Chapter 136: Hunting Down The Hive
I spent three hours trying to find any type of information on The Hive. Do you think I found anything? Nope. Not a single fucking thing.
"Jun Li!" I growled, storming out of the library. The Alliance might think that they were ever so smart, erasing the very existence of their enemy, but that just made them that much stupider. Without information, they could hide all that much better. My problem was that they managed to hide from me.
"Jun Li!" I called out again.
"In the med bay," came a voice over the speaker. "Downloading a new language program into your boyfriend."
"Mate, not boyfriend," I said with a sigh. "Completely different and one distinction that I think he would appreciate you making."
"Fine, I am downloading information into your ’mates’ brain. What do you need?"
"I seem to remember us killing two Hive members when we first got free," I said as I headed towards the dining hall on my floor. I was hungry after not eating for a while.
There was a brief moment of silence before Jun Li managed to get back to me. "Yes, there were two Hive members that were seeking an alliance with the Sisalik."
"Where did you find them?" I demanded.
"What?" asked Jun Li, confused.
I entered the hall and sat down at one of the tables. Picking up the touchpad, I quickly put in an order for fettuccini alfredo with a side of garlic bread and an energy drink. "I want to find The Hive," I said, thinking that I had already made myself perfectly clear.
"Which one?" he replied just as a bot rolled up to me and deposited the energy drink onto the table in front of me. I was pretty sure that caffeine counted as its own food group right now.
"What do you mean, which one?" I asked. Apparently, it was now my turn to be confused.
"The Hive are all solitary creatures, especially since they are now stuck to ships. Each adult female lives and breeds independently," he explained.
Well, fuck me. That just made this first move infinitely more complicated.
"Let’s figure out how to get in contact with one Hive, and then we can move on from there," I said as the rest of my dinner appeared on the table in front of me. "And do you have any information on them?"
"I have a bit," said Jun Li. "I’ll upload it onto the computer in the library."
"Thanks," I said, breathing a sigh of relief as the first actual bit of food hit my tongue. I always seemed to forget how much I loved food until I was actually eating it. "I couldn’t find anything in the system," I grumbled.
"It’s partially because The Alliance doesn’t want other species to be able to find them and partially because they don’t want to be found."
"Why don’t they want to be found?" I asked, twirling some more pasta onto my fork before eating it. With the rate I was going through this plate, I might need something else, too. I wonder what I still had stocked up for dessert.
"They are assassins," came Midnight’s voice, and I looked up to see him entering the dining hall. "Sorry to interrupt," he said as he came to sit down at my table.
"Not interrupting. Sorry that I am not used to having people around. I probably should have asked if you wanted to eat with me. I’ll remember for next time," I said as I pushed the touchpad toward him. "Hopefully, you will find something you will like."
"Any recommendations?" he asked, looking at me.
"Start with the steak and potatoes and then work your way through the menu?" I suggested. Yes, I was making the assumption that he ate steak, but come on... he was a wolf. Those teeth poking out of his mouth were not used to graze on grass.
"Sounds good," he grunted, handing me back the pad, and I quickly pulled up the steak and potato option.
"How do you like your steak?" I asked, my finger hovering over the rare button.
"What is steak?" he asked cocking his head.
"A large chunk of meat," I said, knowing I wasn’t explaining something that could cost a few hundred dollars on Earth all that accurately.
"Uncooked," he grunted.
"Can you define uncooked?" I asked, scrunching my nose. "Are you talking like completely raw, cooked on the outside but still cold on the inside, or more cooked on the outside and warm on the inside?"
He looked at me like I was crazy, but I only shrugged my shoulders. "My species eat their meat a lot of different ways," I explained, "I haven’t even gotten to medium-rare, medium, medium-well, well done, and the one I personally refer to as charcoal."
He blinked at me and huffed out a sigh. "Just give me whatever way you like," he finally said. Luckily for him, I like my steak more on the rare side than well done.
"Perfect," I said, putting in his order. "And if that is cooked too much for you, let me know; I’ll introduce you to tartare."
"What’s that?" he asked, his head cocked to the side.
"Completely raw beef," I answered with a smile. It was my second favorite dish. Unfortunately, I found that there were a lot of places that didn’t know how to make it right. "Now, back to The Hive. What do you know about them?"
"Honestly, not that much. I try to avoid them as much as possible," he replied, and the server bot came out with his plate of food.
"Why?" I asked, needing to know absolutely everything possible before I tried to contact them. There was no point in letting them into my plans if I didn’t have enough leverage against them.
"They are a parasiticidal species that require a living host to be able to implant their eggs into," said Midnight, cutting into his steak. "Once they were hunted almost to extinction, the remaining colonies each took a ship and disappeared. However, they still reproduce the same way."
"So, they take the target, bring him or her back to the colony to implant an egg inside of the unwilling host, and make money off the whole transaction," I grunted in approval.
"Smart."
