Hellstrom's Hive

Janvert stopped at the next door, pressed an ear to the door’s surface, listening. He heard faint, rhythmic thumpings on the other side—some kind of machine, he guessed. There was a hiss accompanying the thumps. He released the wheel latch, opened the door a crack, and peered in. It was a much smaller room than the other, but still big. He guessed it to be a hundred feet on a side. The ceiling was low and the door opened directly onto the room’s floor. The light was only a dim red glow from tubes across the ceiling, revealing stubby benches, each with a maze of transparent glass tubing in pillars at both ends. The tubing pulsed with fluids in brilliant glowing colors and this distracted him for a moment from what lay between the pillars on the bench surfaces.

He stared at the objects, unwilling to believe his eyes were reporting accurately. Each bench carried what appeared to be the stump of a human body from about the waist to the knees. Some were grossly male and some female. Among the females were a few whose abdomens bulged as though they were pregnant. Beyond waist and knees there was nothing that could be thought of as flesh—only that tubing with its pulsing colors. Could they be real?

Janvert slipped into the room, touched the nearest one, a male stump. The flesh was warm! He jerked his hand away, felt vomit rising in his throat. He backed against the door to the tunnel, unable to take his gaze from the contents of this room. Those were live stumps of human flesh. They had to be!

Movement in the room’s far corner caught his attention. He saw people parading along the benches there, bending, studying the stumps, examining the tubing. It was like a caricature of doctors doing their rounds. Janvert slipped back into the tunnel before he was seen, closed the door, and stood there with his forehead pressed against the smooth, cool surface.

Those were human reproductive sections. He could imagine Hellstrom’s hive keeping those monstrosities alive for breeding purposes. The thought of his own flesh subjected to such indignity sent shudders coursing through him. His back, neck, and shoulders trembled and his knees felt incapable of supporting him. Reproductive stumps!

Somewhere below him there sounded a dull thud and in his ears he felt a change in the tunnel’s air pressure. Bare feet could be heard slapping the tunnel floor, running.

They’re in here after me!

Terror driving him, he jerked open the door, slid through, sealed the door behind him. The medical procession noticed him this time, but they could only jerk upright in surprise before the stunwand in Janvert’s hand sent them tumbling. He plunged through the nightmare room, trying not to look at any of the stumps. An arched passage led from the room into a large gallery thronging with people. Terror still hounding him, he whirled left, shouldered through the throng, pushing people aside, heedless of the disturbance and curiosity he obviously was arousing. Milling turmoil marked his path. There were waving hands behind him, a few inarticulate outcries, and one oddly piercing female voice calling after him, “Say there! Say there!”

At the first elevator entrance, he shouldered a man away from the opening, leaped into an upbound car, staring down at faces that kept staring upward with puzzlement and some alarm until the floor of the car closed off the opening.

Two women and a man shared the car with him. One of the women looked like an older version of Fancy, but the younger one had a full head of blonde hair, one of the few he’d seen like that in the depths of Hellstrom’s hive. The man, completely hairless, with a narrow, foxy face and brightly alert eyes, reminded Janvert of Merrivale. All three showed obvious curiosity and the man bent toward him, sniffing. What he inhaled seemed to puzzle him because he sniffed again.

In panic, Janvert turned the captured weapon on him, swept its beam across the women. They slumped to the floor as the car passed another opening. A woman with heavy breasts and a round, blank face tried to enter, but Janvert kicked her in the midriff, sent her sprawling into the people behind her. The car passed another opening without incident, another—another. He dove out at the fourth opening into a throng of people, plunged through them across the tunnel and into a smaller side passage that had attracted him because it was unoccupied. Two of the men he’d sent sprawling behind him leaped to their feet and started to give chase, but he dropped them with a burst from the weapon, then fled, skidded around a corner to the left, another corner, and found himself back in the main gallery at least a hundred yards from where he’d left the elevator. A milling crowd could be seen down there with figures jammed into the side passage and more trying to enter it.

Janvert turned right, holding the weapon upright in front of him to conceal it from the people behind, forced himself to assume a slow walking pace while he tried to bring his heaving lungs under control. As he moved, he listened carefully for sounds of pursuit. The sounds of disturbance faded, but he heard no pursuers and, presently, he dared to cross the tunnel to his left, leaving it by a smaller right-angle passage that slanted upward steeply. This passage opened within a hundred paces into another large cross tunnel with an elevator directly in front of him. He wove his way without incident through passing people, stepped into the first upbound car. The car picked up speed the instant he entered. He glanced around to see if some operator he’d missed controlled this, but he was alone in the car. Openings flashed past him. He counted nine, wondering if Hellstrom had some secret control of this car and they’d sped it up to trap him. He didn’t dare try to leave at this speed.

His panic increasing, Janvert moved to the doorway, searching the sides of the car for controls, but there were none. As he moved, the car came to another opening, slowed. He jumped out, almost collided with two men guiding a long cart piled with what appeared to be yellow fabric thrown loosely into it. They dodged him, grinned and waved, their fingers moving in the same kind of intricate designs he’d seen in the gray-haired man beside the river. Janvert smiled ruefully, shrugged, and the pair accepted this, continuing to trundle their cart down the tunnel.

Janvert turned to the right, away from them, saw that the tunnel ended shortly in a wide arch with bright lights and machinery visible in a large room beyond the arch, people busily working there. He felt he didn’t dare turn around now, continued into a wide, low room with metal-shaping machinery on floor stands scattered through it. He recognized a lathe, a stamping press of some kind (the ceiling had been opened above it to take the machine’s upper part), and there were several drill presses with men and women bent over them, working steadily, ignoring his presence. There was an underlying smell of oil in the place and the biting acridity of hot metal. It could have been any large machine shop except for the nudity. Carts carrying bins of unidentifiable metal objects were being pushed along several of the aisles between the machines.

Janvert tried to act knowledgeably busy, strode as directly as he could across the room, hoping to find an exit on the far side. He noted that people were paying a different kind of attention to him now and he wondered why. One woman actually left a lathe and came up to sniff at his elbow. Janvert tried his universal shrug, glanced down to see perspiration glistening on his skin. Had his sweat attracted her, for God’s sake?

The far wall of the room he was crossing showed no open door and he was beginning to feel trapped when he saw a wheeled latch in the wall: it alerted him to one of the doors into the tunnel he’d used earlier. The door was only a faint line in the wall, but it opened outward when he worked the latch. He moved through the doorway as though he had every right there, sealed it behind him. The tunnel sloped up to his right. He listened for sounds to tell him whether others shared the tunnel, heard nothing, and set off upward.

His back and legs ached with fatigue and he wondered how much more of this he could endure. His stomach was a region of painful hollowness, his mouth and throat were dry. Desperation drove him, though, and he knew he would press himself upward until he dropped. He had to escape from this monstrous place.