“Same here,” said Rimas. “The tunnel walls are all lined with mucous, but I don’t see any pellets of metal. It’s like the worms did their digging, and the metal was all collected.”
Mazer was thinking the same. Worms had obviously harvested here, but their metal had been taken elsewhere.
“Maybe the worms mine the asteroid in stages,” said Kaufman. “So they mine one section, pick it clean, then the Formics move them to another side of the rock.”
“That’s not a bad approach, actually,” said Rimas. “Attacking the asteroid all at once might quickly weaken it structurally. Doing it bit by bit would preserve the integrity of the rock.”
“Let’s move to another location,” said Mazer. “There’s nothing here. Stay sharp.”
They moved to the far side of the asteroid and patrolled there as well, finding nothing. Eventually they stopped walking on the surface and just used their propulsion to view the surface from the air. That proved just as fruitless.
Mazer called Zembassi. The colonel’s face appeared on Mazer’s HUD. “There are no creatures near the surface, sir. We’ve circled the whole rock. The worms couldn’t have gone anywhere, so they’ve obviously burrowed deeper into the rock. No sign of Formics.”
“Bring Bingwen in,” said Zembassi.
“Sir, the area is not secure.”
“We have our orders, Mazer. I don’t like it any more than you do.”
Zembassi’s image disappeared.
Mazer met back with Rimas and Kaufman at the rope.
“Kaufman, you’re the biggest,” said Mazer. “So you’re out. Head back to the landing craft and help Bingwen inside the cocoon. Give him your nanoshields, and all the spare canisters of O2 and propulsion he can carry. Then return to the craft and wait. Rimas and I will go in with Bingwen. I’ll take point. Rimas will take rear. We’ll stick to the larger tunnels and see how far we go.”
“We won’t go very far judging by what I’ve seen so far,” said Rimas. “The tunnels narrow pretty quickly. We can’t go as far as Bingwen can. We’re twice his size.”
“Let’s do our best,” said Mazer. “I don’t like the idea of Bingwen going in alone.”
Kaufman took off, and five minutes later Bingwen came down the rope. He handed Mazer and Rimas their spare air and propulsion canisters and Mazer and Rimas switched them out.
“Ready?” Mazer asked.
“Let’s not keep Kaufman from his ravioli,” said Bingwen.
They found a tunnel nearby that was one of the larger ones they had seen. “I go first,” said Mazer. “All of my nanoshields will be in front. Rimas, your shields cover our rear. Bingwen, your shields should cover any side tunnels we hit along the way. That way we are boxed in and shielded at all times. Understood?”
“All this for some stupid worms,” said Rimas.
“Let’s move,” said Mazer.
He crawled in first, activating his StabBoots to stabilize himself in the tunnel. He took slow deliberate steps, the rods triangulating in and out, in and out. Bingwen and Rimas stayed a short distance behind, spacing themselves apart to give them each the room they needed. Mazer felt as if he were ascending some giant twisting chimney. At first the tunnel was fairly spacious, but the farther they ascended, the narrower the tunnel became.
“It’s getting a little tight in here, Mazer,” said Rimas. “You and I can’t go much farther.”
He was right. Ten meters later the tunnel narrowed. Mazer had gone as far as he could go.
“We’ll try another tunnel,” said Mazer.
“It’s all right,” said Bingwen. “I’ll be fine.”
“There are hundreds of tunnels to explore,” said Mazer. “We’ll find one that fits all of us.”
“No,” said Bingwen, “we won’t. These are made for Formics, Mazer, not human adults. Besides, we don’t have time to explore for something we’re not likely to find. We have limited oxygen, and it will take a lot longer to get out of the tunnel moving backwards then it does to go forward. You need to let me go ahead alone. Just loan me your weapon.”
Mazer knew he was right. But there was so much uncertainty, so much that could go wrong. What if Bingwen got stuck or injured? He suddenly wished he had brought in an entire team of cadets.
Bingwen held out his hand for the crossbow. “I’ll meet you back outside at the landing craft. You can monitor my every move.”
Mazer put the safety on and gave him the weapon. “You know how to fire that?”
“I’m going to take a wild guess and say point the bolt at the bad guy and pull the trigger.”
“Be sure you’re anchored before you fire,” said Mazer. “Otherwise—”
“I’ve got it,” said Bingwen. “I’ll be fine.”
“Watch your oxygen,” said Mazer. “Be sure to give yourself more than twice as much O2 as you think you might need to get back.”
“I was listening during all your training sessions, Mazer. I took good mental notes. I’ve got this.”
Mazer hesitated. Then he scooted downward and let Bingwen take the lead.
* * *
Bingwen waited until Mazer and Rimas had backed out of the tunnel before he pushed on. He easily moved through the spot that had blocked Mazer, and then he turned off all of his lights. He would use dark vision from here on out. No need to fill the tunnel with light and tell the Formics he was coming.
The tunnel remained narrow, but as he advanced it didn’t get worse. Bingwen actually preferred this width. The StabBoot rods didn’t have to reach out so far to triangulate, and Bingwen felt steadier as a result. His two nanoshields were positioned in the front and rear, moving with him, boxing him in.
He went about fifty yards, and then the tunnel ended at a much larger tunnel that ran perpendicular. Bingwen poked his head out of the smaller tunnel and looked right and left. The way was dark in either direction.
“What have you found?” Mazer asked over the radio.
It felt good to hear Mazer’s voice. It steeled Bingwen’s courage a little.
“Looks like a main thoroughfare,” said Bingwen. “It’s much wider here. I’d say you could fit five or six Formics abreast in here shoulder to shoulder. And the tunnel is taller, too. I can almost stand up in here.”
“You’re in the middle of the peanut shape, right where the two bulbous ends of the asteroid meet,” said Mazer.
“Then we can infer a lot from this tunnel,” said Bingwen. “It likely means the Formics have two important sites down here. One is at the center of the bigger half of the peanut, and the other is at the center of the smaller half. This tunnel connects the two, and the Formics expect a lot of traffic between them. I’m not sure what to make of that. If there are only five Formics on this rock, why would they feel the need to make such a wide tunnel?”
“Any signs of movement?” asked Mazer.
“Nothing. It’s like everyone skipped town. I’m going to the left. That’s the bigger half of the peanut.”
“Be careful,” said Mazer. “If you sense movement, duck back into one of the smaller tunnels, feet first, weapon out.”
Bingwen pulled himself out of the narrow tunnel and into the thoroughfare.
“Bubble.”
His nanoshields came and encircled him. His Nan-Ooze soles adhered to the floor. He had to stoop a little, but he could nearly stand upright. He moved down the thoroughfare, taking cautious steps, looking for any signs of movement, the crossbow up to his shoulder, ready to fire. It was designed for someone twice his size, and it felt bulky and awkward in his hands, but he felt better having it.
He paused and looked back over his shoulder every so often to ensure that no one was behind him. He was using the lights on his wrists to guide, with the luminance at the lowest setting. The light didn’t reach far, and the near total darkness left Bingwen feeling vulnerable. But he resisted the temptation to turn on his high beams.
The thoroughfare ended a hundred meters later, opening up into a wide, dark cavern. Bingwen
felt as if he were standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking a massive underground chamber. He couldn’t see far into the cavern however, for a dark metal wall stood ten meters inside the cave, blocking his view and extending in every direction. Bingwen flipped on his helmet lights. The metal was flat and smooth, with a closed aperture in the center.
“What are we looking at, Bingwen?”
“It’s hulmat,” said Bingwen. “It’s the indestructible hull of a warship. These asteroids aren’t missiles, Mazer. They’re factories. The Formics are building a ship inside each one.”
“How is that possible?”
“This was their strategy all along,” said Bingwen. “Not to bring their fleet here, but to build it here right under our noses. That’s why the warships above and below the ecliptic haven’t attacked yet. They don’t have to. The fleet is already here. All they needed were a few Formics and a few creatures, and the asteroids provided everything else. Don’t you see? The worms mined and processed the metal, some other creatures used that metal to build the hull of a ship. We never saw any construction outside the asteroid because it was all happening in here, at the asteroid’s core, where we couldn’t see it.”
“And when they’re done building the ship,” said Mazer, “the Formics climb inside, and they detonate the atmosphere inside the asteroid. That’s how the ship gets out. One of Lem Jukes’s mining ships in the Kuiper Belt found an asteroid broken to pieces. That’s what the Formics do. They blow the ship free once it’s ready.”
“You’re right,” said Bingwen. “It would be easy to do. They could use the worms to dig perforations in the rock above the warship and in the shape of the warship. So when the explosion happens, the surface of the asteroid above the warship pops off like the shell of an egg. It doesn’t even have to be a big explosion. They could build the ship right near the surface of the rock. And when the ship is ready, boom!, the warship is free.”
“There’s a problem with this theory,” said Mazer. “You need more than five Formics to fly that ship, and only five Formics arrived here.”
He was right, Bingwen realized. A ship this size would require a crew of dozens. Maybe as many as a hundred.
“The asteroid isn’t solely a ship factory,” said Mazer. “It’s also a Formic factory.”
Of course, thought Bingwen. The Hive Queen wasn’t solely building her fleet. She was also building her army. That’s why the thoroughfare was so wide: so that the crowd of Formics birthed here had plenty of room as they made their way to the ship.
“I guess we now know what’s at the other end of this thoroughfare,” said Bingwen.
“Listen to me, Bingwen,” said Mazer. “You need to get out now. We’ve learned all we’re going to learn. We have vids of everything. Find a tunnel and come back to the landing craft.”
“We haven’t learned everything,” said Bingwen. “We don’t yet know if we’re right. If there is in fact a nursery on this rock, we need to confirm that, and more importantly we need to find out what happens there. Are Formics hatched from an egg? Do they crawl from a womb? Are they grown in vitro? What’s their life cycle? If we understand that, if we can learn how they’re grown, maybe we can discover some contraceptive or method to retard their growth. We could prevent them from ever gaining any reinforcements.”
“Bingwen—”
“You know I’m right, Mazer. Whatever we discover at the end of this tunnel could determine whether or not we win this war.”
“You’re not prepared for that kind of recon,” said Mazer.
“I have a helmet cam,” said Bingwen. “I don’t have to understand what I see. I just have to record it. People much smarter than me will analyze the recording and tell us what we’ve learned.”
“You can’t go in alone,” said Mazer.
“There isn’t time to equip more cadets and get them in here. I don’t have enough oxygen to wait for them.”
A new voice sounded in Bingwen’s ear. “This is Rear Admiral Zembassi. Bingwen, you are ordered to proceed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bingwen switched off his helmet lights, muted his radio, and headed back down the thoroughfare the way he had come, his nanoshield bubbles surrounding him, his wrist lights giving him just enough light to see.
He passed the spot where he had entered the tunnel and then went another one hundred meters until he reached a second cavern. The space was wide, but the ceiling was only two meters above him. Bingwen swept the room with his lights and found trails of glistening mucus all along the floor and ceiling. The mucous trails weren’t random, however. They all seemed to point in the same direction: toward a passageway on the far side of the room.
Bingwen’s light found a single grub on the wall, inching toward the passageway ahead, like a latecomer to a party.
Bingwen killed his lights and cautiously advanced, the crossbow up to his shoulder, moving toward the passageway. He reached the hole just after the grub did and found that it wasn’t the entrance to a passage but rather the entrance to a third cavern.
The Formics were all there. Maybe sixty of them, all surrounding an elevated platform in the center of the chamber. Flat bioluminescent creatures that Bingwen recognized as doilies lay around the edges of the platform, shining a dull light on the stone altar that stood in the center of the platform. And there atop the altar, held in place with thin filaments, was a pod about the size of a small pumpkin.
No. Not a pod, Bingwen realized. A cocoon.
The Formics were fixated on it, worshipping it, oblivious to Bingwen.
A throne room, Bingwen realized. A queen.
The cocoon on the altar twitched. Only slightly, but the movement sent a ripple of silent excitement through the Formics.
The cocoon twitched again.
Then the filaments that surrounded the cocoon—like the strands of a spider web—began to stretch, as if something were trying to push its way out. Then another push from inside. And another. Then Bingwen heard a soft ripping sound as the filaments of the cocoon broke. And then slowly, purposefully, majestically, she rose up out of her cocoon. Her wings spread, their damp thin membranes glistening in the light from the doilies, shimmering with a dozen different colors. She stood erect upon the altar, her head held high, presenting herself, baring her glory and splendor.
And then she saw Bingwen.
Her head snapped in his direction. And a heartbeat later, every Formic in the room turned to him as well, their eyes now as fixed on him as they had been on the Hive Queen. The mass of them attacked at once, rushing toward him, arms out, maws open. They did not stumble over each other as any pack of humans so tightly compressed together would have. But they moved like a single organism, fluidly, precisely, coming at him like a wave.
Bingwen ignored them. He was going to die anyway.
He steadied the crossbow and squeezed the trigger. The recoil was much harder than he had expected, but his feet were anchored well.
The bolt buried itself in the queen’s eye, and her head snapped back, skewered through.
The organized wave of Formics broke, like puppets whose strings had been suddenly cut. Rather than fall upon Bingwen with the feral ferocity they had possessed moments ago, they crashed into him and his nanobots like dead weight, limp and lifeless.
Bingwen was thrown backward into the cavern, arms flailing. He slammed into the far wall, sinking a little into the mucous there. For a brief moment, he allowed himself to believe that he would live. Killing the queen killed her workers.
But no. As he watched, the inactive Formics regained their faculties. They rose, collected themselves, and charged again. But this time they were not as organized, not as unified. They were not one organism now, Bingwen realized. There was some order, yes, but there was also autonomy. Fewer strings to hold them now.
It didn’t matter. The crossbow was no longer in his hands. He quickly scanned the room, but he didn’t see it. His back was stuck to the mucous, but only tenuously. He pushed off the wall easily.
Not to flee, because they would be on him in seconds, and he could never outrun them in the tunnels. He merely wanted to steady himself and free his hands.
“Wall. Front.”
The nanoshield around him formed a wall in front of him, and the first wave of Formics hit it, pushing it inward. The wall could not hold them off, Bingwen knew. It would struggle and persist but it would break at any second. There were too many Formics filled with too much rage. Their faces didn’t express emotion, but the ferocity with which they came at him was all the evidence he needed. They would pound at him with stones, break open his suit, rip him from it piece by piece.
He only needed another second though. The igniter was already pulled from his pouch and in his hand. He hoped Mazer wouldn’t be disappointed.
Then he dropped his nanoshield and made a spark.
CHAPTER 30
Children
To: mazer.rackham%
[email protected] From: imala.bootstamp%
[email protected]/fleetcom/gagak
Subject: Deliver a message
* * *
Dear Mazer,
I am writing in the hope that you can relay a message to Victor for me. He is heading toward a ship of the Fleet above the ecliptic called the Vandalorum. I do not have the ability or permission to contact that ship directly. Victor is in a zipship and therefore unreachable. My hope is that Victor will find my message waiting for him when he arrives.
I cannot tell you where I am, but I can say that I am on a ship whose course is set and whose intentions are secret. We are accelerating. I spend my days strapped in an elaborate harness. I feel like I’m being squeezed like a lemon. It is more G-force than I have ever experienced. Nothing about it is pleasant.
At first I thought my sickness was from the flight, but my urine is constantly analyzed, and the ship has confirmed that I am pregnant. I don’t know what effect the acceleration will have on the baby, but I fear the worst. Please let Victor know that I am going to try to figure out a way to minimize the threat to our child. I don’t know how exactly. But I can’t just sit here and do nothing. There may be ramifications if I alter the ship’s acceleration schedule, but a mother must do what is necessary.