Queen of Jarilo

There was a color about the Bug, yellow, and Walker could have sworn that he felt a twinge of uncertainty or fear. A second-hand emotion, broadcast by the creature like a facial expression that was communicated through scent. It was nervous, afraid of him perhaps as it hovered outside the door. It opened his cell, waiting, the impression of color in Walker's mind shifting further towards the green spectrum. It was expectant, it wanted him to leave his cage and step out into the tunnel.

Walker took a step forward, the creature backing away as its mood shifted towards yellow again, it was as scared of him as he was of it. He slowly stepped out of his cell and into the corridor beyond, a long tunnel that extended perhaps ten meters to the left and right before curving out of view, gloomy save for the odd bio-electric lighting that clung to the ceiling. He took in a breath of the warm, humid air, his senses scrambling to process the new information. He could sense the passage of other Bugs as if they had left footprints in the dirt, a trail of scents of such complexity that he could distinguish between individuals and the time that had elapsed since their passing. Half a dozen Betelgeusians had trodden here and left their signatures behind. More than that, there was a map, strong scents that drew his attention down different paths like the painted lines on the floor of the Pinwheel that would direct pedestrians to the station's different quarters.

He cradled his head in his hands. The sensations too much to process, he felt like somebody who had been blind all of their life and was now seeing for the first time.

The Bug stood beside him, its aura green, waiting for him to make a move. It was not attacking, it did not seem to be aggressive in any way, its behavior defied logic. Walker had fought the Bugs for almost two decades, and he had never known them to respond with anything other than overt hostility to beings who were not of their race.

It released a scent into the air and Walker felt a strong compulsion to follow it. The feeling wasn't conveyed through any complex means but rather through an urge akin to the desire to sneeze or yawn. He could deny the impulse if he wanted to, but what other options did he have? The Bug began to walk away, leaving an invisible trail behind it that lingered in the air, and so Walker followed.

It all made sense to him at that moment, it was like someone had switched on a light bulb in his head. Pheromones. The Bugs communicated using pheromones rather than speech, that was why Borealans were so adept at tracking them and how Kaz had been able to follow their scent trails with her keen nose. She could smell them, but she couldn't read them as he now could. The scents contained a wealth of information that his new organ must be attuned to. The Bugs wanted to communicate with him. The surgery had given him a rudimentary pheromone sensing organ, a sixth sense that they had wired into his existing senses as best they could. Like a frugal computer technician, his surgeon had patched into the already existing systems of his brain, piggybacking on them to take advantage of their processing power. He could not see the world as the Bugs did, that might be impossible for him, but he was getting a rudimentary translation as his brain struggled to parse these new signals.

***

He followed the Bug for what must have been half a mile through a winding maze of tunnels that left him disoriented and lost. There were so many branching pathways and corridors, some verging left and right, others slanting up or down. He had to stop thinking with his eyes and start seeing the world with his nose. The passages had their own scents, a pheromone trail that acted like a subway map. Each tunnel had its own distinct smell, its own color in his mind, and while he could not yet read the language that they were written in he knew that the information was there.

His stumpy guide was following one such path, leading him to some unknown destination. Some nightmare laboratory where he would be subjected to further surgeries and experiments perhaps? Were they going to somehow turn him into a Bug? That might make a good horror movie, but it wasn't very likely. He wasn't being restrained, and he considered just running away, there was no way that this Bug would be able to catch him on its little legs. Where would he go, however? He didn't know which color, which smell marked the way to the surface. Perhaps he would be able to learn in time and use that information to make his escape.

Walker smelled something in the distance, a great number of Bugs and what might have been disturbed soil. The scent got closer and closer as they followed the branching tunnels, the pheromones of what had to be two dozen individuals bombarding him, their emotional states mingling and difficult to distinguish.

He followed the Bug around one final corner, and he found himself in a half-finished tunnel, the hollowed-out dirt ending abruptly some distance away. There were perhaps thirty Bugs milling about, the same kind as his captor, short and stocky with mismatched arms. The hues of their iridescent shells varied wildly, from azure blue to amber and gold, even reds and purples. Their horns were just as varied, some twisted and branching like those of a stag, others were prominent and flared like a beetle. They were digging, using the spade-like hands on their upper arms to burrow into the soil, a few of them hauling the mounds of fresh dirt off down the tunnel and out of sight.

It was remarkably primitive, Walker saw no sign of construction equipment or heavy machinery. The Bugs were capable of interstellar travel and yet they had not invented a backhoe? That said, the little aliens were remarkably adept at their jobs, their limbs seemed to have been either evolved or engineered for the very purpose of excavation. Walker had been deployed on Kruger III during the war to wrest control of that system from the Betelgeusians. He had dug trenches alongside in his men in that muddy hellscape, and it was immediately apparent that these Bugs could accomplish the same amount of work in a fraction of the time.

When they had finished excavating a section of tunnel, they smoothed it out, packing the dirt as tightly as they could. Then their complex mandibles opened, revealing pink flesh beneath the hard shell. A long, sinuous tongue shot forth from an opening that could scarcely be called a mouth and was barely larger than the appendage, some kind of thick saliva oozing forth into their cupped hands. They rubbed it on the walls, the drool seeming to harden on contact and seal in the soil beneath.

They stopped what they were doing for a brief moment, seeming to smell Walker, turning to stare at him as their mandibles clicked and flexed like fingers. They quickly resumed their work, leaving Walker to wonder why the hell he had been brought here.

He felt a hand on the small of his back, his guide urging him forwards, releasing a new scent. It smelled acidic, like lemons and citrus fruits, giving him the impression of lime green in his mind's eye. It wanted him to do something, it was expectant.

"You want me to dig?" Walker asked.

The Bugs stopped again, turning to stare at him, their long tongues shooting forth as if to taste the air. They made no sound besides the creaking of their armored limbs and the clicking of their mouthparts. It was not complex enough to be a language, did they have none? The UNN had no record of verbal communication from the Bugs, but it was hard to imagine how a species that lacked one could evolve to sapience. Sure, they had their pheromones, but you couldn't record information in the long-term using scents. They would fade over time. How did they do math? How did they enter information into their computers without the written word?

"Do you speak? Can you hear me?"

They ignored him, returning to their business. Hell, for all he knew they might not even have ears, maybe they felt vibrations in the air rather than hearing them as sound.

His guide shoved him forward again, Walker sensing a lighter shade of green from its pheromones now, impatience? Frustration?

He stepped up to a wall, rolling up his sleeves and wondering just what they expected him to do without tools. Surely this was not why they had gone to the trouble of taking him alive? What use would Bugs have for slave labor?

He took up a place beside one of the diggers, a Bug with a ruby-red shell that had a decorative horn resembling a rhinoceros. He watched it plunge its hard fingers into the soil, scooping out handfuls of earth and dropping them into a pile that was forming behind it, no doubt to be carted away once it reached the appropriate size. Walker resigned himself, he didn't have much choice other than to play along, and so he pushed his hands into the soil. It was surprisingly tough and damp between his fingers, there were small rocks in it that made the work harder. He noted that there were no roots. They must be deep underground, no plants had dug this far down. The roots of a tree could dig as deep into the earth as the specimen was tall, it was possible that the Bugs had planned out their tunnels to avoid them, but judging by the size and proliferation of the continent-spanning forests that seemed unlikely.

His guide again secreted a scent that was green, bordering on yellow, increasingly frustrated with him. It was adamant, and he had nothing else to do, might as well humor his captors.

He dug out a pitiful handful in comparison to his fellow workmen, dropping it onto the pile, his fingernails filthy with soil. The red Bug beside him halted, turning to look at the mound of dirt, its mandibles clicking frantically. It released a scent, orange in color, the emotion coming across as irritation. It leaned down and carefully scooped away the soil that Walker had deposited on its pile, placing it to one side, apparently wanting him to start a fresh one. It returned to its duties, completely absorbed in its digging.

Walker suppressed a grin, scooping out another handful of dirt and depositing it on his neighbor's pile.

The Bug turned once more, examining the knee-high mound with its blue eyes, its mandibles waving erratically in the air. It released another puff of orange pheromones, the smaste of it reminding Walker of bell peppers. Once again it carefully moved the soil from its pile to his, as if acutely aware of precisely how much dirt its own collection was comprised of, then returned to its duties.

Some of the Workers around him were glancing in his direction now, pausing as they dumped large handfuls of the soil, one of them halting to peer at him as the gooey resin that they secreted dripped from its chitinous palm. The pheromones were obviously disturbing them, the emotion conveyed within the scents drawing their attention as if their companion was in distress.

Walker dug a few more holes, now beginning to form his own pile, the smell from his neighbor shifting in hue towards the purple spectrum as it calmed down. Did blue hues indicate calm? Yellow seemed to be fear or anxiety, the scent and taste of citrus, harsh and acidic. That was the impression that he had gotten when his jailer had been waiting by the door to his cell. Green must be expectation, urgency, a fruitier smell. Green bordering on yellow might signify a blending of those emotions, the lime green that he had sensed earlier signifying frustration. What was orange then? Anger? Irritation?

Walker wondered if this was by design, or if it was merely his brain struggling with the new information that was available to it, running the sensations through familiar filters and drawing parallels wherever it could. He undoubtedly associated the color red with anger, and so if he managed to frustrate his neighbor enough, would its pheromones shift from orange to red? It was time to do some science.

He crouched and lifted as much dirt as he could carry in his hands from his pile, dropping it on top of his neighbor's. The Bug shivered, its complex mouthparts waving and twitching as it turned to look at the mound of soil. Yep, there it was, a fiery orange that bordered on red along with a bitter aftertaste. The hues that flared in his mind when he sensed the pheromones indicated emotion, a spectrum that his brain must be interpreting in the only way that it knew how, using his visual cortex and the memories of color to process the data.

The red Bug carefully scooped away the dirt from its pile, its mandibles clicking angrily, and returned it to Walker's tiny mound. He was disrupting the work on a larger scale now, the rest of the Bugs stopping to stare, the scent of confusion flooding the tunnel.

His guide stepped forward and took his wrist in its hand, its exoskeleton hard and dry against his skin, and it loosed a more complex pheromone. There was information layered in there, something that Walker couldn't parse, a language that he did not speak. It waited for him to react, but he had no idea what it was saying, and so it led him over to the wall and planted his hand against the packed earth.

The gesture was obvious enough, it was telling him to get on with his work, and so he continued to dig into the wall with his hands. Even with a shovel, he would not have been able to come close to the speed and efficiency at which the Bugs operated. They were like machines, single-minded in their task, tireless as they carved out this new extension of the hive. These ones were physiologically different from the Drones that he was so accustomed to fighting, could they be a class of Betelgeusian whose only purpose was to dig tunnels? No, his surgeon had been one of these, using its smaller pair of arms to operate on him with surprising dexterity.

His handler observed him closely, seeming confused by his lack of progress, as if the concept of someone being bad at digging was completely unheard of. Walker still did not understand the purpose of this exercise. Did they actually expect him to help excavate the tunnel, or was this a part of some larger experiment?

Walker continued to dig for perhaps an hour longer, his fingers starting to become sore, stained black with soil. His guide observed him the whole time, clicking its mandibles quietly as he struggled to form a pile. More Workers came to carry away the mounds of earth when they reached a certain size, and it must have taken Walker ten times as long as his neighbors before his own pile was taken away.

He watched as one of the Bugs collected the soil in its four arms and carried it off down the tunnel, then he slumped against a nearby wall, taking a breather and wiping his dirty hands on the leg of his pants.

His handler chittered angrily, releasing a scent that indicated frustration, scurrying over to him and attempting to pull him to his feet. Walker batted it away, the Bug confused by his reaction.

"I need a break, you damned roach. Do you expect me to work my fingers down to the bone?"

It cocked its head at him, its mouthparts moving incessantly, some of the Workers around them stopping to stare. It gestured to the wall unhappily, its pheromones confused and anxious. It had probably been told to make him work by a superior, and his lack of cooperation was reflecting badly on it. Perhaps it would get into trouble if Walker didn't complete his task.

It approached the wall, digging its hard fingers into the dirt and scooping out a handful. It brought the soil over to Walker and presented it to him, expectant, as if assuming that Walker had somehow not understood his assignment. He glared at it, crossing his arms, and the Bug placed the dirt on the floor of the tunnel to form a new pile.

"Ok, you want a pile? How about this?"

He rose to his feet and sauntered over to the red Bug's growing mound, scooping away about half of it, and carried the armful over to his own pile where he dropped it unceremoniously. The red Bug turned to watch in disbelief, practically vibrating with distress, this form of conflict and disruption perhaps entirely alien to it. These insects worked like machines, never deviating from their task. Walker had not even seen them rest or communicate with one another in any way since he had arrived. They couldn't process what was happening, they might never have known upset, never witnessed disorder before. All of the work in the tunnel had ground to a halt, the other diggers not knowing how to respond, the red Bug's aggrieved pheromones putting everyone else on edge.

It scurried over to his pile and attempted to recover its haul. It looked as if it would have counted every pebble if it had been able, pausing on its way back to retrieve a few clods that had escaped Walker's arms during his theft.

What was their deal? Did they get paid based on how much dirt they collected? Was it just animal instinct, like termites in a colony? Would they be punished if they failed to meet a quota?

Either way, Walker was done with digging, and he had apparently made a shambles of the whole operation. The rest of the insectoid creatures were standing about nervously, the red Bug hovering over its pile as if unable to decide whether it wanted to resume digging or continue to guard it. He could sense their stress and confusion, smell it in the pheromones that they secreted.

Emboldened, Walker made his way over to one of the other mounds, an amber colored Bug with antlers like a moose clicking with irritation and emitting a perplexed scent as he stooped to take a handful of its dirt. He scattered it on the ground, the alien's vexation palpable as it loosed a pheromone that smelled like bitter mustard. He kicked over the adjacent pile, chaos erupting in the tunnel. One of them ran away, perhaps interpreting the pheromone signals as the warning of an attack, others protecting their respective piles with their many arms. The rest stood around in confusion, not knowing how to respond.

Walker noted that despite his behavior, none of the Bugs became aggressive towards him. They were surprisingly innocent, as if the thought of violence or the use of force simply did not occur to them. It was a far cry from what he had seen from the Drones, the soldiers fought as ardently and as single-mindedly as these ones worked.

He returned to his seat by the wall, enjoying the disorder that he had sown, until the cavalry finally arrived. Three Drones appeared at the far end of the tunnel, no doubt drawn by the distressed pheromones, Walker bristling at the sight of them. There were Drones in the tunnels then, that might complicate his escape plan. These did not seem to be armed, there were no shield projectors on their wrists, and the plasma pistols that they commonly carried were absent. They had their signature knives, but they were sheathed.

They made their way down the tunnel, stopping nearby him to taste the air with their long tongues, and Walker wondered what he looked like to them. Did they have orders not to kill him, did his new organ emit pheromones that identified him as a member of the hive? Their level of individual intelligence was hard to determine. His guide spoke to one of the soldiers as the other two tried to corral the upset Workers, communicating with complex layers of scents that Walker could not discern. It was a language of a sort, totally beyond anything in human experience, but these aliens were definitely talking to one another. He tried hard to identify the nuances of their discussion, but he was too inexperienced. Not only was it a foreign language, but his control over his new sensory organ was still tentative at best, it would take him time to master it.

Contextually speaking, the subject of their conversation was fairly obvious. The Drones had come to investigate the disruption, and his handler was currently explaining what had caused it.