Earth Awakens (The First Formic War) (23 page)

And his current assignment. Had Father actually done him a favor by keeping him outside of headquarters in a newly created position? Was everyone on the Board
that
vehemently opposed to Lem,
that
threatened by him?

He found it hard to believe. He knew all the Board members on a superficial level; he had met them all casually at various events. But other than Norja, who Lem had known all his life, most on the Board had joined the company or risen up from the ranks while Lem was off making his fortune elsewhere. Lem knew their résumés, of course, he knew their skills and education and expertise, but he didn’t know them personally. He didn’t know their hearts. Maybe they were as devious and scheming as Norja had suggested.

But if so, why would Father keep them on? Why tolerate that level of infighting?

Because Father would say a little feverish competition was good for business. He’d say it keeps everyone sharp.

Plus there was the fact that every member of the Board was extremely accomplished and highly valuable. Any CEO would want their counsel. They could have horns and forked tongues and tails out their backsides, and still Lem would be reluctant to let them go. In fact, any one of them could easily be Father’s replacement. No one in the business world would bat an eye if the company were to appoint any one of them to that position.

But would the business world react the same way to me? he wondered. Or would they, as Ramdakan suggested, balk and turn up a nose of scorn? Suddenly Lem was unsure.

He arrived at the warehouse to find Dr. Benyawe and the rest of the engineers hard at work on the prototypes. Benyawe still hadn’t spoken to him since the drone attack. Lem had been back at the warehouse for a few days now, but she continued to avoid him.

Lem was pleased to see that someone had finally hauled away the leftover space junk that Victor and Imala had left unused, thus removing a visual reminder of the events. Not that anyone was likely to forget, of course. Wherever Lem went in the warehouse these days he could feel workers’ eyes boring into him. There goes the man who let Victor and Imala die. There goes the callous snake who cut all communication to the shuttle before the drones attacked.

Lem stepped out onto the warehouse floor and sensed the same scorn from everyone. The room fell quiet, and suddenly the entire staff was intensely focused on their work in front of them.

What do you expect of me? he wanted to ask them. A confession? A mournful cry of regret? You want me to flog myself? Weep and wail and gnash my teeth? Subject myself to sackcloth and ashes? Of course I’m sorry it happened. Of course I hated having to do it. But there was nothing I could do.
Not
warning them was a kindness, people. A mercy. Can’t you see that?

No, they wouldn’t see that. They only saw that he had deserted two of their own. And yes, that’s how they saw Victor and Imala now. Not as outsiders. But as members of the team. It was ludicrous. Victor and Imala had been among them for only a few days, and yet by the way everyone was acting, you would have thought the two were close personal friends with everyone on staff.

This is how martyrs get their fame, Lem thought. As soon as you die, you’re suddenly a hero.

Benyawe called to him from the center worktable. “Mr. Jukes. Could I have a moment of your time, please?”

Mr. Jukes. She was being formal with him. That would only make things more awkward. But he smiled pleasantly and joined her.

On top of the table were two metal cubes, each a meter square on all sides. A narrow cable ran between them, connecting them like giant bolas. In the middle of the cable was a reel with at least fifty additional meters of cable, suggesting that the two cubes could be stretched apart for quite a distance without severing the connection. It was a modified design of an idea that Lem had pitched to Benyawe almost a year ago, a replacement for the glaser; using the same tech, but safer. She called them shatter boxes.

“We conducted the first test today with a prototype,” said Benyawe. “I thought you might want to see it.” She made a hand gesture above the worktable, and a holovid appeared. In it, a small mining vessel in space approached a second larger ship that had been stripped of parts so severely that only its skeletal structure remained. Benyawe paused the vid. “We’re nowhere near an asteroid big enough to conduct a real test obviously, so we found a decommissioned ship listed for recycling and hauled it a few thousand klicks away from Luna.”

She started the vid again. The smaller ship slung two shatter boxes toward the skeleton ship at high speed. As the shatter boxes spun toward their target, the reel between them unspooled more cable and the distance between the boxes grew. Then suddenly the boxes converged on the ship, attaching themselves to opposite ends. An instant later the skeleton ship was ripped apart, not in a single explosion but in a series of lightning-fast explosions in which every piece broke into smaller and smaller constituent pieces again and again until there was nothing left. No ship, no shatter boxes, just fast-moving dust that was gone an instant later, flying off in every direction into the vacuum of space.

“Quite the disappearing act,” said Lem. He asked them questions after that. How did the sling mechanism work? How easily could the shatter boxes be aimed? Could they hit a moving target traveling at a high velocity? And what about safety, could these be used in near-Earth orbit without endangering the planet?

Benyawe understood why he was asking. “You want to use these against the Formics.”

“You just proved to me what the shatter boxes can do to a ship,” said Lem. “This is far more destructive and effective than our lasers, which are the only weapons our ships have and which were never designed as weapons in the first place. I don’t want to damage the troop transports, Benyawe. I want to obliterate them.”

“Transports?” Benyawe said.

He told her what he had proposed to Ramdakan. The shield. Using Juke ships and crews to stop additional Formic reinforcements. “I want to arm every one of our ships with shatter boxes, Benyawe. I want our crews proficient in their use. That means the sling mechanism must be able to hold several rounds of shatter boxes at once or there must be some system for quickly reloading the sling. I don’t want our ships armed with only one shot. I want them picking targets and taking down as many as they see.”

“We’ve only conducted a single test, Lem.”

She wasn’t calling him “Mr. Jukes” now. That was an improvement. “We don’t have time for lengthy field tests, Benyawe. I see that it works. I’m sold. I want this moved into production now, today, as soon as possible.”

“Today? The Board hasn’t even approved the shield yet, much less this tech.”

“They will,” said Lem. “They’ll approve both. As far as they’re concerned, this is a financial no-brainer.”

“And if you’re wrong? If they don’t approve?”

“We’ll do it anyway. I’ll finance it myself. And you can be sure that Chubs and his crew and plenty of the other ships will join us in the fight, regardless of what the Board decides.”

She considered that and nodded. She knew Chubs as well as he did. All of the workers had gathered now. The mood of the room had shifted. There was an excitement among them. Lem could feel it.

“How do we move this into production?” said Benyawe. “We need facilities, crews, raw materials, bots.”

“We’ll use the drone production facility to build the shatter boxes. They’re not doing anything at the moment. That whole division is a sunken ship. They’ll be eager for the work. Then we move the shatter boxes and drone crews to Kotka and retrofit all the ships there. We’ll need every engineer here as well,” Lem said, looking around the room at their faces. “The ships at Kotka are of various sizes and shapes, with differing drive systems. We’ll have to custom-make the fittings for the sling mechanisms for each ship, placing the sling wherever it will give the crews the most accurate targeting.” He turned back to Benyawe. “So I repeat my final question to you: Do these pose a threat to Earth? We fretted over the glasers misfiring and hitting the planet. Is that a problem here?”

“No,” said Benyawe. “The shatter boxes only emit the tidal forces once they’ve attached to their target and confirmed that their positions are polar opposites. There’s no chance of them firing as they’re rotating through space. I made certain of that. You don’t want them misfiring and hitting the ship that launched them.”

“What if they miss?” asked Lem. “What if one is slung down toward Earth?”

She shrugged. “It will burn up on reentry. It will never get near the surface.”

Lem nodded. “That’s good enough for me. Let’s get busy. And Dr. Benyawe, a word in private please.”

She followed him into his office, a cramped space with bare walls and two old, mismatched office chairs he had found discarded in the warehouse. He motioned Benyawe to one, and he sat opposite. He tapped his wrist pad, and the walls and ceiling went black, dotted with stars and vibrant nebulae, giving Lem and Benyawe the sensation of sitting on a platform in the immensity of space.

“Trying to set a mood?” she asked.

He nestled back into his chair, a musty threadbare thing that smelled like an attic. “It’s funny. I hated every moment of our trip to the Kuiper Belt. The cramped spaces, the food, the inconvenience, the confinement. And yet I do miss this.” He gestured around him. “There is nothing more peaceful than space.”

“Is that what this is?” she asked. “An attempt at peace?”

“Between us?” he said. “I hope so. You’re angry that I severed communications with Victor and Imala. But you have to understand—”

She cut him off. “I know why you made the decision you did, Lem. You don’t have to justify your actions to me. You tried to stop your father. He had his reasons for moving forward. My issue is that you made that decision without consulting me or anyone else on the team.”

“You would have objected,” Lem said. “And if you had, I couldn’t have stopped you from making a transmission. The only way to ensure that no transmission was sent was to keep you in the dark and pull the plug myself. I did this for their sake, Benyawe. As a kindness, a mercy.”

She looked sad. “One day, Lem, you’re going to wake up and realize how arrogant you are and how lonely your world is as a result.”

He raised an eyebrow. “So much for passing the peace pipe. How am I being arrogant here? Please, I’d be fascinated to hear.”

“You assume you’re the only person intelligent enough to make a rational decision.”

“That’s not true. I ask for your counsel all the time.”

“No, you ask that I advise you on how to achieve the decision
you’ve
already made. You don’t ask what we should be doing in the first place. And what’s ironic is that your father has this same trait and you find it maddening.”

“Is this what this is about, Benyawe? You feeling slighted? You not having enough authority?”

She laughed. “Is that what you think? That I want
authority
?” She practically spit the word out. “I would have told Victor and Imala that drones were coming, yes. But I also would have done everything in my power to save their lives.”

“There was no way to save them.”

“This is my point.
You
decided it was hopeless. And if
you
couldn’t think of a solution, then there must not be one.”

“Are you saying you had a solution?”

“As impossible as that might seem to you, yes. I would have told them both to get as far inside the Formic ship as possible.”

“Inside the target? The thing the drones were sent to destroy? That would’ve been your plan?”

“Yes. And if they had followed it they might have survived. We didn’t know the strength of the hull. There was a good chance it could withstand the glasers. Which it did. So instead of relaying lifesaving instruction to the people under our care, the people we were responsible for, we did nothing.” She stood. “What saddens me most is not that they died, Lem. It’s that they died thinking we abandoned them, thinking we betrayed them. That’s not a kindness. Or a mercy. That’s anything but.” She walked out.

He wanted to throw something. Nothing he did could please this woman. She was worse than Father.

Or was he angry because he knew she was right? He hadn’t thought to have them hide inside the ship. He
wouldn’t
have thought of that. It seemed absurd. And yet in hindsight it would have worked, maybe. It might have saved them.

He couldn’t stay here. He had nothing to do but sit in his office and brood while everyone out in the warehouse chatted and twittered about what a monster he was. Thanks, Benyawe. Just as I feel a jolt of optimism, just as I’m rising out of the funk Ramdakan put me in, you have to throw the proffered olive branch back in my face.

He left his office, left the warehouse, not looking anyone in the eye. He climbed into his skimmer without knowing where he was going. The AI told him he had a message from Despoina. It started playing before Lem could object.

“It’s me,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Your father had a conference call today with several delegates from the European Union. Thought you might want to know. Also, I’m making lemon chicken tonight. Tell me what time you’re coming.”

Great, he thought. Now she wasn’t even inviting him. He was expected to come over. And was she calling him from the office? Didn’t she realize that all of those holo records were likely recorded?

He erased the message, flew back to his apartment, and threw his jacket to the floor. Let the cleaning crew pick it up. He went to the dispenser in the kitchen and poured himself a drink.

Father, Benyawe, Ramdakan, Des. To hell with them.

He downed the drink and replayed in his mind his conversation with Ramdakan. You’re arrogant, Lem. You’re too handsome, Lem. You’re not your father, Lem. If you only had a different last name, Lem.

A child of privilege, they say. Ha. A child of a curse, is more like it.

Lem turned around, glass in hand, and stopped cold. The gun was an inch from his face.

“Welcome home,” said Victor. “We’ve been waiting.”