"Everyone is eager to hear news," said Rena. "Thank you."
Captain Doashang looked at her with compassion. "I want to be as sensitive as I can with the families, Mrs. Delgado. Now that I've met you and heard your husband's transmission, I wonder if the report of the battle would be better delivered by you."
"Me?"
"I will accompany you, if you agree. But you know these families best, and I wonder if such news is better delivered by a friend instead of a stranger."
It took Rena a moment to find her voice. "With all due respect, Captain, I don't know if I'm in the right emotional state to do that."
He nodded, blushing. "Of course. It was inconsiderate of me to ask, particularly in your own time of grief. Forgive me."
But before Rena excused herself, she reconsidered. If she could choose someone to tell her such devastating news, she would want it to be someone she loved, a friend, a fellow sufferer even, someone who could take her in her arms and weep with her.
"On second thought, Captain, I think you may be right. I will meet with the families individually. But first, I must hear the full account myself."
He showed her everything. She watched the vids and listened to the transmissions. She seethed when Lem Jukes's ship pulled away and fled. Her heart broke when El Cavador disintegrated before her eyes. Her home, the only world she knew, was gone.
Why hadn't Concepcion come with her? Rena had insisted that she join them on the WU-HU ship, arguing that by Concepcion's own orders, all women and children were to leave El Cavador. But Concepcion had laughed this off. "Old, stubborn women are the exception," she had said.
Now she was gone. They were all gone. Bahzim, Chepe, Pitoso, Mono: cousins, brothers, nephews, uncles. Half of everyone she knew and loved in the world. As well as the man she loved more than them all.
The vids ended. She knew everything she needed to know. Her back was straight. Her eyes were dry. "Come, Captain. You and I have work to do."
*
Captain Doashang stayed at Rena's side as she met with every woman from El Cavador. Doashang promised each of them protection and safe passage to the Asteroid Belt. The ship would have to ration its food supply--corporate hadn't planned for this many passengers--but neither Doashang nor his crew would get an ounce more food than anyone else. The children would not go hungry. The women wept in sorrow and gratitude, and one even kissed his hand as she cried.
In the corridor afterward, he faced Rena. "My senior officers and I will vacate our quarters for those families who do not yet have a room."
"That's not necessary, Captain."
"I have children of my own, Mrs. Delgado. We have quite a trip to the Asteroid Belt ahead of us. The more comfortable the children are, the more pleasant the flight will be for all of us."
She nodded. "True. I'll see to it. Thank you. Also, with your permission, I would like to organize a work detail. Those of us from El Cavador don't want to be a burden. We would appreciate being allowed to help maintain the ship however we can."
"Permission granted. Work out the particulars with one of my officers." His wrist pad vibrated. "Now if you'll excuse me."
Doashang hurried to the helm. His first officer, Wenchin, was waiting for him at the monitors. "We found a Formic drifting in space," said Wenchin. "It's dead. Or at least we think so. It wasn't wearing a suit. It must have fallen from the ship. I have a team outside checking it now."
On the monitors, five spacewalkers in WU-HU suits surrounded the Formic. They had attached various instruments to its body, but the men were keeping their distance.
"It couldn't have survived in a vacuum this long," said Doashang. "Restrain its limbs and bag it. Use every precaution. Treat it as if it were the most lethal of biohazards. Have the men outside decontaminate their suits. Then get the Formic to Dr. Ji to examine. The more information we can send to Earth about these creatures the better."
"Yes, sir."
Captain Doashang moved to the communications officer. "Any luck contacting Lem Jukes?"
"No, sir. The Formic ship is putting off all kinds of interference. It's causing a perturbation that randomizes the digital information. I'm getting transmissions, but at a much slower rate. A bit per second instead of a trillion bits per second. Which means what I am getting is basically nothing. It's not enough information to decipher anything. We can't send or receive long-range messages at all. Not as focused laserlines or as blanket spreads."
"That's unacceptable. I need to send a warning to the Asteroid Belt."
"I don't know what to tell you, sir. The only radio communication that works is short-range. And we've deviated from the main thoroughfare to follow the Formic ship, so no other ship is going to come even remotely close to this position. We could accelerate back to the major flight paths and wait until a ship comes close enough to hear our transmission. But that could be a long wait, sir. And there's no way to determine if the interference is still affecting that quadrant. If it is, whomever we contact won't be able to send long transmissions either. The most reliable way to get word to the Belt, sir, may be to go there ourselves."
"That's several months away."
The officer looked helpless. "It's not ideal, sir. But we're short on options."
"Is the Formic ship sending radio? How are their messages getting through?"
"Near as we can tell, the Formics are silent, sir. Even when we were close, I didn't pick up so much as a squawk."
Captain Doashang turned to Wenchin. "Set a course to the nearest station in the Asteroid Belt, moving as fast as our fuel supply will allow."
"What about Lem Jukes?" asked Wenchin.
"He's out of range, and I doubt he cares what happened to us anyway. He abandoned his own men. He won't concern himself with us. He's probably heading for the Belt as well."
Wenchin relayed the order, and the ship quickly accelerated.
Doashang stayed on the helm until Dr. Ji called him to the medical offices several hours later. Ji appeared pale and shaken when Doashang arrived.
"Not the most pleasant postmortem examination you've performed, I'm guessing," said Doashang.
"That's putting it lightly," said Ji.
The two stood at a large window outside a room where a team of technicians was examining and videoing the dissected Formic.
"What are they?" asked Doashang.
"They're semivertebrate," said Ji, "in that they have a single neural column, but clearly they evolved from exoskeletal hexiforms."
"What does that mean?"
"They evolved from creatures very much like ants, but they left ant-hood far behind."
"So they're not insects?"
"Descended from insectlike creatures. Certain evolutionary changes have occurred. They're warm blooded, for instance. They insulate and perspire to regulate body temperature in much the same way we do. They have an endoskeleton covered with muscles and skin and fur. Most of their organs are a mystery to me, although we've documented everything. They have six legs obviously. The middle pair has musculature that suggests they can bear weight, though perhaps not as much as hips or thighs. The joint socket is extraordinarily flexible, even more so than human shoulders. Plus they have highly developed back muscles, which suggests they have enormous strength."
"We've already seen evidence of that. What I want to know is how do we kill them."
"They're not indestructible. They're tough and resilient, but they can be broken. What frightens me more than their physicality, though, is what we saw them do on the vids. They were immediately willing to give their lives to thwart any attack. No hesitation. No attempt to protect themselves. Just unbridled animal ferocity and completely unyielding devotion. These aren't just technologically superior creatures, Captain. This is a species that will never, ever give up until every last one of them is destroyed."
"On that point, Doctor, we will gladly oblige them."
*
Lem stood in the engineering room, which had been converted into a war room of
sorts, and looked at all of the notes on the wall-screens around him. There were anatomical diagrams of a Formic; sketches of the Formic ship with various engineering theories on how the ship operated; photos and analysis of the weapon that had destroyed El Cavador; a systems chart showing the Formic ship's trajectory; as well as numerous other scribbles, lists, ideas, and theories. "We have all this intel," said Lem. "All this critical information that Earth desperately needs, and we can't do a damn thing with any of it." He turned and faced Chubs, Benyawe, and Dr. Dublin, whose hands were still in casts. "Unless we relay this to Earth, it's worthless," said Lem.
"We're at the mercy of our radio," said Chubs. "Until we get through the interference there's not much we can do."
In the weeks since the attack, the interference from the Formic ship had rendered long-range communication impossible. Lem had ordered the radio officers to continually broadcast a looped transmission about the Formics--detailing the ship's coordinates, flight path, dimensions, and speed--but as far as the radio officers could tell, nothing was getting through. Every day hundreds of the transmissions went out and zero transmissions came in. The Makarhu was screaming a warning, but nobody could hear a word.
"Then how do we get around the interference?" asked Lem.
"We don't know the limits of it," said Chubs. "Right now we're four million kilometers away from the Formic ship's trajectory. We could go farther out, but there's no telling how far we would need to go. Ten million? Twenty? A hundred? Also, if we distance ourselves any more from the ship, we won't be able to track it. It's so far ahead of us already that it disappears from our scanners for days at a time. We're out of range of its weapons, which is good, but if we deviate any more from our current course or speed, we'll get so far behind the ship that we'll lose it completely. We could do that, but it's a risk. We may not reach the end of the interference before the ship reaches Earth."
"I don't want to lose sight of the ship," said Lem. "But unless we do something to counter this interference, Earth isn't going to get much of a warning, if any at all. They'll be completely unprepared for an attack."
"We don't actually know if the Formics intend to attack," said Dublin. "We strongly suspect that, but we can't be definitive about what they'll do once they reach Earth."
"They're not coming to borrow a cup of sugar," said Chubs. "You saw what they did to El Cavador."
Lem cringed inside. El Cavador. He knew it wasn't his fault that they had been destroyed--they should have gotten out when he did. Still, he couldn't shake the nagging idea that he should have done more. What, he didn't know; there was nothing else he could have done, really. There was no saving the men stuck on the Formic ship; they were beyond rescue. El Cavador should have seen that. But no, Concepcion had adhered to some foolish, self-destructive notion of "never leave a man behind," which was stupid. Lem was all for saving people, sure. But once it was clear that further rescue was impossible, what good was it to hang around? In the heat of the moment he had chided Chubs for ordering the ship to leave, but now he saw the wisdom of it. All El Cavador had accomplished by staying behind to rescue its men was its own sad demise.
But that was free miners. He respected their courage. But to ignore self-preservation for the sake of family didn't feel noble. It felt irresponsible.
There was one more thing, too. One he tried not to think about, since it made him feel shallow and callous. But there was no denying it either: The destruction of El Cavador meant the destruction of their copy of his files. Concepcion had said she would erase them, but now he knew without a doubt that it had happened. There was the slim possibility that one of the women had carried a copy onto the WU-HU ship, but that was unlikely. They were worried about protecting their children and surviving. Burning Lem Jukes at the legal stake hadn't been on their minds. He was in the clear. The files were gone.
"My point is," Dublin was saying, "we don't yet know why they're headed to Earth. What do they want? Our resources? To make contact? To study us?"
"They didn't come to make contact," said Lem. "Their pod destroyed the Italian free miners."
"Yes," said Dublin, "but only after it had been among them for twelve hours. Maybe it was trying to contact them in all that time."
Lem shook his head. "Concepcion told us everything. The Italians didn't pick up anything that resembled communication from the pod."
"Maybe they have a way of communicating that we don't know about," said Dublin. "Maybe they were trying to communicate, but humans don't have the tech to receive their transmissions."
"They killed the Italians," said Chubs. "If someone doesn't answer your hello, you don't waste them."
"I'm trying to look at this scientifically," said Dublin.
"It doesn't matter if they tried to communicate or not," said Chubs. "They wanted to kill us. Did you watch the vids? Did you see the face of that Formic climbing up the mooring cable? It wasn't coming to introduce itself. It was coming to rip Lem's head off."
Dublin held up two hands in a gesture of surrender. "I'm not defending them. I'm reminding us that they come from a completely different social structure with completely different behaviors and values."
"There is one theory we haven't discussed," said Benyawe. She walked to the sketch of the Formic ship on the wall, studied it, then faced them. "What if it's a colony ship?"
"Colony?" said Chubs. "Can't be. The planet's taken. We own it. No vacancy."
"Maybe they don't care," said Benyawe. "Maybe they come from a civilization where aliens share planets."
"Or maybe they intend to take it for themselves," said Lem. He turned and studied the diagram of the Formic. "We've been assuming all this time that they consider us as equals. But what if they don't? What if they think of us in the same way we think of houseflies or rabbits? If you want to build a house on a lot and you find a family of rabbits living on the land, you don't think of the land as belonging to the rabbits and build elsewhere. You shoot the rabbits or you scare them off."
"There are twelve billion people on Earth," said Chubs. "With cities and industry and tech. That's more than a family of rabbits."
"Fine. Pick a different animal. Say, earthworms. How many worms are on the plot of land? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Or what about ants? A million? They have colonies and homes, but what do we care? We level the land and build anyway. My point is, maybe they don't consider the planet ours. We only happen to live there. Maybe they see it as theirs for the taking."
"There's a hole in that theory," said Dublin. "The interference. If the Formics didn't consider as us equals or at least near their place on the species hierarchy, why are they working so hard to cloak their approach with the interference? What they're doing to our radio suggests they fear us and have developed tactics to avoid our detection. It implies they consider us a threat."
"Only if the interference is deliberate," said Lem. "But what if it isn't? What if it's nothing more than a by-product of their propulsion system? What if they have no idea they're wrecking our radio? Yes, it's working to their advantage, but that doesn't mean they meant for it to happen."
"If that's true," said Benyawe, "then Earth is in more danger than we thought. If the Formics aren't doing anything deliberate to hide their approach, if they don't care if we notice them or not, then they don't consider us a threat at all. They're so confident they can destroy us that it doesn't matter if we know they're coming."
The more they talked, the less Lem liked what we he was hearing. "So what do we do?" he asked. "We can't communicate with anyone. We can't surpass the ship and get ahead of it--not at its current speed anyway. It's moving too fast. We can't even catch it if we wanted to."
"Which we most definitely don't want to do," said Chubs.
"I see two options," said Benyawe. "We can either deviate and take a gamble that there's a way out of this interference. Or we can continue to track the ship and gather intelligence and hope that it decelerates enough for us to zip past it and beat it to Earth."
/> "Also a gamble," said Lem.
"There's no easy answer," said Benyawe.
"Option B gets my vote," said Dublin. "That puts us closer to Earth. That's our destination."
"I agree," said Benyawe. "There might be something else we can learn about the Formics, a weakness perhaps. That would be more valuable to Earth than anything. If we lose sight of the ship, we lose that chance."
"The Formics are leaving a wake of destruction," said Chubs. "People may need help. I say we stay the course."
Benyawe said, "An odd philosophy for you, considering you've left quite a wake of destruction yourself."
"Always to protect us," said Chubs, annoyed.
A navigator from the helm appeared on the wall-screen. "Sir, sensors indicate that the Formic ship has vented again."
"Decelerate immediately," said Lem. "I don't want us flying into the gamma plasma. Bring us to a full stop if necessary." It was the second time the ship had vented since the battle with El Cavador.
The navigator made a series of hand movements offscreen, then returned. "Deceleration commenced, sir."
"Were there any ships near the Formics that may have been affected by the plasma?"
"Don't know, sir. The only reason we can detect the Formic ship at this distance is because of its size. Anything smaller doesn't show up on the sensors."
"Keep scanning. Let me know if we find anything that might have been hit by the plasma."
"Yes, sir."
The navigator disappeared. Benyawe walked to the systems chart that stretched across one wall. A line representing the Formics' trajectory cut across space. Benyawe touched various points on the line, leaving blinking red dots. "The first venting happened here, near Weigh Station Four. The next venting was here, roughly six au later. Now we have a third venting that's approximately six au after that."
"So they vent every six au," said Dublin.
"Which means we can approximate where it will likely vent again," said Benyawe. She tapped her finger down the line every six au and left more dots. As she reached the inner Belt, she placed a dot near an asteroid.