Science Fiction and Adventure

Welcome To The Hive:                                  

“If extraterrestrial life is abundant in the universe, then why aren’t they already here?”

Professor Enrico Fermi

Maybe the answer is: they haven’t arrived yet.                                                                                              

Another possibility for contact is with an alien probe—one that would be trying to find human beings—is an alien Bracewell probe. Such a device would be an autonomous space probe whose purpose is to seek out and communicate with alien civilizations.

But what if the purpose of such a device was of a far more sinister nature?  What if aliens are already on the way?

"I think it would be a disaster. The extraterrestrials would probably be far in advance of us. The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species. I think we should keep our heads low."

Professor Stephen Hawking                                                                                      

The Earth Has Been Found!

The HIVE is coming!

This is the story of The Hive: It begins over 10,000 years ago, when man’s most powerful weapons were the spear and the bow and arrow for this is the time of the great migration.  The Hive. having exhausted the resources of their own solar system move out among the stars to take what they require:

         It was late in the season.  Mating had concluded, and the eggs were being tended to. The ritual killing of the "different" was only twelve rotations away. Millions of the “wrong” and of the unfit would be torn to pieces in the powerful mandibles of the “correct.”  The bodies of the “wrong” would serve as a food source for the growing larvae of the new generation.  This is how it had been since the earliest ancestors of the Hive, had been nearly mindless crawling things, scraping their armored carapaces across the dry landscape of the Hive home world.  The Hive had expanded.  The Hive had conquered and exploited their system of worlds until there was no longer room for their exploding numbers, and their systems’ resources were near exhaustion.  Yet, an imperative deep in their genetics drove them with the unquenchable need to expand.  The facetted lenses of the Thinker and Engineer casts had scanned the stars.  The new ships had been built.  The Hive in a great swarm was ready to move out among the stars, to conquer and exploit the worlds of other suns.   If those worlds they came upon were inhabited, it was no concern to the Hive; they would exterminate all other life forms, for the Hive must dominate at all costs to survive and expand.

  June  30, 1908: Our fate is sealed in the skies above Tunguska, Siberia:

The probe swept across in a descending orbit about the blue and white sphere and sent images, temperature and atmospheric data back to the main body of the robot ship to be collected and sent to the Hive.  It was an inhabited planet which meant a food source to support the next generation of Hive conquers.  The probe had completed its task and in its last orbit around the target world, fell toward the great northern land mass, devoid of inhabitants.  If a target world held intelligent beings, the probe had been programmed to destroy itself without any trace or evidence to serve as a warning that the Hive would be coming.  Ten kilometers over the great swampy forests of Northern Siberia, a tiny laser igniter fired an intense beam of energy through a precisely drilled channel. It was directed through a series of optical surfaces then reflected off a perfectly spherical core of polonium.  The beam was focused on a tritium isotope pellet in the center of the core. Packed within the compartment and surrounding the polonium core was more tritium encased in beryllium.  The beam superheated and compressed the tritium heart of the core, and the atomic nuclei began a runway fusion reaction.  In an instant, a new sun filled the sky over Tunguska as the force of a fifteen megaton nuclear explosion devastated the forest below, erasing the visit of the probe without a trace. Because the self-destruct device lacked a plutonium trigger, it produced no measurable radiation.   On June 30, 1908, at 7:15 in the morning local time, the Earth had been found. The Hive would be coming.

One hundred and ten years later,  an unmanned probe to the outer planets built by the United States and Russia, by astronomical odds, crosses orbits with the main bus of the alien sentry:

Moscow: October 2018: Tatiana Zhdanova watched the ever lengthening bar on her monitor that indicated the images from deep space were being compiled in the computer main frame cache. An image popped into focus. It was not what she had expected.  The ringed sphere of Saturn was partially blocked by a … a thing!  A thing that did not make sense but appeared to be some kind of spacecraft. Tatiana’s voice was near the edge of panic.  “The alien craft is operational!  Our probe flew through its data stream!  Someone or something out among the stars is watching us, listening to us, knows about us!  I’m afraid.”

With less than three years warning can the nations of the world put aside their differences and unite to do battle with horrific, unstoppable race bent on the conquest of Earth?  In ten thousand years of effortless conquest of system after system by The Hive, this time it will be different. This time their prey knows what’s coming. This time conquest will not be so easy.

The Hive will keep you biting your nails, page after page as the forces Earth discover the true nature of the alien device and its purpose.  It’s a race against time to prevent the conquest of humanity by an alien menace that has spread to hundreds of worlds, laying waste to everything in their path.  It’s a race made more complicated by one nation at odds with the world community, seeking their own agenda.

It’s a story of two people, Colin Hewette an American aerospace engineer and Marina Asamova, a Russian SETI expert who find love against a countdown to invasion

Enter The HIVE to answer the question: Will mankind survive?           

The Hive: Available at bookstores this January, 2009

ISBN: 9780979975738    ISBN10: 0979975735