Earth Afire (The First Formic War) (31 page)

The earth exploded to Mazer’s right.

A shower of dirt and rocks and heat rained down on him.

Mazer looked up. A skimmer flew by overhead, having just missed him with a burst of its laser fire. The skimmer flew on for a hundred meters then abruptly turned back, changing its course with unnatural speed. It opened up its gun at a distance, unleashing a barrage of laser fire that tore into the downed HERC and slung shrapnel and burning wreckage in every direction. Hard, hot projectiles struck Mazer in the arm, the shoulder; a heavy, burning piece of metal fell across his leg. He cried out. The pain was immediate and unbearable, the heat intense. Panicked, Mazer pulled at his leg, desperate to free himself. But the fabric of his pant leg was snagged on the metal and held him fast. Screaming, burning, his body coursing with pain and adrenaline, he found the strength to sit up, push the metal off him, and pull his leg free.

The skimmer flew by overhead again, but Mazer didn’t track it with his eyes this time. He knew it would be coming back. Patu’s assault rifle still hung from her shoulder. He had dragged it out here with her. He crawled to it, pulling himself forward in the dirt. A part of him wanted to lie still and let the inevitable happen, to get it over quickly. Better to die in an instant than to suffer a long lingering death from a gut wound out here in the open. He knew help wasn’t coming. He knew he wouldn’t survive. His wounds were too serious. He was losing too much blood.

But there was the other part of him as well. The soldier. The warrior. The part that had been shaped by drills and exercises and mottos and principles. The bigger part of him, the stubborn, angry, Maori part of him.

He reached the rifle and pulled it free. It was hot to the touch, scorched in places. The screen said it still held three hundred rounds.

Mazer turned over onto his back. Sure enough the skimmer was coming for a third pass. The earth to his left exploded. Rock, dirt, heat. Mazer ignored it. The ground in front of him exploded, partially blocking his view. He waited a millisecond for the debris cloud to disperse, then he pulled the trigger. The gun screamed, shaking in his hands. He didn’t have the strength to hold it. He held it anyway. The vibrations felt as if they were ripping him in half inside, which they probably were. He fired anyway. A continuous burst of armor-piercing slugs.

The skimmers weren’t as durable as the troop carriers. The bullets ripped through the hull and pinged around inside in a violent ricochet. The rifle clicked empty. The skimmer flew by. Mazer turned his head to watch it pass. It descended rapidly, crashed, rolled, and took out a half-dozen trees before finally coming to rest in the dirt. Mazer watched it a moment. The wreckage smoked and hissed but didn’t move and nothing emerged from inside.

Mazer dropped the rifle. He could feel himself going into shock and losing consciousness again. He blinked his eyes, trying to stay awake, to focus, to use what time he could. He turned his head, searching for the med kit. It was there to his right. He reached for it. It was just beyond his fingertips. He didn’t have the strength to move any closer to it.

He reached again, straining.

His fingers brushed the handle. He reached again and this time the tips of his fingers curled around the handle and brought it close. It seemed to require an enormous effort. His eyes were heavy. He could feel his strength draining from him like a dying battery. He was going to bleed out. If he didn’t stanch the bleeding immediately he was going to bleed out.

His mind went to Kim. She would know exactly what to do here. She would know how to handle this. She would get into that medic mode, that laser-focused place her mind went to whenever there was serious trauma that needed fast, mistake-free action. He had seen her do it several times and marveled at how she could turn off the world that way and move like a preprogrammed machine. No doubting, no indecision, just go go go. Syringe, meds, pressure, equipment. Boom boom boom. Like a soldier. She had saved countless lives that way.

She couldn’t save his now.

He fumbled with the latch to the kit until the lid sprang open. He turned it over, and the contents spilled out, giving him a better view of everything. He found the packet he needed. He lifted it and brought the corner of it to his teeth, ripping the packet open and spitting out the torn edge. He pulled up his shirt and poured the powder in and around the wound. It burned, and he nearly lost his grip on the thing. But he held on and emptied the packet. Next came the wound gel. Mazer unscrewed the large cap and scooped the gel out with his fingers. Gingerly he spread the thick gel over the wound. The anesthetic worked almost immediately. Like a valve of pain had suddenly been turned to a lower setting. He couldn’t see the wound in his arm and shoulder, but his arm felt dead now. He scooped more of the gel and lathered it around the general area, not even sure if he was doing any good.

The gauze was self-sealing. He had the packet out. He tried to bring it to his lips to rip it open, but his hands weren’t working right anymore. They were heavy and clumsy and too weak to hold anything. The world was fuzzy at the edges. The sounds of the fire and the wind were fading.

He didn’t want to sleep. If he slept, he wouldn’t wake up.

But the sleep pulled at him, lulled him, and in his mind he saw Kim kneeling over him and sadly shaking her head. Sorry, my love, she seemed to be saying. This one is beyond even me.

CHAPTER 16

Last Chance

The latest transmission from Luna came in, and Victor read it aloud. Imala floated nearby, listening. Landers had set down in China. They had carried skimmers and troop carriers and flyers. The aliens were spraying defoliants all along the countryside, killing vegetation and crops and civilians, leaving everything to rot in the sun. Flyers from the landers were dumping bacteria in the South China Sea, killing marine life. The Chinese Air Force was creaming the flyers, but the land war was a different story. Air strikes against the landers were completely ineffective. The landers were shielded somehow. Direct hits inflicted no damage whatsoever. Chinese ground troops were engaging the aliens in the open, but always at heavy losses. Early estimates put casualty numbers in the thousands.

Victor stopped reading, turned to the monitor, and started digging through the ship’s archives for a map. “Where is China exactly?” he said.

“You don’t know where China is?” Imala said.

He turned to her, his cheeks flushing, embarrassed and angry. “No, Imala. I don’t know where China is. I’ve never been to Earth, remember?”

She blinked. “Of course. Sorry. Here, I’ll show you.”

She came forward, but he put up a hand, stopping her. “You know what? Never mind. I’ll find it myself.” He turned back to the monitor. As soon as he did so, he regretted it. He was being overly sensitive, rude even. Imala was trying to help, and he was snapping at her because he was ashamed of his own ignorance. He rubbed his eyes, waited for the hot flush of embarrassment to subside from his face, then turned around to apologize. Imala was on the other side of the shuttle with her back to him now, rereading the news feeds on the other monitor. Victor opened his mouth to speak, but then said nothing. She was probably angry with him. She had every right to be.

He turned back to his monitor and dug around until he found a map of Earth. It took him a few minutes to decipher it. The map had been designed for commercial ships moving between Luna and Earth, so it was loaded with superfluous information like trade routes and atmospheric entry and exit vectors. Victor made all that invisible and then found China quickly. It was a big country.

The map included several wiki entries, and Victor read through them, feeling more ignorant by the moment. He had known China was a country—there had been a few Chinese corporate miners in the Kuiper Belt. But China’s nationhood had been the extent of his knowledge on the subject. He had not known that China was in a continent called Asia, or that it was the most populated country in the world, or that the Chinese language spoken by the corporates was actually one of many variations of Chinese, or that the language was written in ridiculously difficult to decipher characters instead of letters. In other words, he hadn’t known what every schoolchild on Earth probably knew.

Again, he felt stupid and frustrated. How was he supposed to get into a university when he couldn’t even name the continents? An admissions committee would laugh him to scorn. All their perceptions of free miners as dumb, bumbling grease heads was true. It wasn’t a stereotype, it was him.

Oh sure, he could fix things. He could take a busted water pump and rebuild it with nothing but scrap metal and discarded circuits, but he couldn’t tell you the capital of Japan. And now that he thought about it, he wasn’t even certain Japan was a country. Was it a state somewhere? Or a province? He looked it up.

Country.

Yeah, you’re a real brain, Victor. A genius.

He was sure Mother had taught him all of this at some point. He remembered lessons on geography when he was little. But he had been, what, seven years old at the time.

Then again, maybe he had missed that lesson. He had started apprenticing with Father at a young age, much younger than was the norm. So he had been absent for a lot of the classes. Mother and Father had argued about it. Mother had wanted Victor to stay with the other children and sit through the lessons, but Father had wanted Victor’s help and had said that the survival of the family took precedence. Mother had been insistent however; Father would just have to find someone else.

Father had tried that, using a fifteen-year-old boy for a while named Gregor. But it hadn’t worked out. Gregor had initially been assigned to the kitchen, and it soon became clear to Father why. “The boy doesn’t think,” Father had said. “He’s slow. He can’t work his way through a repair. The parts are all pieces to him. He can’t see how they go together, how they intertwine and function as one.”

“So teach him,” Mother had said.

“I’m trying,” Father had said. “That’s the problem. I spend half my day trying to drill a simple principle into the kid’s head, and the other half of the day I’m redoing what he did wrong. I’m losing time. And all the while, this ship is continuing to break down. I’ve got a backlog of work orders now, some of them critical. This kid isn’t helping. He’s dragging me down. I do more without him. I need Victor.”

And so on special repairs—ones that needed a second person to hold a pipe while Father tightened it, or ones that needed a tiny child’s hand to reach into a small space and remove something—Victor had tagged along. At first these had been exceptions, but slowly, over time, Father had become more and more dependent on Victor until Victor was going with Father more than he was going to class. And then eventually, without anyone acknowledging it aloud, Victor was going with Father every day.

So perhaps Mother had taught all the children about China, and Victor had simply been elsewhere on the ship at the time, crawling through an HVAC duct or squeezed into an engine room or packed tight beside a water heater, making some repair to keep the ship moving and the family alive.

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Vico,” said Imala. “I was just surprised you had never heard of China before.”

She was behind him, hovering there, which of course only made him blush again. He should have apologized earlier. It should be him instigating this conversation. He turned around, not caring now if she saw how embarrassed he was. “I’ve heard of China, Imala. I just didn’t know anything about it. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I was out of line. I’m sorry.” He sighed. “I just can’t help but feel like an idiot. I should know all of these things about Earth, but I don’t.”

“You’re space born, Vico. Earth has never been your world. You grew up on a ship in the Kuiper Belt. You think I know anything about the Kuiper Belt? I couldn’t tell you two facts about the Deep.” She smiled. “Let’s help each other. Isn’t that how a free-miner family works? Everybody has their expertise, and you work together, sharing skills and information. Stronger together than alone, and all that?”

He smiled. It should be him making this argument. He should be the peacemaker. “That’s the gist of it, yes. Although if we were a real miner family, we’d also be yelling at each other and threatening to kill each other. You’d be calling me a pig-faced rockhead, and I’d be crying and saying how I wished I’d never been born in this family.”

She held her smile. “Something tells me your family isn’t like that.”

He shrugged. “Not usually, but we have our moments. It wasn’t a very big ship. When you have that many people in that tight of a space, everyone’s faults are glaringly obvious. Believe me, we had our disagreements.”

In truth, El Cavador had never felt tight or close-quartered to Victor. It was simply the life he knew. People crammed in together to sleep. That’s what you did. You stacked four or five or even six hammocks on top of each other—so close together that turning over in your sleep would likely brush your hammock up against someone else’s. It wasn’t always comfortable—there were smells and other annoyances occasionally—but that’s how you lived.

Now that Victor had spent time on Luna, now that he understood Imala’s world and all the space it afforded, he realized how confining this shuttle must seem to her. It made her sacrifice to accompany him all the more selfless and significant. She was doing this for him, suffering for him, and he was acting ungrateful.

“Let’s dock at the depot,” he said. “A few umbilicals have opened up. Let’s go inside and stretch our legs. We’ll take a holopad and read the feeds in there for a while.”

“They’re charging ridiculous docking prices,” said Imala. “They bill you by the hour. We don’t have that kind of money.”

“I do,” said Victor.

“Yeah, money for your education.”

“Which I’m not likely to get. Please, Imala, let me buy you lunch. We could both use a breather.”

They docked and floated down the umbilical to the café. There were few people inside. Victor launched toward a table near the back, away from everyone else, and strapped himself in. Imala followed, and soon a waitress floated over.