Thren Valis's Arc

Chapter 2 of 18

Thren spent the morning counting beetles. She walked her greenhouse row by row, lifting vines, checking the underside of every leaf. The glowing insects clung to the wetter growth, their clear shells lit with green veins. She counted forty. Then sixty. By noon she had found a hundred and twelve. She stopped and sat on the woven floor. A ship's hull would need thousands. A hundred beetles could fuse a door, not a vessel. Any ship she started would sit half-formed and dead. She pressed her stained hands to her face and thought. Gathering more from the forest would take weeks she did not have. She needed the beetles to make more beetles, fast, and she needed them working in one place instead of scattered across her vines. That was the answer. She did not need to find beetles. She needed to breed them. Thren cleared a bench and began to build a home for them. She wove damp roots into a tight ball, layer over layer, the way she had seen the insects tunnel their own shelters in the wild. She left round mouths in the sides for the beetles to crawl through. In the dense center she packed rotting leaf and a fleshy hexagonal frond she cut from a nearby tree, the kind she had watched them feed on. Food and shelter in one core. A nest that fed itself. She carried the beetles to it one by one. Most fled deeper into the roots at once. A few gathered at the fleshy leaf and began to chew. She watched for an hour. Two crawled into a mouth and did not come out. She hoped that meant they were laying. By evening she had her proof. She pried gently at one root mouth and looked inside. The chewed leaf was studded with pale eggs, dozens of them, packed against the warm center. The beetles were breeding. The nest worked. Thren sat back, tired and green to the wrists. She did not have a hull. She had something better. She had a machine that would grow her workers while she slept, doubling and doubling until she had enough to fuse a whole ship. But the win carried its own trap. She lifted the nest and felt its weight, felt the heat coming off the packed core. The beetles needed constant food to keep breeding. The fleshy frond inside was already stripped half bare. One nest ate more leaf in a day than three of her plants could grow. To feed thousands of beetles, she would need a forest of that fleshy tree, not a bench. She looked out through the curved leaf panes at her small greenhouse. It could never grow enough. To feed her hive, she would have to leave this dome and go to where the fleshy trees grew wild and thick. Thren set the nest down and started planning the walk into the forest.