That’s how I found the hive-queen. A real one. Except she was just as dead as the crew.

The venom sacs on the queen were inflamed bright green, just like the holo I’d seen in the lounge. I guess that’s where the hologram came from — the captain had taken a picture of the queen as she sat in the ship’s hold.

From the look of the hold, the queen had done more than just sit there: she’d tried to rip straight through the walls with her claws. You wouldn’t think a creature of flesh and blood would be strong enough to gouge out whole chunks of steel-plast… but the far bulkhead was ribboned with huge ragged furrows, so deep I could stick my hand in up to the wrist.

If the walls looked bad, the queen’s claws looked worse. With all that smashing and bashing, her claws had got their points hammered down blunt and their armor plate fractured like peanut brittle. Sticky brown blood was still oozing up through the cracks in her shell.

It made me go sick in the stomach to see a queen all damaged and smashed. Injured. Broken. But it was a good thing she’d hurt herself too much to keep whacking on the walls; otherwise, she would have bashed through the hull and let hard vacuum into the ship.

Why was Willow transporting her here on her own, without attendants? Queens go mad if they aren’t milked every day. Her poor venom sacs were like two swollen balloons bulging up where her tail met her torso: both sacs had turned grass green against her yellow body, so you couldn’t possibly miss how full they were. Queen Verity once told me it hurt like daggers to go unmilked for even a few hours past ripeness, and this queen…

This queen wasn’t Queen Verity. And at the moment, I didn’t want to think about Verity, not with one of her royal sisters lying dead in front of me. Which one was this, I wondered. Queen Fortitude? Clemency? Honor? Or one of the queens-in-waiting who escaped from deep freeze while Troyen was spinning into civil war?