Earth Afire

by Orson Scott Card

  "You expect us to trust these people with our lives after one visit?" said Abbi.

  "We've been putting our lives in other people's hands from the moment we left El Cavador," said Rena.

  "That's different," said Julexi. "That was WU-HU. These are scavengers."

  "He has offered to give any one of you a tour of his ship to meet his family. But we need to move quickly if we're going to do that. He grows impatient."

  "Impatient?" said Julexi. "And what other emotions of his should we fear? His rage? His lust?"

  "Will you shut up?" said Edimar. The fifteen-year-old popped out of the shadows. Rena hadn't even noticed that Edimar had been listening. "I am so sick of you cutting everyone down. Everyone's wrong but you. Everyone's to blame. Well you know what? If you actually said something positive every once in a while, you might not be so miserable and people might actually find you tolerable."

  Lola, Edimar's mother, looked aghast. "Edimar! You will apologize to Julexi this instant!"

  "No," said Edimar. "I won't. Because every one of you knows it's true, and you're all too polite to say so. Well I'm not. If you want to stay here and wait for the Chinese to kick us out, Julexi, fine, but I'm going with Rena."

  Julexi narrowed her eyes. "You spoiled little child. You're worse than your dogging sister."

  Lola slapped Julexi so fast and so hard, that it spun Julexi into the wall. Several women gasped. Julexi steadied herself, a hand to her cheek, shocked.

  Edimar's sister had been Alejandra, whom the family had sent away when they feared that Alejandra and Victor might fall in love. Dogging, or marrying within the clan, was taboo, and even though Alejandra and Victor had done nothing wrong, the family had taken precautions. To accuse Alejandra of any impropriety was cruel and heartless. Rena was tempted to slap Julexi too.

  Lola's voice was like ice. "You will never speak of my daughter again. Do you understand me? If you had a drop of Alejandra's goodness and decency, it would be double what you have now."

  Edimar stared, mouth agape. Rena was no less shocked. Lola was always so mild-mannered. She had never lashed out at anyone.

  Lola turned to Rena. "Edimar and I will do whatever the council decides. I trust your judgment. If you think it's best to leave with this crow, if this is how we can get back on our feet, then I will salvage a hundred ships at your side." She pushed off the wall toward the storage room door. "Come, Edimar. We've said our peace. Let the other women say theirs."

  Edimar was still too stunned to move, staring at her mother as if seeing her for the first time. Then after a moment she came to herself and followed Lola inside.

  When they were gone Julexi said, "Did you see that? Did you see her slap me? She's trying to divide us."

  The hypocrisy of that statement almost made Rena laugh. But it would have been a sad and tired laugh had she done so. The sense of family was fading, she realized; the thread that stitched them together was unraveling and fraying at the edges. She couldn't allow that. Segundo had asked her to keep them together, to keep everyone alive.

  "I'll tell you what I want," Rena said, realizing it was true as the words came to her. "I want us on a ship again. Not a crow's ship or a corporate ship, but our ship. Just as El Cavador was and always will be. That is where we belong. We're not going to get there by staying here. Here we have no future. Our work and welcome are drying up. Arjuna can help us move in the right direction. If you disagree speak up now."

  They discussed it and then voted. A handful dug in their heels, but the majority--though nervous of the idea--was for going. Anything to get them closer to their own ship, they said. And in the end, even those who were against leaving came along. Staying with the group seemed safer than staying alone with WU-HU.

  Later, as the second group boarded the shuttle for Arjuna's ship, Julexi stepped to the airlock with her bag and faced Rena. "If they rape us and kill our children, I hope God has mercy on you."

  "I hope God has mercy on us anyway," said Rena. "We need all the help we can get."

  CHAPTER 8

  Beacon

  The blueprints on the wall in the engineering room looked nothing like what Lem had imagined in his head.

  "It's still your idea, Lem," said Benyawe. "Trust me. The design may look different from what you initially envisioned, but the principle is the same." She was floating in front of him at the wall, stylus in hand.

  "I don't care if it's my idea," said Lem. "Throw out my idea if it's rubbish. Don't feel handcuffed to anything I suggested. I only care that it works. I'm not conceited enough to think I have a better grasp of this than you do, Benyawe. Do whatever you think is best."

  In truth it stung him slightly that she had changed the design a bit, even though he had fully expected her to do so. He wasn't an engineer after all, and he only understood the science on the most fundamental level. Of course she was going to change it.

  He had commissioned her months ago to develop a replacement for the glaser, and at the time he had given her a suggestion for its design, fully expecting her to dismiss his idea outright, pat him on his little head, and tell him to stop playing in her sandbox. Instead, she had thought the idea worth pursuing and assembled a team of engineers to make it work. Now that nugget of an idea had grown into schematics and actual plans.

  "We call them 'shatter boxes,'" said Benyawe. "As you know, the problem with the current glaser is that the gravity field spreads outward too quickly and too wide."

  Lem hardly needed reminding of that. It had almost meant his life. Back in the Kuiper Belt, when they had fired the glaser at a large asteroid, the gravity field had grown so quickly and stretched outward so far that it had nearly consumed the ship and turned them all to space dust. Lem's quick thinking was all that had saved them.

  Benyawe pointed to some crude drawings on the wall that looked like two cubes connected to each other by a long, coiling string. "Your initial idea was a device like a bola, with two small glasers on both ends that attach themselves to opposite poles of an asteroid." She wiped the crude drawing away with a flick of her stylus, and floated over to the detailed schematics. "The shatter boxes operate the same way."

  The cubes were now thick discs, and one of them was disassembled in the air, as if the whole thing had been photographed a microsecond after it exploded apart, revealing each of the individual pieces inside. "When they're fired from the mining ship, they spin through space like a bola, which as it turns out, is a brilliant mechanism if we detach the cable from each glaser at just the right instant. The spinning motion and additional guidance from us will sling them to opposite sides of the asteroid, where these anchor braces will dig into the rock." She indicated the teethlike claws on the sides of the shatter boxes. "All that's left is pushing the button and letting the glasers rip the rock to shreds. The two gravity fields will interact, counter each other, and keep the destructive reach of the fields to a minimum."

  "So it works," said Lem.

  "In the computer models, yes. It's much safer than the current design."

  "Then why aren't you clicking your heels in glee?" said Lem. "Or am I missing something?"

  "There is a problem, yes," said Benyawe.

  "Which is?"

  "Money. The original glaser isn't destroyed every time we use it. The shatter boxes are. They're consumed in the gravity field along with everything else. That's enormously expensive and would offset most of the profit we'd reap from mining the asteroid. It's not cost effective."

  "Then make it cost effective," said Lem. "Use cheaper components and materials, shrink the size of the shatter boxes, remove anything that's not absolutely essential. Do whatever it takes."

  She was quiet a moment then asked, "Are you sure this is how we should be spending our time, Lem?"

  "How else would you be spending it?"

  "Finding a way to fight the Formics."

  "My dear sweet Dr. Benyawe, what do you think you've been doing?"

  She seemed confused. "You want to fire these a
t the Formic ship?"

  "I want to use them however we can. If they can safely destroy asteroids, maybe they can safely destroy the ship or whatever happens to be inside it."

  "We'll never catch it before it reaches Earth. And if it enters Earth's atmosphere, it's beyond our reach. Plus it will take months to build these once we arrive at Luna."

  "We'll need to move this through production much faster than that," said Lem. "We may not have months."

  Lem's wrist pad vibrated, signaling a message from the helm. He tapped it. "Go ahead."

  Chubs's voice said, "Long-range sensors have detected an emergency beacon."

  "From where?"

  "We can't determine its point of origin. Considering its trajectory however, it appears to have come from the Battle of the Belt."

  Lem glanced at Benyawe and saw that her interest was piqued as well. The Battle of the Belt was the name the crew had given to the massive line of wreckage the sensors had found since flying closer to the Formics' trajectory. The Massacre of the Belt would have been a more fitting name in Lem's opinion, considering how one-sided the outcome had been. It was impossible to say what had happened exactly, but the amount of wreckage suggested that anywhere between fifty to one hundred mining ships had attacked the Formics in a coordinated assault. Sensors couldn't identify the ships at this distance, but they were likely free miners and corporates alike, allied for once against a common enemy.

  A beacon sent from one of the ships in the battle might hold critical, useful intel. Maybe they had discovered a weakness in the Formics' defenses. Or perhaps they had more information about the Formics' weapons capabilities. Any nugget of information could be helpful.

  "Is the beacon broadcasting a message?" asked Lem.

  "Affirmative," said Chubs. "But sensors are only getting a billionth of it through the interference. We can't make it out. The light sequence suggests it's a STASA beacon, though."

  Every satellite used blinking lights to identify itself from a distance in case radio had failed. No sequence was more familiar to anyone than that of the Space Trade and Security Authority.

  "I'm on my way," said Lem. He clicked off and launched toward the push tube. Benyawe, as he expected, followed close behind. When they reached the helm, a rendering of the beacon spun in the system chart in front of them, its lights dancing across its surface.

  "Can you determine when it was sent?" asked Lem. "Was it before or after the battle?"

  "Impossible to say," said Chubs. "It may have nothing to do with the battle. We don't know."

  "Where is it now? Could we intercept it?"

  "It's not along our current trajectory. If we alter our course, we could snag it in about eighteen hours."

  "Would that delay our arrival to Luna?" asked Benyawe.

  "By twelve days at least," said Chubs.

  "Twelve days?" asked Lem.

  Chubs shrugged. "That's the math. We'd have to decelerate to intercept the beacon and then accelerate back up to our current speed. Twelve days minimum."

  Lem considered a moment. "You think we should go for it?"

  "In all honesty, it's probably not worth pursuing," said Chubs. "If it were a free-miner or corporate ship, I might expect intel on Formic defenses or weapons, something useful. But this is a STASA beacon. It's probably a worthless emergency announcement."

  "Maybe it's a distress signal," said Benyawe.

  "If it is, it was sent from the ship before the ship was destroyed," said Chubs. "There's nothing left from the battle but debris. And even if by some miracle a few people survived in a scrap of wreckage and fired off a beacon, they couldn't have held out this long. Too much time has passed. There's no one out there we can save."

  "Maybe it has information about the battle," said Benyawe. "Which ships were engaged, crew manifests. That would allow us to at least document the battle for historical purposes."

  "We're not historians," said Chubs. "That's not our mission."

  "Even so," said Benyawe, "thousands of people lost their lives. Their families on Earth have a right to know what happened to them. That battle is a testament to human courage."

  "And a testament to human inadequacy," said Chubs. "You're not going to boost morale on Earth by pointing out how our new alien friends wiped out dozens of heavily armed ships."

  "We're not going to keep it a secret either," said Benyawe. "Earth needs to know what it's up against."

  "The Formics will reach Earth long before we do," said Chubs. "By then Earth will know exactly what it's up against."

  "I say we go for it," said Lem. "Right now we don't have any critical intel that's going to make any difference in the coming conflict. With that beacon we might. If we show up twelve days late, so be it. It's not like they're expecting us."

  Eighteen hours later a crewman extended one of the ship's claws normally used for mineral extraction and snagged the beacon from space. Lem watched from the helm as the claw brought the beacon into a holding bay. There crewmen attached cables to the beacon's data ports. Three seconds later the download was complete.

  Lem went to the conference room beside the helm with Benyawe and Chubs and pulled up the beacon's files and projected them in the holofield above the table. There were images of the Formic ship; 3-D models; information about the ship's trajectory, speed, and estimated date of arrival at Earth, but nothing new, nothing Lem didn't know already. No weapons analysis. No identified weakness. Lem waved his hand through the field, pushing files aside and bringing others to the forefront to take a closer look. Worthless, worthless, worthless. It was all old news. His hand moved faster. He was getting impatient.

  A man's head appeared. It was a vid. Lem stopped.

  The man looked to be in his fifties--old for a space commission, but not that abnormal for high-ranking officers. Lem made the appropriate hand gesture, and the vid began to play.

  "I am Captain Dionetti of the Space Trade and Security Authority, commanding officer of The Star Seer. As the evidence in these files shows, an alien vessel is approaching Earth at incredible speed. We have been tracking alongside it for the past three days, and we will continue to match its speed and monitor it until it reaches Earth."

  "Don't monitor it, you idiot," said Lem. "Destroy it."

  The captain continued uninterrupted. "Two weeks ago, reports circulated among the ships here in the inner Belt that an alien vessel had attacked an unspecified number of ships near Kleopatra. News of this engagement spread quickly among the ships in the area. Several clans and corporate vessels decided to stage an offensive against the alien vessel once it reached our position. I and other STASA officers made repeated attempts to quell such an illegal and unprovoked attack--"

  "Unprovoked?" said Lem.

  "We reminded miners that attacking any ship is against space trade law established by STASA and ratified by the U.N. Security Council. We do not know this alien ship's intentions, and such aggression might justifiably provoke it to defend itself or retaliate, thus putting all of Earth in jeopardy.

  "Sadly, the mining ships ignored our counsel, and a total of sixty-two ships joined in the assault. Our vessel recorded the events from a distance, and the vids of that battle are included amongst these files. I am saddened to report that all sixty-two ships appear to have been destroyed. As you will see from the vids, the alien vessel is fully capable of defending itself if provoked. Therefore, by the authority invested in me by the Space Peace Act and the Space Emergency Response Act, STASA is issuing a cease-fire against the alien vessel. Any mining ship which fires upon or attempts to obstruct the alien vessel will be subject to arrest."

  "Cease-fire?" said Lem. "Tell me this is a joke."

  "Typical STASA," said Chubs.

  "The human race is a peaceful species," continued the captain, "and STASA will do everything in its power to maintain that peace. Rather than provoke our alien visitors and assume malicious intent, we will extend to them the hand of welcome and begin diplomatic efforts to establish a lasting, p
eaceful relationship between our two species. If the intel in this beacon reaches Earth before we do, we implore you to notify STASA of our escort and to make preparations to greet the alien ship with the proper delegates and peace offering. God protect us. End of transmission."

  The man's head winked out.

  "Are they insane?" Lem said. "A peace offering? He watched the Formics wipe out sixty-two ships, and he wants to shower them with gifts? Unbelievable."

  "He saw the Formics' firepower," said Benyawe. "He's trying to prevent another massacre and maintain calm. Firing on the Formics is only going to lead to more deaths. You can't argue with that. He's doing what he thinks is best for Earth."

  "He's wrong," said Lem. "We saw their firepower too. We saw what they did to El Cavador. That doesn't mean we're suddenly going to crawl into bed with them."

  "I'm not saying I agree with him," said Benyawe. "I'm saying he's asking for diplomacy over rash action. I see his point of view."

  "His point of view is boneheaded arrogance. You didn't see these creatures up close, Benyawe. I did. And believe me, a nice present in a pretty pink bow isn't going to make them our best friends."

  "What do we do now?" said Chubs.

  "We get to Luna as fast as we can and pray the political idiots don't roll out the red carpet."

  "Faster than our previous speed?" asked Chubs.

  "We can bump it up a notch," said Lem. "We're trying to avoid collision threats, I know, but our previous speed was still a little cautious. Let's push the safety parameters."

  Chubs nodded. "I'll give the order immediately." He hurried back to the helm.

  Lem returned his attention to the holofield where the captain's head had been. "How could someone be so asinine? An escort? The man watched all those people die and he has the audacity to give the Formics an escort?"

  Benyawe shook her head, her voice barely above a whisper. "Sixty-two ships."

  "We thought it might be more than that," said Lem.

  "So many people."

  Lem wiped his hand through the holofield, searching through the files for the vid of the battle. He found it and played it.