Flavia’s group penetrated rather more easily than expected to the twelve queen quarters which formed a circle around the inner axis of the ship. Four of the twelve were larger than the others, suggesting that there was some order of precedence among the queens. Once again, controls were situated in awkward – for human and Mrdini – positions depending from ceilings, angled up from the floors and in the narrow ends of the oval-shaped quarters.
`No-one’s found the starting button yet,’ Rojer remarked to his companions. He was hallway to cancelling a random thought as too ridiculous when his brother started to laugh.
`They may yet have to do just that, Roj.’ `Do what?’ Flavia demanded, half turning her head in their direction while she kept most of her attention on her work.
We’ve got a queen, Thian said softly. Presumably she’d know how to start up – Flavia’s eyes went round. lit her aboard that ship?
She can’t take it anywhere but if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t figure out how to turn the power on – Thian said and shrugged without adding the obvious conclusion.
`Oh!’ Flavia mulled that problem over. `Surely someone `Hope so!’ Rojer said but he couldn’t be very encouraging as he watched his group clambering over the machinery, following coloured leads, attempting to fathom the unusual composition of the Hive drive. It was apparently much more efficient than it looked.
There were only so many viable forms of space drive, or so humans and Mrdini were agreed. Perhaps they should have tried to capture one of the Xh-33 scouts or shuttles when they had the chance. But, according to what Rojer had been told, that had been impossible as well as unlikely. The kidnap of Refugee had been thought to be enough of a coup as well as a solution.
After two full watches of exploration – and the kind Wasn’t this more of an academic exercise anyway, Rojer wondered. They didn’t really need to know how the Hive ship worked, or who did what where and when. The navy did need to discover exactly where to aim what sort of missiles to destroy a Hive ship, or render it helpless.
Thian had located the lifesupport area, just above the queens’ level. The gas had destroyed whatever plant types generated oxygen although emergency supplies in tanks were carefully racked in adjacent storage space.
Thian’s second find were the round cases of food stuffs: all colour-coded, though whatever glyphs the spheres bore were indecipherable. The semantic experts were delighted with this much to work on. The ship seemed oddly devoid of signs of any type, though illumination proved that certain colours must be recognizable to various queen workers, or why bother colouring anything?
One of the `Dini xenobiologists suggested that a sample of each of the food cases be sent to the Heinlein Base. The queen had been quiescent far too long and the theory was that she might be missing some vital nutritional elements. Surely that could be remedied by supplying her with home-grown sustenance.
On the main schematic board, tubes, halls, oval access conduits, pipes and tunnels were appropriately coloured to match the originals.
Save for the irising airlocks, hangar and cargo bays, there were no doors.
There didn’t seem to be `crew’ quarters either but there were more of the larvae tubes, all spiking out from the various queen quarters, similar to the ones Thian and Lieutenant Auster-Kiely had discovered.
Empty, of course.
of vigilance required of the three Primes – Thian sent a message to Admiral del Falco that the Primes were going off duty.
`Don’t let him argue you out of it, Thian,’ Rojer said, the inexorable fatigue of nearly thirty hours of intense activity making itself felt in his mind and bones.
`I’m bushed.’ `That is quite obvious,’ Flavia said, but she spoke with such kind concern that Rojer couldn’t resent it.
She swung her legs to the side of her couch. `They’ve more than enough to keep them going with the main objectives found. They have enough personnel to swap round but we don’t have that option. I’m quite hungry!
Those sandwiches they sent up – oh, hours ago now have left a larger gap.