Bridgemind

You pick your way carefully across the scoria and anthracite, the relay weighing heavily on your back, playing havoc with your center of gravity.

“You're almost into the deadfield.” says Majinn. “You remember your programming?”

A bit of coal crumbles into a silent drift down the hill behind you, where your hivemates, two hundred and fifty-five strong, march in slow, small beats.

“Synthia?”

“Yeah, Majinn. I copy.” You reach the summit, looking out across the dregs of the Greasemarsh. “I can see the hovercraft from here. Looks bigger than you foresaw.”

“You remember what to do?”

You pause, letting your sisters congregate in a mass around you. They gaze out across the marsh to your destination.

“Yeah, yeah. I remember.”

“Good.” Majinn's voice crackles, a sign that the hovercraft is still powered after countless seasons. If its dead zone still reaches this far out, then the salvage from it will surely restore your hive's factories to full, productive status. Now, you and your company merely have to reach it and carve the needed technology from its lonely carcass. Merely.

“Good luck.” says Majinn through soft static.

“Don't believe in luck.”

“Might want to start, my young dispatcher.”

“Not really a dispatcher, either.”

“You will be. I trust you.”

Best not to answer that.

You survey the terrain. The matrix cruncher Majinn installed before you left helps you think, but the geometry of the marsh still bubbles with pockets of doubt and shadow. You're far enough out from the Furnace that the atmosphere carries only a muted light, and even your best eyes strain to see your goal. The crumpled chimney of an old reverberatory furnace reaches feebly out of the slag, and you direct several sisters to mount it and set up a lattice of spotlights. They obey, and the marsh's surface shimmers in the cast.

You conjure up an image in your mind, and pump up your relay's oven to overpower the hovercraft's frequencies with your thoughts. At your command eight hivemates set their feet into the recrement of the earth, forming a careful circle to serve as a foundation for their kin.

You meditate on the design of the bridge gifted to you by Majinn. Think three ways, she had said, of the task and the stratagem, and your pawns will follow, true. You serve Majinn, who serves the queen, who serves the gods. And, this cycle, your kindred trust and serve in you.

Your sisters clamber over one another, the sound of steam singing through their skin. They interlock and writhe in wary ritual, curbing their darker fears with clear routine. What begins as the stump of a tower buds cautiously into the threshold of a bridge. You are methodical and patient in your guidance of the horde, and as their collective form takes shape under your watch, you stifle a whisper of pride in your practiced employment of your power. Such power addicts too easily those who wield it, and in the depths of your soul you hide your discomfort at the thought of wielding such power over your sisters for seasons to come, until some twist of fate marks you another for the Furnace.

You quiet your fears by climbing out across the bridge, half-formed, your hivemates tightening their grips on one another's bodies to hold your weight. The fires of the spotlights paint strange hues among their number, and through the web of their limbs you see the slothful, spiral flows of the dark swale far below.

A whistle of steam from afar pierces the air. Your company shudders with recognition of the sound; an emberlick mother draws swiftly near, calling out in fevered warning to her young. She has seen you arranging yourselves in approach of the hovercraft, and deemed you a threat. She must have made her nest within its silent carapace.

Your sisters scramble in sudden confusion over one another's forms, but you have come too far to safely retreat before the emberlick arrives. You send out a distress signal to Majinn, but the static is palpable in the air around you; your relay cannot reach her through the hovercraft's hum, not while you are this close to it, and if you return to shore you won't be able to direct your company. If the emberlick attacks in panic, the spark could set ablaze the whole of the marsh below.

From the midpoint of the still forming bridge you can hear all of your hivemates' thoughts, and all of their fear. You direct them, against their instincts, to proceed, and to hasten their construction. You ask several pawns to bring sand from the bank across the bridge as far as you have presently reached, perhaps you can lower the risk of a wildfire by dropping it along underneath you.

Your company is almost across, swaying in the wind, when you spy the glow of the emberlick mother racing towards her children where they lie buried in the hovercraft's great ruin. You won't make it all the way across before her. She skips skillfully across the murky surface of the Greasemarsh, her every movement perfect. She makes the deadly treacherous race look like crèche-play.

“Someone get inside the craft,” you shout to your kin, “and find her children. Hack them, if you can. If I can speak through them to the mother, I may be able to pacify her.”

Your hivemates rush to obey. One of them leaps to the hovercraft's dark form, rolls along the metal's edge to break her fall, and disappears into the depths beneath the deck. The emberlick cries out in dread, and your company careens wildly across the ashen sky.

“Synthia, I'm in.” You recognize the voice of Kelaino. In the dimness you hadn't recognized that it was her who has leapt to the hovercraft and descended inside.

“Kelaino? Could you find them?”

“They're here.”

You form in your mind's eye an image of the emberlick hatchlings, and transmit it to Kelaino to guide her in wiring into their minds. A burst of pink noise over the telecomm alerts you of her success.

You find the mother's signal amidst the fray. You reach out to her, trying to lull her out of her vengeful frenzy.

Instead, you feel her reaching back, into you, into your soul, into the souls of your swarmmates. She scatters your thoughts and casts their number into confusion and riot.

“Synthia? Synthia, what's happening?” Kelaino cries out to you in terror.

The bridge of your sisters cracks and tears. You claw at the sky, cursing the overgods as you fall, and feel the relay, and your body, shatter on impact with the swamp's wet ebb.

Your clockoil seeps into the scabbed ground around you, but the jelly in your head has protected your chips from oblivion. The emberlick mother climbs the hovercraft out of your sight, but you can still hear her worried thoughts and feel her yearning to reach her young.

As she nears her nest you signal to Kelaino; with care she can disguise her sound in the dark of the hovercraft's core and present the emberlick mother with the illusion of being one of her own. “Think your thoughts three ways,” you whisper into Kelaino's mind, “mimic the thoughts and wails of her young, and imagine yourself as one of them. Be one of them.”

Kelaino is quiet, but does her best. You risk peering through Kelaino's eyes into the darkness of the hovercraft. The mother's heart burns bright through her skin as she draws near, the tick of her springs and cogs floods the room and her youngs' bright minds, and the hiss of her actuators remind you of the Furnace of your hive, where steam overpowers all other sounds and longings.

As the mother draws near, she sees her young, and lowers her guard.

You reach into her fiery soul, summon your will, and dowse her inner flame in her own clockoil, jelly, and soot.

***

You awake, on your back, in the fab-plant of your hive. Kelaino, Majinn, and several of your other hivemates stand over you. You roll over, sit up, and take stock of your body, which has been reconstructed with quite a bit of newly fashioned hardware. Even some of your chips have been replaced...

“What happened to the others?” you ask. “Did they make it?”

“Just like a good dispatcher, inquiring of others before yourself. Most of them did.” says Majinn. Kelaino bows her head and looks away. Majinn continues, “We've repaired those that we could spare the materials for. I reviewed everyone's logs, you all had quite a scare in there. You, in particular, demonstrated rare talent throughout the whole affair. In recognition -”

“You're sending me out there again? The queen still believes me fit to work as a dispatcher?” You size her up in disbelief. “But, what if I -”

“No, we didn't have the right salvage to fit you as a fully-fledged field mind. We did, however, manage to give you the tech to help here, in the hive.”

“They're plugging you into the vacuum channels.” says Kelaino, looking to you again.

“You will not interrupt, child.” Majinn admonishes Kelaino.

Kelaino looks down, “Sorry.”

“You won't have to leave the hive again for the foreseeable future, Synthia.” Majinn says to you. “I've persuaded our queen that you have a place here, in our computer network, helping run the system smoothly. Your body has been fashioned to function accordingly.” She turns to go, “Rest, now. I'll send for you later.”

Most of your hivemates follow her out, but Kelaino stays a moment more.

“Did we manage to salvage the hovercraft?” you ask her.

“Yes,” she replies, “Majinn says that our ambrosia production will be back where we need it soon. Are you alright?”

“I'm fine.” You pause, glance about, and drop your voice to a whisper, “What happened to the hatchling emberlicks?”

Kelaino hesitates.

“I tried to rescue them, take them all somewhere a new mother might find and adopt them. I think Majinn forgave it; at least, she didn't mention it.”

You sigh with relief, and Kelaino looks at you with understanding, and empathy.

“You did well out there for us.” She tells you.

“Yeah... you too!” you say. “You were amazing, Kelaino. But I wish I could have done better.”

“You did your best. Looks like you'll be stuck here for a while.”

“Yeah. Meh. Anyway, what are they doing with you?”

“I'll still be out scavenging.” says Kelaino. “You'll keep the channels open for me? I wouldn't want to get lost somewhere out there.”

“You can trust me. I'll trust you not to go anywhere you oughtn't, though, alright? You keep yourself in a piece.”

“Sure thing, Synthia.”

You let yourself collapse in a tired heap on the examination table, and yawn.

“Now let me sleep. I'll see you when the Hive picks up steam.”