Globules of blood seeped out and floated in the air. The Formics rooted around for a moment, then removed their bloody hands and pushed the man aside, done with him. They scurried away until they found something else that caught their interest. Then they hunkered down and began cutting again.
"What just happened?" said Imala.
Victor watched the limp, eviscerated body of the pilot float away from the wreckage. "They were looking for something," he said. "When they didn't find it, they moved on."
"Get back to the shuttle, Vico. This is too big for us. It's too dangerous."
"I'm already here, Imala."
"You don't even know where here is."
Victor looked to his right. "Those shafts up there, they point toward the center of the ship. If I can get to one of them--"
"You can't," said Imala. "It's too bright in here. You'll be exposed. There are at least twenty Formics who could see you. You'd never reach the shaft. And even if you did, you have no idea where it leads. Also, they're eviscerating people in there. So, I'd say it's a lost cause."
Victor poked his head out of the shaft and looked down. A few meters below him a Formic pulled a cart to the right, heading toward the distant shafts. "I could hitch a ride, Imala. I could grab on to a cart, use it as a shield, and let the Formic pull me to the shaft. I'm weightless. The Formic wouldn't notice."
"Listen to me, Vico. We did our best here. We got some intel, and now it's time to take it to those who can use it. We've gone as far as we can."
"We've got nothing, Imala. We found some glow bugs and the cargo bay. That's strategically useless. We need intel with military significance, something that a strike team can use to disable the ship."
"I thought we were the strike team."
"We are. But if we fail--"
"We won't fail if we survive. Now turn your butt around and get to the shuttle before you're seen."
He looked below him again. The Formic and its cart were almost past him. His window of opportunity was closing. "I'm going for it, Imala." He muted her audio before she could object, then he scanned the debris in front of him. The Formics were busy at their tasks, not looking in his direction.
Victor took two quick breaths, found his courage, and then crawled out of the shaft and down toward the cart like a spider, clinging to the wall with his toe and glove magnets. For one terrifying moment, the duffel bag on this back caught up with him and shifted his momentum just as he was reaching out with his hand and foot. He instinctively blinked out a command to increase the magnet's power, and his hand and foot slammed into the wall with a deafening clang. He clung there a moment, his heart hammering, not moving, praying that no one had heard. If so, all was lost. He was in plain sight, a sitting duck.
He relaxed the power to the magnets and got moving again, scurrying now, eager for the partial concealment of the cart.
Seconds later he reached it. He grabbed the front of it on the right side and then brought his knees up to his chest in a fetal position to make himself as small as possible. It wasn't enough, though. The cart was only two thirds his size, and his shoulder and buttocks and the top of his helmet were sticking out for all to see. The duffel bag on his back wasn't helping, jutting out behind him like a turtle's shell. If seen from the other side of the cart, he might go unnoticed, but if anyone looked in his direction from a high angle, it was over. They would come for him--cutters out, maws open, hands bloody.
The Formic pulling the cart paused, and for a terrifying heartbeat Victor thought it had detected him. Then it lowered its head and pulled harder, as if adjusting to the nearly imperceptible increase in mass of its cargo.
It was not a fast Formic, Victor soon discovered. Each step was deliberate and labored. Victor's eyes traced the track in front of him, calculating the distance to the shaft far ahead. At this rate, they wouldn't reach it for another ten minutes or more. That was too much time. He wouldn't go unnoticed for that long.
A light on his HUD was flashing. It was Imala, trying to get his attention. He debated keeping her muted until he reached the shaft, but the flashing light became more insistent, and eventually he gave in and reopened her audio.
She was yelling, frantic, midsentence "--extended all the way! They've all extended!"
"Imala, slow down. What's extended?"
"The cannons! I see eight of them extended. No, nine."
"Cannons?"
"Formic cannons, Vico. Outside the ship. The one over the hole, it's extended, too. Something is coming. I've got movement on my Eye. Over forty contacts, heading toward us."
"You mean ships?"
"Fanned out, coming from multiple angles. A hundred and sixty klicks out and moving in fast."
A fleet, Victor realized. An attack. But who would be attacking? The Americans had already lost their fleet. Who else had that many weaponized fighters?
"The Formics are firing!" said Imala.
"Show me," said Victor.
A vid feed appeared on his HUD. A half dozen of the Formic cannons were in view, each of them slinging pellets of green plasma into space in a steady stream of glowing destruction.
"Show me the contacts," said Victor.
A second window appeared on his HUD showing blinking dots moving toward a center target. The fighters were coming in hot, but the cannons were picking them off easily. Two of the dots winked out, then three, six. They were nimble things, Victor saw. They juked right, then left, spinning and dodging in a way Victor didn't think possible. But the pellets persisted, and one by one the dots on his screen winked out until only six remained.
"Who are they, Imala?"
"No idea. The Eye can't identify them."
On Victor's HUD, one of the remaining six fighters disappeared, destroyed. Then another, then another, leaving only three.
"What do we do?" asked Imala. The panic in her voice had been replaced with a calm resignation. Victor would never make it to the shuttle in time, and they both knew it. The fighters would fire on the ship with their nukes long before Victor was halfway up the shaft. And if he ran for it and the fighters failed, then he would have revealed himself to the Formics in the cargo bay for no reason.
No, if he moved he was dead.
And anyway even if he could make it to the shuttle, it would only be to die with Imala instead of alone; any blast from the Formic ship would kill them both.
He wanted to say something comforting to Imala, an expression of gratitude perhaps, or an apology for dragging her into this, the kind of parting words that people share when death was imminent. He owed her that much. But every sentence that formed in his head felt trite and awkward and overly dramatic, so he said nothing.
On the vid feed, one of the Formic cannons slammed into the hull in a twisted heap, like a metal can suddenly crushed by a giant invisible boot. Then another cannon crumpled. And another.
"What's happening, Imala?"
"I don't know. The cannons are collapsing."
"They can't collapse. There's no gravity."
And then there was gravity. All around him. One second he was weightless, the next he was pressed flat against the side of the cart, heavy and disoriented, the weight of the duffel bag and all of the tools crushing him. The debris in the center of room fell all at once, a mountain of wreckage crashing down, crushing Formics, banging and colliding in a deafening boom. The Formic pulling the cart was now tipped far to one side away from the wall, nearly upside down, it's legs flailing, trying to get purchase. If not for the anchor bar still locking it to the track, it would have plummeted downward.
Every part of Victor felt as if it were being crushed. His organs were heavy in his gut; his muscles were pressing down upon his bones; his helmet, his suit, everything was smothering him, squeezing him. The world became fuzzy and dark at the edges. He was blacking out. Imala was yelling in his ear.
The cart suddenly shifted, bending downward, tilting to the side, nearly dumping him off. Victor scrambled to hold on, suddenly awake, the impossi
bly heavy mass that was his body sliding toward the edge. His hands clung to one of the cart's traces, his feet dangling, his grip sliding downward inch by inch. He could see far below him. Fifty meters down the ship debris had clustered into a pile of twisted metal and jagged points, like a mountain of dirty knives waiting to receive him.
The duffel bag, by some miracle, had snagged on a corner of the cart and now rested on the cart's side above him. The strap of the bag, tight around Victor's chest, was all that kept him from falling off. He needed to secure himself another way, he realized, get a better grip on the traces, lock himself into the wall somehow. If the bag tore loose, the weight of the tools would pull him down like a stone.
He tried readjusting his grip so he could free his other hand to reach back and unstrap the bag.
But then the anchor rod bent again with a screech of twisting metal and the cart tipped downward. The duffel bag slipped free and slammed into him, knocking Victor free. Arms flailing, he reached out, grabbed nothing but air, and fell.
CHAPTER 5
Alliance
Just outside the city of Lianzhou, at the foothills of the Nanling Mountains in southeast China, Mazer Rackham sat cross-legged on the dirt floor of his tent, eyes closed, back straight, deep in meditation. He was aware of everything around him. The cot to his right. The wind on his face and bare chest--blowing in gently from the open tent flap. The warmth of the sun. The dirt and grass and pebbles beneath him. The soldiers and vehicles moving about the camp. The four armed Chinese guards outside the tent, each ready to shoot him should he try to escape.
Mazer inhaled deep, exhaled slowly. His Maori mother had taught him to believe in Te Kore, the void, the place unseen, the realm beyond the world of everyday experience, an existence between nonbeing and being. The realm of potential being.
Mazer knew he was well below his potential at the moment. His body was not as strong as it had been--his abdominal wound had sapped him of energy and strength. Nor was his mind as clear as it should be. The deaths of his crew and companions still swirled in his mind like a storm. Patu, Fatani, and Reinhardt--killed when the Formics shot down their HERC. Then Danwen, the grandfather who had tended Mazer's wounds. And now Calinga was gone as well, vaporized in the nuke detonation.
The loss of them all left an emptiness inside him, as if a plug had been pulled from his foot and a portion of his soul had drained out of him like water.
No, not soul. Mana. Energy, essence, power, the presences of the natural world. That's what had flowed out of him. That's what the whakapapa taught, what Mother had whispered in his ears at night as a child as she tucked him into bed. "We are all brothers and sisters, Mazer. People, birds, the fishes, trees. All of this is family. All of this is whanau."
His Father had called it nonsense. He had never said so while Mother was still fighting cancer, but Father had made his feelings plain enough after she had died. He never forbade Mazer from believing, but Father's skepticism and disdain for it was so thick and bitter and obvious that Mazer had abandoned it for no other reason than to remove anything in their lives that might keep him and Father apart.
But now here Mazer was, drained of mana, sapped of his essence.
The rational, educated side of his mind--the side shaped by Father and books and computers--said that such thoughts were ridiculous. The mystical Maori mana was a thing of fiction. A fool's hope, a religion born of ignorance.
Yet there was a stronger voice inside Mazer. A voice that clung to the notion. Mother's voice. Soft and gentle and layered in love. A voice that told him to believe.
He had not entertained such thoughts for many years. Mazer's faith had died when Mother did. And yet he couldn't deny that something had leaked out of him. He could feel the vacancy as assuredly as he felt the ground beneath him. And until mana flowed back into him, he could not be who he was, who he should be. His mind was clear on that point. Unless he found mana, unless it flowed back into him, he would continue as a lesser form of himself.
He opened his eyes and dug at the dirt. He found a pebble just below the surface no bigger than a pill. He lifted his canteen off the cot and poured water over the small stone, rubbing it between his fingers to clean it of dirt. In the school of learning, the whare wananga, a student swallowed a small pebble, a whatu, in the initiation ceremony. It was believed that by swallowing the stone, a student established the conditions whereby mana could flow into that person in the form of knowledge.
Mazer placed the stone on his tongue, took a drink of water, and swallowed.
It was not foolishness, he told himself. He had done this eagerly as a child, swallowing the water so quickly that some of it had gone down the wrong pipe and sent him into a fit of coughing. Mother had watched from the front row of the cultural center, beaming with pride. And hadn't he felt stronger after the ceremony? Hadn't he flexed his arms and told Mother that, yes, he could feel it now. He was stronger. And she had laughed and taken a knee in front of him and told him how proud she was of her little warrior. Mazer had felt such a rush of love in that moment, that the memory of it, even now, caused his cheeks to burn. If that wasn't mana, he didn't know what was.
A jeep came to a stop in front of his tent, tires squishing in the mud. Mazer watched as Captain Shenzu of the People's Liberation Army got down from the driver's seat, approached Mazer's tent, and stepped inside. Shenzu's camouflaged field uniform was a mottled mix of browns and greens with his rank on his collar and the red star of the Chinese military embroidered on his upper right sleeve. He looked as if he hadn't slept in days.
"General Sima requests your presence," Shenzu said in English. "Please put on a shirt and come with me."
Mazer's shirt lay on his cot. He had removed it before his meditation and exercise. Prior to the crash, he could do a hundred push-ups without slowing his pace or breaking much of a sweat, but now he could barely do twenty without the pain in his abdomen lighting up like a flare.
He got to his feet and picked up the shirt.
Shenzu winced and gestured to the red, jagged scar across Mazer's midsection. "That's a nasty cut, Captain. And recent by the look of it."
Mazer pulled the shirt down over his head and covered the scar. "Our HERC was shot down near Dawanzhen by a swarm of Formic fighters. I was the lucky one."
Shenzu's expression softened. "And your crew? Patu, Fatani, and Reinhardt?"
Shenzu knew their names of course. It was Shenzu who had come to New Zealand before the war and convinced Mazer's superiors at the New Zealand Special Air Service to conduct a joint training exercise with the Chinese military. And it was Shenzu who had handpicked Mazer and his crew for the task. The deal was simple. Mazer and his team would teach Chinese pilots how to fly the HERC--a new experimental anti-grav aircraft--and the NZSAS would get a few free aircraft for their trouble.
"My crew died on impact," said Mazer.
Shenzu looked genuinely regretful. "You have my condolences, Captain. They were good soldiers."
"Thank you," said Mazer. "And yes, they were."
A silence stretched between them until Shenzu said, "I suppose I am partly responsible for their deaths. I brought them to China, after all."
"You didn't know what was coming," said Mazer. "The Formics killed them, not you. Though you did threaten to shoot us down."
Shenzu nodded. "You and your team had stolen a HERC, expensive government property you had no authority to fly off base."
"We were helping civilians," said Mazer.
"My superiors were afraid your flight path would be seen as an act of aggression against the Formics and instigate a conflict. There are still some officers who believe that's what happened."
"Is that what you think?" Mazer asked.
Shenzu hesitated then shook his head. "No. The Formics had already killed hundreds of civilians when they landed. Threatening to shoot you down was a mistake."
"What about arresting me and Captain O'Toole?" asked Mazer. "Was that a mistake as well? Are you intending t
o punish us for destroying one of the Formic landers? For helping your people?"
Shenzu turned his body toward the open tent flap and gestured toward the jeep. "General Sima is the man to answer that question. Shall we?"
They climbed up into the jeep and drove north through camp, maneuvering through a sea of tents, the bustle of camp all around them. Trucks and four-wheelers slogged through the mud. A team of mechanics huddled around a half-disassembled transport. Medics treated the wounded at a field hospital. Soldiers formed lines at mess halls and latrines. Trucks were being fueled and serviced. Equipment was being checked and rechecked. Loads were being tied down. They even passed a pickup game of baseball, where soldiers swung a broomstick bat at a wadded ball of socks.
"How many men are here?" asked Mazer.
"Close to eleven thousand," said Shenzu. "The camp extends for almost two kilometers west of us, all the way to the Qinglian Expressway." He pointed to their right. "The easternmost boundary of camp is the Lianjiang River. And just beyond that is the city of Lianzhou, where General Sima has established his command post."
It wasn't much of a city in Mazer's opinion. There were no high-rises, no industrial complexes, at least not along the western back of the river. Nor were there any people, from what Mazer could see. All the streets and shops along the river were vacant and quiet.
"Has the city been evacuated?" Mazer asked.
"The military ordered them north shortly after the invasion," said Shenzu. "It wasn't safe for them here, and the city is an important strategic position. The Qinglian Expressway is a supply line from the north. It's one of the few highways that has been cleared of abandoned vehicles for the army's use. It takes a lot of vehicles to move an army this size. Plus the city itself is a good source of food, blankets, communication devices, and other supplies. General Sima has crews collecting anything that might be useful as we speak."