Earth Unaware (First Formic War) (42 page)

How dare she, thought Lem. How dare she blame him for the destruction of Weigh Station Four. He pushed away from the desk. Free miners. Dirty little scavengers. He shouldn’t have mentioned the files. Now she’ll suspect they have great value. She’s probably contacting the WU-HU ship to try and sell them right now.

No. He knew that wasn’t true. She was erasing them. She hadn’t been lying.

But had she really sent him a laserline warning him of the Formics? Or was that some ploy to make him feel guilty? What had Father said? “Guilt is the greatest weapon because its cuts rarely heal and it aims for the heart.”

No, Concepción Querales was nothing like Father. Father might try to burden Lem with guilt for some personal gain, but something told Lem that Concepción didn’t play that game. Deceit and dominion and the twisted manipulation of human emotion weren’t the old lady’s style.

*   *   *

Mono stood in the cargo bay, twisting his pinkie finger and wishing he were a million klicks away.

“What were you thinking?” said Concepción. “You disobeyed direct orders and you terrified your mother.”

Mono felt himself shrink a little. All of the men who had stayed behind, along with Concepción, stood nearby, looking down on him, furious. Even Segundo, who never got angry, now looked as if he was ready to give Mono the spanking of his life. Mono cursed himself. He should have thought his plan through a little better. Of course Mother would eventually figure out that he wasn’t on the WU-HU ship. She would realize Zapa was lying sooner or later. He couldn’t pretend Mono was in the bathroom forever. But Mono hadn’t thought that far ahead. He hadn’t considered what would happen next. Mother had gone to the WU-HU captain in tears, according to Concepción, and the captain had radioed immediately to El Cavador. After that it was just a matter of Concepción getting on the ship’s loudspeaker and telling Mono, wherever he was on the ship, to get his butt to the cargo bay immediately.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” asked Concepción.

“I wanted to help,” said Mono. “I’m good with the small-hand work. Vico said so. You might need that.”

Concepción rubbed her eyes.

Segundo turned to Concepción. “What are we going to do? I wouldn’t recommend we dock again. The WU-HU ship hit us hard. We took a little structural damage, nothing to be concerned about, but enough to weaken the area around the docking hatch. I wouldn’t risk another high-speed dock if we don’t have to.”

“You’ve put us in a very difficult position, Mono,” said Concepción. “I thought Vico had trained you better.”

That did it. He could bear the angry looks of two dozen men; he could tolerate a good tongue-lashing; but to think that this would disappoint Vico, to think that Vico would disapprove, that was too much for Mono to bear. He covered his eyes and began to cry. “Don’t tell Vico. Please. Don’t tell Vico.”

To Mono’s surprise, they responded with silence. No one lashed out. No one told him he couldn’t be an apprentice anymore. They just stood there and watched him cry. Finally Concepción spoke again, and this time her voice was calm. “From now on Mono, when I give you an order or when your mother gives you an order, you will obey it. Do I make myself clear?”

He nodded.

“I want to hear your answer,” said Concepción.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I appreciate your willingness to help, Mono, but lying to your mother and getting others to lie for you is not how we operate. We are family.”

He wanted to tell her that it was
for
the family that he had stayed and
for
the family that he had lied, but he didn’t think that would help his situation.

She made him stand off to the side while the men checked their equipment. Helmets, suits, propulsion packs, magnets, helmet radios. Mono watched them work, feeling foolish and angry with himself. He had frightened Mother when all he ultimately wanted to do was drive her fear away.

Segundo set up a workbench to assemble the timers and magnet discs to the explosives. The explosives weren’t live. That required a blasting disc, which the men would insert into the mechanism when they set the charges on the Formic ship, so there was no chance of them detonating prematurely. Segundo enlisted four men to help him assemble the timers, but it quickly became clear that the men were out of their element; they could set explosives, but they didn’t know wiring and chip work. Finally, after forty-five minutes, Segundo excused the men and called Mono over.

“Don’t think this means you’re not in trouble,” said Segundo.

Mono kept his face a blank and didn’t say a word. He worried that he might say the wrong thing or smile at the wrong time and anger Segundo and spoil his chance to help.

The timers were a cinch to assemble. He and Vico had done similar work on other things dozens of times. It was just a matter of cutting and rewiring and making a few taps with the soldering gun. The magnet discs were a little trickier, and Mono ended up changing the design Segundo had started. Instead of having the magnets
underneath
the explosive, which would dampen the explosive’s damaging effect to the hull, Mono used smaller magnets around the rim of the device and increased their attraction with a second battery. It was nothing innovative, really. Mono was merely copying something Victor had done when they had repaired one of the water pumps. But Segundo, who had been watching him silently work, picked up the piece when Mono was finished and nodded. “This is the kind of thing Vico would do.”

It was more praise than Mono could have hoped for, and even though he thought it might get him in trouble, he couldn’t help but smile.

*   *   *

Segundo secured his helmet and stepped into the airlock. They were minutes away from reaching the Formic ship, and a quiet intensity had settled among the men. They had drilled their maneuvers so many times over the past few days—using a wall in the cargo bay as the hull of the Formic ship and setting down dummy explosives over and over again until it was second nature—that Segundo didn’t feel nearly as much anxiety as he thought he would. They could do this.

Once everyone was in the airlock and the door secured, Bahzím had them check and recheck each other’s equipment. Segundo was especially thorough with those around him and found nothing out of order. Concepción then gathered them in a circle for prayer, asking for protection and mercy and that a heavenly hand watch over the women and children. At the “Amen,” Segundo crossed himself and offered his own silent prayer for Rena and Victor.

Everything moved quickly after that. Bahzím ordered them to clip the D-rings of their safety harnesses onto the mooring cable that would be shot down to the surface of the ship. Segundo positioned himself at the front of the line so that he would be the first one on the Formic ship. He knew that many of the younger men were watching him closely, and he suspected it would put them at ease to see him leading out. Concepción strapped herself into the seat on the winch. She would pull everyone in once the charges were set. Segundo couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her in a suit and helmet.

“Remember,” Concepción said. “Your suits weren’t designed for spacewalks at this speed. They’ll protect you from collisions with space dust, but anything bigger will rip through you like shrapnel. So the less time you spend outside the better. Bottom line, move fast. Set the explosives, click back on the cable, and I’ll reel you back in. Nothing to it.”

Right, thought Segundo. Nothing to it. Just perform a spacewalk at an insane speed, cling to magnets for dear life, and take down an alien ship fifty times our size. Easy.

He turned on his HUD, and windows of data popped up on his visor. He blinked through a few file folders until he found the family photo he was looking for. A candid shot of him, Rena, and Vico at some family gathering a few years ago. He smiled to see how small Vico was then, still a boy. He had grown to his man height so quickly. Segundo’s smile faded. He wondered where Victor was at the moment, rocketing toward Luna all these months, his health slowly deteriorating.

Video taken from inside Lem Jukes’s helmet popped up on Segundo’s HUD. “We’re in position,” said Lem. “Give the word.”

The Makarhu was approaching the Formic ship on the opposite side, and Lem, like Concepción, was manning the winch on his ship. The plan was for Lem to fire his cable onto the hull at the same instant El Cavador fired hers. Then both ships would send out their men.

“We’re opening our doors,” said Concepción.

The large airlock doors opened wide, and Segundo stared in wonder and horror at the size of the ship before them. El Cavador was over a hundred meters from the ship, yet the view of the ship filled the entire airlock doorway. Segundo had seen renderings and models of the ship, but until now he hadn’t grasped the sheer immensity of it. It was larger than any structure he had ever seen, and yet it was so smooth and uniform and singular in its design that it didn’t seem like a structure at all. It didn’t seem like something
made
. It seemed like a giant drop of red paint falling from heaven to Earth. The color surprised Segundo, though he wasn’t sure why. What had he expected? A menacing black?

These are not ignorant monsters, he realized. They are every child’s worst nightmare. The monster that thinks. The monster that can build and move fast and defy every defense. I’ve been in denial, he realized. He had seen the pod, he had seen their tech, but the obstinate, dominant-species part of his brain had refused to believe that a face so horrific and antlike could be more innovative or intelligent than human beings. Yet here was the proof. Here was a whole kilometer of proof.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” asked Lem. “Are you seeing what we’re seeing?”

“We see it,” said Concepción. “And I’m more convinced than ever. We cannot let this reach Earth.”

“You’re right,” said Lem. “But I don’t like it.”

Segundo agreed. He wasn’t convinced that they’d be the ones to stop it, but it had to stop.

“Makarhu, are you ready to fire your cable?” asked Concepción.

“Makarhu ready,” said a man’s voice.

“On my mark,” said Concepción. “Four. Three. Two. One. Cable away.”

The mooring cable shot forward with a large round magnet at its end. Segundo watched the cable uncoil as it flew toward the ship. It seemed to go forever, and then it struck the surface, holding firm. Concepción gunned the winch, and pulled in the slack. The cable was taut. Bahzím was shouting, “Go, go, go!”

Segundo launched himself out and thumbed the trigger on his propulsion pack. He shot forward toward the ship, keenly aware that he was also moving in the direction of the ship at one hundred and ten thousand kilometers per hour. The smallest rock chunk would kill him, and the thought prompted him to press the thumb trigger harder. The Formic ship was coming up fast. A beeping message in Segundo’s HUD warned him of an impending collision and urged him to reduce his speed. Segundo ignored it. He needed to get down fast or he’d slow down the line. Thirty meters. Twenty. He hit the second thumb trigger, and retro boosters on his thighs and chest quickly slowed his descent. Two seconds later he was bringing his feet up in front of him.

Touchdown. His boot magnets—thankfully—held to the surface. A disc magnet with a handgrip was already in his left hand. He reached down to the surface and anchored his upper body with the magnet while his right hand released the D-ring from the cable, all in one fluid movement as they had rehearsed.

He scooted to his right, getting clear of the cable, making room. The others arrived behind him. Chepe, Pitoso, Bulo, Nando, and the rest, with Bahzím picking up the rear. Segundo looked ahead of them. Lem Jukes’s crew was coming down a cable from the Juke ship maybe three hundred meters away. Even at a distance Segundo could see that the Juke suits and gear were far superior than anything El Cavador men had.

“Spread out,” said Bahzím. “Be back on the line in twelve minutes.”

Segundo was on his hands and knees, crawling forward, keeping his body low, getting as far away from everyone else as he could. The idea was to disperse and set the explosives far apart to create a wide circle of damage. Segundo’s knee and hand magnets held him securely to the hull, but they were cumbersome and difficult to move. He had to pull hard on each leg to momentarily break the attraction and lift the magnet enough to move it forward. It was agonizing and far more difficult than their rehearsals. After twenty meters, his thighs were burning, and his breathing was heavy.

He could see now that the surface of the ship wasn’t as smooth as it had appeared at a distance. There were thousands of closed apertures in rows running the length of the ship, like planted fields of crop. Each aperture was as big around as Segundo’s helmet, and he knew that if any of them opened it would be to unleash their weapon. He tried not putting any weight on the apertures for fear that the magnet might trigger something and open them. It was like crawling across a minefield.

Finally he stopped and looked around him. The men from both ships were spread all over the surface. Some were laying explosives; others were still crawling forward; several explosives were already set, each with a small blinking green light, indicating the explosive was live. Segundo removed his first explosive from his pouch and set it gently on the surface. He inserted the blasting disc into the slot then set the timer to detonate three hours from now.

They had agreed to radio silence during this phase of the operation so that they could all concentrate on setting the charges without interruptions. But suddenly everyone was yelling. Segundo lifted his head and saw that one of the explosives had gone off prematurely, ripping through the hull and throwing up debris. The voices in his helmet were fast and frantic.

“What happened?”

“Pitoso’s dead!”

“It blew up right under him!”

“What do we do?”

“Get back to the cable. Set your explosives and get back to the line. Move!”

Segundo’s explosive was blinking green, set. He left it and turned toward the mooring cable at least thirty meters away, a good five-minute crawl. They weren’t going to make it, he realized. Even if they got back to the line and up to the ship, they couldn’t fly El Cavador away fast enough. The whole operation relied on them getting in and out and then a safe distance away without being detected, before the Formics could respond. That wasn’t going to happen now. The Formics knew they were here.