1. Spider Hole
The Hive around them shuddered again, to what must have been a direct hit by heavy artillery on the nearby exit. The air pulsed with overpressure, hurting Compound’s sensitive tympanic membranes. The walls shook. Structural spittle detached and rained down upon the three Changelings who huddled in their spider-hole.
“Make it stop!” Cowl cried, “It’s got to stop! There can’t be this many shells in all the world!” He clutched at his own head, scrabbling at the chitin with his claws.
“Easy,” Carry said. “It’s noise. Just noise.” The massive Worker took up most of the room in their hole, but the other two lings did not begrudge him the room. His quiet strength, emotional as well as physical, had so far kept them from going insane.
We’re the lucky ones, Compound knew. She dug her claws almost reflexively into the side of the spider hole, gripping structural spittle. We were assigned to Hive 238, back when there still were hundreds of Hives, back when we were winning the war, before this became Hive Prime by process of elimination. Because of that we’re still alive. For a little while longer.
“But where do they get all the shells?” Cowl asked again.
“You know the answer,” Compound said. “The factories.” They’d been powered by steam at the start of this war, now they were all run by electricity, and the last she had heard from the Infiltrators when there still had been an intact Infiltrator Corps was that they were starting to provide the electricity from earthfire reactors.
Cowl did not ask the obvious next question, which was ‘Where do they get all the workers for those factories?’
That was a question Compound did not want to answer, because the answer would have been politically dangerous. The answer, of course, was that the Equestrians got their workforce from the other Hives, the ones Queen Hunger had driven into alliance with Equestria as their only alternative to annihilation by Hunger’s forces. A horrifyingly large number of these Changelings were defectors from Hunger’s original Hive, under her previous reign-name of Chrysalis.
2. Memories
Compound knew this well because – at the start of the war, when Hunger’s armies had still been large enough to permit a sizable staff element – she had been a Theoretical Infilitrator – a new role, corresponding to an Intelligence Analyst among the Ponies. She had seen the statistics on the Equestrian population, industrial base, transport capabilities, reserve military strength, the incredibly-rapid progress of Equestrian research into advanced weaponry – air cruisers, airplanes, rockets, magefire bombs and reactors.
They had all added up to one alarming conclusion.
We cannot win a war against Equestria, no matter where or how we attack. We can run wild for a year at most, before the superior Equestrian resources are brought to bear and our armies are ground into so much broth. If we attack Equestria, we will waken a sleeping giant – and her wrath will be terrible.
A few years ago Compound had been young, innocent, new to her position, and extremely loyal to Queen and Hive. She had been tasked by Queen Hunger herself with the job of compiling a logistical analysis of the likely course of another Equestrian War.
She had done so. A totally honest one. Which, as she well remembered, had incorporated those exact lines, finishing with ‘and her wrath will be terrible.’
She had felt a sense of relief when she submitted the report. Her logic had been impeccable. Surely, she would be believed! She had saved the Hive from disaster.
It had never entered her young head that her conclusions might be rejected purely because those who read the report might not want these conclusions to be true. Surely there was nothing more important than service to the Hive, service to the Queen ... surely even if her immediate superiors did not like her revelations, they could not keep this knowledge from Hunger herself!
Least of all had it occurred to her that Queen Hunger might be the very one who had refused to accept her report. That Hunger’s arrogant pride might mean more to her than the well-being of her Hive. That Hunger, most of all, was a traitor to her own lings, viewing them as merely so much fodder for her own glory.
Compound had stuck her neck out, forgotten the most ancient motto of her race. In Secrecy, Safety. In Safety, Survival.
She was lucky that she hadn’t been sent on a suicide mission. Despite her subcaste, she’d also had the normal Infiltrator training – she could have ventured into Equestria, either raiding for love or with orders to destroy some vital military target. Of course, all such targets were now protected by magelights which would glow green when a Changeling entered their glow. Many would shift them into their true forms as part of the bargain. Attempting to Infiltrate any major Equestrian city, or any important target such as Canterlot Palace or Mustang Marina had been a one-way trip for a long time now.
Instead, some sense of the value of her talent for logistical analysis seemed to have stayed the horns of the Queensguard Specials, the most elite unit charged with fighting disloyalty within the Hives. They were sinister, silent lings who used some private communications channel, speaking only by body language, and only to the lings whom they had made their prey. Compound was terrified of them – any sane ling was – and half-expected at any moment them to tear open her sleeping-pod and drag her off to her doom.
Compound had been terrified for years now, to the point that it had become her normal state. There had once been a young ling, before that an innocently awkward nymph, who had loved and been loved, trusted and been trusted, as part of her normal life, but that had been a long time ago. She didn’t suppose that she’d ever feel that way again, not in the few days or hours of life that now remained to her.
She’d spent most of the war sitting at a tertiary core, tasting the memory waxes and inscribing trails of her own into fresh wax, helping to predict the demand for supplies from various military units. It was a challenging and important job – the new wonder-castes Hunger was birthing were indeed effective on the battlefield, but many of them required npn-standard supplies to operate.
There had even been a point at which she thought that her old report had been wrong, that the Hives could win. She remembered her exultation as the armies had poured out of the Badlands, overrunning Dodge Junction and Appleloosa, spilling through the Everfree, the forest’s monsters fleeing before them as if they were army ants consuming some jungle. Ponyville, a place the Queen hated, put to the torch. Breakout into the Plain of Avalon, breadbasket of the Equestrian Realm … the Palace of Canterlot almost within range of their guns …
Then the Equestrian counterattack, the revelation of new and powerful weapons which had been already in development at the war’s start. Some she had known about – others had come as terrible surprises.
She’d heard reports from secondary sources that Spark Wheel Aircraft Industries had been developing practical internal rotary aircraft engines – not from inside, never from inside, that traitor, who had received the same training as Compound herself ensured that no Infiltrator of Hunger’s ever saw the inside of one of her own husband’s factories! And that treacherous vine bore ill fruit for the Hives, as aircraft faster by far than any Changeling in flight tore through the Air-Warrior Castes, shredding wings and chitin with sprays of shells from their automatic cannons, slaughtering elite Warriors as if they were helpless nymphs.
On the ground, formations of clanking armored monstrosities, carrying artillery behind their plating, rolling on wide wheels and caterpillar tracks, shedding Changeling bolts, their machine-guns and howitzers blowing the biggest and strongest Warriors to shreds. Ordinary Pony Warriors, bearing the new repeating personal firearms with semi-automatic and automatic actions, grenado-launchers, armor-piercing rockets … the new weapons were reaching the front with blinding speed, far faster than the Changelings could adapt their tactics.
Her report had mentioned the Equestrian War Department buying up suspicious quantities of uranium, far more than could be explained by normal industrial demand. There were old records, references to still older ones, legends from the Age of Wonders to which she had pointed urgently, and which had been returned to her red-peppered “Unsubstantiated” in waxes whose taste had been bitter indeed to the young Infiltrator.
So she had almost expected it when the frantic reports came from the front of fireballs hotter than the surface of the Sun, and Celestia herself nowhere in sight, the banespells against Alicorns useless as whole regiments vanished in flashes of heat and hurricane winds, mushroom clouds rising high into the air over what had been elite formations.
At first the new weapons only let Equestria stabilize the front. Hunger ordered a tactical retreat back to the forests. Next year’s offensive would guarantee victory.
But the Equestrian armies grew month by month. Equestria kept her forces in the field during the winter, Peagasi clearing the skies to ensure air superiority when necessary, railroads and the new motor-wagons delivering ton upon ton of supplies, regiment upon regiment of reinforcements. Long before winter was wrapped up by the Equestrian Guard Environmental Corps, it was evident to all but the stupidest Hive Warrior-Leaders that there would be no spring offensive on the part of the Changelings.
Compound had predicted this all, yet she felt sick horror as she actually saw it happen. Equestria was mobilizing even faster than she had expected. New airplanes, new artillery, new fighting vehicles appeared among the enemy ranks. Field Infiltration was still – just barely – possible, and Compound got regular reports from the enemy camps.
That spring the Equestrians began their advance. Slowly, at first. Making mistakes, at first, ones which the veteran Changeling Warriors could still exploit to force Equestria to pay for every mile gained. There were still well-supplied fortresses to be reduced, Changeling reinforcements reaching the fronts, tricks that elite Infiltrators could play that cost Equestrian lives. There was still space for cunning and finesse, for courage and determination, traits at which the Changelings excelled.
But, steadily, the Changelings lost ground. As that campaign year wore on, tremendous amounts of artillery and shells reached the Equestrian formations. New armored vehicles appeared at the front. New attack jets soared over Changeling lines, delivering death from above which the Changelings could not check or counter.
More and more of the earthfire bombs. Fortress after Fortress, Hive after Hive vanished in blinding light, their Warriors and Workers vaporized or burned or mashed into sick parodies of ling forms. The losses mounted, far more rapidly than any program of breeding or construction could replace.
Now the Changeling retreat became a rout. Of the millions upon millions who had raced north in those first heady months of victory, mere hundreds of thousands staggered back south into the Badlands, their defeated columns cut up by slashing armored attacks, strafed and rocketed by the attack jets, burned to pitiful twisted forms by liquid fire. Rarely could they mass to make a stand, and when they tried, increasingly the strongpoint vanished under a roiling miles-high toadstool of earthfire.
Hunger decreed new "Provisional Hive Guard Swarms." Compound read the reports, knew clearly what the official statements concealed. The new Warriors were being rushed to maturity, lings who were barely more than nymphs had weapons put in their claws and were told they were ready to fight. Workers were being declared Warriors by Royal fiat, given makeshift weapons, thrown into battle.
Compound heard the results, increasingly horrified by what they said and what they implied. The underaged Warriors fought bravely, but with little leadership or skill were little more than roadblocks, at best buying a few hours or days for Hunger's Hives. The fate of the misused Workers was even worse. Completely untrained and unequipped for warfare, they were little more than distractions forced forward to soak up enemy fire. They meeped and whimpered in uncomprehending terror until somepony cut them down with the new Equestrian weapons.
Hunger claimed amazing successes at Infiltrating Equestrian positions, produced memory-impressions of Equestrian camps with numerous Hive Hunger Changelings within. Compound, part of whose training included impression-analysis, could plainly see what was really happening. The soft-hearted Equestrians, increasingly aware of the harmlessness of Changeling Workers, were letting them join as servants -- giving them love in return for the performance of menial labor. The adopted Workers looked happy, healthy and well-fed; Compound could not help but compare their condition with the sorry state of the Workers back in the Hives.
Winter had seen a slowing but not a cessation of the Equestrian advance. Equestrian troops, transported in the new fast steamships, landed along the Gulf River, lifting the sieges on some of the Equestrian cities there, and taking back those which had already fallen. Now what remained of the Territory of Hunger was surrounded by Equestrian forces on all four sides. Queen Hunger had no allies, and now even if she had it would have done her no good.
Come the spring, the end of the snows and the storms, and the Equestrian advance resumed. What remained of Hunger's field armies melted like the snows in the furnace-blast of Equestrian military might. Whole units were vanishing in single days. What was more, Compound was now receiving reports that Hunger Warriors had begun actually surrendering to the Equestrians. Warriors, as formations, rather than individuals.
Hunger's forces were not merely being wiped out, they were disintegrating. This was something almost unknown -- Changeling Warriors almost never surrendered; they fought until they won or became physically-incapable of fighting. Workers might be paralyzed by confusion in battle, be captured, and adopt their captors as a surrogate Hive, but Warriors? Never! This meant that not only were the armies disintegrating, but the Hives as well.
A Pony could not have fully grasped the cosmic terror that gripped Compound's soul at the thought, and she understood Equestrian culture just well enough to realize that most Ponies would not understand this. Hive and Queen were all, they were the ultimate focus of felt-love, even though the love Compound felt most strongly now, after a week in the spider hole with them, was for her buddies Cowl and Carry. Without loyalty to the Hive, what was a Changeling? Nothing. Less than nothing, just a burden.
Did any Equestrians understand this? Of course they did; for the majority of the Changeling species, those who had refused submission to Hunger in the first place, was actually now working and fighting on the side of Equestria. Cowards! the official announcements relayed through the Hive Minds called them, Race-traitors!
But Compound could not help noticing -- though she spoke of this to no one, for this would surely have put her at the not-so-tender mercies of the Specials -- that the Hives who had accepted Reconciliation from Celestia were numerous, well-housed, well-fed, and well-loved. They were thriving as symbiotes with the Ponies, while the path of Hunger was increasingly leading her lings to suffering and annihilation.
Strange thoughts began to whisper at the corner of Compound's mind. The defectors have not betrayed the Hive. They have betrayed the Queen, but not the Hive. It is the Queen who has betrayed her own Hive. She is leading us all to destruction. We must revolt against Hunger, before it is too late for us all!
Madness. The Queen was the Hive. True, there had been a Queen before Hunger, even before Hunger had been named Chrysalis. Somehow, logically, Chrysalis must have replaced her. But ... these were forbidden thoughts. Every time her mind wandered onto them, Compound gave a little gasp of fear, looked around her, made sure that she had not broadcast any of that thought onto the Hive Mind channel.
Soon, there was no field army at all, nothing to impede the Equestrians from concentrating their forces against and crushing one Hive after another. Which is exactly what the Equestrians did. One after another Hive fell off the Inter-Hive Mind network. Some were pounded into craters by earthfire bombs. Others fell to close assault. Still others just stopped sending -- and the few Field Infiltrators left reported rumors of whole Hives surrendering rather than be destroyed.
There was a new factor now. Rumors -- strictly suppressed within the Hives, of a new claimant to the throne, a Queen of Kindness rather than Hunger, whose Stare and whose Pheromones were utterly overwhelming. She was somehow securing these surrenders, shattering the lings' loyalty to their rightful ruler, both through dominance and through the love she induced in all who beheld her. She promised peace and forgiveness, but these had to be lies, hadn't they?
In Secrecy, Safety. In Safety, Survival. Long centuries had taught the Changelings that they could live only hidden in the darkness. that they would die if brought into the light. Look at what was happening -- Hunger's hordes had erupted into the light, and now they were dying. Surely Celestia would, when the Hives of Hunger had all been crushed, turn on and destroy her supposed Changeling "allies." It was the way of the world.
Celestia had, after all, Reconciled with the very oldest and deadliest enemy of the Changelings, the one who had cursed them in the beginning, tormented them for centuries until there was nothing to do but hide from him. The Demon of Chaos, the Destroyer of Love. The Twister.
And that was the strangest thing of all. For the Queen of Kindness had also reconciled with the Twister, and counted him among her closest friends. How could any ling be the Twister's friend? It was enough to strain Compound's sanity to even try to imagine. No, the "Queen of Kindness" had to be a lie, something in which the Field Infiltrators were all too wiling to believe, for the obvious reason that it gave the Hives some hope, even past defeat.
Hunger kept proclaiming that they would inflict so many losses on the Equestrians that their courage would fail, that Celestia, who cherished her little Ponies too much to watch them keep dying in battle, would negotiate with her. Many in the Hive believed this.
Compound was not so sure. For she knew something they didn't.
Directly killing Captives was not normal for the Changelings -- they wanted to keep them alive as long as possible, to tap their love. But the war had gone so badly. There was increasingly little food in the Hives. There had been little sustenance for the Captives over the last few months. And it had been necessary to tap love at higher and higher levels to gain enough energy to empower the Warriors.
Equestrian forces had overrun some of the Hives fast enough to liberate their Captives, or just slowly enough that the corpses were still warm. Some of them had been in the first stages of being processed for the nutrient tanks. Stallions. Mares. Foals.
Pony intelligence was largely oriented toward protecting their foals. It had been even on the Primal Plains, before anyone had first tinkered with the equine genome to create their species.
"Foal-killer!" was a cry that resounded deep within the Pony soul. It meant a predator threatening the herd, a predator to be trampled and crushed without mercy. And this came only four years after Windvane's Rebellion, and the revelation of just how the New Mandate had gotten the energy to power their Rainbow of Darkness.
The Equestrian armies, who might have been expected to be war-weary after such a long, hard fight, flung themselves into the fight with rekindled fury, and a grim determination which looked absolutely terrifying in the memory-impressions. Now, the problem many lings faced was that some Ponies were no longer accepting their surrenders.
Compound knew then that the war would not end until either Celestia's or Hunger's subjects were all dead. Which was why she knew that her life was almost over. For there was no way, now, for the Changelings to win. The story of the Changelings, as anything but Equestrian slaves, was almost over now, and soon Compound's own story would end as well. It was inevitable.
As was normal for a Changeling, Compound did not much fear personal death. Her mind contributed to the constant emergent hum that was the Hive-Mind, and when she died she would return to the Hive, and something would be born again which might partake of some of the nature of Compound. Even a defeated Hive would be consumed or integrated into the Hive which had vanquished it. Life went on. The Changelings went on.
But if the Hive itself died? If all the Hives died? Compound despaired before the horror of such a cold and uncaring Universe, the cold and uncaring Universe against which the Hives themselves had been built to shelter. This would be the ultimate victory of that cold uncaringness over Rosedust's Children, a victory that could never be undone because the Changelings would be no more. And soon, very soon, this would be exactly what would happen. Compound shivered at the thought.
3. Collapse
Carry noticed her fear and embraced her in his strong, powerful forelegs, forelegs which could toss a heavy stone boulder as if it had been structural spittle, forelegs which could tenderly shelter a nymph, forelegs which now held his officer and commander in seeming safety against the world. Cowl saw what was happening and joined the huddle, and they both shifted slightly to let him in. They held one another, and made their own small pocket of warmth, and felt-love, against the cold from outside.
The bombardment, which had tapered off, resumed with a fury.
WHAM!!! the great guns said. WHAM!-WHAM!-WHAM!-WHAM!-WHAM! Outside their spider hole all was chaos and death and confusion. WHOOM!!! That one struck right above the exit, and the whole tunnel overhead caved in, fortunately in a manner which did not crush their spider hole. They still had light from their small glowmoss lantern. Compound knew that the air would eventually run out, if they didn't dig themselves out first. Changelings were good diggers -- but right now it would be death to attempt such an activity.
Whoom! Whoom! Whoom! The hits were muffled now by the absence of a direct atmospheric path, but were still quite audible through the hole's walls. With each detonation the spider hole shook and the spittle rattled down. Now rubble and earth were starting to sift through cracks in those walls, and Compound knew that if this went on much longer, the whole hole would fall in on them; they would be buried alive in their own Hive.
For once the greater Hive was no comfort. They could hear the Hive-Mind in the back of their own minds, and it was not soothing them. It was screaming.
She smelt the acrid tang of vented wastes. Something hot and nasty ran down her leg. She looked at Cowl's face, saw a tear-streaked mask of shame and misery. They had their own little latrine in one corner of their hole, with neutralizers and a lid to cover it, but despite all that the hole was at best unpleasant for long residence. The latrine had not ruptured. Cowl, in his utter terror, had lost control of his own bodily processes.
I'm sorry, he minded to her -- they were all far too deafened right now for acoustic channels I'm so sorry .... Cowl's mind-speech was weak and stuttering. It had been a long time since any of them had eaten food-love, and their powers were at the lowest ebb they had ever known.
Wham! said the guns. Wham! The tremors were less intense; apparently the hit which took down the tunnel mouth had satisfied the Pony observers, and the batteries had shifted to new targets.
Compound knew he could not hear her sound-voice and wanted to conserve her mind-voice, pheromones were useless in the stench surrounding them, so she answered through her only remaining communication channel. She clutched him tightly, stroked him affectionately, play-bit his cranial carapace. It's all right, her body language said. We're friends. I love you. It's all right.
He smelled abominable, but then everything in the hole now smelled abominable, and he was her buddy. They were all going to die in this hole, in their own bodily wastes, but they were going to die together, and that somehow made all the difference. Holding Cowl, with Carry holding both of them and sheltering them from the crumbling ceiling with his own great bulk, they were their own little Hive, and that was enough.
WHOOM!!! That one was far-off but tremendous, and Compound knew what that meant. One of the new Equestrian bunker-busters, well-aimed, had hit the magazines of a Changeling popup turret, detonating its entire store of shells. The whole hole rocked to pressure waves so strong that the walls visibly rippled, and for a moment, Compound thought this was the end. Will I see Rosedust? she thought as the secondary explosions crackled like the Twister's own firecrackers, and then the shaking stopped, was replaced with the (by comparison) mild tremors of shells hitting other parts of the Hive.
They were all covered in filth. Looking down, touching her own hindquarters, Compound realized that her own bowels had let go as well at that last great explosion. There was more waste than she and Cowl could possibly have produced, and she looked at Carry, who returned her gaze sheepishly. They'd all messed themselves.
She smiled at both of her friends. "We're all in the same cocoon now!" she said audibly, and started laughing. Neither of them could hear her, of course, but her meaning was obvious and they joined her in hysterical laughter. They were laughing because of the utter disgusting absurdity of the situation, because they loved one another, but most of all, they were laughing in sheer relief that they were all still alive.
4. Digging Out
Again the bombardment tapered off, or perhaps had simply shifted from their sector. She could still feel a grumbling and a shifting through her hooves that made it clear that no one had declared peace. But this meant that they had a chance of survival.
She reached for a large box, opened it. Within were mattocks, picks, shovels and hoof-spades. She selected a set of hoof-spades and stepped back. Carry and Cowl instantly grasped her intent and took tools of their own -- Carry a big mattock and shovel, Cowl a smaller shovel. Carry used the mattock as a lever, began shifting the lid of their spider-hole.
Dirt sifted down.
"Props!" cried Compound. Whether because their hearing was returning, because she immediately looked toward the timbers in the corner, or because it simply made sense -- a surprising amount of Changeling communication worked by shared perception of a common purpose -- Carry instantly grasped her idea, reaching for the timbers and wedging them into place under the load so that all but a small center, just big enough that Carry should be able to squirm through it, was supported.
Then Carry grabbed a pick and looked first at the lid, then at Compound. She nodded. Carry began to rip apart the lid with one point of the pick.
Great drifts of soft earth and pebbles, mixed with what had been the structural spittle ceiling of the tunnel outside, fell into the spider hole. Carry's nictitating membranes covered his eyes, shielding them as he continued to work like a demon, his pick making short work of the plyspit covering the hole. Now actual rocks fell on Carry's head and forelegs as he worked, but the big Worker merely grunted as he grabbed a long-handled shovel and stabbed at the hole, shaking himself occasionally to throw off the falling debris.
Compound scrabbled with her hoof-spades, throwing the spoil into a corner of her hole. Cowl adjusted the supports, shored up any part of the hole which looked in danger of catastrophic collapse. Sometimes their tunnel did threaten to collapse, or a section fell in entirely, but they simply adjusted their tactics and continued on forward.
They worked as a team. Each of them had chosen a role and did it uncomplainingly, without concern for status or danger. This, not predation or even shapeshifting was the great strength of the Changelings -- cooperation, a closer cooperation than that known to any of the other Four Kinds without considerable formal organization.
That Compound was an Theoretical Infiltrator, Cowl a Clerk-Worker, or Carry a Load-Worker; that they had all had spears pushed into their claws by a Hive gone mad, and told that they were Warriors now, meant nothing. They were buddies, they were a team, and there was a problem before them, a job to be done. Therefore, they did it. They forgot their fear, their shame, their pain, and they did the job. They were Changelings, and that is what Changelings did.
If you had somehow been able to tell Compound, at this moment, that this would be the virtue that was to carry her Kind across the sidereal Universe and beyond, to every corner of the Cosmos, even she, intellectual though she was, would have looked at you as if you had gone mad. This was the Twilight of Hunger, the Downfall of Hive-Prime, and even Compound's gleaming great eyes were at present unable to see the stars.
They dug backward, deeper into the Hive. Their spider hole had been backward-facing in any case, the idea being that Compound's trio would make a last mad dash against the rear of Pony assault troopers entering the tunnel from outside, all their life and individuality and potential spent in a suicide attack that if they were impossibly lucky might claim a few Equestrian lives as well. They should have had firearms, or at least repeating crossbows, but in these last days of the war the supply system of Hive-Prime was failing (perhaps because they no longer trusted the brilliant Compound to run it).
So they had been issued spears -- their own magic was far too weak after weeks of love-starving for their horns to be much good -- and ordered to expand themselves against Equestrian assault troops armed with automatic-action rifles and grenado-launchers, like so many rounds of the ammunition the Hive so sorely lacked. This would be a waste of Compound's carefully-inculcated skills as a Theoretical Infiltrator, or Cowl's as a Clerk-Worker. Even Carry's great size and strength could be better employed than soaking up Equestrian bullets. Sapient lives should not be thrown away senselessly in such a fashion.
But this was Hive Hunger-Prime in its last days, and this contagion of madness and death, which had spread from a single half-Zebra Changeling Royal to infect first one Hive, then through the greatest Territory the Changelings had ever possessed, was in the last brutal stages of its cauterization from the world of life and sanity. Hundreds of thousands of Ponies, and millions of Changelings had perished already, and now the whole domain of Queen Hunger had contracted to a single Hive, and that Hive was being pounded into rubble by the greatest concentration of conventional artillery this planet had seen for the last four thousand years. And if that failed, the earthfire bombs waited in readiness to be loaded onto the heavy bombers, to put a final end to Hunger's dark dream.
What were the lives of three little lings, against a background of such terrible waste?
Compound was, of course, thinking in no such terms. Her world had narrowed to a single tunnel that she and her two friends were digging. Carry dug. She shifted the spoil. And Cowl shored up the tunnel which stretched farther and farther up the shaft toward the Hive, toward safety and life, even if it was the safety of a little more life in the heart of a doomed Hive.
They were well within the old access tunnel now. They knew this by their positional senses, scrambled as these were by the repeated insults delivered to their bodies and minds during the hellish bombardment. They knew this by the quality of the rocks Carry was tossing backward and Compound was catching and shoving onto the growing heap of spoil. And they knew this by certain patterns they saw on the fallen structural spittle which were, to their nyctalopic senses, like so many clearly written signs to one of the other Kinds of Pony.
The moment came when they reached a section where the damage to the walls had been minor enough that they were within range of telepathic transmissions from the Hive-Mind. This theoretically should have enabled them to call for help from other members of the Hive, but the Hive-Mind was not in good shape, its channels mostly jammed by its own fear and pain.
Help, the Hive-Mind was saying Damage to sectors ... a list followed. Chambers ... another list ... entirely destroyed. Fires out of control in ... another list. Severe casualties ... and then on its emotional channels ... Help, help, help, the pain, the pain, make it stop! It whimpered and cried out for relief, for repair, but there was neither relief nor repair, only more and more damage, as the Equestrian bombs and shells and rockets tore great holes into the hillside, blasting and burning and smashing the non-sapient, but horribly-sentient and suffering collective intelligence of the Hive.
The trio looked at each other in horror.
"Shut down the channel," shouted Compound vocally, and did so herself. She could hear a bit now, and hoped that the other two could as well. "The Hive-Mind. It's hurt, it can't help us now. Shut down the channel, so that you can hear yourself think."
Cowl nodded, and made a brief mental effort. He wasn't as skilled at this as was Compound, who had recalled her Infiltrator training and had simply changed her Mask into that of a Compound who couldn't hear the Hive. So it was a struggle, but his strength sufficed. His features relaxed, his mind obviously cleared of the jamming.
Carry just gaped at her helplessly.
"I can't ..." he said. He'd never had any training on any topic more complex than how to find his way around the Hive and safely move heavy objects. "How are you ..." His face twisted in sympathetic anguish with the Hive's.
He couldn't dig very effectively like this. Besides, Compound couldn't bear to see him suffer any more.
"Wait," she said. "I think I have just enough energy left to help you. Look into my eyes," she said, putting a hoof-claw on each side of his head to ensure that he was facing her directly.
Carry obeyed her.
Compound closed her eyes, marshaled all her strength, and when she opened them her Stare riveted Carry's attention. It was not the mighty power of a Royal: she was only an Infiltrator, and a love-starved one at that. But Carry trusted her, was letting her in voluntarily. That helped a lot. A moment of adjustment, and then his will was hers to command.
"Ignore the Hive-Mind," she told him. "You cannot hear it. Only hear and pay attention to it when this order is countermanded." The last was almost a whisper -- her last dregs of energy were draining from her -- but she had to complete the command, leave a clear path to restore his link to the Hive-Mind after the crisis was over, lest she damage him.
As she spoke these words, she saw the pain depart her friend's face, his stance straighten. At the same moment the strength left her own limbs. Her forehooves dropped away from Carry's head, she tottered on her hooves, and might have fallen had not Carry's powerful forelimbs caught and steadied her.
"Easy," Carry said. "You look beat."
Compound reached within herself, made one more Mask-shift. She was now a Compound who didn't care about exhaustion. She felt her muscles firm, a false strength return to her.
"I'm all right," she told Carry. "Just had to catch my second wind. Let's keep digging." And, at Cowl's more dubious look. "Come on! We want to get out of here!"
She was lying to her friends. The strength was false. Mask-shifting wasn't like a true Shift at all, it was just a mind trick. What she had actually done was turn off the normal governors that any Changeling has to keep them from expending their last endurance, the reserves which maintained major organ functions.
She could keep going for a good while like this -- then something would give. Her heart, her blood vessels -- if she was lucky she would just faint. If she were unlikely, she could drop dead in her tracks, without her own bodily sensations giving her any hint of danger. When she had been taught this technique in her Infiltrator training, she had been warned that it was extremely dangerous, something she should not attempt save in an extreme emergency, if there were no better options.
This was an extreme emergency, and she had thought of no better option. Now, all she could do was use the extra energy she was burning from her own substance, to help save all their lives.
They resumed digging. A frightening amount of the tunnel had fallen in; Compound couldn't imagine how the Hive had taken so much damage from a single shell, without the explosion crushing all of them in their spider hole. It stumped Cowl as well. Surprisingly, it was Carry who grasped the reason.
"More than one hit," he said. "Look, the debris is in levels. The shell to the door must have caused the first collapse, the one that blocked our spider hole, that weakened a lot of the ceiling; then that really big blast sent it all crashing down. We're lucky it didn't send our little chamber crashing down right on our heads!"
Compound was impressed. Ordinary Workers weren't supposed to be that smart. Then again, he was a Load-Worker -- wouldn't knowing how things fell down be an important part of knowing how to pick them up and move them safely? Compound wasn't sure -- Infiltrators cross-trained in a lot of other skills, but noling had seen fit to teach her the ways of Load-Workers. She had no real idea what they knew or didn't know.
As she scrabbled to shift the spoil, it occurred to her that there were a lot of things about the world she didn't know, that she would never get to know, because even if they could dig their way to safety, they would all die within a few days when this fortress fell. It seemed a bit of a shame, really. Compound had always been a very curious ling, it was a requirement for her profession, and she had spent her whole life learning things. Soon, her education would end, forever.
"Wait," said Cowl, "Do you hear that?"
"Stop digging a moment," ordered Compound. Carry complied, standing in relative silence. They were all breathing hard now, and couldn't control it -- they were exerting themselves hard, in an oxygen-depleted atmosphere. Compound could hear the pounding of her own heart, and wondered how much longer she could keep this up before she collapsed. But she needed to keep calm, make the right decisions -- everyling was counting on her!
There it was again! Metal ringing against metal, muffled voices on the other side of the debris to their right! Compound consulted her memory -- hadn't there been some sort of ready room here? Yes, there had been a unit of Provisional Hive Guards stationed there. Had relief crews already reached this far?
"Dig in that direction," Compound said, jerking her head to the right. Carry heaved large rocks out of the way, Cowl struggled to shore up the tunnel with whatever large pieces of structural spittle he could find, Compound shifted spoil. It was the same thing they had been doing before, only now the air was definitely running out but there was noise on the other side, Changeling voices that were growing rapidly louder and more excited.
Suddenly Carry pulled away a piece of fallen ceiling and the soft earth shifted and there was light on the other side, brighter light than the wan illumination of their little lantern! The trio redoubled their efforts as claws reached out from the other side of the barrier.
"We're in here! We're in here!" a treble voice buzzed, which struck Compound as an odd thing for rescuers to say to rescuees.
"No, we're in here!" insisted Carry, while Compound and Cowl exchanged puzzled glances.
A moment later, the barrier crumbled between their little tunnel and the chamber beyond, and Compound realized what had happened.
There were eight supposed Warriors in the chamber. Compound's thought was "supposed," because six of them looked like older nymphs, not yet grown enough for their horns and wings to have fully developed. Two of that six looked so young that Compound was momentarily surprised there were no Nurses tending to them. They did, at least, look like they would grow into true Warriors, if it wasn't for the fact that they were all going to die long before that could happen.
The other two of the eight were Workers, and they were grown. One was a big strong Lifter drone like Carry, who was in fact the one who had been digging on the other side of the barrier. The other was a reedy little female, who was at least helping move the spoil. She was a bit older than the other Worker, and seemed to be directing her bigger friend.
"It's an Infiltrator!" the big drone said, looking back at the reedy female. "We're saved!"
This faith in her capabilities would have warmed the cockles of Compound's overstressed heart, on behalf of her whole Caste, were it not for the fact that they were, in fact, not saved. Instead, Compound, Carry and Cowl had just used a good portion of their remaining strength to dig in the direction of a blind alley. And the air was still going bad -- the new chamber they'd reached was bigger, but there were now eleven lings breathing what was left.
Compound noticed that the six Warrior nymphs seemed to be sitting around passively.
"Who's in command here?" she asked.
"Noling," came the amazing answer from the oldest Provisional Hive Guard, a big chubby colt-nymph with what a rather sickly cast to his thermal signature. "We had a Squad Leader, Warmdagger, but he went outside with the Assistant Squad Leader and they both got squashed when the tunnel fell in. And we're all Recruits and there's noling senior so we decided to just sit and wait till someling told us what to do."
Compound's mind boggled. Her culture was hierarchical, but not this hierarchical -- it sounded very much as if she hadn't happened along, all six of the supposed Warriors would have just sat in that chamber until their air ran out, leaving pretty little nymph corpses for some future explorers to find. She had heard of being "too dumb to live," but had never expected to encounter such a clear example of it, especially not in her last few days of existence.
Then she thought quickly. The eight in this chamber were eight more pairs of forelimbs and strong backs. And they were breathing her air. The implications were obvious.
"Right," she said. "I'm in charge now."
The two Workers looked relieved. The big chubby colt-nymph gaped at her in surprise.
"Don't you need a scent-marker ..." he started to ask.
"No," snapped Compound. "I'm a big scary full-grown Infiltrator, and you're just a little Warrior-nymph. You do what you're told!"
"Yes'm!" saluted the young Warrior, gulping.
"Now to the task at hand," continued Compound. "You," she said to the big Worker-drone. "Come up front with my team-mate Carry and do the digging. You," she said to the chubby colt-nymph. "And you, and you," she addressed the two other biggest Warriors. You're trimming the tunnel and shoring it up. You," she said to the small Worker, "and you two -- you're going to shift spoil. Get to it!"
With two big Workers digging, four lings shoring and four more shifting spoil, the job now went much faster. It might have gone faster still, had not Compound herself found it increasingly-difficult to put in her part of the effort. Her Mask was keeping her from feeling it too bad, but her hoof-claws were weakening, her breath coming with greater difficulty, and she had to coordinate her squad-sized group in addition to clearing spoil. Sometimes she had to stop for a moment, stars dancing in her vision, breath labored, heart racing.
She couldn't let her lings down. The world had narrowed to this race between the remaining blockage and the remaining air. It was a hellish race, here down in the dark with only the little lantern for light, a race on a course of unknown length, for she had no idea how much of the tunnel remained blocked. What if it were all blocked? What if the whole of Hive Prime had fallen in and there were nolings left alive in the rubble but her squad, eleven frantically and pointlessly laboring beings, doomed to labor thus by the delusions of their Infiltrator leader, until the air ran out and they dropped dead in the dark, just more organic debris in the great ruin that had once been a living Hive?
She tried to push the thought away but it kept coming back, each time more depressing than the last. Still, she could not show it, not speculate on it, for to do so would be to dishearten her squad. She was the one who must face such dark thoughts, alone, while exhorting her lings on to keep trying. That was her duty as leader.
A stray phrase came to her mind, a little piece of Equestrian ideology she had encountered in her researches, regarding the proper position of an Equestrian Princess. "Between the peril and her Ponies," the line went, and Compound laughed at the utter and absurd presumption of applying it to herself, for she was no Royal. She was just a Theoretical Infiltrator, and a disgraced one at that. She'd been sent here to the front to die, not to lead, but someling had to lead in this situation, and she was the only ling available to do the job. So she did it.
A blinding light. Pain penetrating the armor of her Mask, pain in her lungs, pain in her heart, so that she staggered as she stepped forward. Was this the light of Rosedust, calling her on to the next world? She was suddenly tired, so very tired, all her Masks dropping away, her mind no longer strong enough to maintain them.
And then the last wall of debris fell away, and she was at the interior guard post, which was full of Changelings, all of them staring in amazement as Compound and her squad, dirty and exhausted and stinking, staggered out into the full radiance of the glowmoss, gasping with relief as they finally tasted air with sufficient oxygen. The Changelings there included some very high-ranking Infiltrator and Warrior Leaders, and one of them was tall and darkly beautiful, her eyes blazing and her head topped by a pheromone crown, and Compound herself gaped in amazement as she beheld her sovereign, Queen Hunger.
Then reflexive duty took over. After a situation like this, she was supposed to report to the highest authority available, and the Queen was indisputably the highest authority available anywhere in the Hive. So Compound, half-dead though she was, made herself by sheer force of will take a few last, shambling steps up to Queen Hunger, looked her directly in the eye, and said:
"Provisional Warrior Team Leader Theoretical Infiltrator Compound reporting to base with ten more survivors of the tunnel collapse. Provisional Warriors Cowl and Carry have performed flawlessly and with the highest loyalty to the Hive. This Team Leader aided Provisional Warrior Carry with a Stare which needs to be countermanded. This Team Leader salutes you, Your Highness -- Glory to the Queen! Glory to the Hive!"
And that was that. She had just enough left in her to clear away the last remnants of her own Masks and then it all hit her, at once. The Hive-Mind, which was still jammed, sobbing to itself in dull misery. Her own exhaustion and pain. Her relief at finally being safe, even if it were only for now, at having brought her friends through this with no losses, not even of the baby Warriors she'd found along the way. It was all, suddenly, too much for her love-starved frame to bear up under.
Her vision grayed out around the edges. Suddenly the world was spinning, shifting, dissolving. Her limbs were floating. Gravity went away. Everything went black.
She was unconscious before she hit the floor.