Bees (second half)

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  She enhances her sight and scans the surrounds. The trees extend out of view in all directions. No sign of people or machines mar the area. The sanctity of her hut has not suffered violation.

  The quiet in the forest infuses her with its ambiance. Satisfied that the vicinity lies safe she climbs down the ladder, adds more threads to the rungs and sends the ladder back up to nestle in its container.

  When she arrives back at Gilgamesh's cabin, he stands ready with a hive encased in plastic and fitted with vents. He attaches the hive and two satchels to her back-rack and fits her to it. Cautiously, she heads upstream for the preserve.

  Brambles along the path make for tough going, but after a half hour of scratches and abrasions, she breaks through into a clearing surrounding a trout pool. Clouds portending, the wind bites. The land falls away toward Gilgamesh's cabin through trees, bushes and grasses. Pearl sits on the top of the pool's dam and lights one of the old man's specials.

  Odd, the cigarette smoke curls up and dissipates, but seems to reform downstream in puffs. Before she can ponder on it, a flash of light belches, and a thud bends double the saplings lining the creek.

  Striking balance with the wind, she perches on the dam for a view. The blast has leveled the land she struggled through up from the shack moments before. The smoke spreads out into a haze, which coats the land. Trees, bushes and grasses seem poised to flee, roots and all.

  A searcher knifes through the smoke, laser-bursting the glade sloping down from the dam. Five hundred meters away, it veers toward where Pearl balances on top of the dam.

  She screams, "The BOC!"

  Her first impulse, to give up, drives her to fear and grief, but she realizes that the searcher scatters out a will-sucking vibration. She tries to run, slips on moss and falls into the pool above the dam. She manages to partially close the hive's vents before the bees and she plunge under the water.

  Fish dart by. Water creeps into her lungs. She surfaces, gasping, sucking for air, getting instead smoke that burns into her throat and lungs.

  The searcher's whoosh has faded, but a wall of flame roars up the creek. Her choice: suck water and boil or breathe the fumes and broil. Drowning would inflict less pain although more certain death, so she pulls herself out. Around her the conflagration churns the greenery to ash. Trees burst into torches. The lasers have evaporated the water from the creek below the dam.

  No escape in any direction. Except – she streaks downstream on the muddy bottom through an arch of flame and toward the older fire.

  She slips, gets up, runs, and falls again. After the tenth time, she stays down. Her steaming clothes parboil her skin. Burning air knifes into her body. Her lungs give up. She can discern nothing through the smudge.

  But she must live to set the bees free in the preserve. God reads her mind and lends a hand, she swears, though Pius, her ex, would have said nature provides falling air to replace the retreating fire, but to Pearl, breezes slide down just to save her and her charges.

  Well, bees, we made it for now. Damn, the bees! She kicks out of reverie and pours them onto the ground. They lie limp. No legs move, no wings flutter, no proboscises unfold. What if the BOC sought to murder the bees too? What will I say to Gilgamesh? I've ruined his work. All those years of breeding. He trusted me. Now, I've drowned them. She counts the carcasses. 526 lost. Why did he trust me? I can't go back. I didn’t want the responsibility for these bees.

  Perhaps, the bees sense their cousin a billion times removed. As if cued by a group mind, they wig-wag. Pearl's chest heaves. Her eyes clear. She shovels them back into their hive, happy that they have survived.

  Carcasses of animals line the bank. She steps on a fish gasping in the muck, slips then rights herself. The BOC will slaughter any amount of life. They won’t leave either until they have murdered me.

  She fears she has responsibility for the carnage, just by arriving here, just as blameworthy as the BOC itself. Driven by shame, Pearl double-times out of the destruction into the day and into exhaustion until she stumbles over a root and falls flat. Rolling over on her back she views stars already signaling the arrival of dusk. She makes camp and sleeps so hard that sounds pass unheard.

 

  A drizzle yanks the curtain on night. Pearl sits under a tarpaulin, searching out into the dreariness of a slack morning, anxious, parsing the woods for killers. She starts confiding in her companions, We must keep moving to stay ahead of the BOC, so let’s load up and scram.

  The bees cover their hive screen and buzz as if they understand that the BOC searches for them too.

  They have not gone a kilometer when a cougar pell-mells by. Gradually, the sound of tortured wood replaces the silence in the cat's wake. In the direction of that groaning, through the trees, hidden by bushes, Pearl creeps. She slides out from the protection of the forest within a few feet of a searcher lying atop a grove of saplings. Is this the one that damn near got us?

They mean nothing more to the BOC than the greenery: kill trees, slay Shaw, kill bees; same dispassion. Pearl could have slipped around the searcher, but a bane of foulness oozes through the woods. She realizes that this world has given her a responsibility to match her freedom.

  The BOC kills sans blame. She will even the score a bit. Should I fail, what about the bees? My main task? To place them safely near the preserve. It does not make sense to attack such a small portion of the BOC's vast empire. What can I do except to get even with a few of them?

  Silently, she chants the para-survivalist anthem with which her practices had begun and ended, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness...." Death comes to anyone found guilty of even humming that. She has lost five comrades for their voicing of emancipation.

  Her options coalesce into a Hobson’s choice; Ride this horse or none. This negates her quandary. She must kill an enemy. No doubt about it. She unloads the hive and satchels and shoves them out of sight under a bush. With her stiletto hugging her thigh, she creeps the 20 meters through the cover of trees and bushes to the door of the searcher.

  Arrogance rides the sliver of light coming from the hatch. She peeks in and views an amazon checking her equipment. Pearl draws her knife slowly from its sheath. In that moment, her jacket brushes against the door.

  The amazon stops short in examining the peripherals and turns around slowly. Humorless eyes and a hard-line mouth confront Pearl. "Stay where you are, Shaw." Her right hand moves so fast that Pearl does not notice until the baser points at her heart.

  No time, no alternatives ‒ she leaps into the craft, hits the floor and rolls. A ray takes off her left ear, searing the wound. Sneering, the BOC braces for the final shot. Pearl pauses in that first instant when muscles begin to uncoil, but nothing of motion springs forth. Then the BOC's eyelids flutter, and she turns rigid. Her in-vivo infusion!

  In that half second, Pearl jumps through the air, her elation pumping Adrenaline. But, the amazon's eyes resume their steel cold before Pearl reaches her. The infusion instantly activates the BOC. She fires into Pearl's left thigh, spinning her in mid-flight as she swings the knife. They collide.

  Visions fuzz as darkness forces its way in. But, her eyes stay open ready for consciousness to bloom again. First sensation, the pressure of weight. She and the amazon entangle like an meal of spaghetti. Pearl's knife has missed the BOC's chest all right. However, fluid oozes from a gash in her enemy's neck to form a lake on the floor. Pearl vomits, adding her touch to the picture.

  Movement sobers her. One of the scanners shows four BOC approaching the searcher from the far side. Leaping up, Pearl slips in the bloody vomit and falls against a locker. It pops open, revealing the crew’s food. Ah, steal their food; that will disable this operation, she guesses. She stuffs all the packages into one of their trash bags and staggers out of the ship.

  The lead BOC shouts. Baser blasts slice branches from trunks left and right, and ozone permeates the air. Pearl realizes that they zero in on the sound of her thrashing, so she stops. All quiet. Perhaps, she can pick up their breathing. She does not move. They wait for her to make a sound. Then they creep toward her but turn and enter their ship.

  A para-survivalist does not retreat without survey. Pearl watches what the BOC will do. One stands at the hatch. After several minutes, he enters the searcher, and a corpse tumbles out. The door closes, and the craft lifts off toward the east. After the ship embraces the sky, the saplings, released from tonnage, rise in bows and angles, creaking and sighing, reasserting their claim.

 

  With the BOC disabled for now, Pearl limps away, worried about her bees. She hurries as if they could not last a second without her. Yet, when she pulls the bush's branches aside, only the satchels, torn open and empty, lie there, and all for the sake of one dead BOC. Mortified that she chose killing that BOC over the safety of her bees, she can only stare.

  A rut runs out from the bush to the left. She follows it 30 meters and finds the hive. Among its shatter lay a few dead bees.

  She has not endured alone; the bees had hummed in her ears. The despair from their loss crushes her. Some animal must have eaten them. She sits down in this place of ominous smells and sounds. A presence slides in to touch her; a buzzer wigwags on her arm. "Oh, bee. You're safe.” Such a relief, that solitary bee.

  Gilgamesh had taught her how to read the bees’ wig-wagging. She checks the position of the sun and glances off to her left. A cloud of bees covers a branch, hundreds flying to and fro.

  She reconstructs the hive with glue and tape from her repair kit while the bees zip around, seemingly interested in returning to claim their residence. To reassure them, Pearl says, "Don’t worry guys. I used to live in a worse place." They settle into the hive before the glue dries.

  Once more, bees and keeper make for the preserve. They have not gone more than two hours before the mountain at the center of the refuge sends out its call. Snow spikes the green of its lower reaches. The mountain reveals depressions and crags, avalanches and valleys of mist. She names it "Survival" and imbues it with freedom.

  She stops early to rest her baser-flashed leg. Gently she hangs the leg over a fallen limb and reads the rest of the notes Gilgamesh has written on the history of bees: These bees differ from the bees of old. Queens obsolete, all females procreate.  Drones pair up with the females, sharing duties. They resemble an assemblage of wasps more than a hive.

  Gilgamesh has trained his bees to respond to sound in addition to cues of smell, movement and external and internal conditions. He has included in Pearl's satchel a device capable of the various pitches and tones the bees have learned.

In a couple of hours, following his directions, she can play a selection of hums. While she practices, the bees cling to the hive screen, wagging, seemingly fascinated with her attempts. Pearl decides to try out her expertise and opens the door. As each bee flies out, it circles her head, then makes for trees and plants. Pearl gives them fifteen minutes of buzz time, then plays return on the hummer. And here they come, filling the air around her, hundreds of them at once. They land and enter the hive.

  With the bees safe, Pearl intuits, I did make the correct choice in killing that BOC.

  She makes camp two more nights before reaching a stream bordering the preserve. Almost there. Safe. Peaceful. Alone with her bees. She lets her guard down too soon. A crunch of footsteps disturbs the forest she has traversed. Pearl faces the sound and kneels alert with drawn knife. She freezes in that position for an hour ‒ no sign of anyone.

  She wades the stream. A sign says, "National Preserve. Keep out." Hell with it. She crawls under the fence. Fifty meters on, the woods end in a two-kilometer-wide strip of grassland that falls away right and left.

  The preserve begins for real on the other side of that swath, so close she quavers with the urge to rush out to it, but she can’t chance a crossing, so sits down to wait for night.

  The bees soon find flowers in the strip. They stream toward the space. Drowsily, she wonders, Maybe this would be a good place to leave them....

  She awakes in Spring air. The sun lies shimmering about thirty degrees off the horizon. She raises the hummer and begins to blow a jazzy rendition of the return. In the break, two bees seem to float in unison, swinging to the beat, growing bigger as they come toward her. Not until they appear larger than finches does she realize they do not resemble insects of any sort.

  The lettering on them says, "Department of Conservation." Pearl tenses and backs farther into the fringe. Beams of fire from each ship sweep the ground. Ahead of them green, behind, black and gray. They move steadily upon her before she realizes, Space, the bees.

  A pellet hits her forehead and falls supine onto her lap. The buzzer revives and flies to the top of the hive where it wig-wags. Pearl reads the direction and turns her head toward the near-side. Staggering like drunks, her bees fly in and out of the smoke. After about fifteen minutes of bacchanal, they return in ones and twos, wiggle and tumble into their hive.

  Pearl closes the lid, then sits staring across the strip. Where does the BOC’s monitoring privilege end if it ends at all? Anyway, since when does the BOC recognize limits?

  After dark, she places the hive and satchels on her back-rack and slides out from the protection of the trees. A light flashes off to her left.

  6-foot bushes signal the end of her crossing. She steps past them and slams into something resilient, which bounces her back into the strip. She gawks at what could stand only four meters away, but nothing shows.

  Has the BOC thrown up one of their restraints around me? She decides not. Too difficult to maintain the energy field so far from their base.

  She better not test this danger in daylight. She tunnels into the bush and hauls the hive to safety before dropping into sleep.  She awakes to a perceptible buzz. In the sun, the reason the object had invisibility at night becomes apparent. Millions of translucent threads rise out of the ground like waves off hot pavement. Through this flutters a meadow of flowers.

  She lets the bees out while continuing to study the phenomenon. They fly among the shrubs, then one of them turns and beelines toward the flowers. It bounces. Several other bees follow the leader and also end up on the ground. After a few minutes of this, they stop the attempt and fly along the shimmer until one goes over the top eight meters up. The rest follow into the preserve.

  Looks as if the bees have chosen their place themselves, but how would she or Gilgamesh – maybe only her if Gilgamesh hasn’t survived the BOC attack – get to them with that wall blocking the way?

  She works out how to get over, I'll wait until night and drag a log across the strip, lean it against the barrier, climb up and jump over. Sounds too easy, but the Department of Conservation figures not like the BOC.

  The molasses hours of day present a medium for doubts. She can't shake her concern so finds a rock and heaves it toward the top of the wall. As the missile reaches its zenith and crosses over, bolts of energy shoot up from the wall and blow it to dust.

Okay, small things, yes. Big things, no. Look to insects as the real conquerors of Earth. They can pass where I can't. She stares through the wall at her visionaries flitting among the blooms. She decides on a test and blows a return. The bees stream back over the wall and enter their home. Gilgamesh and she will not need to go over after all.

  As the bees settle down and slow their buzzing, a faint whine steals Pearl’s notice. When one waits, any game will do to pass the time. She plays the hummer, trying to match the vibrato. The bees climb onto the screen and buzz along with her. She lets them out. They fly circles to and from the barrier, finally lighting on it.

  As she and the bees continue humming, their pitch approaches that of the whine. Suddenly, the wall stops shimmering. The bees fly en masse past the fallen wall into the preserve.

  Pearl removes the instrument from her mouth. An underlying moan still persists. Its pitch seems to come through the trees behind her.

  Now that the bees reside safely in the preserve, she slides the hive deeper under the bush, then after scanning the sky for sign, dives into it as well.

 

  Blankly, Leader One faces the sky. She recalls the time when she had kneeled beside her bed praying. Perhaps, once a week she replays this. Provided counseling to get rid of that memory, it still slaps her around.

  One of her crew notices. In response, she adorns herself with professionalism. She chips instructions into the log: "Precisely at 1830, cloaking up, the searcher will come in low over the treetops to where the aborigine said the black had crossed. Periphery sensors corroborate his information."

  Hugging the tree tops the searcher clears them. Leader One cannot spot the form, so she engages the sensors. A body hides under a shrub. Leader one scoffs at the attempt. She orders the sequence.

  The wall’s hum comes again. Pearl steps out from the bush. Behind her, it explodes. A ramrod of heat throws her flat on her stomach.

  She pulls out her knife – sharp enough and will do to rob the bastards of success. Then Gilgamesh finds her trouble. She imbibes their shared responsibility for the bees and the future they represent, and just like that, the man of mind fades, replaced by one kindly....

  The form skips like a child from the blast toward the preserve. A close-up shows a contrivance in its mouth. Leader One kicks in enhanced, and hears the reject hum and laugh.

  The capacitors loose their second battery. The blast drives Pearl forward faster. Just before she crashes into the wall, whines cease, and she flies shrieking into the preserve.

  Leader One orders a landing thirty meters from the point of focus. The crew follows search and destroy script. Basers drawn, they surround the area, then when no stirring occurs, close the circle.

  They do not find leftovers, no bone chips or teeth, no bits of human debris, no chitin or exoskeletons, just several hinges and some wire mesh. Leader One observes the scene with a perception she does not understand. She chips a "disintegration" conclusion to the log.

  Still, she needs something to prove they have gotten the reject then she finds it. Just outside the barrier sits an artifact resembling the Jews harp she had played years ago in a child band. A knife lies on the ground pointed at the harp. She scoops up the harp, knife, wire mesh and hinges.

  Sans warning, tears slick her cheeks. She turns her head so the crew will not notice, wipes her face dry and gives herself an early infusion.

 

  A new story will post on or about 1 Jun 2026

  To get the book Eve Valor: click here.

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