Earth Awakens (The First Formic War) (2 page)

“What a pack of crap,” said Bungy.

“Brilliant crap,” said Deen. “Crap that might get the Captain and Rackham out of jail.”

“This little orphan boy is playing international politics better than most grown-ups,” said Bolshakov. “Don’t ask Sima anything, don’t beg, don’t extract. Just give him all the credit and announce to everybody that our men are in his headquarters. He’s not going to
deny
any of this. We did this without his consent and it worked, but by giving him credit for it we take away all his embarrassment and give him every incentive to treat our guys like heroes.”

“I wrote it in Chinese because I know how to make it sound formal and proper,” said Bingwen. “But now I need somebody with better English to write it so it will sound right in the international version.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Deen and Bolshakov helped Bingwen make a credible sentence-by-sentence translation into credible English that sounded as if it might be the original from which Bingwen’s announcement had been translated. Meanwhile, ZZ and Cocktail came up with a recipient list that included high Chinese government offices, MOPs’ own headquarters, and news nets around the world. “One more thing,” said Deen. “Sign Captain O’Toole’s name to it.”

“He won’t like that,” said ZZ.

“He’ll love it, if it gets him away from the Chinese,” said Deen.

A few moments later, Deen reached down into the holodisplay and twisted send.

“If this doesn’t work,” said Cocktail, “we can still go in and kill a lot of people and drag our guys out like in an action movie.”

“What Cocktail is saying,” ZZ translated to Bingwen, “is that if this works, you saved a lot of people’s lives and got us out of a jam.”

What Bingwen was thinking was: Mazer wasn’t killed by the nuke or the Formics, and maybe I just saved him from the Chinese.

CHAPTER 2

Glow Bugs

Victor cut into the Formic ship knowing full well that he would likely never come out again. There were simply too many variables beyond his control, too many unknowns. What was beyond the metal wall in front of him, for example? A squadron of Formics waiting with weapons drawn? An automated security system that would incinerate him the moment he stepped inside?

He had no way of knowing. The ship was the largest structure he had ever seen, bigger even than most asteroids his family had mined in the Kuiper Belt. And every square meter of it inside was a mystery. How could he possibly find the helm and plant the explosive if he had no idea where the helm was located? There might not even be a helm, for that matter. And even if there was, how could he reach it undetected?

He pushed such thoughts out of his mind and focused on the wall in front of him, turning his head from left to right so that the beams of light from his helmet could illuminate its surface and show him every detail.

He had reached a dead end, or more accurately the bottom of the hole he had climbed into, a hole on the side of the ship so deep and dark and narrow that it reminded him of the mine shafts his family had dug into asteroids.
Pajitas por las piedras
, Father had called them. Straws through the rock.

Father. The thought of him was still like a knife inside Victor.

Even now, weeks after learning of Father’s death, Victor still couldn’t fully grasp the idea. Father was gone. The one constant in Victor’s life, the one unshakable foundation Victor had always clung to was gone.

It was Father who had always been the steady voice of reason during a family crisis. If there was a mechanical breakdown on the ship, for example, if life-support was failing, Father never panicked, he never lost faith, he never doubted for an instant that a solution could be reached, even when Victor saw no possible outcome. Father’s calm, set expression of absolute confidence seemed to say, We can solve this, son. We can fix it.

And somehow, despite the odds against them, despite having hardly any replaceable parts, Father had always been right. They
had
fixed it, whatever it was, a busted coupler, a faulty water purifier, a damaged heating coil. Somehow, with a bit of luck and ingenuity and prayers to the saints, Victor and Father had set everything right again. The solution was rarely pretty—a jury-rigged, make-do repair that would only last them long enough to reach the nearest depot or weigh station—but it was always enough.

And now that pillar of confidence was gone, leaving Victor feeling untethered from the only anchor he had ever known.

A voice sounded in Victor’s earpiece. “Are you sure you want to go through with this, Vico?”

It was Imala. She was outside in the shuttle, hovering a few hundred meters from the Formic ship. She and Victor had flown the shuttle from Luna, moving at a slow, drifting pace so as not to alert the Formics’ collision-avoidance system. Victor was now sending her a live feed from his helmetcam.

“If you want to pull out now, I won’t think any less of you,” said Imala.

“You said it yourself, Imala. We can’t sit idly by. If we can do something, we should do it.”

She knew the risks as well as he did, and yet she had insisted on accompanying him.

“We don’t know what we’re getting into,” said Imala. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t help. I’m saying we should be certain. If you start cutting there, there’s no turning back.”

“This is the only place I
can
cut, Imala. I can’t cut through the hull outside. It’s covered with those plate-sized apertures, any one of which could open while I’m hovering above it and unleash laserized material directly into my handsome face. Cutting out there would be like cutting into the barrel of a loaded gun.”

“Keep telling yourself your face is handsome and it might come true,” said Imala.

Victor smiled. She was making light, breaking up the tension like Alejandra used to do.

Alejandra, his cousin and dearest friend back on his family’s ship, El Cavador. She and Victor had teased each other like this constantly. She, telling him that he was knobby kneed or laughing at him for squeaking like a girl whenever she or Mono had jumped out of a hiding place and startled him. And he, mimicking her whenever he caught her humming while she worked. Hers were pleasant little melodies that seemed to sway back and forth like a swing. “What are you humming about anyway?” he had asked her once. “What’s so pleasant about doing the laundry?”

“I’m telling myself a story,” she had said.

“A story? With hums? Stories require words, Janda.”

“The story is in my head, genius. The humming is … like the soundtrack.”

“So you’re telling yourself a story and making up the music while you’re washing other people’s clothing. You’re quite the multitasker, Janda. And these stories, let me guess, they’re about a handsome, teenage mechanic who can fix anything and build anything and smells as sweet as roses.”

She had looked at him with such a start, with such an expression of surprise on her face, that at first he had thought he had offended her. But the look had vanished an instant later, and Janda had returned to smiling and scrubbing the clothes again, with her hands in the dry gloves box where the sudsy water was contained. “Victor Delgado,” she had said. “Don’t you know? If I ever created a story about you, I would make it a true story. You wouldn’t smell like roses, you would smell like farts.” Then she had flung open the dry gloves box and threw a soaked shirt in his face. And the next moment she was roaring with laughter because in his surprise, in his twisting to avoid the soaked fabric, he
had
farted. Accidently of course, something he would never do in front of her, but there it was.

And she was still laughing when he finally got his feet anchored to something and grabbed the shirt and flung it back at her. She had dodged it easily, and a heartbeat later he was flying away up the corridor of the ship, humiliated and yet laughing inside as well.

She had gotten in trouble for that, he remembered. Water had leaked out of the scrubbing box, and it had taken four women a good twenty minutes to collect it from the air and the crevices in the wall.

He should have seen it then. He should have known that the friendship they shared was something more than that. Why hadn’t he recognized what those feelings truly were?

Because he had never experienced them before, he told himself. Because they had come on so gradually all his life that by the time he recognized them for what they were, it was too late to stop them.

It made little difference now. Janda was gone. Just like Father.

And here he was talking to Imala the same way. Why? Because it was natural? Because he missed that part of himself, the part that could tease a friend? It wasn’t flirtatious. Or at least he hoped it didn’t seem that way. He was eighteen. Imala was … what? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? He was a child to her. Did she
think
him flirtatious?

Imala’s face appeared in Victor’s HUD, snapping him from his reverie. “If you’re having doubts, Vico, then let’s rethink this.”

She had mistaken his hesitation for fear. “I’m fine, Imala. I’m just taking a moment to consider how best to do this.”

He unstrapped the duffel bag from around his back and pulled out the bubble, an inflatable dome designed to form an airtight seal on the side of the ship. With Victor inside the bubble, he could cut a hole into the ship without exposing it to the vacuum of space.

Victor pulled the ripcord, and the bubble filled with air and assumed its domed shape. He climbed under the dome with his duffel bag of tools and sealed the bubble to the wall. “Whatever happens, Imala, don’t stop recording.”

They had agreed that Imala would record everything Victor captured with his helmetcam. If he didn’t make it back, they needed to share what they had found with whoever would listen. “Don’t just give it to Lem,” Victor had said. “Upload it on the nets. Broadcast it to the world. If enough people know what’s inside that ship, maybe someone will see a way to end this war.”

He unzipped the duffel bag and dug around the tools, looking for the laser cutter. His gloved hand found it and pulled it out. Victor set it to a low setting, pressed it against the wall, and waited for the beam to punch through. Father had taught him this technique years ago. The two of them out in the Kuiper Belt had cut into a dozen derelict ships over the years. Most had been grisly scenes: free miners hit by pirates; ships with mechanical failures that had stranded the crew and starved them out. Whoever they were, they were almost always dead by the time El
Cavador arrived.

Mother had tried to protect Victor from participating, arguing about it with Father one night when they thought Victor was asleep in his hammock. “Anyone in the family can do that job,” Mother had said in a hushed tone. “It doesn’t have to be Vico.”

“No one uses these tools as often as he and I do,” Father had said. “I trust him with a cutter more than anyone. I don’t want someone doing this who isn’t experienced with the equipment. Anything could go wrong.”

“Which is why our
son
shouldn’t be the one to go.”

“He’s a member of this family, Rena. Everyone has their duty.”

“He’s just a boy,
mi amor. Un niño.
” A child.

“
Cierto,
” Father had said, falling into Spanish alongside her, the way he always did whenever a disagreement escalated. “
Un niño que hace su parte en esa familia, tal como tí y tal como yo.
” A child who does his part in this family, just like you and just like me.

In the end, they had compromised. Victor would help cut, but he wouldn’t go inside the ship and assess the damage. “Leave that to the men of the crew,” Mother had said. Father hadn’t argued, and so Victor had been spared the worst of it. But
not
seeing what was inside the ships was perhaps worse than actually seeing them since Victor’s mind always painted the worst possible picture.

He wondered then, as he often did, where Mother was now. Lem had said that the women and children on El Cavador had left the ship and boarded a WU-HU vessel, but Lem had no idea where the vessel was or if it had even survived the attack. It had been heading for the Asteroid Belt, so in all likelihood Mother was there now, perhaps at a depot or outpost where other survivors were gathering. She wasn’t dead. Victor refused to even consider it. Losing Father had been grief enough. No, Mother was safe somewhere, tending to the women and children, comforting them, strengthening them, protecting them as she had always done on El Cavador. He had to believe that.

The laser punched through.

Victor stopped the beam and checked the readings. “The wall’s only four inches thick, Imala. I can cut through this easily.”

“Be careful, Vico.”

He intensified the laser, set it to the proper depth, and quickly cut out a small hole no bigger than his finger. Then he inserted the snake camera through the hole to see what was on the other side. He couldn’t see much. The space was dark and empty, a crawlspace perhaps, or a shaft of some sort. Whatever it was it was clearly big enough for him to climb into. And more importantly, it was free of Formics.

He retracted the snake, cut a hole large enough for his body to pass through, pushed the cut piece into the ship, and shined his light inside.

The shaft was a meter high and four meters wide. It extended to his right and left as far as he could see, sloping downward in either direction, matching the bulbous curvature of the ship. The walls were discolored and unattractive, covered with rust, blemishes, bumps, and imperfections, like scrap metal left to oxidize in a damp place for a few hundred years. It was almost as if the interior of the ship had been built with crude, unrefined ore, creating an ugly canvas of browns and grays and touches of black that felt dingy and ancient and long ignored.

The air in the shaft was no cleaner. Dust motes and clumps of small, misshapen brown matter floated everywhere. Victor looked at his wrist pad and read the sensors. “Air is twenty-four percent oxygen. That’s only slightly higher than Earth, Imala. The rest is nitrogen, argon, and a touch of carbon dioxide. I could breathe this if I wanted to.”