The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

‘Allegiance’

(mc, f/f, sf, nc)

DISCLAIMER:

This material is for adults only; it contains explicit sexual imagery and non-consensual relationships. If you are offended by this type of material or you are under legal age in your area, do NOT continue.

* * *

‘Allegiance’

Part Two

* * *

“...but how?” Ellibree asked, her salad forgotten.

“Hm? Well, the egg hatched—”

“No! How did you get away? Why aren’t you, how did you get rescued?”

“Okay, I’ll skip ahead,” Tetha replied. “Being a drone was actually rather boring. I mean, it was great at the time, but it’s pretty boring to talk about. There’s only so much ‘I was told to do this so I happily obeyed’ I can tell you before it gets repetitive.”

Ellibree just stared at her.

Tetha laughed. “All right, all right. They came and got us; the Service did. They had implanted tracking devices in us, and monitored them from orbit, and then they came and got us. That was... that had been their plan all along. They wanted us to be converted, so they could study it. So they had known base cases from which to study the transformation into drones.”

Ellibree was shaking her head. “They didn’t.”

“Oh yes, they did. Do you really think they would hesitate to sacrifice us like that? What’s the first duty of a citizen of the Union?”

“...yes.” Ellibree admitted quietly. “On Menelaus, during the Tauroid campaign... they—no, we—did the same thing. We put the garrisons there, told them we would rescue them. There was never any intention to. They were a distraction.”

“Weren’t you in one of those...?”

“Yeah. I surprised everyone, I think.”

“I bet you did. Was it Nehi? Pulled some strings to get you assigned to suicide duty?”

“No. Er, yes, it was, but I mean ‘No—I want to hear what happened to you. I’ll tell you about Menelaus later.”

“Okay.” Tetha pointed with her fork. “Eat your salad.”

Tetha continued as Ellibree obliged. “Well, that’s basically it. They came and got us—well, five of us, Thissa was deep in the hive—and took us to a medical facility to see if they could reverse the procedure. Un-enslave us.”

“It must have worked.”

Tetha looked thoughtful. “On me. They cut open my head and pulled out the thing living there. I was... mostly intact. I lost a lot of...” She smiled, but the pain was clear. “For six months I saw everything upside-down. I probably still do, but my brain has adjusted. And there was lots of physical therapy. But mentally, at least, I was still me.”

She crunched on some beans for a moment. Ellibree waited.

“None of the others were.”

* * *

tethadrone awoke, and began putting her mind in order.

she was an Ant now. she had come on a mission to study them—but actually her superiors had sent her for this, to be enslaved, she didn’t know why—and the Ants had captured her and put her in a Hivecell and brought the Antmind egg.

It had merged with her—tethadrone understood now; the Ants were many races and one race, many races in body but all with one race in their minds, a race that stretched back millennia to when it first merged with and subsumed other life on its own planet.

Now one of the race was in her own mind, was part of her mind. she was tethadrone, a new creature. A slave of the Queen.

tethadrone remembered her conversion, her integration—the Antmind had no memory before Tetha, but it remembered Tetha, remembered conquering and merging with her. She had not resisted, not in the slightest.

And in tethadrone’s Tetha memories, she could remember that mind’s decision to submit. Her memories of Dr. Yoon and what she had said. Her worry for Thissa, who would fight hard and be erased. Her surprise at her own total acquiescence, and then her realization of the need for pain-ease that was the true root of it.

As a drone, Tetha would not miss Ellibree.

* * *

“I hadn’t... I hadn’t resisted,” Tetha said. “Because of what Dr. Yoon said. So the parasite, or symbiote or whatever it was, didn’t have to do any more than set up communication with my brain. There was nothing it had to fight.”

“And when they removed it, you were you again.”

Tetha shrugged. “Pretty much. There was lots of therapy, and memory work. Surgery. But I was a high-value commodity then. The only person ever turned back from an Ant.”

She stood up, and collected the dishes. “They shipped me to Jennai, set me up in an apartment and a false identity. Put me through cooking school for three years.”

“Sounds nice.”

“It would have been nicer without all the identity issues. You try keeping cover while at night you dream of blissful slavery in a hive, or wake up screaming because a pillow touched your head wrong. But yeah, other than that it was a pretty good life.”

Tetha put the dishes in the machine as Ellibree walked in from the other room. “Tetha...”

“Yes?”

“It is selfish that I am so glad they got you back?”

Tetha smiled. “Probably. But I love you anyway, and I am also glad they got me back.”

She closed the machine door; the hum of dishwashing began. “So. Let’s go for a ride—I have a pair of Tir-Tang jetbikes in the garage that have hardly seen any use, and it’s another gorgeous sunny afternoon here on New Tejas.”

Ellibree smiled.

* * *

Trees did not do well on New Tejas.

Something about the water table, and the soil. Rain was a rarity, and seasonal, and even on the mountain slopes the terraformer-created dirt was so deep as to drain away what water that did fall deep below the roots of any but the largest trees.

In the lowlands, where water was reachable, the air was too thick and gassy for multicellular plants at all.

So what groves there were had been planted and carefully tended, or grew alongside the rare streams that trickled from the high snowpack.

Tetha and Ellibree lay in one of these; a thin green wiggly line down the side of the mountain.

“They didn’t see what we were doing until it was too late,” Ellibree said, twirling a long golden grass stem in her fingers. “They thought we kept missing them, and of course even a particle beam can’t do much through the flare of those engines, so if we had been aiming for the ship it wouldn’t have done any damage.”

Tetha lay half in shade, half in sun, her bare brown legs warming and her head in Ellibree’s lap.

“They had no idea we were using the particle beams to bend their exhaust draft. The ship was Syndicate made, and they always cut corners. Just a few minutes with that fusion reactor venting hitting the exhaust collar and the damn thing melted. Once that happened, the exhaust flare bent, the collar kept melting, the exhaust flare got even more lopsided, until they had to kill engines or explode.”

“And they taught you that at the Academy?”

Ellibree laughed, and slid her grass stem into Tetha’s hair. “No. I read it in a comic book, of all things; well, something like it. And it gave me the idea.”

“Nice.”

“The Nakajima took a pounding, of course; while we were busy waving our beams at their ass, they were hitting us. But she held together. They build well in the Pawtaw shipyards.”

“That they do.”

Ellibree plucked another long blade of grass. “So what did you do after Jennai?”

Tetha sighed, and her look grew distant. “I can remember that. It was October. I was working in a restaurant in New Madras. It was raining outside.”

She reached up and plucked the blade of grass from Ellibree’s hand, and stuck it in her own mouth. It wiggled as she spoke. “I really liked working in a restaurant. Constant pressure, but also constant reward when you make something you know is good. Food that people will like. Anyway, it was raining and a woman came in and I knew. I just knew, and she talked to the maitre d’ and then came into the kitchen, and told me I was being sent on assignment.”

Tetha chewed on the end of the blade. “The Commonwealth. Coralis, actually. I was going to be a chef in the entourage of a Minister. Further action to be taken later.”

“This is the one who died in the crash?”

“The same.”

“So what did you do?”

Tetha grinned. “Made pastries, mostly. Prophet, but that man loved his pastries. Eclairs, creme puffs, strudel of all shapes and sizes. I still think it was his weight that brought the plane down.”

“You didn’t, you know, spy?”

Tetha sat up. “Not a lick. Stayed there for another two months after his death, then it was back to the Union.”

She took the blade of grass from her mouth and leaned towards Ellibree. Drew little wet circles on Ellibree’s cheeks.

“And then it was off to Harmony,” she said quietly.

* * *

Harmony had been an Ant world for twenty years.

Tetha had come alone. Her tiny ship slipped past the orbital defenses and the sporeships awaiting destinations, and down to the planet’s surface.

Either they hadn’t seen her, or they were not worried about a stranger landing on their world. Tetha figured it was the latter.

Unlike Kove, there was nowhere to land that was hidden, out of the way, secluded. The entire world was Ant; all lifeforms were part of the Hive. In the most remote mountain fastness, all the birds, beasts, and other things would note and report on her landing.

So she put down in a fallow field, some distance from the nearest hive. She’d consider herself fortunate if the once-human drones who worked the fields did not remove her ship before she returned.

Tetha was not particularly afraid of being captured.

It wasn’t her goal, this time. This landing was a more simple proof of concept.

There were organs in Tetha’s brain that the Ants had grown. They were still there. The Service scientists figured that they were an identification marker of sorts, and that Tetha would be recognized as being part of the hive and not molested, even on this most thoroughly assimilated world.

And if they were wrong, then Tetha would be made into a drone again.

The same scientists had tried their best to indoctrinate Tetha not to ‘go native’, not to give herself up. On a Commonwealth world it would have been called defecting; on an Ant world it was simple submission. There was understandable worry that Tetha would remember the bliss of obedience and simply turn herself in.

For some reason, the conditioning had not been as effective as it once was. Somehow the covers were off; Tetha could see the programming in her mind, see what behaviors the Service had put there. And, like a bound faerie learning its true name, knowing the programming broke its hold on Tetha’s mind.

It was freedom, of a sort.

Tetha didn’t let the Service know she had it.

She climbed from the ship and looked around. There were no once-human drones, although a creature that was partially a dog was observing her from the road which ran next to the field.

Tetha climbed from the ship, and walked towards it. It observed her as she drew near, and then observed her as she set off towards the towering mass of the hive.

The once-dog did nothing else. Nor did the once-men laboring in the next field she passed. They were operating a harvester, collecting the cotton which grew in dark green rows. The scene almost looked normal for a human world.

The structures she passed next did not.

Drones required no possessions. Almost all the human structures had been torn down; once-humans slept on the ground, or in pods, which grew in clusters on Ant plants grown for the purpose. They ate a nutrient paste excreted by a different sort of plant; drank special nutrient juice from a third.

All of these flora were present at the road juncture; they surrounded another, more important creature.

A radio brain.

Each hive had one Queen. On Harmony, there were four hundred and seventeen hives. Four hundred and seventeen Queens. Four hundred and seventeen beings with wills of their own.

Four hundred and eighteen, if you counted Tetha.

Each Queen ruled over an area hundreds of kilometers in diameter. For Her will to reach Her drones, it required amplification.

Hence, radio brains.

It was an animal, but immobile and non-sentient. It allowed communication of all drones with the Queen, and with each other, if such was the Queen’s will. Most of the time, drones knew their tasks—generally, to obey other drones. But if the Queen had specific goals, She had only to implant them in the minds of the appropriate drones; the radio brains made sure that their minds were as open to her from afar as they were in Her presence.

Tetha stared at it.

She almost expected it to pulse at her, to hear the commands of an alien Queen, fed into the Ant living in her skull and translated into orders for her to obey.

But that Ant was no longer there. If the radio brain pulsed for Tetha, it pulsed in vain.

None of the drones nearby, resting or feeding or making love, approached Tetha. None of them paid any attention to her at all.

It appeared that the Service scientists were right.

She should return to her ship now. Before it was found and removed and used for some other purpose. Before thought of Tetha got back to the Queen and was actually analyzed, and She sent someone specifically to find out who this interloper was, this Ant who did not hear Her mind.

She should.

But instead, Tetha decided to walk a bit further. She’d go back to the ship soon enough.

* * *

“So it’s still in your head?” Ellibree asked.

Ellibree didn’t recoil from her, didn’t appear to even think that she should.

Tetha stretched, keeping her head in Ellibree’s lap. The sun had moved; only her toes were warmed by it now.

“No. When I retired, they took it out. Heh—my scalp looks like a waffle iron from all the cutting they’ve done. No, I don’t have the Ant identification lobe any more. I’ve got a nice large plastic marble there instead. It does nothing at all.”

Ellibree ran her fingers through Tetha’s blond hair, feeling the long scars. “Oh Tetha,” she said. “I wish...”

“Yeah, me too.”

Ellibree’s probing touches turned into a more vigorous massage. “So the Ant mind control blocked the Service conditioning?”

Tetha closed her eyes and sighed happily. “More or less. It... it let me know what it was, and I could decide consciously whether to obey it or not.”

“Did they ever find out?”

“No.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. I... I wasn’t going to... Ellibree, they didn’t replace the lobe in my head with a plastic marble. They replaced it with a bomb.”

Ellibree stopped stroking.

“It’s okay,” Tetha said quickly. “I went to a doctor I knew, had it taken out. Had the marble put in instead. But they programmed me not to know. Not to even be able to suspect. Heh. If they hadn’t bothered, I might not have. As it was...”

“...it was like they told you themselves,” Ellibree finished.

“Yeah.”

“Prophet.”

“Yeah. Hey.”

“What?”

“Did I say you could stop rubbing?”

Ellibree laughed, and put her fingers back to work.

* * *

Instead of riding directly back to the ranch, they jetted up to the crest of the ridge; there was a low saddle between peaks, and the vast Stockton lowlands stretched away north and east as far as the eye could see.

“It’s a shame,” Ellibree said, after they had revved their jetbikes down and stepped away to enjoy the view. “That they never finished terraforming this.”

“Someday,” Tetha replied. “I hear that the Syndicate is experimenting with Old Empire terraforming.”

“That’s ironic.”

“Howso?”

“Oh, that the Syndicate of all entities would be the one to try and revive technology that requires hundreds of years to work.”

Tetha shrugged. “They can be long-sighted.”

“They don’t fight like it.”

Tetha laughed. “Oh, really. That’s right, you were part of that action around Luk-Soon. And who won that?”

“We did.”

“Right. But who owns Luk-Soon now?”

“...” Ellibree put up a hand to shade her eyes. “Your point.”

Tetha turned around, looking back southwest towards the plateau and Abilene City. This time of day, nothing was visible on the plateau but the starched yellow of the grassy fields.

“The Syndicate are bastards,” Tetha said, “absolutely. But, you know, I don’t think they’d ever sacrifice fully terraformed human worlds to the Ants just to be able to seize other worlds.”

“Sure they would. They just haven’t had the opportunity.”

“That’s probably true.” Tetha turned, squinting. “Elli, why aren’t we at war with them? Lord knows they’ve provoked us enough.”

Ellibree shrugged. “We’re busy. And we don’t know if we can beat them. Say what you will about the Union, but we only pick fights we can win.”

“True enough.”

“Did you ever work on Syndicate worlds?” Ellibree asked.

“A few times.” Tetha walked back to the jetbikes, and leaned on the sleek red one she was riding. “Not for black ops, mostly to trade contraband and such.”

“Ah.”

“You know,” Tetha said thoughtfully, “Syndicate slaves are a lot like Ant drones.”

Ellibree raised an eyebrow.

“We got a shipment of them once; sort of a middle currency between the radioactives we sold and the information we wanted. I spent four days with them in possession, standing around docilely in the cargo hold. I had thought- I had thought that they would be conditioned, like what the Service did to me, but it was different. Very different. They had been willwiped. There wasn’t a desire in their heads beyond providing total obedience. If I had dropped them off on Harmony to be assimilated, I doubt they would have known the difference.”

“Great.”

Tetha shrugged. “At least in the Syndicate they’re not the whole population. They do it to criminals, debtors... the Ants do it to everyone.”

“And we just do it to our spies.”

Tetha laughed ruefully. “Yeah.”

They remounted the jetbikes and flew back down to the ranch.

* * *

Tetha had never been into a hive.

Even when she had been a drone, she had worked entirely outside of the giant sporeship, busily being converted into a hive. Only Thissa had gone into the hive, which is why the extraction team had not been able to steal her back to Union space.

thissadrone was on Kove still.

Tetha was back on Harmony. This time with a mission.

To observe a Queen.

She was on foot. Ants had rapid transport, of course; on Harmony the trains still ran and a much smaller but still significant number of hovertrucks still moved goods around. But those were all for cargo. Drones being for the most part interchangeable, there was very little in terms of moving them around; some horse-like beasts that could be ridden, a few aircars kept around for the occasional purpose.

Without a mental link to the Hive, Tetha had no way of acquiring any of these; so, she walked.

The city she passed through was abandoned, stripped; concrete shells with food pods growing on them, workshops where the drones slept on the floors. She passed through like a ghost, drawing no attention.

The hive loomed larger before her.

It was colossal, mountainous. Tendrils as thick as passenger trains ran from it like mooring lines. Drones milled around the bases of them.

The tendrils were the way in.

Tetha mingled with the drones; in other parts of the world, drones might wear light shifts or heavy parkas. Here they were nude, sweating. Their bodies seemed the more alien for how human they were; bulges at the base of the spine or on the neck, slick strange eyes and waxy, sweating skin.

Tetha was nude as well, save for the waistpack she wore. It contained her gun, some food bars. The scientists had warned her against eating the excreted food on Harmony, lest her alien lobes began to grow again.

Watching the naked once-humans around her, that idea seemed no more unpleasant than it had before.

The xenolife among them seemed normal by comparison; at least Tetha did not know what it was supposed to look like. Tall four-legged beasts and thick, waist-high spidery things moved through the once-humans with similar thoughtless purpose.

The end of the tendril was wet and green and open. Drones emerged from it; others walked up inside.

Tetha followed them.

* * *

Ellibree sipped her scotch.

“How many times did they send you back, Tetha?”

Tetha was at the sink, peeling carrots. “Fifty. Maybe more. Mostly at the end, when they... I’ll get to that.”

She flipped peel from her knife and sliced some more. “That was basically my career. A mission or two to an Ant world, then off to some Commonwealth world for an extended undercover stay. Sometimes to kill someone, mostly to spy. And to reacquaint myself with humanity, I think.”

“Odd that they would send you there, rather than bring you back to the Union.”

Tetha’s smile was small and strange. “I think they were afraid of me,” she said. “If I did something unexpected, they didn’t want it happening on a Union planet. And they knew I wouldn’t defect.”

Ellibree looked out the window. “Yeah.”

“So. Back on Harmony. They wanted me to see a Queen...”

* * *

It was not hard to find Her.

A hive had only one radio brain, a massive pulsing core at the center of the structure, in touch with all minds at once. It was the heart of the Hive, the collective mind of which the Queen was the will and the physical hive merely the residence.

Tetha could not hear it. Surrounded by busy drones, passing by on programmed errands, she almost felt sad.

The Queen was at the center of the hive. Tetha had an excellent sense of direction; although the interior spaces were confusing, with major hallways connecting to minor hallways connecting to chambers, organically and without a grand plan, somehow she could always sense which direction was Inward.

She passed rooms full of infants, already assimilated, quietly feeding and sleeping and being programmed as their brains grew. Almost all of the female once-humans on the planet were pregnant; the sporeships in orbit required legions of drones fed to them before they could conquer new worlds.

There were similar chambers for the xenolife; and vast rooms of slugs and lesser Ants, unintelligent but still able to be moved by Her will.

Tetha knew she was drawing close when she could feel Her.

The Queen. She was there, a presence in Tetha’s mind. Not a replacement for Tetha’s will, as her own Queen had once been, but a presence, a sense of a mind other than Tetha’s own.

She kept moving Inward.

A last chamber of eggs, a chamber of food, and then she was there: the Heart. The great space at the core of the hive, vast and open, with a radiant galaxy of glossy strings connecting to the Queen’s chamber, a glistening green sphere suspended in the center.

The Ants here moved more slowly, stunned by their nearness to Her. Tetha found herself mirroring their pace, stopping to gaze languidly at the green bubble above, where She dwelt.

She found a good vine, thick and viscous, and began to climb.

The tendrils to the Queen’s chamber were not meant for once-humans; the going was slow. Still, none of the Ants came for her, or questioned what she was doing. The things that grew in Tetha’s head told them that she was Ant, that she belonged.

Her climb lasted almost half an hour.

The bubble was large, five stories in diameter. Tetha clambered along its sticky surface, seeking entrance. At this distance the Queen’s will was a tangible thing, a solid presence in Tetha’s head, and she knew that even were she not half Ant she would feel it.

She found an orifice, and clambered in.

tethadrone, the Will whispered.

tetha stopped, stiffened. Yes... her mind replied.

The Queen examined her mind. No. tetha-not-drone. you are half dead, tetha. half of you are dead.

tetha felt terribly sad.

tetha become tethadrone now. climb down. [Image] awaits tetha. tetha obey [Image], become tethadrone again.

Yes!

tetha turned, enthusiastically. she began to climb down, down the thread that She had shown her, to meet the drone who now awaited her and would place her into the cell where she belonged, where she would be assimilated and join this new hive, serve her Queen.

The drone was waiting for her at the base of the thread. he led her away. It was good to obey, to be like the rest of the drones, serving the Hive, serving the Queen. To have a purpose and nothing more.

The assimilation chamber was small, a remnant. Sporeships were made up mostly of assimilation chambers, huge machines for turning free animals into drones. But nothing had been born free on Harmony in a generation.

The Ants still produced eggs, however.

tetha climbed into the cell; the smell was familiar and comforting. The drone chose an egg and placed it atop her head, and that too was familiar and comforting. It began to seal the cell above her.

To her surprise, tetha noticed her hand moving. It had taken out her gun.

It reached up above her, and shot the drone.

Shocked, tetha felt as though she were watching as her body hauled itself out of the cell, pocketed the egg, and staggered out of the chamber.

A few minutes and several hallways away, she was shocked again when she pulled a hypodermic needle from her pack, and injected herself.

Then she fell asleep.

* * *

“It was the conditioning,” Tetha said. “The Service had planned for that. If I got captured, they had built in a trance-Tetha who would act autonomously on pre-programmed lines to get me out of there.”

She took a spoonful of ice cream. “Of course, I knew they’d done that, and I let them. Let myself obey the compulsion to forget, to not know about auto-Tetha. After all, if I had known about it then the Queen would have too.”

Ellibree licked her spoon, and put it down in her bowl. She rose from the well-stuffed chair she’d been in.

“When I woke up, I was myself again,” Tetha said, watching Ellibree approach. “At least, by a slim majority. A lot of me wanted to go back to the Queen, but enough of me wanted to get the Hell out of there that—”

Ellibree’s finger pushed down on her lips. Tetha looked up at her, questioningly.

“Enough,” Ellibree said. “Tetha, I’m... I am in awe of you, that you not only survived all this, but that you held on to who you are. That is, I think, your greatest triumph. And if I did not already love you madly, I might think about beginning.”

She kept the finger on Tetha’s lips, slowly lowered herself to Tetha’s lap. Eyes staying fixed on Ellibree, Tetha put her bowl aside.

“But I’ve heard enough for tonight. I want to hear more, want to hear you, want to hear about you. But not tonight. Not now. Now I want to feel you, to know how real you are with my hands, and my lips, and my skin. To reassure myself that you are here and I am not dreaming.”

She took her finger away, and Tetha obediently said nothing.

There were no more words that night; only touch, and taste, and scent.

* * *

Ellibree yawned, and rolled in the bed, gathering the comforter to her. She squeezed it between her legs, which led to thoughts of Tetha.

As she had every day since Ellibree had come, Tetha had risen early, despite their staying up well past midnight. Idly, Ellibree wondered if the changes the Ants had made to Tetha’s brain caused her to need less sleep.

It was already mid-morning; the sun was bright and heavy, and the air still and thickly warm. Ellibree put on a robe and went to find Tetha. She looked around the back, in the orchard, but there was no sign of Tetha. Nor in the garage, nor in the front, nor anywhere in the house.

Had she gone somewhere? All the vehicles seemed to be accounted for, but Ellibree knew her mental inventory was far from comprehensive.

“Tetha?” she called, standing again on the rear porch. “Where are you?”

“I’m up here,” came the familiar voice. Ellibree stepped out into the sun, and squinted.

A hand waved, up on the flat roof. “Up here,” Tetha said. The hand pointed. “The ladder’s thataway.”

It was an orchard ladder, wooden and curved from a wide base to a narrow top, which rested against the roof. Ellibree climbed it.

The surface of the roof was solar sheeting; a thick protective layer over photovoltaic panels. Ellibree could already feel the heat rising from the dark surface.

She completely forgot about the roof, though, when she saw Tetha.

Tetha was lying out, on a long recliner, completely naked. Her nut-brown skin glistened with tanning oil; her blonde hair hung over the recliner’s edge.

Ellibree stared.

Black sunglasses turned her way. “See anything you like?” Tetha asked.

“Wow,” Ellibree replied. “I... I made love to you a few hours ago. I know what you look like nude. But... wow. Tetha, you are glorious in your element. I want to suck you all over.”

“Well, don’t restrain yourself on my account,” Tetha said.

Ellibree approached and knelt, reaching slowly and then touching, running her fingertips over Tetha’s breast and down her side. Tetha shivered.

Ellibree’s fingers trailed up her belly and onto her other breast, which she squeezed gently as she leaned over for a lingering kiss. Then she leaned back on her haunches.

“I can see why you chose to retire here,” she said. “It’s a great world to get a tan.”

“You got me,” Tetha replied. “All those years, next to you what I missed the most was the sun.”

“Which one?” Ellibree asked.

“Joker. Any of them. Sunlight. Lying out and absorbing it.”

“Well, I can’t really associate, but I do enjoy the result.” Ellibree let her eyes slide along Tetha’s nude body.

“You can touch more if you like.”

“I would like, but right now I’d just like to talk.”

“Mmm.”

“You know, one of my officers in the Navy used to rate sunlight.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, they’re not all yellow, you know. Some worlds are quite habitable with red or even white, although those are pretty uncommon. And the yellow ones vary a lot in hue and distance, etc. One of my officers kept a log of every world he’d been to, and how good the sunlight was for lying out.”

“Sounds like my sort of woman.”

“Yes, except he’s a man.”

“Hmm. I always knew they weren’t all bad.”

“He has a database of hundreds of worlds—some of them not even Union—on his personal computer. What the sunlight is like in different locations, comparisons with other worlds...”

“That sounds fun. Wish I could have done that.”

“What, don’t Ants tan?”

“Nope. And I spent most of my time in hives, anyway.”

“They risked getting you close to a Queen again?”

“They had to. That was the only way they were going to acquire what had become for them the Holy Grail.”

“Which is?”

“A Queen egg.”

* * *

Outside the world was tropical, at least this part of it, but inside the hive the only thing different from any other Ant hive was the predominantly golden skin and slanted eyes of the once-human drones.

They were all astir, all busy; in the corridors of the hive Tetha found herself pushing past them, rubbing against waxy, converted flesh. The hive was crowded, in a way she had not seen before.

The Ants were preparing to transfer a new Queen.

Sporeships were built, and grown, in orbit. They were too huge not to be. But the heart of the ship, the chamber the Queen inhabited and never left, was grown in a hive, and launched from it. A new Queen would hatch from Her cell and be borne to the top of the hive, to the fleshy sphere where she would live the rest of her life.

Tetha wondered idly how long that was.

She’d just undergone her first rejuvenation treatment; three and a half months in a very human and mechanical pod, tricking her body into thinking it was twenty rather than thirty-five. She’d come out younger, tighter, and in sore need of some exercise and a haircut.

Humans lived for well over a hundred years now, before irreperable nerve and neural damage led the Union to discontinue an individual’s rejuvenation treatments. In the Syndicate, the oldest man alive was almost four hundred, though confined to an ambulatory suit.

Tetha wondered how long Ants lived. Would the once-human drones who pressed in on her be alive in twenty years? Fifty?

They would not, of course, care.

She had made her way to the heart of the hive. It was full, drones of all sorts standing shoulder-to-mandible, staring blankly.

Tetha considered the once-humans standing quietly near her. Who had they been? Did they even remember their names? As a drone... as a drone, tetha had remembered her own name. Did the blank-eyed woman whose breasts were pressing into Tetha’s back? Or was she just ‘drone’, and obeyed without thinking?

Then it happened. Tetha did not know if she felt the touch of Queenmind or if she simply turned because everyone else did, but suddenly they were all looking at a particular entrance, high above the heart’s floor.

The new Queen emerged. Tetha hoped that her mind was hidden amongst the thousands of other minds here; she could feel the new Queen, feel her power. If it turned to her, Tetha knew she would obey.

The Queen was bipedal, slightly saurian. A large, narrow head sat upon a long sinuous neck, scanning the vast herd of drones.

Then She began to climb, scaling the wall of the hive’s heart, moving upwards in serpentine motion, arms and legs moving together on a side. The drones watched Her rise.

Then She was gone, exiting through a passage in the very top of the heart. On Her way to the chamber atop the hive, that had been grown specifically for Her.

The drones began to disperse.

Tetha made her way up the wall to the entrance the new Queen had come from. She climbed in, and walked down a short passage into a small room.

It contained only a few assimilation cells. The seal of one had only just been broken. There was an empty egg case inside.

Tetha took it.

* * *

“So the Queens are symbiotes too,” Ellibree said.

They were in the orchard; Tetha was supervising a crew of six robots as they weeded the ground between the trees. Two had large rotating sets of tines, tilling the earth where the trees’ roots were deep; the other four collected weeds near the base of the trees using long clawed limbs.

“Yeah,” Tetha said. “We call them all Ants, or Slavers, but it’s really the symbiotes that are the Ants. All the other creatures are... well, are other races, species that the Ants have taken over and assimilated.”

Ellibree took hold of a limb, and let herself dangle from it. “So, uh. Are the Ants themselves intelligent? I mean, you had one in your head. Was it smart?”

“I don’t think so. They get their intelligence from binding with another creature; the Ant provides the will and the motivation, and the telepathy. The host provides everything else.”

“The queens must be pretty smart, to run it all.”

Tetha stopped to examine a robot which had paused. It was considering a small weed, which turned out to be a seedling pear tree.

“Pull it and continue,” Tetha told the robot, which yanked the seedling, sucking it up its arm into the central mulch bin, and moved on. She turned to look at Ellibree.

“Actually, they’re not,” she said. “They’re sentient, but they’re not really that smart.”

Tetha’s eyes seemed to look far away. “It was a Commonwealth scientist who told me that. I never would have seen it myself.”

* * *

“So.”

“So.”

Tetha looked across the small room at the man seated on the floor opposite her. He’d had a few rejuv treatments, so his age was hard to guess, but his eyes placed him in his seventies.

She had the gun, of course. But the door was locked, and the first ones through it might be Commonwealth security. Better not to behave badly.

“You were sent to kill me?” he asked.

“No,” she half-lied. “To abduct you.”

“Ah. You are Union?”

She shrugged. “I can’t say.”

“Ah, the conditioning,” he said. As smart as he looked. “Then you were not sent to kill me, for if you were, you would be firing that.”

“Pretty much.”

“What about Doctors Tung and Greene?”

“I’m not sure,” she replied, “but I think we got them. Kidnapped.”

“I see.”

She waited. The longer she sat here, the smaller the chance her team would come through that door first.

“May I ask why?” he ventured.

“You may,” she deadpanned.

He blinked. “Then, why?”

She shrugged. “Because we want you. This is the Commonwealth’s top Ant research laboratory, and we have an interest in the Ants. So we came to get you.”

“But no, surely your study of the Jacobsen’s Slavers is more advanced then ours. They do not attack your worlds,” he said ruefully.

“I just obey orders,” Tetha replied. “I’m the delivery girl, and you’re the pizza.”

He actually laughed. “I am not a very good pizza then. Perhaps with anchovies, or sneeps. You see, I would not survive the trip to Union space. I am on medication, which is in my quarters. And I do not think you can get me to Union space within a week.”

“Well. That stinks.”

“Indeed.”

“You wouldn’t be lying, now would you?”

He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Perhaps. But then, you will find out the hard way when I convulse and die in a few days.”

“I guess we will.”

“Damn,” he said quietly.

“Don’t worry about it, doc. Given elapsed time, I think it will be your boys coming through that door to get us.”

“You will excuse me if I hope for that quite fervently.”

“Hope away.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. Tetha stretched.

“You are not angry that I locked the door?” he asked.

“It ticks me off a little, yes, but not so that I’m going to shoot you.”

“They will torture you, you know. I will not be able to stop them.”

“You know, doc, for someone with a gun pointed at you, you have a stupid tendency to tell uncomfortable truths.”

He laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Perhaps I am not so smart.”

Tetha looked at her wrist, where the suitclock was. There was no way if her team was still on the other side of that door.

“Shall we trade secrets?” he asked.

“Do you have a condition or something?” Tetha shot back. “Stupid Tourette’s?”

He laughed again. “I am sorry. I bore easily, and you are the prettiest woman I have seen in almost a year.”

She rolled her eyes. “Right. Secrets. You go first.”

“We are smarter than the Ants.”

Tetha gave him a level look. “For being dumber than you, they sure are kicking your ass.”

He waved his hand. “No, no. We are outnumbered, and they have a great deal of intelligence at their command. What I mean is, we humans are smarter than their queens. We have captured several of them, and they are all the same. They are not so smart as we.”

“Then how are they beating you?”

“Ah,” he said, “I have there a theory. You see, they take us as slaves, no? And some of the human slaves are as smart as before. They take others as slaves too. So there are many smart slaves, you see?”

“Right...”

“But no smart queens!” He slapped the floor suddenly, and Tetha almost shot him. “And it is because of this,” he went on obliviously. “Because the queens are from the first lifeform that the Slaver lifeforms merged with. And together they found that they could use the Slaver lifeforms to assimilate other creatures; but the Slaver lifeforms were never the queens. The queens are the original species, and they only make new queens from themselves, never from the slave races, even though the slave races are smarter than they are!”

Tetha stared at him. She had been into a dozen hives, seen Queens with her own eyes. Obeyed not one but two. Seen the special eggs put into the cells with the special host.

And that was why the Union would never lose to them. At the highest level, the Ants really weren’t all that smart. The slaves, the drones who knew spaceflight and atomic power and engineering and tactics—they could obey to a very high level. Could achieve the goals the Queens set for them.

But those goals would never be anything but simple.

“Well?” he demanded. “Well?”

“You’re right,” Tetha confessed. “You are absolutely right.”

He gave her a strange look, then smiled. “And now, your turn.”

“Hm?”

“A secret. You must tell me a secret.”

Tetha gave him a look. Then she shrugged.

“I’ve been an Ant,” she said. “They assimilated me.”

It was his turn to look mystified. “No,” he said. “This is not true.”

“It is true,” Tetha said. “I’ve been an Ant. They put me in a cell and put an egg on me and turned me into a drone.”

“But how?”

“The Union came and fetched me. Cut it out of my brain.”

“We have done this. It means nothing.”

Tetha nodded. “Most of the time, yes. But I was different. I... I knew how the assimilation worked. Knew that, if I resisted at all, the Ant would hurt my brain. So I didn’t resist. I let it have whatever it wanted, did whatever it told me, and so it left my brain mostly alone.”

“And then, they cut it out of you.”

“Yep.”

“But this is fascinating.”

There was a sharp ‘crump’ and the wall above Tetha’s head exploded, showering her with shards and white powder.

“Tetha?”

Markus. They had found a way to get in.

“Here,” she said, standing up.

“You have Dr. Mahmet?”

She looked across the room at the doctor. He wore a frown of disappointment and resignation.

“I do,” she said. “But he can’t travel. He has medication he has to take daily and it’s not on him.”

“Shit.” Markus didn’t even consider her veracity. “Well, we have to go now. Kill him and climb through.”

Tetha raised the gun, and gave the scientist a meaningful look.

“Die,” she said, and shot him through a lung.

He slumped to the floor, bleeding profusely, and did not move.

Tetha looked at Markus, who nodded at her. She crawled through the hole.

* * *

“You didn’t kill him?”

Tetha shrugged. “I don’t think so. Depends on when the guards got there. It should have taken him quite a while to bleed out.”

They had reached the end of the orchard. Tetha instructed the robots to return to the barn; she and Ellibree began the walk back up-slope to the house.

“Were you there to kill him?”

Tetha’s smile was wry. “Yeah. Capture, or if not possible, kill. Remember, we’re using the Ants to break the Commonwealth. Don’t want the Commonwealth figuring out how to fight back.”

“So you disobeyed a direct order.”

“Yup.”

Ellibree kicked a clod of dirt. “I’ve done that.”

Tetha stopped, surprised. “You have?”

Ellibree nodded. “Yeah. Ten years ago, during the battle for Koh-I-Noor. I’d bent orders before, or delayed them, twisted them... but this was the first time I went against an order one hundred eighty percent.”

“Do tell.”

“I was in charge of the Argus, a single-gun ship. Basically a weapon platform for a big mass driver. We were defending an orbital platform under construction, as part of a small fleet. Seven ships under Rear Admiral Trevlinka.”

They stopped under a cherry tree. “Well, the Exarchate sent a task force to destroy the platform. We fought them off, and moved the platform. Another task force came; same thing. The third time they found us I realized what was happening.”

Ellibree wiped sweat from her forehead. “They were using the platform’s communications array to find us. I told Trevlinka we should shut it down. He flatly refused. He was using it to communicate with the Admiral and with the fleet. I told him we could go ship-to-ship. He still said no, and warned me not to bring it up again.”

“Well, we were down three ships already. Good people, too. Pa-Yun Tung I had known for years, fought with at Halland. And of course the Exarchate finds us again, and we lose another ship beating them off. Lucky for us they were turning tail as soon as they started taking damage. They didn’t want to lose any ships.”

The resumed their walk up the slope. “We didn’t have that option, and the Minerva got cut open to space. Leaving us with just three ships. They were going to hit and run us to death.”

“All we had to do was to not get found for five days, while the damn robots got the damn platform on line. I told Trevlinka to shut off the communications array. He told me to leave the array alone and if I mentioned it again I’d be relieved.”

“So I turned the Argus around and blew that damn array to Hell.”

Tetha laughed. “And you’re not still in the stockade?”

Ellibree snorted. “Well, two things happened. Trevlinka got his idiot self killed later in the campaign, and the Admiralty decided that I’d made the right choice. So it was three more years of office duty and yet another official reprimand.”

“From what I read you’ve been collecting those.”

They had reached the house. Ellibree stepped into the shade of the rear porch gratefully. “You don’t know the half. If you were to weigh my reprimands against my merit citations, you’d find that I’m a lot more disobedient than I am brilliant.”

“I’d call those two things the same,” Tetha replied.

They went into the house for drinks.

* * *

It had been a long, lazy afternoon. A man from the settlement came by to discuss purchasing seed with Tetha; they took another jetbike ride; Tetha went out to oversee the robots as they fertilized some of the row crops; and they talked.

Ellibree spoke of battles, campaigns, wins and losses. The Byzantine politics of the Navy. Tetha talked about the Ants, the Commonwealth, of murders and betrayals.

Dinner was chicken, freshly killed and robot plucked; home baked bread, and salad. It was excellent.

Tetha collected the dishes; Ellibree sat at the bar as she fed them to the dishwasher.

“They didn’t want me to retire,” Tetha said. “They tried threats, they tried bribes. But I had set up dead-drops in a dozen worlds; if they didn’t let me quit, the entire details and history of the Union’s use of the Ants against the Commonwealth would become general knowledge in human space. And as long as they were still planning to use the Ants, they couldn’t allow that.”

“Besides, the conditioning would keep me in check. I submitted to weeks of it, pre-retirement conditioning. First thing they tried was to program me to stay, but somehow that never took. Lucky for me that didn’t seem to phase them. And everything else they planted in my head I obediently adhered to. And they didn’t want to break me; they wanted to keep me as a resource, even if shelved.

“So I got my retirement. Three and a half years ago. I moved here, set up the farm. Settled down. And finally, when I could face you, I called.”

They were facing each other across the counter. Ellibree nodded.

“So what now?” she asked.

“Now I live here. We both know you can’t quit, but you can visit from time to time. And we have these weeks together.”

“Yes. Yes, those we have.”

Tetha looked aside suddenly. “I need to go to the restroom. Why don’t you head down to the den. We can watch the sun set.”

Ellibree watched her leave, then rose and walked to the stairs. The den with its windows was already lit in orange; she walked down the steps slowly, and drifted over to a window. She watched the shadows of the plateau sweep across the plains towards her.

Tetha walked into the room with two tumblers; ice clinked within scotch. “Elli, I think it’s time I show you my museum.”

“Your museum?”

Tetha nodded. “Mementos.”

Ellibree took the glass from Tetha and sipped at it. “Okay, sure. Where?”

Tetha turned around, but did not ascend the stairs back into the house. Instead, she squeezed her thumb between her ring and pointer fingers.

With a soft whir, the stairs began to move. They disconnected at the top, leaving a growing gap, and began to swing downward. Ellibree watched in surprise as they rotated down through the horizontal until they came to a stop, once again at a forty five degree angle. Only this time, they were descending.

To a steel door.

Tetha, glass in hand, walked down to the door. She pressed her palm against the sensor panel set in the middle.

The door clicked, and with a huff of air, swung open. It was almost a foot thick.

Tetha turned and looked at Ellibree. “Come on,” she said.

Ellibree took another swig of scotch and followed her friend.

It wasn’t a room behind the door; it was a tunnel. The shaft ran wide and straight back into the mountain; light panels clung to the ceiling.

“I had the house built on an outcropping,” Tetha explained as she led the way. “The soil on New Tejas is deep, but here we are in solid rock.”

“Who did the boring?”

“Robots.”

There was a second door, which required a second handprint. It swung open, revealing a large, round room.

The room was full of Ants.

Ellibree stepped into the room cautiously; they were clearly dead, mounted, but they were all alien and very dangerous looking.

“All the Ant xenos I’ve been telling you about?” Tetha said, slowly turning. “Here they are. That,” she pointed at a monstrous hulking figure, with plated armor and six black marbles for eyes, “is one of their shock troops. Those are the spidery things, this is one of the octopoid ones.”

Ellibree walked around the room, fascinated. She had encountered xenolife many times, but there was something illicit and thrilling to be amongst these, so dangerous while alive.

“You can see why I keep this hidden. Importing xenolife is strictly forbidden, even dead, and importing Ant xenos...”

“Yeah.”

“That big one was a pain. Had to bring him in in parts.”

“Tetha, I...” Ellibree started to say, but faltered.

“Come here,” Tetha said, and Ellibree went to her. She was standing at a glass-fronted cabinet.

“Those are the slugs,” she said, pointing at hat-sized greenish masses under glass lids. “And those are some of the flying critters.”

“Tetha,” Ellibree wondered, “How did you get these? I mean, how did you get them here?”

“Syndicate contacts. Lots of people in the Service have a little something on the side. The Service looks the other way, if you have enough clout, and the Syndicate... well, they will do anything for a price. Most agents usually use them to smuggle stolen wealth or art. I just... well, this was my life.”

Ellibree was staring into the case. “Tetha, are those... eggs?”

Tetha slid the front of the case open, and reached for one of the pearlescent ovoids. “Yeah,” she said. “They’re dead, though.” She held it out towards Ellibree.

Ellibree took it. It was cool in her fingers. Smooth, though not like a bird’s egg. More like polished stone.

Tetha was looking at her oddly.

“What?”

“There is something else I want to show you,” Tetha replied. She stepped back, one hand holding onto the side of the case. With a soft grunt, Tetha pulled the case towards herself. It slid.

On rollers.

There was a strange, waxy smell, and then a dimly lit opening. Ellibree, egg in her hand, stared into the small room beyond.

Something moved.

She stepped back, spilling some of her scotch. There was a small animal on the floor of the room, looking at her. It was xeno, with five legs and an alien symmetry. Where the legs met were five eyes; three of them looked at her, the other two back into the room.

The wall behind it looked like a giant honeycomb.

“It’s a builder,” Tetha said. “One of the types of Ant that constructs the hive. This kind builds cells.”

“Tetha, you shouldn’t...”

“Wait.” Tetha stepped past Ellibree, into the small room. The builder’s eyes watched as Tetha stepped around it, but it did not move.

“It’s harmless,” Tetha said from inside the dim chamber. “It has built this miniature hive because that’s what it’s programmed to do, but there is no intelligence guiding it.”

Tetha picked something up and turned around, came back. She held the black ovoid in her hands like an offering.

“This is a Queen egg.”

* * *

They didn’t guard them.

That was the strangest thing. Tetha stood in the chamber with the eggmother, and they were alone; around her lay thousands of eggs, thousands of Ant symbiotes waiting to be placed on a living being to hatch, to merge with that being and make it Ant.

Tetha had always gone to the wrong place, gone to the guarded place, the chambers where the Queens emerged from. But that was just an assimilation chamber.

The eggs came from here.

And they weren’t even guarded.

Tetha stepped carefully among them. The eggmother watched her without apparent concern, although what concern would have looked like in its five eyes Tetha did not know.

The eggs were piled haphazardly. Gingerly, Tetha searched through the piles.

There.

Three of them. Three black eggs. Queen eggs.

Lying together on the floor, with other eggs atop them. Aside from their color, and their greater size, nothing set them apart at all.

Dr. Mahmet had been right.

The eggmother watched as Tetha scooped them up, put them into her bag, and carefully left the room.

* * *

Tetha kicked the ashes.

It was time to leave; her rendezvous behind the third moon was in twenty-six hours. She had checked the little single-man stealth ship and it was ready for takeoff.

Tetha knelt down and picked up the eggs. They looked just the same as when she had taken them from the egg chamber, but they were dead inside. Cooked by the time spent next to the little fire; slowly, so the exact reason for their death would be hard to determine. Just enough heat to kill, not enough to cook.

The Union would not be getting any Queens.

Tetha put both eggs into the special protective canisters the Service scientists had provided and sealed them. The seals clicked shut; they would be unopenable until the canisters reached Kenneb.

She got off-world smoothly, staying away from the sporeships assembling in orbit. Ants could not read her mind in space, and if they spotted her tiny craft they’d incinerate it.

Shuo Nu had four moons, the fourth a rock hardly worthy of the name.

Five hours before rendezvous, Tetha fired a torpedo at it.

The torpedo arced away into space, disappearing almost immediately. It had a tiny tracking beacon, which the Syndicate smuggling ship hiding on the moon should easily detect.

In place of a payload, the torpedo had a large black egg.

* * *

Tetha held it in her hands.

“Can you feel Her, Elli? She’s asleep, but you can feel Her in your mind if you listen...”

Ellibree shook her head—she could indeed feel something, a presence in her head as though someone else were in a dark room with her.

“Tetha—”

“I’m going to destroy the Union,” Tetha said suddenly. “Destroy them from within. Didn’t you ever wonder why the Ants haven’t infiltrated us? Have never infiltrated anyone at all? Never sent in assimilated spies, never secretly converted humans behind the lines?”

Ellibree, eyes wide, had no words to respond.

Tetha stared at her and her eyes were searing coals. “Because they’re not that smart, Elli. Because they don’t think that way. But we do. We’re so much smarter than them, Elli. A human Queen, with all the power of the human mind and all the tools of Ant biology; she’ll be unstoppable. She’ll destroy this monstrous thing, this Union. And she’ll bring bliss to people who are already slaves.”

Ellibree felt weak in the knees. “No,” she whispered. “please don’t.”

“I have to do it, Elli. I want to do it. Haven’t you been listening? Don’t you see what they did to me? What they did to us? To all of us? No, Elli, the Union deserves destruction, and I shall see to it that it’s destroyed.”

Ellibree’s hand trembled, and the scotch glass shattered on the floor. “Get rid of it, Tetha. Please. You don’t want to become that... thing.”

“Become...?” Tetha laughed, a short bark, but tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Oh Elli. No. This is not for me.

“It’s for you. You will become my Queen.”

She couldn’t stand any longer; the drug buckled her knees. Ellibree slid down the side of the open door. “Oh no,” she whispered.

“Don’t you see, Elli? You’re so much better than I am. You’re brilliant. You’re the smartest person I have ever known. As a Queen you will be unstoppable.”

Ellibree, slumped against the wall, just stared at her.

“And... and I love you, Elli. I always have, and I always will. I don’t want... if I have to be a slave, if I’m going to be a drone, I want to be your drone, Elli. Only yours.”

Ellibree’s head slumped forward. She couldn’t move at all.

Tetha, crying, put the egg down. She picked up Ellibree under the arms, and dragged her to the central cell in the comb. Feet first, she slid Ellibree in.

The builder scuttled forward, and began to seal the cell. Ellibree moaned.

Tetha picked up the Queen egg. She held it in her hands, staring at its black, glossy surface. It was hard to see through her tears.

The builder worked fast; in a moment, the cell was almost sealed. It was time.

Tetha reached in and put the egg on Ellibree’s head. Ellibree’s eyes were dilating; the scent of the cell was already taking effect. By the time the drug wore off she would be fully sedated.

“Tetha...” Ellibree whispered. Tetha froze.

Ellibree’s eyes rolled up to look at her.

“Please don’t leave me...”

Tetha couldn’t see. She let go of the egg, and sat down on the floor.

“I won’t,” she said, sobbing. “Not ever.”

* * *

Tetha woke with a start. She looked around the room; the builder was down by her feet, making the soft crooning noise it sometimes did.

She had left the room a few times in the last week; mostly to get water or food. To speak with scheduled visitors, of whom there were a few, all on farm business Other than that, she had been down here. Slept and ate and waited, down here.

Tetha sat up, and looked at the builder again. It was not looking at her, it was looking at-

She turned around.

A hand, a beautiful woman’s hand, had pierced the waxy top of the cell. Another slid out next to it; together, they began to break off the cell cap.

Tetha couldn’t move.

The hands cleared away the wax, and took hold of the walls. The woman pulled herself out of the cell. Put a bare foot on the stone floor. Stood, head bowed.

Looked up.

“Elli?” Tetha whispered.

Ellibree smiled.

She didn’t look like a Queen, or a drone, or... she looked precisely the same as she had when Tetha had slid her into the cell. Human. Beautiful.

I don’t want to stand out, silly.

Tetha’s eyes widened.

Of course it worked. Why would we be compatible with humans only to make drones?

“Elli...”

Your mind, Tetha.

Elli?

Yes.

I... I’m so sorry. I couldn’t—

Hush.

Ellibree walked forward, and reached down. She lifted Tetha, finger beneath her chin, until Tetha stood before her and looked into her eyes.

They were different now. They looked the same, the same sapphire blue, but the intelligence behind them was... Tetha remembered Harmony, and how easily the Queen made her into tethadrone; enslaved her with just a thought. That was in Ellibree’s eyes now. That power.

I could, Ellibree told her. Is it what you want?

“I don’t care,” Tetha breathed. “I’m yours. Do with me as you wish. What do you want, my Queen?”

I want you to love me, my Tetha. And to be always at my side.

“Always,” Tetha promised.

Ellibree smiled, and kissed her on her forehead.

Then come. We have much to do, and many, many worlds to conquer.

* * *

END ‘Allegiance’