Earth Unaware (First Formic War) (31 page)

“Did it have any other weapons?” asked Father.

“None that the Italians could detect. Just the probing needle drills. It’s also much smaller than we thought. Maybe a quarter the size of El Cavador. The Italians believe it’s designed for atmospheric entry and exit, though probably not in really strong gravity, by the looks of its engines and design. It could land on and leave from, say, Earth, but it might have trouble with Jupiter. That’s conjecture, though, and not necessarily helpful.”

“Anything is helpful,” said Father. He quickly gave her his own report and informed her that they had found Faron’s body but no survivors.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” said Concepción. “Once we destroy the pod and make needed repairs, if any, we’ll resume the search. In the meantime, hold your position. If you don’t hear from us afterward, come to us. We may not be able to contact you, and we’ll likely need you for repairs.” She paused a moment, then added, “Qué Dios les proteja.” May God protect you.

“Y ustedes también,” said Father. And you as well.

The radio went silent, and no one spoke for a moment.

“She doesn’t think they’ll survive an attack, does she?” Victor asked.

“I don’t think so, no,” said Father. “And she has every reason to believe so. The Italians tried to stop it and couldn’t. It got all four of their ships, and they all were desperately fighting to the end.”

“El Cavador doesn’t have a chance,” said Toron. “This thing took laser fire. Direct hits. We can’t let it reach the ship.”

“What do you suggest?” asked Father.

“Bahzím has a team outside with penetrating tools. We have the same tools here. Spreaders, shears, cold sprayers. We’re closer to the pod than they are. It will be coming from this direction. When it passes, we get behind it and attack it from the rear. We’ll have to come in slightly from the side to avoid its thrusters, but we hit its hull, climb out, anchor ourselves to whatever we can, and destroy anything that moves with the tools. Maybe we can disable these grappling arms or needle drills. If we cripple it enough, it can’t inflict any damage.”

“It’s going to be moving,” said Father. “If we’re off on our approach, even slightly, we’ll miss it.” He turned to Victor. “You only just learned to fly this thing, Vico. Can you do this? Can we hit it?”

Victor blinked. They were going to attack the pod. Alone. With rescue gear. “I’d need to make some adjustments to the program to give us more propulsion; we can’t match it with our current speed. We’ll need to be much faster. But even then, I won’t have a guidance system. It will be like shooting a bow, with us as the arrow. If I track it right, and judge our speed right, it might work. But it will largely be guesswork. The challenge will be securing ourselves to the hull once we reach it. How do we anchor? We’ll need to cling to the hull long enough to get out of the ship with tools.”

“Leave that to me,” said Father. “You worry about getting us into a position to attack.” He clicked on the radio. “El Cavador, this is Segundo. Give me the exact location, trajectory, and speed of the pod based on our current position.”

“What are you planning?” asked Concepción.

“A bit of sabotage,” said Father. “We might be able to do some damage before it reaches you. And don’t argue with us. You know it makes tactical sense, and we’re doing it whether you approve or not. We’ll simply have a better chance of success if you help.”

After a pause, Concepción answered, “Selmo will give you the coordinates. Be careful, Segundo. I need my two best mechanics and my sky scanner alive.”

“You need everyone on board El Cavador alive,” said Father.

Selmo gave them the coordinates. The numbers meant little to Victor. But for Toron, a sky scanner, the coordinates were a second language he spoke fluently. Even without instruments, using only the placement of stars around them, Toron knew precisely where the pod would be coming from. He gave directions to Victor, who turned the quickship around and flew them through the debris, weaving this way and that until Toron felt certain about their position. Victor fired the retros and settled in a patch of shadow behind a large piece of debris.

“He’ll be coming right through here,” said Toron, making a sweeping gesture with his arm, showing them the expected trajectory.

Victor rotated the quickship so it was pointed in the direction to intercept the pod once it passed. Toron gazed outward with his visor zoomed to maximum, searching the sky for the pod, waiting. Father worked furiously behind Victor, making hooks for the cables. Using the shears, he snipped bars from the quickship’s walls and bent them with another hydraulic tool, jury-rigging a hook.

A few minutes later Toron saw it.

“There,” he said, pointing.

Victor strained his eyes and zoomed in with his visor. At first he saw nothing. There was wreckage clouding his view, and the sunlight through the debris was dim and heavily dappled with long shadows that kept most of their surroundings in near darkness.

Then he saw it. Or at least a glimpse of it, there in the distance, behind a scattering of debris, moving toward them.

Then the debris thinned, and the whole pod came into view. Victor’s heart sank. It was a ship, yes, but with its grappling hooks and needle drills already extended, it looked more like a smooth-shelled insect. It wasn’t human. Whatever was inside it piloting it couldn’t be human. It wasn’t shaped for humans. It seemed too narrow in the body. And what was that on the nose of the ship? A drive? For the first time in Victor’s memory, he was mechanically stumped. Typically he could look at other ships and know just by the shape of them and the placement of their sensors and engines how the ship flew and operated. Even ships he had not read about and whose designs were completely foreign to him, even those Victor could understand if he looked at them long enough.

Except this one. This was like nothing he had ever seen before. Had it not been flying through space in front of him, if he had seen only an image of it on the nets, he wouldn’t have believed it was a ship at all. He wouldn’t have believed it even existed.

El Cavador can’t stop it, Victor realized. Concepción isn’t prepared for this. Nothing is prepared for this.

“What the devil is that?” said Toron.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Father. “We don’t have to understand it. We just have to stop it. Check your safety harnesses. Make sure your cables are secure. If you’re not tethered and you slip, you’re gone. The ship will be moving. Use your hand and boot magnets. Strap a second pair of magnets to your knees. Stay as flat as you can. Crawl, don’t walk. Toron, once we land, bring out the tools. We’ll target the needle drills and grappling arms first.” Father reached up and turned on his helmet cam. He was going to record everything. “You can do this, Vico,” he said. “Wait for the pod to pass. Then pull up alongside it and land on its surface.”

Yes, thought Victor. Land on its surface. How simple. Just plop a quickship—which was never intended to be piloted, never intended to hold people at all, and operated with rudimentary flight controls—onto a moving alien target. Easy.

Victor watched the pod approach. It decelerated as it sunk into the debris cloud, yet it still moved faster than Victor thought safe for a debris field. It must be incredibly nimble, he thought. It must be able to shift direction quickly. And just as he considered this, it happened. The pod jinked and spun to avoid a chunk of debris and then returned to its previous trajectory with inhuman agility. Again, like a flying insect, zipping to the side and back with ease. How was he supposed to land on something that could change direction that fast?

Ten seconds passed. The pod drew closer, getting larger. For a harrowing moment, Victor thought it was coming directly for them, that it had seen them moving through the debris and decided to attack them instead. But no, now it slowly began to veer to the side. They were beside its trajectory, not on it.

Finally it passed by, not a hundred meters from their position, slick and smooth and moving fast.

Victor slid his finger down the screen of his handheld, and the quickship shot forward. Earlier he had devised a dial to increase the propulsion by simply sliding his finger across the screen, but as soon as the ship took off, he knew that he had misjudged it: They were accelerating too quickly. He had intended to start slow and then rush at the end, but it was too late for that now. He would have to rely on retros to slow them down in the final moments just before impact.

The quickship raced forward, not aiming at the pod, but at a point in space ahead of it, where Victor hoped the two ships would meet. He had to hit it right, he knew. If he came late, they might fly up into the pod’s rear thrusters, burning themselves up in whatever heat or radiation was emitted there. Too early and they’d put themselves directly in the pod’s path, only to be crushed by the subsequent collision. It was the middle of the pod or nothing. And not at too sharp an angle either or they’d only bounce off or, worse, collide with such force that they’d kill themselves instantly.

Victor kept his eyes focused on the point of interception. The pod was to his right, slightly ahead of them. They were too fast, he realized. He was going to overshoot.

“We’re coming in hot,” he said. “Hold on to something.”

He fired up the retros to a quarter power. The straps across his chest tightened as he felt his body pressed forward in sudden deceleration. Then just when he thought he had slowed them enough, he released the retros, hit the propulsion, and they shot forward again. Victor waited one more moment then killed the propulsion. Now they were in a fast dead drift, closing in on the ship.

Three more seconds. Then two. One.

The impact was hard, and Victor’s body jerked against the straps. He hit the propulsion again to keep them from bouncing off, but he could already feel the ship deflecting away. He saw Father’s body fly by, and for an instant Victor thought Father had been thrown from the ship. But no, Father had launched forward, using the speed and force of the impact to get clear of the quickship, and hurled himself onto the pod. Two cables uncoiled behind him, and Father raised the hook in his hand. He hit the surface of the pod and snapped the hook around the base of one of the long grappling arms. His body flipped around, still full of momentum; and it would have flown off into space if not for the cable attached to his safety harness, which snapped taut and whipped him back to the surface of the pod.

The cable attached to the hook snapped taut next, and the quickship swung back to the pod like a pendulum, slamming hard against the side of the pod. For a moment, Victor felt dazed and disoriented, then he tore at his restraints, pulling himself free, crawling out. He set his boot magnets to the hull and was relieved to feel them attracted to the metal. Toron was right behind him, magnet pads in his hands, crawling out onto the pod with two hydraulic shears strapped across his back.

Victor grabbed the heat extractor, and crawled forward. Toron was right beside him. Debris whipped by overhead. They reached Father. Toron handed Father one of the shears, and Father immediately went to work, firing up the hydraulics. They had aimed for the drills, but Father was attached to a grappling arm, and he set the shears to work there first. The teeth bit at the metal but they didn’t sink in. He tried again, setting the teeth at a different angle, but again to no effect.

“I can’t bite through,” said Father. “The metal’s impermeable.”

“What do we do?” said Toron.

“Vico, get the heat extractor here at the base of this grappling arm,” said Father. “We’ll suck the heat off of it. Freezing it will make it brittle.”

Victor moved quickly, attaching the claw of the heat extractor around the narrow grappling arm. Then he watched the meter as the heat of the arm quickly dropped.

After ten seconds, Father said, “Good enough. Take it off.”

Victor snapped the claw free, and pulled the extractor away. Father was instantly at the frozen spot with the shears again. This time the shears bit through, but instead of tearing, the metal cracked, splintered, and then shattered. The entire grappling arm snapped free and hovered there in space a moment before Father pushed it away from the ship.

One arm down. Three to go. Plus the drills.

“That one next,” said Father, indicating the grappling arm two meters to their right. Victor began crawling for it, following Father, sliding his knee magnets across the smooth surface, keeping himself low and his grip on the pod secure. A flicker of movement in his peripheral vision stopped him. He turned toward the nose of the pod and saw a hatch open. A figure emerged wearing a pressure suit and helmet. It wasn’t human. It was three-quarters the size of a human, with a double set of arms and a pair of legs. All six appendages stuck to the surface as the creature shuffle-crawled forward with incredible speed, racing toward them, an air hose trailing behind it.

Victor couldn’t move. His whole body was rigid with fear.

The thing paused, lifted its head, and regarded them. Victor saw its face then. It wasn’t an insect exactly—there was skin and fur and musculature. But it
was
antlike. Large black eyes. Small mouth, with pincers and protuberances like teeth. Two superciliary antennae that bent downward across its face.

“Son hormigas,” said Toron. They’re ants.

The creature moved its head, eyeing their equipment. Then, seeing that Victor had the largest piece, the heat extractor, and perhaps the most threatening, the hormiga shot forward toward Victor with its first set of arms raised.

Victor cried out. And just before the arms seized him, the blunt end of a pair of shears struck the hormiga on the side of the head, knocking it away. It was Toron. “Help your father! I’ll hold it back.”

The creature slid away and then tumbled off the ship, spinning into space. Its air hose snapped taut and held firm, however, and as soon as the hormiga got its bearings, it shimmied up the hose like it was climbing a pole and was back on the surface of the pod. Toron hurried to the hose and severed it with a quick snip of the shears. Air poured from the hose, and the creature lunged at Toron, pinning him to the surface.