The armor shot away from him, and Victor felt himself pick up speed. Not much. But some. Enough to make him feel like the effort had been worth it. He closed the distance in a matter of seconds and came down gently onto the rock.
Without the bulky gauntlet atop his mining gloves, his fingers had greater mobility and grip strength. Even so he scrambled desperately for a moment until he grabbed something he could hold on to. His fingers found purchase on the lip of a small, narrow tunnel, and he brought his feet down and stuck the toes of his boots into two small holes. Now he was anchored on the surface. But he could no longer see the ship. He would have to climb the asteroid like ascending a cliff face. And there were just enough small holes all over the surface that it might work.
His orientation shifted in his mind. The asteroid was no longer down. The ship was up, his feet were down. He tapped the inside of his boots to make the toe crampons pop out for him to use. Then he dug in again with the toes and reached upward with a free hand and gripped the lip of another hole.
He ascended one step at a time, securing each handhold and foothold before he continued. He worried that at any moment another Formic could attack and he’d be torn away from the wall. But no Formic came.
After a minute of climbing he came to the largest tunnel entrance he had seen thus far. It was big enough for him to crawl into. He shined his light in, and the tunnel extended straight back a good distance and then turned downward. A Formic could easily fit in there.
He climbed around it and continued upward. How much hydrogen was in his lungs now? he wondered. He pushed the thought away and continued. There was nothing he could do but hurry.
After another few minutes of climbing the ship came into view. He climbed a little farther until he was certain that he could launch to it. Then he retracted the crampons in his boots, anchored his feet, bent down low, pointed his body, and launched.
He soared through the air faster than he had intended, forgetting that he had shed the mass of the upper half of his suit. Even so, he had good control. He tucked and spun as he and Imala had practiced, and he landed feet first atop the ship with a loud clang that echoed through the space. The surface of the ship was smooth, however, with nothing to hold on to, so before his momentum sent him tumbling elsewhere, he twisted and launched again immediately toward one of the spidery anchor legs. He crashed into the unforgiving metal and threw his arms around it. Pain shot through him in three places, but he clung to the metal nonetheless.
He tasted blood in his mouth and could feel more blood draining from a cut above his eye. He wiped at his brow, and sure enough his glove came back red. He shined his light on the spider leg and saw that it had six segments with internal cables and pulleys and hinges. The legs were clearly designed to fold outward and keep the ship perpendicular to the asteroid. The pulley system looked ancient, and the metal was rough and discolored.
He shined his light on the ship, searching for a hatch or door or some point of entry. But there wasn’t one. The side of the ship was perfectly smooth. He shined his light at the nose of the ship and saw that the nose was blunt and flush against the surface of the asteroid. There had to be an entrance there. A door that led directly into the tunnels of the rock. But how to reach it?
He clung to the spider leg and searched with his light around the base of the ship until he found a large tunnel entrance. It extended inward for a meter and then cut to the left toward the nose of the ship. That had to be his way in. That had to lead to the nose. He began to climb around the spider leg so that he could position himself on the side of the leg closest to the tunnel. Then he would point his body and launch. But just as he was moving, a Formic crawled out of the tunnel in question and hurled itself directly at him. Victor retreated to the opposite side of the leg again, and the Formic slammed into the leg on the other side. It scrambled, trying to get its footing, reaching for him, clambering, moving around the leg, desperate to attack. Victor moved around the metal structure in the opposite direction, keeping the metal leg between them. When they had switched positions, and Victor was closest to the tunnel, he turned and launched, reaching back and pulling his spear free as he flew.
He twisted in the air and slammed his back into the asteroid right near the tunnel entrance, the wind knocked out of him, his head ramming back into the wall so hard it nearly knocked him out. He saw spots at the corner of his vision as his head rang with a dull fog of sound. But the spear was up in his hand, and its end was anchored against the wall like a pike, ready to meet the Formic that was already soaring through the air after him, arms outstretched, maw opened, ready to attack.
The Formic impaled itself on the spear point, colliding into Victor in a hairy, violent mess of flailing appendages. Victor pushed the spear away, and the creature exhaled a final raspy breath before becoming still. Victor left the spear where it was and crawled into the tunnel. And there, just as he turned the corner, was the entrance to the ship, a wide circular doorway tall enough for him to walk into standing upright. He pulled himself forward out of the tunnel and into the ship. To his right on the wall was a circular crank. He wondered if it would close the door. He turned it clockwise, and sure enough the blades of an aperture began to extend, closing the entrance.
Victor heard a noise out in the tunnel, a pattering of feet. He paused to shine his light out into the central tunnel that extended straight back into the rock for quite a distance. And there, coming toward him, racing up the tunnel, were a pair of Formics hurrying for the entrance. They were pushing off the narrow walls with their various feet, launching as much as running, soaring at him in zero G. If they got inside, he’d lose. He was unarmed and exhausted. He spun the crank as fast as it would go. The aperture blades seemed old and rusted and painfully slow. And the closer they got to closing, the harder it was to turn the crank. The blades of the aperture were almost touching when the Formics slammed into them. There was a furious scraping and pounding on the door as Victor strained and pulled and finally sealed it closed. His arms were burning from the exertion, and he felt like throwing up. A second door was behind the first, he realized. He found a second crank and turned in, and two panels came out of the floor and ceiling and met in the middle and locked.
He was inside.
He turned around and shined his light in the dark space. The ship was small. Barely ten meters long and quite narrow. The strong, putrid organic smell that he had only detected faintly outside was thick in here. Like rotted plants, mixed with feces. A single aisle extended up the middle of the ship, with oddly shaped shelves on either side. The shelves held rows of round habitats made of packed mud or stone.
For the slugs, Victor realized. The Formics had brought the creatures with them all this way. And yet he had seen more slugs in the tunnels than there were habitats to house them, suggesting that the Formics had bred more slugs upon arrival. These habitats were made just for the parents.
But why were the slugs here to begin with? What was their purpose? What did the Formics want with pellets of metal? Why had they built this habitat around this rock? All of his struggles and fighting and nearly dying, and he still had zero answers to give the IF.
He moved up the aisle. Shining his light in each of the habitats, relieved to find them all empty.
He found another crank on the wall to his right, this one three times the size of the ones near the door. This controls the ship’s spider legs, he thought. He knew it instinctively. He grabbed the crank and turned. It wouldn’t budge clockwise, so he turned it the other direction, and it spun easily. Unseen gears ground and squealed, reverberating inside the ship, and Victor felt the ship shift a little. Yes, he was retracting the legs. The ship suddenly felt unsteady. He continued to spin, and the legs continued to retract and fold inward, or at least that’s what Victor assumed was happening. At last there was a snapping and locking sound, and the wheel couldn’t spin any farther.
All that held the ship now in place was the resin that had grown all around the thrusters
creating an airtight seal. But what could Victor do now? There was no instrument panel, no flight controls. There were three cranks and rows of rock habitats. That was it. And yet somehow, the Formics had flown this craft. It had a powerful thruster. It had targeted and reached the asteroid precisely, flying billions of kilometers to get here. So where were the starcharts? Where were the nav computers? The terminals?
He hovered upright in the middle of the aisle, looking around him, desperate for a throttle or wheel or way to fire retros. There had to be retros. The ship had made a delicate landing. It had touched down on a rock hurtling through space. It had come in gently, with surgical precision. How had it done so?
He spun in the air. He could still hear the dull sound of fists pounding on the closed doors outside, the two Formics desperate to get in.
I’m thinking like a human, he realized. I need to think like a Formic. He grabbed the lowest shelf and pulled himself down to the surface he had labeled the floor. It was dirty and sticky and smelled of grime and excrement. He grabbed at the shelf bars and positioned himself flat against the floor, staying low like a Formic would. There was a narrow empty space beneath the lowest habitat that extended the length of the shelves. A Formic could crawl in there easily, he realized. Victor couldn’t fit as long as he wore his lower armor and mining suit. He was too bulky, too wide. He shed the lower half of his armor and his mining suit so that he wore only his skintight single undergarment. Now he was thin enough to crawl in under the shelf, though just barely. He pulled himself forward and found a lever and a button in front of a sliding panel. He pushed the panel up to reveal a small porthole. A Formic would crawl in this space and look out this porthole. Why? He experimentally tried the level and heard gears beneath him. Something was moving, rotating. He pushed the button and heard a spray of propellant. The ship titled upward, pushed back.
The lever and button powered one of the retros. He pushed his body away from the wall and slid across the aisle to the other side and found an identical panel and identical lever and button. He pushed the button, and the ship lurched slightly back and up.
A crew of five Formics because it took five of them to land. He pulled himself out from under the shelf and climbed up to what he considered the ceiling and found, as he had expected, matching spaces above the habitats, just wide enough for a Formic to squeeze into.
He crawled in, pushed the button, fired a retro. The ship lurched back, and now he could feel it tearing free of the resin. He slid to the fourth retro and fired it as well, more tilting, more lurching. It was all sloppy guesswork, with the ship tipping one way and then another, but it was backing away from the asteroid.
With all of the Formics working together simultaneously, their minds linked as one, delicately navigating the spacecraft would be a simple ordeal. By himself, it was a disaster.
And yet it was working. Or so it seemed. He moved back and forth between the four retros, tapping them enough to push the ship back. The ship bucked and dipped and spun, and he tried his best to keep it moving in the right direction.
He looked out the porthole and saw that he was free. The ship was drifting away from the rock. A giant hole remained in the resin where the ship had been. The air was no doubt pouring out, turning the whole environment into a vacuum once again. The remaining Formics, the slugs, all were sucked out into space to die of asphyxiation.
He couldn’t see the quickship, though he knew Imala was out there somewhere. Waiting, tracking him, following.
It was several hours before the Gagak arrived and grabbed the ship with one of its docking claws. And then another hour before a docking tube was attached to the hull of the Formic ship. A laser cut a hole through the ceiling, and someone pushed the cut piece clear.
Victor looked up to see Arjuna’s concerned face looking down at him.
“He’s alive,” Arjuna shouted back over his shoulder.
Victor heard a chorus of cheers back in the ship.
“Are you hurt?” Arjuna asked him.
“I’ve got dangerous levels of hydrogen in my lungs and I may need a few stitches. Other than that I’m fine. Is Imala safe?”
“She’s inside. Safe. But she’s a mess, Vico. You put her through hell. Your mother, too. Rena wanted us all to charge in there and get you out. I almost had to restrain her.”
“I shouldn’t have gone in, not with the air as volatile as it was. That was stupid.”
Arjuna sighed. “You’re alive. That’s what matters. And you brought back a souvenir, too.” He stuck his head into the Formic miniship and made a face of disgust. “It smells like a bucket of sewage, though.”
“I don’t smell much better,” said Vico.
“I’ll bring you some sanitizer and clean clothes. We want your family to welcome you, not throw you back out into space.”
CHAPTER 19
Soldier Brain
Formic technology is, at its root, biological. Rather than use machines, the Hive Queen engineers and mentally controls animals to perform certain tasks. The degree to which she controls those animals is a subject of much debate, but the prevailing theory is that not all creatures are controlled at the same integrated level. To some creatures, such as mining worms for example, the Hive Queen merely gives them an impulse to do the thing they’re genetically predisposed to do. The worms then act autonomously, with the Hive Queen only checking in periodically to confirm that her creatures are still following their given set of instructions.
To other, more complex organisms, such as Formic soldiers, the Hive Queen gives more detailed instructions in the moment. Those instructions may be general or specific. Analyses of battles from both the First and Second Formic War suggest that sometimes the Hive Queen merely orders her troops to “attack.” In these instances, the creatures act as independent organisms, firing and jumping and fighting as autonomous soldiers, fearless but uncreative. In other instances, it appears as if the Hive Queen seizes full mental control, for the group ceases to act as individuals and begins to move like a single organism.
—Demosthenes, A History of the Formic Wars, Vol. 3
Mazer and Prem stepped off the elevator at the corporate offices of Gungsu Industries, four stories beneath the surface of Luna. A young Korean male with styled hair and a tight designer suit greeted them with a polite smile and a bow. “Captain Rackham. Lieutenant Chamrajnagar. I am Ms. Woo Han’s assistant. Welcome. You will forgive us for being so unprepared for your visit.”
“You’re unprepared because we didn’t tell you we were coming,” said Mazer. “I hope we’re not being an inconvenience.”
The assistant’s smile didn’t waver. “Any representative of WAMRED and the International Fleet is always welcome at our offices. Generally we like to set such appointments well in advance so that our schedules can be cleared to receive you. But these are challenging times, with new threats arising every moment, it seems. Gungsu always stands ready to assist you. Might I inquire the nature of your visit?”
“We have a proposition for Ms. Woo Han,” said Mazer.
The assistant waited for more information, and when Mazer didn’t give it, he asked, “Might I share with Ms. Woo Han any more details concerning this proposition so that she might prepare herself to greet you?”
The assistant had clearly been sent to fish for information, and Mazer saw barely contained panic in the man’s eyes. He clearly didn’t want to return to Hea Woo Han empty-handed.
“Tell Ms. Woo Han that the International Fleet is forming a special asteroid assault team,” said Mazer, “and that we have several tech designs we would like to present to her. The timetable for this mission is short, and our experience with Gungsu leads us to believe that your corporation may be the perfect partner in this endeavor.”
The assistant’s smile widened. “Of course.” He gestured to an ornate waiting room to his right. “Won’t you have a seat? I will inform Ms. Woo Han of your arrival.”
“Thank you,” said Mazer.
He and Prem s
at as the assistant scurried away.
“An asteroid assault team?” said Prem. “That sounded official.”
“That was my hope,” said Mazer.
“The assistant looked like he was going to burst into tears if we didn’t give him something to say to Woo Han. She must be a scary one. What do you know about her?”
“Next to nothing,” said Mazer. “Except that she’s Colonel Vaganov’s direct link to Gungsu. Whatever deal Vaganov worked up, I think it’s safe to assume that Woo Han was the one who orchestrated it all.”
“Then why are we talking to her? Isn’t she the enemy here?”
“She’s an opportunist,” said Mazer. “She makes deals. And she can probably call off the prosecution if we’re right about her influence.”
“You realize of course that we have no authority whatsoever to speak on behalf of the International Fleet, and that by walking into this woman’s office and pretending like we do, we’re inviting a real court-martial.”
“I’ll represent you in court if you represent me,” said Mazer.
“I’m serious, Mazer. At best, I’ll get disbarred. At worst we go to jail.”
“I’ll tell the arresting officers that you tried to talk me out of this, that you outlined all the consequences, and that you said this was a monumentally bad idea.”
“It is a monumentally bad idea.”
“My point is,” said Mazer, “there’s no reason why we should both take the heat for this if it doesn’t work. It’s my idea. I’ll go solo. You take the elevator now, and I’ll meet you back at the office. If I get court-martialed, you can represent me. Could I get a two-for-one special on attorney fees?”
“You don’t pay me, remember? I’m appointed.”
“Even better.”
Chamrajnagar considered a moment then sighed. “It’s better if we both go. Alone you look like a rogue crazy man. With me—”
“I look like a rogue crazy man with a smart lawyer.”