Ukko continued. “Two IF fighters tracked the Formic fighter to a small asteroid in the Kuiper Belt sixteen hours ago and terminated the threat.”
“They blew it up?” said Rimas. “How stupid can you get!”
Mazer agreed. We should have captured it. There were a hundred questions that would never be answered now. If the ship was that small, had it come alone? It was clearly not big enough to be an interstellar ship. It must have come from one of the warships. But how?
There were other questions as well. Did the Formics understand Copernicus’s military significance? Could they read its data? Was this a deliberate dismantling of our intelligence infrastructure in preparation for an invasion? Or were they merely targeting all artificial satellites, and they simply hit the closest one first?
Surely Ukko understood how strategically misguided it was to destroy the fighter. Was he losing his influence over the Strategos and the Polemarch? Or was this a misjudgment by them all?
Kim, if we’re led by fools, how can we possibly believe that we can win?
The Hegemon continued, rattling off specific details about the attack. Time, place, the kind of IF fighters used. He even showed a brief vid taken from the IF fighters as they attacked the lone Formic ship.
Mazer kept waiting for Ukko to explain the backup system the IF would employ to track the Formics now that Copernicus was destroyed. But no such information was offered. Ukko eventually gave the podium to one of the rear admirals to take questions, perhaps knowing that the questions would be brutal.
The rear admiral gave the usual nonanswers, trying his best to demonstrate that the IF still had matters under control. It was a weak performance, and by the time the transmission ended and the holo winked out, Mazer felt even more uneasy.
“Why didn’t they capture that fighter?” asked Rimas.
“Maybe they couldn’t,” said Shambhani. “Maybe destroying it was the only option.”
“Or maybe they could have,” said Mazer, “but they felt like they had to destroy it to put everyone’s mind at ease. Make a show of force, reassure the world that we still have a fighting chance. Terminate the threat and win the PR game. Remember, the IF can’t hide the loss of Copernicus. The press regularly receives reports from the IF on the data Copernicus gathers. If that source of intel suddenly ran dry, the press would eventually figure out why. Better for the IF to destroy the fighter and make a vid of them doing so than to let this single Formic fighter go unchallenged and seem smarter and faster than the entire International Fleet.”
“So they blew up the fighter to save face?” asked Shambhani.
“Maybe,” said Mazer. “But I’m more concerned about the loss of Copernicus than I am about how the IF plays the press. We’re essentially blind now. The one slight observational advantage we had is severely limited. The seven other Parallax satellites are so far away from the position of Copernicus that they won’t be much help in making up for what Copernicus no longer reports to us. We’re going to have to be smarter and faster and flawless now. No casualties, no slip-ups.”
“People aren’t stupid,” said Kaufman. “The IF can’t spin this one. Taking out the assassin doesn’t change the fact that the king is still dead. And in terms of technology, that satellite was our king.”
“So we’re pretty much screwed,” said Shambhani.
“Ukko Jukes and the big brass don’t seem to think so,” said Rimas. “Everybody in that press conference acted like we had scored a major victory.”
“‘Act’ is the appropriate word here,” said Mazer. “That press conference was a performance. Ukko and the admirals understand the situation. They’re just trying to paper over how badly screwed we are.”
CHAPTER 2
Bingwen
To: ukko.jukes%
[email protected] From: robinov%
[email protected]/centcom
Subject: Sanction the Chinese
* * *
Dear Ukko,
The public needs a show of strength. With Copernicus down, the IF’s detractors are out in force. I have politicians from every country in the Crescent—Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan—calling for my resignation and threatening to ignore Hegemony taxation if I am not removed. Never mind that losing Copernicus was the Polemarch’s fault and not my own. Swift action must be taken to calm the panic and silence the naysayers. I implore you to approve and fund new weapons, give us more troops, and demonstrate the Hegemony’s commitment to a strong defense.
You know as well as I do where those troops can come from. Nearly every military on Earth has committed soldiers to the IF except the Chinese. I recognize that their military feels thin after its devastating losses, but who better understands the need for a space-based defense than the very nation that suffered the most during the war? Now is the time for you to use your incomparable negotiating skills to bring Beijing around. To give you credible leverage, some level of economic sanctions would surely get international support, especially from the other nations of the Warsaw Pact. My contacts in Russia assure me that their ambassadors would endorse the move. If raising public alarm would help you, I could inform the media that we cannot defend our military assets or our citizens if the Chinese leave us woefully understaffed. You and I are taking heat we do not deserve. Wound the Chinese with words, and hit them in their purses, and they will have no choice but to concede.
Respectfully,
Yulian
Strategos
—Office of the Hegemony Sealed Archives, Imbrium, Luna, May 12, 2118
Bingwen went alone to the Formic tunnels that night, wearing his black battle suit and a climbing harness. He left the officers’ barracks at midnight and mounted his skim cycle under the cover of darkness. No guards were on duty. All was quiet. He slid on his helmet, switched on its night vision, and flew west, soaring across a shallow valley in the northeast corner of Guangxi province.
Three years ago, before all of southeast China burned, the valley here had been green with rice. Families from nearby villages had worked the fields, with their straw hats and sun-bleached clothes, while laughing children played and sang and worked alongside their parents. Then the Formics had gassed everything and peeled back the landscape, leaving the valley black and smoking and littered with corpses. It gladdened Bingwen to see the grasses returning now, creating a sea of green just visible in the moonlight, like a biological show of defiance, a refusal to be defeated. Burn us out, you furry bastards, and we will only grow back again.
No villagers would ever see this land again, however. The military owned it now. It was one of the many new bases that had sprung up since the war. Here soldiers trained and learned how to defend China should the Formics ever reach this soil again.
Bingwen flew with all of his lights off, pushing the skim cycle as fast as it would take him, the valley floor a blur beneath him. It felt like an escape, as if he were actually doing it this time, as if he were really running, putting the military behind him and heading southwest toward Vietnam. Toward freedom.
But of course he would never make it. The tracking chip inside him would alert Captain Li and the others the instant he stepped off base. They would track him down and collect him easily. And even if he somehow did elude them and removed the chip, what would he do? The International Fleet would not take him. He was far too young. And if he found employment and waited until he was eighteen, the war would be long over. Or, more likely, he would be dead, the Earth would belong to the enemy, and he would have done nothing to help stop it. At least here, hell that it was, he was doing something, accomplishing something. At least he was a soldier.
The checkpoint came into view ahead of him, and Bingwen began to slow.
During daylight hours the Formic tunnels were filled with soldiers running training exercises. But at night, after the temperature dropped and the lights were extinguished, the tunnels were dark and still and deserted, just as Bingwen wanted them. For it was in this setting, with all evidence of the human world gone, that Bingw
en could focus his mind completely on the enemy.
He parked his skim cycle near the checkpoint. A pair of guards were posted outside the gatehouse. They came to attention and saluted when Bingwen approached. He spoke a greeting in Chinese and returned the salute, moving around their barrier and continuing toward the giant hole in the ground. The first dozen times he had come here, the guards had dutifully checked his credentials before letting him pass, but now his presence was routine, if not expected.
It still felt odd to have grown men salute him, even now, a year after making lieutenant. It went against the natural order of things. Particularly in China, where respect was reserved for your elders and those with experience. Twelve-year-old boys were to be deferential, submissive, silent, and low. Everyone was your senior. Everyone deserved your respect. You were nothing. To give a boy command was an offense not only to the individual obligated to obey those commands, but also to China, to its heritage, its families, its very soul. And yet here Bingwen was, commanding a squadron of fifty grown men in the Chinese army, all of whom hated having a boy as their commander.
But of course that was the point. Captain Li had handpicked the men for Bingwen’s squadron because their psychological profiles suggested that they would vehemently resist Bingwen’s authority and maybe even take steps to remove him. They were thugs, hardliners, traditionalists—men who could not abide the idea of a child giving them any orders. Bingwen knew they wouldn’t dare attack him publicly or defy him openly. For there was a higher power that could inflict harsh punishments for any show of insubordination. But they could despise him in their hearts and find less obvious ways to resist him.
Usually, after a period of working with Bingwen, the men would soften somewhat. A few even grew to respect him. He was not as incompetent and weak as they had assumed. Some even began to defend him when others spoke ill of him or called him “the Child.”
Of course that was always when Captain Li would yank those men out of the squad and replace them with men who took great offense at having to serve under a child. It meant Bingwen was commanding a different group of men every two months or so, with Captain Li finding soldiers even more unyielding and malicious than the ones before. The most recent replacements, a group of four men, had come from a military prison along the coast. Bingwen couldn’t access their records, but they seemed like the kind of men who were in prison for good reason.
But that was Captain Li, molding Bingwen through the school of pain.
Bingwen reached the hole in the ground, a perfectly cylindrical crater dug straight into the earth, measuring seventy meters deep and nine hundred meters across. It was just as the Formics had left it three years ago when one of their landers had lifted off from this spot and headed back into space to fight Mazer and the Mobile Operations Police, or MOPs, at the scout ship. The crater was visible from space. It stood out like a bullet wound to Earth, a reminder of how unstoppable the enemy had been, how technologically superior.
Bingwen moved along the safety fence, making his way toward the scaffolding staircase that led down to the crater floor. In the moonlight he could make out hundreds of tunnel entrances at the bottom of the hole, as if an army of monster groundhogs had had a field day here.
Bingwen smiled. Groundhogs. If only.
He reached the staircase and clattered down to the bottom. The soil at the floor of the crater was hard-packed clay, dried in the sun. Bingwen flipped on his helmet light and saw hundreds of tunnel entrances on the ground ahead of him, as if he were standing on a giant sieve. The Chinese had built complex surface-drainage systems around the site to funnel rainwater away from the crater, as well as another drainage system on the floor of the crater between all the tunnel entrances, using narrower pipe. The result was a piping system that branched out in every direction in front of him and worked surprisingly well. Some water did get down into the tunnels, but pumps sucked the water away and discouraged erosion and flooding.
Bingwen’s tunnel was in the center of the crater. He reached it by walking atop the drainage pipes, turning one way and then another like a well-trained mouse in an elaborate maze. A tall pyramidal iron structure stood over the top of the tunnel entrance. A winch was secured to the bottom of the structure, allowing soldiers to hook in and descend down into the darkness. Bingwen snapped the winch’s D-ring onto his climbing harness and lowered himself into the hole.
The shaft wasn’t much wider than the span of his arms, but if Bingwen kept his limbs close to his body he could easily avoid the narrow ledges and rocks that jutted out from the wall every few meters or so. Bingwen imagined the Formics using these ledges to descend, dropping from one ledge to the next like monkeys swinging down to the lower branches of a tree with a fluid, swift grace.
The Formics had likely come up the shafts the same way, leaping from one ledge to the next, their strong forelimbs pulling them upward with that same easy grace. Bingwen knew the Formics had the strength for it. As a tagalong and then an adopted member of the Mobile Operations Police, he had witnessed dozens of engagements with the enemy in China. He had seen the Formics’ clenched fists pound on soldiers in the heat of battle, exuding a brutality and strength far greater than their diminutive size suggested.
His feet touched bottom, and he unhooked the D-ring. To his right, installed on the tunnel wall, was a thin projection tube that extended into the tunnel and disappeared from sight. Bingwen took the cable from the winch and hooked it to the small transmission device mounted at the base of the projection tube, nearly hidden from view.
Then he turned and faced the tunnel leading away from the shaft. It was only a meter tall, so Bingwen got down on all fours and crawled forward. Most adults could crawl through these taller tunnels, but there were some places that required them to get on their bellies and squirm. Bingwen had a much easier time. There were even places where he could stand and crouch slightly and continue on foot.
He reached the spot where the tunnel forked into four different passageways. He took the one on the far right, a slightly descending tunnel full of twists and dips and intersections, the light from his helmet cutting through the darkness. Without mapping equipment, one could easily get lost down here. The special ops teams knew that fact well. One of their favorite training exercises was to lead a man deep into the tunnels and then leave him there, giving him nothing but a few cans of supplemental oxygen, with instructions to find his way out in the dark. It was near impossible to do, but that was mostly the point. It was a test of mental endurance more than anything.
Bingwen twisted and turned and moved randomly, not thinking about where he was going. His wrist pad was tracking his movements, but he tried not to look at it. Occasionally he reached a dug-out space as big as a room that even adults could stand up in. Perhaps the Formics had congregated in these chambers for some reason. Why, Bingwen could only guess. To breed? To eat? To sleep? There was nothing here to give any hint of its purpose.
He stopped in one of the larger rooms and punched in the code to initiate the simulation. Four thin projection tubes running along the tunnel walls above and to either side of him turned on, filling the room with a faint holofield. The projection tubes continued uninterrupted throughout the tunnel system, so that now a single holofield filled every passageway. Since Bingwen was standing in the field, the sim knew exactly where he was located.
Bingwen crouched down in the center of the tunnel’s chamber and waited, keeping the various tunnel entrances in his peripheral vision so he could see the attack before it came.
The first Formic appeared a moment later, bounding down the tunnel directly in front of him, its six limbs launching it forward with the power of a jungle cat springing on its prey.
Bingwen’s slaser was on the forearm of his battle suit, but he didn’t raise his arm to fire. He wanted to witness the creature’s every movement, even up to the moment when it delivered the death stroke. Bingwen noted every placement of its arms, forelegs, and hind legs; the way it dipped and bobbed its
head to maintain its balance as it scurried forward; the way it had banked up the side wall when the tunnel had turned sharply; the way it breathed, accelerated, fixed its empty eyes upon him; the way it leaped at the last moment, to grab the head and snap the neck.
The creature struck him and exploded into a shower of pixels.
This was Bingwen’s custom: to let the first one get him, to face death and welcome it, to show the enemy that he would not cower. And with that done, he dropped to his knees and scurried away, taking note of how the creatures chased him, caught him, worked in pairs or small groups to cut off his exit or guide him into a dead end. He used his slaser to kill the ones he could. Others reached him and exploded when they touched him.
All of the creatures’ movements were based on actual vids taken from soldiers in the war. Some had even come from soldiers brave enough to enter these tunnels, though those vids were all recovered after the fact, once the Chinese had cleared the tunnels and found their corpses.
After half an hour, Bingwen’s knees were sore and he was sweating profusely. He turned off the sim and sank to the tunnel floor, catching his breath. If it comes to tunnel warfare, we lose, he thought. We would never win here. The enemy would have every advantage.
Bingwen removed his helmet momentarily to drink from his canteen, then he put his helmet back on and took his writing tablet out of his pack. He ran a cable from the tablet to the projection tube and turned on the tube. It had taken him a few weeks to figure out how to get on the nets. His access on base was restricted to sites that Captain Li and the military approved of, which were mostly the military’s intranet. He could get the news and world events, but always through the military’s filter, which would have the reader believe that China was the most advanced nation on Earth and the envy of everyone. Bingwen knew better. To get unrestricted access he had to use the few resources at his disposal, namely the tunnels and their equipment. The winch tower outside served as a crude transmitter and receiver after Bingwen had installed a few discreet pieces of hardware there. The projection tubes provided the needed power, and the winch cable connected the two.