“Maybe if you guys ever practiced, you might get good enough to have an actual show,” Lulu muttered. “You’ve been a band for over ten years now.”
“We’re still looking for a singer,” Sam said, “since, you know, our old one quit.”
Lulu scoffed. “Your choice was to have me sing in your band or have Tito and Axel remain un-murdered. You couldn’t have both, and you made your decision.”
“We said you were out of tuneonce,” Axel said. “And you were. By, like, a lot.”
Tito nodded enthusiastically.
Lulu shot them both a warning glare, and Axel shut up as we continued to examine the room.
One of the chutes in the far corner had come undone, and piles of rotten grain filled the area, burying several charging pods, including the charging station for the sentry rhino’s gun. It turned out, they didnotglow blue when they were charged, but the large weapon still did not have any juice. By the time we entered the dusty room, about thirty drones were hard at work, so the charging pod was free. Only some of them were from our farm, and the rest were painted in that same black matte paint. As we watched, two of the drones opened up a crate, and a group of six more drones skittered out of the box, moving like spiders. In addition, there were four more of the large rhino-class drones, bringing our total to five.
The room was now filled with swirling dust and theclink, clink, clinkof dozens of legs moving about.
The drones started collecting crates filled with more drones and other supplies and moving in concert to the elevator.
“Interesting,” Roger said. “The digital manifest claims there are three crates with hive queen units such as myself along withqueen-specific repair supplies and charging stations, but they are not here. Based on the dust levels, it appears they were removed some time ago. The last time the sentry detected movement down here was almost twenty years ago.”
“So, like twenty years ago, someone came down here and stole all the stuff we need to repair you?” I asked. “Why?”
“I do not know. I suspect I know the day. You won’t remember this, Oliver, but it was soon after the pinhole had reopened communications from Earth, and we’d been visited by a congregation from Fat Landing who’d had a conversation with the then-mayor of Burnt Ends. They toured the city. Your grandfather had us all hide in the barn for the duration of their visit, though they never toured the countryside. He was afraid that the planetwide government would frown upon him using us for agriculture.”
“They probably took it so they could start their own farms,” I said.
“It’s possible, but if they are utilizing other hive queens, they are very quiet on the local net.”
All the honeybee supplies, crates, and charging pods took up a little more than half of the room. The other half was filled with survival supplies, including cases upon cases of never-expire food rations, insta-shelters, a pair of crates with unassembled medical pods, multiple crates of personal transport scooters, and more.
“It’s like all the supplies for a new colony,” Lulu said as we moved through the warehouse. “We’ll only be able to take a portion of this stuff. I haven’t seen one of these scooters in years.”
“Our dad had one,” Axel said, moving his hand across the crate. “It broke down and he never got the parts to fix it before he died. The husk of it is still in our barn.”
“These are all from theHibisco,” I said, wiping dust off a crate.
“Yes,” Roger said. “Despite the ship’s troubles, most of the supplies from that particular ship made it to the peninsula unscathed. The entirety of our farm’s honeybees are from that ship.”
While my grandfather was fromForlorn, most of the supplies in the area had come fromHibisco, another one of the fifteen generation ships. That particular ship had been plagued with issues near the end of the journey. The captain had supposedly gone mad. He’d shut off the AI controlling the ship and ripped out and hammered the computer into pieces. Then he’d insisted on manually plotting the entry vectors of the landing craft onto the peninsula, which had led to a mass disaster. It was where Burnt Ends had gotten its name. The captain had killed himself afterward.
“Look at this,” Sam said, peering inside a crate. “They’re all giant cameras and things. Rosita, you can make a movie using the real stuff instead of that weird little camera you always have floating around your head.”
“That is a camera system, but it’s a hologram projector,” Roger said in our ears. “It looks like a primary system along with fifteen disks. That’s a better and more robust system than the one the mayor of Burnt Ends utilizes.”
“Like the one at the bar?” Lulu asked.
“That is correct,” Roger said.
Years ago, all the bars and public spaces had had the receiver disks for the hologram system. Whenever the prime minister all the way in Fat Landing wanted to make a speech or announcement, he’d turn the thing on, and he’d appear in all the bars. Unlike the flickering piece of crap that the mayor of Burnt Ends used, this system was really good. Unless you were right up against it, you couldn’t tell it was a hologram.
The problem was, at least on the peninsula, nobody liked the politicians in Fat Landing much, and years of beer and food thrown at the projector disks had made them mostly inoperable. The one at the Belly-Rubbed Pug still worked, but it was no longer connected with Fat Landing. Instead, AJ, the guy who ran the bar, used it to project a woman dancing on a pole in a forever loop. On the rare occasion we got strangers to visit the crossroads, it was always greatfun to watch them get drunk and try to approach the forever-dancing woman, whom we’d affectionately named Yasmine.
We continued to look through the supplies.
Against one wall was a group of three crates, each labeled “New Colony Proliferation Kit.” Someone had taken paint and put a big red X over the crates. They had written, “Do Not Use. Poison.” over each one in large block letters.
“Huh,” I said. “I wonder what’s wrong with these.”
Rosita stood next to me, also looking at the crates. Her camera buzzed by her head. The familiar sound of the tiny camera drone was strangely comforting. I took a half step to my left just so I could feel her arm against mine. She smelled like her greenhouse with a tinge of garlic. When we were kids, they’d called her Ajo, which was Spanish for garlic. It was meant as an insult, but she pretended not to care.
