“I’m telling you they use this tunnel,” Gilly said.
Anders pulled on the barrel of the lightning gun, straining for leverage. Gilly felt pressure building on his back. “Keep watching it.”
“I’m watching.”
“Unh,” Anders said. He adjusted his grip. “So what did you learn?”
“What?”
“The salamander. Could you communicate?”
Now that he was being rescued, talking with Martin seemed very foolish. He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have engaged with the alien at all. “A little. I called him Martin. He learned very quickly.”
“‘He’?” Anders said.
“I mean ‘it,’” Gilly said. “I was studying it. It’s like a worker, but different. A new class, I think. Something we’ve never seen before. If we made it back to Service, it would be critical intel.”
Anders strained against the rifle. “I don’t think Service is taking our calls, Gilly.”
“I know,” he said.
“This is the source. We saw them venting. Millions coming out of the ground. At first, we thought it was a tornado. This is where they come from. The whole planet is a hive.”
“What?” But it made sense to him immediately. One of the puzzles of salamander biology had always been that they weren’t adapted for any known planetary environment, but seemed perfectly at home in space-faring hives. But this thinking rested on the assumption that hives were something like spaceships, temporary accommodation. The truth was, the salamanders were literally at home in hives. “We have to tell Service.”
“Yeah,” Anders said. “Shame about that. Goddamn, this resin. It moves but doesn’t break.”
“If they’re venting, they must be breeding.”
“Saw it myself. They have nurseries. They’re safe for us, because the soldiers won’t enter.”
“Nurseries?”
“Slabs full of babies. In eggs.”
“Eggs?”
“Sacs,” Anders said, and began to describe a brown pool, which delivered translucent white jellies, to be cared for by nurses.
“How deep was this pool?”
“I didn’t go in. Deep, I think. From how it bubbled, seemed it was coming from a long way down.”
“So the breeders are deeper?”
“I guess.”
“Why would that be? They physically isolate the breeders? Don’t they trust the soldiers around them?” He shook his head. That couldn’t be it. “You said the soldiers stay out of the nurseries. So they do obey physical limits.”
“Beats me, Gilly.”
“They must have special requirements,” he said. “Or else . . .”
“Watch that fucking tunnel,” Anders said.
His eyes had drifted. “Sorry.”
“I don’t give a shit about breeders, Gilly. I just want you and me to get out of here.”
But he’d had a thought and couldn’t keep it in. “Or else there aren’t many. They have more nurseries than breeders. So they have to transport embryos in sacs from one to the other. Through liquid-filled tunnels. Tubes, which come up in pools.”
“Watch that fucking tunnel. I’ve got this gun stuck halfway in the wall. It’s going to take me a second to pull it out.”
“Understood.” Anders strained again. “If there aren’t many breeders, they’re valuable,” Gilly said. “That could be another reason to separate them: for their protection. There might be only a small number.” He licked his lips. “There might be one.”
Anders looked at him.
“A queen.”
“Gilly—”
“They have identical DNA. They’re all produced by a single animal. It’s a common hierarchy in colony species. It’s been hypothesized. We just never had any evidence for it.” Anders opened his mouth. “Anders, if there’s a queen, and we kill it . . .”
Anders sighed.
“They’d have a way to replace her, but that would take time. Years, potentially. And until then, no new salamanders. It would end the war.”
Anders shook his head. “All that money on the ships and you want to go face-to-face.”
He snickered. “The ship got us here. And it chose us. AI selected the crew.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it was imagining this situation. Gilly, I have to shoot this wall.”
He couldn’t argue any longer. “Not here. Farther