Farfetch

Below the cliff, the troopers held the settlement. The sun was setting. An Imperial ba

The settlers had been herded outdoors, under surveillance by the floating gun platforms and patrolling guards. Knowing nothing of the ground-blanketing swarm of insects coming toward them, they withstood defeat with pride.

She felt the first, tentative touch of the pentad—aching, hungering to complete itself again, but repelled by the taint of the Inverts. The hivebinder, relaxed and pleased, wound them all together, keeping the pentad a single entity—as if it were a hive all by itself, while she and Jindigar were a unit, with Jindigar holding the closest mental contact with the alien, Emulating the herald's role. He even walked with

Chinchee's gait as he rose to confront Terab, "Will you let the binder include you among us? It won't be like the last time, when the hive tried to swallow us. We're forming our own hive."

She recoiled, leery of anything so alien.

"It's not permanent," coaxed Jindigar.

Terab said, as if wondering if the Dushau had lost his grip on reality, "Jindigar, the herbivores are not intelligent—"

"No," he agreed. "They're not even self-aware as whole hives. So we must communicate on the lowest levels. Chinchee knows how. It's his role—Herald. But we need someone from each species among us." He turned to Irnils.

Terab reached toward the hivebinder tentatively. "Better me, then."

Krinata felt a wash of truly alien perspectives reshape the gestalt, realigning her concept of reality. And then Jindigar was kneeling before Shorwh.

Shorwh reached to touch the hivebinder. Suddenly he was in the link, too—a child's perspective, strange in its fragmented Cassrian view, yet vibrant with the essence of youth.

Jindigar turned to Storm. "You've been so close. Could a little closer hurt?"

The Lehiroh reached for the hivebinder with both shaking hands, and Krinata remembered her fascination for the Oliat linkages. What compelled a person to become an Outrider– always so close to the Oliat, yet never a part of it. Apparently Jindigar understood Storm's feelings. He took Storm's hand in his own and captured the Lehiroh's eyes, and Krinata was seeing the Lehiroh—so very human, even to the round black pupils of the eyes—through Dushau perception, handicapped by the darkness, so she saw only blotches enhanced by imagination and memory, augmented by the peculiar duad perception. But it was the hivebinder holding them, not an Oliat subform.

She suddenly knew something about Jindigar that had escaped her notice even through all their adventures and intimacies of shared memory; for all the good reasons he'd delayed taking Center, the real reason was that he loved working Oliat and didn't want it to end; he was too involved with experimenting. He wanted to offer others what Krinata had found. A peculiar stretching disturbed the duad, including Storm within its perceptions. But the harmony of triad couldn't solidify. There was a moment of painful discord, then she was on her knees, head spi

Jindigar knelt, capturing Storm's hands, calming him. The hivebinder held the linkages out of sheer instinct. It was as shocked and bewildered as the rest of them. Jindigar finally got Storm's attention. "I shouldn't have allowed that."

But Storm struggled to his feet again. "No—I'm glad you did. Now I know I could never be part of even a subform." His eyes strayed to Krinata, but he said to Jindigar, "At least I can help with this." He touched the hive-binder again, apologetically, and the hivebinder brought him back into the group rapport. Now there was the pentad, the duad, a Holot, a Cassrian, and a Lehiroh—each a distinct entity, yet part of a whole. Krinata saw how exotic this seemed to the binder, but it was starved for its own function and willing to work even thus, to create what it must have to live.

With this multispecies core the hivebinder touched the group mind of the troopers, already resonating with a common patriotism, and brought them into light contact.

The settlers also had a united mind, a group opinion of the Imperial colors—a lifelong conditioning to upwelling patriotism overlaid by recent bitter experience. That, too, was brought into the overall resonance, though only the ones who'd touched the hivebinder seemed real to Krinata. The settlers and the troopers all seemed to believe they were imagining the images and sensations that flowed through their minds.

Among the minds joining now were many Dushau, adding depths and overtones as they grasped what was happening. They, led by the Aliom trainees, didn't reject what was happening but strove only to protect those who had no training with multiperception. Somehow, out of the swirling mists of Dushau memory, came the unmistakable trace of the Archive.

Oh, no!

But this time it was a multiplex stillness, warded round with a dynamic strength. Images flowed in co

Krinata's personal relief sent cascades of joy through the entire mind, and Jindigar's i

The pentad, through the Outreach, brought a wide view into focus. Up on the plain, among the tall grass, huge mottled herbivores ran, half a dozen species, thousands of individuals. Heads down, hooves beating a hypnotic rhythm, they ran with their fellows, not the hive-bearers, nor the young, nor the providers—just the protectors, but from so many hives, so many species.

They ran. Under their pounding feet the ground turned to muck matted with pulverized straw. As far as anyone could see in any direction, humped backs pumped like waves of the sea, long necks poking up here and there, undulating in rhythm. Long, furred beasts beside scaled ones, curly pelted beside sleek, a solid mass of living flesh moved as one to their deaths. The hives would live. The hive was as immortal as the plain itself.

At the edges of the stampede swarms of smaller creatures, vermin and scavengers, hunters and hunted, ran together toward the intruder crouched on the lip of the precipice.

On the lower plain, dusk did not halt the advance of the swarm. Hundreds of varieties of insects, the warriors of thousands of hives, some as big as a human hand, others almost microscopic, flowed across the countryside, a living blanket of destruction. But where they passed, grass and leaves were uneaten, life undisturbed. This army was disciplined and dedicated to one target. The offworlders.

And then the beasts and insects of the plains saw a huge native hive covering the fortress and spreading over the settlement below—one such as the intruders destroyed so routinely, one such as Chinchee visited in his eternal rounds as Herald, binding the hives together, as this giant hive was bound to all others.

The vision-hive covered the intruders, controlled them, defined them, tamed them. Krinata was at once part of the gestalt of the new hivekind, and on the periphery of the lightly touching mass of plains hivekinds. The hives' mass consciousness was infused with a red rage, energized by instinct, driven by primal urges to defend the hives.

Desperate with how close the stampede was, Krinata closed her eyes and summoned that natural ability Jindigar had called being a natural Conceptor—conceptualizing the dome of the hive over them.

The pentad flinched, almost shattering the multirapport, and Jindigar caught her back against him. "No, that's Inverted. Come—be Receptor—like this..."