Lyon's Pride by Anne McCaffrey Page B

that three escape pods had managed to leave the Mother ship shortly before the nova shock wave hit it. The Human-mannedships had gone in search of the pods to prevent even a single queen from surviving to start a new colony on a hospitable world: a circumstance that the Alliance wished to thwart. One pod had already been captured and it contained a live queen. She had been “decanted,” as someone termed it, at the Heinlein Moon Facility, from which escape was unlikely. Her apprehension made her the first live specimen of this engimatic species for both Human and Mrdini. Shortly after her arrival at the Moon Facility, she had laid a huge mass of eggs.
    The other two pods had also been accounted for: or rather the remnants of the one which had collided with an asteroid and the other whose occupant had died when its supply of oxygen had given out.
    The
KLTS
, through Thian, had reported the absolute surety that the Hive home system had been incinerated by its nova-sun.
    Squadrons C and D were still in pursuit of the other two Hive ships, going further and further from their homeworlds. One lobby urgently wanted the squadrons to return on the grounds that the two Hive ships were light-years beyond any Alliance system and therefore no further threat.
    â€œNo immediate threat,” another faction rebutted, and urgently wanted the squadrons to explore the significant number of G-type star systems with M-5 planets that had been identified during the pursuit, to see why the Hive ships had ignored them. Were these already infested with the Hive species? But investigation was certainly in order to discover if these primaries had generated planets suitable for colonization for either species of the Alliance.
    The quandary of continued pursuit now obsessing the High Councillors was ethical in substance. Was it right to let the Hivers continue, knowing that once the Hive shipsfound the sort of world they needed to colonize they would exterminate whatever life form might exist? Certainly one of the avowed aims of the Alliance was to seek out and identify worlds that had been taken over by the Hive species and prevent them from developing to the stage where their population expanded to the point of recolonizing.
    Twenty eggs of the captive Hive queen had hatched, producing creatures who were apparently limited to attendance on the queen, cleaning her, bringing her food, or sent scurrying down the empty corridors of the Heinlein Base: useless errands, since there was nothing but unfurnished rooms, offering only more empty space.
    Of more immediate, and perhaps helpful, value was the refugee Hive ship which the Rowan-Thian-Flavia merge had purloined. It would soon be back at the main Earth naval base, totally free of the gases that had destroyed all organisms.
    Human and Mrdini naval specialists were impatient to examine an undamaged queens’ quarters which contained the control systems for the ship. The most important discovery would be navigational records or star charts that might identify which worlds were Hiver-occupied.
    Ever since the Rowan mind-merge had subdued the Many Mind on the Leviathan Hive ship attacking Deneb, it had been assumed that the queens managed all aspects of control on the ship, formulating tactics and forwarding orders to their specialized minions. Whether the duties were equally distributed among them or whether each of the ten to sixteen queens on board a colony ship had different responsibilities had yet to be discovered: hopefully from the type of controls in each queen’s quarters. Engineers, astronauts, and technicians, Human and Mrdini,were eagerly awaiting clearance to board this entire ship and begin their investigations.
    The Prtglm episode had somewhat eclipsed the positive activities of the Alliance: such as the tapes Rojer had taken, unique in establishing the culture, or rather agriculture, of the Hive species.
    Destroying Xh-33’s imminent colonization project was a