“I was in a meeting. My wrist pad was off.” And you’re not one of the important people whose messages I really care about, he thought to himself.
“A vid message arrived for you from Captain Nikula in the Kuiper Belt. The message was marked with high importance.”
“Who’s Captain Nikula?” Lem asked.
“He’s the captain of one of our mining ships, sir. His vessel is the Gungnir, an A-class digger. Mr. Ramdakan had ordered Captain Nikula to investigate a KBO possibly targeted by the Formics.”
KBO. A Kuiper Belt object. An asteroid essentially. Norja had said that a few of our ships were close to asteroids Edimar had identified as ones the Formics might have seized.
Lem moved toward the door to this right. “Send the vid to the holo room.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lem stepped into the room, removed his suit coat, and hung it on a hook by the door. A large image appeared on the far wall of a middle-aged man facing camera from the helm of his ship. Captain Nikula wore a Juke flight uniform not unlike the one Lem had worn when he had captained a company vessel. Lem waved a hand, and the vid began to play.
“This is Captain Franz Nikula of the Gungnir, ship registration 450081, property of Juke Limited. We arrived at the area designated by our starmap to be the current location of 2045LJ78, a KBO measuring one kilometer in diameter with an expected surface of water ice plus ammonia and a rocky core. However, the asteroid was not there. A thorough search of the sector alerted us to a large chunk of rock not currently on the starchart. The object was several hundred thousand klicks away and measured three hundred meters in diameter. We went and investigated this object, pictured here.”
The captain was replaced with vid taken from the ship’s exterior cameras. It showed a disc-shaped asteroid with hundreds of small holes and tunnels all over its surface, lit by the ship’s floodlights.
“We believe this smaller KBO is actually a fragment of the original asteroid 2045LJ78. You will note the holes all over the rock’s surface. Initially we thought this fragment was chipped away from the asteroid as a result of a collision, but we could find no evidence in our Eye record to substantiate this idea. There was no object of considerable size coming in that could have collided with the asteroid.
“A further analysis of the sector revealed other unknown objects. When we quadrangulated their trajectories we discovered they all originated from a point along the orbit of the asteroid in question. This confirmed our suspicions that these other small objects were also fragments of 2045LJ78. The asteroid had broken apart roughly two weeks prior to our arrival and scattered its pieces in multiple directions.
“We then reexamined the records from our Eye to see if we could find when a heat signature had appeared. This would indicate when the Formic miniship had abandoned the asteroid. If we were lucky, the heat signature would also give us a trajectory of that ship, which we hoped to track.
“We did in fact find a heat signature in the record, but it was not what we had expected. There was a bright flash of heat right at the moment when the asteroid broke apart, which leads us to believe that the Formics did not break the asteroid but rather blew it apart with explosives.
“Also, after analyzing the original, heavily tunneled fragment of the asteroid that we recovered, we found no evidence of anything alien. No Formics, no tools, no small Formic ship. And yet something must have made those holes and dug those tunnels through the rock. They could not have occurred naturally. We will prepare a full written report and send it directly to Lem Jukes. Captain Nikula out.”
The transmission ended. Lem stared at the wall, now more confused than ever. Why would the Formics mine an asteroid and then blow it to bits? To cover their tracks? To prevent humans from discovering what they were doing there?
It was all so frustrating. Just when he felt as if he were getting answers, a mountain of new uncertainties avalanched him. We’re fighting an enemy we don’t understand, he thought. And what was it that Sun Tzu said? One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred engagements. But one who knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in every engagement. That’s us, thought Lem. We don’t know ourselves or the enemy. The Formics are perfectly united in a hive mind that we cannot possibly grasp, and we’re a fragmented, argumentative pack of egoists with more opinions than good sense.
Lem opened his e-mail to see if Captain Nikula’s written report had come through. Instead he was surprised to find one from Edimar. He opened it and read it. Victor had gone inside the shell and recovered mined pellets of pure metal. Lem reread the letter than opened the attachments. He scanned through the images and watched in horror and fascination at the grublike creatures digging through the rock in Victor’s vid. Then he opened the analysis of the pellets. Victor had found iron, magnesium, aluminum, nickel, silicon, and pristine ice. There might have been other metals as well, but Victor, in his desperation to escape, had not stopped to collect more samples.
Lem went back to Edimar’s e-mail. She had written that she had sent this same information to “a certain IF officer.” She had not mentioned the name to protect the person’s identity, but she clearly expected Lem to know who it was. It had to be Mazer Rackham. But Rackham was at WAMRED. What could he do with the information there?
The door to the holo room opened and Xianxo poked her head in. “Mr. Jukes, I’m sorry to disturb you, but there is a Captain Mazer Rackham here to see you.”
Lem stared at her a moment, too surprised to speak. “Send him in,” he finally managed.
Xianxo disappeared and then Mazer and a female officer entered. The woman was young and attractive, with olive skin and dark hair. Indian, maybe. Mazer looked exactly as Lem remembered him from three years ago, though now he was dressed in a rather formal-looking uniform.
“I’d offer you a seat, but there aren’t any,” said Lem.
Mazer spoke first. “Mr. Jukes, I’d like to present Lieutenant Prem Chamrajnagar of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.”
Lem shook her hand. “An attorney. This gets more interesting by the moment.”
“You should have received an e-mail from Edimar,” said Mazer.
“I just finished reading it,” said Lem. “So you can imagine my surprise to have you walk in right at the moment when I realized she was likely referring to you.”
“I received my e-mail from her on the way over here,” said Mazer.
Lem was surprised. “So it wasn’t her intel that brought you here? Now I’m even more confused.”
“I’m here to share information, get information, and hopefully make a deal,” said Mazer.
“What kind of deal?”
Mazer extracted a small data cube from his wrist pad. “Do you have a holoprojector?”
“This entire room is a holoprojector.”
Mazer handed him the data cube. “This is the exosuit Victor was wearing in his vid.”
Lem slid the cube into a slot on the wall, and a holocolumn in the center of the room appeared with a 3D model of the suit lazily spinning in the air.
“The helmet obviously needs a better seal,” said Mazer, “but Victor can work on that, as can your engineers. Otherwise, it’s a smart design. There are other designs Victor has created as well. We need good engineers with mobile manufacturing capabilities to produce them.”
“Mobile manufacturing?” Lem asked.
“So that we can make new suits and modify the design on demand as the marines move toward the asteroids. I’m putting together a proposal for a special forces strike team tasked with finding out what the Formics are doing at these asteroids and then learning how to take them out. I’m hoping Juke Limited will take part in that proposal. We already have Gungsu contributing as well.”
Lem scoffed. “Gungsu? Why?”
“Short answer, some of their tech works very well,” said Mazer.
“And some of it doesn’t,” said Lem. “Some of it is catastrophically ineffective.
”
“No one knows that better than me,” said Mazer. “Victor is the chief engineer here. I trust his designs. Gungsu is offering expertise and manufacturing. I’m confident they can deliver. Just as I’m confident Juke can deliver. Victor had the right idea going inside the shell, but a team of trained soldiers working together has a better chance of achieving the objective.”
“You said this was a proposal?” asked Lem.
Mazer and Chamrajnagar exchanged glances. “Full disclosure,” said Mazer. “We’re operating outside our authority here. Neither Prem nor I have the clout to put a project like this into motion. We don’t have any senior-level sponsors. Nor do we have any funding. We’re not even sure if the IF already has a plan in motion for the asteroids, but considering Edimar’s obvious disdain for the Polemarch we’re not counting on it. Basically we can’t sit idle. Also, part of the reason we involved Gungsu was to end a bogus court-martial against me.”
“Court-martial?” said Lem. “My interest is piqued. If the IF is court-martialing you, as clean-cut as they come, then something is rotten in the state of Denmark. But you saw Victor’s vid; these asteroids are filled with hydrogen. Blowing them up will be easy. They’re bombs.”
“Even so,” said Mazer. “We’ll still need to gather intelligence on what these asteroids are being used for. Why are Formics harvesting and processing metal and ice? And where do they want to push these asteroids? Finding those answers is going to take a well-equipped insertion team. And a team is going to need suits.”
Lem paused, studied the holo one more time and nodded. “Jukes will agree to produce the suits if we win Hegemony approval. I suppose you want to be paid big bucks for the design.”
“Victor did the work,” said Mazer. “Not me. He should get the big bucks.”
“So you want nothing in return?” Lem asked.
“Talk to your father, Lem. Get the funding from the Hegemony. If there is money allotted to this, the IF will make it happen. They’ll launch. I only ask that I’m on that ship when it does. Perhaps your father can put in a good word to the Strategos on my behalf.”
“The Strategos knows who you are, Mazer. If it comes down to him picking people, you can bet you’ll be at the top of that list.”
CHAPTER 21
Silicon
May she see with her eyes the sorrow of destruction.
May she hear with her ears the cries of the innocent.
May she lift with her hands the load of the burdened.
May she break with her strength the weapons of war.
May she forgive with her heart the violence against her.
May she grasp with her mind the goodness of man.
May she find with her soul the pathway to peace.
—Prayer for the Hive Queen, from the prayer book of Wilasanee Saowaluk, Hegemony Archives, 2118
Wila sat alone in the cafeteria in the semidarkness, eating a bowl of peach-flavored oatmeal. The food at the Rings was some of the best she had ever eaten, with dishes from all over the world and desserts so rich every bite was like a dream. But the breakfast lines didn’t open for another two hours, and so she had resigned herself to one of the self-serve oatmeal packets kept in a bin near the serving lines. It was a poor substitute for the ham and cheese omelets that the kitchen staff was scheduled to serve later, but it was no worse than the food she had eaten back home.
In fact, there had been some days, working hard on her dissertation, that she had not eaten at all. Her cupboards had been bare, not because she couldn’t afford to buy food but because she couldn’t be bothered with such an uninspiring task as grocery shopping. Time was too precious. There was too much to write. And so rather than get dressed and go out and buy herself sustenance, she had pushed on in her pajamas and told herself she was fasting.
She smiled and shook her head at the memory; she could laugh about it now. But in truth, it had not been all that long ago. Her dissertation had consumed her life. Researching, writing, editing, cutting. And in the end all that effort had amounted to nothing.
No, that wasn’t true. Her research had led to this job. It was not a job in academia like she had always hoped, but the work was important. No, more than important. It was the only work that mattered, really, and she was right at the heart of it.
She still could not believe that she was here, living in the Rings, circling the Formic scout ship. So much of her research had focused on the creatures and plant life that had thrived in the oxygen-producing garden on that ship, and now here she was, only a few meters from it.
She had not actually gone to the ship yet, but her colleagues had assured her that the opportunity would eventually come. She spent much of her spare time gazing up through the portholes in the ceiling on the top floor of the research facility, the floor that was closest to the ship. She would look up at the ship as it rushed past, as if it were spinning on its axis like a top, its red surface sometimes glinting in the sun. But of course the scout ship was motionless, locked in Earth’s geosynchronous orbit, and it was Wila who was moving around it.
The size of it. That had been the most alarming thing. She had known of course precisely how big it was, but numbers on a screen could not do the real thing justice. Was she right about its construction?
“Can’t sleep?”
The voice startled her. She turned and saw Dr. Dublin enter through the door behind her. He was still wearing his lab coat and the clothes he had worn yesterday. His thin hair was unkempt, his slacks wrinkled, as if he had fallen asleep in the lab again and had just now awoken to find everyone gone.
Wila smiled to herself. Dublin was an eccentric character, and yet Wila could not help but like him. She marveled at how focused he could become. Time seemed to stop in his mind whenever he stepped into the lab and began a task, as if the rest of the world had melted out of existence. It made him notoriously late for meetings—if he showed up for them at all—and it had earned him a great deal of harmless ribbing from the other researchers. Or at least they thought it was harmless. Dublin took it all in stride with a good-natured laugh, but Wila had sensed embarrassment and sorrow and maybe even a little shame in those eyes.
She had imagined him as a child among his peers at school. Awkward, quiet, isolated, bullied probably. He had made friends, no doubt, but they were probably the kind who had abandoned him as soon as their association with him had threatened their own social standing. False friends. The kind who blew about like dandelions seeds—as soon as you thought you had caught one, the slightest gust ripped it away and carried it elsewhere.
“What’s on the menu there?” he asked, bending forward to examine her cup.
“Oatmeal from the bins up front,” she said, pointing to where they were located.
“Hmm,” he said. “I didn’t know we had bins.”
He shuffled off and returned a minute later with a cup of his own.
“You didn’t heat it up,” said Wila. “You just added water. We have mini ovens, you know.”
He looked in the direction of the ovens, as if he had only remembered that they were there. Then he dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “Eh, it’s going down the gullet whether it’s warm or cold.” He took a bite. “You always up this early?”
“The change in time zones,” she said. “My body has not yet adjusted.”
In truth, she had always been an early riser, but the change in sleep schedule here had not helped.
He gestured to the small book on the table beside her. “Your journal?”
“My prayer book,” said Wila.
He looked intrigued and extended a hand. “May I?”
“By all means,” she said, lifting it and giving it to him. “The more of us who reach for peace, the more likely we are to find it.”
He flipped through the pages. “You wrote all these?”
The prayers were handwritten, some quickly, some stylishly, some with little doodles around their edges.
“Some of them,” Wila said. “Oth
ers I found in books. Several are from Master Arjo. He is the master of a temple in Thailand I frequented since I was a child. He always prayed in solitude, but he would tell me his prayers afterward if I asked.”
“You have beautiful penmanship,” said Dublin. “The letters are written so small and yet so precisely that they look printed.”
Wila smiled. “You are kind. Do they have prayers in your faith, Dr. Dublin?”
He chuckled. “I was raised Catholic. My mother prayed as often as she breathed. We went to Mass three times a week, she and I. I think that’s what turned me off to it in the end. The relentless pursuit of it, that and the fact that my mother’s prayers never seemed to do much good.”
“Oh?”
“My father was still abusive and unfaithful to her, no matter how many saints my mother implored. I think she believed God would fix the whole thing. She died before my father did, and she never left him. I find it rather depressing, to be honest.”
“I am sorry for your sorrow. And for hers. In my faith we believe that those who are compassionate and kind in this life will find themselves in a better situation in their next life. By that rule, I believe your mother is happier now.”
“And my father? What of him? I suppose he’s a mule on a farm somewhere.”
Wila blushed and lowered her gaze. “I have offended you. That was not my intent.”
He chuckled, still flipping through her book. “You haven’t offended me, Wila. I find your faith fascinating. But I see here that your prayers don’t invoke any God or supreme being. Who do you pray to exactly?”
“To no one,” said Wila. “Buddhist prayers are not addressed to any enlightened being. Not even to the Buddha. I say them to myself, to strengthen my resolve to end suffering and to see to it that all beings flourish.”
Dublin closed the book and set it down. “When you say all beings, does that include the Formics? Do you pray that the Formics flourish?”
Wila hesitated. “That is a delicate question, Dr. Dublin. But a good one to propose. Buddhists have given it much consideration since the First Formic War, and I, in my time alone, have meditated a great deal on the subject as well. A Buddhist seeks enlightenment, to reach the full potential of the mind, to advance to the highest state of wisdom and compassion. This requires that we seek to alleviate all suffering around us, that we demonstrate kindness to all creatures in millions of forms throughout infinite universes, not just to the creatures that originate from our own community, but the creatures from all communities.”