Bee Speaker

From Arthur C Clarke award winner Adrian Tchaikovsky comes the third instalment of the Dogs Of War science fiction series

- Adrian Tchaikovsky

A distress call from an old world. A mission to save them. And now here they are - 300 million kilometres from home. And it has already gone horribly wrong.

Honestly, even though the walls of the Factory weren't exactly friendly on the eye, Cricket was glad to get into their shadow. Not that bad things couldn’t happen to you there, of course. If he was scared of the dog, well, this was where the dog came from. It was, to give the place its full name, the Dog Factory.

Tall concrete walls, narrow windows. Electric light, shining coldly within. There were ways of generating that, still, but they were feeble, unreliable things. The monastery’s antique solar panels often went a whole day without collecting enough to light a room an hour beyond dusk. Mostly they went without, fell back on more robust methods. Husbanded the understanding of such things for some future time when it would have a practical application. Here in the Factory, they'd never lost the use of them.

Partly it was that what the Apiary knew of the lost world was fragments and scraps compared to what the people of the Factory had never forgotten. Partly, that there were some places like this designed in the last years of the Old, built with redundancy in mind. The Factory generated its own power from the deep earth, or else the rushing of buried watercourses, or something else more reliable than the often-shrouded sun, or the fragile vanes and bearings of wind generators. The lights were always on there, and he could hear the rumble and judder of machines in the chambers beneath the earth. The places where the dogs were made.