Lem squared his shoulders, buttoned his suit coat, and approached them, smiling pleasantly. "Father, I'm so glad I found you. Could you and I speak in private for a moment regarding a most urgent matter?"
The surprise on Father's face was replaced with a forced smile of barely contained fury. "Lem. This is very unexpected."
Lem turned to the woman. She had a pin of the American flag on the lapel of her jacket. A politician most likely, though Lem had no idea who. A congresswoman, perhaps. Or someone from the current administration. Why was Father meeting with the Americans?
He extended a hand. "Lem Jukes."
She took his hand, showing no signs of irritation. "Margaret Hopkins. U.S. State Department. And you hardly need introduce yourself to me, Mr. Jukes. I've seen several of the interviews you've given on the nets. That must have been a harrowing experience to face the Formics in the Kuiper Belt."
"I don't recommend it," said Lem. "A summer cabin with a nice mountain breeze is more to my liking." He turned to Father, impatient. "A moment, Father?"
Ukko Jukes dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a napkin and leaned forward in his seat. "Ms. Hopkins and I were having a private conversation, Lem. Perhaps you and I can talk after."
"It can't wait. Would you excuse us, Ms. Hopkins?" Lem gestured to a door across the room that led into a parlor.
Father considered a moment, forced a polite smile, then stood and followed.
The parlor was four times the size of the dining room. Rustic leather furniture, Persian rugs, shelves filled with antique paper books. When the doors were closed behind them Father said, "You have ten seconds to explain yourself."
"You launched drones at the Formic mothership. You need to recall them. I have people there now."
Father showed no surprise. "I know about Victor and Imala, Lem. And I'm not recalling the drones."
It took a moment for Lem to find words. "You know about them? And you're going to let them die?"
"They died the moment they launched, son. They're taking on an alien ship with tech far greater than anything the human mind has ever conceived. Victor is eighteen years old, practically a child. Imala's an auditor. These aren't soldiers, Lem."
"Victor is intelligent, Father. He's resourceful."
"Simona is resourceful. A three-legged dog is resourceful. That doesn't mean we should launch them into space and expect them to defeat an army. Victor has a personal vendetta against us. Imala Bootstamp is no better. She threw away her career to go to war against me. And you want to protect these people?"
"Does it matter who they are if they defeat the Formics?"
Father laughed. "Do you honestly think that's even possible? They're fools if they think they can take out that ship, and you're a bigger fool for believing them."
"At least let them try. What have we got to lose?"
Father looked incredulous. "Do you watch the news, Lem? Are you even aware of what's going on in the world? People are dying by the millions. Old, young, women, children. They're hit with the Formic gases, and their flesh melts off their bones. Guangzhou, Foshan, all along southeast China. How long do you want me to wait exactly? Because every second I do, for every minute I keep those drones waiting, more people are going to die. Scientists, doctors, engineers, people a hell of a lot more resourceful than Victor Delgado. Is that what you're proposing to me? That I sit back and let that happen, let thousands and maybe tens of thousands of people on Earth die so I can give more time to two people who have no chance of getting out of that Formic ship alive anyway? Is that what you're suggesting? Am I reading your logic right? Because if so, than I wasted a hell of a lot of money on your education, because that's bad math. Two people are not greater than thousands."
Lem said nothing.
Ukko exhaled and ran a hand through his hair. "I'm proud of you for taking the initiative, son. You had good intentions. But this problem is bigger than you think."
"I know how big the problem is, Father. And saving Victor and Imala isn't the only reason why I'm here. The glaser is unstable. You can't fire it this close to Earth."
Father rolled his eyes. "This again."
"Benyawe has seen the schematics. The design is flawed. Blowing up Earth won't exactly save us from the Formics."
Father was suddenly angry. "Do you take me for a fool, Lem? Do you have such a low impression of my intelligence that you think I would not take precautions? If one of the glasers were to misfire, we would terminate the drone from our position here on Luna. They're not on preprogrammed flights. We control them here."
"The misfires aren't the real problem," said Lem. "It's the well-aimed firings I'm worried about. We have no idea what will happen if we hit the Formic ship. It has mass. The resultant gravity field will expand outward exponentially, consuming everything in its path. I saw it happen. We blasted an asteroid in the Kuiper Belt much smaller than the Formic ship, and the subsequent gravity field grew so fast and so large that it nearly consumed our ship and killed us all. The Formic ship will likely react the same way. If you hit it with fifty glasers, it could create a gravity field that reaches Earth and rips the planet apart."
"You're describing highly unlikely probabilities, Lem. You're pulling at straws."
"Talk to Dr. Benyawe if you don't believe me. Or to Dublin. Get their opinion, if you don't want mine."
Father was quiet a moment. "Are you finished? Because I have a meeting to return to."
He wasn't going to abort, Lem realized. He was going to do what he always did, ignore anyone who disagreed with him.
"And let me give you some unsolicited advice, Lem. Don't send a message to Victor and Imala. Don't warn them. That would be cruel. You'd essentially be telling them they have a few hours to live."
"Not telling them is cruel as well."
"Dying is what's cruel, son. Protecting someone from the knowledge of their own death is a mercy. Stay silent. For their sake. You may think that monstrous, but it's a kindness."
Ukko turned and walked out.
Lem stood there, considering, alone. He pulled his holopad from his pocket and prepared to call Benyawe, imagining how the conversation would go. Then he pocketed the pad and looked for another exit. Father was right. He couldn't save Victor and Imala. Silence was the only kindness he had left to give.
CHAPTER 4
Gravity
The Formic was down on its arms and legs inside the shaft, pulling a metal cart behind it. Victor caught himself on the walls before colliding with it, his helmet less than a meter from the creature's face. Victor rolled to the side to avoid it, fumbling for his weapon. The gun was up and in his hand an instant later, but his finger paused on the trigger. The Formic wasn't paying him any attention, Victor realized. It hadn't so much as flinched or turned in his direction. Instead, it continued down the shaft, moving past him with slow methodical steps, showing no signs of alarm.
It was then that Victor noticed the metal plate over the Formic's eyes, a sort of half helmet that obstructed its vision like blinders.
It didn't see me, Victor realized. I was simply in its path over the track.
The cart was an odd thing: boxy, metallic, and covered with rust, without any lights or visible tech along its surface. Its four sets of ancient, corroded wheels fit snugly into the recessed grooves of the floor and ceiling, keeping the cart securely locked on the track. The wheels squeaked and jostled as they rolled over minor bumps and imperfections on the surface.
A harness around the Formic's midsection locked into the track beneath it and prevented the creature from going anywhere but forward. Two poles extended back from the sides of the harness and fastened to the cart like traces. One of the Formic's hind legs was injured, Victor noticed. It bent outward instead of inward, forcing the Formic to walk with an awkward limping gait that made Victor almost pity the thing.
When it had moved on and Victor had lowered the gun, Imala whispered, "Are you hurt?"
Victor holstered the weapon. "Scared witless m
aybe. But unhurt."
"What was it pulling? Could you see in the cart?"
"No. All the sides were sealed. At least we know now what the tracks are for and what was making the squeaking noise."
"I don't get it, Vico. Where's the tech? These are supposed to be an advanced species, and yet so far all we've seen is floating excrement and carts that would predate our Industrial Revolution."
"It didn't see us, Imala. That's all I care about."
"The blinders over its eyes, though. That doesn't make sense. It's as if it were a beast of burden."
"Maybe it is," said Victor. "Did you notice it limping? Maybe maimed Formics are relegated to manual-labor jobs. Maybe everyone has a duty, and if you're injured and can no longer perform your duty, they turn you into a mule."
"That hardly sounds like a civilized society."
"Who said they were civilized? They're murdering planet thieves, Imala. You've seen the vids. They don't care about their own well-being. They only act in the interest of the group, the many. If he's told to be a mule, he'll be a mule."
"How do you know it was a he? Maybe that was a she."
Victor smiled. "I'm perfectly aware that women can do manual labor, Imala. I'm not sexist." He pushed off again, continuing up the shaft, putting the Formic behind him.
"I'm not suggesting that you are, Vico. I'm making a point about the Formics. They all look the same to me. Male, female. I can't tell the difference."
"Maybe we haven't seen any females yet. Maybe all of the soldier Formics sent to Earth were males."
"Why males?" said Imala. "Females can be warriors, too. In fact, from a biological perspective, the female is more often the protector of the young. The male usually does his business in the mating process and leaves."
"Well, you know men, Imala. Only good for one thing."
"I'm serious, Vico. Your family called the Formics hormigas. Ants. And who leads an ant colony? A queen. The males are merely her workers. Same with bees and wasps."
"Just because they loosely resemble ants, Imala--and I emphasis the word 'loosely'--that hardly means they function like an ant colony. Maybe all the Formics we've seen are females. Or maybe they have seven sexes. Or just one. Who cares? What does it matter?"
"Of course it matters. It absolutely matters. If you don't understand your enemy how you can possibly hope to defeat him? What is the hierarchy here, for example? Who relegated that Formic to cart work? Who gives the orders? We're here to take out the leader if we can, and yet we have no way of identifying him or her. They don't wear uniforms, so there's no visible rank classification. How are we supposed to fulfill our objective if we haven't the foggiest idea what we're looking for?"
"The leader will be at the helm," said Victor.
"Maybe," said Imala. "We're not even sure if there is a helm. We know next to nothing."
"We know they're killing people on Earth, Imala. That's information enough for me."
She didn't argue further, but Victor knew her well enough to know she had plenty more to say.
After another ten minutes, the curvature of the floor leveled off, and the end of the tunnel came into view. Victor couldn't see much of what was beyond the shaft other than bright light, crossbeams, and a hint of the wall on the opposite side a hundred meters away. Whatever the room was, it was wide and colossal.
"Is that the helm?" Imala asked.
"Doubt it," said Victor. "I've been moving parallel to the hull toward the back of the ship, not toward the center."
His external mike was picking up noise now. At first he thought it might be mechanical--bots perhaps or machines pumping and hammering, working in unison. But the more he listened, the more he realized there was no order to the noise, no rhythm of operations, no repeated sequence of sounds that come from machines doing a task over and over again. No, this noise was too random, too scattered--like the sound of people at work--the clang of metal, the hiss of saws, the grinding and turning of heavy equipment. There were Formics in that space, he realized. And lots of them.
He inched his way forward toward the end of the shaft. The lip of the shaft was rounded, and the track ran over the lip and downward, disappearing from view. Victor reached out, grabbed the edge, and pulled himself forward just as--
Another Formic appeared, crawling up into the shaft in front of him, barreling its way inside, changing its orientation ninety degrees to enter the shaft. Victor had only a moment to push off the floor at an angle and get clear. He initiated his glove and toe magnets midflight and stuck to the opposite wall. The Formic clawed its way farther into the shaft, feet scrabbling at the divots beside the track to get purchase. The cart followed it in, metal squeaking and screaming as the anchor rod scraped against the inside of the track. Like the other Formic, this one wore blinders over its face and continued into the darkness without seeming to notice Victor was there.
Victor clung to the wall and waited until the creature was out of sight before crawling back to the lip of the shaft. The room that opened up before him was larger than any enclosed space he had ever been in, like the vast domed stadiums of Earth. It was oval in shape--like the inside of an egg--and its walls were lined with cart tracks that led to dozens of different shafts much like his own. Cart-pulling Formics were everywhere, moving along the tracks, all held in place by their harnesses and anchor rods.
The center of the room was a massive space filled with large chunks of ship wreckage. Victor's heart sank when he realized what it was. It was the Italians all over again. A nightmare revisited. Cabins, engines, helms, cockpits, fuselages, fuel tanks. All twisted and broken and ripped apart.
Imala sounded nervous. "What is that, Vico?"
"It's wreckage, Imala. It's the debris of destroyed human ships."
She was quiet a moment. "How is that even possible?"
Victor turned to the left and saw a massive aperture on the wall, currently closed. "They must have brought the big pieces in from outside through that aperture."
"Yes, but where did the debris come from? How could they recover it? Is this from the ships that attacked them here in orbit? The cannons destroyed those ships. They obliterated them. The pieces exploded and flew off into space."
"Well, they obviously recovered some of the pieces, Imala. Look at that chunk of hull plating there? It has the American flag on the side. That's from the American fleet." He zoomed in with his visor to show her. The flag was scorched and the metal was twisted, but there was no denying the red and white stripes and blue box of stars.
"Not all of these are military vessels, though," said Victor. "Look. See those pieces there?" He zoomed in on another hunk of debris. "That's free-miner design. That's from a digger, Imala. That's a clan ship."
"I don't understand," said Imala. "Free miners haven't attacked the Formics."
"Not here they haven't. Not in near-Earth orbit."
"What are you saying? That some of these ships are from the Belt?"
"And the Kuiper Belt," said Victor. "They have to be."
"That's not possible, Vico. The Formics were coming in hot. They were decelerating the whole time, but they were never slow enough to recover anything."
"They didn't have to, Imala. The pieces followed them in. Remember the vids Lem showed us of the Battle of the Belt? When the Formics destroyed some of the ships, several pieces of the wreckage got caught in a magnetic field behind the ship. The field wasn't strong enough to seize the pieces and pull them behind the ship like the tail of a comet, but the field was strong enough to influence the trajectory of the wreckage and put it on the same course as the Formic ship."
"So this wreckage followed the Formics to Earth? They've been dragging debris across the entire system?"
Victor didn't answer. The full implication of what he was saying had just taken root in his mind. "What if a piece of El Cavador is here, Imala? What if part of my family's ship got caught in that field and pulled to Earth? Or worse, what if someone from El Cavador is here?"
It was unlikely, he knew, but he couldn't deny the possibility. Lem had said that during the battle in the Kuiper Belt the Formics had flung the men of El Cavador away from the Formic ship and out into space. That wouldn't put them behind the ship and anywhere near the magnetic field, but what if the Formics had thrown at least one person in that direction? And what if that one person had been Father?
No, it wasn't possible. The Formic ship was moving too quickly. Even if a scrap of El Cavador or someone from the ship had been snagged, course-corrected by the field, and sent toward Earth, that scrap or person would still be in space and moving in this direction, months or years behind the Formics. Plus, the farther away they were when the magnetic field pulled them, the less likely they were to hit Earth. Any deviation in their course, however minute, would send them millions of klicks from here.
No, Father was not in this wreckage. Nothing from El Cavador was. The free-miner scraps here had to be from ships in the inner Belt. Nothing else would have reached Earth this soon.
And yet despite that, despite the logic of it, Victor wanted to leap out from his concealed position and rummage through every scrap of wreckage he could find just to prove to himself that he was right.
The Formics put an end to that notion. There were six of them to his far left clinging to a chunk of debris. Three more were attached to a bigger piece below his position--hammering, cutting, inspecting, disassembling. And those were the ones he could see. There were likely others, hidden among the various pieces.
"What are they doing?" asked Imala.
"Salvaging anything useful," said Victor. "Looking for parts, hunting for metals that they can melt down and forge differently, exactly what humans do when we find a derelict ship."
Ahead of him, a large chunk of wreckage rotated, revealing two Formics clinging to the back side. They crawled along it, spinning it in zero-G, until they revealed a small cockpit with a dead human pilot inside.
"Victor--"
"I see it."
The man was slumped forward in his seat, his helmet obscuring his face. The Formics scurried to the cockpit and began cutting the canopy away using small devices concealed in their grip. When the canopy was free, they cut the man's straps and restraints and pulled him from the cockpit. The back of the man's helmet had an oxygen tube tethered to the ship, and one of the Formics severed it with a single swipe of his cutting tool. The other Formic removed the man's helmet. The pilot was young, with close-cropped hair and a small frame. The Formics removed his flight suit as quickly as someone peeling a fruit, as if they had done this many times before. Next came his inner garment until they had his chest and stomach exposed. Before Victor knew what was happening, the Formics cut the pilot open across his lower abdomen and reached up inside him. Imala gave a sharp intake of breath.