Excerpt: The Hive by Chris Berman
Prologue: 10,000 BC
The Orion arm of the Milky Way Galaxy stretched like a brightly glowing band across the sky. The great ice sheets of the past forty thousand years had finally receded. Full and satisfied from a great feast of meat from the afternoon’s kill, bands of human hunters rested about their fires, their tensions and fears of a difficult winter now receding. They were confident in the knowledge that the successful hunt would feed their group and families through the long cold and dark months ahead. They would survive. A hunter, near exhaustion from the physical effort of killing the great tusked beasts lay back peacefully on a cured skin of an antelope and gazed upon the night sky before he descended into sleep. As fatigue overcame him, he looked upon the luminous band of stars, like a bridge across the heavens. In that boundary between wakefulness and dreams, he thought of it as a great sky path to be traveled upon, closed his eyes and was enveloped by sleep.
Two thousand light-years away in that same glowing band of light, the Orion arm, an orange dwarf star, half the size of the sun, shone its ruddy light on the second planet of a system of seven worlds. The night side of this second child of the small sun was alive with light in a pattern of necklaces and fine webs of luminosity. This world was companioned by two moons, both equally aglow with activity on their dark hemispheres. The space between the seven worlds of the small orange sun was an intense scene of activity with the moving lights of painfully brilliant tiny suns, the fusion exhausts of spacecraft plying the blackness between the planets. This was the system of the Hive. They had evolved, developed, and spread out to exploit all the resources of their solar system.
It was late in the season. Mating had concluded, and the eggs were being tended to. The ritual killing of the "different" was only twelve rotations away. Millions of the “wrong” and of the unfit would be torn to pieces in the powerful mandibles of the “correct.” The bodies of the “wrong” would serve as a food source for the growing larva of the new generation. This is how it had been since the earliest ancestors of the Hive, had been nearly mindless crawling things, scraping their armored carapaces across the dry landscape of the Hive home world. The Hive had expanded. The Hive had conquered and exploited their system of worlds until there was no longer room for their exploding numbers, and their systems’ resources were near exhaustion. Yet, an imperative deep in their genetics drove them with the unquenchable need to expand. The facetted lenses of the Thinker and Engineer casts had scanned the stars. The new ships had been built. The Hive in a great swarm was ready to move out among the stars, to conquer and exploit the worlds of other suns. If those worlds they came upon were inhabited, it was no concern to the Hive; they would exterminate all other life forms, for the Hive must dominate at all costs to survive and expand.
Chapter 1: Russia: Tunguska, Siberia, 1908:
The Hive probe had traveled for well over a hundred years across the eternal blackness of interstellar space. The main bus of the spacecraft containing its nuclear fusion engine, and the great dish antenna separated from the much smaller planetary explorer to take up an orbit between the two great gas giants. The planetary probe fell inward to the warm heart of the yellow sun’s system of worlds. Planet three, a water world had already been detected. Not only this, but as the robot craft crossed the comet belt, intelligent but primitive modulated radio signals had been sensed. This information was already on the way back to a Hive outpost world.
The probe swept across in a descending orbit about the blue and white sphere and sent images, temperature and atmospheric data back to the main body of the robot ship to be collected and sent to the Hive. It was an inhabited planet, which meant a food source to support the next generation of Hive conquers. The probe had completed its task and in its last orbit around the target world, fell toward the great northern land mass, devoid of inhabitants. If a target world held intelligent beings, the probe had been programmed to destroy itself without any trace or evidence to serve as a warning that the Hive would be coming. Ten kilometers over the great swampy forests of Northern Siberia, a tiny laser igniter fired an intense beam of energy through a precisely drilled channel. It was directed through a series of optical surfaces then reflected off a perfectly spherical core of polonium. The beam was focused on a tritium isotope pellet in the center of the core. Packed within the compartment and surrounding the polonium core was more tritium encased in beryllium. The beam superheated and compressed the tritium heart of the core, and the atomic nuclei began a runway fusion reaction. In an instant, a new sun filled the sky over Tunguska as the force of a fifteen megaton nuclear explosion devastated the forest below, erasing the visit of the probe without a trace. Because the self-destruct device lacked a plutonium trigger, it produced no measurable radiation. On June 30, 1908, at 7:15 in the morning local time, the Earth had been found. The Hive would be coming.