me get this straight…” I spoke to Hornet, rubbing my forehead, “what you’ve been trying to tell me is, Thorax disguised himself as me and escaped from the hive?”
“It does look like it, Sir.”
“And the airborne sentries let him?!”
“It doesn’t look good for them, I admit, but for the record, they did think it was you, and only discovered otherwise when Chrysalis told them that she hadn’t authorized any unscheduled inspections, let alone your departure.”
“I thought they were supposed to look up as well as down! Thorax - if it really was him - couldn’t have flown away that fast! They should have been able to spot him!”
“Don’t look at me! I’m not their drill instructor!”
Of course she wasn’t. But the airborne sentries were selected from the best of the best; it should have been common sense to them not to allow for such oversights! They shouldn’t have needed to be specifically told that ‘keeping their eyes open for anything out of the ordinary in any and every direction’ by definition included the direction of above! Worst of all, I’d noticed such oversights happen before, I’d pointed them out to the sentries, I’d made sure their drill instructors would remember to work on correcting that weakness in our defensive perimeter… I’d really thought we’d made an improvement!
Of course, if I hadn’t vented about it in front of Thorax, he might not have known about a weakness he could exploit! I was as much to blame as any of them! How many other weaknesses of the hive’s security had I foolishly revealed to him? Why hadn’t I predicted that he might decide to run away at some point when he couldn’t take any more bullying? Had I assumed that he wasn’t listening to my words or that he’d forget them as had seemed to be the case with probably everything else I’d said to him? If I’d kept my mouth shut about things he didn’t have the clearance to know about, he may have been discovered before having gotten away, while he may still have had a chance to explain his actions as a transgression less serious than abandoning the hive!
And if I’d tried harder, I scolded myself, he wouldn’t have even thought of leaving.
But there was no escaping the truth: my only surviving brother, the pathetic wimp and the hive’s laughing stock, had become a traitor.
And I had only myself to blame for it.
What was I going to tell Chrysalis?