Shadows in Flight, enhanced edition

respond at all. He caught glimpses of this and that. The Hive Queen alive. The small males flying around her, and then landing on her. Some she batted away, but others she helped stay in place while they attached. Images of the Hive Queen's own hand bringing slugs to the mouths of the males.
    But as Ender experienced it, the slugs came to his own mouth. He smelled them, he saw them wriggle, and they looked delicious. His mouth watered. He was so, so hungry.
    Ender tried to picture someone moving slowly, but their images overwhelmed what he was imagining. Then, desperate for communication, he tried simply feeling sluggish. Heavy-lidded. Tired.
    He got a jolt of some strong emotion that would certainly have wakened him, if he had really been dozing off. The emotion wasn't anger, it was -- alertness. They sent him what they wanted him to feel.
    They were definitely in control of this exchange.
    He tried something else. He took an image they gave him -- this time it seemed to be rabs bouncing around in a corridor -- and tried to freeze it. Hold still. Wait.
    Immediately they sent the image again; again he froze it. Examined it.
    And now they understood. The next image came, not as a pure memory, in motion, but rather as a frozen moment.
    Now he saw the image of a Hive Queen, tall, magnificent; he felt the devotion they felt for her, and the hunger as well. They needed to be close to her.
    She was covered with drones. If Ender hadn't seen her without the males, he would have assumed their backs were her belly, they coated her so completely.
    Then he felt himself become one of the drones. Again the image of her feeding him, but as she lowered the slug toward his mouth, she let go of it. The slug dropped away out of reach.
    The world seemed to sway; it was the Queen swaying. Then she lay down, half coiling within the circle of her private zone. Even as she pulled herself downward, she made sure not to crush any of her males. She was protecting them, loving them till the end.
    Then Ender felt something vital go out of his mind. He realized that the warmth and light he had felt when he was one of the attached drones was the mind of the Hive Queen. And now it was gone.
    The males, one by one, detached. As one of them, Ender understood that it was time for them to look for a new queen. She hadn't eaten them, so they were valued highly and allowed to help a new queen seed the hive.
    They rose into the air and flew. Around them was the constant pushing and shepherding of the slugs, the rabs, coming up all the ramps.
    Something else, though. Formic workers, becoming limp. Unlike the Queen, they didn't pull themselves down to the ground. They drifted, floated, rose, fell, depending on the eddies of air in the Hive Queen's chamber.
    All these images of dying Formics came as still pictures, one after another -- it was a change from when he was an attached drone, then a flying one.
    There was no Queen. Nothing but Formic workers, and they were all dying. All dead.
    Now a single drone was putting images into his mind. But since he had experienced the desperate search for a new queen, each drone pressing imagesinto the minds of the others, that was now what he gave to Ender.
    Again Ender tried to freeze the image, but instead the drone moved on. He felt a sense of loss, emptiness. It wasn't just the death of the Queen. The drones had images of every part of the ship, many of which Ender recognized from his travels. But each view ended abruptly; he was momentarily blind.
    He realized what they were saying in this image-language. The drones had shared in the Queen's connection with all the Formic workers. They were the minds most closely bound with hers, and she shared everything with them.
    They understood the whole ship. They were used to being able to watch any part of the ship at any time. When she died, they might have continued to connect with the Formic workers. But they died with the Queen. All that remained to the drones was each other's vision, and since they were all in the same room, they were all seeing the same thing. Dead Queen. Rabs herding the slugs up the ramps. Dead Formic workers.
    They went to a door. They had never opened one with their own limbs. But they all had the memory of being inside the mind of a worker when she opened the door. They knew exactly where the lever was and how it felt to work it. Only it was hard. The drone's hand slipped off the lever twice -- and to Ender, as if in a nightmare, it felt as if