Earth Afire

  The man in the mask rolled Mazer off of Bingwen and onto his back, then he got his arms under Mazer's armpits. Another man in a matching suit and mask grabbed Mazer's ankles. They lifted him. He was dead weight. Mazer's head lolled to the side, showing him Formics on the ground, bleeding out, dead. Smoke billowed out of their transport. It lay flat on the ground, no longer hovering, burned out. The netting was on the ground too, discarded in a heap. A crude-looking device lay on top of it, something to short-circuit the net, perhaps. The air was thick with smoke and the stench of dead Formics.

  The men carried him into a large vehicle and laid him on the floor, the metal surface cold and hard and unforgiving. A third man in a black suit rushed inside behind them, carrying Bingwen. The instant he was in, another man slammed the door shut and yelled to the driver. "Go go go!"

  Tires spun. The vehicle shot forward, bouncing, rattling, accelerating. The man holding Bingwen--Calinga they had called him--lay Bingwen down on the floor beside Mazer, bunching up a piece of fabric under Bingwen's head as a pillow. Bingwen appeared limp and frightened, but when he made eye contact with Mazer, a look of relief washed over him. We're safe, it seemed to say. We're alive.

  There was a long bench in front of Mazer, where several men sat in mottled gray-and-black containment suits, feverishly working with their holopads. "No movement from the lander," one of them said. "Sky's clear."

  Someone behind Mazer responded. "Keep watching. And keep tracking that transport we saw heading north. If it so much as decelerates to head back this way, I want to know."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Air is clear," said another man. "Ninety-seven percent. We're good."

  "Masks off," said the man behind Mazer.

  The men removed their masks. Mazer didn't recognize any of them, but he could tell by the way they handled themselves that they were all soldiers, expertly trained. They instantly began caring for their gear, checking their weapons, reloading, readjusting sights, cleaning their masks, getting ready for the next fight as soon as the last one was over. Their movements were quick, disciplined, and automatic. They had done this a hundred times. The dead Formics behind them were already forgotten. They weren't congratulating themselves or celebrating their victory like amateurs; they were calm and procedural, going about business as usual.

  They're expert Formic killers, Mazer realized.

  It was only after their weapons were ready again that the soldiers saw to their own needs, taking a drink from a canteen, ripping open an energy pack.

  None of them were Chinese, Mazer noticed. They were as diverse a mix of ethnicities and nationalities as Mazer had ever seen in a small unit. Europeans, Americans, Latinos, Africans. And yet their clothes revealed nothing as to who they were. No uniforms, no insignia, no rank. And yet Mazer knew at once who they were.

  Calinga knelt beside him, preparing a syringe. "The paralysis is temporary. Residual effect of the zappers. This will help." He stuck the syringe into the meat of Mazer's arm. Almost at once, Mazer felt the knot in his muscles relax and the jittered shake of his hands subside. He hadn't even realized he had been trembling until he no longer was.

  Calinga did the same for Bingwen.

  Mazer could feel his fingers and toes again. His wrist responded when he told it to move. "Thank you," he managed to say.

  "Talking already," Calinga said, as he packed up the syringes and supplies. "Good sign. Means they didn't cook your brain. Ten more seconds and you were heading for the gray mountain." He turned to Bingwen, his expression warm and cheery. "And you, little man, are lucky this guy took the brunt of the net. I know he's heavy and smelly and covered in mud, but it's better to be flattened by him than a zapper. Believe me." He patted Bingwen lightly on the arm.

  "How long have MOPs been in China?" Mazer asked.

  "Since right after the invasion," said the voice behind him.

  Mazer knew that voice. He turned and faced Captain Wit O'Toole on the bench behind him.

  "Hello, Mazer," said Wit. "I'm glad to see you still alive."

  "So am I," said Mazer. "I have you to thank for that."

  "You two know each other?" said Bingwen. He pushed himself up and removed the gas mask. His face was the only part of him not covered in mud.

  "We tested Mazer for our unit," said Wit. "But instead of incapacitating my men and escaping the test, he endured nearly an hour of torture."

  "You tortured him?" Bingwen was suddenly angry.

  "Only a little," said Wit. "It couldn't have been worse than the zapper. And you are?"

  "Bingwen."

  "Captain Wit O'Toole. Mobile Operations Police. I'd say it's a pleasure to meet you, but that would be a lie considering the circumstances." He turned to Mazer. "You brought a civilian into a hot zone, Mazer. Not smart. And a child, no less."

  "It's not his fault," said Bingwen. "He tried to get rid of me, but I kept coming back."

  "You must have already been at the lander when you saw us," said Mazer.

  "We arrived last night," said Wit. "Observing. Undetected. We blew our cover to save you."

  "You shouldn't have," said Mazer. "Don't think me ungrateful, but destroying the lander is more important than our lives."

  "I'm glad to hear you haven't lost all sense," said Wit. "Because you're right. Strategically, it would have been smarter to let the Formics kill you."

  "Well I for one am glad you didn't," said Bingwen.

  "The shield only goes to the surface," said Mazer.

  "We know," said Wit. "We saw the tunnels. We counted twenty of them around the lander. We'll have a hard time using them, though. Transports patrol the area, and the holes have a lot of traffic. Plus they're too narrow for us. They're Formic sized."

  "I could fit through," Bingwen offered.

  "Those tunnels aren't the answer," said Mazer. "But the principle is. What's the range on this vehicle? Could it get us fifty klicks south of here?"

  "Why?" asked Wit. "What's to the south?"

  "Drill sledges. We're not going to use Formic tunnels. We're going to dig our own."

  CHAPTER 27

  Launch

  There was little heat in the shaft and only the standing lights of the construction crews to see by, but Lem was more worried about secrecy than comfort. Father had ears throughout the Juke complex, but he didn't yet have them here. The shaft had been dug only twelve hours ago. The walls and floor were still barren rock. The dust in the air was still thick and chalky. It seemed the perfect place to meet with Norja Ramdakan, longtime member of the executive board, who now stood opposite Lem, hugging himself in the cold.

  "I should have told you to dress warmly," said Lem.

  "You should have told me what this is about," said Ramdakan.

  He was a plump man who cared far too much for fashion and far too little for his own health. Fine fabrics and colorful little boutonnieres didn't make you any less round in the midsection and thus more attractive to the womenfolk. No doubt Ramdakan's three ex-wives had told him exactly that as they stormed out of his life with a good chunk of his fortune.

  Lem had known it would be this cold, and he could have easily passed the information on to Ramdakan, but he rather liked watching the man squirm.

  According to the map on Lem's holopad, they were standing in solid moon rock, fifty meters from the nearest Juke tunnel and thirty meters below the surface. The tunnel was to be a connector between two of the wings, but since the excavation and construction were far from complete, the company map had not been updated to include it.

  "I'm worried about my father," said Lem. "And I didn't know who else to talk to but you who know him best."

  Ramdakan had been with Father since the beginning, handling most of the finances in Father's early mining ventures. He had even spent a few years in the Belt with Father, though Lem could hardly imagine that. Ramdakan recoiled from any discomfort. He must have been a bear to live with aboard a mining vessel.

  "Why should you worry about your father?" asked
Ramdakan, trying not to look suspicious. He was one of Father's most trusted lieutenants, but he was also the most transparent. The man couldn't act to save his life. He had no sense of his own face, no awareness of how to conceal emotion. It made him seem enormously stupid. For an instant Lem tried imagining the man doing King Lear or Prospero, and the idea was more than a little revolting. Falstaff is more to your liking, chubby, except sapped of all wit and humor.

  "I think someone in the company may be trying to usurp my father by discrediting him to investors," said Lem.

  Ramdakan laughed. "They'll have a hard time of that. Your father is loved by investors. They all care about one thing, Lem. Coin. And your father gives them plenty of that."

  "Yes, but Father could quickly fall out of favor. Everything could turn in an instant. You no doubt know about this business with taxes and tariffs, for example."

  "I know we pay taxes and tariffs," Ramdakan said cautiously.

  Oh you stupid little man, thought Lem. Is that the best you can do? Is that the face you make when you're pretending to be innocent? Has that ever once worked with anyone?

  Lem's face of course revealed nothing. Instead, he showed concern. "You haven't heard then? I thought for sure that you, of all people, with such control of the finances, would know." He gave Ramdakan the holopad with Imala's findings already pulled up on the screen. "The LTD recently found billions in unpaid taxes and tariffs," said Lem. "And worse still, there were people both inside the LTD and in Juke Limited who not only knew about the discrepancies, they also took steps to cover it up."

  It was absurd to call the illegal accounting of billions of credits mere "discrepancies," but Lem knew that was exactly the term Ramdakan himself had used when the Board was scrambling to keep the news silent. The evidence hadn't implicated Ramdakan directly--he was too smart for that--yet Lem could see the man's dirty fingers all over it. Ramdakan had likely done all the up-front work himself. And if not him then at least his weasely finance teams who had taken his explicit direction.

  But regardless of who had gotten the ball rolling, it was obviously a vast undertaking that involved far more people than Imala even knew about, with Ramdakan and Father likely right up at the top.

  "Ah yes," said Ramdakan. "I had heard something about this."

  Lem wanted to laugh. Ramdakan was acting as if illegal activity with that much money was mere office chitchat or casual gossip. "That's a lot of money, Norja," said Lem. "It takes whole departments of people and no small amount of money to conceal something like this."

  Ramdakan shoved the holopad back into Lem's arms suddenly angry. "Is this why you called me into a freezer, Lem? To show me what the idiots at the LTD do with their spare time?"

  Not in their spare time, moron, Lem wanted to shout. They're a government agency. This is what they're supposed to do all the time. That is, when they're not taking bribes from you and doing whatever dance we tell them to.

  But he said none of this. Instead he kept his expression calm. "I called you here, Norja, because I'm worried. Father would never have agreed to this. And yet, the evidence insinuates that Father was complicit in this. Some may even conclude that Father orchestrated the whole thing."

  "Not true."

  "Of course not. But if the press were to ever hear about this..."

  "They won't," Ramdakan said. "We have people on this right now, Lem. They're making it go away. And if the press ever did catch wind of it, the PR folks would handle it and make sure it didn't go to the nets. That's their job, and they do it very well. This is old news, Lem. We've got it under control."

  "Good. I'm glad to hear it. So how much of it have we paid?"

  Ramdakan blinked, confused. "What do you mean?"

  "The back taxes, the unpaid tariffs. How much of it have we paid thus far? Surely we've begun the process of meeting the required debt."

  "It's complicated, Lem. We're talking about massive amounts of money. It's not like buying a pair of shoes."

  Or a bigger belt, Lem thought.

  "There are lawyers involved," said Ramdakan. "There are thousands of pages of documentation to sift through. These things take time, Lem. Our people will handle it. That's their job. It's not your concern."

  "But it is my concern," said Lem. "People in this company are threatening to taint my father's reputation. I won't stand for that. Have we at least made an initial payment, to show our good faith, to keep the LTD from taking this public?"

  "I told you. No one's going public with this. Trust me."

  Because you've silenced them with threats and bribes and that pig-ugly grimace of yours. "Information has a way of getting out," said Lem. "I'm told these discrepancies were uncovered by a no-name, low-ranking junior auditor at the LTD. If someone that insignificant can dig up this dirt, anyone can. Sooner or later this is going to leak. We need to prepare for it."

  "How?"

  "We go on record that we as a company are doing all we can to meet this obligation. If we wait until the leaks do that, we'll look like unrepentant snakes trying to cover our own asses."

  Ramdakan's teeth were near chattering. "Fine. I'll look into it."

  "How much will you give?"

  "I said I'll look into it. We haven't allocated funds for this, Lem. It will need some examination. This has been a rough quarter, in case you haven't noticed. We don't have vaults of liquidity that we can dip into whenever we want. This has to be budgeted and approved. I'll have to consult with the Board. They're the ones who will decide." The emphasis was an attempt to remind Lem that Lem had no authority in the matter, that he was a minor-league scrub throwing pitches in the big leagues, but Lem pretended to have taken a different meaning.

  "You're right," he said. "We don't have time for delays. The last thing we need is boardroom bureaucracy miring this in indecision." Lem thought for a moment, or rather acted as if he were thinking and then pretended to reach a decision. "You may think me a great fool, Norja, but I don't think we can wait for the Board. I want to make a good-faith payment from my own personal fortune on behalf of the company."

  Ramdakan chuckled. "You can't be serious."

  "I am serious. I'll have my people do it immediately. A tenth of what we owe should be enough to keep the LTD content for now."

  Ramdakan's eyes widened and he nearly choked on the word. "A tenth? But that's ... an enormous amount. You can't possibly--"

  "--have that much money? I do, Norja. You forget, I've managed a few companies myself. I've done very well. No one seems to remember because Father's shadow is quite long, which is fine by me. But that's how committed I am to this company and to my father."

  "Yes, but ... a tenth?"

  "Anything less would backfire in the press. It wouldn't be a show of good faith. We'll call it a loan. The company can pay me back over time once the funds have been budgeted."

  "Your father won't approve of you doing this, Lem."

  "He doesn't have to know. I fear he'd be embarrassed by it. And no one else on the Board must know either. I don't want to do anything to diminish Father's standing among them. It would shame him if the Board and investors knew his own son had to bail him out. Promise me you'll keep this quiet, Norja. My father has spent his entire adult life building this company from nothing. I'm not going to allow a few cheapskates or crooks to tarnish his reputation. He's already poised to take a hit with this drone nonsense."

  That gave Ramdakan pause. "Drone nonsense?"

  "This business about loading the drones with the glaser. You have to talk to him, Norja. He won't listen to me. The glasers will fail. I've seen the Formic ship in action. Our drones will be decimated. The Vanguard project will tank after the war as a result. The idea of us producing and using drones will be dead. Father's intentions are good, but that will be an ax blow to the company. It could very well cost him his position and all of us our jobs." He stepped closer and put a hand on Ramdakan's shoulder. "You have to help me prevent that from happening. We must protect Father. He has always trus
ted you. Do I have your word that you are still his man?"

  "Of course, Lem."

  Lem visibly relaxed. "Good. I'm sorry to make you endure this cold, but Father's precarious position right now can't be heard by those who might try and take advantage of it."

  "Yes. Of course."

  Lem gestured back toward the corridor. "You go on ahead. We shouldn't both be seen coming out of the shaft at once."

  "Smart. Good luck, Lem." He pushed his way through the sheets of plastic hanging from the ceiling to keep the dust and cold out and made his way back to the corridor, his steps bouncy and light without a magnetic floor beneath them to compensate for Luna's low gravity.

  Lem watched him go. If Ramdakan was smart, he'd see Lem's game and play along, knowing that his best chance of staying afloat when Lem took Father's place was to prove himself now as Lem's loyal servant. If Ramdakan wasn't smart--which was more likely--he'd believe Lem was sincere and do exactly as Lem had asked. Either way, Lem won.

  He tapped into his holopad and sent the message to his assistants that the good-faith payment they had already prepared for the LTD was a go. It was an enormous amount, yes, a very large portion of Lem's fortune, but like everything else Lem spent his money on, it was an investment. You don't make money without spending money, and if this worked, if Lem ascended to Father's position at this ripe young age, he had a lifetime ahead of him to make back a hundred times that or more.

  And if it didn't work, well, that's what lawyers were for. He'd get back most of it in the end. Then he could leave the company and go turn that investment into a bigger fortune elsewhere. It wasn't hard, really. Once you had your first few hundred million, the money did most of the work for you.

  But it would work. He knew it would. He had made gambles like this before, and he'd always been right. He would release Imala's findings to the press in a week or so, going first to the underground press on the nets, away from the journalists Father owned. And he'd leak the news of his good-faith payment to the LTD as well. He would spin it to give the impression that he had made an enormous personal sacrifice to save the thousands of jobs that would have been lost as a result of the company's poor performance. There were all kinds of human-interest stories there. He made a mental note to have a video crew start shooting B-roll of blue-collar types working in the factories. The press ate that crap up.