Shadows in Flight, enhanced edition

the image, blotting it out. It replaced the image with picture of hundreds of Formic workers swarming over the surface of the world, tending fields, carrying loads, building things -- and then he erased the workers.
    For some reason they couldn't accept the idea of humans planting their flora and fauna on the planet.
    No, no, Ender was missing the point, thinking like a human. They were showing him that the whole thing was pointless to them if there was no queen to populate the world.
    Ender was getting more adept with the image-language, and now he repeated back to them the image of the dying Formic workers at the time of the Hive Queen's death. Why? He pushed his inquiry at them with great urgency. Why did the Formic workers die?
    They answered him by showing the dead Hive Queen.
    Why does the death of the Hive Queen cause the death of the workers?
    He had no idea if they really understood. They simply showed the dead Hive Queen again.
    So Ender tried juxtaposition. He remembered the dead Hive Queen, then the dying Formics, but then contrasted them with the swarming drones. Dying workers, living drones, dying workers, living drones, and all the time his urgent inquiry.
    The drones watched these images, his inquiry, till he had repeated them several times.
    Then the messenger let go of him and retreated to the distant corner where the others awaited him.
    "What did you say?" asked Sergeant. "Did you piss them off?"
    "They know this cocoon is dead," said Ender, "and they want a live one."
    "Well, abracadabra," said Carlotta. "What do they think we are? Wizards?"
    "They think there's a living Hive Queen in a cocoon somewhere. A human has her. I saw him -- they know his face, it's the same face every time. When they saw our ship and realized we were human, they thought we were bringing that cocoon with us. They thought that's what I had in the sample case."
    "Sorry to be such a disappointment," said Sergeant. "Why would they think a Hive Queen cocoon survived?"
    Then the two who were wearing their helmets grew quiet, listening. "The Giant's laughing," said Carlotta.
    "Put your helmet on," said Sergeant. "You want to hear this."
    "My helmet tells them I'm done talking with them, and I'm not."
    Sergeant sighed, but Carlotta came close to Ender, sat beside him. He could hear the Giant faintly now.
    "It's the Speaker for the Dead," the Giant said. "The Speaker for the Dead has that cocoon. She's alive inside it, that Hive Queen. That's why he could interview her and write his book."
    So The Hive Queen was based on truth after all. And these Formics knew about it because all Hive Queens were in constant contact with each other.
    But not the drones. Ender realized that the moment the Hive Queen died, the drones had contact only with each other. Their mental powers were much greater than those of the workers, but they didn't match the Hive Queen's ability to project its mental control or contact over seemingly infinite distances. The drones had to be close.
    The messenger drone returned and landed on his head.
    It had a different message now. Ender saw the life of these drones for the past century. There had been twenty. Now there were only five.
    Ender saw the death of each one. It was numbingly alike. They opened the door, and while most of the drones fought off the attacking rabs, a few would fly past them, outmaneuvering the rabs. They went to the ecotat and entered through a portal known only to them. The feral rabs could not get through it.
    Inside the ecotat, they would gather all the slugs they could and then fly back, slowly, burdened with the clinging slugs.
    As they neared the helm, they would pry off a slug or two and fling it near the horde of rabs pressing against the door of the helm. The rabs immediately went into a feeding frenzy. While they were distracted, the door opened again, and the drones flew in with their remaining slugs.

     
    Only now and then a rab noticed them and bounded upward, clawing. One by one over the centuries, drones were killed. And as fewer drones remained, it became harder to fight off the rabs at the door, and more dangerous.
    The expeditions to the ecotat ended. Instead, they opened the door just a crack and closed it at once. Then they fought the rabs that got in, killed them, peeled them, ate them.
    But their flesh was nauseating to eat, and worse, they lost more of their brother drones in fighting the rabs that got in. It had been a long time since they had dared to do any such