Earth Unaware (First Formic War) (24 page)

The first bodies appeared shortly thereafter. Two of them. Men. Stiff with death. The spotlights rested on them, but the men were thankfully at such a distance that Victor couldn’t make out their faces. The lights moved on.

A few minutes later the ship came upon a large piece of wreckage. El Cavador’s retrorockets fired, and the ship slowed and then stopped alongside the wreckage.

“Listen up,” said Bahzím. “We’re opening the doors. First ones out are Chepe and Pitoso. They’ll do a quick scan while the rest of us hang tight. If they detect something, the rest of us go in.”

The wide bay doors opened, and what had been video became a reality. The wreckage in front of them was a mangled heap of destruction: bent girders, severed conduit, twisted pipes, torn foam insulation, crunched deck and hull plates. It looked as if it had been ripped from the ship instead of cleanly cut away by a laser. Victor searched for markings on the hull that might identify it as Vesuvio, Janda’s ship, but there were none. Bahzím gave the order, and Chepe and Pitoso were out in an instant, flying down to the wreck and moving fast.

They flew to the hull side of the wreck where the surface was smooth and there were fewer protrusions that might snag or cut their suits. There were several windows, and Chepe went to those first, shining his helmet lights inside. The first few windows were quick looks, but at the fourth window they stopped. “There are people inside,” said Chepe.

Victor’s heart leaped.

“But they’re not moving,” said Chepe. “I don’t think they’re alive. Some are wearing masks, but it looks like they died from anoxia. They must have survived the attack, though. I see emergency heaters set up in the room. We just didn’t get here in time.”

“Is Alejandra with them?” asked Toron. “Do you see Alejandra?”

“It’s hard to see faces through the masks,” said Chepe. “And many of them are turned away from me. Plus the window’s small. I can’t see the whole room, especially around the corners.”

“Maybe they’re not dead,” said Toron. “They could be unconscious. Maybe we could revive them.”

Isabella’s voice came on the line. “Chepe, it’s Isabella. I’m at the helm. Can you send your helmet vid feed over the line?”

The video from Chepe’s helmet appeared on Victor’s HUD. Now everyone saw what Chepe saw. There were bodies drifting in a dark space. The room—what Victor could see of it—looked like barracks, with hammocks and storage compartments for clothes and personal items. Glow rods in the room offered some light, but they had dimmed to almost nothing. Chepe’s helmet lights illuminated a few faces, and Victor saw at once that there was no reviving these people. Some had eyes open, staring into nothing, the look of death forever frozen on their faces. Men. Women. A young child. Victor recognized a few of them from the week the Italians had spent with them. That woman there had been holding an infant back on El Cavador during one of the feasts—Victor distinctly remembered—but she held no infant now. And that man, he had sung with a few other men during that same feast, a song that had left them all laughing.

“Bang on the hatch,” said Isabella. “See if anyone responds. Watch for movement.”

Chepe took a tool from his pouch and banged it hard against the hatch. Victor watched. Chepe’s lights swept the room through the glass, pausing at each person. He banged again. A third time. A fourth. No one moved.

Janda wasn’t among them. Victor was sure of it. Even those who were turned away, whose faces he could not see, he knew the size and shape of her body enough to know she wasn’t here.

“We could put a bubble over the hatch and send in Chepe to run vitals on those people,” said Isabella. “But that’s going to take time, and right now every second counts.”

A bubble was a small inflatable dome that could be hermetically sealed over an external hatch. If Chepe was inside the bubble when it inflated and sealed over the hatch, then he could open the hatch and go inside without exposing the room beyond to the vacuum of space. Bubbles could be dangerous, though, as they required you to momentarily detach your lifeline to climb inside. The lifeline was attached to a valve on the bubble’s exterior. This fed to an extendable lifeline inside the bubble, which restored air and power to the suit wearer. But detaching your lifeline, even momentarily was a risk.

“I’d say it’s highly unlikely we’ll find anyone alive in there,” said Isabella. “I suggest we press on and look for signs of life.”

“Agreed,” said Concepción. “Return to the ship. Let’s keep moving.”

“We’re just leaving them there?” said Toron.

“There’s nothing we can do for them, Toron,” said Concepción. “But there may be others we can reach in time.”

Victor felt hopeless then. These people had survived the attack. All the factors that Victor had considered critical for survival had been met. And yet all of them were gone. He pictured them alive, huddled around a heater, clinging to each other, speaking words of comfort. How long had they lasted? Twelve hours? Fifteen? Had they known El Cavador was coming? Had they believed rescue was imminent? Or did they think themselves all alone, waiting out the inevitable?

Victor looked at Toron beside him and saw that Father had a hand on Toron’s shoulder, comforting him. Toron looked pale, even in the low light of the cargo bay.

“They had masks and heaters,” said Father. “That’s a good sign, Toron. It means there’s equipment out there.”

“Little good it did them,” said Toron.

Chepe and Pitoso landed back in the airlock, and the ship moved on. The bay doors remained open as they continued to patrol through the destruction. Twice more they stopped, and twice more Chepe and Pitoso flew out to investigate. One of the wrecks was empty. The other had a massive hole in the back that hadn’t been visible until Chepe and Pitoso went in for a closer look. There were no signs of survivors.

The ship moved on. As they continued patrolling they passed more bodies. Most were men. But there were women, too. And children. One burned terribly. Victor turned away.

Once, a corpse floated uncomfortably close to the open airlock, right there in front of them. It was a man. A boy, really. No more than twenty. He could have been a suitor for Janda if he wasn’t married already. His eyes were—thankfully—closed. The miners nearest the edge could have reached out and touched him, and for a horrific moment Victor thought the body might float inside. But the ship moved on, and the body slipped past.

No one spoke. Several of the miners glanced back at Toron to see how he was taking it, the compassion evident on their faces. Toron never said a word, and as the minutes stretched into an hour, Victor’s hope began to dissolve. There was too much wreckage. They had come too late. Nineteen hours was far too long. Perhaps if they hadn’t stopped to install the pebble-killers or scatter Marco’s ashes, if they had accelerated then instead of
de
celerating, maybe they could have saved someone; maybe they could have stopped this whole thing from happening.

No, they couldn’t have arrived before the attack. Even if they had pushed themselves and never slowed. And what good would it have done if they
had
been here? They’d be just as dead as everyone else.

A large piece of wreckage came along the ship. The biggest piece yet. El Cavador’s retros fired, and the ship slowed. Victor couldn’t imagine how anyone could be alive inside. The whole structure was twisted, not just the ends. And none of the sides were smooth with hull plating, suggesting that it had come from somewhere deep inside a ship.

Approaching it would be difficult. Sharp twisted beams and other jagged structural pieces protruded from all sides in a random fashion, like a crushed metal can wrapped in iron thorns. Chepe and Pitoso flew down cautiously, circling the wreckage from a distance. “I see a hatch,” said Chepe. “It’s solid. No windows.”

“Can you get close enough to bang on it?” asked Bahzím.

Victor watched Chepe’s approach via the man’s vid feed. Chepe drifted to the hatch slowly, steering clear of the jagged girders and beams.

“Watch his line, Pitoso,” said Bahzím.

Chepe settled on the hull beside the hatch. “The space around the hatch looks smooth,” he said. “We could get a bubble around it if we needed.” He banged on the hatch, then pressed his hand against the metal. He wouldn’t hear a knock response from anyone inside, but he would feel the vibration of it. Chepe waited a full minute and knocked again. After a pause, “I don’t feel anything.”

The wreckage was drifting and rotating. One of the jagged beams was coming close to Chepe’s lifeline. “Back off,” said Bahzím. “She’s spinning.”

Chepe and Pitoso pushed off from the wreckage and floated a short distance away as the wreckage slowly spun in front of them. The far side of it, which hadn’t been visible before, turned into view of the cargo bay. It was a mess of twisted channel beams and girder framework, bent and mangled together, worse even than the other sides. But through that, beyond the web of distorted metal, was a corridor, maybe ten meters deep, like a shallow cave, with the entrance to it pinched half closed. Victor zoomed in with his visor and strained to see through all the obstructions, trying to see down into the corridor.

Then he saw it.

A flicker of light. A movement. There was a hatch at the end of the corridor with a small circular window in the center. And in that window there was a light. A glow rod. Wiggling in someone’s hand. “There’s somebody inside!” Victor shouted, and before he knew what he was doing, he had pushed his way to the end of the airlock and jumped out into space.

“Vico, wait,” said Bahzím.

But Victor wasn’t waiting. He had seen someone. Alive. “There’s someone down there.” He hit the trigger on his thumb, and the propulsion pushed him toward the corridor entrance. He jinked left, avoiding a protruding beam, then jinked right avoiding another.

“Slow down,” said Father.

Victor rotated his body, got his feet under him, and slowed. He landed expertly atop the bars and metal that bent across and blocked the corridor. He stepped to the side, squatted down, and looked through a hole in the web of metal down into the corridor, as if peering down a well. He could see him clearly now. A man. The circle in the hatch was smaller than the man’s face, but he was clearly alive and looked desperate. He wasn’t wearing a mask, either, meaning he had none, or the canisters had run out. Victor zoomed in, switched on his helmet vid, and blinked out the command to send the feed to everyone else.

The reaction was immediate. Bahzím started giving commands. “All right. Listen up. I want cables on this wreckage. Moor it to us. Lock it down. I don’t want it spinning. Segundo, I want you and Vico cutting away that debris at that entrance. I want the other shears at the hatch Chepe found. We might be able to reach survivors through there. Chepe and Pitoso, circle the wreckage another time and look for another way inside. Nando, I want you with a board and marker down there with Segundo and Vico communicating with whoever’s inside. I want to know how many are alive and what their status is.”

Father and Toron gingerly landed beside Victor, carrying the saws and hydraulic shears.

“He must have heard Chepe knocking,” said Victor. “There might be other people in there.”

“And we’re going to get them out,” said Father, handing a saw to Victor. “Try the saw first. If it gives you problems, go with the shears. Let’s cut these channel beams away first.” He indicated the ones Victor had avoided. “We need a clear path in and out of here.”

Victor wanted to say something to the man at the hatch. “We’re here. We’re going to get you out. You’re going to live.” But no one could reach the hatch yet with all the obstructions in the way, and Victor had no means of communicating with the man anyway. Father took the beam on the left, Victor the one on the right. Victor fired up his saw. The blade spun.

“Clean cuts,” said Father, “as close to the bottom as you can. Don’t rush.”

Victor’s blade cut into the metal. He couldn’t hear it, but the saw vibrated in his hands as it ate through the beam. Nineteen hours. Someone had gone nineteen hours. It looked like a big space. There had to be more people inside. Maybe it was their version of the fuge, the designated place for an emergency. Maybe lots of people had gone there. The saw felt slow in his hands. He pulled the blade free and killed the power. “Toron, give me the shears.”

Toron passed them, and Victor wiggled the pincers into place and started the hydraulics. The shears went much faster, cut-crunching their way through the beam, opening and closing like a ravenous animal, making easy work of the metal.

Bahzím was giving more orders, sending two more miners down with hydraulic spreaders.

The shears bit through the last few inches, and the beam snapped free.

“Easy,” said Father. “Push it away slowly, not by a jagged edge.”

Their gloves had an outer layer of leatherlike material and were built to withstand heavy use and scrapes, but Victor was overly cautious anyway. The beam drifted away. Nando was down near the web of metal covering the corridor entrance, writing on the small light board with a stylus. He wrote, “How many people?” and turned the board around for the man. The man in the hatch placed nine fingers against the glass.

“Nine people,” said Nando.

“Vico,” said Father. “Don’t take your eyes off what you’re doing. Pay attention.”

Victor turned away from the hatch. Father was right. He couldn’t cut and watch Nando or the man at the hatch. He focused on the girder beam he was cutting and guided the shears through the metal. Nine people. So few. The Italians had close to three hundred people.

“He’s writing on the glass with his finger,” said Nando. “One letter at a time. He’s moving slowly. He seems half out of it. Air. He’s saying they need air.”

“I don’t see any other entrance besides the hatch we knocked on,” said Chepe. “We’ve been around the whole thing.”

“Ask him if Alejandra is in there,” said Toron.

“Ask him first if he can reach the outer hatch,” said Bahzím. “We might be able to get a docking tube sealed over it. Then they could open the hatch and fly right up to us.”