It was a beautiful design of the explorer caste: The armor, made for easy movement, would not be broken.

***

Jin walked the streets of the Hiveworld, silent.  Above her, various building symbiotes constructed new buildings with no fear of falling; would they do that, their organic parachutes would catch them, and their tentacle arms would drag them back to the building.  All around her, food-runners and couriers carried their nutrients and parcels to their destinations.  As they went, her symbiote leeched from one of the food-carriers.  She ignored it, for the most part, as it pumped the food into her body.  She had more important things on her mind.

She had a briefing to attend in half an hour, and it was a good deal of walking distance away.  If she could run in this crowded street, she wouldn’t worry.  She could run quickly and agilely if she had to; she had been tested for agility, speed, and stamina.  However, the chaos such an action would be irreparable.  The system was based on order.

The thoughts floated from her mind, and she took care to stop her symbiote from filing the thoughts away in its mind for later use.  Careless thought-retention was punishable.  Too many thoughts in a head made a Szert-Epi insane.  They were best off dead.

She continued to walk, her symbiote breaking away from feeding.  She turned a corner, and the crowd thinned a little.  Still silent, she trudged onward, maintaining the constant speed set by the others in this street.  No one said anything, but the silence, as far as Jin was concerned, was comforting.  Random noises caused chaos.  Chaos was useless to the system.

As she walked, she noted her position, and she calculated her ETA.  Perhaps ten more minutes of walking would get her there.  Then, she would be ten minutes early. 

With military precision, she turned a corner into a busier street, her pace matching that of hundreds of other walkers.  There was the building up ahead.  She cut through the columns of symbiotes and turned into the building. 

It was a large, cave-like building, well-lit, but with black walls.  The main resource for building materials was a black excretion of the builder symbiotes, so of course it made sense for the coloring.  She waited for the guard symbiote to taste her excretion, and then she walked into the building.  Down the hallways with a heavy marching gait she went, looking for the door with all four of her eyes as a symbiote.  There it is, right on her left, one of her side-mounted eyes insists.  She turns and affirms this, opening the door.

Inside, the room is cooler than the corridor outside.  The lighting is also a bit less harsh, and a man is seated behind a desk.  She enters, taking the only seat left open and waits.

The man behind the desk waits a few moments more and then rises.  “We will begin,” he announces, rising and distributing reading material for each of them.  “For those of you who don’t know, I am Captain Ellish’naroll.  You may, of course, call me Ell.  You have been selected to explore planet MF17G.  You will depart in two days’ time, so make certain you review the materials presented.  I will be leading the mission, and each of you will be playing a vital part.  Kai’seresh will be our second in command.”  A man across from Jin nodded.  “Sel’in’jo will be our terrain specialist.”  The woman next to Kai’seresh nodded.  “Essen’tach’nir will be the quartermaster.”  The next man over nodded.  “And Jinno’bhear’lion will be in charge of recon and initial settlement plans.”  Now it was Jin’s turn to nod.  “The rest of the flight going up will be grunts.  Each of you will be assigned a specific number to do running for you.  I think that takes care of the rank designations for now.  Are there any questions before we move on to the planet itself?”

No one raised his hand.

“Good.  Please accommodate yourselves for nocturnal settings,” Ell said.  Each symbiote flicked extra eyelids off of their side-mounted eyes and waited as a projector displayed a planet blotched with white, yellow, and blue.  “This is MF17G,” he said, stepping beside the image.  “We believe that it is uninhabited, but spectral analysis of the atmosphere suggests that it has an atmosphere which is able to be transferred into breathable air by our symbiotes.”

Kai’seresh’s hand shot up.

“Yes? Kai’seresh?”

“Just Kaiser, please.”

“Kaiser, then?”

“What’s the yellow from, if the atmosphere is breathable?”

“We believe that to be the indigenous plant life.”

Sel’in’jo raised her hand.

“Sel’in’jo?”

“Just Sel, if you would.”

“Sel, then?”

“How far away is this planet that our telescopes can not achieve a clear enough picture of the surface?”

“Twenty light years away.  Simply a skip of a stone to our ships, though.”

“Indeed.”

“Any other questions?”  Ell was met by silence.  “Then we continue.  We will be landing on the largest of the landmasses, about here.”  The slide changed to a frontal view of the largest land mass and zoomed in towards a great plain region between two blue areas.  “We believe the blue to be water, though we may be mistaken, so we’ll be flying in tanks of liquid as well.”  A new slide flashed up, the same general picture, with lines and diagrams drawn on it.  “The first day, we’ll set up a smallish camp and begin taking samples.  Second day, we’ll expand a bit, and each of you will begin your duties en masse.  We’ll be here for thirty days, pulling out on the off chance that things get messy.  We’ll be going in mostly blind, so don’t leave your wits on the Hiveworld.  You’ll find most of the details in the report.  Any other questions?”

Ell was met with silence again.

“Excellent.  I’ll see you all in two days.  Review the material.  Accommodate yourselves for daytime settings.”  Jin’s peripheral eyes flicked down two almost-clear lids.  The lights turned on again.  “You’re dismissed.”

They waited for Ell to leave, and then Kaiser, and then Sel, and then Essen’tach’nir all left.  Jin was the last one in the room, and she waited for the others to have gone a while before she, also, left.  She was, after all, the lowest caste among them.  She could tell simply by knowing their specialties.  Once she waited the allotted time, she, too, left, returning to her home.  She hoped there would be a quiet corner somewhere.  She had a lot of reading to do.

***

Jin woke early, before most of the hive was awake, and began to walk.  She wanted to reach the launch pad early, before the streets were filled.  She had filed away the statistics of the planet MF17G for quick and easy reference at a later point in time.  As she left the district limits, she was careful to walk only in assigned zones for her caste.  The higher castes didn’t trust hers too much yet.  Hers was a new caste, recently developed in the passed century for the exploration of planets.  It was still relatively unstable, and the Epi broodlings born to it were more prone to logging rebellious thoughts.  Many in the hive where Jin lived were malcontent with the caste system.  Few of them got as much work as she did.

The streets were beginning to crowd again as the workers changed shifts for their duties.  The nocturnal workers got less work than those operating in daylight, so there were fewer of them, but each was worked as hard as the daylight workers.  She wove between them, staying to the zones marked for her caste, crossing only when the zone crossed.  In such a manner, she made her way to the launch pad.

The launch building was also a large, cavernous black building, but it did not stretch as high into the air as most of the buildings of the city did.  Large metal pieces thrust into the air, as did a few ships that were ready for lift-off.  This was where most of the metal had gone once the symbiotes made machines obsolete. 

She entered the main building, the guard tasting an excretion to allow her inside.  She battled through a hectic rush of scientific couriers who never left the launch buildings, and carefully avoided them.  Couriers always seemed to get angry when interrupted.

She stopped at the information desk and touched tentacles with one of the posted officials to know where to find the bay she was supposed to be in for the launch.  Then, she left again.  She arrived at the launch bay in a little over five minutes.

Kaiser was there, speaking with Ell.  They both stopped to look up when Jin approached.  She averted her gaze and bent her head, showing the proper respect for being in the same room as superiors for an extended period of time.  Kaiser, she noticed, shifted uneasily.  Ell approached her, cheerfully.

“Ready to go, Jinno’bhear’lion?” he asked.

“Just Jin, please.”

“As you wish.  Your locker is over this way, if you’ll just follow me, please.”  He led her away at a moderate pace.  When they were out of earshot, Ell spoke softly to her.  “I know we must on the Hiveworld, he said, but once we leave the atmosphere, I want us all to function as equals.  We’re bringing grunts along for a reason, so please don’t let Kaiser order you about.”

“As you wish,” Jin replied, following him into a room.

“Right in here.  It has your name on it.  Please familiarize yourself with the special shields for the peripheral eyes, as well as the thermoskin device within.”  That said, he left her to enter alone.

Hesitantly, she opened the door.  Sel and Essen were inside, discussing something.  When she entered, they looked up and then continued speaking.  She made her way to the locker and opened it, noting the shroud to protect her eyes.  She looked around the locker, but there was no sign of the thermoskin anywhere.  That was odd, she knew.  Quietly, she turned.  Sel and Essen were both still there. 

“Um, excuse me?” she asked.  “Essen’tach’nir?”

He stopped speaking to Sel and looked over at her.  “Yes?” he asked.

“We were supposed to be issued thermoskin, Ell told me, but I can’t seem to find mine.”

Essen smiled.  “New model,” he said.  “Remember your last mission, where each piece had to be custom fitted to cover your Szert body, but leave the Epi pieces to function properly?”

“Yes,” Jin replied hesitantly.

“We don’t use that anymore.  It was too costly, and too many symbiotes died of improper application.”

“Then what do we use?”

Essen reached in and lifted the optical shroud, revealing a bulky silver bracelet, inlaid with a blue oval of some unknown substance.  “Your new thermoskin is stored inside this blue ball,” he explained.  “Please give me your hand.”  She did as she was told, and he slid the bracelet over her hand, where it stuck and stayed.  “Now, watch,” he said.  “You roll the ball forward swiftly to extend the thermoskin.”  He did this, and a quick chill covered the Szert parts of her body.  “You roll it back quickly to retrieve it.  While you have it on, you can roll it forward again slowly to activate the camouflage.  Back again slowly will end the camouflage.  Left makes it warmer, right makes it cooler.  Please adjust it to your desired heating.”

Jin marveled at the much safer, more useful thermoskin she had just been issued.  “Thank you, Essen’tach’nir,” she said reverently.

“Are there any questions?” he asked her.

“No, none, thank you.”

“I trust you are familiar with the optic shrouds?”

“Very much, thank you.”  She took hers from her locker and nodded before leaving, fiddling with the temperature of the thermoskin as she went.

Behind her, Essen and Sel resumed their conversation.

***

“Everyone strapped in back there?” Ell called from the pilot’s seat in the small and durable shuttle.  Various calls of ‘yes’ and ‘affirmative’ were the answers.  “Alright.  Everyone, shield your peripheral eyes.”

Jin reached up as her eyes flicked down all the eyelids before pulling the soft, black gauze over each of them.  The other flight officers did likewise.

“Shield frontal eyes.”

Jin closed her eyes, and a soft but thick secretion poured out of her symbiote around her face, covering her eyes so that she couldn’t open them until she was out of sight of the brightest stars and the friction of the atmosphere.

“Double check harnesses.”

Four voices chorused “Check” back at him.

“Right, then.”  He pressed a button to his left.  “Stratinoch to command, come in.”

“Command here, Stratinoch.”

“We are ready for lift-off, command.”

“Roger that, Stratinoch.  You are green for liftoff.  Commencing countdown.  Ten minutes on the clock.”

“Roger that command.”

As Kaiser and Ell ran through the flight checklist, Jin felt familiar butterflies dancing in her stomach.  It wasn’t her first mission off the planet, that was for certain.  Almost every member of her caste had been off-world once.  It was blissful and euphoric, finding new worlds and resources, and exploring virgin worlds that no one before her had ever touched.  And now, as always, she was excited to begin again.  What would be on this new world?  What sort of danger would face them?  What sort of new resources would they find?

And then, the final countdown began.  As Ell and mission control counted down the seconds from twenty, Jin fought her stomach to keep it out of her throat.  And then, Ell lit the engines, and the Gs began to suck her stomach down on its own.  She forced herself to breathe as the fires of friction on the atmosphere danced across the front viewing panel.  Within the hour, they were out in the blackness of space, and Ell taxied the shuttle away from the system, lining it up with the coordinates given by the telescopes.  He suggested they all get to sleep, and then keyed them in to a near-light speed warp. 

Jin’s heart skipped a beat, and she began to let her mind rest, her breathing deepening.  They’d be there soon enough, and who knew what sort of things would greet them all?