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others.
    She stood over the Hive Queen's body while Ender took holoimages of the corpse.
    "Don't touch it," Ender said. "She'll crumble into dust."
    "So I guess this means interrogation is out of the question," said Carlotta.
    "Go ahead and ask her anything," said Sergeant.
    Carlotta didn't feel like joking any longer. "Somebody piloted this boat, and it wasn't her. But I can't trace the communications system because there isn't one."
    Ender was oblivious to their concerns. "I've got all the images I can and they're stored back on Herodotus . So I'm going to take a sample."
    "What happened to 'crumble into dust'?" asked Sergeant.
    "I'll be careful," said Ender.
    Carlotta saw that Ender really did have a delicate touch -- he lifted off sections of dried-up Hive Queen from various regions of the corpse, but never disturbed anything, or even pressed downward. Just nipped a bit, raising it as he did, and pushed it into self-sealing sample bags.
    "The Formics were really good at genetics," said Carlotta.
    "But no lab," said Ender. "Not here, anyway. Or their lab was the Queen's own ovaries. By an act of will she could decide when to extrude an egg that would become a new queen. And presumably to create an egg that would become a rab instead of a worker."
    "It can't have been reflexive," said Sergeant. "She had to plan what she was doing, at least when she was making rabs."
    "And while she was doing that," said Carlotta, "who was piloting the ship?"
    "She was," said Ender.
    "And who was tending to the ecotat, and who was doing maintenance everywhere, and who was reporting to the other Hive Queens on other worlds?"
    "She was," said Sergeant. "Hive Queens are smarter than we are."
    "Multitasking is fine, but was she really seeing and hearing the sensory input of all her workers at the same time, equally well? Or did she concentrate her attention where it was needed?"
    "The individual Formic workers weren't just an extension of her mind," said Sergeant. "Not like hands and feet. More like perfectly obedient ... children."
    "Somebody piloted this ship," said Carlotta, "and she wasn't there to control them. What if some of the Formic workers survived her death? If she wasn't controlling every thought in their heads, if they had the independence to learn their job and do it even when the Queen wasn't paying attention, then when she died, they could go on."
    "No," said Sergeant. "It makes sense, but we know that every Formic worker died when the Hive Queens died. There were assault teams on some of the Formic planets when Wiggin killed the Hive Queens, and the human soldier reported that all the Formics stopped fighting at once. Stopped running, stopped doing anything . They lay down and died."
    "But they lay down," said Carlotta.
    "Dropped," said Sergeant.
    "I read the same reports," said Ender. "They lay down. Some of them had vital signs for as long as half an hour. So Carlotta's right. There were at least some body systems in the workers that kept going for at least a little while after the Hive Queens died."
    "What if this Hive Queen, knowing she was going to die, gave some of her workers instructions to keep piloting the ship?" asked Carlotta.
    The others nodded. "We can't know what mechanism makes the Formics die when the Queen does," said Ender. "Maybe there's an exception."
    "Let's find the helm and see," said Sergeant.
    Carlotta looked out over the sea of rot that surrounded her. "Home sweet home," she said. "I'm trying to see this the way she did, when she was alive. All these little holes were like wombs for her eggs. All these slugs were being herded here to feed her and feed her babies."
    Ender pointed up. "Don't forget the ceiling."
    Carlotta looked up. Lots of stringy protuberances hung down from the highest points. A few of them had melon-sized balls hanging from them.
    "What's that?" Carlotta asked.

     
    "Cocoons. I'm sure they're all dead, but I'm going to want to take one back to the lab to study, if I can," said