Deathstalker 02 - Deathstalker Rebellion

of the alien hive.
    She filled the space beyond the tunnel, a great bloated sac of living tissue, hundreds of yards across, living walls of pale pulsating flesh, studded here and there with black lidless eyes. Ridiculously small atrophied limbs protruded in
    places, remnants of a forgotten earlier life. Metal instruments and gleaming cables plunged into her great flesh from all around, as though she was built into the ship or it had been grown around her.
    Silence tore his gaze away and looked around him. The swarming insects had been blasted away by the force of the explosion. Dead and injured alien forms lay everywhere, some twitching feebly. But Silence had no doubt more were already on their way. Eight of the marines were still standing, looking numbly to him for instructions. The Investigator only had eyes for the Queen. Silence checked the four fallen marines for life signs, but he already knew what he'd find. Their suits had ruptured from the combination of the explosion and insect damage. Four more good men lost to the aliens. Silence looked up sharply as his suit's sensors picked up scrabbling sounds, drawing nearer.
    "Investigator, more insects on the way. Recommendations?"
    "Hit the Queen. She's the heart and mind of them all."
    "You heard the Investigator, marines. Hit the Queen with everything you've got."
    Vivid light seared from the away team's disrupters and blasted away great chunks of the Queen's body. The pale flesh boiled and vaporized and blew apart, only to seal itself together again in moments. The Queen was just too big for them, too huge even for energy weapons to do any real damage. She towered over them, vast and monolithic, and from everywhere at once lesser aliens came suddenly swarming into what was left of the tunnel. There seemed no end to the living wave, and Silence knew that this time no weapon he had would be enough to stop them. They would just keep coming until their sheer numbers overwhelmed the away team. If he was lucky he'd die then.
    Damn. More good men lost. Frost. I wish…

    And then everything changed. The enigmatic gift he'd acquired from the Madness Maze blazed brightly in his mind and Frost's, and they were linked again, mind to mind, soul to soul. A vast, incomprehensible roar filled their heads: the alien thoughts of a million insects, and thundering through it like a great heartbeat, the commands of the Queen.
    It took Silence and Frost only a moment to patch into the roar of the mass mind, seize control, and impose their own commands upon it. The insect tide turned away from their human prey and fell upon the Queen. They swarmed all over her gigantic body and began to eat her alive. The last thing Silence and Frost heard before the link broke and they fell back into their own heads again was the Queen, screaming. They both grinned savagely.
    Only human again, Frost and Silence looked at each other. They couldn't see each other's faces, but they didn't need to. Silence glanced briefly at the stunned marines watching the insects devour their own Queen, and decided explanations could wait. He activated his comm implant and accessed Frost on the command channel.
    "It's not the same as the creature we found on Unseeli," Frost said calmly. "And it's nothing like what those poor bastards found on Wolf IV. So what exactly have we got here? The creators of those killer aliens in the vaults on Grendel?
    Or the ancient enemy the Grendel Sleepers were created to fight? Or something else entirely?"
    "Beats the hell out of me," said Silence. "Let the specialists worry about it.
    We need to talk, Frost. This… link of ours. It's getting stronger. I don't know how much longer we can keep it hidden."
    "We have to," said Frost. "They mustn't know what really happened here. They'd reclassify us as espers. Strip us of our rank. Turn us into lab rats. I'd rather
    die than live like that."
    "There's always the underground."
    "Not for us."
    "No," said Silence. "Not for us. Aliens like these could return at any time, and only a strong and undivided Empire can hope to stand against them. So we'll keep quiet about what happened here. Act like it's a mystery to us, too. Lionstone doesn't need to know."
    "On the other hand," Frost said thoughtfully, "Lionstone was actually really quite lucky here today. With the fleet gone and the planet's defenses in disarray, Golgotha was practically defenseless. If we hadn't turned up when we did, this ship could have trashed half the damn planet. We