She threw more switches and punched in more commands. "My father's a pilot back in Arizona. He did everything he could to convince me to follow in his footsteps. Flying lessons, low-grav flight training. He even took me on an orbiting shuttle cruise when I was a kid and talked the pilot into letting me take the helm for a few minutes. I think he thought I'd have some magical experience that would convince me to pursue piloting. I broke his heart when I told him I wanted to work in tax and tariffs."
"A far cry from flying."
"And not the most glamorous of careers either, in his opinion. What can I say? Macroeconomics and financial structures fascinate me. My father called it a 'cataclysmic mistake.'" She smiled. "You have to know my father. He's not the most open-minded of men. He even tried to marry me off to another Apache to keep me from coming to Luna. A real tribesman like my father. Pride of the people and all that. Preserving our heritage.
"Despite all that, though, I really liked the guy. If my father hadn't been the one to introduce us and if he hadn't been pushing the whole thing, I'm not sure what would have happened. My mother said I broke it off to spite my father, which is probably true. When I left home, it wasn't a fond farewell. My dad and I both said a few things we probably shouldn't have."
"Is that why you're not going back to Arizona? Is that why you're coming with me?"
"I'm coming with you, Victor, because you shouldn't do this alone and because I think the world owes it to you."
"It's not your debt to pay, Imala. I got here on my own, remember? I'm not helpless."
"Yes, but what you seem to forget is that you nearly wasted away to nothing and you've failed miserably on your own ever since you arrived. If I hadn't helped, you'd still be stuck in the recovery hospital awaiting trial, with the world none the wiser about what's coming."
Victor put his feet up on the dash and his hands behind his head. "My hero. Whatever would I do without you?"
"Not much," said Imala.
The anchors detached, and Imala pulled the shuttle up and away from the terminal.
Victor sat up, suddenly serious. "Are you sure about this, Imala? This is a year-long trip. Six months out, six months back."
"I can do the math, Victor."
"Yes, but you're being rushed into this. It's not too late to change your mind."
"You're saying you don't want the company?"
"No, I'm saying this is a sacrifice you don't have to make."
"I can't stay on Luna, Victor. And I'm not going home. If I go home, I'm useless. Here, I can do something. I may not be able to stop the hormiga ship, but I can contribute in some small way. Will you let me do that please? Will you at least give me that courtesy?"
He smiled and pushed off the seat, weightless now. "On one condition: My family calls me Vico for short. If we're going to be in this can for six months, we should at least treat each other like family."
She grinned, testing the sound of the word. "Vico. I'll see if I can remember that."
*
They flew for seven days toward Last Chance, a small supply depot that was the last stop in this quadrant for those traveling to the Belt. From here, crews could anticipate several months and two hundred million kilometers of nothing. Victor and Imala didn't need supplies, but they were desperate for news. Their shuttle had lost contact with Luna after the first day because of the interference, and they had no idea what preparations Earth and Luna had made since then.
As they approached the depot, still several hours away, Victor said, "You realize of course that in all likelihood the ships docked at this place are going to know less about what's going on than we do. They won't have had communication for the same reason we don't. They'll be pumping us for information, not the other way around."
"Probably," agreed Imala. "But our shuttle is hardly the fastest thing out here. Maybe there are ships at the depot that left Luna after us and arrived before us. In which case they might know something we don't."
The shuttle's flight data said that Last Chance had ten docking stations with umbilicals, but when the depot came into view, Victor saw that there were at least four times that many ships clustered around it.
"It's packed," said Victor. "No way we're getting on board."
"Maybe we don't have to," said Imala. "Laserlines work over short distances. If we get close enough, maybe they can feed us news directly to the ship."
When they were less than a hundred klicks away, Imala used the laserline to hail the station.
The head of a portly woman appeared in the holofield.
"I'd ask for a docking tube," said Imala, "but it doesn't look like you have one available."
"We don't. You're welcome to patch in to our news feeds, though."
"You're getting broadcasts from Luna?"
"We're getting text only," said the woman. "The bandwidth doesn't handle voice or video."
"How are you getting even that?" said Imala. "We can't get anything."
"We've set up a string of ships between us and Luna," said the woman, "with a ship every million klicks or so. Like a bucket brigade. They're passing up information via laserline as it becomes available. It's not a perfect system, mind you. The deterioration you usually get in ten million klicks happens in a hundred thousand now. So in a million klicks you can barely make out a very slow transmission. The ships have to repeat the message three times and make the best guess about some passages, but even so you're going to get some deterioration and holes in the text. Shall I send you the codes for the uplink?"
"Yes. Please," said Imala.
"There's a fee," said the woman.
"You're charging me for the news?"
"Keeping relay ships out there isn't cheap. News wouldn't get through otherwise."
"How much?" asked Imala.
The woman told them a ridiculous amount. Imala wanted to argue, but Victor said, "I'll pay it." His family had left him money for his education at a university. He could spare some of it here.
Five minutes later text from various news feeds appeared on their monitor. The reports were riddled with holes and sentence fragments, but Victor and Imala got the gist of each report.
Victor had hoped that a fleet had been assembled, but it quickly became evident that such wasn't the case. STASA was calling for calm and pushing for diplomacy, seeking for ways to communicate with the hormigas when they arrived. The U.N. had conducted an emergency summit as Ukko Jukes had suggested, but all that political circus had accomplished was to appoint the Egyptian ambassador, Kenwe Zubeka, as the secretary of alien affairs, a new position with zero power or influence. Zubeka seemed not to notice how insignificant his position was and kept making asinine statements to the press.
When asked about the destroyed ships in the Belt, Zubeka had said, "We don't know what kind of misunderstanding or provocation our alien visitors were responding to. As soon as we can talk to them, I'm sure we can have a peaceful conversation that will benefit both our species."
"Are you kidding me?" said Victor. "A misunderstanding? He's calling the murder of thousands of people a misunderstanding? When they killed the Italians, it wasn't a misunderstanding. It was deliberate. They knew what they were doing."
"It's typical geopolitics, Vico. Few countries have any military presence in space. Most of the bigger powers have shuttles and cargo vessels that are space-ready and could be weaponized, but to form a fleet, to amass enough ships to stage an assault or form a blockade, we need a coalition. The U.S., Russia, China, India, France. These countries don't work well together. The Chinese don't trust the Russians, India doesn't trust the Chinese, and the U.S. doesn't trust anybody, except for maybe a few countries in Europe. And no country wants to act on their own. If they go alone they risk crippling their ships and weakening their arsenal. That would make them vulnerable to other powers."
"So they're going to do nothing? Why does everyone seem to believe that inaction is the best course of action?"
"Caution is their action, Vico. Or at least
that's their justification. They're sitting tight to see what happens. Everyone is hoping this will resolve itself. They're acting like humans always act when war seems inevitable and most of the variables are still unknown. They're playing the good-guy card and waiting for the other guy to shoot first."
"The Formics don't shoot first, Imala. They rip apart. They find life and they destroy it. They're not interested in diplomacy or gathering around a table and making friends. They're interested in breaking us wide open and bleeding us dry."
They read on, but the situation only worsened. Riots were springing up all over the world--people taking to the streets to demand that governments take action. Deaths were reported. Governments continued to call for calm. The media discussed the vids Victor and Imala had uploaded as well. Experts scrutinized every detail, spending far too much time excusing the media for initially ignoring the vids. The vids did, after all, look like so many spookers out there.
When they finished reading, Victor said, "We can't move on, Imala. We're not leaving this depot. Not yet. Not until we see how this plays out."
None of the other ships at the depot moved on either. And over the next few days, the number of ships only grew. Victor and Imala programmed the monitor to alert them whenever a new message came through, regardless of whether they were sleeping or not.
They stayed for days, reading the reports aloud to each other the moment they came in. Sometimes Victor became so frustrated with the idiocy of governments or the press that he would tell Imala to stop reading. Then he would retreat to the back of the shuttle to cool off.
"All that effort," he told her, "all that time spent in the quickship so that Earth could prepare, so that countries could muster enough resources to take action, and nobody is doing anything." He wanted to cry. He wanted to reach down through space and shake someone. "How can they be so fundamentally wrong?"
"Because the world doesn't think like a free-miner family, Vico," Imala said. "We're not one people. We're splintered, too concerned about our own people and agendas and borders. We're one planet, but you wouldn't know it by looking at us."
Among all the idiocy, there were voices of reason as well. Several governments were as incensed and baffled by the inaction as Victor was. Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa. All were advocating forming a coalition to build an immediate defense. But Russia and China and the U.S. beat down the idea in the U.N. Security Council. Further provocation would only lead to further violence.
On the fourth day, with a small cadre of STASA ships acting as escorts, the hormiga ship reached Earth's geosynchronous orbit and came to a full stop.
CHAPTER 10
Mothership
"What do you see?" said Bingwen. "Are they letting people inside the library?"
Above him, Hopper clung to a drainpipe on the side of one of the village houses. Even with his gimp leg, Hopper had always been a better climber. It was the position of his bad foot that gave him the advantage. Since the foot was turned slightly inward, Hopper got more of the sole of his foot on the surface of things without having to bow his legs. It allowed him to scurry up rickety pipes like this one despite it being wet and narrow. "There's got to be at least four hundred people here," said Hopper.
It was dark, well into evening, and the crowd was dotted with lanterns. Nearly everyone from the nearby villages had come to the library to see what would happen when the alien ship arrived. Bingwen's parents were somewhere in the crowd, as was Grandfather. Bingwen had been standing with them, clinging to Mother's hand. But as the crowd grew and shuffled forward toward the library, bodies began to push against each other, and Bingwen felt as if he might be crushed. Before Mother could stop him, he had ducked down and crawled through people's legs behind him until he came out the back and found Hopper.
"Ms. Yi's got the door closed," said Hopper. "She's getting up on a chair."
Bingwen was desperate to see. He looked around him. There was a rain barrel to his right below a windowsill. He grabbed a fruit box from the trash pile and used it as a stepping stool to climb up onto the barrel. From there he pulled himself up into the windowsill. He didn't have nearly as good a view as Hopper, but he could see over the crowd well enough.
Ms. Yi, the librarian, was motioning for quiet. "Please. Everyone, please. The library is closed. We will reopen tomorrow for the news feeds at normal business hours."
The uproar from the crowd was immediate. "Let us inside!" someone shouted.
"We want to see the feeds!"
Ms. Yi waved for quiet again. "Even if I could let you in, we don't have enough machines. You wouldn't fit. If we hear any news, I'll post it on the door."
"You'll open the door!" someone shouted.
"This is our library!"
"Push her out of the way."
"They're going to rip her arms off any second now," said Hopper.
It was true. It was about to get ugly. Bingwen had to do something fast. "Hop, we need to get on the roof of the library."
Hopper gave him a mischievous grin. "I don't know what you have in mind, but I like it already."
Bingwen lowered himself to the ground, and Hopper followed. They ran around the crowd to the back of the library. There were no doors or windows in the back, just a smooth stucco wall.
"No way to get to the roof," said Hopper. "Nothing to climb. I could give you a boost, but the roof is four meters up."
Bingwen was hardly paying attention. He had run past Hopper to a stretch of tall grass behind the building. The bamboo ladder was right where he had left it, anchored to the ground with two hooked stakes. Even if someone had stood right where Bingwen was standing, they likely wouldn't have seen the ladder; it was too well concealed beneath the thick net of grass and undergrowth. Bingwen lifted it free of the stakes and dragged it toward the back of the building.
Hopper blinked. "What is that?"
"A ladder."
"Obviously. Where did it come from?"
"I made it."
"When?"
"About a year ago."
"And when were you going to tell me about it?"
Bingwen gestured with his hand. "Hopper, I'd like you to meet my ladder. Ladder, Hopper."
"Very funny. You mean to tell me you've been sneaking into the library for a year now?"
"A few years actually," said Bingwen. "This is the third ladder I've made."
Bingwen leaned the ladder against the lip of the roof, placing the bamboo poles neatly into the two small grooves on the roof he had chiseled out for that purpose. He gave the ladder a tentative shake to determine it was steady, then gestured to the lowest rung. "After you."
Hopper shook his head. "A few years? Why am I not surprised?" He climbed the ladder, and Bingwen followed.
The top of the roof was flat. Bingwen pulled up the ladder and laid it to the side.
"This is why you ace all the practice tests," said Hopper. "You've been cheating for years."
"I don't cheat," said Bingwen. "I study more."
"When?"
"Three or four in the morning most days. You'd love it. It's very quiet."
"That explains how you learned English."
"What did you think, Hop, that I could pick up English during the paltry hours of study they give us? It's the most backwards language in the world."
"Stop using words like 'paltry.' You're only making me feel dumber."
Bingwen smiled and put a hand on Hopper's shoulder. "You're not dumb, Hop. You're smart. I study more because I have to. I don't grasp concepts as quickly as you do."
Hopper folded his arms and scowled. "You're only trying to make me feel better."
Bingwen made scissors with his fingers and snipped the air. "Let's cut this wonderful bonding moment short and get inside, shall we?"
Bingwen hurried to a spinning, bulbous air vent. He knelt beside it and peeled away the rubber skirt around the vent's base. Then he wrapped his arms around the base, twisted, and lifted. The vent came free easily, le
aving a gaping hole in the roof.
"How did you lift that thing when you first started coming up here?" asked Hopper. "Your arms weren't long enough to wrap around the thing."
"Pulley system," said Bingwen. "Little rope, little bamboo, lot of work. Believe me, this is much easier."
Hopper shook his head again. "Unbelievable."
Bingwen set the vent aside.
Hopper leaned forward and peered into the hole. "It's a four-meter drop to the floor. How are we managing that? No, let me guess. Winches and scaffolding made from rice shoots and bubblegum?"
Bingwen grinned. "Hopper. We have a ladder."
Hopper flushed. "Right."
They retrieved the ladder, lowered it into the hole, and shimmied down. They were in the southwest corner of the building, obscured from the rest of the library by tall shelves of books.
Bingwen could hear voices.
"Now what?" whispered Hopper.
Bingwen crept forward to the end of the shelf and looked down the aisle. The front door was barred, and Ms. Yi was inside now, seated at a terminal, flanked by two of her assistants, watching the news feed.
"That mud sucker," said Hopper. "She gets to watch the feed and we don't?"
"Follow me," said Bingwen.
They crept along the back wall to the main office. Bingwen pulled back a corner of carpet and took out a concealed access card.
"I'm not even going to ask how you got that," said Hopper.
Bingwen opened the door, rehid the card, and they went inside. The projector and antenna box were in a cabinet. "Hold out your arms," said Bingwen. Hopper obeyed, and Bingwen loaded Hopper's arms with both devices. The amp and speaker were in a drawer in the back. Bingwen slid them into his pocket and motioned for Hopper to follow him out.
When they reached the ladder, Hopper said, "So you get the light stuff, and I get the heavy stuff?"
Bingwen put a finger to his lips, took the antenna box, and scaled the ladder. When they both reached the top, Bingwen pulled up the ladder and resealed the hole.
"If you had told me theft was your plan from the beginning," said Hopper, "I could have saved us both a little jail time by telling you what a yak's ass of an idea this is."
"Not stealing," said Bingwen. "This equipment will never leave the library." He carried everything over to the opposite side of the roof above the front door. Most of the crowd was still present, but they had calmed and were sitting in small groups along the village staircase or in the few patches of grass, conversing quietly and waiting for the librarian to bring them news. No one noticed Bingwen setting up the equipment.